Notes on a Cowardly Lion (32 page)

As a comic actor, Lahr's instrument of entertainment was equal to, if not greater than, the funny-men of the screen. His face was as distinctive as Keaton's; his energy drew on real emotions and could match the more artificial mayhem of Harpo Marx. In 1938 he could also claim a comic style that raised a point of view, less self-conscious but as special as Chaplin's. On top of these assets, he possessed one of the definitively funny stage voices, and like all of the excellent fun-makers, his personality on stage or screen created an instant affection.

When he set off for Hollywood in 1938 he was conscious of the risk he was taking, but his instinct for survival pushed him to develop a performing flexibility. “I realized that good scripts didn't turn up every year on Broadway. I couldn't afford to sit around waiting for a year. If I wanted to stay alive I'd have to go into other areas of entertainment. Today, I think I've learned enough to make myself qualified for any medium.”

There were many reasons for Lahr's departure to the Coast. The primary one was, of course, money. But closely allied was his desire to be with Mildred. “A lot of my friends were going out to California and doing pretty well. I thought it would be good for me …” Typically, he had no faith in the success he had attained. At the height of his Broadway career, he intended the move to California to be permanent. Critics have praised his loyalty to the stage; Lahr himself has claimed indifference. “I never go to see plays; I don't like them. I can always outguess them.” As he embarked for California, he was hounded by what seemed to him an undisputed failure in radio. In forsaking the stage again, he must have wondered whether the gilded world of Hollywood and its new technology would betray him in the same way radio had.

Lahr looked on California like Pinocchio at the fair. His image of it was a child's vision of leisure and simple fun. He told a reporter soon after arriving in the new Xanadu—

Forget the glory. I've had plenty of it rising from the bottom of show business. Now I ask myself, “What do I get out of life.”

I like to see prizefights. Most of them are as good around Hollywood as in New York. So are the football games. There is nothing wrong with the golf courses either
.

Even in 1939, while he was joking about Hollywood to Fred Allen, Lahr was making plans to build a house there. He would make sorties to New York to do a show or a guest appearance. But it was in the parched, craggy Hollywood Hills that he settled. He was forty-three, and while he might be able to tell the world there was glory in rising from the bottom of burlesque, he bore the scars of a struggle that had been long and, in his mind, far from glamorous.

Coldwater Canyon, which he had picked out as the site for his home, was then rolling, sparsely populated territory. The comedian of many disguises, the chameleon of laughter, found himself adapting almost immediately to the new terrain. “Space. You had room to move around. Air. You could breathe fresh, clean air. It was—it was—very green.” When he thought of California, he imagined the lovely dog-leg at the Hillcrest Country Club, a long, crooked tongue of emerald turf with palm trees rimming the side. California, as he would paint it for Eastern friends, was the clink of glasses, the laughter of old acquaintances enjoying the leisure of their success, names that later made him smile with happy memories: Jimmy Cagney, Frank McHugh, Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien, Eddie Foy, Jr., Ralph Bellamy. All of them were refugees from the legitimate stage. They had found their way to California, and Lahr, surrounded by Nature and old companions, felt he had never had it so good.

Broadway was Lahr's bailiwick, but his exuberance in the early months of his arrival to California indicated a confidence in the new life.

—
Bert Lahr entertaining some of the boys at Dave Chasen's with a broken down rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy
.”

—
Bert Lahr, so busy telling stories on the Metro set that he's never ready until they yell, “Camera
.”

The buffoon who laughed at his inarticulateness on the stage was gaily passing out his “bon mots”:

On Hollywood:

Hollywood is the only community in the world where the entire population is suffering from rumortism …

If you want to be a success in Hollywood. Be sure to go to New York.

On Woman:

She's not so bright, but she's got an enormous scandal power when she's lit.

On Screen Technique:

He'll wind up behind the eight-ball unless he stops stealing scenes from himself …

Lahr had performed in two-reelers made in 1928 at the Warner lot in Brooklyn for Brian Foy. “It was pretty bad. Foy just said, ‘Go ahead in there.' I had very little script. It took three days.” Later, Lahr had been transported to California to do the screen version of
Flying High
(1931), a year after Joe E. Brown had impersonated him in
Hold Everything
. He gave virtually his stage performance on screen; but to the disappointment of the moguls and himself, it failed to come across as richly as it did on stage. He did not care about films at that time. His memory of his first screen exposure is not of the material but of two of the industry's pioneers: Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. He recalls the humility of Thalberg, who in 1931 summoned him to his office, from which he presided over the creative end of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions. “Bert,” he said “I want you to help me cut this picture. You know where the laughs are.” Lahr was flattered. (Lahr met Thalberg with his wife Norma Shearer two years later in the Astor Ballroom. Thalberg approached him. “Perhaps you don't remember me. I'm Irving Thalberg.” Lahr, who had not spoken to him for fear of being presumptuous, was touched by the attitude of a film magnate to a performer. “I thought he'd forgotten who I was.”) It was not the way most movie moguls, like L. B. Mayer, who handled the business end of Metro, behaved.

At M-G-M, Mayer was a man of astounding power and callousness. His genius for showmanship had manipulated his films to a success and quality still unparalleled in the movie industry. Mayer himself was the single highest paid man in America for nine years in the thirties and forties, earning as much as $1,300,000 in 1932, but he was notoriously stingy with his performers. His struggles for power within the industry and his ruthless exploitation of talent created many enemies. (This was
never so clearly indicated as in the reaction to his death. Explaining why so many people had come to the funeral in 1956, Samuel Goldwyn, who knew the bitter in-fighting, quipped, “The reason so many people turned up for his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.” Lahr, a victim of Mayer's philosophy of entertainment, said, “If you want a full house, you give the public what it wants.”)

Lahr's contract for
Flying High
called for a substantial sum for the eight weeks of filming. For any extra time on the set, Lahr was to be paid at a special rate. When it became evident that the film would take longer than two months and that Metro would have to pay a conspicuously large salary to Lahr, he received a summons from L. B. Mayer. When Lahr arrived, Mayer, a toad of a man, small and bilious, was seated at his desk. His assistant, Ed Mannix, stood by the door.Lahr's initial nervousness was assuaged by Mannix, a large, friendly man who had once been a bouncer at Palisades Amusement Park.

Mayer began his talk with Lahr quietly, dispensing his words with a fatherly consideration.

“America is a wonderful place, Bert, isn't it? I mean where else could a man build a great company like Metro which has brought the best talent together to make movies? Where else could a guy like me who came from Russia be able to control all this? It takes diligence, and thrift, and the hand of God.”

Lahr nodded, surprised and confused by the typical Mayer introduction, calling on Metro, the homeland, and Divine Will, in that order.

“We want you to stay out here, Bert. But we can't afford to pay you
pro rata.
”

Lahr was astounded. His contract with George White had been a handshake. No one had ever balked at paying his salary.

“Mr. Mayer, Florenz Ziegfeld called me a few weeks ago to do a show for him in the fall. I've got to go East to firm the deal.”

“We can't pay you that money, Bert,” said Mayer, chomping on his cigar.

“But it's in my contract. I want to go back to New York. I've got business there. We agreed to this a long time ago.”

Mayer got up from his desk and leaned on the glass top with fingers jammed against like a tripod. “We can't pay you
pro rata
. You'll only be here a few more weeks.”

“I can't give in to that.”

Mayer went to the water cooler and took some pills from his vest
pocket. “He tried to cajole me. He kept walking around me, talking. Sometimes I couldn't see him.”

When Lahr persisted, Mayer lost his reserve. He shoved Mannix, screaming, “Why did you bring this man in here? Get him out of my sight! Get him out!”

Mayer turned to Lahr. “Actors are a dime a dozen out here. We won't do any close-ups of you. We'll do it our way or not at all. We won't finish the picture. Go back East if you want.” Mayer stormed out of the office.

Lahr's first impulse was to pack for New York. “But I discussed it with friends who thought I was making the wrong move. They said, ‘This man is very powerful. It's not going to do you any good if you come back here.'”

A few days later, Lahr called the front office and said he would stay for the cutting and close-up shots. M-G-M offered to pay him one thousand dollars a week “expenses.” In three weeks he was shuttling across the country to receive a much warmer welcome from Florenz Ziegfeld.

The Mayer incident left Lahr with an abiding distrust of movie management, even seven years later, when he returned among the palm trees, an exile eager to cash in on Hollywood's fabulous prewar boom. Nearly everything the movie industry marketed turned to gold, and Lahr began living as if he would be part of that gilt-edged currency. He purchased a cream-colored Cadillac convertible, ordered his casual custom-tailored suits from Eddie Schmidt, Hollywood's tailor for the “stars,” and waited for the scripts to arrive. He had high hopes, and a Guild card that read: “Support.” When the offers arrived, they were not what he expected. The anticipation was mingled with suspicion. John O'Hara, a frequent drinking partner who as a writer suffered the same frustrations that Lahr faced under the lights, remembers that he and Lahr “shared among other things a distaste for the men who were producing motion pictures.”

From the beginning, Lahr's anxiety about Hollywood scripts reflected the battle between his standards of comic excellence and his desire to make California his home. The buffoon's anarchy on stage capitalized on immediacy, extending into the twentieth century an impulse that could trace its heritage to the amphitheaters of Greece and the streets of Italy. Now, not only his body but also his comic personality would be subjected to the electronic distortions of a new medium.

In 1938 the quantity of work disguised the quality of Lahr's experience in front of the camera. Like so many others, he suffocated in roles that neither used his talent nor cared for it.
Merry-Go-Round of 1938
was only a modest success, despite the insertion of Lahr's popular Woodchopper song and the ego balm of being the highest salaried comedian on a term deal in Hollywood. Universal Pictures, however, dropped his contract; and Darryl Zanuck gave him a sixmonth contract at Twentieth Century-Fox. The next two films,
Love and Hisses
and
Josette
, were no better. Lahr's word is “failure,” but the problem lay as much with the system as with the management. Neither Lahr nor his agent fought it. Believing in affluence and aspiring to gargantuan leisure, they could only bemoan the dearth of material and acquiesce.

If Lahr was perplexed by the inability of studios to find decent scripts for him, his friend Jimmy Cagney had pointed out the economic score. Cagney, soldier-straight and surprisingly aloof from the Hollywood idiom, had served on the Screen Actor's Guild. Lahr was a visiting member of the “Irish Mafia” (as they jokingly called themselves), and heard the facts and figures of Hollywood discussed at nearly every weekly meeting of the clan. According to a Screen Actor's Guild survey, despite the large movie output, approximately only four hundred performers were employed. The average of work came to three and a half weeks a year.

Lahr did not count himself lucky. He had been one of Broadway's highest paid comics in the thirties. In Hollywood, he had to hustle to make a comparable living. This inevitably meant playing inferior parts, sometimes, humiliatingly, to a twelve-year-old star like Shirley Temple, which he did in
Just Around the Corner
.

In the show Lahr was paired with Joan Davis to supply comedy relief. A few weeks before the release of the picture, a movie executive told him, “They previewed your picture. You're a big hit.”

“I was very happy about it. I never had a part up to then where I could stand out. I was working on the Fox lot, and the job was the first of any consequence I'd had.”

Since Lahr seldom went to see himself in pictures (and today rarely watches his taped television performances), he sent Mildred to see the show. When she returned from the picture, she announced that he was hardly in it. He called the director, who could only explain: “You and Joan were too strong. Mrs. Temple saw to it that you were cut down.”

As a comedian Lahr was banished to either playing a friend or a
guest. “In other words, the comic was incidental to the picture's value. If you're not part of the story and you're put in as comic relief on the periphery of the script, you're the first thing that is cut.”

Lahr's problems in adjusting to the Hollywood scene reflected a shift in public taste. Sound had changed the focus of movies. By 1938, comedy no longer dominated films. Romance sold best. As James Cagney said to Lahr, “This is a boy-girl business.” There were exceptions like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, but significantly, their humor was distinctly more verbal and subdued than Lahr's. Films did not want the eccentricities of comedy to overshadow the romance.