Notes on a Cowardly Lion (34 page)

To Bert—

Still King of the Forest.

With “ruff” and “luff.”

Yipper

The Cowardly Lion embodied the very best parts of a buffoon's instincts: gut responses, frenetic gestures, a touching and elusive sense of the world. The roar he made created affection, not fear; yet it kept the audience and the people around him at a distance from a more disturbing private self.

Although Hollywood has been known to film successful pictures many times, milking the public's fascination with one particular vehicle, it is generally agreed that no one could undertake a re-make of
The Wizard of Oz
. Not only would cost be prohibitive, but no finer cast (Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Judy Garland, and Lahr) could be assembled for the major parts. Nor could a sufficient number of midgets be rounded up to play the inhabitants of Oz.

According to LeRoy, 350 midgets were difficult to amass even when vaudeville entrepreneurs managed midget acts. The responsibility for bringing all the midgets to Culver City fell on the casting director Bill Grady, an old Broadway agent who had handled W. C. Fields. Although Singer's Midgets are listed in the picture credits for
The Wizard of Oz
, Grady maintains that Singer had nothing to do with acquiring the little people, although many of them had worked for the impresario. Grady explains it this way:

“Of course the only guy I could get them from was Leo Singer of Singer's Midgets. Leo could only give me a hundred and fifty. I went to a midget monologist called Major Doyle. I told the Major my problem, and he said he could get them all for me. I said I had one hundred and fifty from Singer.” Doyle despised Singer not only because he would give him no work, but because the fivefoot-five manager was known to exploit his clientele. He answered Grady in a Boston Irish brogue, as rich as it was stubborn.

“‘I'll not give you one if you do business with that son-of-a-bitch.' ‘What am I gonna do?' I said. ‘I'll get you the three hundred and fifty.' ‘I'm almost committed to Leo Singer.' ‘If you do business with Singer, you'll not get any from me.' So I called up Leo and explained the situation. I said that I could get all the midgets from Major Doyle but
if I did business with him, I couldn't get any from the Major. Leo raised hell, but I explained that there was nothing else I could do. When I went down and told the Major that I'd called off Singer, he danced a jig right on the street in front of Dinty Moore's.

“The Major gets these midgets for me. They come from all over the world. Now I've got a date. I'm going to bring them out West in buses. The meeting place was the Times Square Hotel on Forty-Third Street. I had these buses pull up there. We were going to bring about one hundred and seventy midgets out of New York, the rest I was going to pick up out West.

“The first three buses are loaded. They are to go through the Holland Tunnel and on through to Chicago. The first bus starts
up Broadway
. They are supposed to go down Eighth Avenue. I grabbed a cab and followed the bus. Major Doyle is sitting in the front seat of the first bus. I yelled out, ‘Hey, Major, where we going?'

“‘Come with me,' he yelled.

“So I followed him. Leo Singer lived at Sixty-eighth Street and Central Park West on the fifth floor. Major Doyle took the three buses and arrived at Central Park West. They waited at the curb in front of Singer's house.

“The Major got up and went to the doorman. ‘Phone upstairs and tell Leo Singer to look out the window.'

“It took about ten minutes. Then Singer looked from his fifth floor window. And there were all the midgets in those buses in front of his house with their bare behinds sticking out the window.”

“Major Doyle's Revenge,” as it became known in movie circles, was not the last the movie executives heard from the midgets. Once they got to Culver City, there was a problem of controlling them. The polyglot group of little people came from a wide range of professions. Many of the “Munchkins” were midgets who, in fact, made their living by panhandling, pimping, and whoring. Assistants were ordered to watch the crew of midgets, who brandished knives and often conceived passions for other, larger Metro personnel.

“I remember one day,” smiles Lahr, “when we were supposed to shoot a scene with the witch's monkeys. The head of the group was a little man who called himself ‘The Count.' He was never sober. When the call came, everybody was looking for the Count. We could not start without him. And then, a little ways off stage, we heard what sounded like a whine coming from the men's room. Somebody investigated. They
found the Count. He got plastered during lunch, and fell in the latrine and couldn't get himself out.”

The midgets were also a problem from the production angle. Victor Fleming, the director who stayed longest on the film, had a production philosophy that probably accounted for his tenure. (Dick Thorpe and George Cukor tried to direct the picture and gave up. King Vidor finished the last black and white segment of
Oz
when Fleming left to direct
Gone With the Wind.)
Fleming's dictum was simple: “Don't get excited—
obstacles make a better picture.
” There were many outrageous problems: a flying witch, bolts of fire, simulated tornadoes. How do you get a rusted Tin Woodsman off his mound of earth on to the road for a dance? How will the Cowardly Lion wag the tail of his one hundred-pound lion suit? How do you teach 350 Munchkins to sing “We Welcome You to Munchkin Land,” when only a third of them speak English?

The idea of having the midgets sing their song seemed natural enough. Fleming gave them the song, but the first day they performed on camera his problem was apparent. Jack Haley says, “Some of 'dem sang mit de Cherman agzent. They couldn't speak English and when they sang together it was the damndest conglomeration of noise you ever heard.” Fleming solved it by having the Munchkins mouth the words while the voices were dubbed.

Although Lahr had wanted to do the picture immediately and Twentieth Century had let his contract run out, Metro wanted his services for only three weeks at $2,500 per week. Lahr balked. “I said I wanted a five-week guarantee. When they wouldn't give it to me I said ‘The hell with this, I'll go back East and do a show.' I wasn't getting the right parts. Nobody knew what to do with my comedy.” It took Metro a month to accept Lahr's terms. Its prediction was significantly unrealistic. Lahr worked five weeks on one number, “The Jitterbug,” which never got into the picture. The studio exhibited little understanding of the complexity of the undertaking or of the future of their venture into realistic fantasy. Lahr spent twenty-six weeks as the Cowardly Lion.

Staring out of their offices, the executives of Metro were treated to a panorama of grotesques that even Nathanael West could not equal. These were not fusiliers, bandits, or cowboys going to work on Stage 36, but people with green skin, a man walking in what looked like a tin box, his face tinted silver, a lion sauntering erect carrying his tail
to avoid tripping, hundreds of midgets with red fright wigs and pointed beards scurrying to the lot. The window watchers were always being surprised; the people never stayed the same. Sometimes the man with the silver face looked rusty; the midgets with their rosy cheeks on Monday would be transformed into cloud gray on Tuesday.

For the actors, the metamorphosis began promptly at seven each morning. The principals had a make-up man apiece; and twenty make-up men processed the Munchkins at the rate of nine an hour.

The Wizard of Oz
was the first large-scale make-up job in Hollywood. Metro had to have special make-ups created for the Wicked Witch, and for the Tin Man, whose silver skin and blemished, rusty quality had never been attempted before. Metro also had to invent tricks of its own. The primary one evolved in
The Wizard of Oz
was the use of sponge rubber. The Tin Woodsman's helmet was made of rubber, his bald head simulated by a plastic cap that the studio had just developed. Lahr's lion snout was also composed of sponge rubber; so too were the Wicked Witch's hooked chin and the Scarecrow's sandbag head, which was made to look like a burlap sack. The rubber was applied to the face and then colored to match it.

The make-up, which was applied fresh and with new rubber fixings each day, took two hours to put on. Jack Dawn, the head of the Metro make-up department, worked on the Cowardly Lion. He remembers that Lahr was never too enthusiastic about getting into character. “He would wait reluctantly for the exact time to start putting on the make-up. He'd just hesitate and keep looking at the clock.” Although Lahr was surrounded by two old cronies in Bolger and Haley,
Oz
was grueling. “You couldn't have fun,” says Haley, “it was awful. I had a radio show at the time. I had to drag myself to work.” Even the Munchkins were unenthusiastic, not prepared for the incessant waiting and painstaking preparation. The make-up men also had a problem with the midgets. “There was a great deal to learn about working with them,” Dawn says. “They were adults, not children, and sometimes we forgot. They did not want us to touch them or lift them up into the make-up chairs. They clambered into the seats by themselves.”

The costumes for Lahr and Haley were particularly burdensome. Haley, encased in his Tin Man's garb, was nearly immobile off the camera. The studio designed a leaning board so he could lie down. Lahr's situation was even more preposterous. Already burdened with a heavy wig, he bolstered the cumbersome lion's suit with shoulderpads. The make-up, which was so funny on the screen, was no laughing
matter off it. The sponge rubber that covered his upper lip prevented the snarling Lion from eating a regular lunch. Lahr took his meals through a straw since the make-up was too elaborate to strip down. The other principals ate in their dressing rooms. “They wouldn't allow us to eat in the commissary,” Haley recalls. “If we put on our dressing gowns—as we were supposed to—it would have caused too much of a commotion.”

In 1939, before the color process was perfected, it took more light to illuminate a set. The heat from the arc lights made the costumes unbearable and the hours long. “Each day Judy [Garland] had to go to school. Her tutor—an old woman—would come on the set and someone would yell ‘School Time!' We used to long for that sound—it meant we had an hour's rest.” Too keyed up and uncomfortable to sleep, Lahr ambled next door to Haley's dressing room to enjoy a cigarette and a chat. Usually he found his friend asleep on his special board.

Off camera, adversity was something often overcome with good talk. Among friends like Bolger, Haley, and Lahr, a continual patter of stories and pranks persisted. If the work was difficult, the actors felt that the picture and their parts were excellent. Their high spirits relieved the boredom of retakes. When Haley or Bolger were preparing to perform, Lahr bellowed the triumvirate's private anthem, “Smith's premium ham!”—a radio commercial of the day. “Vic Fleming had never experienced guys like us,” Lahr says. “Some legitimate directors can't imagine anybody thinking about something else and when he yells ‘Shoot,' just going in and playing. We'd kid around up to the last minute and go on. You could see he got mad and red-faced. Some actors try and get into the mood. They'll put themselves into the character. I never did that. I'm not that—let's say—dedicated.”

When the trio told dirty stories, they tried to keep them from the inquisitive ears of Judy Garland, who was then fifteen. “Little Judy would sneak around. We'd joke with her and yell ‘Get outta here …'” Their affection for Judy was genuine. At the conclusion of the picture Bolger gave her a fine edition of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, who was her favorite poet. In later years, as the picture became a Hollywood legend, stories about how the three comedians tried to nudge her off the Yellow Brick Road would circulate. But the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow never acted maliciously toward the talented young star. As Haley points out, “How could that be? When we go off to see the Wizard we're locked arm in arm, and every shot is a long shot. How can you push someone out of the picture with a long shot?”

Sometimes their jibes came very close to the bone. Bolger, who had worked with Lahr in
Life Begins at 8:40
, was often the good-natured brunt of their pranks. He was not as outgoing as the other two, but his generosity of spirit extended to his particular brand of blarney. His tall tales made him a perfect foil for Lahr's clowning. Lahr's overtures always began with, “Hey, do you wanna have some
fun?
” When Haley agreed, Lahr made his proposal.

“Lahr said to me, ‘Say that you'd like to be somebody or do something. If you dwell on it, Bolger will tell you he's done that.' I agreed to go along with it. Everyday we had lunch together I'd say, ‘You know Ray, Bert and I worked together many years ago in a show called
Folly Town
. He was in terrific shape. He used to work out boxing with other guys, and he had a belly on him like a washboard. He used to box with this guy practically every day.'

“Then you wait. And here's the line. You know this line is coming; you could lay book on it. Bolger says, ‘I was a boxer once.' You were? ‘Yeah, I wasn't very good, but I had a few fights.' And then he'd tell you an incident about one of his ‘bouts.'”

Bolger's harmless tales were the source of amusement during many of their off-camera moments. But Bolger had his own revenge. Once, after a heavy rainstorm, he had a friend call Lahr to warn him that soil from his newly acquired land in Coldwater Canyon had been swept down the road in the torrent, and it was necessary to send a truck to collect it. Lahr panicked, and made a few frantic phone calls before he realized that he'd been duped.

On camera, Victor Fleming won the respect of all the performers. Lahr was flattered when Fleming would take him aside and ask his opinion for improving a scene. But Haley saw this tactic in another, more realistic perspective. “Fleming had a wonderful understanding of people. He knew that the make-up was wearing on us. After a couple of hours it was depressing to have it on. In order for us not to lose interest in the picture, to try and keep our animation, he would call all three of us together and say, ‘Fellahs, you've got to help me on this scene.' Well, I knew this guy was a big director, and he didn't need actors to help him. He'd say, ‘You guys are Broadway stars, what do you think we should do here?' The scene might be waking up in the poppy field and we'd give our suggestions on how to play it … But I always thought he was just trying to keep our interest.”