Notes on a Cowardly Lion (40 page)

Until
Oklahoma!
(1943), most of the men creating musical comedy molded their sophisticated diversions from the contemporary urban experience. Even when musicals were set in faraway places, their spirit was that of Shubert Alley. But the year Lahr returned to Broadway, musical entertainment had given first notice that comedy was an unwanted appendage for a theater of escape.
The Song of Norway
opened three months before
Seven Lively Arts
. The inundation of the exotic continued with
Bloomer Girl
(1944), a Civil War tale that took place in upstate New York. In time, even the most conservative Broadway producers would drop the term “comedy” from their descriptions of musicals. And with this careful distinction, the form—the most significant American contribution to the theater of the Western World—would gradually decline.

Comedy was the vehicle that gave the wooden fantasy of the plot the grit of reality. Lahr entered musical comedy when the form was drawing from experience: the spontaneously real comic gesture completing a faith in the present. Lahr's talents had first been matched, in musical comedy, by those of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, who were masters of the good-natured adulation of national heroes and cultural passions. His work later for Ziegfeld and White had been successful because the laughter he generated, as income tax collector or English aristocrat, mirrored America's immediate dreams and despair. He never admitted in song or gesture the sadness of the depression; yet within frothy musical paeans to the nation's benevolence, his laughter never lost sight of private torment.

Seven Lively Arts
, whose avowed purpose was to resuscitate a splendor of the past, received more publicity than any show, musical or dramatic, on Broadway in 1944. No other show could boast a half-million-dollar advance in wartime; no show would have such an awesome array of talent. No show would be such a devastating disappointment to the theater world.

Produced by Billy Rose, the pint-sized impresario of spectacle,
Seven Lively Arts
was intended not only to reopen Rose's newly acquired Ziegfeld Theater, but, once and for all, to transcend the Great Ziegfeld. The production brought together the foremost performers and artists in the world. Rose coaxed Bea Lillie out of a self-imposed five-year retirement from the American stage and brought Lahr back from Hollywood. Cole Porter was commissioned to write the score, Igor Stravinsky to provide ballet music for prima ballerina Alicia Markova. William Schuman contributed a composition entitled “A Side Show for Orchestra,” and Rose hired Benny Goodman and his famous Quartet for the downtown element. Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman wrote the sketches, with Ben Hecht helping out and contributing incidental monologues spoken by “Doc” Rockwell. Hassard Short directed. The production opened in Philadelphia with two acts, twenty-three scenes, and ten train-car loads of scenery.

From the beginning,
Seven Lively Arts
was a $1,350,000 theatrical anachronism. Rose was trying to serve up spectacle in an archaic formula. He proudly confided to Lucius Beebe for a New York
Herald-Tribune
interview that
Seven Lively Arts
did not contain an “ounce of significance, a suggestion of social, economic, or political implication or a trace of moral purpose …It's the last word in complete escapism, a super Christmas tree, a grab-bag of fun, anything you want to call it.”

Escape was possible in a faraway land; but to mount a show whose laughter and lavishness were an arrogant fist in the face of universal carnage was severely misjudging the public's taste. Rose had moved the show's New York opening to December seventh, a commemoration and denial of Pearl Harbor. A nation still at war would see an opulent extravaganza that attested not only to the stability of America's theatrical history, but also to a carefree attitude that the country would never regain.

Eventually, this affluence spelled the death of spectacle as a theatrical entertainment. Rose's tepid vision indicates how insensitive he was to the satire of both Lillie and Lahr, whose responses to the world (however unwittingly) exposed its foibles. By bridling them with a “sense of fun” stripped of any social insight, he was making both performers return to a good-natured type of humor and style of entertainment from which they had graduated. Without the vinegar of serious comic content, there was little hope of making their humor register.

Rushing to get
Seven Lively Arts
in shape before the historic December day, Rose planned only one out-of-town tryout. Dissatisfaction was brewing long before the show reached Philadelphia (Bea Lillie was already calling it
Seven
Deadly
Arts);
but the audience, at least, seemed pleased.

… From 8:35 to 12:15 last night as many as could be squeezed into the Forest Theater saw the world Premier of the apotheosis of stage revues. True, it follows the general pattern of all these shows from W. C. Fields through Ziegfeld and George White, but for sheer beauty of scene and diversity and wealth of material
Seven Lively Arts
is tops.…

Variety

Lahr had misgivings about his material. Rose had tried to con him in
Harry Delmar's Revels
and he felt that
Seven Lively Arts
was another fancy bill of goods. “I was unhappy with the show from the beginning. Billy Rose didn't get me the proper material. I could see my sketches were thin, and I kept asking if he would fix them up. He said he'd try, but he didn't do much. Fortunately for Bea, Moss Hart wrote her scenes.”

Lahr's annoyance surfaced at the Philadelphia opening night when Rose came backstage to present him with a wreath of flowers. His excitement jarred with Lahr's obvious displeasure. Rose, once again, promised to do something. He handed Lahr the flowers, saying, “Your talent is as fine as this bouquet.”

Lahr cut his speech short. “You know where you can put them!” Anxiety over the material and Rose's obsession with bringing the unpolished production to New York hung over the show. Porter and Bea Lillie found Rose hard to work with—tight-fisted and lacking any sense of excellence. When Miss Lillie claimed a sore throat and failed to appear at a Broadway benefit preview,
Variety
reported that her absence was a gesture of protest against Rose's mismanagement.

(Even Igor Stravinsky got the special Rose treatment. Contracted by the producer to write a fifteen-minute ballet for five thousand dollars, Stravinsky's score had pleased Rose at rehearsal. When Rose heard the music from the pit on opening night in Philadelphia, he fired off a telegram to the composer:

YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL STOP IF YOU WOULD AUTHORIZE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION STOP BENNETT ORCHESTRATES EVEN COLE PORTER
.

Stravinsky wired back:

SATISFIED WITH SUCCESS.

The ballet was not presented in its entirety until the winter of 1945, when it was performed by the New York Philharmonic.)

The possibility of an inglorious return to Broadway put Lahr on the defensive and clouded his comic instincts. His self-consciousness squelched valid comic ideas. “Moss Hart wrote one scene for me that was good, but I didn't think it was right for my kind of comedy.” The sketch was about an English officer who gives a lecture on the evils of women to his troops. As he talks, he becomes progressively more excited, until he has to be cooled off with a bucket of water. “The water was a little uncomfortable for me. I didn't like it. I didn't want to get drenched every day. It wasn't worth it. Being unhappy in the show anyway, I just couldn't do the sketch. It was dropped from the show, but it was much better than I thought at the time.”

Lahr also refused to sing a chorus of Cole Porter song that rhymed “cinema” with “enema.” “When you said a word like that on stage, you could feel the audience freeze up.” Lahr's prudishness and his nervousness about the audience did not do justice to the song, which cast him as an old man singing out his venom. (This hilarious comic idea would be employed later when S. J. Perelman and Lahr discovered the redbaiting ice-cream tycoon, Nelson Smedley, in
The Beauty Part.)
Lahr's testiness during the rehearsals is measured by the mildness,
not to mention the wit, of the Porter song he would not sing. Disgusted with the show, he misjudged not only material, like Hart's, which looked toward the past, but also ideas, like Porter's, which offered something new.

Porter's song “Dainty, Quainty Me” would have given Lahr's material the sophistication and variety it lacked. The song was certainly stronger than much of the comedy business he performed. His attitude at rehearsals and his gripes against government and society were strong enough to have made the comic statement hilarious.

I'm “Dainty, Quainty Me”

And from care completely free.

You may ask me how I can still feel gay

Why, by merely ignoring the world of today.

When e'er I feel like mis-behaving

I go out and buy a French engraving

So like the lark, I'm as happy as can be

Little old, “Dainty, Quainty Me.
”

The patter was a glib commentary on life in the early forties.

When people talk about those columnists, such as Walter

Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Westbrook Pegler, Hedda Hopper,

Dorothy Thompson, Dorothy Kilgallen, and that frightfully

vulgar girl they call “ELSA”

I take BROMO SELTZA.

When one mentions Martha Raye, Carmen Miranda, Lana Turner,

Anita Louise, Joan Davis, Betty Hutton, Gregory Ratoff,

Red Skelton, Monty Woolley, Don Ameche, Jack Oakie, Sir

Cedric Hardwicke and other stars of the CINEMA

I have to take an
ENEMA
.

The song was suited to the sophisticated intention of
Seven Lively Arts;
but Lahr's anxiety put him at odds with himself. He wanted fresh material—but not
that
fresh! Porter continued to polish the song with the hope of convincing Lahr to use it. Lahr's absolute veto scotched the idea. In later years, Lahr's decision still rankled Porter, who once confided to Mildred, “Your husband doesn't think I can write a comedy song.”

Porter too sensed the show's mediocrity. Writing under not only the burden of such an unwieldly enterprise but also his own private problems, he could not find the comic or melodic flare that had distinguished his earlier scores. The only song to come out of
Seven Lively Arts
was
“Ev'rytime We Say Good-bye.” Although Porter fitted Bea Lillie with a few fine comedy numbers, he did not provide the material Lahr had so confidently expected from the creator of
Du Barry
. One unpublished song shows Porter playing with the comic personalities of two of his favorite laugh-makers—Lillie and Lahr. In “Where Do We Go From Here,” he tried to pit Lahr's obstreperous mug against the alabaster whimsy of Miss Lillie.

The lines are smooth, and although they pay attention to Lahr's body, they miss his speech patterns. They are not particular enough to develop the sense of variety that makes Porter's best lyrics unique. If Porter's inventiveness seemed momentarily stale, he could still parody the musical tradition he had done so much to revolutionize.

“Rose promised me material; but I never got it,” Lahr says. “Finally I had to try and protect myself—I suggested to Cole a burlesque on the old Shubert drinking songs. He liked the idea, and ‘Drink, Drink, Drink' became the only decent number I had in the show.” Porter set Lahr in an admiral's costume, with a large he-man chorus providing harmony as his baritone voice mounted to heroic proportions and he got progressively drunker.

But the song was not enough to assuage Lahr's bitter disenchantment. If the audience howled at the final stanza, it was laughing at old wine—

Drink to
The Student Prince
that show sublime,

And please don't forget Jeanette, in
Apple Blossom Time
.

Drink to Nelson Eddy, before you faint, And here's to J. J. Shubert, our patron saint.

The gaudy façade of the production perplexed Lahr. Opening-night tickets sold at twenty-four dollars a seat. The scene outside the theater and in it had been spectacular and grotesque. After the show, Lahr would read Lucius Beebe's approving account:

… The gangways seethed with the names that made news hoisting
fire pails of champagne at the expense of the management. The limousine line stretched from the theater's blindingly lighted marquee all the way to Central Park. The speed guns of news cameramen were once more busy as ever they were at the openings of 1939, and neither grand opera nor any other social clambake save perhaps the horse show has in recent years brought out such an undulant red carpet of chinchilla and boiled shirts as populated the orchestra stalls when the first curtain went up.

Lahr went to Bea Lillie's dressing room to wish her luck. He found her at the make-up table, crying. “I didn't say anything. It was about then, I think, that her son was missing in action. And now, on Pearl Harbor Day, she was going on …I wouldn't have done any good. I knew how she felt.”

For Lahr, there was a certain gluttony in the enterprise, which contrasted violently with his beloved co-star bent over her dressing table in tears. Lahr understood the sadness intuitively, yet he could not relate it to his own life. “It was the only time I ever saw Bea cry.”

The war had not touched him as it had Bea. He had suffered nothing; he was at once safe in his profession and yet strangely threatened by an optimism as artificial as the sumptuous Ziegfeld Theater lounge that Dali had decorated for the occasion. His faith in Bea's unerring comic sensibilities and her quintessential professionalism was challenged by a wonder that politics had somehow intruded into the sacrosanct province of laughter. His humor had always been based on a buffoon's anarchy; it was indisputably apolitical. But Bea's tears hinted at a world that could no longer dismiss history.