Notes on a Cowardly Lion (41 page)

The first-night audience enjoyed themselves, stopping the show several times for encores. The good spirits were self-conscious; the rapport between the performers and eager audience strained by the emotional vacuum backstage. Lahr was disturbed by the audience's apparent enthusiasm and the inability of the best of America's professionals to meet that demand with excellence.

The critics were kind to the performers despite the fact that the show was top-heavy, uneven, and, in some cases, like Stravinsky's
Scenes de Ballet
, extraneous. The lavishness Rose imagined would be part of the fun was only occasionally amusing. “Fragonard” placed Bea Lillie on a swing engulfed in a pink arcadia. Lahr in matching pink pantaloons and a periwig pushed her gently in a parody of eighteenth-century manners. Miss Lillie recalls, to her delight, the night the swing clipped Lahr on the chin and sent him sprawling. Rose's instincts for extravagance
were foiled on another occasion when Benny Goodman refused to don Rose's elaborate costumes for the finale. He made his appearance in a modest set of tails. Perhaps the most trenchant observation on the show was made by
Saturday Review's
John Mason Brown. Commenting on Rose's Lucullan intentions he turned the other cheek to his hospitality. “Had Mr. Rose succeeded in making those seven arts lively, one might have forgiven him his gold plate, even in wartime. What we resented, so far as entertainment was concerned, was being overfed and underprivileged.”

Seven Lively Arts
was intended to be a bromide to the war's doldrums, to paint over anguish with a show of splendor that asked nothing of the future except that it be like the past. The decadence of the show was apparent even to Lahr. Its array of burlesque and vaudeville turns, its extravagance in homage to another era seemed curiously old-fashioned, a wistful recollection of a more innocent time. Behind the faltering material and lapses in taste that Lahr could see was a fear of something larger and more elusive. The war would change laughter. Although
Seven Lively Arts
had delighted first-nighters and eked out a respectable run of 183 performances, it was not merely a bad show. The people were not responding. It spoke to a different society; and no return to an earlier bravado could gloss the fact. Lahr was no prophet. Continually misled by his sense of historical fact, he nonetheless feared for his career in a postwar environment. The image of Bea crying stayed with him through the gayest moments of
Seven Lively Arts
and after it. “I don't know why. It made me sad. I just couldn't get it out of my mind.”

As a father Bert Lahr emerged from the shadows of midnight kisses and occasional walks only slowly. Jane and I barely understood that there was someone else besides Mother and an endless succession of foreign nurses who were responsible for us. His behavior during
Seven Lively Arts
and the two years of relative inaction that followed certainly did not seem normal—even to children as young as we. He rarely played with us, and on a Sunday morning we could never gain access to his room much before noontime.
We wanted to hear stories, and he would always begin one—the same one—which he never finished. It was about a street cat—or dog—who never had a home. He wandered around the city, and my father would describe what the animal saw. We wanted him to embellish his stories with tales of birds and goldfish, which interested us at the time. He never did.

He was an upsetting man. His voice could be volcanic. It would sometimes crash through the world of comfort he had created for himself: suede shoes, tweed jackets, Of-Thee-I-Sing cologne, cigarettes in every cigarette box. Now, I know there was fear in his voice; but, unable to read it then, the sound was simply stamped on our imaginations as Authority. He surrounded us with toys, and answered every one of our material needs. He protected us. Jane and I never knew there had been a world war until we entered grade school.

My father was aloof. A game of catch in the park was two or three tosses. I did not know he worried; he simply cast no aura over the household. Even the birthday cards and Christmas presents from him were written in Mother's hand.

Once, soon after
Seven Lively Arts
closed, he went to a costume party. It was the first time I had seen him in disguise. He went as Whistler's Mother. He seemed like one of the sweet, puckered old ladies who took us to the park. I woke up when my parents came home from the party. Mother's voice was loud in the hall. I crept to the door and saw her giggling. She was laughing at my father, who had passed out in his dress. Years later, he would tell me that people came up to him at the party (he went complete with rocking chair) and pinched his cheek, saying, “What a cute old lady!” He would turn around, completely inebriated, and say something gross. Dead drunk, in his outrageous costume, the personality beneath scared me. He was different from the other more reliable grownups my friends had as fathers. I hated to see him drink. But I remember that often when I'd lie awake waiting for my parents to kiss me goodnight their kisses had a perfumed smell. It made me sad.

There were no Broadway parts that seemed to be right for my father in the year and a half after
Seven Lively Arts
. Having cast his lot for Broadway, Hollywood was not a place he visited often, although he would sometimes tell us about his home and his orchard. It was a restless time, and he had to resign himself to waiting for the right part. His anxieties about his comedy were never expressed to us, but we were aware of the tension. Muffled voices behind locked doors suddenly blurted out into harsh, sometimes teary sentences, and then, tantalizingly, fell back into whispers.

The mystery of my parents was my chief pastime. I would eavesdrop
in the early hours of the morning—trying to listen or peek through a keyhole. Sometimes I regretted my snooping, because I found out more than I expected. I recall seeing my father throw a suitcase on the bed, waving his hands wildly at Mother. He walked out of the room, and then out of the house. What annoyed me was not that he'd left, but that he had not bothered to kiss me goodbye. He hadn't kissed Mother either. That was some consolation.

We often tried to ferret out the secret of Father's job, which he would never explain. When he took the family to see
Peter Pan
so many people at intermission wanted his autograph that there was a line all the way up the aisle. My father recalls walking with Jane on the street. People would gape at him. “Why are they staring at me, Daddy?” He never explained. He always evaded our questions. Sometimes he told us he was a pitcher for the Yankees (but when he broke Mother's antique vase with a pitch he called the “dipsy doodle” she didn't act as though he were a professional athlete). He said he was a big-game hunter, an aviator, a golf pro, and only after he came up with so many answers to the same question over a period of years did we realize that these responses were red herrings. Even when we were told that he was an actor, he was different from other fathers. In front of audiences he danced, he sang, he put on faces he never showed us at home.

Why did he hide himself from us? He had a vision of his profession as harsh, vulgar, and coarse—a world he did not want us to comprehend. But his secretiveness at that time, I think now, came much closer to the dilemma he was facing in his comedy. The scripts were not coming; the material was not there. Comedy situations written for him after
Seven Lively Arts
seemed old-hat. There was no way, at the moment, to present his kind of humor on stage. The spectacular failure of Rose's revue and the endless stream of bad musical comedies on his desk corroborated for him the mercurial situation of Broadway. If he was not on the stage, if he was unsure of the pertinence of his comedy, he could never be sure of himself.

In the summer of 1945, he tried out
Burlesque
, the Arthur Hopkins-George M. Watters chestnut, in a dingy theater at Brighton Beach, New Jersey. The choice seemed an odd one; the play, a great dramatic success in 1927, was undeniably dated. Burlesque was an art form that had been moribund for a decade when the play with its artless sentimentality eulogized this particular breed of American performer.
Despite its mustiness, Lahr tried the play out. “I wanted to see what
I
could do with this show.”

What Lahr was testing was his dramatic ability. With his career seemingly stalled, his instinct for survival needled him into developing another facet of his talent—just in case. He was trying a script in which he might be able to incorporate much of his old comic material in a fresh format. Nobody, either on stage or in films, had chronicled burlesque as he knew it. His interest in the play was not just a yearning for the past.

The play was not good in New Jersey; Lahr's first dramatic performance was unsteady. Arthur Hopkins had traveled to New Jersey to see it, and Lahr conceded, “I don't think he was too impressed.” However, in the summer of 1946, still without a promising theatrical property, Lahr tried out
Burlesque
in Greenwich, Connecticut, with additions he had made in the story. The show was a great success. “I was easy in it. I had the conception of the show.”

The public's response to the Lahr version of
Burlesque
impressed an ex-vaudevillian—Jean Dalrymple—who had watched Lahr's cop act from the wings and knew both its pathos and comic potential. She decided to produce the play with Arthur Hopkins even though she had not seen the Greenwich production. “I remember that when I saw Bert's performance in
Du Barry
, it struck me as a wonderfully legitimate characterization. I felt he should do a straight play. When I heard he was doing his cop act in the burlesque show within the play, I thought to myself, ‘That would be marvelous, it can't fail, it's foolproof.' Sight unseen, I decided to bring it to New York.”

Getting
Burlesque
into the Belasco Theater, where it finally outran and outgrossed the original Hal Skelley-Barbara Stanwyck version, was not as easy as the audience reaction to the show indicated. To Hopkins, a man as averse to comic improvisation as he was to busy scenery, Lahr was wrong for the part. Hopkins kept protesting to Miss Dalrymple, “The play was written for a hoofer.” Undaunted, Miss Dalrymple insisted that the play made continual references to the hero's humor and the melodrama could use some comic flair. “Mr. Hopkins wouldn't even go up to Greenwich to see Bert. Finally, one Friday he called me and said he was going up. I couldn't go with him. I was astonished.”

The next day Hopkins called Miss Dalrymple and announced “You were right. You can do the show!”

When Miss Dalrymple met him the following Monday to begin laying plans, Hopkins insisted that he direct it. “I was very disappointed
when he said he'd have to direct the show himself.” Hopkins liked the show in Greenwich, but thought it was too hokey. “I said that I thought the hokiness was honest and precisely what made it a hit. In order to get it done at all, I finally agreed to let Hopkins direct. That was a great mistake. He tried to make Bert unfunny, too legitimate. Unfortunately, it seemed to me, Bert listened to him and played very straight. Hopkins used to call me a ‘nervous Nellie' when I'd complain about the play being ‘flat.' I said I didn't think it was funny at all; he replied, ‘It's not supposed to be funny.'”

The cast had two types of performances: one, when Hopkins was in the theater, played the story; the other followed Lahr's more relaxed instincts. Lahr used to whisper to the actors, “Talk fast, talk fast,” hurrying through the dramaturgy to the burlesque entertainment. Still, Hopkins's presence was an important source of confidence to Lahr. Hopkins respected Lahr's talent and let him direct the burlesque play “within the play” in the third act. Hopkins did not seem to care about the musical-comedy numbers, and Lahr remembers his surprise when the famous producer-writer put him in charge: “You do the musical numbers, Bert; I'll direct the piece.” He was distinctly the mentor; and Lahr listened. “He would ‘edit' me. He never told me much. He would say, very quietly, ‘I wouldn't lay on that line too much' or ‘play that down.' We had a most wonderful association. He had great taste. He was to me what a literary editor must be to a writer. He doesn't tell the writer what to write, but sometimes he points out what to embellish and clarify. When he died, I couldn't go to the funeral. I'm too emotional at funerals; it's embarrassing. I couldn't see him.”

Hopkins provided an important creative catalyst to Lahr, who was eager to absorb all of his directional suggestions. Gail Garber, who played a character part in
Burlesque
, recalls coming back to Lahr's dressing room after the first rehearsal under Hopkins.

“What did he tell you?” Lahr inquired.

“He told me to keep my head up and my chin down. When I looked up, Bert was staring into the mirror and trying it.”

Hopkins encouraged Lahr's dramatic capacities. “When a director can't tell me what to do, I can't learn from him. He stifles me. He's like a hand around my throat.” Hopkins, however, provided the security and intelligence that let Lahr take risks he had never before attempted. Lahr was able to meld the dramatic with the comic moment on stage. He found himself with not only directorial control of one of the play's
most important sequences, but also the responsibility for writing some of the material.

One of the few letters Lahr kept for his scrapbook is from Hopkins, dated seven days before the show opened on Christmas Eve 1946.

Dear Bert,

Working with you has been a real pleasure. I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is a wide and rewarding field for you in straight plays. Character comedians become rarer each year. You can be the answer to what hitherto would have been a serious casting problem.

Free yourself entirely, Bert, from the idea that you have to be continuously funny. Your straight passages can be just as rewarding. I think with Skid, you have only started. Use him to supplant in people's minds the limited category in which your previous success has placed you.