Notes on a Cowardly Lion (43 page)

“It was the funniest thing I ever experienced,” Lahr says. “When we first made our entrance through the door behind the stage and stood in a row in front of an improvised altar, the band played ‘Pomp and Circumstance' instead of the ‘Wedding March.' I'm standing there next to this brute and looking at the judge, waiting for him to begin the ceremony. He was very old; he had glasses the size of bottles. He leans over to me and says, ‘You're getting a lovely wife.'”

“I'm not getting married; he is!”

The wedding celebration was even more outrageous. The buffet dinner had been attended to by the stage manager, who, being Jewish, had provided Kosher meats. More unusual than the bill of fare was the guest list. Sitting on the groom's side were forty wrestlers, mixed with actors and other theater people. “You've never seen so many cauliflower ears. I saw the Swedish Angel take ten sandwiches in one hand. It was like a plague of locusts.”

The cast recalls Lahr fondly—aloof, unpredictable, professional, and talented. On the road, he took complete charge of the show. Once, tired of the nonchalance with which the show girls were dressing in the hotel, he called them together. “I want this group to come down looking shipshape in the morning.” The next day, Lahr's dumb blonde, who, according to another member of the cast, “thought she looked like Hedy Lamarr but was closer to Marjorie Main,” came down to the hotel lobby in an evening dress and a picture hat.

The cast always listened to Lahr, sometimes out of reverence and sometimes out of fear. In Brooklyn, Lahr found that his policeman's coat was missing. He was furious. As a prank the stripteaser tipped him off that the tenor, Santo Scudi, had stolen it. Gail Garber recalls seeing Lahr storm into the wings while Scudi was giving his rendition of “The Sheik of Araby,” yelling “Where's my coat, where's my coat?” Scudi, continuing his song, kept shaking his head and pleading ignorance. Lahr finally recovered the prop, but not before his wrath had threatened the entire cast. The stripper's tip-off was retribution on the tenor, who had acquired a ring that squirted water, with which he doused her as she exited.

Lahr's anger was not reserved for members of the cast. Once, a drunk in the front row took exception to Lahr's imitation of one. “Go home you drunken bum!” he yelled at Lahr's most dramatic scene, when Skid passes out on stage. “When we came out to take our bows,” recalls Gail Garber, “Faye McKenzie and I had a death grip on him. He wanted to jump over the foots after the guy.”

Many stories grew out of
Burlesque
. Members of the cast will tell you about the five-minute ovation Lahr received when the show played Hollywood and its star returned after a three-year absence. “I don't remember it,” is Lahr's reply. “I went over all right, I guess.” But Gail Garber is more precise. “When he walked out, he got a standing ovation; I've never heard a response like that before. He finally had to step out of character and acknowledge their kindness.”

Lahr's hypochondria is another theme for the stories. Once one of the chorus girls in
Burlesque
fainted. She was brought into Lahr's dressing room while the doctor examined her. Lahr was doing his make-up for a Wednesday matinée. Miss Garber, a registered nurse as well as a performer, was aiding the doctor and present at the examination.

“Have you had dizzy spells before?” asked the doctor.

“No.”

From his dressing table, Lahr puzzled. “Sometimes I get dizzy.”

“Stomach cramps?”

“No.”

“Say, Doc,” Lahr said, “sometimes I have cramps.”

“Does your mouth often go dry?”

“No.”

“Mine goes dry all the time, Doc.”

Exasperated, the doctor turned to Lahr, “If you don't mind, Mr. Lahr, I'm trying to find out if this woman is pregnant.”

Lahr's fear of illness was intensified by the death of his father from cancer during the
Burlesque
run. The fact was kept from him until a Friday performance. According to the cast, he never showed any outward emotion. At home, however, things were strangely different. I remember asking about the candle he left burning on his desk. He never explained; and he never did it again. It was the only time he ever exhibited a religious awareness. Lahr's sadness over his father's death was immense, but whatever he felt he rarely expressed. Occasionally, he would recollect the times when we'd visited his father at an old age home, and how we'd played checkers.

On the road, Peggy Cass took Faye McKenzie's part. Miss Cass recalls seeing Lahr sitting glumly at a table one night. She asked him how he felt.

“Not so good,” he said. “I think I've got the Big C.”

After this Broadway success, Lahr once again played a waiting game. His potential as a legitimate performer had been impressed on audiences and critics, but not on producers. No one capitalized on his acting ability. If theatrical management was nervous about breaking commercial stereotypes, Lahr also contributed to the situation. In his three-year absence from Broadway, he toured in the Sid Caesar vehicle
Make Mine Manhattan
, appeared frequently on television, and made a few unmemorable appearances in films. He had defied Hopkins's good advice for axioms closer to his heart. “I'm a mercenary. Any dramatic parts I got after
Burlesque
just couldn't pay well. I had dependents, and a lot of obligations. Comedy was the only thing I could afford to do.”

In 1951
Two on the Aisle
brought Lahr back to Broadway. Just as Ziegfeld's last extravaganza had starred Lahr,
Two on the Aisle
, conceived and directed by Abe Burrows, was Broadway's last big-time revue, “a bright and authentic flashback to the nearly forgotten formula” as
Theater Arts Magazine
referred to it. (Later, smaller-scale revues like
New Faces of 1952
and
1956, La Plume de Ma Tante
in 1958, and
Beyond the Fringe
in 1961 found admiring audiences on Broadway by offering not only more acerbic satire, but also an economic format that counterbalanced spiraling Broadway costs.)
Two on the Aisle
was the last flamboyant breath for the star-studded cast and opulent extravaganza, a form that had nursed comedy and comedians on Broadway into an important force.

If the show was an anachronism, Lahr was happy to be with it. “I waited a long time for this show. Good sketches are tough to develop.” The difference between
Two on the Aisle
and previous revue attempts was the quality of material. An impressive array of Broadway talent was concentrated on bringing the revue format up to date. Abe Burrows and Nat Hiken created the sketches; Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote the music and lyrics. None of the songs have lived, but two of its comedy bits, “Schneider's Miracle” and “Sawsie Dusties,”
have become part of the American comic heritage. Beside fresh, contemporary situations, they allowed Lahr to sport costumes and disguises, key props of the buffoon's fun. The audience could see him decked out as Queen Victoria, a Wagnerian Siegfried, a baseball player, and a park attendant.

The sketches satirized modern targets with a more intellectual flavor than most of Lahr's previous material. Abe Burrows concocted the first American science-fiction routine for the show; a satire on television that betrayed the lie of sportscasters and, in the time of the Kefauver investigations, the embarrassing intimacy of the television camera's microscopic scrutiny of public events for private viewing. One sketch took Lahr into an urbane triptych in which a love scene is played in three different styles: burlesque, T. S. Eliot, and Cole Porter. While some critics moaned (John Chapman of the New York
Daily News
said, “When is Santa Claus going to bring Lahr some new material?”), the show was more literate than many of its predecessors in the Golden Age of the revue.

It was particularly exciting to be around my father at this time of his career. With more good material to run through each evening than he had had in a decade, he was at his comic peak. His security in the laughter (while never complete) was strong enough to warrant moving to a fourteen-room duplex on the West Side. He suddenly had become a collector and selfproclaimed expert on porcelains. Fleshy paintings on the scale of “The Rape of the Sabine Women” and still-life studies of “Nature Morte” kept cropping up on the downstairs walls. In October 1951 he brought home a copy of
Time
Magazine with his face, in baseball costume, on the cover.

He never decorated his dressing room. It was barren, except for an occasional press picture. Most of the attention was focused on the softdrink cooler. But in
Two on the Aisle
a special gaiety pervaded even his somber surroundings. After each scene Lahr would come back soaking wet. The room had a washline for costumes. It was cluttered with a Superman outfit, Viking helmet complete with bull's horns, a New York Giants uniform, and a ridiculous set of royal robes for Lahr's impersonations of Queen Victoria. What was laughable was seeing Dad standing in his underpants and bare feet, wearing basketball kneepads and holding out his arms for his valet to slap the next change on him.

With so much to amuse us, we spent many matinées in the dressing room. The family would sit, eating, playing with the props, listening
to the ball game on television. Even without an afternoon performance, he was often at the theater by four, checking the box office, waiting for the eight o'clock curtain. On the surface, everything seemed placid and secure. It wasn't.

Lahr did not take the show on the road—a final gesture of disgust with Dolores Gray, whom, regardless of talent, he could not abide. The difficulty began when the show opened in New Haven. Miss Gray, just returned from London, where she was a hit in
Annie Get Your Gun
, had a big voice and an ego to match. Burrows, following revue format, had slotted Lahr for the number three spot, the position allotted to the first star. (Its importance was read into contract law when, in another show, it was stipulated that Bea Lillie was not to appear before 8:50.) The second number went to the show's second star, with the opening number usually a boy-girl production. Miss Gray argued that she should be placed at number three. “That was unthinkable,” says Abe Burrows, who finally settled the dispute. “I won it by threatening to quit the show.”

The continual tension created by the threat of upstaging and other demands made Lahr nervous, and sometimes his concentration on the laughter went to ludicrous extremes. Burrows recalls that “periodically during the show Lahr's valet, an enormous six-foot-four ex-boxer, would appear at the dressing room of a younger actor and summon him to Bert's dressing room. Bert would talk to him and explain where he'd hurt a laugh. One day, Bert insisted an actor was moving on laugh lines. I watched
the scene and I didn't see it. I said, ‘Bert, the guy didn't move!' He replied, ‘He was moving his facial muscles.'”

To a director like Burrows, who was just beginning a Broadway career, Bert Lahr was certainly a tough first-draw. “I walked into my first rehearsal scared. Bert said, ‘Hello,
Abele'
—that means little Abe. He made me feel ten feet tall. I was a green director; and he made me feel good.” But Burrows, squinting nervously over white-rimmed glasses, managed to instill confidence in Lahr while remaining critical of his performance.

“Lahr understood me and appreciated my work. I had a sketch that I'd written for myself—the baseball sketch. I turned it over to him and rewrote it for him. He knew I was on his side. However, there came a point when periodically I felt he was going after the audience too hard. He's America's greatest technical comedian, who over the years had to rely on his comic talents more than he did on his material to carry the scene. Obviously, I never asked him to throw a line away. He's not a drawing room comic in that sense. I also felt he was a real actor. If he would play just the material the laughs would come. We clashed at that point. I guess I was looking for underplay.”

Whatever the tension, it was creative. Burrows, who would go on to become one of Broadway's most famous comedy directors and writers, learned a lot from working with Lahr. “I saw him do my scenes. I argued about it, but I appreciated it. He helped me enormously in my direction. I'm an actor's director. I'm a good one, I think, because I started with Lahr. I learned to use what the actor had, instead of superimposing my attitude immediately. I always try and see what the actors do first and work from that. The point is not to get so dazzled that you immediately toss out your concept.”

Burrows marveled at the way Lahr maneuvered around the stage. “He's the freest man on stage I've ever seen. The little movements I had in mind for his sketches didn't fit at all, because Bert roams the stage in huge strides. I had to adjust to that. I seem to inherit those guys. Every so often I get a free-wheeling comedian like Robert Morse. I think it was my experience with Bert which made me so successful with Morse. I had Morse in two shows,
Say, Darling
and
How to Succeed in Business
. In both of them, remembering my experiences with Bert and realizing that a certain kind of talent shouldn't be changed or stifled, I provided direction that enabled him to flow. Instead of getting impatient because his movements changed the patterns I had in mind, I just went with them and used them.”

Lahr's complete control of a stage fascinated Burrows, who often watched him from the wings. “If anybody moved on stage he was furious; yet, at the same time, the son-of-a-gun would turn around and help break the actors up in some scene. He used to blow on his upstage cheek. You couldn't see it from out front, but the actors would start to giggle. One day I threatened to fire anybody who broke up on stage; and he, being a good guy, stopped immediately.”

Burrows was an admiring audience for Lahr's ad-libbing. “Bert has tremendous control. I used to stand in the wings some nights. He'd be in the middle of a scene that wasn't going too well. He'd see me standing there, and, still in character, stride toward the wings, and say, ‘They're from the moose country tonight!' Without missing a beat, he'd go back into the scene.”