Notes on a Cowardly Lion (44 page)

Lahr's ability not only to make the stage his own territory, but also to turn the sketches into his special view of the world impressed Burrows.
The Baseball Sketch (see Appendix 6), according to Burrows, “was a comic conceit of mine. When I wrote the sketch I was much more interested in the character of the announcer. Bert took it and made it his own, which was a marvelous transformation. He made it a scene about the ballplayer.”

Lahr's love of baseball was not the only element that made his characterizations true. As a man constantly besieged by people who glowed over his talent only to ask him his name or mistake him for Joe E. Brown, he was suspicious of hailfellow good spirits. Like Lefty Hogan, in Burrows's sketch, Lahr was continuously being discussed in romantic-heroic terms he never understood. His matter-of-factness about his business was an amusing contrast to the hifalutin questions people asked and the trite answers they expected in return. (“Everybody says I've got wonderful
timing
. Young actors have actually stood in the wings with a stop watch charting when a certain laugh would come. But you wanna know something, I don't know what the hell they're talking about.”) Lahr was always skeptical of smooth, glib media men. As one of the first commercial television performers, he was continually thrown up against the egos of fasttalking reporters, and his interpretation of Lefty Hogan was drawn from his fund of experience and whimsy. Behind Lahr's lampoon was the firm belief that “television is small time.”

The sketch skewered television's impulse to make myths out of men instead of confronting them. Lefty Hogan, squinting dumbly into the television light, is everything the announcer is not: inarticulate, ugly, bumbling, uncouth. He is human; the announcer tries to make him superhuman. Lefty pierces his heroic rhetoric with straightforward honesty.

Announcer:
  And finally Lefty, you became a professional—you had to. You had to because of that deep love you possessed for this great sport! Because of that you wouldn't rest until you became part of this beloved game.

Lahr:
  No, I wanted to make some dough.

Announcer:
  Magnificent sportsman that you are … and what a great pitcher you were. Tell me, Lefty, after being so great, what made you decide to take off your armor and cease to do active battle on the field of honor with the other knights of baseball?

Lahr:
  I never played night baseball … only daytime …

Burrows articulates what Lahr has always understood in his “flop sweat” and his button pulling: “I guess to somebody out of the business it might sound silly. “What the devil is a laugh?' A laugh is a laugh. It's like radar. Radar operates by sending out a message and it bounces back … You send out an impulse; it hits an object and sort of echoes. By measuring the echo you know the distance, size of the object. A comic is like radar, he sends out a laugh—his personality—if nothing comes back, it's death. Literal death. Comedians always used the phrase, ‘Boy, I died last night.' That's no accident. They are literally comparing it to death. On the other side, they use terms like “I killed them,” “I fractured them,” “I had them laying in the aisles,” “I murdered them.” This is really like a bullfight, but it's more than a contest, it's a life and death battle.”

Lahr never spoke to Burrows about these feelings; but Burrows's ability to understand them in Lahr's work made their collaboration fruitful. After the show's successful opening, Lahr bought Burrows a suit, a vaudeville tradition that indicated his approval.
Two on the Aisle
, dedicated to laughter, opulence, and sheer enjoyment, was always serious for Lahr. The show, which ran 267 performances, was a comedian's
tour de force
. Burrows recalls sitting with Lahr before the curtain went up opening night.

“Do you think they'll laugh?” Lahr asked.

“I think so.”

“They'll laugh. If they don't, I'll make them laugh.”

Waiting for Godot

The only possible spiritual development (for an artist) is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication …

Samuel Beckett
, Proust

Playing
Waiting for Godot
in Miami was like doing
Giselle
at Roseland …

Bert Lahr

THE PLAY THAT
came from Michael Myerberg's office in autumn 1955 was unusual on two counts. First of all, it caused my father himself to pad to the door to take it from the messenger—a chore he usually delegated to someone else. Second, it was not a script at all, but an already-published paperback version of a play. On the cover was a photograph of two hobos moving around a distinctly unrealistic tree. The play was
Waiting for Godot
.

He did not return to his room, but sat down at the dining room table and began reading. Since
Two on the Aisle
, he had been through this process often. The messenger, the hasty reading, the pondering, the call to Lester Shurr, his New York agent and Louis Shurr's brother. No play seemed right. He had moved from his fourteen-room duplex to a small five-room apartment on Fifth Avenue.

But that day his attention was riveted on the book. For the first time in many months an excitement was visible.

“What's it about?” I said. He rarely remained quiet for such a long time.

Without looking up he mumbled, “It's about two bums.”

Bums. The word seemed incongruous in a room full of porcelains, a room dominated by a huge portrait of him as Louis XV in
Du Barry
. No one except my father looked at the china; everyone but he accepted the secret of his favorite painting. The picture shows him standing haughtily with scepter in hand and costumed in gold brocade, lace cuffs, and a shoulder-length periwig. The fantasy pleased him. He did not mind that the eyes beneath the wig were not proud or that the nose
was disconcertingly wider at the base than any French aristocrat's. He often studied the painting with a magnifying glass, forgetting, or perhaps awed by, the final joke—that it was not a painting at all, but a retouched photograph.

A play about hobos did not seem to fit into his carefully planned luxury. He had eliminated the harsh brutality of poverty from his life. Yet the play fascinated him as if some secret frequency had penetrated this sedate comfort. He got up and walked into the bedroom as he read. He shut the door behind him.

An hour later, the bedroom door swung open, and Lahr was sitting near the telephone stand, book in hand.

“Hello, Lester … it's the damndest thing … Yes, I read it … Yes, I don't know. It's not like anything that's been done … I've never done anything like it. Do you think I could do it?… What do you think about it? Do you think it's commercial?… Yes, but do you think I could play it?… Sure, it's funny … Yes, but it's funny … I know, Lester, I know it's supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags … I'm not sure, but the writer's no phony. How many weeks do you think I could get with it?… Yes … I'll call you back when I've read it again.”

Lahr held the book out to Mildred. “See what you think.” As she reached for it, he opened it and thumbed through the pages again. “There's something in here. Something … Read this, John. What does it mean?”

He read the following words, with his finger pressed closely to the lines he spoke:

“You're a student—what does it mean? I don't get it.” He didn't wait for an answer. “All right. Two bums. They're hungry. They're scared. They wait for something that never comes … It's too intellectual for me. The words say something, they're plain enough, but somehow the ideas aren't.”

He stopped and picked up the phone. He cradled it under his chin and talked as he dialed.

“What is this ‘habit is a great deadener'?… Hello, Lester. Bert. How many weeks did you say …?”

Waiting for Godot
intrigued my father. No intellectual discussion intensified his appreciation. The play which would have a revolutionary effect on ideas and form in contemporary drama, was discussed, instead, with others whose advice he had always heeded in musical-comedy matters—with Jack O'Brian, the columnist and ex-drama critic, and Vaughn Deering, a friend and professor of drama at Fordham University who occasionally helped him rehearse. Both of them counseled Lahr to do it. However, the final and most forceful voice of approval came from Mildred, who had long advocated that her husband extend his talents into other areas of theater.

He was tough to convince. Without academic training he felt unsure of the play's complexities and of his ability to stamp it with his own personality. Even while deliberating whether to perform the play, he seemed to delight in its mystery and theatricality. “When I first read it, I realized that this was not stark tragedy. Beneath it was tremendous humor, two men trying to amuse themselves on earth by playing jokes and little games. And that was my conception.”

Millions of critical words have been lavished on
Waiting for Godot;
Lahr conceived of it as a vision of action that reduced itself to a few simple sentences of explanation. While friends, and later the press, reacted to a low comic entering the intellectual arena with amusement, Lahr understood the play not from a literary point of view but strictly from a theatrical one. Once, while still undecided, he came into my room and read these lines:

“He writes beautifully, doesn't he? His meter—he's a poet, isn't he? His rhythm is crisp; there's meter to it, same as in poetry. It's not cumbersome; it's in character. It flows.”

That was all he ever said to indicate his appreciation of Beckett. If he had a reassuring sense of the play's poetry in private, he did not trust the weighty impact of its repetition so easily on stage. In the Miami tryout, he wanted to cut the lines he read to me so admiringly. Years later, talking to my Hunter College drama class, he recollected how sad and beautiful that dialogue was, adding, “And after the last repartee, there was a momentary silence in the audience and then laughter, as if they had held their breath and suddenly been allowed to relax.”

As an actor, he understood the subtleties of the spoken word without ever having read poetry. He never read any other Beckett plays or novels. Lahr's simple words reflect an understanding of the pathos and meaning of the play that went beyond critical generalities. Lahr lived with silences; his understanding of language was commensurate with Beckett's precise, philosophical use of it. His appreciation of the playful potential of words went back to his burlesque days and his use of the malaprop; at the same time, Lahr was conscious of his own inability to make words convey his exact meaning. He didn't like to talk merely to pass time; he would rather remain silent—even with his family. Yet there were reasons why others talked—a motive that in his own shyness he understood. In a radio play,
Embers
, which Lahr would never read, Beckett gave an insight into the significance of his particular type of dramatic language. Talking about the sea, a man (Henry) remarks to his wife, Ada—

…Listen to it!… It's not so bad when you get out on it … Perhaps, I should have gone into the merchant navy.

Ada:
It's only the surface, you know. Underneath all is as quiet as the grave. Not a sound. All day, all night, not a sound.

The languid rhythm of Beckett's speakers, the endless gabble of trivialities between Vladimir and Estragon, creates precisely the surface activity that Beckett's characters refer to in the sea. The insight is also embedded in the laughter of Lahr's comedy scenes, from the inane blathering of the cop to cover his own embarrassment to the TV announcer's verbocity that reinterprets the baseball player's simple sentences. Lahr talked about playing Beckett “instinctively,” a term by which he hints that Beckett spoke to his own immediate and intense private experience.

If he understood the play's poetry in a curiously unacademic way, his faith in Beckett as a craftsman came only after struggling through the play's interior structure on stage. “You never laugh at a blind man on stage or people with their legs cut off. But Beckett wrote in Pozzo and made such a heavy out of him that, by the second act, when he comes back blind, we play games with him. He falls down, he cries for help. Vladimir and Estragon are on the stage. We taunt him. We ask him how much he'll give us. We slide. We poke—you understand? The audience screams. If Beckett didn't know what he was doing, as so many people at the time claimed, he wouldn't have put the show in that running order. When I read it, and saw how deliberately he had placed Pozzo in the script, which was against all theatrical convention, I wasn't sure it would work. When I played it, I realized how brilliantly he had constructed the play. I always thought it was an important play—I just didn't realize how important.”