Notes on a Cowardly Lion (52 page)

Suddenly the defender of public morals, Lahr wanted to expurgate the text. His role of censor got national attention; but his censorship was tenuous. His tomcat's leer mocked his official statements to the contrary. What he really wanted was to eliminate vulgarity without wit. But he was at home with innuendo when defying the audience and speaking, as Aristophanes' henchman, back at the critics.

Every bird will take to the air and cover you

With the vilest vituperation
.

For a man who balked at obscenity on stage, his biggest laugh came when Pisthetairos and his crony watch a female bird being hotly pursued by a male. When the crony inquired about the species of her lover, Lahr replied, “That must be her husband—the horny pecker.”

Lahr thought of leaving the production instead of making a tedious and painful stand about it. Mildred, writing from his trailer dressing room adjacent to the ball field, confided—

I really feel for your father. He is having great difficulty with the words. I'm afraid to say anything for fear he'll quit. I think this is important for his career
.

An Equity ruling assured Lahr's stay at Ypsilanti. They said that while the director had artistic control of the production, Lahr did not have to say anything he did not think proper for the stage. The news was leaked to the press; and Lahr became the topic of controversy.

The most vociferous attack come from John Ciardi of
Saturday Review
, who, although he had not read Arrowsmith's stage translation or seen the production, skewered Lahr for hiding his career behind children. Arrowsmith was a renowned Greek scholar; and in tampering with academic truth, Lahr raised invective as well as eyebrows. “The obscenity wasn't funny,” says Lahr. “It was against all the basics of theater—which is enjoyment. I wanted to make the audience laugh—
which I did. If I hadn't rewritten that translation and played it the way it was—audiences would have walked out.” Ciardi saw things differently, offended by Lahr's claim that the language was “not fit for children” and anxious to point out that vulgarity, violence, and sexuality were swallowed wholesale by adolescents with every television hour.

No, Mr. Lahr, it won't work. If your psyche feels uneasy about the vocabulary of Aristophanic gusto, that of course is understandable.

… You don't know me, Mr. Lahr, and I can't reasonably ask you to take my word for the essential Greek of it. But I know you do know Arrowsmith and I know he will bear me out. If you really want to know something about Greek theater, ask him. And if you don't want to know about it, what are you doing in it … I know you mean well—or I'm willing to pretend I believe so—but I insist on believing Aristophanes meant better …

August 13, 1966

Lahr was protecting his audience, but also himself. He was not a moralist, although his laughter burlesqued human values. He lived for an audience's response and in fear of its silence. Critics, like Ciardi, argued in the name of poetry, but Lahr was trying to keep alive the comic intention on stage. Lahr's freedom, his comic ad libs, were in the Aristophanic tradition. As Robert Corrigan points out in his essay on Aristophanes—

Like our late George S. Kaufman, or more recently Bob Hope, Aristophanes was a master of the phraseology and attitude of the wisecrack. But the basic strategy of the wisecrack is to keep the audience with you
.

Lahr knew he could not hold an audience's good spirits with vulgarity; he also realized that Greek mythology and politics were dusty footnotes to contemporary life. He appended his assortment of modernisms. When Ruby Dee made a spectacular “flying” entrance, Lahr put her in place, exclaiming, “You interplanetary Peter Pan.” When a two-man horse cantered in, Lahr topped the gag, saying, “Ye Gods, it's Pegasus.” He sang the “Road to Mandalay,” relying on his vibrato “m's” to carry to the back of the ball park; and he stumbled hilariously over ancient Greek names (“Agamem-nem-nem”)—with the same droll simplicity he spelled them out phonetically in his script. He dismissed poet and priest as ruler of Cloud-Cuckoo Land with blows from an inflated bladder; and his cop act echoed through his retorts to a finely
plumed female who strutted by—“Great Zeus, what a hunk of stuff!” Occasionally, he was forced to comment on the planes that droned over the stadium or the weather, which interrupted many afternoons in the amphitheater. After one thunderstorm, which left the stage looking like an aerial photograph of the Great Lakes, Lahr entered and, noticing the puddles, observed, “This is the biggest birdbath in the world.”

Lahr's performance was Aristophanic even if the production was not. The music was reduced to the clarion call of a burlesque trumpet; the dances were cut, at the last minute, by the director. Yet Lahr's performance had a fullness that compensated for a cast not completely professional and an enterprise that never made up its mind whether it was opting for Broadway or repertory. The London
Times
was, perhaps, the most judicious appraiser of the performance, commenting that
The Birds
offered “the spectacle of Lahr in spirited but unequal combat with literature.”

The spectacle had a humor and special integrity for his family, who watched him work in temperatures that mounted to 100º on the open stage. The man who slumped in his dressing-room chair during intermission with a thermometer in his mouth, worrying about his health, the audience, the New York Mets, his children's seats, took surprising charge of himself on stage. The performance discovered dimensions of energy that the audience saw only as carefree delight.

He loped off stage like a startled cow—ungainly and cumbersome, trying to remain inconspicuous in his old age. At the end of the play—his nose reddened like a burlesque top banana, his back decorated with flimsy feathers—his movements recalled many evenings in other roles and the fantasies he had tried to tell us as children. The conviction of his playing expressed an understanding beyond the words he knew for it. His face was wrinkled like an apple too long in the sun; his head festooned with a hat that made him look like a Jewish cockatoo. He rode haughtily astride a chariot, his eyebrows at self-important right angles to his eyes. He won the Queen; he flourished the thunderbolt; and for two hours, at least, he ruled the world with a hellion's gaiety. The key to the city of Ypsilanti (and his salary) never seemed as substantial as his playing or the enjoyment he created.

Ypsilanti proved that low-comic humor, as a specialty, could pass for satire but not substitute for it. Critics would praise Lahr's artistry while bemoaning the tameness of the adaptation. Lahr, predictably, pointed to the box-office receipts, where
The Birds
outgrossed
Oresteia
.

He had helped the festival acquire international attention in its first year; but his salary foreshadowed the inevitable extinction of such classical junkets for the future. He had managed, at seventy, to turn a sure disaster into an enjoyable evening. But it was a fatuous and finally self-destructive battle, a fight he waged often during the decade to maintain his own sense of theater for audiences whose view of the world had been changed by mass media. Ypsilanti was a personal success. But the Festival had been drained of funds, its intention being impossible to fulfill under Ypsilanti's self-imposed circumstances.

Television absorbed the comedy sketch, emasculating much of its verve and poignancy. Isolated in hot studios, usually cut off from any audience by a clutter of cables, cameras, and arc lights, the comedian was forced into an electronic vacuum. Deprived of the live response that is so necessary to comic invention, the comedy routines were more often hollow than hilarious. If comedians found television lucrative, they also faced a faster demise through overexposure. Lahr worried about appearing too often on television. In burlesque,
What's the Idea
played years without repeating a theater; now, one Ed Sullivan performance limited the sketch to a single airing every eighteen months. Lahr appeared approximately four times a year on the Sullivan show, a variety entertainment that sustained his old revue routines. New material was expensive, and immediately consumed. Although Lahr considered a television comedy series (and even made a pilot film for it), he was not enthusiastic about the project. He felt there was little challenge to television; but it paid the bills. In the mid-fifties he had done good work on
Omnibus
, a cultural television event long defunct. High-brow and well-intentioned, Lahr played in Molière's
School for Wives
and Shaw's
Androcles and the Lion
and also narrated an
Omnibus
reminiscence written by S. J. Perelman on the delights of burlesque. But quality television was rare; and Lahr considered himself lucky when he had high-caliber material. His last major performance was as Hucklebee, the obstreperous father, in
The Fantasticks
on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, a show that allowed him to sing and grimace within a more relevant framework than a network spectacular. But comedy itself had been changed by the television camera.

With the comic image shrunk to twenty-one inches on the screen, the force and outrageousness of laughter was depleted. The mechanism of buffoonery—the body, the antics, even the prankish texture of
language—was limited to the clumsy scope of the camera's eye and the censor's ear. The static quality of television developed a different emphasis in humor. Lahr watched the rise of another (and to his mind, lesser) form of comedy during the late fifties and early sixties. Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May were stand-up comedians who brought laughter back to a satire of ideas. Their wit was verbal and eminently suited to a medium that is most comfortable when focusing on static figures.

The new monologues were analytic and political. The laughter of the late fifties acknowledged a nation dubious of power; a middle-class life that brought its special deadening after-effects. There was no longer the wonder and generosity in the humor that had filled Lahr's burlesque intentions, but rather an incisive questioning of societal and human foibles. The new comedians talked with a candor and argot that sometimes violated Lahr's sense of stage decorum. He could never flagellate an audience with the corrosive honesty of a Lenny Bruce or tread thin political ice like Mort Sahl. Lahr's comic vision evolved with movement within a situation; theirs had a more cerebral point of view. Lahr was not verbal about life, nor could he be quiet on stage. Sadly, the comic sketch—no matter how talented—had a style and regularity on television that tended to meld the good with the bad. Many of Lahr's famous sketches were unsuitable for the medium either because they were similar to those performed by network stars (sometimes stolen from Lahr's repertoire) or too high-spirited for an invisible audience.

Lahr returned to Broadway in 1959, not with the classics, but in the familiar format of the revue. The effect of television on its content was obvious.
The Girls Against the Boys
intended to cater to both the Broadway audience and the new television tastes. Lahr teamed with Nancy Walker, another favorite of Broadway
aficianados
. The cast was complemented by two recruits from television—Dick Van Dyke and Shelley Berman. Lahr admits the show was a mistake. “It wasn't our fault—little Nancy's or mine—we had very little help. But what we heard at the start, how it was explained to us, looked exciting.”

In theory the show attempted to parlay two types of comic trends, but in practice managed to cancel each of them out. Devoted to the idea of pleasure, the revue floundered because, with the changes of taste, it was not quite sure how to please. Lahr felt at home with the
revue and its intentions; the prestige of the classics never provided the appeal of a revue sketch's laughter. Nancy Walker was second only to Bea Lillie in his admiration. Her body, blunted like a thumb, her face as chiseled as a figure off a Greek frieze—she was an effective foil for Lahr. In the show, she performed her stumpy ballet impressions as well as parodying, with Lahr, the fashion of rock 'n roll. By pairing Lahr and Walker, the revue evoked, without realizing it, a hint of theatrical nostalgia and self-congratulation.

The theme of the battle between the sexes for a revue was so worn that only something which acknowledged the peculiarities of contemporary thinking from Wilhelm Reich to Simone de Beauvoir could have provided exciting, fresh terrain.
The Girls Against the Boys
did not. While Walter Kerr emphasized a “softness” in the fun machine (“a musical revue, by heaven, is no place for sentiment”), one scene between Lahr and Miss Walker was memorable for its bone-honest focus on the hatreds of marriage and its secret dependencies. The sketch, “Hostility” (see Appendix 7), takes place in a slovenly one-room tenement. Miss Walker is discovered giving herself a pedicure, cotton threaded through the toes of both feet. Lahr enters wearing a construction helmet and a frown. The wolf-faced wife confronts her meatball husband. His disgusted grunts match her gorgon's glower. They proceed to ritual combat, living out their hatred with silent infighting: slamming tables, eating noisily, clattering dishes. He wants to be served as Master; instead, he is treated as cavalierly as a dog. The house is in a perennial state of siege. Finally, Lahr and Walker retire to their Murphy bed. Lahr undresses and, half asleep, flops under the covers; Miss Walker fidgets daintily with her housecoat. The final and only dialogue ensues:

Sentiment rarely crept into Lahr's comedy. He wanted the audience to feel sympathy for him as a performer, but the characters he created were never emotional toward the world. The cop, the woodsman, the baritone, the near-sighted eye doctor, the baseball player were all creations for the musical revue. Their appeal rested on the inability
of the character to understand his egotism and his idiosyncracies. The humor lay in this lack of self-awareness. Sentiment came when the characters began to understand what they were about.