Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  The weeks that followed his performance were more exciting than he had ever known. His friends and even vague acquaintances greeted him with the “Dutch” dialect he had bellowed. Sometimes they threw up their arms in the same wild rhythm. They knew him and showed they understood more about him. They challenged his reticence; and he basked in this new recognition. “He was such a success,” recalls his sister, “that Gus Edwards heard about him and wanted to put him in a school act. Mother and Dad wouldn’t hear of it. But after that performance I remember a teacher said he was the clown of the class and they couldn’t do anything with him.”

  Lahr himself never quite feared the life of delinquency his parents kept predicting for him. Yet, when he failed his eighth-grade year and was ordered to repeat it, the question that plagued him was hammered into his mind by Jacob. “What’s going to become of you?” Jacob wanted his son to have an education; but Lahr was not interested. If he did not attempt anything, he could not fail. The upholstery business was the alternative. His hands were not those of an upholsterer but long for their size and, like a woman’s, thin and brittle. They were, as he said himself, clumsy and groping, unable to master the intricate maneuvers of tools and thread. He tried those things to please his father. The results had been disastrous because he could never concentrate. Without a trade and without an education, his possibilities seemed as bleak as the streets he was born to. There was never an answer to the question he asked himself: “What’s going to become of you?” He was only conscious of his immobility and a vague, undirected energy.

  Although Lahr would become P.S. 40’s most famous alumnus, he never graduated. The idea of repeating the eighth grade was oppressive, and Lahr had a scheme for avoiding that humiliation. The plan lay in the very hands he looked upon with such ironic bewilderment. At fourteen, he could get a working permit, so each day he read the papers and the list of available jobs. He would write a letter to his teacher explaining that it was necessary for him to leave school to work in his father’s shop, not an unusual request; many of his friends had been taken from school by a poor parent. It took him two minutes to compose the note and another minute to copy Jacob’s signature. He hesitated a week before handing it in; but when he did, the teacher excused him without further questions.

  For a week following his withdrawal, he did not tell his parents, preferring to rise with his family and set off as if he were heading up Prospect Hill to P.S. 40, two blocks away. In fact, he had composed letters of application in his finest script and was awaiting the results. “I was certain that with my good penmanship, I could get a job.”

  “On my first letter, I got a job with Wetzel the Tailor. I was a lazy kid, I didn’t know where I was going. Now, here’s a complete metamorphosis. Wetzel paid me $4.50 a week, and this year [1966] my agent gave me a Christmas present from Wetzel the Tailor—just a sports coat cost $250. I worked in the vest department, delivering vests up and down. I don’t know how I lost that job, but after that I worked in Rogers Peet, downstairs, on Thirteenth Street. I tried to install the Wetzel System. I was a stock clerk and delivery boy. It was all wrong. They had charts of how things should be done. I loused that up too. Once I had to deliver a suit way up on Broadway. You could get a transfer and travel all over the city for a nickel in those days. It was a long way uptown and getting dark. When I got to the address, I realized it was a cemetery. The caretaker evidently bought a suit and he lived right in the middle of the grounds. Brother, this was really something, because when I was a kid I used to be afraid to sleep alone. I remember running back, running through those graves. I didn’t quit that job, I must have been fired. But there was this fellow in the stock room who belonged to the Boys’ Club on Tenth Street and Avenue A. They spawned a lot of fighters like Knockout Brown, who was cross-eyed and his opponents didn’t know which way he was going to punch. My friends and I used to fool around boxing behind the clothes rack. We were always knocking down the coats.”

  In six months after leaving school, Lahr held and lost fourteen jobs. His optimism was gone, his sense of failure multiplied by his parents’ disgust at his aimlessness. The routine of finding work was as habitual as ways of coping. “You’d earn $4.50 a week and you’d bring it home to your mother. I used to get twenty-five cents a day, a nickel on the subway and fifteen cents for lunch. One time all I ate for four days was banana sandwiches. I broke out in the damndest rash and had stomach aches. I remember that.”

  His fifteenth job was his last ordinary employment and his shortest tenure. Jacob had arranged a job for his son as a delivery boy with L. &M. Friedlander on Wilkins Avenue, who ran a prospering hardware store. His duties were easy enough—to deliver merchandise and help around the store. It was the first time, however, that he had been invested with the responsibility of buying merchandise for the store. The proprietor gave him five dollars to buy brooms at a local warehouse. On the way back from the assignment, Lahr erased the wholesale prices, marking higher ones in their place. He pocketed the difference. His sleight of hand was uncovered that same afternoon. He was fired immediately, and Mr. Friedlander sent a note to Jacob about his son’s actions.

  The family was mortified. This was the first either Jacob or Augusta knew of his thefts. Lahr found himself being judged suddenly as an adult. There had been no respite after childhood, no bridge to responsibility. “I never stole a thing after I got caught at the hardware store. I made up my mind—voom, just like that, when I saw Mom crying in her apron. It was over. Finished.”

  Lahr never dreamed of becoming a professional performer or regarded the theater as more than a convenient, gaudy escape. While he was floundering from job to job, many of his friends were trying to forge careers in show business. This took a conviction, an optimism that he lacked. Convinced of his own worthlessness, driven between the demands of his parents and his own intense dissatisfactions, he was stymied. The family’s growing hostility and his own list of failures, too long for a boy of fifteen, cowed him. But it also made choices easier. So, when Charlie Berado, the older brother of his boxing friend, asked him to be part of a school act for a professional tryout, he did not hesitate, disregarding his parents’ disdain for other children who had gone, against their family’s wishes, into the theater world’s frivolous good times and make-believe. The tryout at Loew’s 145th Street was held once a week, as a service to both an eager public that craved new entertainment and the plethora of young performers who would work for nothing in the hope of getting bookings on the Loew’s circuit. Lahr was buoyed up by the memory of his eighth-grade performance; but now he faced a more disparate audience.

  Some of the same friends who had seen him on the school stage were there to watch him on a “real” one. They were tougher now, more cynical toward Lahr’s aspirations.

  Lahr cannot remember their act or the preceding scenes that he watched eagerly from the wings. The song, however, never left him. In the middle of the school act, he turned to the audience and sang:

  My parents always tell me I’m the apple of their eye

  But my friends just look at me and joke.

  I gaze into the mirror and then I start to cry

  Am I descended from an apple tree or just a poison oak.

  “You said it—Swedish!” yelled one of Lahr’s friends sitting with a block of Wilkins Avenue cronies. Lahr was bewildered: the laughter was not the same affectionate kind he had known at P.S. 40. He tried to relax and continued.

  They say my face is like a mangy dog’s.

  They don’t let monkeys into synagogues.

  “I would’ve been your father,” came a faceless voice from the stalls, “but a bulldog beat me down the alley.”

  So what’s a guy to do?

  Join the circus or the zoo.

  When the song ended, the neighborhood kids exploded with applause and cheers for Lahr. He didn’t hear it. “We were pretty bad; the act wasn’t too good, and nothing came of the Loew’s tryout.”

  After the performance, he removed his
makeup, washed quickly, and wrapped his damp costume in the towel he had brought with him. As he stepped outside the stage door, he saw his friends huddled in the shadows of the fire escape waiting to greet him. They clamored together, chuckling about their friend who stood there, half smiling, half terrified at their presence. A friend sounded a note on his harmonica, as they did at Crotona Park.

  Hooray for Swedish

  Hooray at last

  Hooray for Swedish

  He’s a horse’s ass …

  “I’ll throw pennies at you bastards one day.” The rest of the words could not be forced through his anger. They were laughing at his performance and his vague hopes. He threw his towel at them. It flopped under the fire escape. He pushed his way past the boys and stalked alone into the streets.

  Lahr’s anger dwindled quickly. His moment on stage—and watching the other performances from the wings—was so much more vivid than the blurred memory of jobs not four weeks in his past. When Berado approached Lahr to be part of a fulltime professional act called “The Seven Frolics,” he had no second thoughts. He did not know what kind of performer he could be. He had a loud voice, which qualified him as a singer; his athletic agility could have made him an acrobat; and, of course, there was the clowning. The thought of becoming a “Dutch” comic and using the familiar German-American dialect appealed to him most. “I don’t know if I was impressed with the idea of the stage or not. You know, when you’re a kid your thoughts are on women. What attracted me more than anything else on stage was that you’d see the comedian holding the women around the waist and walking them across the stage. And I said to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could do it.’ Just to be around the women, that impressed me more than anything.”

  Lahr, with his wild shock of black hair and his jagged nose, was no more convinced of his attractiveness than of his talent. The theater brought response and a special kind of excitement, but he never romanticized its appeal. The theater was a practical concern. “I liked it the minute I got into it because performing was easy, and I was doing something I liked. Any job I ever had, I lost. I was lackadaisical. I was all mixed up. I had no ambition to be anything. My idols were the Dutch comedians—Solly Ward and Sam Bernard—because I was born in a German neighborhood and knew the accents. I copied Solly a lot when I was a German comedian. In those days, I couldn’t wait until I got on. I would have done twenty shows a day. It was like a shot of—dope? adrenalin?… When I began to work steadily and travel, I found I liked living alone. I didn’t have anybody waking me up with the words ‘Get up and go to work.’ I just wanted to get away. I wasn’t worried whether my parents loved me or not. I wanted to make some money and get away from that type of life. I wasn’t happy at home.”

  Lahr and The Seven Frolics could not have picked a better year than 1910 for their initiation into the entertainment world. The year climaxed a decade of extensive urban development. Between 1900 and 1914, thirteen million immigrants, accounting for forty per cent of the urban population, would make their way from Europe; eighty per cent of this number would be engaged in industrial and commercial jobs. The economy mushroomed in the decade between seventy-five and eighty per cent, although the workers’ wages did not increase in proportion to the mammoth profits. The new wealth created leisure and a demand for entertainment among the middle classes, while the lower classes, as Lahr knew so well, sought the relaxation of the theater after the ennervating demands of a day’s work. From honky-tonks to side shows, men with a sense of public demand and a flare for publicity made fortunes in packing the harried, entertainment-hungry public into theaters. New York had over two hundred theaters by 1910. Lahr and his friends did not know the figures, but they caught the spirit of possibility that filled the theater world. “Anybody could get on. There were even people who made a living getting the hook. Almost anybody could get a professional tryout. When I started, things were pretty bad, even when I did get work.” It was a seller’s market; and that knowledge gave every performer, no matter how mediocre, hope.

  Lahr entered show business in the salad days of burlesque. After the somber nineties, burlesque rallied until, in January 1910, it reached the pinnacle of its popular acceptance with the opening of the Columbia Theater in New York. The theater represented a decade of building by Sam Scribner and symbolized a theatrical circuit of about forty theaters extending throughout America’s largest cities. They provided the highest quality of burlesque entertainment. Many followed Scribner’s example and established chains of theaters. Lahr had seen the names of these circuits on billboards—the Western Circuit, the Gus Sun Time, the Mutual Wheel—vague, awesome terms. Each handled its own performers and booked its own acts. There seemed to be so many outlets for entertainment that Lahr was sure The Seven Frolics would succeed.

  The tedium of waiting for bookings around the Fitzgerald Building on Forty-second Street was alleviated by the rumors of sudden success that came to performers with less talent, but more luck, than The Seven Frolics. Lahr was always ready to believe the stories. Berado needed only to mention William Hammerstein and his low-brow variety “Nut-Houses” to keep his troupe pacified when jobs were scarce. Hammerstein had proved that while talent was an important theatrical commodity, it was not always necessary. He made show business headlines by booking Conrad and Graham, the two girls who shot W. E. B. Stokes in the Ansonia Hotel. The figure Berado quoted to his troupe was correct; the girls, with absolutely no experience, headlined at three hundred dollars a week, billed as “The Shooting Stars.” Hammerstein also featured freaks like “Sober Sue” and offered a thousand-dollar reward to anyone who could make her laugh. The best comics of the day tried. Not even Sam Bernard or Eddie Leonard could bring a smile to her face, which was understandable, since, unknown to the audience, her facial muscles were paralyzed. Occasionally famous athletes like Jack Johnson the boxer or the Olympic marathon champion, Dorando, were booked into the Nut House entertainments.

  The luster of these stories and the flamboyance of Broadway characters filled Lahr’s imagination. He and his friends spied on the Lobster Palace Society, which made the famous Rector’s its meeting place. Each immigrant group had its own heroes, but Lahr admired them all—Diamond Jim Brady, whose thirty sets of diamonds were a glittering indication of Broadway’s prosperity; Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, factory workers from his neighborhood who set up a chain of nickelodeons and went on to fabulous adventures and fortunes in the film industry. The possibilities were exciting; they filled him with a voluptuary’s dreams, unspeakable fantasies of wealth and leisure.

  Lahr had no idea at fifteen what his comic image was or would be. “I guess I did copy Solly Ward. All German comedians copied someone when they were young. I learned ways of working and delivery. Maybe I copied a few of their mannerisms, not to a great extent, though. I copied ways of carrying the body, maybe a catch line here and there. Finally, I found my own method and threw all those other mannerisms away.” In 1910, the theater was comedians. People wanted to be amused and, at no other time in the history of the American stage were there so many experts at making them forget or, at least, laugh at the gross inequities of the age. Ed Wynn, Hal Skelly, Ben Welch, Clark and McCullough, W. C. Fields, and Weber and Fields were among the many who reaffirmed Lahr’s decision to become a comic. His body, with its wiry, ungainly humor, his protean face, his need for affection made the decision for him.

  “My appeal has been that people identify me with the common man.” Lahr did not analyze it like that in 1910. The comic milieu that spawned him and the rest of America’s great comedians dealt immediately with the elemental emotions—lust, fear, appetite, greed, misery. These spoke to Lahr’s experience; he found a satisfaction in laughing at things that had been painful for so long.

  The humor of the first decade of the twentieth century cut deep into the paradoxical fabric of the New World. It was at once a criticism and an acceptance of America’s ideals. Lahr remembers seeing Ed Wynn perform and watching him jibe at
the rich who could afford the luxury of private education. “Rah! Rah! Rah! Who pays the bills. Pa and Ma.” Although Solly Ward was the one important influence on his early comic identity, Lahr watched a great many comedians, all of whom had something to teach him. Tramp acts were successful in these early years, introducing some of the theater’s brightest stars—W. C. Fields, Lew Bloom, Nat Wills. These acts laughed at the inefficiency of government and the paradoxes facing an unsophisticated immigrant populace. Lahr recalls Ben Welch, the finest of the early Jewish comedians, whose mangled monologues dramatized the immense difficulty that foreigners had in adapting to a new idiom. American society could match its optimism with unexpected terrors. Lahr saw something intrinsically funny in the malaprop, in the same way that random violence on stage took on a ridiculous perspective it didn’t have in real life.

  In its passion to be entertained, the American public encouraged every form of entertainment. Young people like Berado and Lahr could go on the stage without experience or polished material. The most accessible formula was the kid act, satirizing life in the classroom. The young performers could write their own material or crib it from various acts, supplementing their skits from the plethora of material in “business” books like Joe Miller’s Joke Book. If they sometimes lacked the words, they knew well the tedium of overcrowded classrooms and bad teaching and were able to improvise. There was a challenge in this kind of formula routine; its proximity to the adolescent world made it an exciting vehicle for Lahr and his friends. Many entertainers who would become important to America’s theatrical history began in these raucous, simple skits. Jack Pearl, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Bert Gordon (the Mad Russian) and Lahr were among many who first discovered the theater through these routines.