by John Lahr
The comedian’s responsibility for the troupe was important to Lahr’s sense of theater; it also bred revenge. When he caught a chorus girl parodying his gestures in drunken irreverence, he told her to leave the show and go home for the day. She cursed him, but obeyed. The show went on until the “Operating Room” sketch at the end of the first act, a sketch featuring Lahr examining painted ropes as veins and sweeping arms and legs out from under the operating room table.
In the middle of the scene, Lahr heard a Bronx cheer from the boxes. He looked up to see the banished chorus girl whistling and yelling, “You stink, Bert. You stink.”
Whatever the performers’ private feelings, the audience and critics were pleased. The pranks or the catcalls could not deny Lahr’s enormous appeal in Keep Smiling. His success fed his ambition. He imagined himself in vaudeville, films, Broadway. He had never entertained those thoughts in the first years of burlesque, happy to ride the Columbia Wheel as far as it took him. But the ride had been so fast. His experience, the “bits of business” for which audiences clamored, spun gaudier dreams. A decade earlier, he had sat with Jack Pearl imagining what life at the top would be like with a hundred dollars a week. Now he could go higher and the distance would still be measured in dollars and cents. He talked of his visions to no one, not even Mercedes, for a while. His contract in burlesque was renewable after 1923. With Wells providing the material, he could continue to play packed burlesque houses. But after a three-year apprenticeship on the Columbia Wheel, it was apparent to Lahr and to the critics that he was ready for a new challenge. His comedy had found its focus; his energy, even when filtered through a German dialect, captured something real and hilarious in life. Variety, the arbiter of burlesque opinion, summed up his achievement in Keep Smiling, a testament to his polish and growth:
… Mr. Lahr has a real sense of travesty—something which can hardly be said of more than one burlesque comic. He knows how to handle the ins and outs of dialogue and situation perfectly. He’s clean, inclined to be a bit boisterous at times, and works like a Trojan always, but he never gives the appearance of straining for effect in the slightest degree. With all the facility of expression of the experienced burlesquer at his command, Lahr combines this practiced touch with the life and spirit that springs from the temperament of youth,. He knows the business from the ground up.
Vaudeville: Lahr and Mercedes
Comedy is always close to sadness. There was a vaudeville actor, Harry Rose. He used to make his entrance saying, “Here’s Harry,” with a high tenor voice. He was playing a Loew’s theater in Brooklyn where the orchestra would rise up out of the pit and they also had a platform where some actors would go out and entertain the audience. This day, Rose came out, said, “Here’s Harry,” and the platform didn’t come out. He fell down into the pit and broke both his legs. The audience screamed with laughter. That’s funny, but it’s tragic. There was a certain actor when we were kids, a big shot called Herman Timberg. Herman couldn’t see very well. In later years, his eyes got pretty bad. I was headlining the Palace and there was a knock on my dressing room door. It was Herman. I said, “Come in Herman.” He followed the sound of my voice. “Isn’t it wonderful, Bert, you’ve reached these heights. Remember when we were kids.” (He was on the same bill.) I said, “How do you feel, Herman?” “I’ve never felt better,” he said. “I’m in Christian Science and I can read and write with no trouble.” I said, “Sit down.” So he sat on the floor.
Lahr in conversation, 1967
“TELL ME ABOUT Mercedes, Dad.”
“She was a very sweet girl, very quiet and sweet,” he says, tapping a pencil on the side of his desk.
“Well, do you remember much about her? What did she wear? Did she have any special phrases? Did you discuss your ambitions together?”
“Oh, it’s so long ago, John—we were just kids. Of course, we discussed our plans together. We were a team.”
“What was it like working as a team?”
“It was hard work. You had two shows a day, and you always wanted to do your best out there. I was very ambitious—I wouldn’t let anything get in my way. You know there are things in my life that I’m not very proud about—things that would make me seem a heavy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just don’t think I can talk about them because they might hurt someone. For years people have wanted to write books about me, but I turned them down because they would involve incidents which I just don’t think would do anybody any good.”
He continues as if he never intended to stop.
“You understand, John, I was very ambitious, and I just didn’t see anything but my plans. We were very young.”
As he talks, he looks in the mirror and feels the sagging flesh around his cheeks. I know what he is thinking. “How many years?” His skin is leathery, the pouches beneath his eyes are cracked in a labyrinth of lines. He looks like an old turtle this morning. If there were a shell on his back, he could jut beneath it, cutting off the past and the world. But he cannot.
My mother comes into the room and hunts in one of the bureaus for the laundress’s check. She stays too long, hoping to hear about Mercedes. My father stops talking and waits until she leaves.
There is a picture of Mercedes in his drawer. It is buried among the golf balls, screwdrivers, and tobacco. It shows her at the lake with her little dog. She is smiling.
He does not know about her the way I do. He does not know about the quietness of the Arizona night and the loneliness of the small house where she lived with her sister and her son. He cannot imagine the night sounds, the restless sand shifting in the wind, the debris rattling over the barren plains. Sometimes you could hear her, as her son and sister did, shuffling her feet on the uncarpeted floor of her room. She was trying out a dance step, and mumbling the lyrics to one of her old songs. He does not know that in her mind she was still married to him or that in 1930 and 1940 and 1950 she still hoped to get back on the stage.
Her face, like her body, has grown formless and flaccid. She sat in her room in a drab shift, only induced to change her clothes if assured Bert Lahr had picked them out. He cannot visualize the catatonic stupor in which she sat listening to the radio or the television, staring out of her window at the bleached landscape. She rarely saw people. Once when my father’s lawyer dropped in for a visit, she came away from her radio. After a few minutes, she stopped talking. “You have to excuse me,” she said, “I have to go on.”
When Mercedes died in 1965, my father sat up for three nights. He refused to talk.
There is a film of their act that lay unopened in Mercedes’s closet for nearly three decades. It is only one minute long, taken against a cheap backdrop at a Pittsburgh vaudeville house while they were rehearsing. My father never wanted to replay it—the last remaining image of their partnership. In the film he leaps from the wings directly into Mercedes’s path. She has been doing her hootchy-kootchy dance. When Lahr accosts her, she pushes him back and knocks his hat over his eyes. Even without words, the movements are hilarious. Everything in this rehearsal seems perfectly organized. His hat falls effortlessly over his eyes. His policeman’s nightstick bounces on the floor and miraculously rebounds back into his hands.
The performance they give is intimate in its comic turns, filled with the charm of two performers instinctively responsive to each other. The daily ritual of those actions must have formed a deep bond. Mercedes’s body is wonderfully alive. She dances energetically; her movements are supple and graceful. When she reacts to Lahr, it is humorous and natural. Her eyes glisten with understanding, and she laughs at him in her glow. She likes the humor. She stares at him as if some gaudy, harmless leprechaun were cavorting around her. He runs, he waddles, he falls on his face. At one instant he is singing the refrain from “Peggy O’Neill,” at the next, getting hopelessly caught up with his policeman’s stick, which resists his efforts to control it. Gestures raise the comedy beyond entertainment to statement. Suddenly, the act
stops in midstream; the photographer moves in for a close-up. Like amateurs, they are talking to the camera, and laughing. Lahr is mugging and sticking his tongue out. Mercedes looks at him and smiles. She stands there making her hair smooth and neat. She wears a mantilla. He reaches over and kisses her on the cheek. She puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes him away. She is embarrassed. He tries again. Finally, Lahr resorts to clowning. He inflates his cheeks like a bloater fish and crosses his eyes. They move off the stage. His arm is around her.
“It was a mystery.” He waits, and, almost to himself, adds, “I just didn’t see. 1 didn’t know what was happening.”
He looks at me and his eyes widen in glazed emphasis. He shrugs his shoulders, and then sits back.
“Did you love her, Pop?”
“Of course,” he says, looking away.
“Did she love you?”
“I guess so.” His words are lifeless. He turns back to me; and he is crying.
Although theater historians gloss the fact, Bert Lahr spent as much time in vaudeville as he did on the burlesque wheel. The vaudeville experience was more lucrative, but at the same time, limited the scope of his performing. In the four years he put into the Orpheum Time, the nation’s highest-quality vaudeville circuit, he performed only one act. He often tried to talk managers into taking another sketch, but they, like their audiences, demanded the brand-name product. In New York alone, he estimates that “Lahr and Mercedes” could have played vaudeville for two and a half years without repeating a single theater. Lahr had conceived the sketch. Wells had framed it, amalgamating most of the big laugh sequences and “bits of business” from Lahr’s burlesque days. The act was known by various titles: “What’s the Idea,” “The Limp and the Law,” and “The Limb of the Law.” The sketch remains one of the vaudeville classics. Since vaudeville offered a variety of acts with no attempt at plot or cohesive musical format, each performance was spotted at that point in the bill where it would function best. The New York papers, for instance, rated the acts in the same way as they touted the nags:
Lahr contemplated the leap into vaudeville as early as the summer of 1921.With his characteristic sense of insecurity, he felt that he did not have the material to make the switch despite the fact that vaudeville agents and the press were already beginning to suggest what he had envisioned:
Bert Lahr, the principal comedian and star, is not likely to stay long in burlesque, or we are no judges, but will follow James Barton, Bobby Clark, Tommy K. Morton, and many others into the musical comedy field. This is if musical comedy managers have their eyes open. Lahr “has everything” and will go far …
Lahr’s sense of comic contrast and caricature had been carefully nurtured in burlesque. The idea that produced “What’s the Idea” was not so much a routine as a picture in his mind of Mercedes with a gorgeous comb in her tightly drawn hair, wearing an exotic sequined dress. He saw her entrance, and judged the laughs, plotting the comic complications even before the scene was on paper. The beautiful, sensual woman versus the groping, inarticulate cop. The entrance, the songs, the dances were his own suggestions and improvisations. During the layoff between burlesque seasons, he tried the act out at the Amphium Theater in Brooklyn, the sleazy breakin house where he had been banned for being drunk on stage. “When I played it with Mercedes—the first theater we ever played together—we stopped the show. It was a meager house, but they wouldn’t let us off the stage. We really stopped them cold. The stage hands kept saying, ‘Go on, go on!’ I said ‘We haven’t any more.’ ‘Say thank you.’ You understand, John, I finally had to make a speech.”
That summer Lahr and Mercedes played the New York area on “split weeks,” performing four days at one theater and three in another. They received $250 a week. Mercedes gave Lahr a “boodle bag,” a chamois sack that she sewed for him, to carry their money. It was an old vaudeville custom, a sign of good luck, and more than that, a symbol of their dream. Lahr wore the bag around his neck even while performing for the next four years. Only after his first Broadway appearance would he open a bank account.
The sketch became such a favorite with vaudeville audiences that it was included in Lahr’s first Broadway show, Harry Delmar’s Revels (1927) and also in Burlesque (1946). The act not only created a humorous situation with some welltested lines, but was built on a format that enhanced the comedy through sudden surprise. Mercedes, for instance, came on stage singing “La Soldata” in Spanish and doing a flamenco dance, which quickly degenerated into a “bump and grind.” Her song and dance lasted a full minute. When Lahr bolted on stage in his misfit policeman’s outfit, with his hat askew, the contrast was hilarious. The act highlighted the dominant aspects of his comic personality—his physical grotesqueness, his wild, carnival spirit, his instinct for anarchy, and his resilience. The performance lasted fifteen minutes. He and Mercedes experimented with every joke, shifting the stage “business” until they could adapt their sketch to fill a ten-minute time slot or extend it to twenty if there were encores.
At the end of Keep Smiling in 1922, when their burlesque contracts expired, they shifted to vaudeville with remarkable ease. Lahr remembers waiting outside the Seigel Building, where the Keith-Albee bookers and vaudeville agents worked, waiting to see his own agent, Charlie Allen of the M. S. Bentham Agency. Another agent stopped Lahr in the hallway. “Listen kid, you don’t know me, but they’re talking about you at the office. You can get five hundred a week. Don’t take less.” When Lahr confronted Allen a few minutes later and asked for that astounding amount the agent didn’t even blink. “I’m not sure I can get it for you, Bert, but I’ll try.” They met a few hours later. Allen looked dejected. “I couldn’t get it, Bert. The closest I could come was $475—what do you say?” Lahr was astounded. He would have taken his summer-run salary.
Vaudeville represented not only a substantial increase in salary, but also a work day that was cut to an unbelievable thirty minutes. “I was ashamed to take the money, the work was so easy,” he says now.
The new leisure did not bring peace of mind. Lahr went back to reading. Improbably, he read books like Pepys’ Diary, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The archaic and high-flown diction amused him, and he found he could work them into his speech both off and on the stage. He enjoyed the burlesque in the real life of these English men of letters as much as he did on the stage of the Columbia Theater. He also took up golf. But with his livelihood resting on one short sketch, Lahr would never believe that the act was as good as it should be. He brooded over the gags and his delivery in every hotel room and vaudeville house on the circuit. With more time to think about his comedy, he became even more self-conscious and obsessed with his craft. He would wake Mercedes in the middle of the night to improvise a line.
Lahr remembers fetching Wells’s typed sketch from his valise and placing it by the night table, sitting up in his pajamas while Mercedes slept in the opposite bed. The comic taste he would acquire in time was then not always pertinent. He would ad-lib a line like “Oh, Mama, sock me in the puss with a wet sock.” Wells wanted him to take it out, but Lahr refused because he got a laugh. Looking back on it, he is amazed at the lack of subtlety. “It’s the kind of line that, if you did it on Broadway, the audience would freeze up on you.” But without such considerations to bother him, he plowed into the script, trying to wring out every chuckle. The copy still exists. My father’s continual experiments with the sketch can be seen scrawled on every page. He would write in the margins, in his slow, florid hand, talking to Mercedes without raising his eyes from the script.
“Babe, listen to this … Hey, Babe, wake up. I think this is much better for the finish.”
“Bert, can’t we do it tomorrow?”
“Let’s run through it, and see what it sounds like.”
“Bert, please.”
“Let’s run through it now. C’mon, Babe.”
“Where should we start?”
“Start from where I say, ‘It was July. I was patrolling my v
egetable.’”
“Vegetable?”
“I mean patrolling my beat.”
He tries to read his own writing.
“When suddenly I heard a woman scream. Did she scream loud! She screamed so loud she woke me up. Without a second’s delay I rushed upstairs. When I reached the first floor, the yelling was louder; when I reached the second floor, it was still louder, and when I reached the third floor it was still louder. Then I stopped …”
He points to the line he wrote for Mercedes to speak.
“To get your gun?”
“No, I was in the wrong building. I rushed down again. Up the right building. Busted in a door. There was a man. In his hand he had a gun. He was going to shoot his wife with it. I said, ‘Stop!’ He turned around, looked at me and laughed. Oh what a dirty laugh! Then he started to sneak toward me with fire in his eyes. Nearer and nearer he came with fire in his eyes. Four feet. Three feet. Two feet. He came with fire in his eyes. One step nearer he came, the laughter in his face, the gun in his eye …”
“Well, what did you do?”
“I sang ‘Peggy O’Neill’ and he shot himself.”
He stopped reading. “Well, what do you think? I don’t see why we can’t get off with our song at the end of that bit.”
“Whatever you think, Bert—you’re the funny-man. I just want to go back to sleep.”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s get to the theater early and try it out?”
“Goodnight, Bert.”
She would lie back in her bed, and he would continue reading his lines in the shadows of his bed lamp, working out intonation and plotting added movements.
His comedy evolved through trial and error just as it had done in burlesque. This particular bit was tried and cut from the final version. They also eliminated their singing exit in favor of a much more elaborate stage joke. After Mercedes’s opening number, Lahr came on stage rapping his club on the ground and blustering: “Stop. In the name of the station house, stooooop!! What’s the idea? What’s the idea? What’s the idea of massaging the atmosphere?”
