by John Lahr
Foy, who is known to make his exit from parties doing a “buck and wing” is still as irrepressibly gay as he was when he first met my father. He wears a jaunty colored cap and talks about the time he nailed every piece of his wife’s clothing to the floor when she left him.
Foy recalls having drinks with Lahr at the Friars Club, just after he had been accepted as a member. Foy, Jay C. Flippen, and Joe Frisco were sitting at the table when Lahr entered. Frisco had never met Lahr, and when they sat down to the table the first topic of conversation was business. Lahr was excited about his reception in Kansas City, a notoriously difficult vaudeville town.
“I went over big,” he said. “Five curtain calls.”
The men were amazed, and said so. Frisco, however, could not believe it. “Tha—that’s very s-strange, I couldn’t get arrested when I p-played there.”
Lahr offered to buy drinks. “What would you like?”
Foy and Flippen asked for beer. When he turned to Frisco, the comedian looked up without a trace of emotion on his face, “I-I’d like to see your act, you bastard!”
The year was filled with good times. Mercedes and Lahr spent the money they earned lavishly. In New York, they stayed at the Forrest Hotel. If they were not registered, friends knew they were on the road. The company at the hotel off Broadway and Forty-ninth Street was always interesting—Damon Runyon, Jack and Mary Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the Haleys. The excitement of that time is typified by Lahr’s trip to Canada with Bert Wheeler in search of sparkling burgundy. The comedians and their women conceived this craving one Friday evening and traveled to Canada the next day to quench their thirst. There they filled their hotel bathtub with the wine and drank until it was empty. They returned on Monday.
And there was Lake Hopatcong, with long hours of fishing and golf. Lahr remembers Mercedes around the campfire, shading her eyes from the smoke as she watched over the barbecue. She delighted in these cookouts; her food and the exuberance she had for these summer evenings earned her the nickname “Mom.”
Lahr had invited the dance team of Donald Kerr and Ephie Weston to spend a few weeks with them on the lake. Lahr and Mercedes had met them while playing many of the same bills during the year. Kerr and Weston, who were married, were a comedian’s delight. Lahr enjoyed their private idiosyncrasies. When they tried to use the English language in a manner commensurate with their $750-a-week vaudeville pay, they inevitably got lost in the words. Many of the gags my father used around the house are derived from their search for the mot juste. “Pass the salt if I’m not too inquisitive.” “Get in my car and I’ll drive you to your destitution.” Once when Kerr was touting his wife’s dancing ability, he confided to my father, “She can kick the chanticleer.”
With Weston and Kerr in the next room, Lahr and Mercedes were treated to some unusual antics. After one night of drinking, Lahr heard Ephie proclaiming loudly to her husband, “Donald Kerr, you beast! You let me sleep with my clothes on, but my drawers are off!!”
Lahr had purchased a Hupmobile. He recalls a summer excursion with James Barton to Coney Island. “On our way, the car hit a steel hoop and began losing gas. The gas station attendant told me we’d have to have the gas line soldered. I said, ‘Well, I got an idea.’ We went to a drugstore—they carried theatrical supplies in those days. Neighborhood theaters were in all sections of the city. Now nose putty is a product made of wax. You can mold it and put it on your nose. The body heat makes it stick. We used to wear it a lot in burlesque. I bought some and stuck it in the puncture. It held the gas. The car still wouldn’t go because rust had somehow gotten through the gas line and clogged the carburetor. There was only one way to do it, bypass the filter and get gas immediately into the carburetor. I had another idea. We went back to the drugstore and bought a douche bag and cans of cleaning gasoline. We drove to Coney Island and back with Jim Barton holding the douche bag and pouring gasoline.”
The giddy profusion of that year is reduced to snatches of dialogue and fragments of experience. After so many years of skimping, extravagance and waste suddenly held a childish appeal. Lahr’s name was becoming better known, but vaudeville reputations were mercurial. He was conscious of friends moving into Broadway revues: Bert Gordon had performed in George White’s Scandals {1921); Joe Cook had steady work with the Earl Carroll Vanities; and Jim Barton was scheduled for Ziegfeld’s Palm Beach Nights (1926). Lahr brooded about his career and an elusive big-time reputation. As his act became more amusing with each technical “bit” honed for laughter, the nature of his humor escaped his own understanding. The reasons for performing were private and inscrutable; he felt vulnerable when he or others questioned it. When asked to analyze his craft, he sidestepped the personal aspect of laughter with commonplaces. He was handing out this kind of statement to reporters in 1926:
Laugh and the world laughs with you, is the truest saying in the world.… There’s a lot of comedy in humanity, in life, everywhere … Look around as you ride on the trolleys or as you walk along the street. There’s a funny character here, and something funny there, and lots to amuse you.
His enthusiasm for making laughter is not conveyed in such statements, yet his spontaneity toward life is grossly overstated. He is talking to fit the image of the public while refusing to speak about his own image of himself.
Lahr and Mercedes became headliners on the Orpheum Time toward the end of 1925. As one of the strongest comedy acts on the vaudeville circuit, Lahr took on added comic responsibilities. The circuit was grueling:
1926: Orpheum Time
August 23-29 Orpheum, St. Louis, Mo.
30-5 Palace, Chicago, Ill.
September 6-12 Orpheum, Minneapolis, Minn.
13-17 Orpheum, Winnipeg, Canada
20-26 Orpheum, Vancouver, B.C.
27-3 Orpheum, Seattle, Wash.
October 4-10 Orpheum, Portland, Ore.
11-16 Orpheum, San Francisco, Cal.
18-24 Orpheum, Los Angeles, Cal.
25-30 Orpheum, American, San José, Cal.
November 8-14 Orpheum, Oakland, Cal.
15-21 Golden Gate, San Francisco, Cal.
22-28 Hill Street, Los Angeles, Cal.
29-4 Orpheum, Denver, Col.
December 5-11 Orpheum, Kansas City, Kan.
12-18 St. Louis, St. Louis, Mo.
19-21 Orpheum, Chicago, Ill.
22-25 Diversey, Chicago, Ill.
26-1 Orpheum, Des Moines, Iowa
1927
January 2-8 Orpheum, Davenport, Iowa
9-15 Orpheum, Chicago, Ill.
16-22 Palace, Cleveland, Ohio
23-29 Keith’s, Toledo, Ohio
30-5 Temple, Detroit, Mich.
February 6-12 Keith’s, Indianapolis, Ind.
14-20 Keith’s, Cincinnati, Ohio
21-27 Keith’s, Dayton, Ohio
28-5 Keith’s, Louisville, Ky.
March 6-8 Keith’s, Columbus, Ohio
8-10 Keith’s, Canton, Ohio
11-12 Palace, Akron, Ohio
13 Palace, Youngstown, Ohio
14-20 Perry, Erie, Pa.
21-27 Keith’s, Syracuse, N.Y.
28-4 Temple, Rochester, N.Y.
April 5-10 Keith’s, Ottawa, Canada
11-17 Imperial, Montreal, Canada
18-24 Keith-Albee, Providence, R.I.
25-1 Keith’s, Boston, Mass.
May 2-8 Hippodrome, New York City
9-15 Keith’s, Philadelphia, Pa.
16-21 Keith’s, Baltimore, Md.
22-28 Keith’s, Washington, D.C.
30-5 Fordham, Bronx, N.Y.
June 6-12 Keith-Albee, Brooklyn, N.Y.
13-19 Proctor’s, Newark, N.J.
20-23 Proctor’s, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.
24-26 Keith’s, Patterson, N.J.
27-3 Riverside, Ninety-sixth Street, N.Y.
July End of Tour
Lahr teamed up with “the world’s tiniest star,” a midget named Jeanie, to do an afterpiece (see A
ppendix 3). The sketch, “Beach Babies,” incorporated Lahr’s fumbling braggadocio with Jeanie’s pranks. The skit challenged his ability to be at once gruff and beleaguered, and yet to maintain the sympathy of an audience that saw Jeanie as a child. There was a special finesse in this kind of comedy that Lahr always appreciated. “Take W. C. Fields, who was a real horror off stage. On screen he always had a wife who was a dragon. If he did anything with a child, the kid was a brat and the audience wanted to stab him too. So you forgave Fields’s rascality. He always got a form of empathy from an audience. Every comedian finds tricks. I found gutteral noises, ways of moving, doubletakes.”
Jeanie was an engaging performer, and although she was only thirty-eight inches high, she was in her late teens. Lahr and Mercedes would get her on the trains for half price, claiming that she was their child. Jeanie, who enjoyed the fraud, would skip or talk childishly for the occasion. Once, on their way to Pittsburgh, the conductor confronted Lahr. “Is that your little girl in the next compartment?” Lahr said “Yes.”
“Well, she’s drunk and telling snappy stories.” He had to pay full fare.
When they were playing Chicago, a telegram arrived for Mercedes from her sister announcing that her son—Mercedes’s nephew—had died of rheumatic fever. Anna Delpino was a few years old than Mercedes. They had both been in the College Days chorus line when Lahr first met Mercedes. Although Mercedes rarely confided in her sister, Anna was a good friend. She became, in time, Mercedes’s only link with the past.
Anna talks now about those harrowing days as if they were a dream. “I had a boy twelve who died, and when Mercedes came home for the funeral that’s when we first noticed something strange. She was nervous then. She acted nervously. She didn’t realize what was going on, I suppose.”
She remembers that Mercedes sat rigid, refusing to look at the boy. She didn’t cry at the funeral, in marked contrast to her mother, who was inconsolable at Sonny’s death. It is conjecture, of course, but perhaps Mercedes was silently taking her mother’s grief on herself. The boy, who lived with his grandmother while Anna pursued her career, had been her mother’s great hope, a hope held out against a world that had proved itself indifferent to her prayers and her rosaries. Mercedes herself had contributed to her mother’s sorrow. She had first married at sixteen (a fiasco of a marriage, to a middle-aged booking agent, whom she left the day of the ceremony) to legitimize her escape from her mother’s house and to ease her mother’s fear about a career on the stage for “the joy of her life.” Anything, Mercedes had though then, would do if she could earn some money for the family. Now, she must have wondered, what solace could her stage gaiety offer to replace the humiliations her mother had suffered? And what were the reasons for those continuing sorrows? Wasn’t she herself guilty of causing her mother pain?
“The why and the wherefore.” Later, walking down sanitarium corridors, in her Arizona room, Mercedes would repeat these words.She would say them cryptically to doctors and nurses, to inanimate objects, to her dogs. The why and the wherefore. She would repeat them to the picture of Lahr and herself that she kept—the same one they used on their vaudeville Christmas card.
Lahr, who reluctantly attended Sonny’s funeral, did not find his wife’s behavior peculiar. She had always been a quiet girl. She loved her sister’s son and was absorbed in her mother’s welfare. He put her silence down to natural grief. “I was so naive,” he says now. “I didn’t know about those things. I was so young, you know what I mean. I couldn’t distinguish. I didn’t know what was wrong with her.”
If she continued to be self-absorbed off stage, her performances, once they returned to the Orpheum Time, were as professional as ever. On stage she was vivacious, playing as she had before Sonny’s death. And there were other things for Lahr to think about.
Harry Delmar had approached Lahr about working in a high-powered revue on Broadway. Delmar first saw Lahr perform in Newark. He went on the recommendation of Charlie Allen, the agent, and what he saw pleased him. If Lahr and Mercedes could make people laugh like that for fifty cents, they could wreak the same kind of havoc for $5.50 on Broadway. Allen was certain of the talent he represented. “Harry, this Lahr is star material—keep your eyes on him.” Delmar was only twenty-seven, and though a successful vaudeville “hoofer,” his aspiration was producing. He conceived the idea of an all-star revue and clung to it tenaciously. He saw himself being catapulted by one show, like George White, to the zenith of the theater world. He was staking all his money and his dreams on this one idea, and he needed attractions that would draw big money.
Delmar did not meet Lahr until 1926, four months after Sonny had died. They met in Washington, where they were both featured at the Keith Theater, and had adjacent dressing rooms. Lahr was well received in Washington, and Delmar was impressed. “After all,” he explains, “if a low comic could make the predominantly middle-class audience of Washington laugh and not blush at the coarseness of the material, then the New York stage was not far behind.”
Delmar remembers their first conversation vividly because the show, which would eventually bear his name, Harry Delmar’s Revels, became one of the highlights of his career. Lahr, however, had remained cynically aloof to his proposal. Many important producers had watched him perform. Even before he played the Palace in New York, the Shuberts had put him under contract, then let it expire. Florenz Ziegfeld had laughed at his antics at the Palace, intending to find a place for Lahr in one of his extravaganzas, but he never approached him with a contract. So, when Delmar made his opening offer, Lahr was understandably skeptical.
“You let me know, Harry, when you get everything set up.” Delmar remembers those words with relish because, to the astonishment of everyone but himself, his dream was close to reality. He was to sign some of the biggest vaudeville attractions of the decade—Frank Fay, Winnie Lightner, Blossom Seeley. One star seemed to assure another, and his cast fell into place.
Nobody had suggested Broadway to Lahr before. The thought fascinated him. On his dressing table was a review from the Washington Daily News. Never before had he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by what the critics said.
I have reviewed Bert Lahr’s act week in and week out. He had meant nothing in particular. He had just played.
Now Lahr, in his present act, comes out as one of the leading comedians of vaudeville. His new act is a Dutch, done first with a very handsome girl [Mercedes] and second with a child named “Jeanie” who is smart and adept.
Lahr, as I say, has loomed. He is now a headline comic. He has ease, poise, smash. He is a new Mahoney, a new Dr. Rockwell. May Mr. Albee do right by this lad, and not starve and annoy him while he leaps. A new performer, my friends. If you have never seen this lad, now is the chance. He is the big time’s new comedian.
He read the review over many times to himself and then to Mercedes. How hard they had worked for those words! In Washington, Lahr had to correct Mercedes’s movements. He had to keep polishing; there was too much activity on his lines; it was cutting the laughs; they were not as big as they had been the opening night. He was worried about Mercedes’s figure, too. She looked lovely in costume, but now she was putting on weight. Spanish women, he kept reminding himself, had a tendency to gain. “She had to look sexy and nice out there as the straight for my jokes.” He reiterated his worry to her daily. She listened, as she usually did, without argument. Every night there was some gesture, some laugh that could have been funnier. Once she threw a hairbrush at him in frustration. “She had a hot little temper, but it took a long while to come to the surface,” but usually, he thought, she took the criticism quietly, like a real professional.
Whatever daydreams the reviews and the possibility of working on Broadway may have inspired, they were suddenly forgotten in Washington when Anna wired Mercedes to return to New York at once—their mother was dying. Mercedes traveled alone to New York; Lahr finished the engagement in Washington and moved on to New York to their next booking at the Fordham Theat
er in the Bronx. Only five miles apart in the city, they made no plans to rendezvous. Mercedes did not seem to care whether Lahr was with her or not. Another girl in the show would take her place, and she would join him as soon as she could. Secretly, he preferred it that way because he hated funerals, and the thought of having to undergo another ordeal like Sonny’s wake was abhorrent. Mercedes had packed only an overnight bag. She kissed him goodbye at the station absentmindedly. She seemed nervous, but he recalls that she did not cry. She was wearing the amulet she had worn at Lake Hopatcong. It was depressing, but Mercedes, Lahr thought, was a good trouper, a strong girl. When she returned her worry about her mother would finally be resolved. The act could continue.
Mercedes arrived home an hour after her mother died. Isabel was laid at rest in her bed. Mercedes stared at her mother for a long time. The other people in the room, weeping and praying in loud whispers, became shadows to her. She saw only the bed and her mother. She began to sweat profusely. Anna came over. Mercedes stared blankly ahead of her. “What’s wrong, Babe?”
“I don’t know, Anna,” she said, “I don’t know.” As she would relate to doctors later, everything was spinning. She was moving farther away from the people in the room and farther into herself.
Isabel had understood her daughter in a way Lahr could not. She had dwelt on her beauty and cared for her with a concern that was absolute. Bert was different. It was always the act, always the same words, which never reflected that personal insight. With her mother dead, Mercedes’s whole framework of identity slipped away. Nurses would overhear her joking with herself about her name. She would laugh at her many faces. “Mercedes Delpino, Mercedes del Beano.”
Present Illness
About four years ago when her mother was ill, she began to worry a great deal. When doing her act on the road she would become almost hysterical, and it was necessary for her husband to be very stern with her. Her sister states that she began to have peculiar spells in which she would tremble and become faint and stiff. She also had attacks of uncontrollable laughter and crying. On one occasion she smashed everything in her dressing room and also complained of someone peeking at her. Her husband observed that her pupils were widely dilated.
