by John Lahr
The case record runs from 1931 to 1936. Lahr never read it thoroughly. If he had, perhaps, the late months of 1926 and the following year would have been more comprehensible. As it was, there was a kind of theatricality about Mercedes’s actions, a stubbornness that perplexed and angered him. A month after the death of her mother, she smashed their dressing-room mirror during a performance in Los Angeles. Lahr returned to the sound of crashing glass. Mercedes sat slumped in her chair. She was holding her hairbrush in her hand. But she did not speak.
Lahr grabbed her and brought her face up to his. It registered no emotion. “What happened, Babe?”
“Nothing.”
“You broke the mirror. What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Forget it. I don’t know. It just happened.”
“Is something wrong with you? We’ll get a doctor. Do you hurt any place? Do you want me to get something? What’s wrong, for chrissake?”
He could never get an answer. She just looked at him and stared. Although a better educated man might have seen mental disturbance in these incidents and sought a way of dealing with them Lahr viewed them simply as an expression of grief about her mother and Sonny. He believed the purpose of the team was to perform, and Mercedes loved the theater no less than she had before the deaths. She was fine in front of an audience, so he could overlook the curious off-stage behavior. “She always acted peculiar, but I didn’t help matters any, I guess.” He is more compassionate now than he was then. He loved her, but his lack of understanding bred contempt and frustration. Why could she not talk about what was bothering her?
Lahr was a victim of his own energy and resilience. He could not conceive how personal sadness combined with constant performing could force such a change. Mercedes shared his dream; and, in his mind, she shared his stamina. Each new town was a challenge, a step closer to their goal. Doctors assured Lahr that Mercedes’s actions were the logical effects of depression, nothing more. She had been lucid prior to 1926, when they began the Orpheum tour. Now the schedule was more difficult and demanding than Lahr would ever acknowledge. The stage, which held his only hope, was offering its first bitter fruit.
In New York, two weeks after the conclusion of the circuit, Lahr returned to his hotel room to find Mercedes in front of her dressing table, her beautiful black hair sheared from her head. She looked like a monk. “Why, Babe?” was all he could say. She looked at him in the mirror. She said nothing.
Harry Delmar got in touch with Lahr again at the end of his tour. He had raised the money and assembled a sparkling cast. Lahr was impressed, but worried. He could not see where his talents fit into such a bill. Delmàr assuaged his fears. Lahr was especially impressed when he learned that Billy K. Wells had been commissioned to write the comedy scenes. Lahr along with Mercedes was signed as the “unknown quantity” to a two-week contracts while the others players had run-of-the-play agreements.
Harry Delmar’s Revels was scheduled to open in the first week of November 1927. After the first few tryouts in Hartford, nothing, not even the four hundred-dollar-a-week paycheck, could keep Lahr from wanting to quit. “Harry, I’m telling you this material just isn’t funny enough.” Delmar countered every argument and prevailed upon him to stay with the show. Lahr finally agreed when Delmar promised to provide some new sketches for him.
Besides his anxiety about his part, there were other minor annoyances that the Broadway show created. Frank Fay, who was one of the nation’s finest stand-up comedians and whose style was later adopted by such favorites as Bob Hope and Jack Benny, was suave, handsome, and monumentally egocentric. He did not like Lahr’s brand of comedy or the energy and intensity with which he roamed the stage.
Fay, who was, in comparison to Lahr, glib and sophisticated, would unnerve Lahr at the theater, greeting him with “Well, what’s the low comedian doing today?” Once, when they played a benefit at Madison Square Garden, he introduced Lahr saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m going to introduce you to one of the funniest persons on the stage. A man who will keep you in stitches for forty-five minutes. Bert Lahr.”
“After an introduction like that, I was dead,” Lahr admits.
The ploy of referring to other comedians as “low comic” actually originated with Bert Wheeler when he and Fay played the Palace. Fay had been held over nearly ten weeks; he was a phenomenal success. Fay asked Wheeler to do a “bit” with him. Wheeler agreed, but wanted to know what skit they would do.
“We’re just going to go out there and ask the audience to stay after the show and see the afterpiece, which we will do.”
“Why does it take two people to go out there and do that? Let’s rehearse something.”
Fay’s reply was typical. “Don’t you know I’m probably the busiest and most popular comedian in this town and I haven’t got time to rehearse.”
Wheeler remembers the moment vividly. “I knew what I was in for. I get out on the stage with him and he starts on me. And I’m telling you he must have popped nine or ten gags off my head and the people are falling out of their seats laughing at this man. He expected me to answer him, but if I had answered him, he would have killed me double. He was just laying for me there. For once in my life I got smart. I let Fay run out of material, like a fighter out of steam. He got so mad because I wouldn’t answer him he said, ‘Aren’t you going to do something for the folks?’
“‘Yes’ I said, ‘When you get through getting those titters …’
“Fay says, ‘Titters?’
“I say, ‘Fay, you have your method of getting laughs, and I have mine. What you consider a big laugh would be a snicker to me.’
“‘Well, go ahead,’ Fay said, looking at me; I had been leaning against the backdrop while Fay performed. ‘The hall is yours.’
“I said, ‘Now would you like to see me get a laugh like you’ve never gotten in your whole life?’ Fay nodded; and then I smacked him in the puss.
“Fay just stood there while the audience howled. When the laughter died down, he turned to the audience and in his dead-pan delivery said, ‘That’s what you get for mixing with low comedians.’”
When Fay used the term to describe Lahr, it rankled him. Despite the fact that Lahr respected Fay’s ability and would in time become good friends with him, he got his revenge when the show came to Broadway by getting most of the good reviews. Billboard heralded the revue as “extravagant as anything Ziegfeld could offer.” Lahr and Mercedes were singled out for their slick comedy skit.
But what your correspondent wanted to see was more of Bert Lahr. The grotesque we seem to remember from a dim past of burlesque and small-time vaudeville. Lahr is terrifically funny, but he didn’t have enough to do.
New York Post
Lahr’s caricatures were vivid in their wild brashness; his gestures were daring to a Broadway audience, whose taste leaned toward a more controlled, acceptable form of laughter. Lahr appeared in a few skits besides the cop act, and took part in a quartet by Billy Rose called “The Four Horsemen—Don Quixote, Paul Revere, Ben Hur, and Jesse James.” He, of course, was the man outside the law, Jesse James. All of Lahr’s old gags were there, but the difference was a new polish and sophistication for the $5.50 crowd.
The Broadway audience responded well to the anarchy he created on the plush stage of the Shubert Theater. Lahr was shocking and funny. One critic reflects the insularity of the Broadway comic stage and those who wrote about it at the time Lahr entered it:
And then there is Bert Lahr. His name should be writ in gold on the programme. He is an extremely amusing comedian, new to me. I suppose he comes from where I never go—from vaudeville. Everything that is good in these affairs, I’m told, has been annexed from vaudeville. However, Mr. Lahr is excellent no matter whence he comes, and he is the real comedian of the ‘Revels.’”
Harry Delmar’s Revels not only introduced Bert Lahr to Broadway, it was also the showcase for one of the great musical standar
ds of this century, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” As Lahr recalls it, “Delmar wanted a ‘jewel number’ where the showgirls would come down in bizarre costumes. He wanted to do it in a different way. So Lew Brown (of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson) came up with a song title, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.’ I went with Delmar over to a music publishers, a place called Kalmer and Puck. Delmar gave Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields the idea. ‘Two young kids in front of a jewelry store. One says to the other, “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”’They took the title and wrote a song. The number didn’t do much in the show at all. It wasn’t done by important people; and the public didn’t consider Harry Delmar’s Revels a hit show. They put it into Blackbirds of 1928 and it became one of the biggest hits of the country.”
Despite approving reviews, Delmar’s spectacular did not do well at the box office. Lahr was faced with an important decision. “I realized that this was my first show on Broadway, and in order to be seen, I’d have to stay there. The show was a flop. It would have closed. We needed money. Frank Fay put in some cash; and I invested five thousand dollars—which was all of my vaudeville savings. In the end, I was the only person who benefited by the exposure. Since we had put money into the show, we were also part owners. As performers we had taken a cut in salary. We weren’t able to pay the writers. Billy Rose, who wrote some songs for the show, sued us for his money. Being part owner, I resented it. He sued me for forty dollars. I said to myself, ‘How could he do this to people in this position.’ So I went to the Pacific Bank on Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue. I said, ‘Give me forty dollars worth of pennies.’ I was irate, incensed. Now, that’s four thousand copper pennies. I carried them on my back down to the Loew’s State Building where Rose’s manager worked and threw it on his desk. I said, ‘Here, you give it to the son-of-abitch.’ He said to me, ‘You better take it back, Bert. It’s not legal tender.’ So I had to lug the pennies back five blocks, four thousand copper pennies!”
His name sizzled in lights above the Shubert marquee for only sixteen weeks. Frank Fay was the headliner, but Lahr had been promoted to second place on the billing. He had seen his name on marquees before, but this was grander and larger than he had ever imagined. Thrilled, he kept a picture of that first Broadway marquee in his scrapbook.
“We opened the show with a trial scene,” recalls Delmar. “Lahr was the judge. I used to know what kind of a house we had just by watching his face when he stuck his head over the bench.” Usually, Lahr’s face was not too jovial, but whatever his hopes for a full house, there were other things that pleased him about being on Broadway. The new celebrity he had achieved was reflected ironically in the National Shirt Shop Window on Broadway. The buffoon had suddenly become dapper. A picture of him with arms crossed, staring maturely into the camera in a well-tailored three-piece suit, filled the window. A placard read:
“LAHR”
A New Color Combination Neckwear
as Worn by Broadway’s Best Dressed Comedian
He had a picture taken of the window display. It represented the way he imagined himself—opulent, genteel, and smooth.
If people began publicizing him in an image he had always desired, he also was delighted to find his name in the critical vocabulary. A clipping describing another comedian in 1928 reflects his new fame:
Billy Bann, of the Bert Lahr school of funny men, is frequently funny …
Five years after Harry Delmar’s Revels, doctors explained the process Mercedes was exhibiting off stage as “blocking.”
She smiled when answering these questions. When certain other questions were asked, she “blocked” very decidedly, did not reply, paid no attention to the next two or three questions and then answered the first unanswered question pointedly. Q. What are your plans? Would you like to go back to the show business? (late answer): There is room for me in the act when I get ready.
Lahr never understood her evasions of his questions and her silence, made more annoying to him by her elaborate facial responses, as if she were enjoying a private joke with herself. Mercedes had never been more stunning or effective in the act than she was during their only Broadway exposure. Lahr watched her move from the wings, waiting anxiously for the wink to come when he would proclaim himself her Uncle Succotash. She was still lively and crisp in her delivery. The only difference between her present performance and the ones in vaudeville was that her lovely mantilla and fine Spanish comb had been replaced by a scarf, which hid her short, unkempt hair from the audience. When Lahr watched her on stage, he thought of the inexplicable impulses that seized Mercedes and made her alien not only to him but also to herself.
“There is room for me in the act when I get ready.” Mercedes always believed that the stage would accept her again. Her evasions about the theater, her performance, and her husband appeared in the mental barrier, the blocking, she put up to her emotions. Lahr could not keep the questions from his face, but he refused to speak them to her directly. How long could Mercedes remain on the stage? He feared for the worst.
Once during the Revels, he came into the dressing room before the show to find Mercedes drinking with a friend. She was drunk. Lahr could hardly control his rage. He ordered the other woman out of the room and glowered at Mercedes.
“What do you think you’re doing? We’ve got to go on in fifteen minutes.”
“Where’s my brush, Bert?”
“Did you hear me, Babe? Let me look at you.” He looked at her eyes and picked up the bottle to see how much Scotch she had taken.
“What are you trying to do to us, Babe?… What are you trying to do? I’m just starting to earn decent money and you start acting up. If it’s anything I can help … You’re acting crazy … unprofessional. Do you have anything to say?”
She paused; and Lahr waited for her response. Finally, she said, “If I can’t find that brush I’ll never be ready.”
“Mercedes, will you talk to me? Talk, goddamit, talk.”
“The brush.”
“You’re drunk,” he said and struck her.
The image is still vivid in his mind. “I slapped her. It was the only time I ever raised a hand to her. She had to go on stage.” Mercedes just stared at him. She laughed, and got ready to go on.
Lahr tried to be patient. He attempted to calm her, but she would cringe from his touch as if his flesh carried destruction. What was wrong with him? The question plagued him. He felt barren and sexless. She showed little interest in him when he spoke of the act. Mercedes had always ironed his clothes and kept their small accumulation of possessions neat and well organized. He respected her for this, and took it for granted. He never thanked her or acknowledged her actions, but it was tacitly understood, he thought, that this was part of the team effort. Now, nothing seemed to be in its place; the hotel room mirrored the confusion in her mind. He would ask for his shirts, and she could not find them nor remember where she had sent them to be laundered. He expected her to look nice for him, but, instead, he could see that the pride she had shown in her beautiful features was being forgotten. Before, she had spent hours doing her lips and combing her hair, now she dressed hastily and paid little attention to her appearance. He would scold her. “Darling, please dress nicely today. Why don’t we go out and buy some new clothes? I’ll come with you. Don’t you want to look nice again?” She would not reply. He would buy her clothes, only to see them become wrinkled and uncared for.
For a man so conscious of the outside world and the sentiments of others, the humiliation was deep. People knew—how could they not see the difference? On stage, Lahr was free. He could run, jump, improvise with abandon. He was set apart from society. But now with money and acclaim within reach, his private world seemed strangely inflexible. Off the stage, he imagined people were judging him; worse than that, looking into Mercedes wide, dark eyes, he feared she was thinking things about him she would not share. He felt constricted, his freedom overwhelmed by an inarticulate guilt.
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br /> One day he answered the door to his hotel suite and found a policeman standing next to his wife.
“Bert Lahr?”
“Yes.”
“Is this your wife?”
“Of course. What’s happened, Babe?”
“She couldn’t remember her name, sir. She was walking on the grass with her dog. And when I questioned her, she got all confused, cursed at me. I had to write a summons, sir.”
Lahr tried to put the incident out of his mind and interest Mercedes in his next show. The Revels gamble had paid off. He had been signed by Vinton Freedley and Alexander Aarons, two of Broadway’s most successful musical comedy producers, to a five-year contract. He remembers bringing home the announcement and pasting it in his clipping book.
Aarons and Freedley have engaged DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson to write their next musical comedy production. It will be entitled Hold Everything. Bert Lahr is figured to have a prominent part in the piece, and Russ Brown will be engaged …
May 12, 1928
“We were finally there. Big dough, a Broadway contract. I came back one afternoon a few weeks after the police incident and Mercedes had locked herself in the bathroom. I knocked on the door, ‘Mercedes, what are you doing in there? Open the door!’ I waited. There was no answer. I pushed at the door, finally I smashed it open. She was squatting by the lavatory. She held a handful of dollar bills. I couldn’t speak—that was money from our “boodle bag.” She held the money tight in her hands. She was shoving the bills one by one down the toilet …”
All the actors knew what was happening. Nobody talked about it, and even now Delmar and Foy do not want to mention it. “It was so long ago, John. It’s water under the bridge.” Delmar glances at the reviews of the Revels laid out in front of him. He points to a name. He winks.
My father doesn’t hide it. “I started playing around. Mercedes didn’t want me, she didn’t show any emotion toward me. Sometimes I’d stay out to two, three in the morning. When I’d get back, she didn’t mind.” He would leave her and return, silently convinced that Mercedes did not care, certain she did not realize the situation of her selfabsorption. “A change came over me—I was looking for something, reaching out for something.” He repeats it. “Reaching, reaching.”
