by John Lahr
The excitement of going into rehearsal for his first Broadway musical comedy filled Lahr with a sense of urgency and anticipation. His professional concerns glossed the sadness of Mercedes’s condition. Then, in September, she told him that he was going to be a father. Doctors Lahr consulted thought a child would take Mercedes’s mind off the death of her mother and bring her back to reality. Lahr never told them of their Lake Hopatcong “marriage.” In his own mind, they were married. But his fantasies prevented him from realizing that Mercedes had not made the same assumption; and that to be Catholic, unmarried, and pregnant could seriously add to the traumas that already threatened Mercedes’s spirit and mind.
The doctors would uncover her curious responses:
She has refused to give me the date of her birth, but when told all about her early life when a baby, she admitted it. She attended school until 15 years of age, and then took up her profession as a singer and dancer. She took a position in a miniature revue, called “Mimic World” and after that trouped in various shows. She met her husband in one of these shows and married him (blocked on year of marriage)…
Lahr did not tell her of his discussions with the doctors. She had never wanted a child before, and now the sudden thought that one was growing inside pained her, creating complexities she could not express.
And Lahr remembers lying in bed with her thinking of Hold Everything and of the new child who would be born almost as a symbol of their twelve years of struggle. He tried to touch her, to kiss away her fears. He moved toward her and held her in his arms. As he embraced her, laughter rose from her throat. “She laughed at me, John. Laughed when I was making love to her.”
Broadway Beginnings
Once when I was doing Flying High, I played a benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House. Russ Brown said to me, “Do you realize that you’re stepping on the same boards that Tetrazzini and Caruso trod?” I said, “Yeah, but it’s a bad house for mugging.”
Lahr in conversation
When DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson talked to me about being in Hold Everything, I asked them, “Couldn’t I be a German fighter?” Buddy laughed at me. He knew I had the makings of a funny man. When I went into the part, even in those days, I said to myself—” Well, it would be sort of silly, wouldn’t it.” I just fell into this character of a bellowing, punch-drunk fighter.
Lahr in conversation
BERT LAHR’S COMEDY was always contemporary. In 1928, when middle-class America was still on its spree and prosperity still seemed assured, his laughter caught the pulse of the time while reminding an audience of what they had left behind. His humor was lavish and generous, boisterous and unsophisticated. Yet Lahr’s good spirits and his outlandishness were the twentieth-century equivalent of the frontier tall tale—a preposterous stage language anticipating a world of success and safety. In every sketch or song, Lahr’s comedy triumphed over adversity—confirming the audience’s intuitive faith in the benevolence of American life.
Lahr’s initiation into musical comedy was a fortuitous combination of his exuberance and the writing skills of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, a musical-comedy team whose shows reveled in the delight and wonder of the American experience. Good News (1927) sang about happy college days; Follow Thru (1929) about country-club life; and Hold Everything (1928), the first show they wrote for Lahr, gloried in the national fascination with prize fighting at a time when Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were folk heroes. Their shows demanded speed and a joyous celebration of the present—two ingredients of Lahr’s uncomplicated buffoonery.
DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson were living out the prophecy of their own song—
Oh Boy! I’m lucky,
I’ll say I’m lucky,
This is my lucky day.
They shared, like Lahr and other Broadway journeymen, a boisterous faith in America’s profusion. They appreciated Lahr’s humor, his talent, and his “meteoric” rise to stardom. He was as new as Charles Lindbergh, as solid as a Model “T.”
Just as Billy K. Wells had put Lahr into the healthiest burlesque environment, Lahr’s talent, offering the howling variety of low comedy, had attracted the triumvirate at the peak of their success. Lahr could not have made his Broadway musical-comedy debut in more professional hands.
DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson called themselves “The Big Three.” Their routine for writing Hold Everything followed a familiar pattern. In July, they checked into the Ritz Hotel in Atlantic City. They stayed in adjoining suites for a week to twelve days, venturing outside only for afternoon walks and late meals. Twice before from their Atlantic City hideaway the men had poured out songs that charted the romantic exuberance of the twenties, and remained a part of the American musical tradition for generations. In their first “book show,” Good News, the team wrote “Good News,” “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “Lucky in Love,” “Varsity Drag.” The previous year, for George White’s Scandals (1926), they had contributed such songs as “The Birth of the Blues,” “Lucky Day,” and “Black Bottom.”
Buddy DeSylva was the organizer of the group. He left the University of Southern California after his first year in 1916 and came to New York in 1919 because, as he told his friend and collaborator Jack McGowan, “By the time I graduated, I knew I’d be a rich man.” He combined the discipline of a writer with a sense of phrase and romance that made his songs as scintillating as the decade in which they were written. He was especially effective in bridling the wild imagination of Lew Brown. DeSylva had been responsible for many famous lyrics before he teamed with Brown and Henderson. DeSylva had created such standards as “If You Knew Suzy” (with Joseph Myer), “Somebody Loves Me” (with George Gershwin), “Look for the Silver Lining” (with Jerome Kern), “California Here I Come” (with Al Jolson and Joseph Myer).
While Lahr, in an anxious limbo between vaudeville and Broadway, waited nervously to see the script, the team had to sandwich writing Hold Everything between a grueling schedule of commitments for films, stage shows, and their own publishing company.
There were no axioms to producing a musical score, but there was a definite pattern to which the team adhered. Ray Henderson, the only member of the trio still living, can recall the routine vividly. “We’d start laying out a show musically in New York. We might have a couple of titles, a couple of lines; we might even have a couple of tunes. And when we thought we had enough, we always went to Atlantic City to the Ritz. It got to be a habit. DeSylva and Brown would go into the bedroom and knock out a lyric, and then they’d bring it into the living room to me, and we’d set it. We’d work on a song that we might have started in New York or conceived in Atlantic City. We’d stick at it. We’d stay in the suite all day. If we got enough done, we might go out for a little fresh air, and then come back and work some more. That was the same routine, day in and day out. And to show you how meticulous DeSylva was—you see these pages of foolscap. We’d finally get the verse knocked out, and Buddy would write the song neatly on a piece of foolscap and fold it in half. He put it on the right side of the table near the piano. He got the biggest kick out of that. He’d go over and pick it up and feel it and say, ‘Well, we’re coming along.’”
While the score they completed in Atlantic City was not their best, it adhered to the musical recipe of the day. It was light, romantic, and tuneful. The book of Hold Everything, written by DeSylva and Jack McGowan, was about prize fighting—a theme that, even by 1928, had been exploited beyond its merit (there had been four shows with prizefighting scenes that year). One critic observed about Hold Everything:
Of course there is a gymnasium scene, a dressing room episode with the sweetheart busting in, and the battle itself. The story is unimportant. This is a piece in which the clown is king.
In Hold Everything, the punch-drunk sparring mate (Lahr) of a championship contender fights the champion and, through a series of ridiculous twists of fate, wins. There is a love interest, and even an evil threat to the comic world in the crooked promoter, who is a spr
ingboard for the situations. The producer, Vinton Freedley, had hired Lahr to play the pug and Victor Moore the wistful, droll manager of the champion. The love interest and drama were subordinated to the extravagance of the comedy.
“When I went to see Harry Delmar’s Revels, I thought, ‘There’s a wonderful comedian and something new. He would make a beautiful contrast in his brazen manner to the little sweet trainer played by Victor Moore.’” That is Vinton Freedley’s assessment nearly forty years after the show.
However, there was nothing funny about the show’s initial reception. Freedley’s million-dollar instinct—which led to the Gershwins’ Lady Be Good four years earlier and would later mount such famous musicals as Girl Crazy, Anything Goes, and Red Hot, and Blue—was being severely tested. Originally budgeted at $65,000, the price of his venture had risen way above the norm of $125,000 by the time Freedley had absorbed the losses on the road.
“We opened in Newark. We lost ten thousand dollars and played to nothing. Went to Philadelphia and played to less business. I was very discouraged about the play. In the meantime, my then-partner, Alex Aarons (we had just built the Alvin Theater, which is named for him—Al, and me—Vin), had an extravagant production with Gertrude Lawrence and Clifton Webb called Treasure Girl. He looked down on my little flop as just one of those things I’d close up on the road. We changed our leading man to Jack Whiting and also hired a girl called Betty Compton whom Mayor Jimmy Walker saw in the show and later married. In Philadelphia, Brown and DeSylva came to me one night at the Sylvania Hotel with a couple of new numbers for the show. One was ‘Too Good to be True’ and the other was ‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee.’ Those two songs plus the change in cast made the difference. We went to Boston and practically sold out. And then we came to the Broadhurst Theater and ran nearly two years.”
The comedy Lahr and Moore provided gave Hold Everything the necessary originality for a long run that the book, limpid and often sentimental for all its ingenious turns, lacked. Even “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” left some reviewers rankled rather than humming:
“Hold Everything” has several tinkling tunes to help it along, but the best of them is burdened with the most inane lyrics yet heard on our long suffering stage. Here is what the authors ask us to hum on our way home:
You’re the cream in my coffee,
You’re the salt in my stew.
You will always be
My necessity,
I’d be lost without you.
Part of the reason for the show’s mediocre reception out of town had been Lahr’s inability to take complete command of his part. He had always been a “slow study”; and Henderson recalls that DeSylva was very worried about Lahr when they reached Boston. Lahr was nervous, worrying constantly about his part. He sat staring out into space, twirling the middle button of his coat. DeSylva would come over to Henderson and confide, “He’s on the button again.”
Whatever their apprehensions, Lahr had confidence in the Big Three. “I remember that DeSylva told the director, ‘Let that kid alone.’ I worked a special way. Nobody could direct W. C. Fields in a show. They’d just edit him. When you take a gal like Fannie Brice or Bea Lillie—you couldn’t say do it this way or do it that way. They were distinctive talents.”
The opening-night audience was treated to a brand of comedy new to the Broadway stage. Broadway had seen pratfalls and low comedians before, but Lahr’s wildness and his dumb perseverance on stage were matched with vulnerability and pathos. The hilarity he could generate came from his ability as an actor to use his role rather than to go outside it. He was, in the true sense of the word “comedian,” a comic actor. Occasionally, when he pressed for laughs, he went outside his part. But the instinct for acting was conspicuous. (This was not always the case with America’s funny-men. The brilliant and individual comedy of the Marx Brothers and Bobby Clark went outside the characters of the play or its actions. They played themselves rather than their roles. Their humor lay in their unrestrained spontaneity, which mocked the conventions of the play. Willie Howard was a polished version of the dialect comedian. Even Ed Wynn brought self-consciousness to his stance as the “Perfect Fool.”) With Lahr, the comedy was different. He had dropped his German dialect; and, while all his burlesque movements and bits of business were employed on stage, Broadway had never seen a comic so human yet so outrageous.
Lahr remembers peeping through the small hole in the asbestos curtain and seeing an impressive array of first-nighters. “Otto Kahn, who was a patron of the arts, was a backer of the show. He brought his friends. It was a high-class audience. A first-night crowd like I had never seen before in my life. I never played to anything like that in Harry Delmar’s Revels. There were tiaras and diamonds. I was scared. But then when I came on stage, and I noticed after a few minutes Mayor Jimmy Walker almost falling out of his box laughing, that gave me confidence.”
His entrance as Gink Shiner was made not with a cop stick or the ridiculous shuffle of the vaudeville days, but on a bicycle. He wore a beret and checkered pants. He rode it as if it were a bucking bronco. He went out of control on the machine, skidding across the stage in front of his trainer. He crashed into a tree and came back holding the battered bicycle frame. Gazing wideeyed at the audience, he observed, “That’s a hell of a place to plant a tree.” This was the line that introduced him to musical comedy, and it brought howls of surprised laughter.
The carnival spirit of the play was embodied in the title song, “Don’t Hold Everything.” The action goes on around Gink as he struggles ridiculously to comprehend it. The comic world of Hold Everything was a safe and uncomplicated one, where people could sing—
All moody folks,
Sad, broody folks
Should read old Doc Freud.
For instance, his preaching is, his teaching is
“Friends, don’t be annoyed,
Under no conditions
Hold your worries in:
You’ll get inhibitions
That are tough as sin.”
So free yourself,
Just be yourself …
Gink tries to evade an infatuated woman and to summon enough courage and ability to get into the ring with Kid Fracas. Lahr’s parody of the fighter’s self-deception and his misguided confidence was similar to his treatment of the cop in “What’s the Idea.” His statement is not only in words, but also in gestures.
In the last act, Lahr, sporting boxing trunks and knee pads, is in his dressing room waiting to fight.
Gink, dubbed “The Waterfront Terror” for the bout, talks with his manager, Nosey (Victor Moore). Nosey has been watching Gink shadowbox, plainly disgusted.
Nosey: What you doin’ now?
Gink: (matter-of-factly) Practicing ducking!
Nosey: What do you wear those pads for?
Gink: Cause every time I fight, my knees get scraped.
Nosey: Look out, you’ll foul yourself.
Gink: (excitedly) Leave me alone. I’m winning.
Nosey: Come here! (Gink stops.) Sit down there ’til I give you the last rites.
Gink: (sits forlornly) Nosey—something seems to tell me this fight is gonna be the turning point of my career (becomes depressed).
Nosey: What are you feeling bad about?
Gink: (shamefully) Well, I bet on Kid Fracas against myself.
Nosey: (relieved) Don’t give it a thought.
Gink: (breaking down and heaving his chest in despair) But I’m afraid I’m gonna win!
Gink is threatened by Kid Fracas’s manager, who comes to look over the opponent minutes before the fight. Gink blusters at the manager, flexing his muscles in a tableau of hope over experience. After the manager leaves, Gink is aching for victory. His trainer tries to warm him up, throwing a soft jab to the belly. Gink sprawls on the floor, yelling “Foul! Foul!”
Gink marches off stage for his fight. When Gink enters after winning the bout, he struts like a peacock. His excitement is all arms and legs. “Did y
ou see me?” Gink asks. “DID YOU see ME?” He prances around jabbing in the air, feinting courageously with his shoulders. “Didn’t I flatten him pretty?” In the end, Gink not only gets the money, but the girl as well.
“I knew when the show was over,” Lahr begins, shaking his head with a pained certitude, squinting in recollection of that moment. “I knew I was a big hit.” He sat in the dressing room relaxing over a bottle of beer. He didn’t want to go to the cast party. He felt private and exhausted.
Mercedes was not at opening night. Lahr thought of her, and decided to go home.
“I walked up Eighth Avenue. It was foggy. I saw a man throwing newspapers down from the tailgate of a truck. I went over and bought a copy of the American and opened it to the theater review.” The review is preserved in his scrapbook on a special piece of paper. He read just the headline and the first paragraph:
NEW COMEDY KING
CROWNED IN MUSIC
PLAY IN BERT LAHR
A new comedy king was crowned at the Broadhurst Theater last night. In fact, he was crowned several times with beer bottles, brooms, blackjacks, and other miscellaneous tools of the slapstick trade. But he emerged from the fracas with the laurel wreath of triumph resting jauntily on his grease-painted brow, and up and down Broadway and for many a day to come you will hear talk of Bert Lahr.
“New Comedy King.” Lahr’s reaction to the review puzzles him to this day. “I continued up Eighth Avenue. The feeling I had was so strange. I felt—it’s over. I did my job, and this is the way it was supposed to be. No elation. My whole life. All the hunger and the ambition and the fears and the hopes came to fruition. And then, when it happened, it was as if, well, it was coming to me. It was just a feeling … a feeling of …”
