Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  Rusty:

  Here you are boy, that’s all I can spare. (Blackout)

  McGowan lost his bet. He handed his five dollars to his mother-in-law who sat between him and DeSylva on opening night. “When she laughed, I knew it had to be funny.” The scene he thought would be offensive to the audience became the biggest single laugh in the history of the American stage. Ray Henderson, who watched from the wings, saw people actually stuffing handkerchiefs in their mouths to keep from laughing. The next number could not continue and had to wait on stage until the laughter was low enough for the music to be heard. De Sylva clocked the laughter at sixty-two seconds. Robert Littell of the New York World Telegram wrote:

  George White’s new musical is chiefly remarkable for three items, Bert Lahr, a fat girl named Kate Smith, and a very physical medical joke … Bert Lahr as a would-be aviator being examined by the doctor makes the farthest north yet reached on the stage by jokes about the human body. It was outrageous, but also, I must admit, very funny. When Bert Lahr presented the Doctor with a tall glass vessel into which he had poured some whiskey from his pocket flask, the house, especially the galleries, roared and screamed as I have seldom heard them scream and roar.

  Lahr’s comic moment played on the buffoon’s innocence in the face of experience. The fact that he could pull off a joke which trod so thin a line between the heights of humor and bad taste illustrates his comic sensitivity as early as 1930. He articulated his knowledge of an audience many decades after he had capitalized on it:

  There are tricks in this business. If you play beneath an audience, if your character is a lowly character, do you see, the audience, although they like you, doesn’t take you too seriously. “Oh, he’s a schmo,” they’ll say, but they let you get away with it, you know what I mean. I have done things on stage that I don’t think any other actor has ever done, and the audience never resented it … In “Flying High” I had this skit … Now if a wise guy were to do that, a fellow with the wrong personality or that the audience did not respect, they could resent it very much, and it could be shocking. It all reverts back to how the audience feels about you out there, if they accept you as a guy that bumbles into something—that’s in the writing and in the playing. It’s a matter of maintaining an air of innocence. You can do almost anything on stage, if you do it as if you haven’t the slightest idea that there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing. Some comedians can do that particular thing, but a lot of comedians make it vulgar and dirty, and the audience won’t accept it.

  Actors Talk About Acting

  Flying High proved that Lahr was not a one-show success. Yet his wild ambitions and his blindness to his own private actions are embodied with some irony in a song Rusty Krause sings after he has broken the world’s flying record. Lahr never saw the irony. The song, “Mrs. Krause’s Blue-Eyed Baby Boy,” is sung with six girls who throng around him.

  Who’ll be known from coast to coast?

  Who will be the nation’s boast?

  Mrs. Krause’s blue-eyed baby boy.

  Who’ll be rich before he’s through?

  Own his rolls—and coffee too?

  Mrs. Krause’s blue-eyed pride and joy.

  And when the girls cry,

  “Some guy. Just think what he did.”

  I’ll say, “Hey, hey,

  Oh boy, some fun, eh, kid?”

  Who will rise and conquer men,

  Then become the bum again?

  Mrs. Krause’s blue-eyed baby boy.

  Through his triumphs in the show, Lahr has buried his failures. On April 27, 1930, Mercedes was committed to a sanitarium in Connecticut. He says that he was out of the house when they took her away. “It was just too sad.” But the reports from the sanitarium indicate that he and Anna drove Mercedes to the hospital:

  Mrs. Lahrheim was brought to the sanitarium by her husband and sister. On admission she was silent but apparently did not wish to remain because she made an attempt to run away as soon as she arrived. She was assigned to a room, and night and day attendants were appointed. She showed no marked emotional reaction when left by her relatives and seemed apathetic and indifferent.

  Lahr had always protected himself with one maxim: “I’ll throw it out of my mind.” On stage, as he sung about the success of Rusty Krause, he was able to forget his failures as Bert Lahr. His coarseness and his betrayal of his family he understood, but felt compelled to continue. There is no justification for his attitude; he has an ethical naiveté that is paralleled in his stage roles. The baby and the nurse stayed in his apartment; but he usually spent the night with Rachel. “Sometimes I’d come home and go into the child’s room. I’d look at him, but I couldn’t pick him up. I felt dirty.”

  Lahr’s allegiance to Mercedes in the early months of her confinement was genuine. He called her and tried to visit her. Sometimes when he arrived she did not recognize him or talked with a marked deterioration. At other times, she was completely lucid.

  He had not wanted to commit her, but nothing he had tried brought Mercedes out of her condition. “She was a good woman, and even though I fell out of love with her when she became ill, I had a great respect for her.” There was no alternative but to commit her; even her child was alien to her.

  If Mercedes’s goodness haunted him, Rachel made him appalled at his weakness. “When I was with her, I’d say to myself, ‘How can I unload this girl?’” But whatever his doubts, his flesh gave enough reasons for remaining. “I could have become a drunkard,” he maintains when he thinks of what could have happened to him if he had stayed with Rachel. There was an alcoholic haze over their experience. “She was something new in my life. All I thought of before was work and Mercedes.”

  Rachel and he fought continually. Sometimes their grievances took on surrealistic proportions. Once when Lahr was out of town, Rachel called him and said she was going to commit suicide. There was a gun shot, and the voice on the other end of the phone stopped. Lahr called a friend in New York and asked him to go to Rachel’s apartment and see if she was all right. He cautioned the friend about the possible suicide. When the man got to the apartment, he found Rachel passed out on the floor, with a blank-gun lying on the bed.

  It is hard to think that my father, a man whose life reflected such singularity of purpose, ever allowed external situations to confuse him. But Mercedes and Rachel and the new child left him numb with uncertainty. “I was all mixed up. Success, disaster—I had everything.”

  Near the end of the New York run of Flying High, in 1931, he returned to Rachel’s apartment after a visit to Mercedes. He was late.

  When he entered the room, Rachel turned to him sardonically.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was at the sanitarium.”

  “With that bitch again?”

  That word broke the spell. “Bitch. How could she call Mercedes a bitch?” In a matter of ten seconds, two years of humiliation were suddenly resolved. “The whole thing with Rachel left me just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that.”

  Scandals and Follies

  IF THE NATION floundered in economic chaos in the early thirties, Bert Lahr’s career was not so precarious. His talent was in the hands of Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, two producers who had placed their indelible stamp on musical comedy and whose names were still golden theatrical currency. The difference between the two men can be seen in Lahr’s reaction to them. He still refers to Ziegfeld as “Mr. Ziegfeld,” while White he casually calls “Georgie.” Lahr remembers Ziegfeld as part of theatrical history—a Broadway demigod who had carved out of lavishness a kind of entertainment to which every comedian aspired. White, on the other hand, was the renegade—a dancer who had quit the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, stealing its equivalent of fire—Ann Pennington—to start his own brand of musical revue. When Ziegfeld wired him to return to the Follies after his debut, offering two thousand dollars a week, White wired back that he would pay Ziegfeld and Billie Burke three thousand dollars to go in
to his next Scandals. With that, their feud was on.

  Lahr was impressed by the overwhelming success of the Scandals. White’s personal flamboyance and street fighter’s arrogance shocked Lahr into admiration. White was a showman; he had made Lahr a believer with his overhaul of Flying High in Boston. Above all, Lahr respected White’s ability to please an audience and manipulate it to fullest advantage. “He knew something that Earl Carroll and Ziegfeld never did. He knew something of comedy sketches. He knew how to routine a show, where to put a sketch. If you played a jumbo comedy scene, he’d follow it with a fast number. If you got into a dramatic sketch, he’d put a love scene in front of it.”

  When Ziegfeld died on July 22, 1932, White became the unchallenged king of Broadway. During the remainder of the thirties, White reigned—a tattered royalty whose appeal would taper off drastically by the end of the decade. He carved a flossy kind of immortality for himself, not quite what he wanted, but a memorial nonetheless. One of his crucial ingredients was the comedian who had starred in Ziegfeld’s last show—Bert Lahr.

  Lahr has not forgotten the real beginnings of his association with White. Deep friendships were as rare for him as they were for the cantankerous producer, who had only a small coterie of acquaintances. (Lahr seems amazed at the range of people who took a liking to him—Al Capone, who called Lahr “Ugly,” Harold Ross, Samuel Gompers, Will Rogers. As a funny-man and a loner, Lahr posed no threat and had no ambitions outside his craft. He accepted everyone at face value and made no judgments. He moved freely without being part of any particular world.) Occasionally, and much to his astonishment, he made contact with people who remained an enigma to the public. White was one of them. The moment their friendship took root is still vivid in his mind.

  “When I did the Music Hall Varieties (1933) for George, we opened in Philadelphia in a house that had tremendous capacity, maybe four or five thousand seats. I guess it was an opera house. He’d brought a show in there a year before with Rudy Vallée, who at that time was the biggest thing in the country. He did tremendous business. White thought he could do it again. Well, I looked at that audience out front and there was nobody out there. I was friendly with White and money came easily, then. I could do vaudeville in between seasons and make five thousand dollars. Radio was just beginning too. I said, ‘Look, George, you don’t have to pay me till you do some business with this show.’ He looked at me—he almost had tears in his eyes. ‘Ham,’ he said, ‘No actor’s ever done this for me. As long as I live, you’ll always have a job.’”

  White produced thirteen Scandals. He owned each one outright. “A born gambler” is all that Abe Berman can say about his client of over thirty years. “He was Hungarian and gambling was in his blood.” White gambled with talent more successfully than he did with horses. He knew the value of songs. George Gershwin, his earliest find, wrote more than forty-five songs for the Scandals, including “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” and “Somebody Loves Me.” White hired him for fifty dollars a week for his 1920 Scandals and fired him five years later when Gershwin asked for a raise from his $125 salary. Undaunted, White brought Lew Brown and Buddy DeSylva together. The importance of his gambling instinct is sometimes overlooked even by historians who understand the value of the Scandals’ music. Robert Baral makes it seem much easier than it was in his discussion of the Scandals in his book Revue:

  The Scandals probably would have wilted early, if George Gershwin and the DeSylva, Brown & Henderson trio hadn’t come through the door—but they did, and these tunesmiths ripped Broadway apart with their blockbuster scores.

  With Ziegfeld and the Shuberts also competing for revue laurels, White tried to stay one step ahead. He went to Paris yearly, returning with the finest novelty acts. He also had his costumes made there, but not stitched, in order to save U.S. duty. He hustled after American entertainers even harder than he did after the continental acts. If Lahr joined the Scandals late in their evolution, he was still in good company—Paul Whiteman, Eugene and Willie Howard, Ethel Merman, Lou Holtz, Harry Richman, Rudy Vallee, W. C. Fields, and Ed Wynn. None of these performers remained close to White except Lahr.

  Lahr could overlook White’s domineering attitude by keeping in mind the results of his theatrical tyranny. He had observed his friend in more scraps than any other person. “George was a cocky little fellow. He wouldn’t take anything from anybody.”

  To outsiders, everything about the bantamweight producer was odious. Although photographs of him during the 1930’s show him as he saw himself—handsome, affluent, chic—the façade hides a labyrinth of confusions. White’s indifference to his many enemies and his outspokeness were always a source of amazement to Lahr, who once observed a delicious fistfight between Rudy Vallee and White where star and showman stood toe to toe. Through all the bluff, White managed to get off a feathery jab. Lahr was also present when an exasperated chorus girl, Jessica Pepper, crowned him with the Scandals’ sheet music.

  Despite all the vagaries of working with White, Lahr remained loyal to him. Their contract was a handshake. However, in George White’s Scandals (1936), Lahr found that White’s jealousy and cross purposes could overlook friendship. Lahr and Cliff Edwards headlined the revue along with Vallee and Willie Howard. Edwards and Lahr were good friends; but Edwards, enjoying great success as one of the most popular recording stars of the day, ran into trouble with White when he started dating one of the chorus girls. He was marked for revenge. “When White saw a guy with a pretty girl, he would say, ‘Look at that bum with a pretty girl—why can’t I have her.’ He’d go after every girl in the show, but nobody else was allowed to date them.”

  When he discovered Edwards’s transgression, White called the girl into his office and told her never to date the singer again while she was in the show. The girl, of course, had to tell Edwards when he asked for a date that night. Lahr, who shared a room with him on the road, was present when Edwards received the news.

  “Edwards called White on the phone and said to him, ‘I’m coming down there, White. Who the hell do you think you are … I’m coming down there and punch you in the nose.’” Lahr laughs at the thought. “Now you couldn’t do that to White, who was a lightweight you know, but had a lot of guts. So White says, ‘You’re coming down here? I’m coming up there.’ Edwards began putting on kid gloves. ‘This is stupid,’ I said, and called White on the phone. ‘Look George, I’m coming down.’ White could hardly control himself on the phone and kept muttering, ‘Stay where you are, stay where you are. I’m coming up there. I’m coming up.’”

  Lahr went to White’s suite and reminded him that there would be a lawsuit, that the newspapers would get the story, and it would hurt the show. White finally calmed down. When Lahr returned to talk to Edwards, the singer was asleep. “If that was me, I would have been out of town …”

  It was not easy to forget White’s anger. “He would blush when he was angry and was at a loss for words.” If White couldn’t find the words, he often found ways of expressing his disdain. “He was like an elephant, he never forgot.” He once got back at Vallee when Hollywood did a movie version of the Scandals and the crooner had a scene when he was momentarily suspended in the air. White kept him off the ground for nearly an hour during the rehearsal. After the altercation over the chorus girl, White tried to force Edwards to dress on the top floor of the theater. When Lahr interceded and allowed Edwards to use his dressing room instead of making the tiring trek up five flights, White conceived yet another scheme. “He was unpredictable. The fireman at our theater came into our dressing room one night cursing like crazy. ‘That son-of-a-bitch White just told me if I ever caught you or Edwards smoking to arrest you.’ Now if he pinched me, he wouldn’t have a show, but George didn’t care.”

  Lahr was flattered by White’s nickname for him, “Ham.” But after the Edwards incident, Lahr admits trying a new mode of address. “One day I called him ‘God,’ but I only did it once.”

  Occasionally, the dividends of fri
endship were unfortunate. White asked Lahr to visit him at his rented penthouse at the Ritz Hotel in Atlantic City. On one visit Lahr met a lovely redhead. A few weeks later in New York, the girl came up to him at a nightclub and introduced herself. They left together; and a few days later Lahr contracted what he euphemistically refers to as a “social disease.” White consoled him, saying, “Why didn’t you come to me about it—she gave it to me, too.”

  Their other social activities were healthier, but often as coarse. Lahr, who in the early thirties rented a Connecticut home for his son and nurse, invited White for weekends. The group that convened were not performers, but a wealthier crowd that lived on the periphery of entertainment—restaurateurs, agents, theater owners. They were loud and funny and kind. When White made his appearance, he brought a satchel filled with cans of Campbell’s soup. It was embarrassing to Lahr, who could tolerate almost all of White’s eccentricities. The outspoken producer answered his queries about the soup with a philosophy reflecting his attitudes toward theatrical productions. “Ham, how much do you pay your cook here?” Lahr told him. “Right, well, Campbell’s pays their chef fifty thousand dollars to make soup, so why argue with success?”

  When Lahr goes back to those times, he can see White dressed for golf, baggy and outrageous in his knickers. He stood only five feet five, but made enough noise on a golf course for ten large men. Golf had become Lahr’s major relaxation. He played a sound game with a handicap of one. But when he went around the course with White and an equally eccentric agent, Harry Bestry, his game was understandably off. White took pleasure in baiting Bestry, whose hearing defect often made it hard for him to know where the static was coming from.