by John Lahr
White did outrageous things on the golf course, such as cutting holes in his pockets to drop golf balls farther down the fairway than he had driven them, stamping his opponent’s ball into the turf so it could not be found, substituting weighted golf balls on the putting green. His pranks reflected his hatred of losing and his fiendish delight in annoying his more serious golfing partners. During such outings, Bestry, who had to do business with White, directed his rancor at Lahr. Once, turning to him as he was teeing up, Bestry screamed, “I’m gonna hit you across the head with this three-wood if you don’t quit heckling me.” When Bestry turned back to his ball, White was urinating on it.
White’s vulgarity, the brashness with which he met all conflicts, kept Lahr close to him. White was unpredictable in real life much the same way that Lahr was on stage. White’s outlandishness, the mayhem his little body could create was exciting and irreverent in Lahr’s eyes. They were both off the streets of New York; they had both risen to the top of their fields. Lahr appreciated White’s gut energy and stubborn perfectionism. Lahr always pictured the young producer with his shirt sleeves rolled up, working with the dancers, grooming his property into a brassy, low-down reflection of himself. White never made a gesture that didn’t spark excitement or hatred. Ziegfeld had been different. His humorless nasal twang was always a disappointment; it never excited Lahr like White’s bravado. Ziegfeld was cut from a more cosmopolitan mold. He was tasteful and cautious where White was garish and rambunctious. When Lahr worked with Ziegfeld, Broadway’s most famous producer was sixty-three and ill. His orders, especially in the last months, often came via a special telephone hook-up from his hotel room to the theater or in those famous ten-page telegrams. He worked with a quieter intensity. Lahr watched him in the painstaking process of dressing his chorus line, sometimes changing a pair of shoes on one chorine because another girl’s feet showed off the color better. He too was a perfectionist, but he kept a distance from his performers. He was a formidable entrepreneur whose aloofness made Lahr nervous and unsure.
“Ziegfeld usually didn’t like comedians. I think I was one of the few comics he liked.” Ziegfeld admired Lahr the first time he saw him perform, at his debut on the Palace stage. In 1932, in the face of a depression and in an urgent attempt to maintain a name and a formula of entertainment begun in 1907, Ziegfeld picked Lahr to star in his last extravaganza, Hot-Cha!
Ziegfeld contacted Lahr on the Hollywood set for Flying High, where he was making his first motion picture. “I was flattered at the call. I didn’t think much of the films then, I was going well on Broadway, so I came East.” Ziegfeld offered him the added inducement of $2,250 a week plus a bonus of $250, the biggest salary Lahr had ever earned. To Ziegfeld, who was bidding high to maintain his reputation as a producer, the amount was insignificant. In a frenzied effort to keep the public’s taste from changing, Ziegfeld attempted to glut it. Besides Lahr, he hired an astounding array of performers, including Buddy Rogers, Lynn Overman, Eleanor Powell, the DeMarcos, and the sensuous Lupe Velez, who was as popular in pictures as Lahr was on the stage.
Where White controlled his productions by his instincts alone, Ziegfeld, worn down and puzzled by the mediocrity of the script created by Lew Brown, Ray Henderson, and Mark Hellinger, could only turn to Lahr. Lahr cherishes the small moments of intimacy with Ziegfeld. “Did I ever tell you when Ziegfeld called me?” That call, perhaps as pathetic a gesture as Ziegfeld could make in his last years, is still memorable to Lahr. They met at Childs for coffee. “I’m not pleased with the show, Bert. I’m not pleased at all. What do you think we can do to fix it up?” Lahr suggested bringing in new writers to doctor the script, but Brown, Henderson, and Hellinger vetoed the proposal. Ziegfeld was hamstrung.
Ziegfeld’s indecisiveness and insecurity made Lahr skeptical. “We opened in Washington, D.C. I wasn’t too happy with the show; neither was Mr. Ziegfeld. It wasn’t up to the standards of the other things I’d done.” Nevertheless, Ziegfeld, like his revues, tried to whistle past the depression. He told the Washington Times (February 6, 1932):
I look upon the Depression primarily as a lack of confidence. One of the songs in Hot-Cha! deals with it. “There’s just as many flowers, just as many trees.” It’s all in the people’s minds to a great extent. But people have less money and they spend it more carefully … There is still a market for a good product and maybe this Brown and Henderson song and Bert Lahr’s comedy will help rid the public of fear. That will be worth doing.
In Pittsburgh, Ziegfeld came backstage to Lahr’s dressing room after the opening night. “He never said, ‘Good show, Bert,’ or ‘I think we have something.’” He smiled wanly at Lahr and looked around the room. For a moment he focused on Lahr’s costume—the epitome of the Ziegfeld opulence—a sequined matador’s costume with gold brocade and imported cloth. He fingered the material. (“There was nobody who could dress a show the way Ziegfeld did,” Lahr says.) And then, he turned to the valet, saying, “Get a black bag for this outfit so the brocade doesn’t tarnish.” The show was not first rate and Ziegfeld knew it. In Pittsburgh, he was stricken with influenza, and by the time Hot-Cha! reached New York, he had developed pneumonia. Necessity forced him to take a hotel room close to his investment. The night the show opened he was nearly in a coma. George White never attended Hot-Cha! or inquired about Ziegfeld’s health; by July there would no longer be an impediment to White’s claim to the pinnacle of Broadway fame.
Lahr found the comedy scenes in Hot-Cha! mediocre. When he tried to improvise, Ziegfeld clamped down on his ad libs, disappointed in the sketches but suspicious of any free-wheeling departures from them. He wanted the leering zany who had pleased so freshly in Hold Everything and Flying High. Lahr went beyond his trademark responses in his scenes with Lupe Velez. “Working with Lupe was quite an experience. She couldn’t laugh. She cackled—like a duck. I’d say things under my breath to her on the stage and she’d start to cackle.” He imitates a duck and recollects the svelte body of Miss Velez, which helped launch her film career playing opposite such sultry lovers as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. “Lupe never washed. When she’d go to the Mayfair or somewhere she’d just put on a dress. Nothing under it—nothing. So when I’d be clowning with her on the stage and I’d notice her dirty hands, I’d say, ‘You’ve got your gloves on again.’ It would break her up.” Ziegfeld, who watched his performers like a petulant mother-in-law, got word of Lahr’s joking. One day Lahr called him to inquire about his health. He and Ziegfeld had a friendly chat. That night Lahr received a long telegram from the producer, reminding him of his investment and scolding him for taking liberties with the script.
Ziegfeld’s name insured a full fifteen-week run on Broadway despite mixed reviews, but that telegram was indicative of his own misgivings. “I think he liked me because in Pittsburgh he said, ‘Wait for me, Bert, and we’ll drive to the station together …’ He knew at the finish, that he’d lost his touch.” Even Lahr was not without trepidation. Soon after Hot-Cha! closed, Lahr asked Jack Pearl to take a ride in his new Packard. Pearl was commenting on how wonderful it was that both of them had worked for Ziegfeld. Lahr interrupted him.
“How many weeks did you get out of the Follies, Jack?”
“Forty-one.”
“I only got fifteen. Do you think Lew Brown tried to mess me up?”
“Don’t be silly!”
“Jack—let me ask you this—do you think I’ve got a future in this business?”
Pearl began to laugh. “You want me to tell you.”
“No,” Lahr said. “I don’t want to hear.”
His next vehicle was George White’s Music Hall Varieties (1933). There was nothing “artistic” about Lahr’s reason for doing the show. He had been riding high on Broadway, and despite his most recent tepid success, Broadway liked his brand of low comedy. He was prepared to serve them the same style as long as audiences responded. “I had nothing to do at the time. I thought it would be good for my career to be working with Harry R
ichman, who was a big star then, and Lili Damita, who was Errol Flynn’s first wife. The show had George White’s name, and it was just to make money.” Lahr’s conservatism opted for the safe course; left to himself and without external pressures, his comedy would probably have remained the same through the thirties, and he would have been forgotten by the end of the next decade.
George White, who stuck so closely to his own formulas for entertainment, encouraged his friend to experiment with a more satiric style to add another dimension to his performance. Too shrewd a businessman to demand that Lahr abandon his low-comic business entirely, he would, in the Music Hall Varieties, combine that with something untested in Lahr’s repertoire—a satire on the popular English matinee idol, Clifton Webb, whose sophisticated and genteel dance routines seemed an unlikely target for Lahr.
Lahr balked at first. “I didn’t want to do it because I’d never done anything like it before.” But Lahr respected White’s instincts. When he was nervous and uncertain about his sketches, White always pacified him with an axiom: “Never worry about a comic on the road; the dancer or singer will always be your hit out of town.” White’s dictum was well-founded. Lahr always needed practice to smooth his timing and flesh out his impersonations.
The Webb take-off, “Chanson by Clifton Duckfeet,” was a stretch for Lahr. He was forced to be elegant instead of bumbling, controlled instead of excessive. In the sketch, Lahr appeared, as Webb did, from behind the curtain at center stage. He was dressed dramatically in tuxedo pants, a white bolero jacket and top hat. A gold watch chain stretched elegantly across his waist. He spoke delicately and lisped in an attempt at the clipped English monotone. When the spotlight discovered him, Lahr was standing, à la Webb, with his legs tight together and his hand jammed nonchalantly in his left pocket. He took out a cigarette, and after fingering it, threw it away as he began to sing. His song recounted springtime in Paris and a chance meeting with a Parisienne:
’Til midnight we chatted—romantic the scene!
Adventure? Well, rather—my spirits ran high.
The French are so friendly—if you know what I mean—
After the first stanza of patter, Lahr went into a delicate soft-shoe, swiveling his hips and emitting delighted gasps at his steps.
A bottle and a bird …
White, in a box to the left of the stage, interrupted the song by giving Lahr the raspberry. Lahr countered, “Duck to you,” and continued his tale—
We were alone, the hour grew late,
We sipped and sighed and sighed and sipped,
A rendezvous, a tête à tête,
For me pajamas—Alice blue,
For her—negligée—and fetching too.
I began to feel that “je ne sais quoi,”
The night was like a symphony,
And just as I began to unbend
She said, “How about fifty dollars?”
And I said, “RIGHT NOW LADY THAT WOULD BE A GOD-SEND!”
And though it may seem absurd, It goes to show what can happen—from a BOTTLE AND A BIRD!
Lahr strikes Webb’s confident pose, but the sound of a Bronx cheer fills the air. He does a disdainful double-take and makes a hasty exit through the center curtain.
In burlesque Lahr’s ability to mimic people had been limited to a special socioeconomic class. Since that time, his mobility and range of interests had widened considerably. The Music Hall Varieties turned Lahr to other areas of comedy. “White saw that I had the capacity for satire. He thought I could do it, and he made me do other things.”
The final, if less revolutionary, concession Lahr made to White’s comic instincts was a dog act. “I had liver in my pocket, just like the trainer,” my father says, winking. The skit began when he came out in a tuxedo to sing “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. The liver was around his ankles. As he sang, the dogs rushed out on stage and sniffed around his legs. He continued to sing, kicking at them angrily. At the end of the song, the curtain behind him went up, exposing a fire hydrant. “There was even more liver around the hydrant.” The dogs immediately left his legs and turned their attention to the stump. At another point in the evening, Lahr, assuming his burlesque Dutch dialect, to parody the dog trainer’s comic introduction, returned to a style and excess as low-down as any of his burlesque moments. He told the audience: “… Also you have to treat them with kindness and liver! And from there is where come the saying, ‘Bring ’em back a-liver!’ Always I carry in the pocket the best liver what gives. [He shows a piece of liver.] See the liver? Special liver for dogs only [eats the liver] …”
Although the Music Hall Varieties pushed Lahr briefly into fresh comic terrain, its general formula did not stray too boldly from that of White’s previous Scandals. Not even an enthusiastic comedy buff like Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times could be coaxed to give it precedence over conflicting openings. The Times notice underscores the general static quality of the show. While the unsigned reviewer fails to see the significant new area in Lahr’s comedy, his response illustrates the still waters that White and many of the famous entertainers were approaching:
Mr. Lahr does not depart from his fantastic contortions of face or his impossible gutteral mouthings …
The material which goes to make up (George White’s) Varieties has been tried and played so many times before that the performers don’t need much rehearsal to go through with it.
But Lahr’s first stab at satire was noticed immediately by most Broadway writers, and in Life Begins at 8:40, the following year, satirical content embellished his comedy. He was at ease with the more sophisticated material. When White contracted him for George White’s Scandals (1936), it was precisely this urbanity which White had first nurtured that his shows could not, now, create on stage. In the interim between George White revues, Lahr found that he could say more with his pinky than a pratfall. He still took pratfalls, but the nonsense of his burlesque and vaudeville comedy was becoming more refined. He leveled his voice and face at targets foreign to his experience, like the British aristocracy.
The formula of White’s Scandals allowed for a modicum of satire but not at the expense of spectacle. Satire was a special impulse that required a pace and subtlety the revues could not easily sustain. For White, everything had to be fast, funny, and please with good spirits rather than sophistication, even though the spectacle as Broadway entertainment was rapidly losing its public appeal. Movies could do it better; even radio’s fantasy world was more successful than the revue’s carnival spirits. White could not see the pressure of the other media on his work. In his urgency he stuck to his formula, while Lahr outgrew it. “If he could have realized that times change and treatments change, I think that White would be just as big today as he was years ago. But he wanted to do the old scenes; he would not change. He had a one-track mind.”
Lahr found himself disputing his friend’s comic judgment. “When we did the ’36 Scandals (it was the next to the last one George did), it just wasn’t as big as the others. I thought of a comedy scene. I went to the authors. But we wouldn’t let White know what we were doing because he would meddle in it now and ruin it.” The scene Lahr contrived was called “The Englishman and the Baby.” This was an extension of the dry underplaying begun in the Music Hall Varieties and matured in Life Begins at 8:40. White would have wanted broader burlesque, would have forced his own ideas into the writing. The sketch was finally played; White accepted it, grudgingly, into the show. “It was his own egotism, his own lack of perspective that finally finished White. Things were shifting and he never noticed.” Despite the attraction of Eugene and Willie Howard, Rudy Vallee, and Lahr, the revue managed only a modest run of 110 performances.
The sketch Lahr helped to write shows an attempt to remold his comic ground. The laughter is in the idea of Bert Lahr trying to assume the civilized airs of the English landed gentry. His instinct for parody assured him of a surprisingly realistic Oxford accent, but with a slight sibilance, he could take that reality and explod
e it. “It was an exaggerated Englishman. Everything very clip’t, very adenoidal.” He flares his nostrils to emphasize the round, hollow tones. His eyes, instead of crossing, become fastidious beads, the fleshy furrows of his forehead rise two inches higher in a formal bow to his nose.
The sketch played on the stereotypes of the English upper-class indifference, adding an American robustness to the image of civilized control. Set in the plush surroundings of a London club, Lord Marleybone (Lahr) and his acquaintance, Lord Tottingham, have a jowly talk about women with an aplomb that glosses their cool amorality.
Tottingham: And what was the matter early this morning? Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed?
Marleybone: Quite the contrary, you old scullery mop. I got out of the right side of the wrong bed.
The men get progressively drunker, gossiping and talking about old affairs.
Tottingham: I was just glancing through the Times here—I see where the Duke of Marmalade had to give up his yacht.
Marleybone: I’m not surprised. He told me last time I saw him it would have to be either his yacht or his mistress. He couldn’t stand the expense of hauling her up on shore every year and scraping her bottom.
At the finale, Lord Marleybone’s wife calls to inform him that she is pregnant. Tottingham, she explains, is the father. Marleybone puts down the receiver, orders a Scotch, and casually dispatches Tottingham. “I’m awfully sorry, and I know you won’t mind, but I’ve got to shoot you.”
Once the show found its rhythm, Lahr discovered that he was able to serve the impulses of both raucous and refined laughter. The pressure of refinement had its effect on Lahr’s comic instinct. The sketch Lahr suggested to White for the ’36 Scandals germinated in an understatement he had discovered painfully in Life Begins at 8:40, in a skit burlesquing those stereotyped English values: family, formality, stoic acceptance (see Appendix 4). In the scene, a much surer stab at class humor than Lahr’s imitation, Lahr played the son, Richard, and Brian Donlevy was the father. Lahr enjoyed wrapping his tongue around English sounds—a luxury provided by the spareness of the language. He would learn from the experience; and then set out to find his own form.
