by John Lahr
On March 16, 1937, Lahr received a letter from the clinical director that clarified Mercedes’s position:
Mrs. Lahr has improved very much since coming to the sanitarium, especially since she has received the insulin therapy. My reason for writing to you is to get your reaction to having her leave here on trial for one week or so, during which time she would live with her sister, Anna. She has promised me that she would cooperate with this sister and not do anything which might incur your displeasure or embarrass you in any way …
The next week Mercedes and Anna visited Lahr backstage.
Standing in the white light of the dressing room, she must have looked even bigger than she was. She weighed 160 pounds. She wore a black dress, new for the occasion. Her lipstick was smudged. She didn’t seem to notice the strands of hair that hung loosely about her head.
Her eyes would focus on objects in the room, and Lahr tried every conversational gambit to keep her animated. In each glance, he felt the guilt of the past. She gazed at the dresser. Had he put Mildred’s picture away? Yes. And then, for a long time, while he asked her about New York and how she felt, Mercedes seemed preoccupied with the dressing-room wall. He recalled the last page of the report in 1935 that he had scanned for hopeful signs of progress.
One evening she was found sitting huddled up in a cold room with all the windows open and announced that she was cold because the walls were so bare.
He could never read the reports after that.
Lahr talked nervously to her. He could not look at her directly, afraid that her glassy stare would somehow rivet on him, and that he would cry. She would not answer all the questions he asked. Her silence upset him.
When she did speak, her words were uttered with restraint. She talked to him about show business. When she spoke of coming back to the stage, her responses were quicker. She told him what she would express again to psychiatrists a year later when they came to visit her at the Martinique Hotel, where she stayed with her sister. “She said she thought she could take part in a musical revue, that she could dance and perform just the same as she had in the old days. We suggested to her that her physical condition had changed very much since the time when she was actively on stage, that her weight had increased, that she had become flabby, but that didn’t bother her.” As she talked, Lahr remembered that she sometimes danced at sanitarium parties and that, when she hurried up the stairs to her room, her new weight shook the staircase. Between the memories that flooded his imagination and his forced conversation, Lahr found himself silent. “I never talked about an annulment; I never talked about love. She wouldn’t have understood. Most of the time she wouldn’t answer my questions.”
Lahr recalls the meeting as the “saddest moment of my life.” Standing there, trying to be kind, but hopelessly incompetent with words and unsure of his emotions, he only wanted Mercedes and her sister to leave. When she was away from him, he could always hope that she would recover. Face to face with her, all the money, the dreams, the anxiety over her seemed hopeless. She had changed so much. As Anna was getting ready to take Mercedes back to the hotel, Mercedes broke the silence. Turning to her husband, she said, “Let’s go home, Bert.”
“You go with Anna,” he said, “I’ll be along later.”
He never saw her again.
Other Edens
“Despite a few temporary excursions into radio and motion pictures, they have never forsworn their allegiance to the stage.”
Brooks Atkinson on Lahr and Bea Lillie,
The New York Times, 1937
“How do you—an old Broadway Boy—like acting in the movies?” Mr. Lahr shrugged:
“I like anything so long as I’m making money.”
Lahr to Bosley Crowther,
The New York Times, 1939
WHEN MAURICE CHEVALIER accepted a radio contract in 1931 for five thousand dollars a week, star radio was born. The next year Bert Lahr was on the air coast to coast. There are pictures of those days, Lahr standing handsome and nonchalant in front of an NBC microphone. He is smiling, and he holds a script at his side. His tie is undone. His hat (he wears it despite the fact that his coat is off) is cocked at a self-assured angle. In the picture, he is the image of control. As one of the bright new stars of Broadway, Lahr was an obvious attraction for the new medium. Many stage comedians made the transition to radio. Some, like Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny, did it easily; others like the raconteur Lou Holtz were mysteriously ineffective. Lahr had all the accouterments for a radio success: a big name, an unusual delivery, and a sense of verbal idiocy, all of which made the idea of a “Bert Lahr Show” viable.
He rarely talks about radio, which for more than a decade fed him at fees as high as $2,500 a performance but which often left him dissatisfied. Between 1932, when he featured in his own show for Lucky Strike, and 1938, he appeared regularly with the most successful radio personalities of the day: Fred Allen, Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee. By his own estimate, he was a guest on the Vallee show more than thirty times. His own verdict of his radio talent is harsh. “I wasn’t on too long. I wasn’t too good.” Whether he liked the medium or not, Lahr was effective enough to be in demand; and he never gave up radio. “I stayed with radio as long as it was fruitful. When television came in, then radio went out. The money wasn’t there anymore.”
When he began his radio career, the medium was primitive. It had not separated its technique from that of the stage, a fact symbolically illustrated by the audience at all studio sessions. Since tape was not extensively used by the industry until after World War II, it was not unusual for a show being broadcast to the West Coast to be performed twice on the same night. Different audiences were provided for each performance.
The difficulty in making the transition to radio rested in a failure to understand its uniqueness. Unlike the stage, it was graphic but not visual, private more than public. When Lahr made his radio debut on June 20, 1932, critics pondered whether his ribald humor could adjust to the larger, less sophisticated fireside audiences.
If Bert Lahr can project his own particular style into the air without having to use dirt—then he’ll outshine any radio comic so far developed.
New York Sun
But Lahr’s maiden voyage into personality radio was disastrous, floundering not simply because of the material but because of the naiveté of radio personnel to their own medium. Lahr was headlining at the time in Hot-Cha!, and the radio director was intent on capturing Lahr’s Broadway performance for the listening audience. “The director kept telling me, ‘I want you the way you work in Hot-Cha!.’ I worked the same as I did on the stage. He kept saying, ‘Come on, come on, like the stage, just like the stage.’ It was awful. I had a thirteen-week deal, and after four weeks they paid me off for all thirteen. The first experience was so painful that I think it gave me a mental block.”
Although Lahr was a darling of the press, the radio critics were not as easily overwhelmed as the Broadway first-nighters.
At first blush, Mr. Bert Lahr … gave me the impression that he hadn’t quite grasped the radio technique. Possibly the same thought occurred to Mr. Lahr after the initial performance a week ago for he came to the microphone this weekend with more confidence and a greatly improved delivery.
New York Journal
The same thought had occurred to Lahr. At first, there was too much to worry about: the live radio audience, speaking with the right intonation, limiting his gestures, not biting his cues or hurrying his delivery. Years later, listening to replays of his performances, he would shake his head, mumbling, “I was reading too fast. I could have humored it more.” To Lahr this meant a way of reacting, the manner in which he embellished his performance with glances, pauses, ludicrous sounds. But on the air, his boldness and security vanished.
Some performers, like Cantor, were fearless. Cantor even got into costume for his radio shows. His “I don’t give a damn” attitude helped his comic delivery. Lahr’s shyness came through all the bellowing. “Bert was alwa
ys afraid it wasn’t going to go,” says Carroll Carroll, one of the men who wrote his radio comedy. “His own timidity about his ability had an influence on him.”
While the writers sharpened the jokes, they could not resolve the fundamental problem. Lahr was a comedian whose laughter relied heavily on gesture. In front of a microphone with one hand on a script, he was as effective as a hobbled horse. “In those days, I was a fellow who was always moving. When I got in front of that microphone and had to hold a paper in my hand, I had fear. If I did it today, things would be different. But standing there, trying to read, I’d fluff something, and then I’d fight it.”
The importance of the body and movement as a buffoon’s tool is never more apparent than when he is without it. “I was always ahead of my script. I couldn’t read it because I wanted to move all the time. The same holds true of Bobby Clark, who was one of my favorite comedians. After years of working with a fellow named McCullough who stood in one spot through the whole act, Bobby couldn’t keep still. He was a wonderful guy, but he just couldn’t stay within a scene. He was always playing Bobby Clark. We did a scene together at the Lambs Club, it was one of the biggest laughs I ever got there. The situation was this: I was supposed to be in my bedroom at the Lambs. I was just ready to go on, and I was listening to the other acts getting tremendous laughs. It was a knife in my heart. (I played the part of a self-centered, nervous comedian who worries about the next act.) I didn’t know what Bobby was going to do because we’d rehearsed without make-up. When he came on, he had everything—goggles, the coronet, the cane. So I said, ‘He has to work up an entrance to come into the bedroom.’ In this scene he had to sit down with me, but I couldn’t get him to do it. I ran downstage and grabbed him by the arm and said, ‘Bobby, stop underplaying!’ It was a big laugh. I was like Bobby when they put me in front of a microphone. I couldn’t keep still.”
Lahr’s mobile face, his impulse to pierce through a morass of words with a single gesture, made it difficult for the radio writers to forge an effective comedy image of him.
Carroll Carroll, who spent many long hours trying to solve the problem of Lahr’s radio personality, recognized the dilemma. “As a writer you were constantly trying to write something funny. At the same time you knew where Lahr was going to make a funny face. He could not resist doing that. Sometimes you might come up with a straight line which the studio audience would laugh like hell at because Lahr was mugging. It was a problem when the studio audience was breaking up and Bert simply said, ‘How are you?’ It confused the listener.”
Like most of the best radio writers of the time—Herman Wouk, Parke Levy—Carroll’s life was spent in long frenetic writing sessions. He was sympathetic to Lahr’s comedy (he wrote the last television sketch Lahr ever commissioned) and knew radio’s limitations. “What Lahr really thinks is funny are the things he does, the faces he makes, the articulations which have a relation to other people. He’s an actor. His reactions to people are frequently more funny than anything he does or says. Of course ninety per cent of this was lost on radio.”
Nor was Lahr used to working with a team of writers. He liked to ponder his humor, plot his gestures, practice until he had found just the right word for every situation. But a Sunday show each week left no time for perfection. The writers met with Lahr at the Warwick Hotel. He strolled nervously around the room in his kimono, twisting a piece of cellophane in his hand and muttering, “I think I’ve got something.”
“Working with him was not easy,” says Carroll. “We suffered a great deal because he suffered so much. We used to sit for hours looking at each other. I remember we were trying to get a name for an Indian tribe—Seminole would have done. I suggested Potowatami. I thought it was a funny name, with an explosive sound. For some reason Bert didn’t like it. I don’t know how long we argued the point, whether it should have been Mohawk or Onondaga, but you’d continually find yourself coming to a Mexican stand-off with him.”
Lahr’s initial impulse in radio was to return to the burlesque raucousness which, in 1932-3, he had not yet abandoned on stage. He did not understand that the microphone would not accommodate his wild energy. “When we had these sessions,” recalls Carroll, “it was apparent that Bert was trying to translate the humor of burlesque into radio. It was too physical and, in many cases, too salty.”
Lahr’s self-consciousness missed the moments of genuine fun that were broadcast. “Bert isn’t much of a reader, although when he read a line wrong it was usually funnier than when he read it right. He tried very hard to be a good reader, and as a result, it came out at times a little childlike. It sounded as if he was actually reading instead of that free spontaneous play he did so well on stage.”
Because the radio audience could not see his uncomprehending squint, Lahr had to convey his physical responses with language. There was no way to signal the audience that something funny was coming, as he did on stage with a gesture. The best he could substitute was an affected “huh, huh” before every laugh line. Sometimes, in back of these radio situations, a cackle, small—almost elfish—could be heard. The sound was Lahr actually enjoying himself, instead of the dumb show with which he usually delivered his lines.
Carroll and the other writers found Lahr helpful when it came to mangling the language. “He was a great contributor of the ludicrous. When you got to a point where you needed something utterly absurd, it would generally come from Bert. Once, we did something about psychoanalysis, and he came up with ‘Don’t probe into my subnoxious.’ He was good at picking out the words that he could say, while looking funny as he said them. He’s a mugger. He’d do a lot of it on radio to build a joke. The live audience was firmly pledged to him.”
Lahr’s ability to invent language that created not only amusing sounds but also a vivid mental picture is illustrated in one of his ad-lib remarks on the Chase &Sanborn Coffee Hour. The writers created a character called Balzac, who was continually pestering Lahr. Balzac was a scamp who rarely talked, but played havoc with Lahr’s good nature. Lahr always managed to get even. In one sequence, Lahr described a confrontation this way:
I woke up this mornin’, the birds were tweetin’ in the trees, the sun was shinin’, the bees was buzzin’ and I had to run into poison ivy.
Carroll watched Lahr pace the Warwick carpets trying out the word “Balzac” in a variety of tones. “He was fascinated with the word. He could do funny things with his lips; his mouth would quiver like a bloater fish, and his face shrivel into an unexpected angle.”
Lahr’s reading on the air could be very funny. “He did a lot of fumbling around,” says Carroll, “but that was part of what was amusing.” Lahr’s tongue could never quite wrap itself around the words. A good comic ploy, it was also true to life. When he made a mistake on radio listeners were surprised to hear him exclaiming, “Lumpy printing” or “Now I’m reading my thumb.” When things went wrong on radio, a performer still had to say something. Lahr’s ad libs, like his language, were always graphic. One can see a man reading his thumb.
Privately, Lahr considered his use of words to be a technical device he had developed for the stage. He was the most inarticulate man ever to consider himself adroit with words. But the combination of confidence and misuse made his passion for language valuable to his comedy. “I read a lot. In burlesque even, I read. Words. Words. I used to say, ‘You’re a despot,’ and I’d get laughs. I knew what a despot was. I put it in a situation where it was ludicrous. I could have said ‘You’re a villain.’ I used this a lot in radio. I sounded stupid on the air, and my use of big words was surprising to listeners and funny. When I did Louis XV in Du Barry I felt I knew how he behaved.” He raises his head regally. “I read about Napoleon. Very dainty, and the hands.” Lahr’s fingers, usually lying like potatoes in his lap, flutter with frantic delicacy. He reaches out as if taking a mint. “Language. I’m a New Yorker. I’ve got a New York accent and give the impression of being terribly erudite. I don’t say that I’m a scholar. I do a l
ot of crossword puzzles. I digest a lot of it. I’m not crass and coarse.”
The Chase & Sanborn Coffee Hour was a moderate radio success for Lahr. Certainly Carroll and the other writers did not consider it, as Lahr did, a total failure: “I don’t agree entirely that it wasn’t a good show. As writers we were limited to a fixed format which broke down to two or three individual scenes, so that we weren’t in any position to do an extended situation or anything with a real beginning, middle, and an end—the kind of thing Bert was used to doing on stage. We thought we had to set up a premise, get a few laughs, and get off in about six or seven minutes. And then do another seven-minute spot later. The main reason Bert wasn’t as good as he could have been was simply that he was conscious of what people will laugh at when they are looking at him rather than listening to him.”
One of his best radio broadcasts, on October 11, 1939, was with Fred Allen, the master of radio satire, whose cracker-barrel twang and wry wit made him one of the nation’s foremost radio personalities. Lahr felt confident in his company and, privately, looked upon Allen with special amazement. Allen’s carefully planned routine and the simplicity with which he controlled his life were a source of wonder to Lahr. He admired Allen’s efficiency—a man who kept lists for everything from eating at a different restaurant every night to giving money to the many unemployed actors he’d befriended. “I never cared about the money when I worked with Fred. I knew I’d be protected. I mean the material would be there. Allen used to write it.”
On stage, Lahr had learned how to defend himself from the audience and other actors. There was no recourse on radio, no way to recoup an error or ingratiate the faceless thousands waiting to be entertained. “Allen was wonderful to work with because he was so unselfish, he acted as a straightman to the comedian. He was most generous with other people.”
