by John Lahr
Lahr’s radio style had matured. The Fred Allen broadcast was much more refined than his earlier ones. Lahr still read too fast, and his voice was still too loud for the microphone. He spluttered, howled, slurred his words; but the microphone could never let him run his vocal range. Lahr was now able to assume an aristocratic hauteur, missing in the old Chase &Sanborn shows. His facility with words had increased to the point where he could tickle the fancy with more difficult tongue-twisters than his burlesque “despot.” Allen tries it with “poltroonery.” The effect was hilarious. For radio, Lahr’s physical image had to be replaced by a voice and material that conjured up the simpleton, the bluff egotist who didn’t realize the consequences of what he was saying. Allen was able to get the most mileage out of Lahr on radio by steering the humor very close to his personal frustrations: laughter, Hollywood, love life, the stage. He saw instinctively what Lahr could never see—how much his comic character resembled the private one. Lahr was never funnier, as his friends understood so well, than when he was bemoaning his fate.
Lahr: … People think if one comedian is funny, two comedians should be twice as funny.
Allen: Oh, that’s silly. Now, here we are. You’re a comedian, and I’m a comedian. We’re together. Are we twice as funny?
Lahr: (struggling with the words which are sounded out of his nose) To the contrary, to corn a phrase.
Allen: (laughing at Lahr’s miscue) ‘To corn a phrase.” Well, let’s stop the whole thing. Say, how come you left Hollywood, Bert, you must have had a reason?
Lahr: Yes, Fred, Hollywood went too far … It was up to me.
Allen: (laughing at surprise arrogance) What did you do?
Lahr: It was my turn to go too far. (laugh) So I got on a train and came East.
Allen: Oh, you mean out there, you were getting in a rut, artistically?
Lahr: Yeah, I was tired of being a great lover.
Allen: You wanted to get away from it all?
Lahr: Well, most of it. (laugh) There was a little blonde at Metro who might have intrigued me, but, huh, the silly little minx let me get awaaaaaay.
Allen: You must have taken it hard.
Lahr: I was momentarily frustrated. I denounced the human race. I sought solace in the animal kingdom.
The response to the show pleased Allen. Lahr enjoyed appearing with him, despite the fact that the money—as he kidded in the script—was considerably less than he could command. Two weeks after the performance Lahr received a note from Allen.
Dear Bert—
Thank you for the wonderful job. Please accept this token.
“That money was over and above my regular salary. I had never heard of anyone doing that before.” The gesture symbolized a kindness and generosity that radio, in general, never showed Bert Lahr.
The abyss between public approval and artistic accomplishment plagued Lahr in films as well as on radio. To the world, he was a success; privately, the specter of failure haunted him.
Lahr’s career in movies was arranged by his agent, Louis Shurr, who had induced him to go to the Coast to do Buddy DeSylva’s Merry-Go-Round of 1938 and make a more lucrative career in films.
Louis is five foot three, and pale. Although styles have changed, he looks much the same as he did in the early thirties, when he was show business’ most successful agent. He prefers conservative, custom-made suits and elevator shoes. Everyone has always called him “Doc” since George White first dubbed him that. And no one in the vicinity of the Brown Derby, where he lunches daily at table four facing the entrance, would ever deny that Doc Shurr has managed some of The Big Ones.
Marilyn Miller, Clifton Webb, Jack Pearl, and Lahr were “his” in that golden age of revues, which spanned the twenties and thirties. The stable of talent has dwindled since, but almost all the famous stars have passed through his wellcarpeted office. To the Brown Derby set who don’t remember those halcyon days, he is associated more easily with Kim Novak, whom he discovered. They will tell you that he got himself photographed in Life pursuing Miss Novak on foot while she peddled through the Brentwood streets on a bicycle. They may also add that she doesn’t work for him any longer. But there are others who still remain—names which have managed to bridge decades: Bob Hope, Betty Grable, and Lahr.
Shurr is a curious man. He lingers almost sensually on facts and figures. He is not as smooth as the silk-suited young agents he employs, but he is very conscious of appearances. When Lahr thinks of him, the image is of a man checking his cuffs and collar to see if they are clean.
On the table beside his desk is an assortment of well-framed and carefully dusted photographs. Lahr is among them, an old picture from the late thirties. This is how Louis would like to remember him—a smooth, wealthy, “hot property.” Bob Hope is at the front with his arm around Louis.
“Your father and I have been together a long time,” Shurr says. “A very long time.”
He stops to consider their relationship and nodding sagely says, “If there was one thing I learned about him, he was a worrier. That’s it mainly—a real worrier.” He swivels in his chair. “Oh, we’ve had our quarrels,” Shurr adds, “but he’s a great artist.”
The phone rings. He turns away and reaches for a list that is taped to a small table insert he can pull out from beneath his desk.
“Yeh? How many weeks?… But they don’t have to be that young for a Western … Yeh. Let me see. I can give you Andy Devine … No. Gabby Hayes? No. What about Bert Lahr?… Hey, I’ve got somebody here. I know I can work something out for you.”
Shurr turns back, smiling. “Like I was saying, your father is one of America’s finest performers …”
There was a time, even after the scripts had stopped coming as frequently and Louis was no longer there at the train station to greet him on his trips West, when Lahr defended him vehemently to his family. “Don’t tell me about my business.” But privately, he has always understood the problem of his management. When a script comes from California, Lahr eagerly opens it. He looks at the front page. An Elvis Presley picture. He goes back to his crossword puzzle. Later he exclaims, “Jesus, what does Louis think he’s doing?”
The bond between Shurr and Lahr is memory, not understanding. Perhaps there was a point in Lahr’s career when he should have sought subtler, younger guidance. But at seventy-two, it seems more important to keep things in order.
“As far as I’m concerned, if a call comes in for me, I guess he’ll work on it, but he won’t waste much time.” Even when Lahr was new to Hollywood, he was suspicious of the way he was being handled. “Louis was never a mentor, if you know what I mean. He was just an agent. If they’d call him, he’d sell me. At the inception of my movie career, I don’t think I was managed properly. He got me jobs, but he didn’t care what kind of script it was. He’d give you a rubdown, and make you think things were rosier than they were.”
Lahr bumbled into associations. For the stage he could tell a good script and know how to improve a mediocre one. In other media, without his own knowledge to fall back on and with virtually no intimate friends to give him advice, he floundered. “When I went out to Hollywood, I was just a comedian, a caricature. Even now people think of me as I was in those days. But my main source of fame, if I’ve achieved any real recognition, was on Broadway. In radio I had many opportunities, but I never … Let’s just say I was a Broadway specialist.”
As a comic actor, Lahr’s instrument of entertainment was equal to, if not greater than, the funny-men of the screen. His face was as distinctive as Keaton’s; his energy drew on real emotions and could match the more artificial mayhem of Harpo Marx. In 1938 he could also claim a comic style that raised a point of view, less self-conscious but as special as Chaplin’s. On top of these assets, he possessed one of the definitively funny stage voices, and like all of the excellent fun-makers, his personality on stage or screen created an instant affection.
When he set off for Hollywood in 1938 he was conscious of the risk he was taking
, but his instinct for survival pushed him to develop a performing flexibility. “I realized that good scripts didn’t turn up every year on Broadway. I couldn’t afford to sit around waiting for a year. If I wanted to stay alive I’d have to go into other areas of entertainment. Today, I think I’ve learned enough to make myself qualified for any medium.”
There were many reasons for Lahr’s departure to the Coast. The primary one was, of course, money. But closely allied was his desire to be with Mildred. “A lot of my friends were going out to California and doing pretty well. I thought it would be good for me …” Typically, he had no faith in the success he had attained. At the height of his Broadway career, he intended the move to California to be permanent. Critics have praised his loyalty to the stage; Lahr himself has claimed indifference. “I never go to see plays; I don’t like them. I can always outguess them.” As he embarked for California, he was hounded by what seemed to him an undisputed failure in radio. In forsaking the stage again, he must have wondered whether the gilded world of Hollywood and its new technology would betray him in the same way radio had.
Lahr looked on California like Pinocchio at the fair. His image of it was a child’s vision of leisure and simple fun. He told a reporter soon after arriving in the new Xanadu—
Forget the glory. I’ve had plenty of it rising from the bottom of show business. Now I ask myself, “What do I get out of life.”
I like to see prizefights. Most of them are as good around Hollywood as in New York. So are the football games. There is nothing wrong with the golf courses either.
Even in 1939, while he was joking about Hollywood to Fred Allen, Lahr was making plans to build a house there. He would make sorties to New York to do a show or a guest appearance. But it was in the parched, craggy Hollywood Hills that he settled. He was forty-three, and while he might be able to tell the world there was glory in rising from the bottom of burlesque, he bore the scars of a struggle that had been long and, in his mind, far from glamorous.
Coldwater Canyon, which he had picked out as the site for his home, was then rolling, sparsely populated territory. The comedian of many disguises, the chameleon of laughter, found himself adapting almost immediately to the new terrain. “Space. You had room to move around. Air. You could breathe fresh, clean air. It was—it was—very green.” When he thought of California, he imagined the lovely dog-leg at the Hillcrest Country Club, a long, crooked tongue of emerald turf with palm trees rimming the side. California, as he would paint it for Eastern friends, was the clink of glasses, the laughter of old acquaintances enjoying the leisure of their success, names that later made him smile with happy memories: Jimmy Cagney, Frank McHugh, Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Eddie Foy, Jr., Ralph Bellamy. All of them were refugees from the legitimate stage. They had found their way to California, and Lahr, surrounded by Nature and old companions, felt he had never had it so good.
Broadway was Lahr’s bailiwick, but his exuberance in the early months of his arrival to California indicated a confidence in the new life.
—Bert Lahr entertaining some of the boys at Dave Chasen’s with a broken down rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
—Bert Lahr, so busy telling stories on the Metro set that he’s never ready until they yell, “Camera.”
The buffoon who laughed at his inarticulateness on the stage was gaily passing out his “bon mots”:
On Hollywood:
Hollywood is the only community in the world where the entire population is suffering from rumortism …
If you want to be a success in Hollywood. Be sure to go to New York.
On Woman:
She’s not so bright, but she’s got an enormous scandal power when she’s lit.
On Screen Technique:
He’ll wind up behind the eight-ball unless he stops stealing scenes from himself …
Lahr had performed in two-reelers made in 1928 at the Warner lot in Brooklyn for Brian Foy. “It was pretty bad. Foy just said, ‘Go ahead in there.’ I had very little script. It took three days.” Later, Lahr had been transported to California to do the screen version of Flying High (1931), a year after Joe E. Brown had impersonated him in Hold Everything. He gave virtually his stage performance on screen; but to the disappointment of the moguls and himself, it failed to come across as richly as it did on stage. He did not care about films at that time. His memory of his first screen exposure is not of the material but of two of the industry’s pioneers: Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. He recalls the humility of Thalberg, who in 1931 summoned him to his office, from which he presided over the creative end of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions. “Bert,” he said “I want you to help me cut this picture. You know where the laughs are.” Lahr was flattered. (Lahr met Thalberg with his wife Norma Shearer two years later in the Astor Ballroom. Thalberg approached him. “Perhaps you don’t remember me. I’m Irving Thalberg.” Lahr, who had not spoken to him for fear of being presumptuous, was touched by the attitude of a film magnate to a performer. “I thought he’d forgotten who I was.”) It was not the way most movie moguls, like L. B. Mayer, who handled the business end of Metro, behaved.
At M-G-M, Mayer was a man of astounding power and callousness. His genius for showmanship had manipulated his films to a success and quality still unparalleled in the movie industry. Mayer himself was the single highest paid man in America for nine years in the thirties and forties, earning as much as $1,300,000 in 1932, but he was notoriously stingy with his performers. His struggles for power within the industry and his ruthless exploitation of talent created many enemies. (This was never so clearly indicated as in the reaction to his death. Explaining why so many people had come to the funeral in 1956, Samuel Goldwyn, who knew the bitter in-fighting, quipped, “The reason so many people turned up for his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.” Lahr, a victim of Mayer’s philosophy of entertainment, said, “If you want a full house, you give the public what it wants.”)
Lahr’s contract for Flying High called for a substantial sum for the eight weeks of filming. For any extra time on the set, Lahr was to be paid at a special rate. When it became evident that the film would take longer than two months and that Metro would have to pay a conspicuously large salary to Lahr, he received a summons from L. B. Mayer. When Lahr arrived, Mayer, a toad of a man, small and bilious, was seated at his desk. His assistant, Ed Mannix, stood by the door.Lahr’s initial nervousness was assuaged by Mannix, a large, friendly man who had once been a bouncer at Palisades Amusement Park.
Mayer began his talk with Lahr quietly, dispensing his words with a fatherly consideration.
“America is a wonderful place, Bert, isn’t it? I mean where else could a man build a great company like Metro which has brought the best talent together to make movies? Where else could a guy like me who came from Russia be able to control all this? It takes diligence, and thrift, and the hand of God.”
Lahr nodded, surprised and confused by the typical Mayer introduction, calling on Metro, the homeland, and Divine Will, in that order.
“We want you to stay out here, Bert. But we can’t afford to pay you pro rata.”
Lahr was astounded. His contract with George White had been a handshake. No one had ever balked at paying his salary.
“Mr. Mayer, Florenz Ziegfeld called me a few weeks ago to do a show for him in the fall. I’ve got to go East to firm the deal.”
“We can’t pay you that money, Bert,” said Mayer, chomping on his cigar.
“But it’s in my contract. I want to go back to New York. I’ve got business there. We agreed to this a long time ago.”
Mayer got up from his desk and leaned on the glass top with fingers jammed against like a tripod. “We can’t pay you pro rata. You’ll only be here a few more weeks.”
“I can’t give in to that.”
Mayer went to the water cooler and took some pills from his vest pocket. “He tried to cajole me. He kept walking around me, talking. Sometimes I couldn’t see him.”
When Lahr persisted, Mayer lost his reserve. He shoved Mannix, screaming, “Why did you bring this man in here? Get him out of my sight! Get him out!”
Mayer turned to Lahr. “Actors are a dime a dozen out here. We won’t do any close-ups of you. We’ll do it our way or not at all. We won’t finish the picture. Go back East if you want.” Mayer stormed out of the office.
Lahr’s first impulse was to pack for New York. “But I discussed it with friends who thought I was making the wrong move. They said, ‘This man is very powerful. It’s not going to do you any good if you come back here.’”
A few days later, Lahr called the front office and said he would stay for the cutting and close-up shots. M-G-M offered to pay him one thousand dollars a week “expenses.” In three weeks he was shuttling across the country to receive a much warmer welcome from Florenz Ziegfeld.
The Mayer incident left Lahr with an abiding distrust of movie management, even seven years later, when he returned among the palm trees, an exile eager to cash in on Hollywood’s fabulous prewar boom. Nearly everything the movie industry marketed turned to gold, and Lahr began living as if he would be part of that gilt-edged currency. He purchased a cream-colored Cadillac convertible, ordered his casual custom-tailored suits from Eddie Schmidt, Hollywood’s tailor for the “stars,” and waited for the scripts to arrive. He had high hopes, and a Guild card that read: “Support.” When the offers arrived, they were not what he expected. The anticipation was mingled with suspicion. John O’Hara, a frequent drinking partner who as a writer suffered the same frustrations that Lahr faced under the lights, remembers that he and Lahr “shared among other things a distaste for the men who were producing motion pictures.”
From the beginning, Lahr’s anxiety about Hollywood scripts reflected the battle between his standards of comic excellence and his desire to make California his home. The buffoon’s anarchy on stage capitalized on immediacy, extending into the twentieth century an impulse that could trace its heritage to the amphitheaters of Greece and the streets of Italy. Now, not only his body but also his comic personality would be subjected to the electronic distortions of a new medium.
