Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  In 1938 the quantity of work disguised the quality of Lahr’s experience in front of the camera. Like so many others, he suffocated in roles that neither used his talent nor cared for it. Merry-Go-Round of 1938 was only a modest success, despite the insertion of Lahr’s popular Woodchopper song and the ego balm of being the highest salaried comedian on a term deal in Hollywood. Universal Pictures, however, dropped his contract; and Darryl Zanuck gave him a sixmonth contract at Twentieth Century-Fox. The next two films, Love and Hisses and Josette, were no better. Lahr’s word is “failure,” but the problem lay as much with the system as with the management. Neither Lahr nor his agent fought it. Believing in affluence and aspiring to gargantuan leisure, they could only bemoan the dearth of material and acquiesce.

  If Lahr was perplexed by the inability of studios to find decent scripts for him, his friend Jimmy Cagney had pointed out the economic score. Cagney, soldier-straight and surprisingly aloof from the Hollywood idiom, had served on the Screen Actor’s Guild. Lahr was a visiting member of the “Irish Mafia” (as they jokingly called themselves), and heard the facts and figures of Hollywood discussed at nearly every weekly meeting of the clan. According to a Screen Actor’s Guild survey, despite the large movie output, approximately only four hundred performers were employed. The average of work came to three and a half weeks a year.

  Lahr did not count himself lucky. He had been one of Broadway’s highest paid comics in the thirties. In Hollywood, he had to hustle to make a comparable living. This inevitably meant playing inferior parts, sometimes, humiliatingly, to a twelve-year-old star like Shirley Temple, which he did in Just Around the Corner.

  In the show Lahr was paired with Joan Davis to supply comedy relief. A few weeks before the release of the picture, a movie executive told him, “They previewed your picture. You’re a big hit.”

  “I was very happy about it. I never had a part up to then where I could stand out. I was working on the Fox lot, and the job was the first of any consequence I’d had.”

  Since Lahr seldom went to see himself in pictures (and today rarely watches his taped television performances), he sent Mildred to see the show. When she returned from the picture, she announced that he was hardly in it. He called the director, who could only explain: “You and Joan were too strong. Mrs. Temple saw to it that you were cut down.”

  As a comedian Lahr was banished to either playing a friend or a guest. “In other words, the comic was incidental to the picture’s value. If you’re not part of the story and you’re put in as comic relief on the periphery of the script, you’re the first thing that is cut.”

  Lahr’s problems in adjusting to the Hollywood scene reflected a shift in public taste. Sound had changed the focus of movies. By 1938, comedy no longer dominated films. Romance sold best. As James Cagney said to Lahr, “This is a boy-girl business.” There were exceptions like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, but significantly, their humor was distinctly more verbal and subdued than Lahr’s. Films did not want the eccentricities of comedy to overshadow the romance.

  “The answer was this,” explains Lahr. “The Buster Keatons, the Harold Lloyds, the Charlie Chaplins—that kind of humor went out. For years great Broadway comics like Ed Wynn, Bobby Clark, Jack Pearl never were a success in pictures. The studios never went after them unless they were legitimate.”

  Lahr had to teach himself film technique because none of the directors wanted to tamper with his highly successful approach to laughter. “The directors, I think, held me in awe. Whatever I did, they thought was right. But I’ve done a lot of things in pictures which, when I saw them afterwards, I almost vomited.”

  The comic mechanism Lahr had spent a lifetime adjusting seemed to be off kilter in front of a camera. “Different movements which got laughs on stage came out overplayed, ‘funnyfunny’ on the screen. They were very obvious. I shuddered at them.” The camera itself distorted and, in some ways, destroyed the basic responses of buffoonery. Lahr was aware of the difficulty. “The camera made every reaction twice as large. Instead of underplaying, I was way over. I was a caricature. In moving pictures, I learned that the audience subconsciously expects everything to be real. On stage, if you had a rock, it didn’t look real, it signified a rock. But on screen it had to be a rock or a real pie or a real dog or a real emotion. Everything had to be real, if it wasn’t, the audience wouldn’t believe your story.”

  The camera worked against him in another way. Lahr’s responses were isolated from the larger dramatic environment. He was still funny on screen, but the camera’s limitations—the closeup and various angle shots—depleted the energy of his performance and the richness of response. The comic event became more literal, deprived of its improvisational spontaneity and surprise. Mervyn LeRoy’s dictum about filming illustrates the problem: “Where the camera sits, everybody sits.” Lahr’s humor relied upon his response to the stage world. He was larger than life and yet related to all of it. The stage’s frame contributed a sense of formal control to clowning’s anarchic energy. The tension fed comedy. On screen the comic was cut off in the picture frame sometimes at the head, at other times below the knees. By isolating part of the body or by separating the comedian from the total environment of his humor, the resonance and theatrical momentum of Lahr’s laughter was severely hampered.

  Lahr’s first breakthrough in pictures was a dramatic role in George Cukor’s Zaza (1938), a story producers felt might do for Claudette Colbert what it had done for so many others. Originally a stage play produced by David Belasco, it made Mrs. Leslie Carter the belle of Broadway. When the first film version came out of Paramount in 1915, it launched the career of Pauline Frederick. The remake of the film in 1923 bolstered the career of Gloria Swanson.

  Cukor cast Lahr as Cascart, an admirer and vaudeville partner of the scintillating Zaza. The backstage melodrama chronicles Zaza’s shattered romance with a married man and her rise to stardom with the faithful Cascart as her manager. The choice of a low-comic surprised the movie colony, but Cukor, who needed a vaudeville warmth in his film, understood the considerable acting talent that went into being a funny-man. Although Lahr was apprehensive undertaking a legitimate role, his disgust at the comic parts he was getting and the need for work made the decision easy.

  Cukor, a director whose insight and flair for light comedy was especially strong when directing women like Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Audrey Hepburn, was able to explain to Lahr what his previous directors had lacked. The part was a challenge to Lahr. “Cukor edited me. He would take me aside and say, ‘Simple, Bert, simple. Cut it down to half. Give me half of that. You’ve got a microphone above you. You don’t have to kick it out to an audience of a thousand people. Let the camera do the work. You don’t have to reach out to an audience and hand it to them.’ He was the first man to try and adapt me to films.”

  On camera, Lahr’s acting resources were often amusing to the cast, and indicative of an approach to performing not learned on a movie lot. Erskine Johnson, a Hollywood reporter on the Zaza set, captured the freshness of comic response:

  Director George Cukor is rehearsing Claudette Colbert and Bert Lahr in a scene from Zaza. Miss Colbert is lying in bed, heartbroken over the necessity of giving up Herbert Marshall, who has been found to have a wife and child. Lahr’s opening line is—

  “Oh, come now, you’ll cry your eyes out over a dozen worse fellows yet.”

  “And then,” prompts Cukor, “when you see she is unimpressed, you try some other way to cheer her up. Use that funny laugh you used on the stage.”

  Lahr goes through the routine of ludicrous laughs, six in all. The sixth is the one Cukor had in mind. The scene is taken, Miss Colbert responding to the laugh, pleading—

  “Don’t tease me. Just—just.” She doesn’t complete the sentence. Instead, she bursts into hysterical laughter.

  “Cut,” says Cukor. “What’s the trouble?”

  “That wasn’t the right laugh,” Miss Colbert sputters between giggles.
“It was a brand new one.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it was,” Lahr confesses. “I’ve got a dozen of ’em. I couldn’t remember which one we decided on. Anyway, they’re liable to come out differently every time.”

  Lahr took great pride in Zaza. He collected enough material on that picture to fill two complete scrapbooks. His enthusiasm was real because of the economic leverage it gave him in Hollywood. One theme is included repeatedly in his Zaza memorabilia.

  Bert Lahr, in this his first straight dramatic part, impresses with a sincerity and skill in modulation for important assignments outside his customary comic parts. He plays the patron and theatrical partner of Zaza and shows, perhaps, unsuspected ability in the emotional register.

  Thirty years later, the film seems surprisingly sentimental even for a Cukor product. Its best moment is the vaudeville routine of Zaza and Cascart. Arms akimbo, Lahr thrashes his elbows, rolls his eyes, rubs up against his partner with the grace of a Persian cat. The gestures, the excitement of seeing the performers before an audience are more accurately portrayed than the usual backstage melodrama. Lahr’s song and dance are not as fiery as the real burlesque fandangos, but the performance is still vital. In his serious moments, Lahr is dutifully controlled. With his face robbed of distortion, it becomes surprisingly smooth and shallow on the screen. “Unfortunately the Hays office cut the picture to shreds, but I got the notices. If it had been a hit, I would have been made as a dramatic actor.”

  Zaza was moderately successful at the box office; and, despite a performance that was severely cut before distribution, Lahr’s press agent was pleased to slip a surprising announcement to the trade late in 1938:

  NO MORE STAGE

  FOR BERT

  Plans of Broadway producers to star Bert Lahr in a show will not materialize since the comedian is scheduled for another heavy season in the cinema capital.

  While Lahr did not have any immediate plans after Zaza, the optimism created by the picture overwhelmed him. He began building his dream home. The opulent standards set by Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., were not the ones to which theatrical expatriates aspired. Although their homes were well-appointed and attractive, they were comparatively modest palaces. “To be living in a fixed place was something new to any performer.” It was the first time in his life that Lahr owned the roof over his head.

  The wonder and excitement Lahr felt is evident in his plan for his home. The house would have a den, a bar, a swimming pool, and even a driveway complete with an electric gate. But more significantly, the comedian from the streets of Yorkville would surround himself with a jungle of flowers and fruit trees. His trees created a dense orchard of eucalyptus, grapefruit, avocado, orange, lemon, lime, almond, and fig. (“Figs that big,” he says, holding his fingers as if asking for a double whisky.) Clusters of exotic flowers blanketed the lawn: gardenias, camellias, birds of paradise, orly andrews, Gabriel’s horn, and even bougainvillaea over the garage.

  The profusion is what he remembers. He walked among his trees, feeling the softness of the fruit, worrying like a nervous aunt about the health of his orchard. When the fruit ripened, he helped gather it himself, and then gave it away to anyone who asked—and to some who did not.

  Friends of Bert Lahr claim he shipped avocados from his orchard to “21” with instructions to serve them to friends without charge.

  The story was true. He could not begin to use all the fruit his orchards yielded. But, fascinated with the bounty of nature, Lahr even planted a truck garden. When he felt a fit of insecurity, he grabbed a spade and tended to the vegetables he had planted. In his first “crop” he discovered that the cantaloupe and cucumbers, planted next to one another, had cross-pollinated, creating a weird, inedible fruit he named a “cucolope.”

  Gardening was no substitute for work, and Lahr was in his usual state of despondency when Louis Shurr sent him a script from the Metro lot early in 1939, a fairy tale that neither of them had heard of. It was called The Wizard of Oz.

  Lahr and Shurr were attending a wedding the next day. At the church Lahr found himself sitting in front of his agent. When the bride came down the aisle, Shurr, a hard-boiled sentimentalist leaned forward and whispered, “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

  Lahr replied immediately, “Yes, I read the Oz script. It’s wonderful.”

  The Wizard of Oz was a unique property, ideally geared to the world of film and the panoply of talent on the Metro lot. The idea of a fantasy had come separately to the producer of the film and his assistant. Producer Mervyn LeRoy had dreamed of filming the L. Frank Baum classic for years. Arthur Freed, who had been writing lyrics for Metro musicals, saw it as a means of launching his own producing career. “Louis [Mayer] wanted me to produce. There were two properties I was interested in buying—The Wizard of Oz and the Rodgers and Hart musical Babes in Arms, which I later made with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. I had been writing for Judy, and I was interested in her.” Freed finally got Garland for the picture after the studio had lobbied hard for Shirley Temple.

  The picture was an immense technical accomplishment, expanding the potential of filmmaking by going against the rubrics of Hollywood’s formula realism. No make-up man had ever faced the problem of turning a Jack Haley into a Tin Woodsman, a Ray Bolger into a Scarecrow, or a Bert Lahr into a Cowardly Lion; no special-effects engineer had shown life from the inside of a cyclone. “A bigger job than merely creating something unreal descended upon us all,” LeRoy wrote in The New York Times. “The task of putting realism into the fantastic.” The Wizard of Oz (a complete departure from the cartoon fantasy of Walt Disney), was a collaboration that invented a new world and strange events that nonetheless had to convince an audience of their actuality.

  The price of invention was high. Both LeRoy and Freed had to battle Metro executives to do the film. The opposition came from Nick Schenck, Mayer’s business partner, who thought the fantasy a waste of money. The picture would cost Metro an astounding $3,700,000 to make. LeRoy recalls, “Schenck wanted to stop the picture. He thought I was ruining the company, spending too much money. I remember I told him, ‘Mr. Schenck, I wish I had three and a half million, I’d buy it from you. It’s going to be worth more than that.’ “But L. B. Mayer, a man who spoke out loudly, if not too clearly, for wholesome fun, put his weight behind the production, and his insight started Metro on one of the most imaginative and popular pictures in its history. What seemed a gigantic financial risk in 1939 became a national favorite which, with television, would earn $800,000 for a single replay.

  Freed commissioned Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg to do the music. As a writer for musicals himself, he knew the value of Arlen’s music and Harburg’s lyrics. “Harburg had a great sense of fantasy in his lyrics.” Freed was right, and his proof was the beautiful realistic flights of imagination that Harburg concocted in “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” and “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” The Wizard of Oz would become the most memorable of the Arlen-Harburg film collaborations.

  Harburg promoted Lahr for the part of the lion. As a lyricist who could imitate his sound, he began ad-libbing lines from the script to the producers. “‘Put up your dukes! Put up your paws!’ Can you imagine Bert doing that?” LeRoy and Freed liked the idea. “They accepted Bert because they thought he was funny,” says Harburg. “I didn’t. I never do that. I accepted Bert and wanted him for the part of the Cowardly Lion because the role was one of the things that The Wizard of Oz stands for, the search for some basic human necessity. At the heart of this seeking after courage is fear. Call it anxiety now; call it neurosis. We’re in a world we don’t understand. When the Cowardly Lion admits that he lacks courage, everybody’s heart is out to him. He must be somebody who embodies all this pathos, sweetness, and yet puts on this comic bravura. Bert had that quality to such a wonderful degree. It was in his face; it was in his talk; it was in himself. To me that kind of comedy is on a higher plane approaching a more humanitarian, universal statement about Man. I
t is not a temporary gag. A lyricist is lucky to have a Bert Lahr in his lifetime, who incorporates humor and humanity in his performance.”

  To both producers, Lahr was a natural. They associated a lion, like the Metro image, with a proud roar. But Harburg had worked on two shows with Lahr, and he knew how much more lay behind the caterwauling. In an inscription of a book of his short poems, Harburg wrote:

  To Bert—

  Still King of the Forest.

  With “ruff” and “luff.”

  Yipper

  The Cowardly Lion embodied the very best parts of a buffoon’s instincts: gut responses, frenetic gestures, a touching and elusive sense of the world. The roar he made created affection, not fear; yet it kept the audience and the people around him at a distance from a more disturbing private self.

  Although Hollywood has been known to film successful pictures many times, milking the public’s fascination with one particular vehicle, it is generally agreed that no one could undertake a re-make of The Wizard of Oz. Not only would cost be prohibitive, but no finer cast (Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Judy Garland, and Lahr) could be assembled for the major parts. Nor could a sufficient number of midgets be rounded up to play the inhabitants of Oz.

  According to LeRoy, 350 midgets were difficult to amass even when vaudeville entrepreneurs managed midget acts. The responsibility for bringing all the midgets to Culver City fell on the casting director Bill Grady, an old Broadway agent who had handled W. C. Fields. Although Singer’s Midgets are listed in the picture credits for The Wizard of Oz, Grady maintains that Singer had nothing to do with acquiring the little people, although many of them had worked for the impresario. Grady explains it this way:

  “Of course the only guy I could get them from was Leo Singer of Singer’s Midgets. Leo could only give me a hundred and fifty. I went to a midget monologist called Major Doyle. I told the Major my problem, and he said he could get them all for me. I said I had one hundred and fifty from Singer.” Doyle despised Singer not only because he would give him no work, but because the fivefoot-five manager was known to exploit his clientele. He answered Grady in a Boston Irish brogue, as rich as it was stubborn.