Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  “‘I’ll not give you one if you do business with that son-of-a-bitch.’ ‘What am I gonna do?’ I said. ‘I’ll get you the three hundred and fifty.’ ‘I’m almost committed to Leo Singer.’ ‘If you do business with Singer, you’ll not get any from me.’ So I called up Leo and explained the situation. I said that I could get all the midgets from Major Doyle but if I did business with him, I couldn’t get any from the Major. Leo raised hell, but I explained that there was nothing else I could do. When I went down and told the Major that I’d called off Singer, he danced a jig right on the street in front of Dinty Moore’s.

  “The Major gets these midgets for me. They come from all over the world. Now I’ve got a date. I’m going to bring them out West in buses. The meeting place was the Times Square Hotel on Forty-Third Street. I had these buses pull up there. We were going to bring about one hundred and seventy midgets out of New York, the rest I was going to pick up out West.

  “The first three buses are loaded. They are to go through the Holland Tunnel and on through to Chicago. The first bus starts up Broadway. They are supposed to go down Eighth Avenue. I grabbed a cab and followed the bus. Major Doyle is sitting in the front seat of the first bus. I yelled out, ‘Hey, Major, where we going?’

  “‘Come with me,’ he yelled.

  “So I followed him. Leo Singer lived at Sixty-eighth Street and Central Park West on the fifth floor. Major Doyle took the three buses and arrived at Central Park West. They waited at the curb in front of Singer’s house.

  “The Major got up and went to the doorman. ‘Phone upstairs and tell Leo Singer to look out the window.’

  “It took about ten minutes. Then Singer looked from his fifth floor window. And there were all the midgets in those buses in front of his house with their bare behinds sticking out the window.”

  “Major Doyle’s Revenge,” as it became known in movie circles, was not the last the movie executives heard from the midgets. Once they got to Culver City, there was a problem of controlling them. The polyglot group of little people came from a wide range of professions. Many of the “Munchkins” were midgets who, in fact, made their living by panhandling, pimping, and whoring. Assistants were ordered to watch the crew of midgets, who brandished knives and often conceived passions for other, larger Metro personnel.

  “I remember one day,” smiles Lahr, “when we were supposed to shoot a scene with the witch’s monkeys. The head of the group was a little man who called himself ‘The Count.’ He was never sober. When the call came, everybody was looking for the Count. We could not start without him. And then, a little ways off stage, we heard what sounded like a whine coming from the men’s room. Somebody investigated. They found the Count. He got plastered during lunch, and fell in the latrine and couldn’t get himself out.”

  The midgets were also a problem from the production angle. Victor Fleming, the director who stayed longest on the film, had a production philosophy that probably accounted for his tenure. (Dick Thorpe and George Cukor tried to direct the picture and gave up. King Vidor finished the last black and white segment of Oz when Fleming left to direct Gone With the Wind.) Fleming’s dictum was simple: “Don’t get excited—obstacles make a better picture.” There were many outrageous problems: a flying witch, bolts of fire, simulated tornadoes. How do you get a rusted Tin Woodsman off his mound of earth on to the road for a dance? How will the Cowardly Lion wag the tail of his one hundred-pound lion suit? How do you teach 350 Munchkins to sing “We Welcome You to Munchkin Land,” when only a third of them speak English?

  The idea of having the midgets sing their song seemed natural enough. Fleming gave them the song, but the first day they performed on camera his problem was apparent. Jack Haley says, “Some of ’dem sang mit de Cherman agzent. They couldn’t speak English and when they sang together it was the damndest conglomeration of noise you ever heard.” Fleming solved it by having the Munchkins mouth the words while the voices were dubbed.

  Although Lahr had wanted to do the picture immediately and Twentieth Century had let his contract run out, Metro wanted his services for only three weeks at $2,500 per week. Lahr balked. “I said I wanted a five-week guarantee. When they wouldn’t give it to me I said ‘The hell with this, I’ll go back East and do a show.’ I wasn’t getting the right parts. Nobody knew what to do with my comedy.” It took Metro a month to accept Lahr’s terms. Its prediction was significantly unrealistic. Lahr worked five weeks on one number, “The Jitterbug,” which never got into the picture. The studio exhibited little understanding of the complexity of the undertaking or of the future of their venture into realistic fantasy. Lahr spent twenty-six weeks as the Cowardly Lion.

  Staring out of their offices, the executives of Metro were treated to a panorama of grotesques that even Nathanael West could not equal. These were not fusiliers, bandits, or cowboys going to work on Stage 36, but people with green skin, a man walking in what looked like a tin box, his face tinted silver, a lion sauntering erect carrying his tail to avoid tripping, hundreds of midgets with red fright wigs and pointed beards scurrying to the lot. The window watchers were always being surprised; the people never stayed the same. Sometimes the man with the silver face looked rusty; the midgets with their rosy cheeks on Monday would be transformed into cloud gray on Tuesday.

  For the actors, the metamorphosis began promptly at seven each morning. The principals had a make-up man apiece; and twenty make-up men processed the Munchkins at the rate of nine an hour.

  The Wizard of Oz was the first large-scale make-up job in Hollywood. Metro had to have special make-ups created for the Wicked Witch, and for the Tin Man, whose silver skin and blemished, rusty quality had never been attempted before. Metro also had to invent tricks of its own. The primary one evolved in The Wizard of Oz was the use of sponge rubber. The Tin Woodsman’s helmet was made of rubber, his bald head simulated by a plastic cap that the studio had just developed. Lahr’s lion snout was also composed of sponge rubber; so too were the Wicked Witch’s hooked chin and the Scarecrow’s sandbag head, which was made to look like a burlap sack. The rubber was applied to the face and then colored to match it.

  The make-up, which was applied fresh and with new rubber fixings each day, took two hours to put on. Jack Dawn, the head of the Metro make-up department, worked on the Cowardly Lion. He remembers that Lahr was never too enthusiastic about getting into character. “He would wait reluctantly for the exact time to start putting on the make-up. He’d just hesitate and keep looking at the clock.” Although Lahr was surrounded by two old cronies in Bolger and Haley, Oz was grueling. “You couldn’t have fun,” says Haley, “it was awful. I had a radio show at the time. I had to drag myself to work.” Even the Munchkins were unenthusiastic, not prepared for the incessant waiting and painstaking preparation. The make-up men also had a problem with the midgets. “There was a great deal to learn about working with them,” Dawn says. “They were adults, not children, and sometimes we forgot. They did not want us to touch them or lift them up into the make-up chairs. They clambered into the seats by themselves.”

  The costumes for Lahr and Haley were particularly burdensome. Haley, encased in his Tin Man’s garb, was nearly immobile off the camera. The studio designed a leaning board so he could lie down. Lahr’s situation was even more preposterous. Already burdened with a heavy wig, he bolstered the cumbersome lion’s suit with shoulderpads. The make-up, which was so funny on the screen, was no laughing matter off it. The sponge rubber that covered his upper lip prevented the snarling Lion from eating a regular lunch. Lahr took his meals through a straw since the make-up was too elaborate to strip down. The other principals ate in their dressing rooms. “They wouldn’t allow us to eat in the commissary,” Haley recalls. “If we put on our dressing gowns—as we were supposed to—it would have caused too much of a commotion.”

  In 1939, before the color process was perfected, it took more light to illuminate a set. The heat from the arc lights made the costumes unbearable and the hours long. “Each d
ay Judy [Garland] had to go to school. Her tutor—an old woman—would come on the set and someone would yell ‘School Time!’ We used to long for that sound—it meant we had an hour’s rest.” Too keyed up and uncomfortable to sleep, Lahr ambled next door to Haley’s dressing room to enjoy a cigarette and a chat. Usually he found his friend asleep on his special board.

  Off camera, adversity was something often overcome with good talk. Among friends like Bolger, Haley, and Lahr, a continual patter of stories and pranks persisted. If the work was difficult, the actors felt that the picture and their parts were excellent. Their high spirits relieved the boredom of retakes. When Haley or Bolger were preparing to perform, Lahr bellowed the triumvirate’s private anthem, “Smith’s premium ham!”—a radio commercial of the day. “Vic Fleming had never experienced guys like us,” Lahr says. “Some legitimate directors can’t imagine anybody thinking about something else and when he yells ‘Shoot,’ just going in and playing. We’d kid around up to the last minute and go on. You could see he got mad and red-faced. Some actors try and get into the mood. They’ll put themselves into the character. I never did that. I’m not that—let’s say—dedicated.”

  When the trio told dirty stories, they tried to keep them from the inquisitive ears of Judy Garland, who was then fifteen. “Little Judy would sneak around. We’d joke with her and yell ‘Get outta here …’” Their affection for Judy was genuine. At the conclusion of the picture Bolger gave her a fine edition of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, who was her favorite poet. In later years, as the picture became a Hollywood legend, stories about how the three comedians tried to nudge her off the Yellow Brick Road would circulate. But the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow never acted maliciously toward the talented young star. As Haley points out, “How could that be? When we go off to see the Wizard we’re locked arm in arm, and every shot is a long shot. How can you push someone out of the picture with a long shot?”

  Sometimes their jibes came very close to the bone. Bolger, who had worked with Lahr in Life Begins at 8:40, was often the good-natured brunt of their pranks. He was not as outgoing as the other two, but his generosity of spirit extended to his particular brand of blarney. His tall tales made him a perfect foil for Lahr’s clowning. Lahr’s overtures always began with, “Hey, do you wanna have some fun?” When Haley agreed, Lahr made his proposal.

  “Lahr said to me, ‘Say that you’d like to be somebody or do something. If you dwell on it, Bolger will tell you he’s done that.’ I agreed to go along with it. Everyday we had lunch together I’d say, ‘You know Ray, Bert and I worked together many years ago in a show called Folly Town. He was in terrific shape. He used to work out boxing with other guys, and he had a belly on him like a washboard. He used to box with this guy practically every day.’

  “Then you wait. And here’s the line. You know this line is coming; you could lay book on it. Bolger says, ‘I was a boxer once.’ You were? ‘Yeah, I wasn’t very good, but I had a few fights.’ And then he’d tell you an incident about one of his ‘bouts.’”

  Bolger’s harmless tales were the source of amusement during many of their off-camera moments. But Bolger had his own revenge. Once, after a heavy rainstorm, he had a friend call Lahr to warn him that soil from his newly acquired land in Coldwater Canyon had been swept down the road in the torrent, and it was necessary to send a truck to collect it. Lahr panicked, and made a few frantic phone calls before he realized that he’d been duped.

  On camera, Victor Fleming won the respect of all the performers. Lahr was flattered when Fleming would take him aside and ask his opinion for improving a scene. But Haley saw this tactic in another, more realistic perspective. “Fleming had a wonderful understanding of people. He knew that the make-up was wearing on us. After a couple of hours it was depressing to have it on. In order for us not to lose interest in the picture, to try and keep our animation, he would call all three of us together and say, ‘Fellahs, you’ve got to help me on this scene.’ Well, I knew this guy was a big director, and he didn’t need actors to help him. He’d say, ‘You guys are Broadway stars, what do you think we should do here?’ The scene might be waking up in the poppy field and we’d give our suggestions on how to play it … But I always thought he was just trying to keep our interest.”

  But Fleming’s inquiries produced results. In the scene where Dorothy and her companions fall asleep in the poppy field and wake to find it snowing, Lahr inserted a key line—“Unusual weather we’re havin’, ain’t it?”

  “Fleming couldn’t see it,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Vic, I’m sure it’s a laugh. He trusted me. In that situation, I was right. It was a big laugh.”

  Many of the pieces of business that earned Lahr awards for his portrayal of the Cowardly Lion were the fortuitous consolidation of his Broadway experience. Lines ad-libbed in the picture stand out as interesting grafts from his stage performances. Assuming much the same boxing pose as Gink Shiner in Hold Everything, the Lion roars, “Put ’em up, put ’em uuuup.” The slurred words, the not-quite-articulate diction are all part of the stage comic’s machinery. When Oz awards him a medal, Lahr reacts like the cop to Nellie Bean. “Read what the medal says, ‘Courage.’ Ain’t it de truth. Ain’t it de troooooth.”

  With the Arlen—Harburg score, Lahr’s inability to keep up with the erudite, polished lyrics is part of the humor he’d mastered so well in The Show Is On. While a stage hand controlled his tail with a fishing rod from a catwalk above the set to keep him from tripping on it, Lahr even managed to sneak in a hint of his English accent when he proclaimed—

  Yes—it’s sad, believe me, missy

  When you’re born to be a sis

  But I would show my prowess,

  Be a lion, not a mouesse

  If I only had the nerve.

  Lahr’s mugging of the Harburg puns forced The New York Times film critic, Frank Nugent, to exclaim, “Mr. Lahr’s Lion is fion.”

  Awaiting his audience with the “Terrible Oz,” the Lion pondered being “King of the Forest” in an elaborate excursion into nonsense verse. The song became Lahr’s most famous comic gambit. (See Appendix 5.) Lahr delivered “King of the Forest” as if it were open season on lions as well as baritones. All the trills, dainty exclamations, and hoots are heightened in lion’s costume; and Lahr’s performance is more vibrant and complex than in his other films. His special comic spirit and excesses of gesture were easily incorporated into this “realistic fantasy.” The role that came closest to his imaginative life and stage energy became the public’s finest memory of him on screen.

  At the conclusion of the picture, Mervyn LeRoy recalls, the crew applauded the Cowardly Lion. Secretly, Lahr was confident in his performance; but he could not forget a remark that Frank Morgan, who played Oz, made to him during the filming. “Bert,” said Morgan, “you’re going to be a great hit in this picture. But it’s not going to do you a damn bit of good—you’re playing an animal.”

  “If I’d made a hit as a human being,” Lahr muses, “then perhaps I’d be sailing in films now.”

  With the picture completed, Lahr bided his time at home, nervously awaiting the studio’s verdict and eager for work. “One day, I’m sitting on my lawn, and ‘Square-Deal’ Grady pulls up at a light and yells, “Hi ya, Gnong-Gnong.’ This surprised me. Grady and I had been friends in New York, but since he’d become an executive, many of the actors, including me, felt he’d upstaged us. Out there you know by the attitude of the executives what your fate is. When he yelled at me, I was surprised. It was the first time he’d given me a tumble since we’d been in Hollywood. I said to myself, they must have previewed the picture, and I’m a hit. So I called Louis, and he called the front office. He called back. ‘Bert, they’ve shown the picture. You’re a real hit.’”

  Hollywood was humming with the news of his performance. To Lahr it was sweet revenge on the Twentieth Century-Fox producers who had welcomed him to the lot only to mysteriously stop talking to him.

  Louis Shurr sugg
ested that Lahr do a Broadway show. Buddy DeSylva and Herbert Fields had an interesting property called Du Barry Was a Lady. “Lahr wanted no part of it,” Shurr recalls. “Bert said, ‘Metro’s going to keep me for life after what I’ve done for this picture. I’m going to stay out here for a long time.” Shurr wanted Lahr to protect himself with a Broadway show. Lahr, never one for taking a risk with his career, felt his performance was protection enough.

  He was astonished when Shurr brought him the gossip from Metro a few weeks after the preview. “I had just checked with Mervyn LeRoy. He said that Metro was going to stop making musicals at the moment for financial reasons. They’re dropping your contract as well as Haley’s and Bolger’s.” Lahr couldn’t believe it.

  A month later, The Wizard of Oz opened in Hollywood. Lahr was so optimistic that he attended the premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater with Shurr, Mildred, and Buddy DeSylva. “He was the smash of the picture,” recalls Shurr. Walking out of the theater Lahr confided to him. “I’m not going to do a show. I want to stay out here and make pictures!” Shurr, a man who understood the facts of Hollywood, could only defer to his client. “I told him I’d try to talk to the executives and see what I could do.” In the meantime Lahr went to New York, impatient at waiting for so crucial a decision from the studio and to wind up the painful technicalities of his annulment from Mercedes.

  Lahr was in New York when The Wizard of Oz opened there at the Capitol Theater. His picture was in the window of Lindy’s, directly across the street from the theater; the maître d’hôtel at “21” and the Stork Club recognized him as if he’d been away only a week. By 8:15 on the day of the opening, ten thousand people had lined up to see the film. By the evening, The New York Times was telling the city—“The Lahr roar is one of the laughingest sounds since the talkies came in …”