by John Lahr
Lahr reported his pleasure to Mildred in a letter: “Believe me it was a tonic for my inferiority complex which is so readily developed in Hollywood.”
But the two weeks in New York also disturbed him. These should have been happy times, he kept telling himself. His movie was a success. His private life was straightening out—Abe Berman had explained how the Domestic Relations Law, Section 7, subdivision 5, would enable him to finally be free to marry Mildred early in the New Year. Everything seemed so straightforward; yet his future in a town that now knew him as one of its finest exports seemed as uncertain as it had been when he was much younger.
People were swarming to the theater; Variety was blaring the Oz grosses all over its Picture Section—and yet Metro was thinking of letting him go. He was loved by a woman, and yet after so many years of waiting, he was uncertain about marriage. In his self-absorption, Lahr never suspected that his relationship with Mildred had been in jeopardy. But the painful and complicated legal proceedings had frazzled Mildred’s patience and made her apprehensive of any future with him. Lahr never knew she had written Berman about her marital prospects as late as December 1938.
Abe, how is BL’s case straightening out? Do you feel that it is working out or is it proving a wasted six and a half years? I get so afraid when I think of going out on my own. But know that if I must do it, I cannot afford to wait much longer. I get older each year, and each year that youthful spirit I was endowed with weakens, and grows dimmer. I am certain by the time you come out here, you will know definitely.
Berman could not tell her anything when he visited California, but she never left Lahr. He would never know, even with the success of the legal struggle, how close he came to losing her.
The annulment placed another financial burden on him that made a Metro contract imperative. He had spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars to cure Mercedes; and now he had to establish a fund of over $150,000 to take care of her. She would live in Arizona with her sister and son.
The bond of so many performances and private aspirations was reduced to a few pieces of legal foolscap. He would be able to return to California and tell Mildred that the papers for the annulment would be filed in the Westchester County Clerk’s office.
In the last page of the fifty-page documentation, one of the examining physicians and a practicing psychiatrist for thirty-seven years, replied to crossexamination with a sad decisiveness.
Q: Doctor, in your practice have you ever seen another patient suffering the same ailment as you have described this person (Mercedes Lahrheim) suffering from?
A: I have seen post-encephalitic psychoses and I have seen lots of simple dementia praecoxes. I have never seen them both tied up together in this most interesting and unusual type.
Q: Have you ever seen any patient that had it, that was eventually cured?
A: No.
Q: Do you know of any in the medical books?
A: No.
Lahr could return to California with his life intact. If he thought of it one way, everything was good—he would marry Mildred; they had the house; he would continue in films. But, in truth, he saw himself stalled like the Cowardly Lion. He was heading back to California and away from the stage. He was going “home” to a career that was still in the hands of movie executives who threatened to drop his contract. He was making money; yet his financial responsibilities were suddenly graver. The business of comedy was now more pressing than ever. He had to work. But for whom?
His emotional circumstances scared him: there was a woman who was now a mask, living in a silence he feared he had helped create, and there was her exact opposite, the buoyant, beautiful Mildred. She was still not legally committed to him. Would she change like Mercedes? Would a woman so stable, so patient, and so generous grow apart from him the way Mercedes had done?
When he returned to California, Louis Shurr confirmed what he knew before Lahr left—Metro was dropping his option. Lahr seemed resigned, but totally distraught. He talked with Buddy DeSylva, and a contract to do Du Barry was drawn up.
He signed for the show in Shurr’s Hollywood office. Putting Louis’s pen back in its jade holder, he glanced up at his agent. “Well, after all, how many lion parts are there?”
He would return temporarily to Broadway, where comedy and the name of Bert Lahr were still King.
“… But What Do I Do Next Year?”
AS FAR AS MRS. Helen Schroeder was concerned, the telegram postmarked February 11, 1940, should have been written years earlier.
DON’T LAUGH JUST MARRIED
MILDRED AND BERT
But nobody was laughing. The relationship had undergone too much—even after Mildred had been granted a divorce on October 4, 1937. On January 4, 1938, the temporary injunction that had made it impossible for her to return to New York was finally reversed by the State Court. Up to that time, Mildred had been guilty of contempt of court and failing to obey injunction orders. Now, Mildred was exultant and secure. The gaiety of the telegram reflects her ebullience. But it was not funny to her mother, and certainly not to her new husband. It was he who chose to be married on a Sunday, in the quiet town of Elkton, Maryland, three days after an interlocutory judgment of the annulment of his first marriage had been filed with the Westchester County Clerk’s Office. Lahr picked Elkton with the care he usually reserved for selecting a fairway wood. His desire for anonymity is an indication of how heavily his guilt about Mercedes and the legal battle with Robinson weighed on him. “We had to get married as quickly as possible. That whole thing would have come back at us.”
Standing in front of the Episcopal minister, the only one available when they reached the town at midday, was not what Lahr had imagined. He was uncomfortable; a spastic colon had developed during the annulment proceedings and, aggravated by his usual worries about a new play, was acting up. But the comedian who never got the girl on stage was finally taking the leap again.
True to his distrust of sentiment and his inability to sustain a romantic moment, Lahr suggested the mezzanine of the local hotel for the wedding. Amid smoke, musty sofas, and the clink of dishes, he and Mildred were married. As the proceedings were about to begin, the receptionist’s radio bleated its own special irony. “The theme song from this radio program echoed up to the mezzanine. It was ‘Here Comes the Bride.’ Everyone smiled, but then we heard the announcer give the name of the show, ‘I Want a Divorce.’”
Through the ceremony, Lahr noticed that the minister kept looking up at him and reading the ceremony very dramatically. After it was over, the Reverend asked the nervous groom, “Haven’t I seen your face before?”
“Perhaps you saw me in The Wizard of Oz.” With Bible still in hand, the Reverend glowered and threw up his fists, “Put ’em up! Put ’em uuuuuuuppp!”
Afterward Lahr and his new wife had dinner in Wilmington and then returned to New York. He recalls only its uneventfulness. Too many thoughts about his emotional past and his theatrical future separated him from the day.
“I was fearful about the success of Du Barry. I don’t know why. That was a time in my career when I was a little mixed up. As the show went on, I got more confidence.”
Eighteenth-century France provided the musical-comedy idea that eased his always troubled comic instincts. In Du Barry, he played Louis XV. When a subject bowed before him, Lahr, with a democratic good nature at the base of his comedy, dismissed him saying, “Skip the dip.” The phrase is Lahr’s invention, but the eighteenth century was a world that amazed him and that he found both ribald and touching. He knew Boswell and Johnson, and for the show he had made a study of Louis XV.
In Du Barry, a washroom attendant (Lahr) wins a sweepstake ticket, and then, through a misplaced “Mickey Finn,” finds himself transported into that daydream of largesse, the elegant court of Louis XV. It was the first sustained parody of the upper classes Lahr had ever attempted, yet it came close to his frolicsome burlesque. The Hollywood country gentleman had come to court.
Th
e musical had a golden ring to it, which few of his previous entertainments, despite their excellence, had. Cole Porter, the Alexander Pope of American musical comedy, created lyrics whose complexity captured the veneer and exuberance of a world as confident in its coherence as the heroic couplet. The producer, Buddy DeSylva, was as eminent in show business as he was successful. Lahr’s co-star, with whom he shared eight per cent of the gross, was Ethel Merman. Her meteoric rise to Broadway lights was built around a voice and personality both unique to musical comedy.
There was little tinkering with Du Barry on the road. One song, Miss Merman’s “Give Him the Ooh-la-la,” was added in Boston, where the supersophisticated show attracted an unlikely crowd of children and parents who expected clean, wholesome fun from the Cowardly Lion.
The only complication in the book was getting the washroom attendant into the court of Louis XV. In Boston, DeSylva realized the transition was weak, and, trusting his old friend’s sense of theater, he consulted Lahr. DeSylva called at any hour of the night and his opening sentence was always the same: “We’re under it, Bert. Can I come and see you?” Lahr dressed and went down to the front door of his hotel where DeSylva met him in a taxi. They would drive around the city until they came up with a solution.
In this case, their answer came after only a few minutes of touring. As a lovesick washroom attendant, Lahr plays a scene with his protegé, Charley, in which he teaches the bathroom tyro how to brush a coat, to fill a wash basin daintily, and finally to snatch a tip with the voraciousness of a hammerhead shark. The laughs were strong (“We could have stayed on with it forever”), but just how Lahr and Charley, his rival for the love of May (Ethel Merman) would get their Mickey Finns mixed, move into the dream sequence, and get off with a laugh was a real problem.
“All I had to suggest was that the washroom attendant yell, ‘Get an ambulance.’ Let the situation play it, and then go into the fantasy of the French court. The minute I said it, DeSylva laughed like hell. ‘That’s it. Let’s go home.’”
Lahr was beginning to understand that humor did not always come from pressing an audience or a situation. In the car Lahr pantomimed how he would say, “Get an ambulance.” His hands clutched at his stomach, his eyes went wide, and his body shook as if it were attached to a reducing machine.
When Lahr first heard the Du Barry score, he was not convinced of its excellence. The fault was in Cole Porter’s piano playing. “Cole was a horrible piano player. Oompah, oompah. He played with a slow, wooden tempo. If you didn’t know who it was, you’d have thought he was a learner. The same with Jerome Kern. I once heard him play at Billy Rose’s house. It was embarrassing. You couldn’t believe that the melodies which are part of Americana came from the same fingers.”
If the first full orchestra rehearsal proved that Lahr’s fears about the music were groundless, Porter’s bitchy, urbane lyrics raised another problem. His songs were riotous; but they contained bawdy overtones. Although Lahr appeared wild and spontaneous on stage, a sense of decorum modified his antics. The clown always had to please; and Lahr was always conscious of creating “sympathy” on stage. He balked at some of Porter’s words; DeSylva agreed. “If we use all of these lyrics,” he told Lahr, “they’ll walk out.”
No matter how antiseptic the comedy song, both Lahr and Merman had voices and movements that brought any restrained lyric abruptly back to earth—Lahr with his mouthings and leers, Merman with that brassy coarseness she epitomized later in Annie Get Your Gun. In the dream sequence of Du Barry, Louis is trying to woo La Comptesse Du Barry (Merman). As Louis, Lahr had somewhat better luck in attracting his love than he did as the washroom attendant. “But in the Morning, No” is a sophisticated song of seduction set to a minuet. To see Lahr in highbuckled shoes, a lorgnette, and periwig ridiculed the fustian eighteenth century. The play of wit between Louis XV and Madame Du Barry puts the elegance of that time back in its proper physical perspective—close to the stomach.
DeSylva chose only four verses; the others, heretofore unpublished, were not sung. The song received encore after encore. “When Cole got dirty,” Lahr says, “It was dirt, without subtlety. Nothing I sang in burlesque was as risqué as his lyrics. It would never have been allowed on the burlesque stage.” Lahr’s love of biological laughter had become tempered by a sense of propriety that came with theatrical success. But when he reads Porter’s words to himself, he cannot stifle a laugh at nearly every line.
The song, with at least ten refrains, reached the epitome of stage ribaldry in this stanza, matched only by Porter’s private performances in his early days at the Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice:
He:
Are you good at figures, dear?
Kindly tell me if so.
She:
Yes, I’m good at figures, dear,
But in the morning no.
He:
D’you do Double Entry, dear?
Kindly tell me if so.
She:
I do Double Entry, dear,
But in the morning no …
When my pet Pekinese
Starts to mind her Q’s and P’s
That’s the time
When I’m
In low …
He:
Do you like Mi-ami, dear?
Kindly tell me if so.
She:
Yes, I like your ami, dear,
But in the morning, no, no—no, no,
No, no, no, no, no.
The Porter score was inventive and wry; and if Lahr worried about how the audience would react to an occasional line, the general effect was one of immense pleasure. The show produced no immediate “hits,” but through the years three songs emerged as “standards”: “Friendship,” “Do I Love You, Do I?” and “Well, Did You Evah!” which became famous when rewritten for the movie High Society.
Porter had written comedy songs before—but never for a comedian whose gestures and personality allowed him to pull out all the stops. Much of the comic material in his earlier shows had been provided by the male performers themselves. This was true, to a large extent, of Danny Kaye (Let’s Face it, 1941) and Jimmy Durante (The New Yorkers, 1930; Red, Hot, and Blue, 1936). Although Porter had concocted comedy songs for Victor Moore in Anything Goes (1934), they hardly had the verve or wit he displayed for Lahr.
Lahr’s own comic imagination—his instinct for the liberties he could take, his ear for funny sounds and words he could mangle—helped Porter sharpen the thrust of his laughter. Lahr’s comedy was graphic and precise; Porter’s lyrics, whatever his devilish intentions, were often wordily sedate. In collaboration, Porter’s songs could play off not only Lahr’s blundering stage coarseness, but also the impact of his physical presence. In “It Ain’t Etiquette” Lahr was to expound on manners as a bathroom attendant with a taste for “class.” Where Porter inclined toward the general statement, Lahr pushed him for more specific song ideas that carried greater possibilities for movement and response.
A Porter stanza begins—
When invited to hear from an Op’ra box
Rigoletto’s divine quartet,
Don’t bother your neighbors by throwing rocks
IT AIN’T ETIQUETTE.
The lines seemed improbable to Lahr, whose comedy thrived on the outrageously real. He suggested building up to something about a Bronx cheer. These lines, scribbled in the Du Barry prompt book, were the more effective alternatives.
If invited one night to the Met to hear
Rigoletto’s divine quartet,
Don’t shower the cast with a loud Bronx cheer,
IT AIN’T ETIQUETTE.
Porter appreciated Lahr’s uniqueness. The song’s final stanza, written before he had worked with Lahr, began:
If a very proud mother asks what you think
Of her babe in the bassinette,
Don’t tell her it looks like the missing link …
Instead of being cute, Porter was as blunt as Lahr’s body. His revision acknowledges Lahr and
gives the joke resonance:
If a very proud mother asks you to see
Her babe in the bassinette
Don’t tell her it looks exactly like me
IT AIN’T ETIQUETTE.
The element of fey surprise in Porter’s lyrics was matched by Lahr’s delivery, which, no matter how fastidious, mocked refinement. Off stage, Lahr balked instinctively at some of the Porter double entendres. But his image of himself as censor for the audience was laughably hypocritical.
His affection for Betty Grable illustrates this. Miss Grable, whose famous figure was as stunning as her face was sweet, had a fine time jesting with Lahr. “She was a lovely kid. When she opened in Du Barry, she was new to New York. She had a lot of vivaciousness. Then she got the cover of Life, and from then on she sailed.” The one fact that sticks in his mind is not her considerable beauty, but the delightful lamb-and-mutton image she could create in the same moment. To Lahr, a man who lived with artifice, this deception was hilarious. He laughs when he thinks about it. “Betty could say the filthiest things and they sounded … well, you never took offense.” This paralleled Lahr’s own feelings about getting away with anything on stage as long as one did it with a sense of innocence. Both Lahr and Grable used to delight in mocking Broadway decorum while performing. “Under our breath, we used to say things that if the audience heard, they’d back up the wagon.”
Lahr was not as comfortable with Ethel Merman, whose talent he admired, but whose strength made him nervous. Lahr’s humor depended on the reactions of others to him. He had difficulty with Miss Merman. “She’s an individual with a special way of working. There was nothing vicious in what she did, she is a great performer. But she’s tough. She never looks at you on stage. She’s got her tricks.” Lahr had his tricks too, and an inevitable, if friendly, friction developed. It fed their stage roles.
