Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  The impact of the motion-picture idol was stamped into Lahr’s understanding during an afternoon parade through Chicago. A man suddenly leapt out of the crowd and ran toward the car carrying Charles Boyer. “You’ve ruined my marriage,” he shouted. “My wife’s crazy about you.” The man’s obvious seriousness perplexed Lahr. “Boyer had never even seen this man.” If the triumphant procession of film stars made some seem larger than life, others, like Lahr and Marx, suffered because they were not recognizable. Marx’s distinctive mustache was not his own; and he never wore his prop off stage. Without his mustache, the public had difficulty identifying the scholarly looking comedian. Lahr remembers the ruckus when Marx tried to ascend a railroad platform where the troupe was being photographed. A policeman stopped him at the gate.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m Groucho Marx.”

  “Sure. And I’m Jimmy Durante,” said the policeman as he began muscling Marx toward the exit. Marx wore his mustache in public from then on.

  The stage performances were delightful. Lahr did his “Income Tax” scene with Cary Grant as his straightman and also the “Song of the Woodsman”; Bob Hope and Bing Crosby got together on stage for a little snide patois; Pat O’Brien and Frank McHugh did a World War I song and dance routine; and Laurel and Hardy went through one of their innumerable comedy skits. But the memories of the performances have faded. Lahr never saw a complete show; neither did McHugh or Cagney. The laughter was in the dressing room; and after each performer’s stint the stars returned to the make-shift quarters to gossip and trade stories. For Lahr, these were memorable, quiet insights into show business and its personalities.

  No matter how early a performer got to the theater to make up and to calm himself for a performance, Babe Hardy and Stan Laurel were always ahead of him. When Lahr arrived at the dressing room, Laurel and Hardy had already assumed their seats in the corner of the long dressing table. Their make-up would be set out neatly in front of them, with a clean towel folded carefully over it. Between them each day was an unopened bottle of whisky.

  Laurel and Hardy waited quietly as the actors came in. Gradually everyone moved down toward their corner, sharing a drink and theater talk. Boyer was the only performer, besides Laurel and Hardy, to bring make-up. Lahr used to pilfer it at each performance. When Boyer was on the stage the other actors helped themselves. Once, when Boyer was making himself up, he looked at his can of grease paint, now greatly diminished, and said, “They’re not making it like they used to.” Nobody told him the truth.

  In St. Paul, Lahr discovered that the toupee he wore in his “Woodsman” sketch had been stolen. He was distraught. “I depended mostly on that toupee for the laughs in the scene. When I chopped the wood, the toupee would slip and I’d get some fun out of it being in the wrong position. When I lost the toupee in St. Paul, I couldn’t do the act. I remember bemoaning the fact to Groucho. Here I was, in the middle of the country, with no place to get another hairpiece and the train was leaving that night for a two-day junket to Texas.”

  “Go out and buy yourself a pair of toe slippers,” Groucho said, “and change your act.”

  The toupee was mysteriously found en route to Texas.

  On stage, there were many touching moments. The personal magnetism of the performers and the audience’s response could be best calibrated from the wings. McHugh remembers “Wonderful show business things happening. I used to watch certain bits of the show while I was waiting to go on. When the orchestra played Laurel and Hardy’s sign music, you’ve never heard such an ovation. There was another one. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby did one of their routines. They weren’t with us the whole trip—they had other commitments and would leave and rejoin the train. But when they were on stage, they were tremendous. After a while, Hope made his exit and Bing leaned over the footlights and asked the orchestra, ‘I wonder if you could give me a couple of bars of something there.’ He never asked for the song he was going to sing. The orchestra struck up ‘Blues in the Night.’ As soon as the music began, there was a deafening roar of applause.” Lahr was fascinated by the activities of the Caravan. Olivia de Havilland, whom Lahr sometimes escorted to the theater in a cab, was always unpredictable. Once she stopped the cab to go to the local library. “She was daffy. She’d disappear during the afternoon, and then, somehow, don’t ask me how, she’d show up for the show—she once asked me to let her play comedy in my act.” And there was the beautiful Joan Bennett, whose dependence on her glasses made her hilarious when she had to appear in public without them, trying not to squint and wrinkle her face.

  Merle Oberon joined the circle of Cagney, McHugh, Lahr, and O’Brien early in the tour. They became good friends by the end of it. To the stunning and civilized Miss Oberon, Lahr once quipped, “You know the reason we like you, Merle—you’re hairy-assed!” She didn’t wince. From the company she was keeping that was accolade enough. Oberon was the constant companion of the foursome. She ate dinner with them and listened quietly while they reminisced about a theater world she had never known. In Chicago, “the boys,” as she called them, escorted her to the lavish Pump Room in the Ambassador Hotel. McHugh remembers it vividly, “She was beautiful—just beautiful. When we’d go into the Pump Room this gorgeous creature would enter followed by Lahr, Cagney, and myself. Everybody looked at her and then at us, and you could see them saying to themselves, ‘What is going on?’ “Miss Oberon handled herself like a princess. “Everybody called at our table,” says Lahr with a wink. “Just to see her; but she never asked anyone to sit down.” Once a man stopped her in the lobby of the hotel and asked querously, “What are you doing with those three men all the time?” Miss Oberon is reported to have replied quietly, “Oh, I love baggy pants comedians.”

  Lahr remembers watching one of the screen’s most famous lovers waiting at a table for two and arranging a flower for one of the starlets of the show. She never came, but sent a friend in to have dinner with him. “We all saw it; but we didn’t say anything. I thought it was kind of dramatic and sad—here’s this great lover doing all these niceties, and then being stood up by the girl.”

  But, more often than not, the spirit was festive. Lahr can remember Cagney standing on a chair by the transom of one of the compartments hushing the group to keep quiet. From inside came the familiar whisper of a famous matinee idol. “Oh, my darling …” and then a high-pitched young voice, “No, I like to sleep alone!”

  When Claudette Colbert was joined on tour by her husband, a doctor in the Navy, the couple did not emerge from their compartment for two days. When they finally did, they found a note on their door in Groucho’s hand—“Isn’t this carrying naval relief too far?” Pat O’Brien was also a great source of amusement and mystery—more outgoing than the others, O’Brien never seemed to sleep. When Lahr finally returned to his room for sleep, O’Brien would be sitting in the club car; and when he stumbled out in the morning, O’Brien would be sitting, fresh and chipper, having his coffee and reading the paper. Not until the third week of the trip did they realize how he managed his miraculous transformation. Instead of returning to his room at night, he went to the train’s barber shop and fell asleep in the barber chair. The Caravan’s barber arrived at eight and gave him a shave and hot towel to spruce him up for the day’s activities. Unlike the other performers, who stayed to themselves when they reached a town, O’Brien was continually in demand. “If you walked into his hotel room in any given town, you were likely to find the local police force or the local diocese being entertained. His social activities became one of the biggest Caravan jokes—prompting Bing Crosby to jibe, “You son-of-a-bitch, you play Sherman Billingsley all night, and Father Duffy all day!”

  After midnight dinner, the performers went back to the observation car and put on a special show for themselves. Everybody performed. There was a piano and small band for accompaniment. There were no critics and no contests. Lahr felt an affection and safety in the company that he had rarely known around pe
rformers. He would later refer to the troupe as “a caravan of love.”

  Lahr always enjoyed harmonizing; it had been a long time since he had sung in Crotona Park. But now, Crosby and Frances Langford would be singing. Groucho, in his high-pitched tones, would go into one of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs which he knew verbatim. O’Brien, standing with his left wrist on his hip and his right hand extended toward his delighted audience would swing into “Ooooh, shake hands with your uncle Mike, me boy …!” Lahr, of course, improvised a loud burlesque of many of the popular romantic numbers, but when it came to harmonizing, his comedy voice was unwelcome. “We’d sing harmony; but every time I’d try to get into a group, they’d kick me out because I was always off key. They wouldn’t let me in it.”

  When the train made its final stop in Glendale, California, there were many wistful moments. Lahr tried not to cry, and he managed better than most of the others. He recalls seeing the massive Babe Hardy, so outgoing and confident a funny-man, trying to look away from his friends to hide his tears. He looked large and rumpled from the journey. “Don’t let’s lose this. Keep in touch.” The image of Hardy, standing on the platform saying goodbye to the many new friends he had made, lingers in Lahr’s memory. “He looked, I don’t know how to say it—he looked so isolated, so alone.”

  The trip was not allowed to end on a sentimental note; the following day, each member of the troupe received a telegram from Joan Blondell and Joan Bennett. It read, “ARE YOU GETTING MUCH?”

  Lahr remembers the Caravan as a moment of confidence in a business that had conditioned him to continual private torments. Hollywood was never so generous and responsive as the communal spirit generated by the trainload of performers. In the two years that followed, he did only three pictures—all embarrassing grade-B productions: Sing Your Worries Away, Ship Ahoy, and Meet the People. He remembers nothing from those pictures, forgotten as quickly as they were made. Instead, he recalls the few private moments of content—standing knee-deep in his pool teaching me to swim, waiting quietly in the garden to watch the sun teeter on a mountain ridge and finally sink beneath the canyon wall.

  If there was a ray of hope in Lahr’s Hollywood career, it lay in the hands of Jack McGowan, his good friend and the writer of his first two Broadway hits. McGowan had been equally as iconoclastic and successful in Hollywood, and the word about a new idea for a Broadway show he was writing for Lahr became Hollywood gossip. Lahr and McGowan worked up an idea for a musical comedy, the title of which was based on one of Lahr’s famous catch phrases, “Oh, you kid.” In the show, Lahr was to play a policeman in a story which focused on the infamous Boss Tweed. McGowan wrote the script; and, when M-G-M heard about it, they asked to have a look. The result of the cursory inspection was a fifty thousand-dollar check for McGowan, and the promise of the starring role for Bert Lahr. “They hadn’t treated me well in Hollywood. They never seemed to have the right parts for me. This was finally a picture geared to my comic personality.”

  Lahr’s spirits were at their nadir when McGowan brought the news of the picture sale. Lahr had steadfastly refused to play politics for his jobs. “I wanted to give parties, like the other stars did, so that Bert could meet the right people—but he never would let me,” says Mildred.

  Mildred was expecting their second child in the first week of September 1943, and Lahr’s instincts as a provider were sensitive. There were no jobs, but the promised role gave him a reason to relax. He told himself that the McGowan script on which he had collaborated would change his luck in Hollywood and secure his popularity.

  Mildred again went to the hospital two days before the birth. On the night she left, Lahr opened the Los Angeles Times to read that Wallace Beery was to star in Oh You Kid. (Later M-G-M announced that Red Skelton would do the picture, and finally it was dropped completely.) Lahr’s name was not mentioned. He was stunned. “It was a double-cross. They had told McGowan I would do the show in order to get the script from him. I was terribly depressed. Without telling Mildred, I put the house up for sale. I just didn’t know what to do.”

  On September 2, my sister Jane was born. To Mildred, the birth of a daughter completed the family for which she had waited for a decade. She had fashioned her own family community with a kindness and concern her early life lacked. Her home in Coldwater Canyon was the first solid base to her dream. When Lahr came to see her, Mildred smiled at him with tired eyes. As he spoke she began to cry.

  “I’ve sold the house,” he said.

  Within six months, he was stepping onto the Super Chief bound for New York and a Billy Rose extravaganza. With him on the train were the remainders of his Hollywood idyll: a wife, two children, a maid, a valise of dolls, and a carton of avocados.

  Lahr’s occasional returns to Hollywood thereafter were far from triumphant; not only did his agent stop meeting him at the train, but he often found that Hollywood had lured him West under false pretenses. He remembers three fiascos above all.

  In Always Leave Them Laughing (1950), starring Milton Berle, he signed a contract for five weeks, only to discover on arrival in Hollywood that he had almost been written out of the picture. “In the movie, I played an old comedian, married to a young girl. Berle portrayed a hustling young comic who stole my material, then my wife. When I got out there, I looked at the script and there was hardly a thing for me to do. I made one appearance as the cop in my old cop act, and that was only included as a plot point, to show the audience how I worked so that Berle could copy me.”

  The script was finally rewritten to give Lahr a song and a sentimental scene where the old comic shows the young one how to be a professional.

  Off camera, the same struggle was taking place. “Berle was watching the picture very carefully—it was his picture.” This attitude led to conflicts. The first was the day in which Lahr’s “sentimental scene” in a hospital took place. “We shot all morning. I came in early to see what I was going to do. I look out by the camera, and there is Berle. He stayed there all morning watching my scene. I was so upset I blew my lines. The only way it got into the picture was that I convinced him there were no laughs in the scene. I don’t think he knew the difference at that time. It’s just as much value getting interest and sympathy as it is to get laughs.”

  In another scene, where Lahr and Berle did a song and dance routine together, Berle protested and almost brought the two performers to blows. “When we were doing this song and dance together, I had on a Sulka tie with a little design in it. Berle objected to the tie because he said I was trying to take attention away from him.” Lahr capitulated, but the experience remained “one of the most unpleasant situations I’ve ever had in pictures.”

  When Lahr came to Hollywood to do a remake of Rose Marie (1954) with Ann Blythe, Howard Keel, and Marjorie Main, he found that he had again been “oversold.” He had a fine part—a Mountie who never got his man—and the picture was being directed by his good friend Mervyn LeRoy. LeRoy called him to his office when he arrived in California.

  “You’re riding in this one, Bert.”

  “Riding?” replied Lahr, already upset. “I get dizzy sitting on a foot stool. I don’t want to get on one of those things. I don’t know how to steer ’em.”

  “Louis Shurr said you were up every morning in Central Park riding.”

  “To feed the pigeons. I don’t go near animals.”

  “Well, Bert, you’re riding in this one. Go out to the back lot and learn to ride a horse.”

  Lahr’s first confrontation with the Wild West was painful. “To a cowboy, if you don’t know how to ride a horse, you’re a square. When I got to the back lot, the cowboy in charge kept me on a horse for fully two hours. Well, I have a fear of heights, you know. When I got off, I could hardly walk. I came home and my posterior was completely raw from saddle sores.”

  The next day Lahr hobbled into LeRoy’s office.

  “I can’t get up on a horse. The only way I’ll do it is if you get me foam rubber and put Malibu
tights on me so I can sit on the horse without getting sore.”

  Lahr became the first member of the Canadian Mounted Police to have foam-rubber underwear. The results were astonishing. “When we did the picture, of course, they got a double for me because I had to ride very fast. But I did have to come in on a horse, and then go out on one. They’d cut to my stand-in, who would be speeding away. They tell me the biggest laugh in the previews was my exit on horseback. I came in all right, but going out, the camera stayed on me a little longer. I couldn’t hold the saddle. With rubber underwear, I bounced about a foot off the saddle.”

  The part required even more athletic prowess. Lahr was chased by a woman of low-comic aplomb, Marjorie Main. Their song and dance number was an athletic jaunt that required Lahr to evade Miss Main’s aggressive passes. Technical problems proved disastrous.

  “In motion pictures, you’ve got to be on your mark to be photographed because of the lighting. There were certain places in this number where we had to hold and sing the lyrics. Marjorie was not adept at it, and, of course, song and dance is my business. When we were rehearsing I was always on my marks, but when the cameras rolled she’d always get me off it. There was a big oak mantlepiece, and I was supposed to fall back against it. They had to cut out a large chunk of the mantlepiece and insert rubber, painted to look like the wood. I kept getting off my mark every time. Finally, Mervyn said, ‘Don’t worry, Bert. I’ll come around and get you in a close-up.’ We started shooting again; I did the song, and then fell back against the mantlepiece. I missed the rubber and cracked my head against the oak. I finished the song with a gash in my head. When I looked out at the camera, I saw Georgie Stoll, the musical director, rolling on the floor with laughter. It wasn’t funny.”

  While on location, Lahr wanted to take advantage of the fine fishing in the Rocky Mountains. Despite his fear of heights and loathing of horses, he set off with some friends and a guide to find fresh streams at higher altitudes. The cowardly mounted policeman in Rose Marie was never as full of trepidation as Lahr on a mountain trail. “The trail was five feet wide. I was petrified. I remember each turn. And on the way down it was harrowing. The horse looked around at me as if to say ‘Who is this bum?’” Lahr cranes his neck to the side and points his nose arrogantly in the air, nostrils flaring. “When we got to level ground, the horse made a beeline for the corral.”