by John Lahr
There were some consolations. “You know I can make noises like a moose.” Lahr makes a moose noise. “On the way up the mountain, we saw a deer. I gave my moose call. It started to move toward me. The guide offered me twentyfive dollars a day to call deer.”
Lahr’s last completed movie, Ten Girls Ago (1962), was an experience that confirmed his cynicism about films, and left him with a special sadness about the inevitable change in comic tastes. The film was never released. But Eddie Foy, Buster Keaton, and Lahr, who provided comic relief for the rock ’n roll love story, were a significant part of the American comic tradition.
The trio met at Grand Central Station. It was like a family reunion. Lahr had almost grown up with Foy; and while he had not known Keaton until 1931, he had seen his original family act, “The Three Keatons,” at Hammerstein’s Forty-second Street while waiting for work in his pre-burlesque days.
Lahr first met Keaton on the back lot of M-G-M, when the flamboyant figure was riding the crest of his popularity. Keaton’s dressing room was called “Keaton’s Kennels”; his personality paralleled the name of his quarters—carefree, playful, and exuberant. Lahr’s company had been requested at a dressing-room banquet of venison steak. His price of admission was a barrel of beer. This first raucous evening cemented a relationship that was carried on intermittently through the years.
Keaton’s fall from stardom was as famous as it was precipitous. Like all of them, he had tried commercials, TV, grade-B films; but he had not weathered the changes in entertainment fashion. His stoic face, once silent in survival, now looked like a gutted building. Yet what amazed Lahr was not Keaton’s history, which was part of theatrical legend, but his tranquillity. He envied Keaton’s contentment. “He never bemoaned the fact that he’d lost stature. I remember him telling me that he went to Berlin where they were running his pictures, and that he was still a big star. He seemed very satisfied. He had a lovely wife and a nice house in California. He talked a lot about gardening. Years ago, when he was married to the Talmadge girl, he was kind of a playboy, but by now he was a solid citizen. He used to drink a lot; but, with us, he’d only have an occasional beer. He talked about his pantomime—he was very theater wise. In the last years, he was making a pretty good living.”
Keaton’s body seemed brittle; in his youth, Lahr had watched, amazed, when Keaton, wrapped in a gunny sack, was thrown around the stage. The instincts were still there; but his body was no longer as agile. Keaton brought along his ukelele, and accompanied himself when he entertained his friends.
The three comedians, together after three decades of association, seemed to counterpoint one another. Foy was already baiting Lahr about an old stage humiliation. While the others stood immobile and tired, Foy was ready to spring into a buck and wing. With arms extended, he did a pantomime of a soft shoe. Keaton, unlike the others, was distinctly rumpled, tired, and uncommunicative except for an occasional carefully considered sentence.
Lahr did not make the movie out of pure artistic considerations. “They came to me. I read the script. It wasn’t good. They were giving me a three-week guarantee for a tremendous amount of money. When I read the script, I realized they couldn’t get it done in twenty weeks. It was a real amateur situation. Everything was a montage shot when one scene fades into another. It takes a long time to set up a montage and light it. They had at least one hundred of them. So, right away, I knew. They needed somebody to play the other comic part—I suggested Foy.”
What Lahr did not realize was that Foy, typically nonchalant, would accept without reading the script.
“Eddie read it on the train. He phoned me from Albuquerque. ‘I don’t want to do the picture!’”
On the train to Canada, the three comedians discussed ways they could improve the film. “You should do the hanger bit,” Lahr told Keaton. “You know, the one where you get mixed up with the paper and glue and everything. You can invent something.” They laughed about ad-libbing, with Foy reminding Lahr of the quick talking he had had to do when he followed the Hickey Brothers in Texas. “We had a hell of a time,” says Lahr. When the customs inspector came through at the border, Lahr turned to Keaton: “Did you bring the cocaine?” Keaton’s face held its deadpan. “The customs man looked around quick and realized who we were; I don’t think he liked it too much.”
The picture was as much of a fiasco as the three men had expected. Although the company hired an “ace” cameraman, Lee Garmes, who filmed Gone With the Wind, it had not found a director until the last minute. There were only to be two sets: a park and a delicatessen. The story involved a show that was going to be put on in the delicatessen. “One day during the first week,” recalls Lahr, “the writer got in a fight with the scenic designer. The writer was yelling, ‘It needs red paint in this scene.’ The scenic man kept saying, ‘The red will clash with the costumes.’ That night the writer snuck onto the set and splattered the scenery with red paint.”
Dion, the popular singer who struck out on his own after a series of successes with a group called “Dion and the Belmonts,” also had a three-week guarantee; but unlike the other performers, he was signed to do a coast-to-coast tour after his picture contract ended. The miscalculation about the time it would take to direct and light the sets meant that by the time Dion’s three weeks were up, the love interest’s role was not complete. The answer: change the script. In the end, Lahr had to sing the title song—a love song to the young girl.
The three comedians tried to put order into a full-blown disaster. There were moments of nostalgia only they could understand. There was a tacit sense of expertise between them. A reporter on the Toronto Telegraph recorded an incident with a naïveté that must have read strangely to the three veterans:
At one point, Dion, who seems to worship the old-timers, came over carrying a policeman’s night stick. Lahr took it from him. Then he remembered a line from an old vaudeville (or possibly burlesque) routine.
“Stop in the name of the station house, stop,” he said with a mock snarl. Then he turned to Foy, “Remember that?”
The film took six weeks to make, during one of which Lahr was bedridden with pneumonia. “They kept calling me up and asking me when I would be out to the studio. Finally Mildred said to them, ‘Do you think you could be funny with 104º temperature?’”
On the fifth week, the comedians’ salaries were not delivered on time. Lahr called his New York agent, who tried to pressure the production company. They were always elusive. Finally, Lester Shurr called Mildred. “Go out there and tell Bert and Eddie not to shoot.”
It was a ten-dollar cab ride to the studio, and when Mildred arrived Lahr and Foy were in the middle of a scene. “I saw a woman in the back waving. I yelled ‘Cut,’” recalls Lahr. “I said to Eddie, ‘Who’s that?’ I yelled, ‘Whaddya want Mildred?’ She says, ‘Get off, get off.’”
Foy still laughs at the incident. “If you could have seen Mildred standing there as belligerent as a policeman, yelling for us to stop work, you would have laughed too.”
Luckily for Lahr, the assistant director, sizing up the situation, called a lunch break; otherwise, the production company could have taken legal action against him. Lahr, Keaton, and Foy received their money that day, but they were never paid for the final week’s work.
Despite the debacle, there were memorable moments. Lahr played a few scenes with a Bassett hound—one of his most pleasant memories. “The trainer evidently trained him with a whip. I’d come on the set with a pocket full of meat. When the dog could hear my voice, he’d start to whine. I wanted to buy him, but they wouldn’t sell. He got to love me, you know. The dog just looked at me with loving eyes, and his tail would wag all the time. He really loved me.”
Back to Broadway
There is no place in the adult musical plays for the extravagant clowning of Bert Lahr … The shows in which Bobby Clark, Ed Wynn, Willie Howard and W. C. Fields used to appear could not compare artistically with Oklahoma! (or Annie Get Your Gun). In point of f
act, the clowns generally appeared in revues which have become victims of technical obsolescence since America became swamped in television.
By abandoning buffoons, the musical stage has lost one of its most legitimate assets. They belonged to the musical stage because they, too, were larger than life and inhabited a fantasy world. They were as legitimate as the music, dancing and decor.
Brooks Atkinson,
Introduction to
The American Musical Theater (1967)
LAHR’S EXPERIENCES IN Hollywood after The Wizard of Oz and DuBarry crystallized his love of the stage and his faith in Broadway. However, the Broadway to which he eagerly returned in 1944 was already changing. There had been fifty-three new musicals in 1927, when Lahr made his Broadway debut; three years later the number had dropped drastically to twenty-seven, and by the year of Seven Lively Arts, 1944, there were only eleven. Musical comedy, Lahr’s métier, was in decline. Like Hollywood, Broadway was beginning to concentrate on romantic fantasy.
Until Oklahoma! (1943), most of the men creating musical comedy molded their sophisticated diversions from the contemporary urban experience. Even when musicals were set in faraway places, their spirit was that of Shubert Alley. But the year Lahr returned to Broadway, musical entertainment had given first notice that comedy was an unwanted appendage for a theater of escape. The Song of Norway opened three months before Seven Lively Arts. The inundation of the exotic continued with Bloomer Girl (1944), a Civil War tale that took place in upstate New York. In time, even the most conservative Broadway producers would drop the term “comedy” from their descriptions of musicals. And with this careful distinction, the form—the most significant American contribution to the theater of the Western World—would gradually decline.
Comedy was the vehicle that gave the wooden fantasy of the plot the grit of reality. Lahr entered musical comedy when the form was drawing from experience: the spontaneously real comic gesture completing a faith in the present. Lahr’s talents had first been matched, in musical comedy, by those of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, who were masters of the good-natured adulation of national heroes and cultural passions. His work later for Ziegfeld and White had been successful because the laughter he generated, as income tax collector or English aristocrat, mirrored America’s immediate dreams and despair. He never admitted in song or gesture the sadness of the depression; yet within frothy musical paeans to the nation’s benevolence, his laughter never lost sight of private torment.
Seven Lively Arts, whose avowed purpose was to resuscitate a splendor of the past, received more publicity than any show, musical or dramatic, on Broadway in 1944. No other show could boast a half-million-dollar advance in wartime; no show would have such an awesome array of talent. No show would be such a devastating disappointment to the theater world.
Produced by Billy Rose, the pint-sized impresario of spectacle, Seven Lively Arts was intended not only to reopen Rose’s newly acquired Ziegfeld Theater, but, once and for all, to transcend the Great Ziegfeld. The production brought together the foremost performers and artists in the world. Rose coaxed Bea Lillie out of a self-imposed five-year retirement from the American stage and brought Lahr back from Hollywood. Cole Porter was commissioned to write the score, Igor Stravinsky to provide ballet music for prima ballerina Alicia Markova. William Schuman contributed a composition entitled “A Side Show for Orchestra,” and Rose hired Benny Goodman and his famous Quartet for the downtown element. Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman wrote the sketches, with Ben Hecht helping out and contributing incidental monologues spoken by “Doc” Rockwell. Hassard Short directed. The production opened in Philadelphia with two acts, twenty-three scenes, and ten train-car loads of scenery.
From the beginning, Seven Lively Arts was a $1,350,000 theatrical anachronism. Rose was trying to serve up spectacle in an archaic formula. He proudly confided to Lucius Beebe for a New York Herald-Tribune interview that Seven Lively Arts did not contain an “ounce of significance, a suggestion of social, economic, or political implication or a trace of moral purpose …It’s the last word in complete escapism, a super Christmas tree, a grab-bag of fun, anything you want to call it.”
Escape was possible in a faraway land; but to mount a show whose laughter and lavishness were an arrogant fist in the face of universal carnage was severely misjudging the public’s taste. Rose had moved the show’s New York opening to December seventh, a commemoration and denial of Pearl Harbor. A nation still at war would see an opulent extravaganza that attested not only to the stability of America’s theatrical history, but also to a carefree attitude that the country would never regain.
Eventually, this affluence spelled the death of spectacle as a theatrical entertainment. Rose’s tepid vision indicates how insensitive he was to the satire of both Lillie and Lahr, whose responses to the world (however unwittingly) exposed its foibles. By bridling them with a “sense of fun” stripped of any social insight, he was making both performers return to a good-natured type of humor and style of entertainment from which they had graduated. Without the vinegar of serious comic content, there was little hope of making their humor register.
Rushing to get Seven Lively Arts in shape before the historic December day, Rose planned only one out-of-town tryout. Dissatisfaction was brewing long before the show reached Philadelphia (Bea Lillie was already calling it Seven Deadly Arts); but the audience, at least, seemed pleased.
… From 8:35 to 12:15 last night as many as could be squeezed into the Forest Theater saw the world Premier of the apotheosis of stage revues. True, it follows the general pattern of all these shows from W. C. Fields through Ziegfeld and George White, but for sheer beauty of scene and diversity and wealth of material Seven Lively Arts is tops.…
Variety
Lahr had misgivings about his material. Rose had tried to con him in Harry Delmar’s Revels and he felt that Seven Lively Arts was another fancy bill of goods. “I was unhappy with the show from the beginning. Billy Rose didn’t get me the proper material. I could see my sketches were thin, and I kept asking if he would fix them up. He said he’d try, but he didn’t do much. Fortunately for Bea, Moss Hart wrote her scenes.”
Lahr’s annoyance surfaced at the Philadelphia opening night when Rose came backstage to present him with a wreath of flowers. His excitement jarred with Lahr’s obvious displeasure. Rose, once again, promised to do something. He handed Lahr the flowers, saying, “Your talent is as fine as this bouquet.”
Lahr cut his speech short. “You know where you can put them!” Anxiety over the material and Rose’s obsession with bringing the unpolished production to New York hung over the show. Porter and Bea Lillie found Rose hard to work with—tight-fisted and lacking any sense of excellence. When Miss Lillie claimed a sore throat and failed to appear at a Broadway benefit preview, Variety reported that her absence was a gesture of protest against Rose’s mismanagement.
(Even Igor Stravinsky got the special Rose treatment. Contracted by the producer to write a fifteen-minute ballet for five thousand dollars, Stravinsky’s score had pleased Rose at rehearsal. When Rose heard the music from the pit on opening night in Philadelphia, he fired off a telegram to the composer:
YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL STOP IF YOU WOULD AUTHORIZE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION STOP BENNETT ORCHESTRATES EVEN COLE PORTER.
Stravinsky wired back:
SATISFIED WITH SUCCESS.
The ballet was not presented in its entirety until the winter of 1945, when it was performed by the New York Philharmonic.)
The possibility of an inglorious return to Broadway put Lahr on the defensive and clouded his comic instincts. His self-consciousness squelched valid comic ideas. “Moss Hart wrote one scene for me that was good, but I didn’t think it was right for my kind of comedy.” The sketch was about an English officer who gives a lecture on the evils of women to his troops. As he talks, he becomes progressively more excited, until he has to be cooled off with a bucket of water. “The wat
er was a little uncomfortable for me. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to get drenched every day. It wasn’t worth it. Being unhappy in the show anyway, I just couldn’t do the sketch. It was dropped from the show, but it was much better than I thought at the time.”
Lahr also refused to sing a chorus of Cole Porter song that rhymed “cinema” with “enema.” “When you said a word like that on stage, you could feel the audience freeze up.” Lahr’s prudishness and his nervousness about the audience did not do justice to the song, which cast him as an old man singing out his venom. (This hilarious comic idea would be employed later when S. J. Perelman and Lahr discovered the redbaiting ice-cream tycoon, Nelson Smedley, in The Beauty Part.) Lahr’s testiness during the rehearsals is measured by the mildness, not to mention the wit, of the Porter song he would not sing. Disgusted with the show, he misjudged not only material, like Hart’s, which looked toward the past, but also ideas, like Porter’s, which offered something new.
Porter’s song “Dainty, Quainty Me” would have given Lahr’s material the sophistication and variety it lacked. The song was certainly stronger than much of the comedy business he performed. His attitude at rehearsals and his gripes against government and society were strong enough to have made the comic statement hilarious.
I’m “Dainty, Quainty Me”
And from care completely free.
You may ask me how I can still feel gay
Why, by merely ignoring the world of today.
