by John Lahr
When e’er I feel like mis-behaving
I go out and buy a French engraving
So like the lark, I’m as happy as can be
Little old, “Dainty, Quainty Me.”
The patter was a glib commentary on life in the early forties.
When people talk about those columnists, such as Walter
Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Westbrook Pegler, Hedda Hopper,
Dorothy Thompson, Dorothy Kilgallen, and that frightfully
vulgar girl they call “ELSA”
I take BROMO SELTZA.
When one mentions Martha Raye, Carmen Miranda, Lana Turner,
Anita Louise, Joan Davis, Betty Hutton, Gregory Ratoff,
Red Skelton, Monty Woolley, Don Ameche, Jack Oakie, Sir
Cedric Hardwicke and other stars of the CINEMA
I have to take an ENEMA.
The song was suited to the sophisticated intention of Seven Lively Arts; but Lahr’s anxiety put him at odds with himself. He wanted fresh material—but not that fresh! Porter continued to polish the song with the hope of convincing Lahr to use it. Lahr’s absolute veto scotched the idea. In later years, Lahr’s decision still rankled Porter, who once confided to Mildred, “Your husband doesn’t think I can write a comedy song.”
Porter too sensed the show’s mediocrity. Writing under not only the burden of such an unwieldly enterprise but also his own private problems, he could not find the comic or melodic flare that had distinguished his earlier scores. The only song to come out of Seven Lively Arts was “Ev’rytime We Say Good-bye.” Although Porter fitted Bea Lillie with a few fine comedy numbers, he did not provide the material Lahr had so confidently expected from the creator of Du Barry. One unpublished song shows Porter playing with the comic personalities of two of his favorite laugh-makers—Lillie and Lahr. In “Where Do We Go From Here,” he tried to pit Lahr’s obstreperous mug against the alabaster whimsy of Miss Lillie.
He:
I loves yuh, lady, ’cause you’re so refeened,
It musta been on champagne that you was weaned.
I loves yuh ’cause you’re crammed fulla blood that’s blue.
She:
Strangely, sir, I loves yuh too, Your Grecian nose, I simply idolize,
I adore the lack of distance between your eyes.
The lines are smooth, and although they pay attention to Lahr’s body, they miss his speech patterns. They are not particular enough to develop the sense of variety that makes Porter’s best lyrics unique. If Porter’s inventiveness seemed momentarily stale, he could still parody the musical tradition he had done so much to revolutionize.
“Rose promised me material; but I never got it,” Lahr says. “Finally I had to try and protect myself—I suggested to Cole a burlesque on the old Shubert drinking songs. He liked the idea, and ‘Drink, Drink, Drink’ became the only decent number I had in the show.” Porter set Lahr in an admiral’s costume, with a large he-man chorus providing harmony as his baritone voice mounted to heroic proportions and he got progressively drunker.
But the song was not enough to assuage Lahr’s bitter disenchantment. If the audience howled at the final stanza, it was laughing at old wine—
Drink to The Student Prince that show sublime,
And please don’t forget Jeanette, in Apple Blossom Time.
Drink to Nelson Eddy, before you faint, And here’s to J. J. Shubert, our patron saint.
The gaudy façade of the production perplexed Lahr. Opening-night tickets sold at twenty-four dollars a seat. The scene outside the theater and in it had been spectacular and grotesque. After the show, Lahr would read Lucius Beebe’s approving account:
… The gangways seethed with the names that made news hoisting fire pails of champagne at the expense of the management. The limousine line stretched from the theater’s blindingly lighted marquee all the way to Central Park. The speed guns of news cameramen were once more busy as ever they were at the openings of 1939, and neither grand opera nor any other social clambake save perhaps the horse show has in recent years brought out such an undulant red carpet of chinchilla and boiled shirts as populated the orchestra stalls when the first curtain went up.
Lahr went to Bea Lillie’s dressing room to wish her luck. He found her at the make-up table, crying. “I didn’t say anything. It was about then, I think, that her son was missing in action. And now, on Pearl Harbor Day, she was going on …I wouldn’t have done any good. I knew how she felt.”
For Lahr, there was a certain gluttony in the enterprise, which contrasted violently with his beloved co-star bent over her dressing table in tears. Lahr understood the sadness intuitively, yet he could not relate it to his own life. “It was the only time I ever saw Bea cry.”
The war had not touched him as it had Bea. He had suffered nothing; he was at once safe in his profession and yet strangely threatened by an optimism as artificial as the sumptuous Ziegfeld Theater lounge that Dali had decorated for the occasion. His faith in Bea’s unerring comic sensibilities and her quintessential professionalism was challenged by a wonder that politics had somehow intruded into the sacrosanct province of laughter. His humor had always been based on a buffoon’s anarchy; it was indisputably apolitical. But Bea’s tears hinted at a world that could no longer dismiss history.
The first-night audience enjoyed themselves, stopping the show several times for encores. The good spirits were self-conscious; the rapport between the performers and eager audience strained by the emotional vacuum backstage. Lahr was disturbed by the audience’s apparent enthusiasm and the inability of the best of America’s professionals to meet that demand with excellence.
The critics were kind to the performers despite the fact that the show was top-heavy, uneven, and, in some cases, like Stravinsky’s Scenes de Ballet, extraneous. The lavishness Rose imagined would be part of the fun was only occasionally amusing. “Fragonard” placed Bea Lillie on a swing engulfed in a pink arcadia. Lahr in matching pink pantaloons and a periwig pushed her gently in a parody of eighteenth-century manners. Miss Lillie recalls, to her delight, the night the swing clipped Lahr on the chin and sent him sprawling. Rose’s instincts for extravagance were foiled on another occasion when Benny Goodman refused to don Rose’s elaborate costumes for the finale. He made his appearance in a modest set of tails. Perhaps the most trenchant observation on the show was made by Saturday Review’s John Mason Brown. Commenting on Rose’s Lucullan intentions he turned the other cheek to his hospitality. “Had Mr. Rose succeeded in making those seven arts lively, one might have forgiven him his gold plate, even in wartime. What we resented, so far as entertainment was concerned, was being overfed and underprivileged.”
Seven Lively Arts was intended to be a bromide to the war’s doldrums, to paint over anguish with a show of splendor that asked nothing of the future except that it be like the past. The decadence of the show was apparent even to Lahr. Its array of burlesque and vaudeville turns, its extravagance in homage to another era seemed curiously old-fashioned, a wistful recollection of a more innocent time. Behind the faltering material and lapses in taste that Lahr could see was a fear of something larger and more elusive. The war would change laughter. Although Seven Lively Arts had delighted first-nighters and eked out a respectable run of 183 performances, it was not merely a bad show. The people were not responding. It spoke to a different society; and no return to an earlier bravado could gloss the fact. Lahr was no prophet. Continually misled by his sense of historical fact, he nonetheless feared for his career in a postwar environment. The image of Bea crying stayed with him through the gayest moments of Seven Lively Arts and after it. “I don’t know why. It made me sad. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
As a father Bert Lahr emerged from the shadows of midnight kisses and occasional walks only slowly. Jane and I barely understood that there was someone else besides Mother and an endless succession of foreign nurses who were responsible for us. His behavior during Seven Lively Arts and the two years of relative ina
ction that followed certainly did not seem normal—even to children as young as we. He rarely played with us, and on a Sunday morning we could never gain access to his room much before noontime. We wanted to hear stories, and he would always begin one—the same one—which he never finished. It was about a street cat—or dog—who never had a home. He wandered around the city, and my father would describe what the animal saw. We wanted him to embellish his stories with tales of birds and goldfish, which interested us at the time. He never did.
He was an upsetting man. His voice could be volcanic. It would sometimes crash through the world of comfort he had created for himself: suede shoes, tweed jackets, Of-Thee-I-Sing cologne, cigarettes in every cigarette box. Now, I know there was fear in his voice; but, unable to read it then, the sound was simply stamped on our imaginations as Authority. He surrounded us with toys, and answered every one of our material needs. He protected us. Jane and I never knew there had been a world war until we entered grade school.
My father was aloof. A game of catch in the park was two or three tosses. I did not know he worried; he simply cast no aura over the household. Even the birthday cards and Christmas presents from him were written in Mother’s hand.
Once, soon after Seven Lively Arts closed, he went to a costume party. It was the first time I had seen him in disguise. He went as Whistler’s Mother. He seemed like one of the sweet, puckered old ladies who took us to the park. I woke up when my parents came home from the party. Mother’s voice was loud in the hall. I crept to the door and saw her giggling. She was laughing at my father, who had passed out in his dress. Years later, he would tell me that people came up to him at the party (he went complete with rocking chair) and pinched his cheek, saying, “What a cute old lady!” He would turn around, completely inebriated, and say something gross. Dead drunk, in his outrageous costume, the personality beneath scared me. He was different from the other more reliable grownups my friends had as fathers. I hated to see him drink. But I remember that often when I’d lie awake waiting for my parents to kiss me goodnight their kisses had a perfumed smell. It made me sad.
There were no Broadway parts that seemed to be right for my father in the year and a half after Seven Lively Arts. Having cast his lot for Broadway, Hollywood was not a place he visited often, although he would sometimes tell us about his home and his orchard. It was a restless time, and he had to resign himself to waiting for the right part. His anxieties about his comedy were never expressed to us, but we were aware of the tension. Muffled voices behind locked doors suddenly blurted out into harsh, sometimes teary sentences, and then, tantalizingly, fell back into whispers.
The mystery of my parents was my chief pastime. I would eavesdrop in the early hours of the morning—trying to listen or peek through a keyhole. Sometimes I regretted my snooping, because I found out more than I expected. I recall seeing my father throw a suitcase on the bed, waving his hands wildly at Mother. He walked out of the room, and then out of the house. What annoyed me was not that he’d left, but that he had not bothered to kiss me goodbye. He hadn’t kissed Mother either. That was some consolation.
We often tried to ferret out the secret of Father’s job, which he would never explain. When he took the family to see Peter Pan so many people at intermission wanted his autograph that there was a line all the way up the aisle. My father recalls walking with Jane on the street. People would gape at him. “Why are they staring at me, Daddy?” He never explained. He always evaded our questions. Sometimes he told us he was a pitcher for the Yankees (but when he broke Mother’s antique vase with a pitch he called the “dipsy doodle” she didn’t act as though he were a professional athlete). He said he was a big-game hunter, an aviator, a golf pro, and only after he came up with so many answers to the same question over a period of years did we realize that these responses were red herrings. Even when we were told that he was an actor, he was different from other fathers. In front of audiences he danced, he sang, he put on faces he never showed us at home.
Why did he hide himself from us? He had a vision of his profession as harsh, vulgar, and coarse—a world he did not want us to comprehend. But his secretiveness at that time, I think now, came much closer to the dilemma he was facing in his comedy. The scripts were not coming; the material was not there. Comedy situations written for him after Seven Lively Arts seemed old-hat. There was no way, at the moment, to present his kind of humor on stage. The spectacular failure of Rose’s revue and the endless stream of bad musical comedies on his desk corroborated for him the mercurial situation of Broadway. If he was not on the stage, if he was unsure of the pertinence of his comedy, he could never be sure of himself.
In the summer of 1945, he tried out Burlesque, the Arthur Hopkins-George M. Watters chestnut, in a dingy theater at Brighton Beach, New Jersey. The choice seemed an odd one; the play, a great dramatic success in 1927, was undeniably dated. Burlesque was an art form that had been moribund for a decade when the play with its artless sentimentality eulogized this particular breed of American performer. Despite its mustiness, Lahr tried the play out. “I wanted to see what I could do with this show.”
What Lahr was testing was his dramatic ability. With his career seemingly stalled, his instinct for survival needled him into developing another facet of his talent—just in case. He was trying a script in which he might be able to incorporate much of his old comic material in a fresh format. Nobody, either on stage or in films, had chronicled burlesque as he knew it. His interest in the play was not just a yearning for the past.
The play was not good in New Jersey; Lahr’s first dramatic performance was unsteady. Arthur Hopkins had traveled to New Jersey to see it, and Lahr conceded, “I don’t think he was too impressed.” However, in the summer of 1946, still without a promising theatrical property, Lahr tried out Burlesque in Greenwich, Connecticut, with additions he had made in the story. The show was a great success. “I was easy in it. I had the conception of the show.”
The public’s response to the Lahr version of Burlesque impressed an ex-vaudevillian—Jean Dalrymple—who had watched Lahr’s cop act from the wings and knew both its pathos and comic potential. She decided to produce the play with Arthur Hopkins even though she had not seen the Greenwich production. “I remember that when I saw Bert’s performance in Du Barry, it struck me as a wonderfully legitimate characterization. I felt he should do a straight play. When I heard he was doing his cop act in the burlesque show within the play, I thought to myself, ‘That would be marvelous, it can’t fail, it’s foolproof.’ Sight unseen, I decided to bring it to New York.”
Getting Burlesque into the Belasco Theater, where it finally outran and outgrossed the original Hal Skelley-Barbara Stanwyck version, was not as easy as the audience reaction to the show indicated. To Hopkins, a man as averse to comic improvisation as he was to busy scenery, Lahr was wrong for the part. Hopkins kept protesting to Miss Dalrymple, “The play was written for a hoofer.” Undaunted, Miss Dalrymple insisted that the play made continual references to the hero’s humor and the melodrama could use some comic flair. “Mr. Hopkins wouldn’t even go up to Greenwich to see Bert. Finally, one Friday he called me and said he was going up. I couldn’t go with him. I was astonished.”
The next day Hopkins called Miss Dalrymple and announced “You were right. You can do the show!”
When Miss Dalrymple met him the following Monday to begin laying plans, Hopkins insisted that he direct it. “I was very disappointed when he said he’d have to direct the show himself.” Hopkins liked the show in Greenwich, but thought it was too hokey. “I said that I thought the hokiness was honest and precisely what made it a hit. In order to get it done at all, I finally agreed to let Hopkins direct. That was a great mistake. He tried to make Bert unfunny, too legitimate. Unfortunately, it seemed to me, Bert listened to him and played very straight. Hopkins used to call me a ‘nervous Nellie’ when I’d complain about the play being ‘flat.’ I said I didn’t think it was funny at all; he replied, ‘It’s not supposed
to be funny.’”
The cast had two types of performances: one, when Hopkins was in the theater, played the story; the other followed Lahr’s more relaxed instincts. Lahr used to whisper to the actors, “Talk fast, talk fast,” hurrying through the dramaturgy to the burlesque entertainment. Still, Hopkins’s presence was an important source of confidence to Lahr. Hopkins respected Lahr’s talent and let him direct the burlesque play “within the play” in the third act. Hopkins did not seem to care about the musical-comedy numbers, and Lahr remembers his surprise when the famous producer-writer put him in charge: “You do the musical numbers, Bert; I’ll direct the piece.” He was distinctly the mentor; and Lahr listened. “He would ‘edit’ me. He never told me much. He would say, very quietly, ‘I wouldn’t lay on that line too much’ or ‘play that down.’ We had a most wonderful association. He had great taste. He was to me what a literary editor must be to a writer. He doesn’t tell the writer what to write, but sometimes he points out what to embellish and clarify. When he died, I couldn’t go to the funeral. I’m too emotional at funerals; it’s embarrassing. I couldn’t see him.”
Hopkins provided an important creative catalyst to Lahr, who was eager to absorb all of his directional suggestions. Gail Garber, who played a character part in Burlesque, recalls coming back to Lahr’s dressing room after the first rehearsal under Hopkins.
“What did he tell you?” Lahr inquired.
“He told me to keep my head up and my chin down. When I looked up, Bert was staring into the mirror and trying it.”
Hopkins encouraged Lahr’s dramatic capacities. “When a director can’t tell me what to do, I can’t learn from him. He stifles me. He’s like a hand around my throat.” Hopkins, however, provided the security and intelligence that let Lahr take risks he had never before attempted. Lahr was able to meld the dramatic with the comic moment on stage. He found himself with not only directorial control of one of the play’s most important sequences, but also the responsibility for writing some of the material.
