Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  “No.”

  “Mine goes dry all the time, Doc.”

  Exasperated, the doctor turned to Lahr, “If you don’t mind, Mr. Lahr, I’m trying to find out if this woman is pregnant.”

  Lahr’s fear of illness was intensified by the death of his father from cancer during the Burlesque run. The fact was kept from him until a Friday performance. According to the cast, he never showed any outward emotion. At home, however, things were strangely different. I remember asking about the candle he left burning on his desk. He never explained; and he never did it again. It was the only time he ever exhibited a religious awareness. Lahr’s sadness over his father’s death was immense, but whatever he felt he rarely expressed. Occasionally, he would recollect the times when we’d visited his father at an old age home, and how we’d played checkers.

  On the road, Peggy Cass took Faye McKenzie’s part. Miss Cass recalls seeing Lahr sitting glumly at a table one night. She asked him how he felt.

  “Not so good,” he said. “I think I’ve got the Big C.”

  After this Broadway success, Lahr once again played a waiting game. His potential as a legitimate performer had been impressed on audiences and critics, but not on producers. No one capitalized on his acting ability. If theatrical management was nervous about breaking commercial stereotypes, Lahr also contributed to the situation. In his three-year absence from Broadway, he toured in the Sid Caesar vehicle Make Mine Manhattan, appeared frequently on television, and made a few unmemorable appearances in films. He had defied Hopkins’s good advice for axioms closer to his heart. “I’m a mercenary. Any dramatic parts I got after Burlesque just couldn’t pay well. I had dependents, and a lot of obligations. Comedy was the only thing I could afford to do.”

  In 1951 Two on the Aisle brought Lahr back to Broadway. Just as Ziegfeld’s last extravaganza had starred Lahr, Two on the Aisle, conceived and directed by Abe Burrows, was Broadway’s last big-time revue, “a bright and authentic flashback to the nearly forgotten formula” as Theater Arts Magazine referred to it. (Later, smaller-scale revues like New Faces of 1952 and 1956, La Plume de Ma Tante in 1958, and Beyond the Fringe in 1961 found admiring audiences on Broadway by offering not only more acerbic satire, but also an economic format that counterbalanced spiraling Broadway costs.) Two on the Aisle was the last flamboyant breath for the star-studded cast and opulent extravaganza, a form that had nursed comedy and comedians on Broadway into an important force.

  If the show was an anachronism, Lahr was happy to be with it. “I waited a long time for this show. Good sketches are tough to develop.” The difference between Two on the Aisle and previous revue attempts was the quality of material. An impressive array of Broadway talent was concentrated on bringing the revue format up to date. Abe Burrows and Nat Hiken created the sketches; Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote the music and lyrics. None of the songs have lived, but two of its comedy bits, “Schneider’s Miracle” and “Sawsie Dusties,” have become part of the American comic heritage. Beside fresh, contemporary situations, they allowed Lahr to sport costumes and disguises, key props of the buffoon’s fun. The audience could see him decked out as Queen Victoria, a Wagnerian Siegfried, a baseball player, and a park attendant.

  The sketches satirized modern targets with a more intellectual flavor than most of Lahr’s previous material. Abe Burrows concocted the first American science-fiction routine for the show; a satire on television that betrayed the lie of sportscasters and, in the time of the Kefauver investigations, the embarrassing intimacy of the television camera’s microscopic scrutiny of public events for private viewing. One sketch took Lahr into an urbane triptych in which a love scene is played in three different styles: burlesque, T. S. Eliot, and Cole Porter. While some critics moaned (John Chapman of the New York Daily News said, “When is Santa Claus going to bring Lahr some new material?”), the show was more literate than many of its predecessors in the Golden Age of the revue.

  It was particularly exciting to be around my father at this time of his career. With more good material to run through each evening than he had had in a decade, he was at his comic peak. His security in the laughter (while never complete) was strong enough to warrant moving to a fourteen-room duplex on the West Side. He suddenly had become a collector and selfproclaimed expert on porcelains. Fleshy paintings on the scale of “The Rape of the Sabine Women” and still-life studies of “Nature Morte” kept cropping up on the downstairs walls. In October 1951 he brought home a copy of Time Magazine with his face, in baseball costume, on the cover.

  He never decorated his dressing room. It was barren, except for an occasional press picture. Most of the attention was focused on the softdrink cooler. But in Two on the Aisle a special gaiety pervaded even his somber surroundings. After each scene Lahr would come back soaking wet. The room had a washline for costumes. It was cluttered with a Superman outfit, Viking helmet complete with bull’s horns, a New York Giants uniform, and a ridiculous set of royal robes for Lahr’s impersonations of Queen Victoria. What was laughable was seeing Dad standing in his underpants and bare feet, wearing basketball kneepads and holding out his arms for his valet to slap the next change on him.

  With so much to amuse us, we spent many matinées in the dressing room. The family would sit, eating, playing with the props, listening to the ball game on television. Even without an afternoon performance, he was often at the theater by four, checking the box office, waiting for the eight o’clock curtain. On the surface, everything seemed placid and secure. It wasn’t.

  Lahr did not take the show on the road—a final gesture of disgust with Dolores Gray, whom, regardless of talent, he could not abide. The difficulty began when the show opened in New Haven. Miss Gray, just returned from London, where she was a hit in Annie Get Your Gun, had a big voice and an ego to match. Burrows, following revue format, had slotted Lahr for the number three spot, the position allotted to the first star. (Its importance was read into contract law when, in another show, it was stipulated that Bea Lillie was not to appear before 8:50.) The second number went to the show’s second star, with the opening number usually a boy-girl production. Miss Gray argued that she should be placed at number three. “That was unthinkable,” says Abe Burrows, who finally settled the dispute. “I won it by threatening to quit the show.”

  The continual tension created by the threat of upstaging and other demands made Lahr nervous, and sometimes his concentration on the laughter went to ludicrous extremes. Burrows recalls that “periodically during the show Lahr’s valet, an enormous six-foot-four ex-boxer, would appear at the dressing room of a younger actor and summon him to Bert’s dressing room. Bert would talk to him and explain where he’d hurt a laugh. One day, Bert insisted an actor was moving on laugh lines. I watched the scene and I didn’t see it. I said, ‘Bert, the guy didn’t move!’ He replied, ‘He was moving his facial muscles.’”

  To a director like Burrows, who was just beginning a Broadway career, Bert Lahr was certainly a tough first-draw. “I walked into my first rehearsal scared. Bert said, ‘Hello, Abele’—that means little Abe. He made me feel ten feet tall. I was a green director; and he made me feel good.” But Burrows, squinting nervously over white-rimmed glasses, managed to instill confidence in Lahr while remaining critical of his performance.

  “Lahr understood me and appreciated my work. I had a sketch that I’d written for myself—the baseball sketch. I turned it over to him and rewrote it for him. He knew I was on his side. However, there came a point when periodically I felt he was going after the audience too hard. He’s America’s greatest technical comedian, who over the years had to rely on his comic talents more than he did on his material to carry the scene. Obviously, I never asked him to throw a line away. He’s not a drawing room comic in that sense. I also felt he was a real actor. If he would play just the material the laughs would come. We clashed at that point. I guess I was looking for underplay.”

  Whatever the tension, it was creative. Burrows, who would go on
to become one of Broadway’s most famous comedy directors and writers, learned a lot from working with Lahr. “I saw him do my scenes. I argued about it, but I appreciated it. He helped me enormously in my direction. I’m an actor’s director. I’m a good one, I think, because I started with Lahr. I learned to use what the actor had, instead of superimposing my attitude immediately. I always try and see what the actors do first and work from that. The point is not to get so dazzled that you immediately toss out your concept.”

  Burrows marveled at the way Lahr maneuvered around the stage. “He’s the freest man on stage I’ve ever seen. The little movements I had in mind for his sketches didn’t fit at all, because Bert roams the stage in huge strides. I had to adjust to that. I seem to inherit those guys. Every so often I get a free-wheeling comedian like Robert Morse. I think it was my experience with Bert which made me so successful with Morse. I had Morse in two shows, Say, Darling and How to Succeed in Business. In both of them, remembering my experiences with Bert and realizing that a certain kind of talent shouldn’t be changed or stifled, I provided direction that enabled him to flow. Instead of getting impatient because his movements changed the patterns I had in mind, I just went with them and used them.”

  Lahr’s complete control of a stage fascinated Burrows, who often watched him from the wings. “If anybody moved on stage he was furious; yet, at the same time, the son-of-a-gun would turn around and help break the actors up in some scene. He used to blow on his upstage cheek. You couldn’t see it from out front, but the actors would start to giggle. One day I threatened to fire anybody who broke up on stage; and he, being a good guy, stopped immediately.”

  Burrows was an admiring audience for Lahr’s ad-libbing. “Bert has tremendous control. I used to stand in the wings some nights. He’d be in the middle of a scene that wasn’t going too well. He’d see me standing there, and, still in character, stride toward the wings, and say, ‘They’re from the moose country tonight!’ Without missing a beat, he’d go back into the scene.”

  Lahr’s ability not only to make the stage his own territory, but also to turn the sketches into his special view of the world impressed Burrows. The Baseball Sketch (see Appendix 6), according to Burrows, “was a comic conceit of mine. When I wrote the sketch I was much more interested in the character of the announcer. Bert took it and made it his own, which was a marvelous transformation. He made it a scene about the ballplayer.”

  Lahr’s love of baseball was not the only element that made his characterizations true. As a man constantly besieged by people who glowed over his talent only to ask him his name or mistake him for Joe E. Brown, he was suspicious of hailfellow good spirits. Like Lefty Hogan, in Burrows’s sketch, Lahr was continuously being discussed in romantic-heroic terms he never understood. His matter-of-factness about his business was an amusing contrast to the hifalutin questions people asked and the trite answers they expected in return. (“Everybody says I’ve got wonderful timing. Young actors have actually stood in the wings with a stop watch charting when a certain laugh would come. But you wanna know something, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”) Lahr was always skeptical of smooth, glib media men. As one of the first commercial television performers, he was continually thrown up against the egos of fasttalking reporters, and his interpretation of Lefty Hogan was drawn from his fund of experience and whimsy. Behind Lahr’s lampoon was the firm belief that “television is small time.”

  The sketch skewered television’s impulse to make myths out of men instead of confronting them. Lefty Hogan, squinting dumbly into the television light, is everything the announcer is not: inarticulate, ugly, bumbling, uncouth. He is human; the announcer tries to make him superhuman. Lefty pierces his heroic rhetoric with straightforward honesty.

  Announcer: And finally Lefty, you became a professional—you had to. You had to because of that deep love you possessed for this great sport! Because of that you wouldn’t rest until you became part of this beloved game.

  Lahr: No, I wanted to make some dough.

  Announcer: Magnificent sportsman that you are … and what a great pitcher you were. Tell me, Lefty, after being so great, what made you decide to take off your armor and cease to do active battle on the field of honor with the other knights of baseball?

  Lahr: I never played night baseball … only daytime …

  Burrows articulates what Lahr has always understood in his “flop sweat” and his button pulling: “I guess to somebody out of the business it might sound silly. “What the devil is a laugh?’ A laugh is a laugh. It’s like radar. Radar operates by sending out a message and it bounces back … You send out an impulse; it hits an object and sort of echoes. By measuring the echo you know the distance, size of the object. A comic is like radar, he sends out a laugh—his personality—if nothing comes back, it’s death. Literal death. Comedians always used the phrase, ‘Boy, I died last night.’ That’s no accident. They are literally comparing it to death. On the other side, they use terms like “I killed them,” “I fractured them,” “I had them laying in the aisles,” “I murdered them.” This is really like a bullfight, but it’s more than a contest, it’s a life and death battle.”

  Lahr never spoke to Burrows about these feelings; but Burrows’s ability to understand them in Lahr’s work made their collaboration fruitful. After the show’s successful opening, Lahr bought Burrows a suit, a vaudeville tradition that indicated his approval. Two on the Aisle, dedicated to laughter, opulence, and sheer enjoyment, was always serious for Lahr. The show, which ran 267 performances, was a comedian’s tour de force. Burrows recalls sitting with Lahr before the curtain went up opening night.

  “Do you think they’ll laugh?” Lahr asked.

  “I think so.”

  “They’ll laugh. If they don’t, I’ll make them laugh.”

  Waiting for Godot

  The only possible spiritual development (for an artist) is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication …

  Samuel Beckett, Proust

  Playing Waiting for Godot in Miami was like doing Giselle at Roseland …

  Bert Lahr

  THE PLAY THAT came from Michael Myerberg’s office in autumn 1955 was unusual on two counts. First of all, it caused my father himself to pad to the door to take it from the messenger—a chore he usually delegated to someone else. Second, it was not a script at all, but an already-published paperback version of a play. On the cover was a photograph of two hobos moving around a distinctly unrealistic tree. The play was Waiting for Godot.

  He did not return to his room, but sat down at the dining room table and began reading. Since Two on the Aisle, he had been through this process often. The messenger, the hasty reading, the pondering, the call to Lester Shurr, his New York agent and Louis Shurr’s brother. No play seemed right. He had moved from his fourteen-room duplex to a small five-room apartment on Fifth Avenue.

  But that day his attention was riveted on the book. For the first time in many months an excitement was visible.

  “What’s it about?” I said. He rarely remained quiet for such a long time.

  Without looking up he mumbled, “It’s about two bums.”

  Bums. The word seemed incongruous in a room full of porcelains, a room dominated by a huge portrait of him as Louis XV in Du Barry. No one except my father looked at the china; everyone but he accepted the secret of his favorite painting. The picture shows him standing haughtily with scepter in hand and costumed in gold brocade, lace cuffs, and a shoulder-length periwig. The fantasy pleased him. He did not mind that the eyes beneath the wig were not proud or that the nose was disconcertingly wider at the base than any French aristocrat’s. He often studied the painting with a magnifying glass, forgetting, or perhaps awed by, the final joke—that it was not a painting at all, but a retouched photograph.

  A play about hobos did not seem to fit into h
is carefully planned luxury. He had eliminated the harsh brutality of poverty from his life. Yet the play fascinated him as if some secret frequency had penetrated this sedate comfort. He got up and walked into the bedroom as he read. He shut the door behind him.

  An hour later, the bedroom door swung open, and Lahr was sitting near the telephone stand, book in hand.

  “Hello, Lester … it’s the damndest thing … Yes, I read it … Yes, I don’t know. It’s not like anything that’s been done … I’ve never done anything like it. Do you think I could do it?… What do you think about it? Do you think it’s commercial?… Yes, but do you think I could play it?… Sure, it’s funny … Yes, but it’s funny … I know, Lester, I know it’s supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags … I’m not sure, but the writer’s no phony. How many weeks do you think I could get with it?… Yes … I’ll call you back when I’ve read it again.”

  Lahr held the book out to Mildred. “See what you think.” As she reached for it, he opened it and thumbed through the pages again. “There’s something in here. Something … Read this, John. What does it mean?”

  He read the following words, with his finger pressed closely to the lines he spoke:

  Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?… He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot …. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries …But habit is a great deadener.… At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on … I can’t go on!… What have I said?