by John Lahr
The Ziegfeld Theater had been one of Lahr’s earliest memories of Broadway; and now he wondered if it would be one of his last. He could still make people laugh, but what was the commercial appeal of his laughter? In 1932, he alone could sustain a mediocre show when the top price was $5.50 and the galleries could be filled for $.75.
Lahr could still marshal the energy and an enthusiastic following, as his reviews indicated. However, the best ticket was $11.40 and a balcony seat more than the price of a movie. His fans—the ones who recognized him on the street or wrote for his autographed picture—could not afford the price. Merrick’s distrust of his product and his unwillingness to market it reflected a planned obsolescence built into the machinery of Broadway. The star’s commercial value rested, in part, on his past; and yet, each show forced him, like detergent, to be “new” or “improved” without changing the actual content of the commodity. Lahr’s comedy was not obsolete; the format was. Having survived so many changes of taste, Lahr had reached a point where it was no longer a matter of taste, but of the comic material reflecting the emotional, intellectual tenor of the society. As a merchandizer, Merrick knew the value of brand names as clearly as Lahr; but he refused to experiment with the potential. Lahr was both the victim and perpetrator of that attitude.
George White, Lahr reminded himself, never would have treated him that way; nor would Ziegfeld or even Hopkins. The theater was cruder to its performers now; the producer was not so much a man of theater as a man of the marketplace.
“The next time I do a show,” he told Blyden, “I don’t want all the responsibility.” Had he learned from Foxy? Blyden and Lahr’s family hoped so. “He may not believe it. I really can’t see Bert being anything but the focal point of the show. For Bert’s own sake, he’s got to realize that if somebody else—man, woman, dog, goat, and the whole play work—he’s better off. But you can’t ignore him; you can’t deny him.”
Three years later, Lahr stood by the Ziegfeld Theater while a demolition team crashed into its dome and television newsmen prodded him for recollections. Not a nostalgic moment or a teary one—but rather an incomprehensible erasure of a theatrical era already vague in his mind. On television his face was now familiar—associated with a product more substantial than the laughter that sold it and made it a brand name. The Ziegfeld had epitomized the spectacular, grand design of an earlier entertainment in which the clown’s blackout bits were usually larger than life rather than reduced (as now) to sixty-second miniatures. The generic term for the Ziegfeld type of amusement had passed to advertising as well—“commercial.”
Foxy was not forgotten. In May of 1964, Lahr received the Tony Award for the best musical star actor. A small silver disc, the award gave him more satisfaction than any other accolade. Broadway was honoring its own past. The Herald Tribune reported—
Despite the sweep by “Dolly,” the biggest most prolonged applause of the evening was reserved for the beloved veteran of the comedy stage, Bert Lahr …
As he left the American Theater Wing after the ceremonies, a wino emerged from the shadows. Lahr bowed his head and shied away. The man came closer. His hand was outstretched; his eyes riveted on Lahr’s face. He held out a dollar.
“Here, Bert,” he said. “And thanks.”
Dad
“Bert Lahr has been chosen Stage Father of the Year by the National Father’s Day Committee.”
1964
“You had ’em, Mildred. You raise ’em.”
Bert Lahr
RESTING ON HIS chaise lounge in his Dior bathrobe, Bert Lahr is an imposing patriarch. His wife brings him sweetmeats and his glasses; his children sneak him salted nuts (bad for his gall bladder) and report their news, which he cannot decide is good or bad. From his reclining position, my father dispenses his mandates and misgivings. Slow to speak, he sees himself as a quiet ruler, the most observed of all observers. When impelled to action, he is a master of innuendo.
“Bert, will you call Jane and tell her to come home for dinner.”
Lahr casts aside his Afghan and resolutely folds his glasses over the Sunday crossword puzzle. He stalks to the phone and dials.
“Hello, may I speak to … uh … is … uh …”
“Jane!” Mildred yells from her dressing table.
“Is Jane there?… Well, would you tell her to come home. Dinner is ready, and I’m hungry.”
A ruler can sometimes forget his subjects, and Bert Lahr is not infallible. He has introduced me to his Players Club cronies: “I’d like you to meet my son, Herbert.” When I remind him that I’m “John” not “Herbert,” he corrects himself and continues, only to phone his first son long distance and announce, “Good to hear your voice, John.”
Friends, who have come to the house regularly over a decade, marvel when he emerges from his bedroom and greets them by their right names. But even my father, whose home is a benevolent dictatorship, understands the political havoc such slips of the tongue can cause. When he appeared on the Joey Bishop night-time discussion show in California, he reminisced about vaudeville and Mercedes but forgot Mildred and the children in New York. Mildred watched the performance at home with clenched teeth. At the end of the show, Bishop interrupted his sign-off message to wave frantically at the camera. “Bert wants to say hello to his wife, Mildred.”
At dinner, he enters to music provided either by his hi-fi system or his collection of tapes, both equally mischievous to handle, and both the private property of Bert Lahr. With the family seated and the food steaming on the table, he is still bent over the hi-fi.
“Can you hear it, Mildred?”
Mother stares despairingly at the ceiling as the music tumbles out in decibels that make the water glasses shake.
“Yes—that’s fine, Bert. Come to the table.”
The music, as we have matured, has become more subdued; but the memories of ragout and radio news, Mantovanni and jellied madrilène still linger. When he leaves the table (as he does five minutes before the rest of us have finished), he totters to his room where he immediately cuts off the music. Dinner is officially over.
From the seat at the head of the table, he has demanded and received the special privilege of watching football games on his portable television set while the family concentrates on their buttered peas. He has arranged a tape recorder under the table and then baited Mildred about the food (“You call this meat? This is petrified wood!”) until, to our delight, Mildred informed him just how he could dispose of it. There have been moments when he has gone into a bravura imitation of an opera singer and done the “Shimmy Shawabble” to show Jane that the twist was a burlesque invention. While lecturing us sternly about manners, he has mistaken his tie for a napkin.
He protects his small pleasures with the adamance of a divine right. He discovered the cigar in his seventy-first year with as much enthusiasm as the Manhattan Indians took to firewater. He keeps a box in his drawer; and each time he opens one, Mildred shrinks like a slug held up to a hot flame.
“They make me vomit.” “They make me nauseous.” “They make me really sick to my stomach.” Gasping for air, she leaves the room. Surrounded by the blue-gray halo of cigar smoke, Lahr puffs on. Mildred’s persistence and his peculiar sense of responsibility evolve a kind of compromise. If she begins to gag, Lahr moves his armchair close to the air conditioner, holding the cigar into the artificial breeze. The air bellows the smoke into the room, although Lahr inhales contentedly, assured that the currents are taking the smoke into the street. If Mildred continues to complain or if the smoke makes it difficult for even him to breathe, he retires to the bathroom where he finishes his Perfecto in peace.
The family knows he will tire of cigars, just as he grew weary of stereo tapes, Japanese television sets, and painting. These are pastimes, small pleasures to take his mind off work—or the lack of it. He indulges his interests without a thought of being judged. He speaks cryptically about something as if talking to himself and then falls back into an active silence
. At his easel, he interests himself in his paints. He experiments with the canvas by turning out a dozen pictures of the same lion and signing each to give to his friends. He displays them on the large bedroom breakfront—pulling out drawers to prop them up. He ponders them like Jackson Pollock before an empty canvas.
“I think I’ll paint one looking out over his paws with his body drooping down. I think I’ll paint him with tears in his eyes.”
“Bert, you don’t want a sad lion,” cautions Mildred.
“That’s how I see him—with tears in his eyes.”
To his children, Lahr is a friendly absence, a man who, induced to reveal himself, is at once humble and childishly stubborn, concerned and curiously aloof. Lahr can greet Mildred at the door in beret and smock: or chase her, yelping, into the bathroom threatening to take her picture with a Polaroid camera. He is conscious of having given his family the best of possibilities—but whatever these advantages are, he seems to know only by rumor. When he appeared at Jane’s school to receive a report on his daughter, he listened quietly with the three-pieced somberness of the rest of the fathers. After the report, Lahr confided to a teacher, “This is an innovation for Spence, isn’t it?” “Mr. Lahr, Jane’s been at Dalton for two years.”
He never knew what grade we were in; he dismissed good marks with bad (“I never got more than a C in my life, just so long as you pass I don’t care”). And after bemoaning the cost of private education for as many years as he’d paid for it, his presence at graduations and other official ceremonies was now infamous. He missed as many as he made. At Jane’s graduation from Bennett College, he sat through the stodgy ceremony eating an ice-cream cone. At Yale, where the students convene at their colleges, Lahr snuck behind the elm trees in Branford to photograph his son receiving a B.A. The eyes of two hundred parents were glued to him as he tiptoed behind the tree and waited with his camera. When I finally approached the rostrum, he dropped his camera. The crowd moaned in unison as if he’d fumbled on the one-yard line.
Always long-suffering at public gatherings, Lahr has been forced to go against his principles of nonintervention for the sake of Dr. Spock’s vision of family harmony. He gave a graduation address marking my matriculation from sixth to seventh grades at Riverdale Country Day School. When he arrived, he was rushed into the Lower School corridors, notes in hand. “I’ve never been more nervous,” he confided to Mildred. He told us to concentrate during the summer “on hitting the ball a country mile, and catching a fish,” and a few other things he’d never done at that age. He appeared at only one official sports event and left just as his ten-year-old son was intercepting a pass against a bunch of oversized orphans. His only comment was “Why couldn’t you have done it sooner?”
Bert Lahr has even traveled into the wilderness to observe his offspring at play. He was paying for the kind of air, leisure, and careful handling he had missed. He looked on with some amazement at tents, mosquito netting, and an organized schedule of activities more like the Army than fun. He came to a camp council fire, gazing glassy-eyed at his daughter, who sat crosslegged in an Indian headdress chanting the invocation: “… Oh, firemaker, light now our council fire so that we may have light, so that we may have warmth, so that we may sit in council tonight.” My father listened to the words, standing shivering and cornered by night bugs. “I finally sat down at the campfire and told the kids all about Indians. What do I know about Indians?” Besieged by campers, urged on by eager entertainment directors who insisted on greeting him and sending him off with a roundelay, Lahr could rarely muster the enthusiasm for the frontier spirit. Sometimes, it amused him. He watched a squat camper take aim at an archery target and then hit a bull’s-eye three stands away. Flushed with excitement, she turned to Lahr and announced, “I wasn’t even trying.” He tried to cover up his guffaw by asking her a question. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A horse.”
Coming back to New York, he pointed to a fire hydrant. “That was my summer camp.”
He once came to my aid and answered a sixth-grade essay question on “Why I would like to be an Eskimo.” He felt it was a foolish exercise but it was the first A he ever received in school. Only once was I summoned to his room for a discussion about sex. He began by saying, “John, sex is beautiful …” He tried to elaborate, but never finished the sentence. Fumbling for words, he concluded the discussion abruptly, “It’s beautiful … now get to bed.”
What does he think of his children? We are never certain. He can storm out of a room announcing, “All right, I’m off you.” Like milk and eggs, children go off; and Lahr has been known to ban them from court for as long as a week. He rarely assesses us to our face—he is vaguely proud; but, worried about the security of our futures, he remains silent. He bares his emotion as nervously as a grandmother showing a bit of leg. “They’ll forget us, Mildred.” His suspicions of betrayal are unfounded but everpresent. He will shuffle into Jane’s room when she is out and look at her work. Her interest in demonology and astrology amuses him. “Come home,” he told her on the phone, “We need a fourth at the ouija board.” When confronted with his ebullient, beautiful daughter he does not always know what to say, except that she inherited his nose—as big an onus as assuming the national debt.
“So you think I look better?” he asks Jane.
“I think you look beautiful, Bertram.”
“Aw, shut up,” he says, with a wrinkled stage grimace that means love. When I began to write articles about the theater, my father looked on with apprehension. For an actor to spawn a drama-critic son held as much potential disappointment as giving birth to a Cyclops—the latter perhaps being more far-sighted than a critic. “Don’t be like Winchell, John. Be honest!” After his dictum on criticism, he retired to his bedroom and worried about his son in private. The telephone would ring in my apartment with a lobbyist’s sense of timing. Once, he called me as I was about to review a splendid revival of Annie Get Your Gun. “John, I’m glad I caught you. I was thinking … don’t pan Merman’s age.” When I wrote a piece disputing Walter Kerr about the nature of criticism, he called me into his bedroom with the article in hand. “This is very well written, John; but Walter Kerr is the dean of critics now. He’s been very nice to me.”
After six months he began to trust my judgment, and when I was published in a magazine that cost him $1.25 at the newstands, his faith was confirmed. He gave me scripts to read as potential vehicles for him. “This is very deep, very abstract. I don’t know what it means”; or “This could be built up. It’s commercial, don’t you think?” Was he proud? Was he dissatisfied? No one knew. Sometimes he would read the articles as if scanning the want ads and at other times he would lavish more attention on them. When I handed him an article on Harold Pinter, he took it, with paternal tact, to peruse in the bathroom. It began with a Pinter letter on Samuel Beckett and brought Lahr hobbling out of the bathroom, swathed in his robe and with his underpants around his ankles. “What are you, Allen Ginsberg or something?” When I explained that the language was not mine but Pinter’s, he looked again and ambled back to read in pacified silence.
When he found out that I was teaching drama at Hunter College, his fears of his son languishing in the abyss of bankruptcy were assuaged.
“What do they pay?”
“It comes to thirteen dollars a class.”
“Hey, that’s not bad. Let’s see. If you could teach six or eight classes a day—you’d be in business.”
He balked when I asked him to come to a class. “I’m not a scholar, John: I wouldn’t want to talk. We’ll see.” But he did attend a lecture on Waiting for Godot, sneaking into the crowded Park Avenue building. He sat meekly in the back; but when I asked him questions about performing Godot he warmed to the enterprise. He enjoyed recounting his interpretation. At the end of the class, the students clustered around him, not to get his autograph but asking him to elaborate his ideas. He had sat, with Mildred, for an hour and a half. It was the firs
t time he’d been in a classroom in a half century. He did not leave in the middle claiming an appointment with his agent or an extenuating rehearsal. He never said he liked the class; but his presence was a tacit nod of approval. After his visit, he always referred to my course as “Elizabethan drama.” Had he listened? He had, at least, been present. Through family silences, he would inquire during the year what I was teaching. When I tried to explain Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, the words would echo off him.
“Bert, why don’t you listen to him?”
“Whaddya mean, listen. I am listening!”
“How can you listen when you’re not looking?”
“I can listen: ‘Ben Jonson’s Alchemist …’” Shared moments are regurgitated in fragments of understanding. Teaching has an aura of respectability in his eyes that criticism can never have. The names of ancient plays have the weight of mystery and scholarly concern. He calls excitedly on the phone to announce he too has a chance to teach.
“John, listen to this.” He reads the letter slowly. “Any kind of course or, perhaps, direct a school production … Thirty-five hundred dollars a semester … Your title would be Adjunct Professor of Drama …”
“That’s fantastic, Pop.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know anything about drama. All I know is how to do it. I can’t articulate. Maybe I’ll see if they could use you.”
“Don’t be silly—give it a try.”
“It’s too much work; and anyway, what could I tell them.”
“I think you could show them a lot—maybe do some scenes and point out comic tricks …”
“Well, we’ll see …”
“Congratulations, Professor.”
When I call him “professor” he chuckles. He is genuinely amused—Bert Lahr a professor. Perhaps there is less to this academic world than meets the eye. He hangs up, laughing at a world that must certainly be crazy. Universities want him as visiting professor! Museums write for costumes and clothes whose only value for two decades were to cover his pale skin. People he’s never heard of write claiming to be distant relatives and requesting money. Everyone is willing to listen, he reminds us, except his children. “They’ll never listen, Mildred; they’re stubborn,” he mutters to himself. “Don’t get mad at me for saying this, John. Believe me, it’s for your own good. When a man goes on stage and he’s well dressed, he’s got seventy per cent of the audience licked. They give you immediate respect. If you notice me (what am I looking for—a woman?) I’ve got a clean shirt on every day, my pants are pressed, my shoes—you could see your face in them. And there’s such a thing as cologne …”
