Notes on a Cowardly Lion

Notes on a Cowardly Lion

The Biography of Bert Lahr

John Lahr

For Anthea
, who gave a new life to this book and to me

Take the clowns … those basically alien beings, fun makers … their tumblings and falling over everything, their mindless running to and fro … the hideously unsuccessful efforts to imitate their serious colleagues … Are these ageless sons of absurdity, are they human at all? Are they, I repeat, human beings, men that could conceivably find a place in everyday life? In my opinion, it is pure sentimentality to say that they are “human too,” with the sensibilities of human beings and perhaps even with wives and children. I honour them and defend them against ordinary bad taste when I say no, they are not, they are exceptions, side splitting, world renouncing monks of unreason, cavorting hybrids, part human and part insane art
.

Thomas Mann
,

The Confessions of Felix Krull

Hamlet: …
Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time
.

(II, ii, 500-3)

Contents

A Dramatic Chronology

Preface: The Lion and Me

From the Wings: An Introduction

1. Roots

2. Burlesque

3. Vaudeville: Lahr and Mercedes

4. Broadway Beginnings

5. Scandals and Follies

6. Buffooneries

7. Other Edens

8. “… But What Do I Do Next Year?”

9. Back to Broadway

10. Waiting for Godot

11. A Decade of Moments

12. Dad

13. A Beginning and an End

Epilogue

Appendices

Image Gallery

Index

Personal Acknowledgements

A Dramatic Chronology

RECORDS

Two on the Aisle
(Decca)

Waiting for Godot
(Columbia)

The Wizard of Oz
(M-G-M)

Great Moments from the Hallmark Hall of Fame

Preface: The Lion and Me

On November 6th, 1998, twenty-six years after “The Wizard of Oz” was last released and on the eve of its sixtieth anniversary, a spiffy, digitally remastered print of the film arrived in eighteen hundred movie theatres throughout the land. With a rub rub here and a rub rub there, “The Wizard of Oz,” which never looked bad, has been made to look even better. Dorothy's ruby slippers are rubier. Emerald City is greener. Kansas, a rumpled and grainy black-and-white world, has been restored to a buff, sepia Midwestern blandness. And, since everything that rises nowadays in America ends up in a licensing agreement, new Oz merchandise will shower the planet like manna from hog heaven.

The last time I watched “The Wizard of Oz” from start to finish was in 1962, at home, with my family. My father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, was sixty-seven. I was twenty-one; my sister, Jane, was nineteen. My mother Mildred, who never disclosed her age, was permanently thirty-nine. By then, as a way of getting to know the friendly absence who answered to the name of Dad, I was writing a biography—it was published, in 1969, as “Notes on a Cowardly Lion”—and I used any occasion with him as field work. This was the first time we'd sat down together as a family to watch the film, but not the first time a Lahr had been secretly under surveillance while viewing it. The family album had infra-red photographs of Jane and me in the mid-forties—Jane in a pinafore, me in short pants—slumped in a darkened movie house as part of a row of well-dressed, bug-eyed kids. Jane, who was five, is scrunched in the back of her seat in a state of high anxiety about the witch's monkey henchmen. I'm trying to be a laid-back big brother: my face shows nothing, but my hands are firmly clutching the armrests.

Recently, Jane told me that for weeks afterward she'd had nightmares about lions, but what had amazed her most then was the movie's shift from black-and-white to Technicolor, not the fact that Dad was up onscreen in a lion's suit. Once, around that time, while waiting up till dawn for my parents to return from a costume party, I heard laughter and then a thud in the hall; I tiptoed out to discover Dad dressed in a skirt and bonnet as Whistler's Mother, passed out on the floor. That was shocking. Dad dressed as a lion in a show was what he did for a living, and was no big deal. Our small, sunless Fifth Avenue apartment was full of Dad's disguises, which he'd first used onstage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman's props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman's suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary's cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupées, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and makeup. In the living room, Dad was Louis XV, complete with scepter and periwig, in a huge oil painting made from a poster for Cole Porter's “Du Barry Was a Lady” (1939); in the bedroom, he was a grimacing tramp in Richard Avedon's heartbreaking photograph of him praying, as Estragon, in “Waiting for Godot” (1956).

Over the decades, the popular memory of these wonderful stage performances has faded; the Cowardly Lion remains the enduring posthumous monument to Dad's comic genius. While we were growing up, there was not one Oz image or memento of any kind in the apartment. (Later, at Sotheby's, Dad acquired a first edition of L. Frank Baum's “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”) The film had not yet become a cult. Occasionally, a taxi-driver or a passerby would spot Dad in the street and call out, “Put 'em up, put 'em
uuuhp
!” Dad would smile and tip his tweed cap, but the film's popularity didn't seem to mean as much to him as it did to other people.

As we grew older and more curious, Mom had to prod Dad out of his habitual solitude to divulge tidbits of information to us. So, as we assumed our ritual positions around the TV—Mom propped up with bolsters on the bed, Jane sprawled on the floor with our Scotch terrier, Merlin, me on the chaise longue, Dad at his desk—the accumulated knowledge we brought to the movie was limited to a few hard-won facts. To wit: Dad had held out for twenty-five hundred dollars a week with a five-week guarantee, which turned into a twenty-six-week bonanza because of the technical complexities of the production numbers; in the scene where the Lion and Dorothy fall asleep in the poppy field and wake to find it snowing, the director, Victor Fleming, had asked for a laugh and Dad had come up with “Unusual weather we're havin', ain't it?”; his makeup took two hours a day to apply and was so complicated that he had to have lunch through a straw; he wore football shoulder pads under his twenty-five-pound lion suit; and his tail, which had a fishing line attached to it, was wagged back and forth by a stagehand with a fishing rod who was positioned above him on a catwalk. It was only memories of the Munchkins, a rabble of a hundred and twenty-four midgets assembled from around the world, that seemed to delight Dad and bring a shine to his eyes. “I remember one day when we were supposed to shoot a scene with the witch's monkeys,” he told me. “The head of the group was a little man who called himself the Count. He was never sober. When the call came, everybody was looking for the Count. We could not start without him. And then, a little ways offstage, we heard what sounded like a whine coming from the men's room.” He went on, “They found the Count. He got plastered during lunch, and fell in the latrine and couldn't get himself out.”

Dad, in his blue Sulka bathrobe, with the sash tied under his belly, was watching the show from his Victorian mahogany desk, which was positioned strategically at a right angle to the TV. Here, with his back to the room, he sat in a Colonial maple chair—the throne from which, with the minutest physical adjustment, he could watch the TV, work his crossword puzzles, and listen to the radio all at the same time. Except to eat, Dad hardly ever moved from this spot. He was almost permanently rooted to the desk, which had a pea-green leatherette top and held a large Funk & Wagnall's dictionary, a magnifying glass, a commemorative bronze medal from President Eisenhower's Inauguration (which he'd attended), various scripts, and the radio. On that afternoon, long before Dorothy had gone over the rainbow and into Technicolor, Dad had donned his radio earphones and tuned in the Giants' game. “Bert!” Mom said. “Bert!” But Dad didn't answer.