Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

  One of the few letters Lahr kept for his scrapbook is from Hopkins, dated seven days before the show opened on Christmas Eve 1946.

  Dear Bert,

  Working with you has been a real pleasure. I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is a wide and rewarding field for you in straight plays. Character comedians become rarer each year. You can be the answer to what hitherto would have been a serious casting problem.

  Free yourself entirely, Bert, from the idea that you have to be continuously funny. Your straight passages can be just as rewarding. I think with Skid, you have only started. Use him to supplant in people’s minds the limited category in which your previous success has placed you.

  Remember good character stars have never failed to find a gratifying and rewarding place for themselves.

  Above all, don’t worry if they don’t laugh. If there is a laugh there, you will get it. If not—you don’t want it.

  I hope the performance has steadied down again. It is unfortunate that we got sidetracked after the Sunday matinee. Anxiety can be the most harmful of meddlers.

  Hopkins was speaking to Lahr’s two most pressing desires—getting the laughs and prolonging his career. “Nothing should imply that Mr. Lahr has now taken off into middle air and improved himself culturally,” wrote Brooks Atkinson after seeing Burlesque. “If you are a fullranking merry-andrew … there are no higher glories. By comparison, acting Hamlet is only a monologue booking.”

  Lahr had no qualms about directing the burlesque scene because he knew what was honest about the form of entertainment and what the public had romanticized. The sensitivity and wit managed to surface through the melodramatic ice.

  Lahr brought to the Hopkins play a fondness for the burlesque ambience and intimate knowledge of the friendliness and loyalty that characterized the burlesque performer. Directing the part that made the greatest impact on both audiences and critics, his impulse was always one of respect for not only the people he employed but also the institution he was re-creating.

  Ironically, the song that opened the show was singled out by Eric Bentley for embodying an attitude toward entertainment no longer possible in a postwar society. The song is nonetheless the recognition of a sad farewell, looking backward to a romantic excess that had dwindled to formula and boredom on Broadway by 1947.

  Lahr’s song—his only attempt at Tin Pan Alley—was squealed by a handful of young ladies who peered out over the footlights to sing—

  Hello, hello, hello,

  You in the very first row.

  We are the Gaiety Girls

  We hope you like our show …

  We hate to overtax you

  We’re here just to relax you

  So, hello, hello, hello

  Let’s get on with the show.

  Goodbye to cares,

  We’ll show our wares,

  Hello, hello, hello.

  Lahr’s song was not merely a nostalgic interlude. It contained humor and its own self-criticism. Eric Bentley, writing in In Search of Theater, picked up the point:

  The intention behind the show—Burlesque, by Waiters and Hopkins—is clear. For those who sell, it is a profitable commodity. For those who buy, it is a way of keeping awake after dinner … But the even surface of routine entertainment is broken by eruptions of sheer art …Bert Lahr needs only show us a tithe of his extraordinary talent and we are transported to a realm that no entertainment-monger could possibly be interested in. Lahr’s performance has about it that very embarrassing quality—beauty. His personality—like that of all first-rate comedians—expresses a criticism of life and thus calls into play a faculty more formidable than the aesthetic sense: the intellect …”

  Lahr was exploiting the moments of pathos and humor he always found absurd. The tall, buxom woman and the short man; the inarticulate, flustered policeman, the braggadocio tenor whose voice is funny to all but himself. This playful irony was the arena of burlesque laughter. Lahr entered it without any other intention than putting on a realistic version of a burlesque show that would allow him to do his cop act.

  The precision with which Lahr approached the job was impressive. He hired many old burlesque artists: Gail Garber, Bobby Barry, Irene Allery. Barry had been a burlesque headliner and had worked with Lahr on many vaudeville bills. When he hired Miss Garber as the formula “Beef Trust” girl, Hopkins objected. The chorus line needed a dancer who was continuously off-stride and absentminded. If Hopkins and Lahr differed in their choices, they also had different ways of getting results. As Gail Garber pointed out, “Hopkins would hire a good-looking girl and made her look dumb. Lahr wouldn’t do that. He’d hire an ugly dope of a chorus girl and make her think she was beautiful.”

  Lahr played this private game often. He employed a bald-headed violinist for the reason that all burlesque orchestras in his memory had a bald-headed violinist. On opening night, the violinist wore a toupee. Lahr never had the courage to saying anything to the man. In the burlesque show within the show Lahr wanted a tenor voice to sing the hokey “Sheik of Araby.” He wanted it done in the same ornate, melodramatic manner he’d seen on the burlesque wheel, complete with musty costumes and tarnished larynx. Lahr could not find the right man. “I wanted an Irish tenor, a fellow who sings so loud you think he’s going to break a vein. A fellow came in one day and said to me, ‘I’m an opera singer.’ He was just what I wanted. He thought he was great, but he was horrible. In his dressing room, he’d be doing the scales and squirting his throat with an atomizer. I had him come out and close his arms very sternly and lean against the proscenium and sing. The audience used to laugh at him, but he never heard them. He thought he was wonderful. I remember Bea Lillie came to see the show. I knew she’d only laugh at certain fey things that had some satire in them. She’d seen my cop act many times; and I knew she wouldn’t be surprised by that. We all watched her from the wings. When this tenor began to sing—‘I’m the sheik of Araby! And your love belongs to me,’ I heard Bea’s special laugh—eeeeeeh. It was the only thing that caught her fancy in the show.”

  Burlesque was the first show where Lahr’s comedy and his own taste were the complete focus of attention. The songs were of his choosing, recollected from his good-humored image of burlesque: “Get Out and Get Under,” “Put Your Arms Around Me,” “Tiger Rag.” He even had Hopkins reintroduce “Ballin’ the Jack,” a number he had done in Keep Smiling. The accuracy of the burlesque show was matched by the intense concentration with which Lahr assumed responsibility for its success. He watched the production closely. Gail Garber recalls the night she opened in the show. “Bozo—that was Bobby Barry—was pulling me away from another chorus girl. I was supposed to say, ‘Leggo me, you shrimp.’ But I forgot. Suddenly, I was conscious of somebody calling me a shrimp from the wings. I turned around, and there was Bert with a prompt book in his hand, whispering ‘Leggo me, you shrimp.’”

  Lahr unexpectedly called Bobby Barry and Miss Garber aside after the performance. “Bobby, I don’t want you moving on my lines or anyone else’s in this show!” The old comedian took Lahr’s criticism with a smile. He’d been caught red-handed. Miss Garber, who was singing “Something About a Soldier,” was the victim of the upstaging. She was amazed that he had been doing anything. “Bert, how did you know he was moving?”

  “I was watching your shadows from the wings.”

  “Something About a Soldier” was one of Lahr’s favorite old burlesque routines. He had hired Barry specifically for it. Barry, who stood about five feet two, played a fife and did a trollish tap dance, while Miss Garber, decked out in a majorette’s hat and wooden rifle, towered above him. Lahr’s obsession for improving his own material carried over to the burlesque show he was directing. He was continually revising it and putting in new ideas. Sometimes, however, as a neophyte director, he forgot to relate these ideas to everyone concerned. So, when the idea of the impish Barry making his exit by jumping on Miss Garber’s broad back came to him, he told Barry, but in his excitement forg
ot to warn Miss Garber. When Miss Garber pranced smartly off stage during the Broadway performance, Barry hit her from behind, latching onto her back like a monkey to a tree. She careened into the wings.

  Lahr’s only surprising innovation was adding a stripteaser. He used the striptease to update his cop act, and where in vaudeville Mercedes had done a Spanish dance, now Irene Allery came out and did a bump and grind. “We never had strippers in burlesque when I was part of it. The girl I hired was very cute. She had a little figure nobody resented. You’d look out and see old ladies smiling. She was very petite. I used to surprise her on stage. I’d try and break her up. Then her breasts would jump up and down, you know. I’d say, ‘You laugh like a mix-master.’ The audience would laugh with us because I could break her up by just moving my nose. I wanted a stripper for a reason. She didn’t do much of it, just a chorus. When she began to get violent, I’d come out in a cop suit, yelling ‘Stop! In the name of the station house, stoooop!!’ We’d do our act in one. Hopkins was delighted with it. If he hadn’t liked it he wouldn’t have kept it in; he never wanted anything cheap.”

  In choosing an artist whose body was not gargantuan and keeping the bawdy to a minimum, Lahr matched the affection with which burlesque people were described in the play and in his own mind. Hopkins once told him, “The success of Burlesque is this—very few backstage plays have ever been successful. But these people are nice, kind people. That’s why it’s a success.”

  As a director, Lahr was benevolent. The actors came to him to intercede with management when they wanted a few days off. And it was Lahr who, after the dressing rooms at the Belasco had been robbed, paid the chorus girls, who had lost a few hundred dollars, out of his own pocket. As the same time, he kept order backstage. His co-star in the original show, Jean Parker (later replaced by Faye McKenzie) was married to her manager, who was continually causing trouble. His thick-rimmed glasses and even denser Austrian accent earned him Lahr’s nickname, “Dr. Cyclops.” Finally, Lahr had to ban him (“I forbad him to enter” are his regal words) from backstage.

  Jean Parker was a delight to work with, but sometimes galling. “She was beautiful—a fine comedienne and a fine little actress.” At one performance, however, she went on with a cold. When Bonnie goes off with a rich cattleman and is confronted by Skid (Lahr) in his usual inebriated state, she is forced to sing “In the Gloaming.” Skid, sarcastically, asks her to sing, but the Cattleman genuinely wants to hear the song. “Now she’s got a cold, but she starts to sing and hits a clinker. She walks down to the audience and says, ‘I gotta cold,’ then steps back into the play and sings. Well, I’m fit to be tied. When the curtain came down I said, ‘You dumb son-of-a-bitch, don’t ever do that again.’”

  Flouncing her brief burlesque skirt arrogantly up in back, she countered, “All right Pappy!”

  In the next act, the cold prevented her from hearing the orchestra. At the climax of the show, when Skid faints on stage and is carried off, Bonnie comes on to sing “Peggy O’Neill.” “The song was a dramatic moment, because Bonnie is playing a scene as well as singing. But she could not hear the music. She looked down into the orchestra and said, ‘Where is everybody?’” Even Lahr had to laugh.

  At one point, Bobby Barry had come to him and asked for a few days rest. Barry, then in his seventies, “a sweet snaggle-toothed old man,” as one of the cast called him, was going to visit relatives in Pennsylvania. Lahr got him the days off. However, Lahr had not seen Barry on the day of his return, and went on stage expecting to confront his old burlesque cohort in much the same shape as he’d left him. “I’m on stage and Bozo (Bobby Barry) is supposed to knock on the door. There’s a knock and I say, ‘Come in Bozo.’ Well, Barry came in and said, ‘Hiya Skid.’ I took one look at him and all I could see was this beautiful set of pearly teeth. Before, every time he smiled you’d see his upper gums, now he looked like Satchmo. I went—‘aaaaaah.’ I couldn’t stop laughing. Then Bobby started laughing, and the entire cast laughed for five minutes on stage. Isn’t that awful.”

  Lahr’s performance created a pathos, a careful counterpoint between flashy burlesque activity and genuine sadness. The melodrama in the lines was made honest and poignant because Skid’s emotional decline paralleled Lahr’s own private life at one time. One of the play’s most touching moments is the second-act curtain, when Skid is present at the marriage of his girl, Bonnie, to the Cattleman. Lahr found himself mouthing words which drew on his own resources of grief: “Why do people get sore and crab when they lose out in marriage? Why don’t they join in the festivities? Come on, Jerry, play the weddin’ march and play it fast.”

  No matter how flexible an actor Burlesque showed Lahr to be, there were some situations that even his talent could not gloss. Once, when Jane and I were watching the scurry of legs, we heard the orchestra strike up, and Dad’s familiar voice. We opened a door by the set and watched him sing, “Here Comes the Bride.” We particularly liked this part of the show because he skipped around the stage and acted both the bride and groom, as we often did in front of mirrors at home. The audience laughed throughout the number, disconcerting my father, who finally stopped and turned to look behind him. He stared straight at us. We were standing in the middle of the stage. Gail Garber lured us away, and the show tried to regain the lost momentum. On another occasion, I accidentally locked Faye McKenzie in her dressing room and put the key in my pocket, which kept the performance stalled for five minutes.

  Burlesque left Lahr with not only a sense of accomplishment (“I felt I was on the right track again”), but also a camaraderie he had not felt in Seven Lively Arts. Many of the Broadway cast would tour with him around the country and again in summer stock. An affection for the show as well as the people in it, was inevitable.

  Off stage, things could be as grotesque and slapstick as they were on it. He was accorded the honor of being best man at the wedding of his striptease artist, Irene Allery, to a Hungarian wrestling champion. Jean Dalrymple was maid of honor, and the entire wedding, in true burlesque tradition, took place on the stage of the Belasco Theater. As a publicity stunt, Miss Dalrymple had hoped to get the Mayor of New York to marry the couple; but when he could not appear at the celebration, an aged judge was called in.

  “It was the funniest thing I ever experienced,” Lahr says. “When we first made our entrance through the door behind the stage and stood in a row in front of an improvised altar, the band played ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ instead of the ‘Wedding March.’ I’m standing there next to this brute and looking at the judge, waiting for him to begin the ceremony. He was very old; he had glasses the size of bottles. He leans over to me and says, ‘You’re getting a lovely wife.’”

  “I’m not getting married; he is!”

  The wedding celebration was even more outrageous. The buffet dinner had been attended to by the stage manager, who, being Jewish, had provided Kosher meats. More unusual than the bill of fare was the guest list. Sitting on the groom’s side were forty wrestlers, mixed with actors and other theater people. “You’ve never seen so many cauliflower ears. I saw the Swedish Angel take ten sandwiches in one hand. It was like a plague of locusts.”

  The cast recalls Lahr fondly—aloof, unpredictable, professional, and talented. On the road, he took complete charge of the show. Once, tired of the nonchalance with which the show girls were dressing in the hotel, he called them together. “I want this group to come down looking shipshape in the morning.” The next day, Lahr’s dumb blonde, who, according to another member of the cast, “thought she looked like Hedy Lamarr but was closer to Marjorie Main,” came down to the hotel lobby in an evening dress and a picture hat.

  The cast always listened to Lahr, sometimes out of reverence and sometimes out of fear. In Brooklyn, Lahr found that his policeman’s coat was missing. He was furious. As a prank the stripteaser tipped him off that the tenor, Santo Scudi, had stolen it. Gail Garber recalls seeing Lahr storm into the wings while Scudi was giving his rendition of “The Sh
eik of Araby,” yelling “Where’s my coat, where’s my coat?” Scudi, continuing his song, kept shaking his head and pleading ignorance. Lahr finally recovered the prop, but not before his wrath had threatened the entire cast. The stripper’s tip-off was retribution on the tenor, who had acquired a ring that squirted water, with which he doused her as she exited.

  Lahr’s anger was not reserved for members of the cast. Once, a drunk in the front row took exception to Lahr’s imitation of one. “Go home you drunken bum!” he yelled at Lahr’s most dramatic scene, when Skid passes out on stage. “When we came out to take our bows,” recalls Gail Garber, “Faye McKenzie and I had a death grip on him. He wanted to jump over the foots after the guy.”

  Many stories grew out of Burlesque. Members of the cast will tell you about the five-minute ovation Lahr received when the show played Hollywood and its star returned after a three-year absence. “I don’t remember it,” is Lahr’s reply. “I went over all right, I guess.” But Gail Garber is more precise. “When he walked out, he got a standing ovation; I’ve never heard a response like that before. He finally had to step out of character and acknowledge their kindness.”

  Lahr’s hypochondria is another theme for the stories. Once one of the chorus girls in Burlesque fainted. She was brought into Lahr’s dressing room while the doctor examined her. Lahr was doing his make-up for a Wednesday matinée. Miss Garber, a registered nurse as well as a performer, was aiding the doctor and present at the examination.

  “Have you had dizzy spells before?” asked the doctor.

  “No.”

  From his dressing table, Lahr puzzled. “Sometimes I get dizzy.”

  “Stomach cramps?”

  “No.”

  “Say, Doc,” Lahr said, “sometimes I have cramps.”

  “Does your mouth often go dry?”