The Theater: $6.60 Comedian

$6.60 Comedian(See Cover)

From the shadowed haven of the wings, the stage of Broadway’s Mark Hellinger Theater looked as big and lonely as a desert at midday. Its barren boards reflected a fierce, mote-filled glare from banked and blazing floodlights, and out beyond it, in the hushed cavern of the theater, the audience waited like a beast in its den—multi-headed, thousand-eyed, impatient and menacingly silent. It was a terrible place for a ballplayer to find himself on the eve of the World Series.

Nightly, last week—as he has since mid-July—a chunky, middle-aged man in the road uniform of the New York Giants strode bravely out into that awful illumination. His flannel livery (a hand-me-down formerly worn by none other than Giant Second Baseman Eddie Stanky) was as genuine as a Spalding label. So were his cleated shoes, his tilted cap and his shambling, plate-bound walk. It was hard not to believe he was some weathered stray from the Polo Grounds who would presently wheel, find himself in the wrong park, and bolt for the dugout.

Instead, the old ballplayer disintegrated, subtly but suddenly, into a jerky, rubber-faced caricature of all the rough diamonds of the diamond since the days of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Something seemed to go wrong with his eyes, and he was seized, in plain view of all, with electric charges of wild vigor, wild friendliness and wild anxiety. He emitted a hoarse, gobbling cry. The audience, instantly enslaved, gave one seal-like bark of obedient laughter and then bathed him in 20 seconds of delighted applause. Oldtime Funnyman Bert Lahr (Hot-Cha!, George

White’s Scandals, The Wizard of Oz, Du Barry Was a Lady), back as a Broadway comic for the first time in seven long years, was making his entrance in the hit revue, Two on the Aisle.

Quick Change Artist. The baseball bit is just the warmup for Lahr’s night’s work. In Two on the Aisle he has the support of a new Broadway sensation: a glittering, full-blown beauty named Dolores Gray, whose presence, style and big, happy voice make the revue’s less-than-distinctive music sound far better than it is. Paris-born Ballerina Colette Marchand reveals one of the Continent’s sexiest pairs of legs, sheathed in provocative black silk stockings. But it is bald, big-nosed, wild-eyed Bert Lahr who carries the show, provides it with tone, personality, guts and laughter and nightly fills the big house (1,527 seats) to bulging capacity.

In the 140-minute span of Two on the Aisle, he sweats through 19 costume changes. Aided by his dresser and three assistants, who stand just inside the curtain and peel costumes from him in onion-like layers, he gives a dizzying exhibition of that half-forgotten art, the quick change. He leaves the footlights as Captain Universe, a panicky Superman who wears an aerial on his head, slips out through the curtain again as a clown, dives back to reappear almost instantly as a cross-eyed gaucho, and then—encased in a gown which is snapped around him by a body-hugging steel spring—dodders into view as Queen Victoria.

His Majesty the Queen. This grey-haired, gopher-cheeked old lady is probably one of the most raffish monarchs ever to grace the stage. Her robes are immaculate. Her grey wig and crown retain a ladylike balance. But something about her demeanor suggests that she has been loafing in a saloon. She speaks in low Dutch comedy dialect, and when she pauses in her exit, carefully spreads her feet and then lowers her weight in a creaking curtsy, both her startled squint and her spavined posture make it obvious that she has suffered either a rupture of the royal corset or a Charley horse of massive proportions.

But at this point in the show Lahr is just getting his second wind. He reappears as Siegfried, garbed in long red underwear, and surrounded by Rhine maidens who look just like tassel dancers. He tears, howling and trouserless, through a burlesque bit graphically entitled Hubby, Wifey and Lovey. In a quiet, humorous little skit called “Schneider’s Miracle,” he portrays a fumbling old paper picker with such feeling and restraint that his lines have been studded with extra gags to keep the audience from choking up.

It is a wonderful demonstration of the art of a vanishing breed—that noisy band of U.S. comedians who were blooded in the dingy halls of burlesque, rose to astrakhan-collared eminence on the Keith-Orpheum circuits, and reached their fullest flower on Broadway in the days of Ziegfeld, prohibition and the Big Bull Market.

Vitamins & Buttons. The long era of radio has hatched a new species of comic —brash, highly paid, but script-bound comedians who can seldom rise above their gag men. But to Lahr—a master mechanic from the same shops which produced W. C. Fields, Bobby Clark, Ed Wynn, Paul McCullough, Sliding Billy Watson, and Victor Moore—the script is only a blueprint and a beginning. Like all his peers he lives by that ancient maxim of the trade: “You gotta be able to get a laugh without saying a word.”

He repeats the phrase with scowling intentness. He cannot elaborate it. Like most comedians he sees nothing laughable about laughter, or the nerve-racking and exhausting process of extracting laughs from audiences. He speaks of laughter as a stock plunger might talk of his capital, or a prospector of some elusive vein of ore, and his capacity for vitamin-gulping, button-twisting worry about the problems of its production is a byword in the theater. Like all comedians he is engaged in a dogged, lifelong struggle against myopic critics, fickle audiences and, worst of all, the horrors of obscurity.

“School Acts.” Lahr’s war began in Manhattan’s upper East Side, where he was born Irving Lahrheim in 1895. At 15, he left school and his father, a German-born interior decorator with old-country ideas, directed him to devote himself to honest toil. Lahr was not enthusiastic.

He got a job as an errand boy at Rogers Peet, clothiers, but managed to get fired in two weeks. He was immediately hired by one Wetzel, a tailor. He shook Wetzel and found himself in the stockroom of a firm which made imitation ebony hairbrush handles. Weakening but still stubborn, he loafed until he was fired again. Within a matter of days he was sweeping floors for R.L. & M. Friedler, manufacturers of jewelers’ supplies.

He was ready for anything when a boyhood pal reported that a bush-league theatrical producer was forming a child vaudeville troupe in the neighborhood. In those days, before World War I, innumerable child “School Acts” flourished in cheap vaudeville. They were virtually alike, and their kiddy casts played standard parts.in almost all: a sissy boy, a silly boy, a boy with a Jewish accent, a sassy girl, a dumb girl and a teacher (usually portrayed by a Dutch dialect comedian). Lahr reported for rehearsal in a dusty, vacant store, sang a song entitled A Garland of Old-Fashioned Roses and was immediately hired as a “sissy comedian.”

A Yellow Diamond. In the next three years he drifted from coast to coast, one of a small army of kid actors who roamed the land, imitating their elders, scheming for better parts, and yearning for those twin badges of success, a yellow diamond and a room with bath. He was stranded in Chicago with an act known as Joe E. Marks & Co., and in Pittsfield, Mass. with Harry Sixes Greater New England Show. He was fired by tough managers, and interrupted by tough audiences. But he learned.

During his frequent bouts of unemployment he rubbed a ring of grease paint around his collar to convey the spurious impression that he had just stepped from a dressing room. He wore the flashiest of $7 suits, affected checkered caps and learned to assume instantly that false air of hearty confidence which is every actor’s shield and buckler in time of ad versity. He became an expert at snatching free lunches in saloons, buttonholing cheap booking agents, and in the art of living in $2.50-a-week boarding houses.

He also toiled. He was essentially a shy and uncertain boy. But the sound of laughter rolling in across the footlights gave him a sense of power and ambition.

He studied older comics with endless, beady concentration. He moved from act to act — “Nine Crazy Kids,” “May Party,””Boys and Girls of Avenue B,” “Col ege Days.” At 18, already a cagey and seasoned trouper, he was overwhelmed by a veritable Niagara of good fortune —the head of the Columbia Burlesque Circuit gave him a $3$-a-week job as a Dutch comedian.

“Irish Justice.” Then, as now, burlesque comedy hinged on raucous and ancient ritual—acts and scenes which have been played for half a century in smoke-filled backstreet theaters and will probably go on being played until the last shouts of the last intermission butcher die away. Their titles have a ripe and moldy ring: “Flugel Street,” “The Union Hat,” “Water-in-the-Pants,” “Irish Justice,” “The Dirty Boot Finish.” Nose reddened, hair greyed with talcum, baggy pants flapping, Lahr played them all.

He perfected the art of taking bumpers (falls), breaking the spill with one hand and slapping the stage with the other. (Today his left wrist is permanently enlarged from the endless dives of his burlesque days.) The leer, the grimace, the wild cry became his stock in trade. But for all this, in the world of the putty nose and the kick-in-the-pants, going to the Columbia “wheel” was like a scholarship to Yale.

Columbia comedians were forbidden, on pain of $10 fines, to use profanity. Lahr was also instructed in other taboos: it was considered offensive to refer either to rats or false teeth. The shows were, in effect, well-staged revues, and were often reviewed by critics. In this heady atmosphere Lahr felt a new need. Funnymen, like birds of passage, are best identified by their distinctive cries. He developed one which sounded as though he were being strangled to death: “Gung-gung-gung-gung-gung.” And though he remained a loud, low comedian, he labored for the sympathy of the audience and concentrated more & more on perfecting an air of bewilderment and insane incompetence, the eternal fall guy with one foot in his mouth and the other poised over a banana peel.

“Lahr & Mercedes.” In the years after World War I—in which he served as a Navy enlisted man—all this paid off. He invented a noisy, red-nosed cop (“Go ahead and call the captain—he’s drunker than I am”) and hit big-time vaudeville in one jump. His first wife, a beautiful ex-burlesque soubrette named Mercedes Delpino, was his straight woman. LAHR AND MERCEDES, read big newspaper ads, A RIOT OF MIRTH AND IRRESISTIBLE COMEDY. He bought a Packard car and tailored suits, and dreamed of Broadway. “Bert,” said the Broadway wise guys, “you’re too burlesquey.” But in 1927 he got his break. An ex-vaudevillian named Harry Delmar put a revue on Broadway, and asked Lahr to bring his cop act in. Delmar’s Revels ran only 16 weeks—and part of the time it existed only because Lahr, thirsting to be noticed, was pumping hard-earned money into the enterprise to keep it going. But before it folded, Broadway Producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley handed him a contract.

They were putting together a new musical, Hold Everything, based on the million-dollar fight racket which Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney had so magically inspired. They had some nice tunes by De Sylva, Brown and Henderson: You’re the Cream in My Coffee, Don’t Hold Everything. They had Betty Compton. They had Victor Moore. They had a part for Lahr — a punch-drunk fighter named Gink Schiner. What did he say?

Big Man on Broadway. “It scared me,” Lahr remembers. “All those years I’d been hiding behind the putty nose and the baggy pants. Now they wanted me to play without them. I didn’t think I could do it. But I had to try. Opening night I peeked out through the curtain, and it looked like the Diamond Horseshoe. Jimmy Walker was there. Everybody in New York was there. Jewels. Big names. After the curtain went up I heard the laughs, but when it was over I went out and wandered around in the dark, and I didn’t know whether I was good or bad.”

But next day gritty, garish, gold-lined Broadway was Bert Lahr’s street. Lahr was a smash. Lahr was a sensation. NEW COMEDY KING CROWNED, read a Journal headline. Hold Everything ran for 413 performances. Suddenly the headwaiters, the cabbies, the reporters, the speakeasy bartenders all knew Bert Lahr. He played the Palace three times in six months with his old cop act at $4,500 a week. One hit followed another: Flying High, Hot-Cha!, Life Begins at 8:40, George White’s Scandals, The Show Is On.

On to Hollywood. This wonderful binge of laughs and coin could not last forever; the depression hit Broadway, too. Lahr’s wife was suffering from a mental illness and after painful years their marriage was annulled. He was married again, to a softspoken, ash-blonde ex-showgirl named Mildred Schroeder. Meanwhile he had headed west to try Hollywood for size.

He was cast as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. The job took six months and almost put him in the hospital. The banks of arc lights used for color film created murderous heat and he worked clad in long underwear, football shoulder pads and lion skin. It took two hours a day to apply his tricky makeup, and in every scene he was dependent, not only on his own art, but on a lackey who perched above him with a fishing rod and manipulated his tail.

When it was finished, he waited moodily for a verdict. None came. But one Sunday as he was reading in his backyard he heard a distant shouting. In a yard on the hill above him he saw an astounding sight: a cold-eyed little M-G-M talent scout who had ignored him for months was waving at him. “Gung Gung!” the apparition shouted. “How are you today, Gung Gung?” Lahr rose and walked to the house. “They’ve previewed the picture,” he called through the door, “and I’m good.” They had and he was.

But after this vast success he learned the bitter truth. Hollywood wanted comedians who had romantic appeal. He worked in 26 pictures in all, but almost always in secondary parts. Finally he sold his $85,000 English provincial house to Betty Grable. “After all,” he sighed, “how many parts are there for a lion?” He came back to New York.

He had done two widely spaced musicals—Du Barry Was a Lady in 1939, Billy Rose’s less successful Seven Lively Arts in 1944. But styles in musical comedy had changed; the Big Comedian had almost been forced out of business by operetta-like shows such as South Pacific and Oklahoma!.

Lahr worked in radio. He played Harvey on the road. To the delight of his admirers, he did the part of Skid Johnson in a revival of the old hit, Burlesque. It ran longer than the original. He had always saved money; as an investor in stocks he also made some profits on the new bull market.

But it was a long time before Two on the Aisle—before Lahr was really home. Now that he is back, he has no intention of straying very far from home again. Although he has made a few cautious ventures into television, he fears it as a monster which can gobble up his tricks and wear out his material in a matter of weeks. He thinks his future lies with his past— in the old Broadway musical comedy, where a sketch like his famed Woodchopper routine goes down as a classic through the years. Back at his old pitch, with a solid hit on his hands, Lahr has proved that there is still a place on Broadway for his vanishing breed.

The Fisherman. Offstage, Bert Lahr is a quiet, unpretentious, untheatrical fellow who looks and behaves so much like a middle-aged businessman that he is seldom recognized on the street. He lives well. The Lahrs and their two children, John, 10, and Jane, 8, occupy a handsome Park Avenue apartment. Herbert Lahr, 22, the comedian’s son by his first marriage, occasionally comes east from Arizona to visit. Lahr and his wife are casual droppers-in at 21 and the Stork Club. But Lahr seldom drinks, shuns nightclubs, and believes firmly in the old-fashioned virtues and plenty of sleep. Though most members of his set would not be caught at Nedicks without at least one Cadillac, he drives a Chevrolet.

He is a topflight golfer, a voracious reader of biography. His passion is fishing; he has caught salmon in Puget Sound, tuna and marlin off Bimini, and muskellunge in the Canadian wilds. Each weekend, after Saturday night’s show, he speeds to Seabright, N.J. When dawn breaks, he heads to sea in a fast power skiff to troll for bluefish and stripers and seldom gets back to Manhattan before Monday night at curtain time. His biggest hope and greatest weakness springs from some inside dope slipped him by Ham Fisher, the cartoonist — who, unlike Joe Palooka in Fisher’s current sequence, really believes that laundry soap will raise hair. Lahr scrubs his dome three times a week with Fels-Naptha (he keeps two bars in his dressing room) and reports that fuzz is coming in.

But this quiet man disappears nightly when the curtain rises on Two on the Aisle. The show’s director, Abe Burrows, recently delivered a comedian’s own verdict on the consummate buffoon who leaps before the footlights:

“Bert can make children laugh. A really funny man is always able to make children laugh. Somewhere in him he’s a child, too. He wants to be loved, and what is applause but an expression of love? But Bert knows just how to make you love him. He knows all the tricks.

“But he’s got something else. Bert has quality, like a Hattie Carnegie dress. You’ve got to have it on Broadway. Merman’s got it. Bobby Clark’s got it. You laugh at a television program because it’s free. You laugh pretty easy at a movie for $1.20, and even at the Copa at high prices you laugh because part of the check goes for drinks. But people who pay $6.60 on Broadway are different. They demand quality. That’s the way I think of Bert. Bert’s a real $6.60 comedian.”