Where the Laughs Came From

NOTES ON A COWARDLY LION by John Lahr. 394 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

Later this season, when Dorothy and her friends again gather in Oz on their annual TV rerun, only the singing of Over the Rainbow will be more fondly familiar to Americans than the sight of the Cowardly Lion in his boxer's stance, hopefully spluttering "Put 'em up. Put 'em uuuup." Bert Lahr played the lion, of course, and like all his performances, it bore the mark of a unique talent. Most comedians rely principally on their tongues, and Lahr's scratchy voice, wobbly warble and gnong, gnong, gnong earned their share of laughs. But his very special gift was a capacity to turn body English into a complete, expressive grammar of feeling. From his bulbous nose and porridge face to his spindly legs, the controlled disarray of Lahr's features and physique could point up ludicrous resonances even in a simple hello. Lyricist Johnny Mercer once wrote Lahr: "This is the first time I've ever seen a performer do my material better than I meant it. You find laughs where the laughs aren't even there."

Discovering where the laughs came from is the undeclared aim of this biography. Lahr himself professed not to know. "Put me in a jockstrap and if I entertain people for two hours--it's a good show," he once said. "I'm not an artist, I'm in business. If it's a hit, that's all I care about." Another time, speaking about his dramatic abilities, he said, "All I know is how to do it. I can't articulate." In hopes of doing better, John Lahr, his son and biographer, has endeavored to display the man by somewhat disjointedly laying out the surface facets of his personality, much as a dresser might have laid out Lahr's costume changes. In dealing with his father young Lahr, who is a drama critic (Evergreen Review), manages to seem both revealingly intimate and inconclusive in his analysis, suggesting that the real man was unknowable or perhaps not there.

There is no glossing over the facts of Lahr's private life, for instance. But it is so flecked with tragedy as to seem almost unreal. This is how it went: At the start, a poor Bronx childhood, dropout from school, succession of odd jobs and petty thieving. Then Lahr tries burlesque just for fun and is hooked ("I would have done 20 shows a day. It was like a shot of --dope? Adrenalin?"). He rises to vaudeville, lives with and eventually marries his act partner, reaches Broadway while at home his wife is going insane ("She laughed at me, John. Laughed when I was making love to her"). Reluctantly, Lahr has her committed, almost simultaneously scores a smash hit in his first book show and takes up with a nymphomaniac tramp ("I don't know why, John, you see I was reaching for something ... I was all mixed up. Success, disaster--I had everything"). Eventually, he finds the right girl but is so gun-shy that she marries someone else; then he pursues her until she gets a divorce after he is sued for alienation of affections in a headline scandal. He marries her, has two kids, continues as a Broadway star, gets on TIME'S cover but can't make it really big in radio, TV or movies (except for Oz). He wins a huge artistic success in Waiting for Godot as his stage career dims, and finally --oh, irony--makes the biggest money of his life ($75,000 a year) pushing Lay's Potato Chips on TV commercials. Until at final fadeout with cancer (his hypochondriac nightmare come true), nurse bends over and sees him inaudibly whispering an old comedy routine.

This chronicle is often retrieved from corniness by touching moments and memories that allow young Lahr to mold humanity around the trite-tragic skeleton that his father's life seems to have been. For instance, there is Lahr as a budding vaudevillian putting makeup on his collar even when unemployed so everyone will know he is in show biz. One is touched by the physical fact that his left wrist was permanently larger than the right from breaking repeated pratfalls. And a fine moment comes when a wino outside the theater holds out a dollar saying "Here, Bert, and thanks." As a young intellectual, John Lahr is eloquent, too, about his father's final sense that he did not understand the modern world around him. Unfortunately, such moments only emphasize the fact that the book never reaches the secret of the genius that prompted the drunk's gratitude and Lahr's fame. The book does successfully summon up the private Bert Lahr and the backstage world in which he lived, but as his son would probably admit, the best way to know the man through and through was to see him onstage. As with most famous performers, the masque, finally, was the man.

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