Notes on a Cowardly Lion

1969, 1970 Ballantine edition
John Lahr
Notes on a Cowardly Lion
Original price $1.25, purchase price unknown
Very worn paperback
B-

I enjoyed this book about equally with the biographies that Charlie Chaplin, Jr. and Arthur Marx wrote about their comic fathers.  And I had some of the same issues with the book, or at least the man, that I did with Charlie, Sr. and Groucho.  Bert Lahr's life was even sadder than Chaplin's, although he wasn't as poor as a child, more about the level of Groucho.  Lahr's first wife was mentally ill, and it took years to gain a divorce, while he'd meanwhile fallen in love with another woman.  At last he remarried in 1940, and soon had John and a daughter.

Like Chaplin, the senior Lahr was sometimes a distant father, in his case seeing raising the kids as his wife's job.  However, also like Charlie, and Groucho of course, Bert was very funny at home as well as onstage and screen, and his kids seem to have adored him as much as the other comics' children adored them.  Of the three biographies, I think this is the most warts & all (with Marx's the least).  Also, John became a drama critic, so he offers more of an analysis of his father's work than Charlie, Jr. or Arthur did.

While I love Bert Lahr as the Lion, I don't know that I'd have liked him as a person.  He was very conservative in some ways, and he was horrified by the youth of the 1960s with their beards and miniskirts.  (He died in December 1967.)  Of the three men, I'd most have wanted to have hung out with Groucho. 

Chaplin and Marx appear in each other's biographies, among other things playing tennis.  Chaplin is mentioned only briefly in this book, Lahr in neither of the other two books.  But Groucho Marx shows up here, in the section on the Hollywood stars performing benefits during World War II.  Lahr was very nervous when the celebrities visited the White House, but irrepressible Groucho asked Eleanor Roosevelt, "Are we late for dinner?"  As John writes, "The joke nearly reduced Lahr to tears of laughter; he cannot remember shaking hands with Mrs. Roosevelt, although he recalls biting his lips to maintain decorum in the receiving line."  So, yeah, if I had a time machine, I'd go hang out with Groucho, although it'd be great to have Lahr along to see his very expressive face react.