Word: knowed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...story of his life as an omniscient observer, not only aware of his own time but of events from the time of his death until the present. Mujica-Lainez's implication is clear: Orsini's true immortality resides not in the few historical facts and artifacts we know but in his re-creation as a fictional character...
...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...
...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...
...suburban family's kidnaped child. Curiously, the clues all lead to Hind's friends and then back to his own wife and child, whom he has neglected, and finally back to an exploration of himself. Hind, self-consciously tall at 6 ft. 7 in., does not know his own parents and was brought up by a guardian whose strict moral precepts still order his life. Perhaps this is why Hind gradually comes to think of himself as the savior of what McElroy calls the "placental" city. Hearing the police emergency siren, Hind "imagined vehicles fading to the side...