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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."