The late Bert Lahr is most fondly remembered as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. His son John Lahr, the New Yorker's theatre critic, is fearlessly candid as he analyses the reality behind the public personae of show people.
Empathising with performers and operating with the anaesthetic of praise, he probes deeply into the most sensitive egos. He reveals how present successes have been achieved in spite of childhood difficulties, perhaps motivated by them. In this collection of 15 New Yorker profiles, no article is more affectionately critical than the portrayals of his father and mother, which reveal much of the author's own ardent personality and carefully contrived informal style.
A Profile (with a capital P), Lahr points out, is "a short exercise in biography - a tight form in which interview, anecdote, observation, description, and analysis are brought to bear on the public and the private self. The literary pedigree of the Profile can be traced from Plutarch to Dr Johnson to Strachey; its popular modern reinvention is owed to the New Yorker, which set up shop in 1925 and which encouraged its reporters to get beyond ballyhoo to something more probing and ironic".
The magazine's first editor, Harold Ross, established the Profile. His immediate successor, William Shawn, a reclusive perfectionist who was the editor from 1952 to 1987, refined it; and recent editors, Bob Gottlieb and Tina Brown, and the incumbent, David Remnick, though they could not be described as traditional purists, have done their best to maintain their Profiles' superiority. "With the wacky proliferation of media," Lahr writes, "the genre has been debased; even the word itself has been hijacked for all kinds of shallow and intrusive journalistic endeavours." He evidently perceives himself as a bearer of the original sacred flame. In this book, he promises, "there is no tabloid intention".
As far as achieving thoroughness and accuracy is concerned, Lahr has a significant advantage over lesser practitioners of his craft. The New Yorker gives him that greatest of journalistic luxuries, plenty of time. He says he usually spends about four months on research, gathering about 1,500 pages of transcribed interviews for a 10,000-word article. Then the magazine's devoted and demanding editorial acolytes (I imagine earnest graduates of Vassar, Smith and Radcliffe) check every checkable fact, and a senior editor supervises the syntactical fidelity and stylistic polish of his prose.
Even in the few instances when he is unable, for one reason or another, to interrogate his subjects - for instance, Frank Sinatra (arrogant), Bob Hope (senile), Irving Berlin (dead) - Lahr and his team manage to assemble enough material to construct an intricate mosaic of relevant, multicoloured quotations, of which the provenance of every tessera is conscientiously declared. It is a tribute to his talent and enthusiasm that, in spite of the Teutonic laboriousness of the procedure, the final portraits are recognisably human.
In addition to Sinatra, Hope, Berlin and Bert and Minnie Lahr - the show people profiled with impressive verisimilitude in this volume - writers, directors and stars of stage, screen and television, include Woody Allen, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Liev Schreiber, Roseanne Barr, Wallace Shawn (the late editor's son), Eddie Izzard, Neil Labute, Ingmar Bergman and Mike Nichols.
It's all good stuff. Familiar myths and less familiar truths are clearly represented. There are titbits of arcane information, such as that Woody Allen practises for an hour every day, playing New Orleans jazz on an Albert-system Buffet clarinet with a Rico No. 5 reed, and that Izvestia called Bob Hope "a Pentagon clown".
There is much discussion of creative motives and techniques. And, of course, in all the closely woven fabric of facts and opinions, there is entertainment. I recommend the account of Roseanne Barr outrageously bullying her gag-writers, and Izzard on the naming of Engelbert Humperdinck: " 'Look, we're going to call you Bingelbert Hempledonk.' 'What about Binglebert Humperdonk?' 'I was thinking Geldebert Hingledunk.' 'Nah.' 'What about Hinglebert Enkledonk?' 'I've got a list - Geldebert Hingledunk. Hinglebert Enkledonk. Or Engelbert Humperdinck.' 'That's it!' "
In the beginning, the New Yorker's prime intention was to amuse. Sometimes, thanks especially to John Lahr, it still does.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic