Gamboling Lambs

In 1874, to quote from an old Ring Lardner ditty,

. . . Five performers, none of them hams,

Got together and formed The Lambs.

They formed it, at Delmonico's, as a supper club. Its early days were bumpy, but it grew & grew, to become the most ancient, most active, most ardent of U. S. stage societies. Today it has 1,100 members, over 80% of them theatre people, has a smoke-filled, untidy, hospitable clubhouse just off Times Square.

The Lambs has none of the droopy-mustached charm of Gramercy Park's Players. Its keynote is breezy good-fellowship--a slangy, vulgar love of life that has appealed, not only to pinochle-playing actors in loud check suits, but also to such men as Richard Harding Davis, Joseph Jefferson, Barney Baruch, Father Duffy, George Ade, Ring Lardner, John Philip Sousa, Stanford White, Victor Herbert.

Herbert's club song strikes the club note:

I want to be . . . A white Lamb, bright Lamb, Up-all-night Lamb, Good Lamb, baa-baa, untilI die.

Like all self-respecting clubs, The Lambs has its traditions. No woman may ever brighten its doors. No dramatic critic (as with The Players) may ever become a member. Every rector of Manhattan's Church of the Transfiguration ("Little Church Around the Corner") is made an honorary member of the club, as the result of an oft-told anecdote: When Joe Jefferson sought to bury an old Lambs actor, he was turned down by the snooty rector of a Fifth Avenue church, who loftily suggested that he "try the little church around the corner." Ever since, the "little church" has enjoyed most of The Lambs' (and the theatre's) nuptial and funeral trade.

A free-&-easy place, The Lambs is better known for low horseplay than high wit. Most of its yarns concern some member who came in like a Lamb and went out like a light. There was, for example, the soused member who arrived at 3 a.m., just after the bartender had polished 300 glasses and stacked them on the bar. With a sweep of his cane, the drunk knocked all 300 off. He was suspended for six months, then returned at the same hour, in the same condition. "Why haven't you been around lately?" asked a friend. "I was suspended," answered the drunk, "for knocking glasses off the bar--like this," and off went 300 more.

Most famed activity of The Lambs are its Gambols (known on Broadway as Shambles), usually private affairs at the club. These start off as a full-length show, end up as anything. Many a Broadway hit grew out of the Gambols: Experience and The Squaw Man were first tried out there as one-acters, and it was there that George M. Cohan first sang Over There.

This week, for the first time in the club's history, it staged a Gambol in honor of an individual member, loyal, much-loved, 73-year-old David Warfield. Idol of a pre-war generation, Warfield quit the stage in 1924, after a run-in with Belasco. He has never gone back. When he took his turn in this week's Gambol, he looked frail and diminutive, but he could still handle dialect, still bring the catch in the throat. Grand finale of the shindig was a minstrel show with a cast Broadway could never afford: Victor Moore, Billy Gaxton, Bobby Clark, Ben Bernie, Bert Lahr, Frank Crumit, Fred Waring. But Edgar Bergen, who had left Charlie McCarthy at home, stole the evening. Using a handkerchief, a make-up pencil and his right fist, he created a beshawled old crone called Ophelia who mixed sass and smut, made the absent Mr. McCarthy seem like a ventriloquist's dummy.

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