by Moss Hart
It is easy to understand how my aunt became for me a refuge against the world of reality and how the fantasy world of the theatre quickly became an escape and a solace. Increasingly, that world assumed for me more reality than the hostile world in which I lived—and then suddenly both refuges, my aunt and the theatre, crashed about my head. I was ten years old at the time and it was a Sunday morning, and I can still remember the sound and even the smell of that morning.
We had taken in boarders long since to eke out my father’s meager earnings, and I might add that boarders in those days received a full measure for their weekly room rent. Along with the room there were included two meals, breakfast and dinner, and laundry. All of this my mother did, as well as taking care of my brother and myself, and serving separate meals to Aunt Kate in her own room. My aunt, of course, weaved through the various boarders, who moved in and out, like royalty visiting a slum, and complicated the life of the household not only by the separate meals in her room, but by locking herself in the bathroom at the busiest hours of traffic and refusing to budge—another bit of Blanche Du Bois—a rather good example, I think, of life imitating art.
We were all at breakfast that Sunday morning, except my aunt, who was already entrenched in the bathroom, when a telegram came for one of the boarders. He must return to St. Louis at once—a dying uncle or some such. He hurriedly packed his things, and as a parting gesture to my father, whom he liked, he left behind a number of books. My father was very pleased. He was not a great reader himself, but he had received so few gifts in his life that I think it was the idea of being given something that gave him a feeling of possession for those books and marked them as some sort of symbol for him.
In the afternoon my father went downtown to put a “room to let” advertisement in the papers, and when he returned, went directly to the late boarder’s room to collect his books. They were gone. Aunt Kate had taken them and blithely given them to a neighbor upstairs. At first he couldn’t believe it—then he demanded that she go upstairs and get the books back. She merely laughed at the very suggestion of doing such a thing. One did not ask for a gift to be returned. The fact that they were not hers to give she blandly passed by—and then herself produced the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. “Just some old socialist stuff by Eugene Debs,” she scoffed. “Lucky to have it out of the house.”
It was unfair and unkind, and it was the last time she ever baited my father. All the accumulated years of rage and frustration came out in a great burst of violence. It was frightening to see the reservoir of hate in this mild little man spill over. Frightening and astonishing, both. I had hardly been aware of my father before. But Debs was his hero, and somehow his name was the touchstone that set off all the indignities and failures of my father’s own life. I had never seen him like that before, nor have I since that day. He ordered my aunt from the house and stood over her while she packed. For once my mother’s tears availed her nothing, and while I watched horrified, my wonderful Aunt Kate dwindled before my eyes to a frightened old maid, gathering her bits of foolish finery together and dropping her beloved programs from trembling hands all over the floor. It was a terrible scene and I’m not sure that I have ever forgiven my father for it, right though he was. She left the house that day and never returned, and for many years I was not allowed to see her.
It is difficult to recapture now the full impact that quarrel had upon me. A child’s world is made up of the immediate and the absolute. He does not look past today or tomorrow—the tragedy of the moment is an all-enveloping one, and in a very real sense my aunt’s leave-taking represented both a tragedy and a crisis in my life. It marked an end and a beginning. All through those early years I had had no real relationship with either my father or my mother. The two dominant figures in my life had been first my grandfather and then my aunt. I had literally been taken over—alienated, if you will, from my parents at the very beginning. We faced a dilemma now, my parents and I, that was not easy to resolve, nor am I sure that we ever did resolve it. For the first time in my life I was entirely theirs—and we were strangers to each other, almost as though I had been kept in some foreign country and had just returned to them.
I realize now that it was as hard for them as it was for me, but then I was bereft and vengeful. I needed someone to blame and I blamed my father. I think I dimly knew that he was a good man, but the gulf between us was a wide one. My aunt and the world she opened to me had come to mean a great deal. Now it was cut off—both she and it ceased to exist as though they had never been. I blamed him not only for the exile of my aunt but for the poverty in which we lived. Later on, I blamed him for the fact that I was unable to graduate from public school. I went to work the summer I reached the eighth grade, and never returned to school. It was obvious that I could not go back—the money I brought home during that summer vacation was too sorely needed. I hated school, but I desperately wanted to graduate; even the poorest families in the neighborhood saw to it that at least the eldest son or daughter graduated. It had little to do with the idea of education; it was the gesture that counted, and the gesture had meaning. It was a sign that however poor, no family was too poor for that. My bitterness and my sense of shame remained fresh for a long time. I lied when anyone asked me about my schooling, and each time I lied I blamed my father anew.
Children are not creatures of justice—they lay blame and praise about them as their needs demand. Somehow, I think he knew or sensed this in some instinctive way, and although he had never heard of Freud, he made what efforts he could within the harsh realities of daily existence to regain his son; but the damage had been done. Only once did I ever feel close to him and then I was unable to express what I felt or let him know that I understood.
It was the Christmas after my aunt had left the house, and since it was she who always supplied the tree and the presents for my brother and myself, this first Christmas without her was a bleak and empty one. I remember that I was more or less reconciled to it, because my father had worked only spasmodically throughout the year. Two of our rooms were vacant of boarders and my mother was doing her marketing farther and farther away from our neighborhood. This was always a sign that we were dangerously close to rock bottom, and each time it occurred I came to dread it more. It was one of the vicious landmarks of poverty that I had come to know well and the one I hated the most. As the bills at our regular grocer and butcher went unpaid, and my mother dared not even be seen at the stores lest they come to the doorways and yell after her publicly, she would trudge ten or twelve blocks to a whole new neighborhood, tell the new grocer or butcher that we had just moved in to some fictitious address around the corner, and establish credit for as long as she could. Thus we were able to exist until my father found work again, or all the rooms were rented, and she could pay our own grocer and butcher, and gradually the others. This time, however, they had all of them gone unpaid and my mother was walking twenty blocks or more for a bottle of milk.
Obviously Christmas was out of the question—we were barely staying alive. On Christmas Eve my father was very silent during the evening meal. Then he surprised and startled me by turning to me and saying, “Let’s take a walk.” He had never suggested such a thing before, and moreover it was a very cold winter’s night. I was even more surprised when he said as we left the house, “Let’s go down to a Hundred Forty-ninth Street and Westchester Avenue.” My heart leapt within me. That was the section where all the big stores were, where at Christmastime open pushcarts full of toys stood packed end-to-end for blocks at a stretch. On other Christmas Eves I had often gone there with my aunt, and from our tour of the carts she had gathered what I wanted the most. My father had known of this, of course, and I joyously concluded that this walk could mean only one thing—he was going to buy me a Christmas present.
On the walk down I was beside myself with delight and an inner relief. It had been a bad year for me, that year of my aunt’s going, and I wanted a Christmas present terribly—not a present
merely, but a symbol, a token of some sort. I needed some sign from my father or mother that they knew what I was going through and cared for me as much as my aunt and my grandfather did. I am sure they were giving me what mute signs they could, but I did not see them. The idea that my father had managed a Christmas present for me in spite of everything filled me with a sudden peace and lightness of heart I had not known in months.
We hurried on, our heads bent against the wind, to the cluster of lights ahead that was 149th Street and Westchester Avenue, and those lights seemed to me the brightest lights I had ever seen. Tugging at my father’s coat, I started down the line of pushcarts. There were all kinds of things that I wanted, but since nothing had been said by my father about buying a present, I would merely pause before a pushcart to say, with as much control as I could muster, “Look at that chemistry set!” or, “There’s a stamp album!” or, “Look at the printing press!” Each time my father would pause and ask the pushcart man the price. Then without a word we would move on to the next pushcart. Once or twice he would pick up a toy of some kind and look at it and then at me, as if to suggest this might be something I might like, but I was ten years old and a good deal beyond just a toy; my heart was set on a chemistry set or a printing press. There they were on every pushcart we stopped at, but the price was always the same and soon I looked up and saw we were nearing the end of the line. Only two or three more pushcarts remained. My father looked up, too, and I heard him jingle some coins in his pocket. In a flash I knew it all. He’d gotten together about seventy-five cents to buy me a Christmas present, and he hadn’t dared say so in case there was nothing to be had for so small a sum.
As I looked up at him I saw a look of despair and disappointment in his eyes that brought me closer to him than I had ever been in my life. I wanted to throw my arms around him and say, “It doesn’t matter … I understand … this is better than a chemistry set or a printing press … I love you.” But instead we stood shivering beside each other for a moment—then turned away from the last two pushcarts and started silently back home. I don’t know why the words remained choked up within me. I didn’t even take his hand on the way home nor did he take mine. We were not on that basis. Nor did I ever tell him how close to him I felt that night—that for a little while the concrete wall between father and son had crumbled away and I knew that we were two lonely people struggling to reach each other.
I came close to telling him many years later, but again the moment passed. Again it was Christmas and I was on my way to visit him in Florida. My father was a bright and blooming ninety-one years of age now and I arrived in Florida with my wife to spend Christmas and New Year’s with him. On Christmas Eve we sat in his living room, and while my wife chatted with his nurse and companion, I sat on a sofa across the room with my father, showing him the pictures of his two grandchildren. Suddenly I felt his hand slip into mine. It was the first time in our lives that either of us had ever touched the other. No words were spoken and I went right on turning the pages of the picture album, but my hand remained over his. A few years before I might have withdrawn mine after a moment or two, but now my hand remained; nor did I tell him what I was thinking and feeling. The moment was enough. It had taken forty years for the gulf that separated us to close.
With my mother the gulf that parted us was even wider, and it remained so forever. I felt sorrow for her, I admired her, but I did not like her. If this seems like a heartless impertinence I do not mean it so. It is said in terms of compassion and not of complaint. Within her limitations she was a woman of decent instincts and exemplary behavior, and her lot was a hard one. The days of her life were spent in a constant battle of keeping peace between her father and her sister, and later on, after my grandfather died, between her sister and her husband. The struggle robbed her of her children—people who spend their lives in appeasing others have little left to give in the way of love. It was her tragedy, as well as my brother’s and my own. At a certain age, sometimes early, sometimes late, children make up their minds about their parents. They decide, not always justly, the kind of people their mothers and fathers are, and the judgment can be a stern one; as cruel, perhaps, as mine was, for it was maintained through the years and was not lessened by the fact that to the end of her days my mother showed not the faintest sign of understanding either the man she had married or the sons she had produced.
* * *
Thus the scene is set. This was the world I lived in and these were the people who shaped and formed the human being I was to become.
There were two other motivating influences—two compelling forces in my life at that time which, though intangible and inanimate, served as sharply as the people around me to mold the direction that all the years that followed were to take. The first was a goad. The second, a goal.
The goad, in a nutshell, was poverty. Now, there is nothing about poverty in itself that is in any way disgraceful, and I have noticed that children of poor families do not in any way seem to feel humiliated or hampered by it. Indeed, in many ways they lead a freer and less thwarted life than the constantly supervised children of the well-to-do. Moreover, since all the other children they know are also poor, they take it for granted that this is the way the world is, and it is not until the awakening years of adolescence that an awareness comes that the world is somewhat unevenly divided between the rich and the poor.
Somehow this did not hold true in my case. I have never been able to explain satisfactorily to myself or to others just why I hated poverty so passionately and savagely. I can only remember that my childhood from quite early on was filled with a series of bitter resolves to get myself out of it—to escape to a less wretched world than the one I knew. I recall a few years ago having a heated argument on the pronunciation of the word “squalor” with someone who insisted that it was pronounced squay-lor. I argued that it was pronounced squah-lor, and finally to prove my point I said, “When I lived in it, it was squalor!”
Poverty was always a living and evil thing to me, and from the moment in my teens when I could scrape a few pennies together I tried, for however brief a time, to disguise the face of poverty as best I could. I used to go without lunch for a week or ten days until I had accumulated enough to eat in a restaurant that had tablecloths instead of having a frankfurter or hamburger at a Sixth Avenue sidewalk orange-juice stand, which was the usual. Or I would stroll into the lobby of a fashionable hotel and walk around for as long as I dared, making believe that I belonged there. If all of this has a faintly ignominious and snobbish air, I do not defend it. That is the way it was, and doubtless there must have been another side to me too—less foolish and perhaps more admirable. Perhaps all this accounts in some measure for the extravagant way I have lived from the moment large sums of money began to pour in. I know my profligacy has been a cause of head-shaking among my friends, but my hatred for those years I am now speaking of was bound to affect me one way or the other. Either it would make me afraid of ever being poor again and therefore cautious and miserly, or it would send me sprawling among the gaudy and foolish goods the world has to offer, leaving a trail of greenbacks flowing heedlessly behind me. The latter is what happened and I prefer it so. I have built needless wings on my house in the country and planted thousands of trees on my land, so that the late Alexander Woollcott was prompted to remark a little contemptuously, “Just what God would have done if He had the money.” I did not mind. I am not a fool about money but I do not live in fear of it. That fear I lived with in my childhood, and then I was through with it for good and all. That, indeed, was the goad and it served its purpose.
The goal, of course, was Broadway and the theatre. I had no idea how I was to achieve it, but I knew at once there was no other world possible for me. I believed this with all the dedication and the mysticism of a religious. The struggle to reach that world is the story I have chosen to tell; for I have no wish to merely set down a succession of theatrical anecdotes with famous names splattered among the pages in gossip-col
umn fashion. I have never understood the avidity with which people read about the celebrated, and though I have known most of the famous literary and theatrical figures of my time, it is not my intention to reduce these friendships to a pleasant reportage. If the reader has read this far, perhaps he will already know that I consider the memories and pledges that were part of the struggle that preceded success the vital ones, and that I must set them down as though what happened was of great importance, as indeed it was to me, and I have set the stage accordingly. My feet were embedded in the Upper Bronx, but my eyes were set firmly toward Broadway.
I WANTED, of course, to be an actor. It never occurred to me that these godlike creatures did not themselves make up the words that flowed so effortlessly and magnificently from their lips. I think I believed they created a play as they went along—a belief, I am convinced, that some portions of a matinée audience still cling to. More than once, sitting in the audience at a play of mine, I have heard the lady behind me exclaim, “The clever things actors say! Aren’t they wonderful!” And I have been tempted to say, “Not that wonderful, madame!” But I have understood her bewitchment. Not even in my wildest dreams of glory did I ever imagine that I would one day write the words for actors to speak on the stage, and not until long afterward did I come to know that there were more important figures in the theatre than the gods of my idolatry.
Had I had the wit to perceive it, there was already a hint that I was a dramatist; even then I could dramatize a story and hold an audience, and when I inadvertently stumbled on this gift, I used it the way other boys use a good pitching arm or a long reach in basketball. It gave me the only standing I was ever to have in the tough and ruthless world of boys of my own age, and I wielded the tiny sense of power it gave me hungrily and shrewdly. Even in the long-ago days when I was growing up, the cult of “toughness” in American life was beginning to blossom and flower. The non-athletic boy, the youngster who liked to read or listen to music, who could not fight or was afraid to, or the boy who had some special interest that was strange or alien to the rest, like the theatre in my case, was banished from the companionship of the others by rules of the “tough” world that was already beginning to prevail.