by Moss Hart
It is a mistake to believe that this cult of “toughness” was limited to the poor neighborhood in which we lived. It had begun to pervade other levels of American life, and I suspect that today’s bland dismissal of the intellectual and the overwhelming emphasis placed on the necessity of competing and of success are due in part to the strange taboo we have set against that softness in ourselves which brings men closest to the angels. A nation of poets would be no more desirable than a nation of athletes, but I wonder if that toughness and competitiveness, which have become an ingrained part of our character as a people and a symbol of our way of life as a nation, are not a sign of weakness as well as of strength. Is our cultural life not robbed of a necessary dimension and our emotional life of an element of grace? And I wonder if the fear of a lack of toughness in our children does not sometimes rob them of an awakening awareness and sensitivity in the realm of the spirit that are each child’s birthright and his weapon of rebellion against the accepted norm of his time. This lack of toughness and the inability to compete were a constant agony of my own childhood, and I lived it through as best I could.
A city child’s summer is spent in the street in front of his home, and all through the long summer vacations I sat on the curb and watched the other boys on the block play baseball or prisoner’s base or gutter hockey. I was never asked to take part even when one team had a member missing—not out of any special cruelty, but because they took it for granted I would be no good at it. They were right, of course. Yet much of the bitterness and envy and loneliness I suffered in those years could have been borne better if a single wise teacher or a knowledgeable parent had made me understand that there were compensations for the untough and the non-athletic; that the world would not always be bounded by the curbstone in front of the house.
One of those compensations I blundered into myself, and its effect was electric on both me and the tough world of the boys on the block. I have never forgotten the joy of that wonderful evening when it happened. There was no daylight-saving in those days, and the baseball and other games ended about eight or eight thirty, when it grew dark. Then it was the custom of the boys to retire to a little stoop that jutted out from the candy store on the corner and that somehow had become theirs through tribal right. No grownup ever sat there or attempted to. There the boys would sit, talking aimlessly for hours on end. There were the usual probings of sex and dirty jokes, not too well defined or clearly understood; but mostly the talk was of the games played during the day and of the game to be played tomorrow. Ultimately, long silences would fall and then the boys would wander off one by one. It was just after one of those long silences that my life as an outsider changed, and for one glorious summer I was accepted on my own terms as one of the tribe. I can no longer remember which boy it was that summer evening who broke the silence with a question; but whoever he was, I nod to him in gratitude now. “What’s in those books you’re always reading?” he asked idly. “Stories,” I answered. “What kind?” asked somebody else without much interest.
Nor do I know what impelled me to behave as I did, for usually I just sat there in silence, glad enough to be allowed to remain among them; but instead of answering his question, I launched full tilt into the book I was immersed in at the moment. The book was Sister Carrie and I told them the story of Sister Carrie for two full hours. They listened bug-eyed and breathless. I must have told it well, but I think there was another and deeper reason that made them so flattering an audience. Listening to a tale being told in the dark is one of the most ancient of man’s entertainments, but I was offering them as well, without being aware of doing it, a new and exciting experience.
The books they themselves read were the Rover Boys or Tom Swift or G. A. Henty. I had read them too, but at thirteen I had long since left them behind. Since I was much alone I had become an omnivorous reader and I had gone through the books-for-boys-series in one vast gulp. In those days there was no intermediate reading material between children’s and grownups’ books, or I could find none, and since there was no one to say me nay, I had gone right from Tom Swift and His Flying Machine to Theodore Dreiser and Sister Carrie. Dreiser had hit my young mind and senses with the impact of a thunderbolt, and they listened to me tell the story with some of the wonder that I had had in reading it.
It was, in part, the excitement of discovery—the discovery that there could be another kind of story that gave them a deeper kind of pleasure than the Rover Boys—blunderingly, I was giving them a glimpse of the riches contained outside the world of Tom Swift. Not one of them left the stoop until I had finished, and I went upstairs that wonderful evening not only a member of the tribe but a figure in my own right among them.
The next night and many nights thereafter, a kind of unspoken ritual took place. As it grew dark, I would take my place in the center of the stoop and, like Scheherazade, begin the evening’s tale. Some nights, in order to savor my triumph more completely, I cheated. I would stop at the most exciting part of a story by Jack London or Frank Norris or Bret Harte, and without warning tell them that that was as far as I had gone in the book and it would have to be continued the following evening. It was not true, of course; but I had to make certain of my new-found power and position, and with a sense of drama that I did not know I possessed, I spun out the long summer evenings until school began again in the fall. Other words of mine have been listened to by larger and more fashionable audiences, but for that tough and grimy one that huddled on the stoop outside the candy store, I have an unreasoning affection that will last forever. It was a memorable summer, and it was the last I was to spend with the boys on the block.
The following summer, since I was now thirteen years old, I would be able to obtain “working papers” and get a job downtown for the summer months. The prospect of getting away from “the block,” of nudging closer to that small shimmering area where Broadway lay, made life more endurable. All that winter I concocted grandiose dreams of getting a job as office boy for Klaw & Erlanger, or Florenz Ziegfeld, or Sam Harris, and somehow, some way, working my way down from the office and through the stage door. As the last days of school loomed ahead, I scanned the Sunday advertisements more and more desperately, searching for an ad that would read, “Office or errand boy wanted in theatrical office.” There were none, of course. There were errand and office boy ads by the dozen, office and errand boys wanted by every other business under the sun; but no such ad as I looked for ever appeared, and in time to come I learned why none was ever likely to. Nepotism runs through the theatre with the grandeur of the Mississippi at flood time, and when an office boy is needed, there is always a nephew on hand; if a secretary is wanted, a niece or a cousin magically appears. This may account in part for the fact that theatrical telephone messages are inevitably garbled, manuscripts go unread, and theatrical correspondence continues to be a whimsical affair that goes largely unanswered. But all this I did not know then. I persisted in believing the ad I dreamed of would certainly appear the following Sunday.
School closed and still I stubbornly waited, until it became imperative that I take whatever job I could get if I was going to work at all that summer. In desperation I even boldly considered the idea of marching into a theatrical office and asking point-blank for a job; but I lacked the courage and, as a matter of fact, I didn’t even know where any of the offices were. By the time I was ready to concede defeat, all the best jobs were gone and I took the only job I could get. It was quite a distance from Broadway, and the heavy steel door I pushed open and closed fifty times a day as part of my job was a far cry from the stage door I had fondly hoped to pass through; but I was working “downtown” and a step nearer my goal. If I looked northward from 14th Street, as I stood on the steps of the subway station each night, I could see the golden glow of Times Square in the distance.
I worked in the storage vault of a large wholesale furrier, and my job was to open the vault as the hampers of wet skins were brought in and then hang the furs on racks to dry. It wa
s tedious work, but it was cool inside the vault and I had ample time to read. It had another compensation, that job, and I took full advantage of it once I stoically accepted the fact that people were likely to hold their noses and walk rapidly away if they happened to pass within ten feet of me. They had good reason to. I possessed only one suit of clothes and that suit I wore to work every day. Not that it would have made much difference if I had owned a dozen suits and worn a different one each day, for after eight hours in a vault with uncured skins any article of clothing, even a handkerchief, emerged smelling to high heaven.
Out of the vault I would come at the end of each day, into the steaming midsummer heat, every day smelling progressively worse, and make my way down the subway stairs, grimly reconciled to the nightly battle of pushing and shoving my way into the Bronx Express. And therein lay the compensation. The inhuman crush in the subway during the rush hours was just as great then as it is now, and like the rest of the wretched subway riders, I would fight my way into the train and then fight again for enough elbow space to read my book on the long ride uptown. Things changed for the better as I began to smell really awful and the weather grew hotter. Avenues of space would open up around me, and sometimes if I resolutely leaned over a lady who was sitting down, she would give up by 125th Street and I would sink down into her seat with plenty of room on either side of me. I could not smell myself, fortunately, for my olfactory senses had been anesthetized by the daily smell of the vault, and after the first shock of having someone yell at me, “Boy, you stink out loud!” I pretended not to hear either the muttered threats or the imprecations of my fellow subway riders and would gaze innocently around me for a moment as though trying to discover who it was that smelled so bad, and then bury my face in my book or newspaper.
A new excitement had come into my reading life—the newspaper. Not just any newspaper, but the finest newspaper of its era and, for my part, one of the finest journalistic achievements of our time. The newspaper was the New York World, which at the time I speak of, and for some years following, was in its full power and glory. I devoured it daily. It would be truer to say I savored it daily, for I read the news section cover-to-cover on the way downtown in the morning and sternly resisted the temptation to look at the page opposite the editorial page until the journey uptown at night. I saved and hoarded that section like the proverbial stick of candy. It was the high moment of my day and that was why I needed space around me and sufficient concentration to enjoy it to the full. All my new gods were on that page. Heywood Broun and then Alexander Woollcott, doing dramatic criticism; Deems Taylor, music; Laurence Stallings, book reviews; William Bolitho, writing about everything under the sun; and finally, F.P.A. and “The Conning Tower,” illuminating not only the world of the theatre, but the world of wit and laughter as well, and making them both seem even more desirable. Every Saturday morning his “Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys” appeared, and I would breathlessly go through the week with him on a round of opening nights, opening-night parties afterward, lunches at the Algonquin Round Table, poker parties at the Swopes’, and all kinds of high jinks at Neysa McNein’s studio, where all these giants seemed constantly to forgather as if by magic and spin out the nights in a spate of insults and ribaldry. Famous initials and names spattered the diary like a translucent Milky Way: G.S.K. and Beatrice—A.W. and Harpo—Alice Duer Miller and Smeed—Benchley and Dottie—Bob Sherwood and Marc—I. Berlin and J. Kern—H. Ross and Sullivan—H.B.S. and Maggie. The initiate knew that G.S.K. was George S. Kaufman; Dottie was Dorothy Parker; H.B.S. was Herbert Bayard Swope; and so on ad infinitum. If all this has the faint air of a star-struck movie fan standing in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and gazing down at the footsteps of his favorites preserved in cement, I suppose that is exactly what I was doing, only with newsprint instead of cement, and with, I need hardly point out, a slightly superior product.
Yet no movie I have ever seen has dared to be as gauche and idiotically Cinderella-like as life itself dares to be and is. Even I, with my head full of wild dreams of glory as I closed the door of the vault behind me each day, would have had to stretch credulity to its limits to believe all the lucky accidents and the fortunate coincidences that lay in the life just ahead of me. I make no pretense about it and I never have—I have been extremely lucky. Such talent as I possess I have used well and industriously, but talent alone is not enough. I do not mean to suggest that luck per se plays the major part in success, theatrical or otherwise; but I venture to guess that in the grand design of any successful career the element of luck has been a powerful factor. Perhaps luck is too easy a word—too all-inclusive. A sense of timing would be more accurate—or perhaps a quirk of character that enables its fortunate possessor to tread the main path and never swerve from it. Every successful person I have ever known has had it—actor or businessman, writer or politician. It is that instinct or ability to sense and seize the right moment without wavering or playing safe, and without it many gifted people flicker brilliantly and briefly and then fade into oblivion in spite of their undoubted talents.
It would have been hard to convince me then that I was one of the lucky ones, however; for week after week the door of the vault closed behind me and the weeks finally lengthened out into months.
AND THEN it happened. In one day—actually in one afternoon. My fantasy of getting a job in a theatrical office turned into reality, and it seemed not at all strange to me that it should. At the believing age, the old saw that “dreams come true” is taken quite as a matter of course by the very young. It happened none too soon. I had been two and a half years in the storage vault by this time. I was almost seventeen and the lingering look I turned toward the lights of Broadway each evening before I plunged down the subway steps, was growing daily more bitter.
One morning in the early fall I decided in the darkness of the vault that when I went out for lunch that day that steel door was going to swing behind me for the last time. Perhaps it was because my head was full of the accounts in the papers of the new theatrical season just beginning—yet another season that I was not even a microscopic part of. Perhaps it was the sharp sting of going from the brilliant September sunshine into the darkness of the vault that made my lot seem downright insupportable. Whatever it was, I made my decision. I would not return to that vault, stack those skins for another day, if we all starved!
At twelve o’clock I took down my lunch box, gave a last look around and walked out. I didn’t give notice or say good-bye. I hated everyone and everything at A. L. Neuburger Furs, Inc. I ate my lunch on a bench in Union Square and tried to feel a lift of the heart or a slight taste of my new-found freedom. I could do neither. I well knew that I could not afford to be out of work for so much as a week, with the present state of things at home. For a moment I wavered, but not for more than a moment. Character is destiny, and even then I did not believe in second chances. I snapped the lunch box shut and stood up. I had gone over the Help Wanted ads while I ate. One job was more miserable than the other. Packers, stockroom boys, shipping clerks were all wanted in abundance. The halfway decent jobs (what there were of them) all starkly proclaimed, “High school education necessary”—so that avenue was closed to me. Like Scarlett O’Hara, then not yet even born in Margaret Mitchell’s mind, I resolved to think of all that tomorrow. Right now, I turned my face toward Times Square and started walking. This afternoon, at least, I’d have an authentic smell of Broadway, the real thing.
I decided to pay a visit to my one and only link with the theatre, thin though that link was. My friend, George Steinberg, who lived in the apartment next to ours, had the very job I coveted above all jobs. He was an office boy in a theatrical office. I cultivated his friendship shamelessly, though it seemed to me an unjust caprice of fate that George, who cared nothing whatever about the theatre, should have an Aunt Belle who worked in a theatrical office, while the only relative I had who was even remotely connected with the theatre, was a cousin who painted posters for a movie
house in Brooklyn. Moreover, George actually hated working in a theatrical office. He was as incapable of understanding my fascination for his job as I was of understanding his loathing of it. In an irritated way I think I dimly grasped why he felt as he did, for George was by all odds the shyest human being I’ve ever known—“painfully shy” was a phrase that fit him exactly—and I think the flamboyancy of actors, actresses and theatre people in general embarrassed him. Almost every evening we would meet after dinner for a long walk, and my questions were never-ending. Why he endured them and how our friendship continued I do not profess to understand, for I was avid for every small detail of the office, and to make him talk about it seemed to increase his dislike of the job threefold.
I thought of all this as I walked toward 42nd Street—the gods were blind indeed—and as I finally stood looking up at the façade of the New Amsterdam Theatre I sighed. Imagine going to work every day by walking through a lobby where the Ziegfeld Follies was playing instead of having a steel door clang shut behind you! I stood in the lobby and looked at the pictures for a moment before I pressed the elevator button. There they all were—Marilyn Miller, Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields—and on the office directory next to the elevator, the magical names: Florenz Ziegfeld, George Tyler, A. L. Erlanger, Aarons & Freedly, and a horde of others.