by Moss Hart
Again, I could not have arranged a better time to have a gate swing open. It was the heyday of a flourishing New York theatre—the early 1920’s. Seventy theatres were going full blast during the height of the season, and such pathfinders as the Provincetown, the Greenwich Village Theatre and the Neighborhood Playhouse were part of this largesse as well. One memorable week eleven new plays all opened on the same night. So crowded was the time that some new plays were offered only at special matinées on days when the play already in the theatre did not give one. It was thus that Eugene O’Neill was first introduced to uptown audiences.
It was that extraordinary time, too, when a number of exciting new playwrights all seemed to emerge in a burst of heedless exuberance and plenty. Though the imprint of Max Marcin, Sam Shipman and Edward Childs Carpenter still lay rather heavily on the theatre of the early twenties, names like Vincent Lawrence, Robert Sherwood, Sidney Howard, S. N. Behrman and Maxwell Anderson were appearing or were soon to make their appearance, to say nothing of Rodgers and Hart, Vincent Youmans and George Gershwin in the musical field. With my name on a “free list” every evening, I saw everything. I saw the failures first, of course. I was by no means fastidious in my choice. Just walking into a theatre and waiting for the curtain to go up was all I asked for. During the summer months, as the free lists to the hits opened up, I managed to wangle my name onto them—but I should like to wager that for a space of two years I witnessed more plays that closed in less than a week than any other living mortal, barring the critics who reviewed them.
This was not without some value, I believe. I am not suggesting that witnessing a spate of appallingly bad plays is a creditable method of learning how to write a good one, but it has its points. Though I had no idea whatever of writing plays at that time—the thought never crossed my mind—I am certain that some of those expository first acts, some of the ineptitudes of those second-act climaxes, and some of the stunning lack of invention in those third acts must somehow have seeped into my inner consciousness. The big “hit” of any season always seems absurdly simple; so effortlessly does it unfold, that it almost seems as though it could not have been written any other way. Watch a failure on the same subject, and you will see by what a slim margin the mistakes have been bypassed, the cul-de-sacs averted in the hit. I am inclined to think those wretched plays I sat through stood me in good stead long after I’d forgotten what they were even about.
* * *
I was grateful for the free tickets for quite another and more personal reason. Those free tickets brought Aunt Kate back into my life. Once I had tasted the joy of being able to go to the theatre without paying for it, and of sitting in the orchestra to boot, I was determined to find Aunt Kate and escort her grandly into the orchestra. I knew that she had never sat anywhere but in the gallery all of her playgoing life. Seven years had passed since I had seen her, and nothing had been heard of her at our house since that terrible Sunday when she left. Her name was not allowed to be mentioned. I knew she was still alive, for we certainly should have heard otherwise, and I had long since suspected that my mother received an occasional furtive letter from her; but she never spoke of it and I did not dare ask.
One Saturday evening, since I was bereft of the theatre, I paid a visit to the cousins in Brooklyn and made some discreet inquiries. Aunt Kate, of all things, was working only a few blocks away from the New Amsterdam Theatre. She had ultimately worn out her welcome with all the relatives she could visit for long stays, though she had managed to spin out these visits for five years by a carefully timed rotation, and for the last two years she had been custodian of linens in the Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls.
The next afternoon after lunch I went to the drug store on the corner and telephoned her. While I waited for her to be called to the phone, my mind raced ahead to the wonderful evenings we would have together and to the remembrance of those old evenings in the kitchen, and of how much she and they had meant to me. Then a voice said, “Hello.” It was unmistakably Aunt Kate. She managed still to put into the simple word “Hello” all the archaic grandeur, all the necessary hauteur of a lady of fashion. Of sheets and pillowcases, and the fact that she had been forced to go to work for the first time in her life at the age of sixty, there was no hint. There was still all of Ouida and Mrs. Humphry Ward in that “Hello,” and I could have hugged her!
When I said, “This is Moss, Aunt Kate,” there was a glacial silence, and when she spoke again her voice was distant and cold. She had been very hurt, there was no doubt of that, by my failure to get in touch with her all these years, in spite of my father. But my eagerness to see her again was so unmistakable and my pleasure at the prospect of taking her to the theatre so patent, that in a few moments she relented and we were interrupting each other quite like old times, until my nickels ran out.
What a joy it was to hear those grandiloquent and noble phrases roll forth once again after all the years of silence! What a pleasure it was going to be for me to have someone in my life once more whose passion for the theatre matched my own. And how satisfactory her reception was of the news that I was an office boy in a theatrical office—she received it as though I had announced my appointment as Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s! With a sudden pang I realized all at once how deeply I had missed her. I wanted to run to the subway straight off and meet her that very afternoon, but this was one of her “working Sundays in,” she grandly explained, so we agreed to meet on the following Tuesday evening. I had some lunch money saved up and I pleaded to take her to dinner before the theatre, but she insisted I come to dinner with her at the Clara De Hirsch Home first and then go on to the theatre afterward. While I was still urging her to let me take her to dinner, the operator cut us off and so our meeting was left as she had arranged it.
This turned out to be one of the most misbegotten ideas ever spawned by Aunt Kate, in a life not overly concerned with the fitness of things; but I did not know it then, of course, and I looked forward to Tuesday in a state of high excitement. Sunday and Monday dragged by somehow, and on Tuesday morning Mr. Pitou announced to my chagrin that he was not taking the 5:30 back to Bayside that afternoon, but was staying in town to take Mrs. Pitou to the theatre and would I mind working a little later. There was nothing I could do but agree, of course. Why I did not telephone my aunt that I would be delayed I have no idea, but I did not do so and I was well over a half-hour late for our appointment when Mr. Pitou finally left the office.
Once more I looked up the address in the telephone book to make sure and then I hurried out. The Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls was an estimable enterprise charitably run by good people to provide unattached and homeless girls with decent food and shelter in a city not much interested in their welfare. Yet as I hurried toward the building at the corner of Third Avenue, I wondered if any edifice need actually look so cheerless and desolate. Why do worthy institutions or good causes always lack any single element of gaiety or joy? The thought was a fleeting one, for there was a figure on the steps staring anxiously toward me.
It was a thin and emaciated woman who stood there, a woman who bore no resemblance to the bosomy and buxom Aunt Kate that I remembered. In a crowded street or subway I would have passed her by without a backward glance, for this was not Aunt Kate but a stranger. In a moment I was ascending the steps and I saw that it was indeed she. She was too upset at the moment, I think, to notice the astonished and unbelieving look of recognition on my face as I leaned over to kiss her, and now that I was here, some of the strain left her face and it seemed less gaunt and pinched.
I came to know later on that I had constituted her sole topic of conversation with the staff and the girls from the moment she had set foot in the place. No doubt her inventions and tales about me were as unlikely as the romantic and fashionable welter of stories that she made up about herself, but it was a touching proof of how much she had loved me. And when I had finally and at last called her and it seemed she could produce me in person for all
to see, her excitement had been immense. God knows what tall tales she had told them about my present position in the theatre. If I knew Aunt Kate, nothing so plebeian as “office boy” would pass her lips. Thus, when I was over a half-hour late, she must have stood there in an agony of waiting for fear that I had forgotten or would not appear at all.
As we walked toward the door, I stole a sideways glance at her. The clothes were the same, pathetically grand and foolish, but they hung loosely on her, and if they had been ludicrous before, they were now almost grotesque. As she opened the door and stood waiting for me to pass her, I made myself look straight at the ravaged face. Surely these few years of work could not have wreaked such havoc, no matter how she hated it. Suddenly it struck me that she was dying, and with terrible certainty I knew that I had hit upon the truth.
We were inside now and the din was incredible. Opening off the main hall was the dining room to which Aunt Kate was leading me. It was filled to overflowing with about three hundred girls of all ages, and as Aunt Kate appeared with me beside her in the doorway, a silence fell as loud as the din that had preceded it.
As we walked to a table at the far end of the room, six hundred eyes followed us in silence, and then a cacophony of giggles and smothered laughter began to flow over the room and over me like molten lava. By the time we reached the staff table, a walk that I thought would never end, I was in an anguish of embarrassment and rage. Why, oh why, had she done this to me? I forgot about how ill she looked and how much I loved her. I could only smother my anger, wipe the perspiration from my face, and sit there tongue-tied, staring at the plate in front of me. The ladies of the staff were kind souls, no doubt, and the questions they plied me with were well intentioned, but I refused to speak or look up; I nodded or grunted disagreeably, and I could feel my aunt’s dismay as this frightful meal proceeded. I tried to recover but I could not, for every so often a girl stifling a giggle would come over to the table and ask to be introduced, and my aunt would ring out my name like some terrible master of ceremonies at a Rotary meeting.
Somehow the meal ground to a finish—and ground is the proper simile, for even Aunt Kate sat in utter silence at the end. I knew I had been a wretched failure for her, but I could not speak. All I could think of was the gantlet to be run when we left the dining room—not a girl appeared to have moved from any table. They seemed, in fact, to be waiting for our exit. I kept hoping, vainly, that the staff would all rise from the table together and I might somehow lose myself among them, but that was not to be.
Aunt Kate, once again the grand lady of fashion, proclaimed in a ringing voice, “We shall be late for the theatre,” and rose from her chair. Immediately silence fell over the entire room. Knives and forks clattered against plates and then were still. And as we had entered, so we left, only this time the laughter and giggles that accompanied our steps were less well concealed. I could have wrung their necks singly and with pleasure, though my aunt seemed to notice nothing.
We were outside now and neither of us spoke. She was furious with me, I knew, but I was still too anguished to speak and offer some explanation for my behavior. I doubt if I could have. In a dismal silence we walked toward the theatre. Had I been a few years younger I would have been tempted to burst into tears. How eagerly I had looked forward to this meeting and how thoroughly she had managed to ruin it for both of us by the folly of meeting in that dining room! Why need she always be so ridiculous a figure, so strange and different from anybody else? The laughter of those wretched girls rang in my ears, melting into the laughter of the kids on the block as they used to laugh when my aunt walked by, and I cringed. How could I have known that it was her own uniqueness that gave me so much that I treasured and that no one else could have given? I could not, of course; so we walked on in silence.
It was not until we reached the theatre that either of us spoke, and as we walked into the lobby, Aunt Kate instinctively turned toward the steps leading up to the gallery. Without a word I took her arm and steered her toward the orchestra door, and as we handed our stubs to the usher I said, “From now on we sit in the orchestra.” For the first time that evening she smiled; and the sight of Aunt Kate sweeping through the orchestra doors, just as I had imagined she would, was magical. In a moment everything was forgotten and forgiven by both of us in the glory of sitting “down front.” Aunt Kate sailed down the aisle like a great ship coming into port and sank into her orchestra seat, with a quiet sigh of being home at long last. It mattered not a bit to either one of us that we were almost alone in the theatre, for the play was one of the most notorious failures of the season and people could not be enticed into the theatre even with free tickets. We sat there with vast empty spaces all around us, utterly oblivious and content.
* * *
From that memorable evening on, we were inseparable. I said nothing at home about our meeting, of course, but each day I called Aunt Kate from the office and almost every evening we trotted off happily together to dinner and the theatre. I never went near the Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls again. In unspoken agreement, we never mentioned the place, but went instead to a restaurant called Lorber’s on Broadway at 41st Street, directly opposite the Metropolitan Opera House.
Lorber’s was a leftover relic of the nineties, and not long for the bustling world of the twenties, but in its own anachronistic way it suited Aunt Kate exactly. The walls were satin-covered, and little pink lamps stood on each table; an astonishingly good table d’hote dinner could be had for seventy-five cents.
Somehow at Lorber’s Aunt Kate did not seem out of place. No heads turned to look at her strange garb as we took our places at the table, and the old waiters never raised an eyebrow at the stentorian voice with which she ordered the meal. Curiously enough, she herself behaved less strangely in Lorber’s than anywhere else. The sense of belonging at last, of being in a proper setting, seemed to soothe her troubled spirit—for once she was not fighting the world, but was a part of it. She talked sensibly and shrewdly. She even discussed my father and herself with acute perception and understanding, and once she took my hand in a rare moment of tenderness and said, “Some day I hope you’ll be as good a son to your mother as you’ve been to me.” I doubt that I ever was, but I have never forgotten that remark or the way that she said it. It illuminated so much that was dark in all of our lives.
All in all, that year marked a turning point in my life. She died at the end of it. I have always been grateful that the final year of her life was, I think, her happiest one; and of all the good things the theatre has given me, I count as not the least those free tickets that enabled me to give Aunt Kate that last wonderful year.
I SUPPOSE EVERYONE has at some time or other speculated on the curious and sometimes frightening chain of events set in motion by a single and seemingly innocent act of one’s own. I have often been bemused by the fact that two people have met and married, children have been born, and lives channeled in an entirely different direction by the tiny beginning of an idea for a play that passed fleetingly through my mind while I was shaving or brushing my teeth in the morning. True, those actors who married each other after meeting in a play of mine might just as easily have met and married in a play of somebody else’s, but the fact remains that it was at rehearsals of my play that they first met, and who is to say it might not have been quite otherwise had they met in the rehearsal of another play and at another time? It is an idle speculation, of course, and one that must forever remain unproved, for fate is an implacable strategist.
Still, how strange a quirk of fate it is that as Anne Nichols wrote the opening lines of Abie’s Irish Rose she was also changing unalterably the life of an obscure office boy named Moss Hart. Miss Nichols’ play, which had opened to almost unanimous critical disdain, had not at this moment of its incredible career turned the corner that was to make it a lasting theatrical phenomenon, but it was showing enough signs of staggering through the season to alert Mr. Pitou to the direct possibility that Anne Nichols migh
t not be available to produce the next season’s output for his stars. Miss Nichols’ faith in her concoction, however, was monumental and unshakable. Her belief that the critics were wrong and she was right is a legend, and since it turned out that she was correct, countless backers of plays have lost untold fortunes.
Mr. Pitou’s predicament was a very real one. He was certain, as was everyone else, that Abie’s Irish Rose was doomed to ignominious failure, but so long as Anne Nichols persisted in the folly of believing that it was going to turn into a success, she could not or would not give any thought to getting on with the writing of those new plays that were so necessary a part of Mr. Pitou’s business. I do not believe that Mr. Pitou wished Abie’s Irish Rose to fail; he very humanly wanted the very obvious handwriting on the wall to transpose itself into a closing notice as quickly as possible, so that Miss Nichols could get cozily back to her proper knitting for him. But Abie’s Irish Rose stubbornly refused to die, with a miraculous stubbornness that was to turn Anne Nichols into a millionaire.
In the interim, while this maddening period of waiting was going on, there was one historic moment when Miss Nichols, in desperate need of money to keep the play going, offered Mr. Pitou a half-interest in Abie’s Irish Rose for $5,000. It is my impression that he was quite willing to give Miss Nichols $5,000 purely as a token of friendship, for he needed her good will. Nevertheless, in order to make some show of putting things on a purely business basis, he agreed to go to the Saturday matinée, look at the play again, and then make his decision. Theatrical decisions, however, then as now, always hang by the proverbial thread. This mighty decision was not made by him, but by Mrs. Pitou instead, and I was an accidental witness to it.