Act One

by Moss Hart

  Priestly Morrison, an actor of great charm and quite a good director in his own right, was engaged to stage the play, and I suspected almost at once that he thought The Beloved Bandit was absolute nonsense. In those days, however, directors did not pick and choose or wait around for a play they liked or respected. They took more or less what came their way, and since the theatre was in a wildly flourishing state, it was common practice for a director to do as many as four or five plays in a season. If one or two of them were decent efforts, or if one of the five happened to turn out a hit, that was all to the good—and Onward and Upward with the Arts for the following season. Directors did not occupy the hallowed place they do now in the theatre—that place was the playwright’s alone.

  In spite of my suspicions, Priestly Morrison did nothing to diminish Mrs. Harris’ or Mr. Pitou’s enthusiasm—he merely nodded and smiled at their grandiose plans for the play, and during the slight rewriting he demanded of me, he was scrupulously polite and noncommittal.

  In ten days from the fateful morning I had handed Mr. Pitou the third act, the company had been brought back to New York and the play was in rehearsal. Joseph Regan, an actor whose performance on any given night might have been presented as an appropriate gift to two people celebrating their wooden wedding anniversary, remained the star; but an entirely new cast was engaged. I was allowed the morning off to attend the first reading, but thereafter I remained in the office until four o’clock in the afternoon, when both Mr. Pitou and I would ceremoniously attend rehearsals.

  It must have been somewhat bewildering to the cast, or at the very least slightly unorthodox, to see the author of the play called to across the rehearsal hall and sent out to get a package of cigarettes or a container of coffee for the producer. But whatever they thought of this curious arrangement, they kept it to themselves and were always unfailingly kind to me. No actor, not even Joseph Regan himself, ever asked me to run out and get him coffee or cigarettes—a small consideration, but one which I was grateful for nevertheless. Only the stage manager, a hardened soul whose name escapes me, took an exceedingly dim view of the entire proceedings and not even Priestly Morrison’s unflagging good humor could make him feel that anything but disaster lay ahead. His displeasure with the play was not verbal—he would merely emit long, doleful sighs from time to time, like a sheep dog settling down in front of the fireplace for a long nap—and when questioned about his heavy state of gloom he would simply raise his eyes heavenward and tap the manuscript of the play with a finger of doom.

  In spite of our dolorous stage manager, rehearsals were indomitably cheerful. Mrs. Harris did not appear at rehearsals until the first run-through, and under the spell of her delighted and ringing laughter, the actors outdid themselves and the play seemed to catch fire and spring to life. Even Mr. Pitou on that splendid afternoon forgot to send me out for coffee, and Mrs. Harris shook my hand and prophesied a rosy future for me. Three days later the company, the producers and the author left for the opening performance in Rochester, New York, all of them as usual magnificently optimistic and each one filled with hope and dreams of glory.

  THERE ARE many “firsts” in one’s life when one is young and at the beginning of things; but there are certain “firsts” that remain forever memorable. I had never been outside New York City itself. I had never ridden in a Pullman train or eaten in a dining car, and I had never stayed overnight in a hotel. All of these things now took place in glittering succession.

  When the train roared out of Grand Central station and emerged from the tunnel at 96th Street, I sat in my seat at the window and watched the squalid tenements rush past me, in one of which, though I could not see it, I had lived all my life. I have never emerged from the tunnel since then without thinking of that first ride. I sat there not quite daring to hope that the time would come when I would never have to return to the Bronx and the poverty that dulled and demeaned each day.

  In the dining car I sat opposite Mrs. Harris and Mr. Pitou, and sensed what it was like to order the food that tickled one’s palate at a particular moment without thinking of what it cost. And when I settled into my room at the hotel in Rochester, I sat for a long moment on the bed drinking in a joyous sense of privacy that I had never before experienced. I would sleep alone in a room that night for the first time in my life. I did not know until that moment how starved I had been for privacy, what a precious refreshment to the spirit it is; there is no such indulgence in the realms of poverty, and only those who have lived without it can know what a prime luxury privacy is. From that moment on I began to fight savagely for the blessed solace of a door closing behind me in a room of my own. It was a long time before I could rouse myself sufficiently to leave and go to the theatre where the dress rehearsal was about to begin.

  The play was in only one set, a prime requisite of any Augustus Pitou production, and since the scope of the action was limited and the props almost primitively simple (another requisite), it was taken for granted that the dress rehearsal would be a simple and smooth one. I have learned since that the gods who hover over dress rehearsals are perverse, deceptive and wildly unpredictable. The most complicated shows sometimes move with a blessed smoothness, and the simplest ones, the ones in which nothing could conceivably go wrong, turn without warning into hell’s own acre. I have learned, too, that a play with which everything is going to go well, a play which is destined to be a hit almost from the moment the curtain rises, is preceded in its out-of-town birth pangs by a series of unrelated but inevitable omens that I have come to look upon with superstitious awe when they appear and a grim foreboding when they do not.

  When the tide is running right, the room service at the hotel is swift, the food piping hot and delicious, and the waiters silent and matchlessly efficient. The telephone service and the bellboys are expert and bright, the elevator doors swing magically open without a moment of waiting as you press the button, and the traffic lights turn green as you step to the curb.

  Skulk lightly around the outskirts of a play that is in trouble in its out-of-town tryout and you will hear the agonized pleas to room service that the order was given over an hour ago, God damn it! You will notice the glazed eye, its owner already late for rehearsal, watching the dials of the elevator indicator as it remains stuck at the top floor; and you will hear the waiter, his dirty thumb in the plate as he serves the soup, discourse at great length on what is wrong with the theatre. There will be no porters to carry the bags up to the room as you check in. The telephone operators will take a “No Disturb” call as a challenge to their ingenuity as to what early hour to wake you up, and, of course, there will be a taxi strike on and a convention in town. There is nothing more painful to an author with a play in trouble out of town than the spectacle of middle-aged men with fezzes on their heads and noisemakers in their hands, drunkenly greeting him in the hotel corridor as he makes his way desperately to his room for an all-night session of rewriting, knowing full well that the voices of this little group singing “Sweet Adeline” and “By the Old Mill Stream” will vibrate through the halls until the small hours of the morning.

  Not all of these omens were in operation when we arrived, nor would I have recognized them if they were. But the dress rehearsal that night was chaos of a kind to give anyone pause. Nothing went right. The theatre curtain jammed going up as the lights dimmed, and the set, of a hideous green color that I have never seen duplicated, buckled during the first five minutes of dialogue and nearly brained the character man. There was an unholy wait until it was secured and made fast, and the entrance of the star, trilling a lilting Irish ballad, was somewhat marred as he tripped over a stage brace and sprawled full length, all six Irish feet of him, smack into the fireplace. As he picked himself up, cursing, the rain which had been coming down in torrents all day turned into hail, and for the next half-hour not a word was to be heard—a small mercy for which I was not then sufficiently grateful.

  Nothing worked. If an actor went to open a door, it stuck. And at o
ne point, when the leading lady, with a loud cry of passion, rushed to the window to open it and call after the star, the window came off the frame and she was left standing with the entire window in her hands. It was a nightmare of the proverbial bad dress rehearsal. By the second act, the actors were dithering about the stage, hopelessly lost in their lines, hollowly waiting for the next calamity to descend, and sure enough, Joseph Regan, making his second-act entrance through the same door, tripped again over the same stage brace—only this time the fireplace crumpled under the impact and fell in a shambles all around him. Even Priestly Morrison’s unfailing good spirits and courtly manners deserted him at this point and he stalked up the aisle muttering imprecations against the Irish and Irish tenors in particular.

  Only Mrs. Harris remained unperturbed. She sat there, unwavering, as each successive disaster on the stage made the play seem a mass of pure absurdity; leaning over to the perspiring Mr. Pitou from time to time, she would say quietly, “I’m glad it’s going this way, Gus. A bad dress rehearsal means a good opening night. I’ve never seen it fail.”

  Through the years I have heard that phrase repeated over and over, and it is my firm conviction hardened by experience that a bad dress rehearsal with rare exceptions invariably means a ragged opening night. It is one of those theatrical shibboleths that have no basis whatever in fact; but I did not know it then and I clung to the good cheer that Mrs. Harris exuded.

  Somehow the third act dragged through with only the minor casualty of the juvenile being hit in the eye by a flying piece of teacup that shattered as he banged it down on the table, and when the bleeding subsided, the play proceeded uneventfully until the end. Mr. Regan did not trip over the stage brace in his third-act entrance, for the simple reason that it had been removed during the intermission, though the stagehand holding up the door was plainly and incongruously visible and the damaged fireplace still swayed dangerously every so often. It fell again with a tremendous crash just as the curtain came down, rousing Priestly Morrison from the depths of his seat, where he had sunk so low that only the top of his hat was visible. He uncurled himself slowly and came up the aisle to Mr. Pitou and Mrs. Harris. He raised his hat to them both and said, “I’m not going to give any notes to the actors tonight. I’m going to church early tomorrow morning and offer up a little prayer. I suggest everyone do the same.” He bowed slightly and disappeared up the dark aisle.

  Mrs. Harris rose from her seat and laughed. “This is how I like ’em,” she said. “Terrible at the dress rehearsal, great on the opening night. I’ve never seen it fail.” Her golden opportunity lay just ahead!

  We walked back to the hotel through the sleeping city, too tired and exhausted for even a cup of coffee. I have often walked back to my hotel through a dark city after a bad dress rehearsal and looked up at the shuttered and peaceful windows of its inhabitants, some of them no doubt likely to be part of the opening-night audience the following evening. I have wondered if they ever thought enviously of the rewards both financial and otherwise that come with great success in the theatre. I have wondered, too, if they ever glimpsed the other side of the coin—the tremendous toll the theatre takes in return in nerves, in strain, in stamina—that it takes almost as much as it gives and that those who court its wayward favor must be made of stern stuff indeed.

  Now I turned the key in the lock of my hotel bedroom and looked at the bed with something like alarm. The privacy I so longed for seemed a dubious gift right now; though I was thoroughly exhausted, I felt wildly awake. That terrible “second wind” was gathering momentum and I knew that sleep was going to be impossible. In those days, sleeping pills, that basic out-of-town necessity of the theatrical profession, had not yet been invented; or if they had, I had never heard of them. I left the light on and did not even bother to undress.

  I paced up and down the room and thought of the dread consequences for me if the play were to fail. I did not give a damn about the play—my own name was not even listed as author—and I felt absolutely no pride or sense of ownership in it. What I cared about was losing my job, and I knew Mr. Pitou well enough by this time to know that he would ultimately place the blame not on his misjudgment or Mrs. Harris’, but on the trick I had played upon him. I did not particularly blame him—I blamed myself and the insane moment when I had launched blindly and unthinkingly into the whole idiotic business. I castigated myself for my own folly, until I fell asleep with my clothes still on and dreamed a sweet dream that the play was a glorious success.

  The early morning sunlight streaming through the windows brought me back to reality. It was a bitter cold winter’s day, but at least the sun was shining. Perhaps they would be grateful to be out of the cold tonight, and in a warm theatre they might be a generous and receptive audience. I was already beginning to count on small omens.

  There was an eleven o’clock rehearsal at the theatre, and this time, to do Mrs. Harris full justice, the proceedings on the stage resembled something more closely akin to sanity than they had last night. Nothing, of course, could change the nauseous color of the set, but the stage brace had been set farther back of the door, so that Joseph Regan at least remained upright each time he entered the doorway. The window was bolted into the frame, and the juvenile and the character man, though a little the worse for wear, met with no further mishaps. A curious hypnotic state now fell upon everyone connected with The Beloved Bandit, actors and producers alike; and I have seen the same thing happen often since then. Because the horror of last night was not repeated, or was at least greatly lessened, everyone concerned seemed to be utterly blinded to the deficiencies and lacks of the play itself. The mere fact that the play proceeded from one act to another without disaster seemed to lull all minds, including my own, into a sense of sweet euphoria that dissipated any kind of valid judgment or even plain common sense. Before the rehearsal was half over, witless optimism was again flowing through the theatre like May wine, and since everyone was drunk with it, Mrs. Harris was being congratulated on all sides for her shrewd perception and her unshakable faith in the play.

  Before dinner that evening, in Mrs. Harris’ room, I had my first martini. It was thought proper that I should, since a congratulatory toast was being raised to me; but I had never had hard liquor before, and the second martini made me quite drunk. I remember a great many congratulatory toasts being drunk all around, including a special one raised to himself by Mr. Pitou for having discovered Robert Arnold Conrad. We were all in a state of ebullient good spirits as we started for the theatre. In my mildly drunken state I thought the audience looked delightful as I stood in the lobby watching them file into the theatre, and for a brief moment I had a drunken fantasy of rising from my seat in the third row of the orchestra as the final curtain fell and making a graceful little speech to the audience, climaxing with that deathless sentence, “Ladies and gentlemen—I am Robert Arnold Conrad.”

  I took my seat just as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose. The audience seemed slightly stunned as the set stood revealed in its full ghastliness, but there was only the slightest murmur among them and they settled back generously to enjoy themselves. In the first fifteen minutes of a play an audience is the most malleable group in the world. Give them the slightest token that they are going to be entertained or moved and they become a receptive instrument that both playwright and actors can play upon at will. Then a curious thing happens. Somehow at the end of that first fifteen minutes an invisible bell seems to ring in the theatre, and if the play has not captured them by then en masse, they become a disparate group of people who are never welded together again. One can almost feel the moment when it arrives, and the inner ear can hear that bell tolling soundlessly.

  In the first fifteen minutes of The Beloved Bandit they sat pleasantly enough, hoping against hope (or so it seemed to me) that they had not been drawn out of their homes on a bitter cold night only to be made fools of. Had the play had the slightest merit or even a redeeming scene or two to lift it out of the mire of its own
monotony, I believe they would have responded immediately. As it was, they sat there in utter and complete silence. I do not know of any silence more devastating. I have sat through it more than once and it is a searing experience. Yet I have always marveled at the infinite politeness of an American audience. When it is perfectly plain to them that they have been sold down the river, that they have paid their money and they have been humbugged and are in for an evening of crushing boredom into the bargain, they do not become impolite or unruly—they sit there in a rather apathetic silence, and as the curtain falls on each act, they stride heavily up the aisle, the hope written plain on their faces that the next act will be better.

  They have in addition a kind of idiot genius as a group; they can detect falsity and reject the spurious with a lightning-like precision, without knowing why, of course, or saying a word to each other. But they are the surest barometer of a play’s weakness or an actor’s inadequacy that I know of. They knew what was wrong with The Beloved Bandit before the first act was half over. It was a fake. It was a composite of all the plays Anne Nichols had written for Fiske O’Hara, and while I doubt that any of those efforts would have won an accolade from a student of play-writing, they were at least true to their genre. Of their kind, they at least had the virtue of honesty—and The Beloved Bandit was a dishonest facsimile.