by Moss Hart
The company stirred uneasily, but they were as helpless as the character man. Actors who need their jobs are defenseless against a director. They rose from their chairs all over the room and came to the front of the hall. Mr. Dean lit a cigarette carefully and settled back in his chair. “Do go ahead, old chap,” he said amiably. “Do exactly what you did before. We are all agog.”
There was a blood-curdling pause and for a moment or two it seemed as though the character man was going to protest, but actually I do not think he heard very much of what had been said, for his complexion was a dull gray now and his head suddenly bent over the script in his hands like some treed animal anxious to have the dogs called off and the killing over with. He had, of course, no idea of what he had been doing before, and under the circumstances he could not be blamed for the absurdity of what he was doing now—but it was acting of the most embarrassing kind.
Fortunately, it was soon over. Mr. Dean did not interrupt. He had made his point, sadistic as it was, and he did not comment afterward.
“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and walked over to the stage manager’s table.
The actors gathered up their things and filed silently out. I watched the stage manager, waiting for him to present my letter to Mr. Dean, but he had forgotten, as well he might have, all about me. Mr. Dean was already out the door by the time I grabbed up the letter from the table and ran after him. I overtook him in the corridor on the way to the elevator and silently held the letter out to him. Like the others, I was too plain scared to address him directly. He waved me away as though I were an insect buzzing about his head and strode on toward the elevator. He was trapped at the elevator doors, however, for though he pushed the button angrily the elevator did not appear, and he could no longer deny the fact of my presence or the letter I still mutely held before him. There was no one else in the corridor but myself and the terrible Mr. Dean. Without a word he took the letter from me, ripped it open, glanced at the contents, and for the first time I felt those glacial eyes turn directly upon me.
“We want only English actors for this play,” he said coldly, crumpling the letter and letting it fall to the floor.
“But I just played an English part, Mr. Dean,” I replied with a bravery I did not know I possessed.
“Well, you must have done it very badly,” said Mr. Dean in the pleasantest tone I had heard him use all afternoon. And with that the elevator appeared and he stepped into it. I did not follow him in—my bravery did not extend quite that far. I waited for the next trip down.
It was beginning to grow dark as I started back to the New Amsterdam Theatre at 42nd Street to report to Irving Morrison. I walked slowly, the lights of Broadway coming alive all around me—and I came to a bitter conclusion. Mr. Dean’s conduct had been inhuman, but he was right—the character man was an actor of little talent who long since should have faced up to that fact. Had he done so early enough, he would not have been exposed to the indignity and humiliation I had just watched him suffer. In terms of strict justice he deserved it.
Though I found it hard to excuse Mr. Dean’s behavior, I could after a fashion understand it. There is something maddening about mediocrity that calls forth the worst in those who are forced to deal with it. What sort of brainless vanity had caused the character man to persist in a profession where his own limitations must have long since been apparent even to himself? Was it just plain indolence or was it the very haphazardness of an actor’s life that had brought him in his sixties to the sorry moment I had just witnessed? With his good looks and commanding presence he might easily have done very well in some other field had he made the choice early enough. Why had he not done so? Or, like myself, had he had “beginner’s luck,” and with not much else than a desire to act and an adolescent infatuation for the theatre, had he set forth long ago on the path that had led to this afternoon’s deplorable failure? Had it been as unthinking and foolish as that? For back of this afternoon lay the failure and waste of an entire life, and it was failure that lacked the redeeming quality or the saving grace of aspiration. Almost surely he must have known long ago that he was second-rate and that the shoddy rewards the theatre offers to the second-rate do not compensate for the humiliations that go along with it.
Somehow I made a complete and terrible identification with the character man. I do not know if it is true of others, but all my life I have been prey to this curious psychological quirk. If I am in the middle of writing a play and happen to attend the opening night of a play that has gone badly, I am likely to make a swift and thoroughgoing identification with both the author and the play, even though the playwright may be completely unknown to me. I have even made a melancholy identification with someone in a field quite unrelated to my own, and then spent a depressing few hours afterward bringing myself back to reality.
Now I made a complete identification with the character man, and in the immediacy of the fear that clutched my heart I felt an irrevocable “There but for the grace of God go I” and I could not shake that fear off. It took hold of me completely, and for the first time I faced up to the grim possibility that a passion for the theatre and a deep desire to be an actor might not be enough. I had taken both these things for granted for so long a time that to make a stern assessment of just how much talent I had for acting was almost more than I could bear to do. I do not think I could have done so at all without that pitiable figure of the character man still so clearly before me; but the truth I was resisting, the truth I was so reluctant to come to, the actual truth when I allowed myself to know it, was simply that, in spite of a lucky beginning, in spite of passion and dedication, I would never be more than a passable actor and at best an adequate one—and there is no more damning word to apply to acting than “adequate.”
It was a conclusion I did not come to easily. I was wrestling with a dream that had satisfied the needs of my childhood, and the elements of fantasy attached to that dream ran deep and strong. To give it up, to let it go, was to relinquish a secret part of myself that had sustained me through the years. Without it a new fear settled over me. I felt suddenly more alone than I had ever felt before—without the theatre as the goal that gave direction and point to my days, I felt engulfed by a world that was alien to me, a world I felt I was unequal to cope with. All the anxieties and insecurities of my years and my nature seemed to rise up in defense of the dream I had cherished for so long and that must have been a substitute and a symbol for so much. But I suddenly and sharply knew once and for all that however I remained attached to the theatre, it would not be as an actor.
THERE ARE certain crucial moments in life when the emotions one feels come perilously close to the mawkish, but the pain of those moments is not any the less acute because the moment itself happens to be a small or an unexalted one. I walked on, overwhelmed by a sense of sorrow and personal loss, and by the time I reached the New Amsterdam Theatre I knew that the dream of being an actor was behind me—that if I was to be a part of the only world I cared anything about, I must find some other way. And I knew now how bleak those prospects were.
As I waited for the elevator to come down, I wondered if it would not be wiser to walk out of the lobby and get the smell of the theatre out of my nostrils for good and all. But I remained standing there, watching the indicator as it marked the slow downward count of the floors. The elevator doors opened and a young man stepped out into the lobby. His name was Edward Chodorov, and let no one say that luck does not play a large part in the fashioning of any career. There is not the faintest hint of the mystic in my nature, but I have seen the large role that coincidence and chance play in all of our lives too clearly demonstrated to reject as mere superstition that portion of our destiny or fate called luck. It is as inexplicable as fate itself and as inexorable.
Would I not have gone on to write plays if Chodorov had not stepped out of the elevator at that particular moment? Of course. I am not suggesting anything so foolish as that. But Chodorov walked i
nto my life at a moment when a different corner turned, a chance meeting missed, might very well have changed the whole course my life was to take from that time on. It is a prime example of what I mean by luck, that I did not take the elevator up to see Irving Morrison that evening but instead walked out of the lobby with Edward Chodorov—and into six years of apprenticeship and work that I am convinced made a fundamental difference in all my years in the theatre that were to follow.
Edward Chodorov had drifted into the Pitou office during my days of glory as office boy and we had hit it off immediately. He was exactly my age but I had never met anyone like him before. Though he had presumably come into the office as an actor looking for a job, he did not talk like an actor and he certainly did not look like one. He had a copy of the American Mercury stuffed into his overcoat pocket, and under his arm he carried a large volume, in German, on the influence of Max Reinhardt on the world theatre. No actor I had ever seen before had carried such props, and from the moment he sauntered in, full of easy assurance and with a carefully tailored avant-garde manner, he made a formidable impression on me.
He talked of Meyerhold and Georg Kaiser and Jacques Copeau—names that were utterly new to my provincial ears—and in subsequent visits he demolished my own heroes of the day with a cascade of invective that was wonderful to listen to. His attitude toward the theatre was as unsentimental and cynical as mine was stage-struck and hero-worshipping, and when I had recovered from his monumental disdain of almost everything I had heretofore held sacred, it was as though a fresh gust of wind had blown through the musty pages of the theatre magazines I still pored over, and I could never look at them in the same way again.
He had taste and wit and a gift for exploding pretense in a quick, bold comic way that dissolved me into helpless laughter, and he dispensed these wonders before my newly opened eyes and ears with the expert ease of a circus barker performing in front of a country yokel. There is no doubt that I was a flattering audience and there is no question that he enjoyed showing off before me. At the same time the narrow horizons that had constituted the theatre for me up until then were being widened and enlarged almost without my being aware of it.
We had not yet become close friends at that time for the reason that he had a faculty of suddenly appearing and then disappearing again quite as suddenly for months at a time, so that any kind of sustained relationship was impossible. But I always enjoyed his reappearance and the gallows humor with which he related some exploit or other of his own making that had turned out a shambles, as they invariably did. He had a wonderful Don Quixote quality about him always, and I fitted into the role of his Sancho Panza with no trouble at all. He had just returned from one of his periodic disappearances and had been up to the Pitou office to see me—unaware, of course, of The Beloved Bandit and all that had happened since. I filled in the details for him, including what had happened that afternoon and my present despair as to just what to do next.
He listened with an interested eagerness that was one of the unexpected charms of a man who liked to talk as much as he did, and when I had finished he said explosively, “Time! Time! That’s what we need—Time! We need to escape being swallowed up. That’s what we’ve got to fight for—Time!”
It was typical of him, and it was touching as well, that he should include me in this battle cry, for I knew that he rather looked down his nose at my own timid theatrical ambitions. His own ideas for himself were a good deal more grandiose. Though he had never spelled them out exactly, I had gathered that he was to be a combination of Max Reinhardt, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Edmond Jones and the Shuberts. The pivot on which his enthusiasms swung would vary from time to time, but there remained always the grand scale, the large canvas, and now as ever he was equal to the occasion.
Eddie’s scheme of things invariably included biting off more than he could chew and a deep aversion to anything approximating logic. His appetite for the implausible and the audacious remained unchastened by experience, and what he was proposing now was quite in key with everything else about him.
“A man offered me a job yesterday,” he was saying, “and I told him I’d let him know by tonight. It’s to take over and direct a little-theatre group at the Labor Temple. It doesn’t pay much, but this man owns a summer camp and he hinted if I made good he might consider me for the job as social director at his camp this summer. See what I mean?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
“You’re not using your head,” he said and shook an impatient finger under my nose. “We need time—time! Once you step out of the theatre you never get back inside—you mustn’t step backward—there’s no escape from the civilians—you know that. Now, we’ll take over this little-theatre group together—do a group of one-act plays—you direct three and I’ll direct three—and this summer I’ll go to his camp as social director and you’ll be my assistant. See? Three solid months in the country with a salary and all expenses paid. It’ll give us time—time to think, to plan.”
“But did you ever direct a little-theatre group before?” I asked a little breathlessly.
“No,” he answered. “What’s that got to do with it?” He looked at me eagerly, his eyes alight with pleasure at the prospects of windmills in the distance.
“Well, neither have I,” I said. “I don’t know any more about it than you do.”
Again the impatient finger was being shaken under my nose. “You’ll get nowhere with that attitude, my boy,” he sighed, “in the theatre or out of it. We must improvise—improvise!—play it by ear. These people are amateurs.”
“But so are we in that field, Eddie,” I protested.
“And who’s going to tell them that,” he cried triumphantly, “unless you do. All you have to do tonight is to sit there and look bored. You can do that, can’t you?”
“And what about afterward—what happens when we have to get up on our feet and put these plays on? Won’t they catch on to us?”
He laughed aloud. “Right now,” he said, “standing here unemployed on the corner of Forty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, either one of us is a better director than Philip Moeller or Robert Milton. Want me to prove it?”
“No, no,” I said hastily, for I well knew he could convince me that the moon was green. “Just tell me what to do so I don’t make a fool of myself. Perhaps if we told them the truth…”
“The first thing you’ve got to do,” he said severely, “is to stop being so damned ethical. All right—we’ve never directed little theatres before. Well, we’re doing it now. Why advertise it? We just go ahead and do it. The point is,” he went on, “you can’t hock moral scruples. If you could, we’d all be eating more regularly, and you’re not exactly in a position to be this finicky, are you?”
That settled it. Actually, it was nothing so high-minded as moral scruples that held me back, but plain, ordinary cowardice. Though I vaguely knew the mechanics of directing, it was one thing to have observed Priestly Morrison directing but quite another to get up on my own feet and do it myself. Furthermore, I completely lacked Eddie’s abiding faith that he could master whatever situation arose, or talk himself out of it—sideways, backward, or straight down the middle. Yet the point he made was unanswerable—time to avoid being swallowed up; time not to turn the wrong way and be unable to get back—that was the thing that mattered most now, and in spite of my fears, I knew that I must follow my friend Don Quixote toward the windmills.
I watched him take over the little-theatre group at the Labor Temple that evening, lost in admiration for the brilliant way in which he convinced not only everyone there but himself as well that he knew exactly what he was talking about, which of course he did not. Much of what he said lay well beyond the realm of common sense, but even I, who knew that most of the time he didn’t have a clue as to what was going to come out next, was sometimes swept along by the authority with which he conveyed to the spellbound little group a skill and a knowledge he did not possess at all. It was a bravura performance of
audaciousness and pure gall that made it very hard for me to keep looking bored as I had been instructed to do, and when at the end of a solid hour of talk he finally sat down, I was hard put not to join in the applause that followed.
He winked at me as he cupped his hands to light a cigarette, and if I had not actually known what frauds we were, I might almost have believed, as everyone else in the room seemed to, that two young Max Reinhardts had, by some miracle, come to take over their little-theatre group. This country has reason to be grateful that Chodorov’s talents did not take a turn toward the career of revivalist preacher. Had they done so, our rivers, fields and streams would be full of his converts being baptized in a faith that he improvised as he led them to the river banks and that he knew no more about than he did little-theatre directing. He could hypnotize a group of people into believing almost anything he wanted them to believe, and more often than not, in the process of doing so, he also succeeded in completely hypnotizing himself.
As we walked back to the subway station later that evening, well satisfied with the way the first meeting had gone, I was a little startled to hear Eddie saying, “The impact on our culture of the little-theatre movement is very possibly the beginning of a renaissance in our literature as well.”
I almost turned around to see whom he was talking to, for I could not believe he was addressing this balderdash to me, his friend and partner in crime. But he was. For the moment he had quite succeeded in believing what he was saying himself and he would go on believing it till the moment when, as it always did, his own sense of humor came to his rescue and unhypnotized him. Until then all I could do was nod and try not to get hypnotized myself.
* * *
Two evenings later I conducted my first rehearsal.