Act One

by Moss Hart

  I have not entirely forgotten to this very day the agony of having to walk out onto a stage and play for an entire evening a part that, as Eddie quite properly said, I was ludicrous in. It has made me suffer and sympathize with actors who are miscast in a play, for they invariably know it, and it can only be the urgency of meeting the rent and telephone bills that enables them to do it for more than the two performances which were all that I had to suffer through.

  Nevertheless, by some miracle of unknowingness, even by amateur standards, the audience sat solemn and polite throughout the two evenings we performed Ghosts, and though very little applause greeted the final curtain, at least laughter, that nightmare sound to even amateur actors’ ears, did not punctuate the proceedings. At the end of the second and last performance, I sat wiping the make-up off my face with so great a sense of relief that even the thought of the summer job, which was never very far out of my mind, was momentarily gone in the pleasure of knowing that Ibsen and I had parted company forever.

  One thing was clear at any rate. I had evidently been wise to put the idea of acting behind me—to fail as dismally as I had failed these past two nights was a depressing enough proof that I had been right—but it was a small consolation. Wiping the marks of the wretched Oswald off my face, I could see the want ads of the New York Times in front of my eyes, and once more I decided no—there would be no turning back, whatever happened. Though exactly what would happen, except simple starvation, I failed to see.

  I was suddenly aware of Eddie’s grinning face in the mirror in front of me and I felt his hand fall heavily on my shoulder. “I bring you incontrovertible proof that He who watches over Israel does not slumber,” he said, talking into the mirror. And as I turned around to look up at him he whispered, “We got the job!”

  Sure enough, the gentleman who owned the summer camp was coming into the room smiling, not glowering. “You liked it?” I asked ingenuously.

  “It was hopeless,” he replied, still smiling, “but it was Ibsen, that’s the point. I like a young fellow who makes this kind of mistake—that’s the kind of fellow we want on the staff at Camp Utopia.” And he held out his hand to me.

  This somewhat enigmatic compliment was an excellent clue to the character of my future employer. William J. Perleman was a would-be playwright, not yet produced, and part owner of a summer camp, to both of which endeavors he brought artistic and intellectual pretensions, and no talent of any kind whatever for either enterprise. Yet in his bumbling way he was a sweet-tempered man and certainly a most forgiving one, considering the travail Eddie’s inexperience as a social director was to put him through. He shook my hand again warmly, and after another complimentary word or two to the effect that “large mistakes were the only kind to make,” he smiled his way out.

  Almost before I could realize the wonderful turn for the better my fortunes had taken, I became aware that I was suddenly ravenously, wolfishly hungry. As always, at a moment of triumph or disaster, the first return to reality was announced by my stomach. “How much money have you got?” I asked Eddie.

  “Three dollars,” he answered.

  “I’ve got two,” I said, throwing caution to the winds. “Let’s go out and eat all we can get for five dollars.”

  “Get the rest of Oswald off your face,” said Eddie, “I’m going to treat you to a bottle of wine.”

  Jubilant, I made short work of the last traces of Oswald and I was even a little more than jubilant very shortly afterward, since Eddie’s idea of a bottle of wine was changed to straight gin by the time we sat down in the speakeasy around the corner from the Labor Temple.

  By the third gin I was so murderously hungry and riotously drunk that in order to get the food on the table as quickly as possible, I cheerfully agreed to all the lunatic plans Eddie was suggesting for our debut as social directors. At that time, one could get a really mountainous amount of food for very little money, and I ate the greater portion of it myself, hardly stopping to interject a word or to object to the utter nonsense that Eddie was spouting. By the end of the meal we were both sufficiently sober for Eddie to discuss in more sensible and less grandiose terms our plans for the summer, which was actually then only about six weeks away.

  “The greatest asset a social director can have,” he said, “is a stockpile of special material … comedy skits, songs … especially the newest stuff from the musical comedies. It’s a must, we’ve got to have it!”

  “How do you get it?” I asked. “We can’t afford to go and see the shows.”

  “There are ways,” he answered mysteriously.

  “How?” I demanded. “If we can’t get to see the shows, how do we get it?”

  “Go home and get some sleep,” he answered, still with an air of mystery. “Get some sleep and I’ll show you how we get it. We’ll start collecting the stuff tomorrow night.” And that was all I was able to make him say on the subject the rest of the evening.

  * * *

  There were indeed ways, as I was to learn in the following weeks, or at least Eddie’s ways, of collecting the necessary material for a social director’s portfolio. One of them was for us to arrive on the sidewalk in front of the theatre of a reigning musical comedy hit just before intermission time. We then mingled with the audience as they emerged into the lobby at the end of the first act, picked up a program that someone inevitably dropped and left on the lobby floor, and brandishing the program conspicuously in front of us, walked back into the theatre with the audience to see the second act.

  Though this system restricted the amount of material we could steal, the authors of musical comedies and revues invariably save some of their heavy ammunition for the second act, and there were always reprises of songs from the first act. There were a few theatres, of course, that issued intermission checks to the audience to stop just such banditry, but there were not many of these. The New Amsterdam Theatre, where the Follies was playing, issued these checks and moreover kept a sharp lookout for intermission crashers, but I knew the ticket taker and he allowed us to pass through not once but several times. The Follies was very necessary for us to see, for it contained not only a large amount of special material in skits, but Fanny Brice as well, of whom I was to do an impersonation for several summers thereafter.

  After each show, it was our practice to go straight to Eddie’s house and between us piece together all the material we had stolen from the show with the help of a pocket flashlight and notes scribbled on the program. It was quite astonishing how accurate our thievery became after a time. We were very often able to piece together whole sketches word for word, and what we couldn’t remember we wrote ourselves.

  There were three new musicals opening that spring just before we were to leave for the camp, and to pilfer from these in their entirety Eddie had an even more ingenious scheme, for he felt it was vital to his prestige as social director to be able to present material from the newer shows on Broadway.

  His theory was that on an opening night the stage doorman could not yet possibly know the chorus boys by sight, since the show itself was but barely installed in the theatre. Therefore, just before the half-hour was called on the opening night we were to brush past the doorman with a hurried and excited “hello” or “good luck” as though we were part of the chorus, cross the stage, and go out the pass door from the stage into the theatre. We were then to hurry down to the men’s room, lock ourselves in a booth, and remain there until we heard the overture begin, when we would walk upstairs and stand at the back and see the entire show. Eddie’s other contention was that there was always so much excitement on an opening night and so many hangers-on standing about in the back of the orchestra that we would never be noticed.

  He turned out to be correct on both counts: the stage doorman grunted a hello as we brushed past him, and no one paid the slightest attention to us as we stood in the back—but it took a good deal of passionate argument to overcome my initial timidity and even outright threats on Eddie’s part to get me to screw up
my courage sufficiently to brush past the first doorman. It all worked like a charm, however, and was well worth the anguish I went through.

  I was greatly surprised all those hectic few weeks by the industry and concentration Eddie showed in scrupulously planning each week of the camp season, which was to last from Decoration Day until Labor Day. It was unlike him to maintain a pitch of excitement about anything once the windmill had been tilted at, and I was immensely relieved to see him buckle down and set a definite schedule for each play and each musical we were to do.

  This singular enthusiasm and industry did not, regrettably, persist past Decoration Day; for just before we were to leave, Eddie received an offer to join a company that was to make a tour of South Africa in the fall. The appeal to his sense of the spectacular that the very words “South Africa” made was immediate and profound. He promptly lost all interest in the summer job and went through with it, I believe, only because it was a way of marking time until the fall.

  Moreover, with the usual theatrical nepotism, he had engaged as other members of our social staff his sister Belle, a cousin, Eleanor Audley, and three of the members of his group from the Labor Temple. All of them were not only as inexperienced as we ourselves, but were to remain throughout the summer his willing and adoring slaves, taking his indolence for the musings of an artist and his pulverizing lack of organization as the unmistakable mark of genius.

  * * *

  It had been a necessity between the end of my employment at the Labor Temple and the beginning of the camp season to take a temporary job of any sort to fill in the time and earn some money, and I took the first job that came along. It was not a very likely job and I lasted exactly a week at it. I was no better at being a floorwalker at Macy’s than I had been at playing Oswald. Not only did my mind wander alarmingly, so that I found myself walking out into 34th Street one afternoon for a breath of air (an unheard-of thing for a floorwalker to do while on duty, I was told), but the collecting and writing up of the material we were gathering was spilling over into the days as well as the nights.

  Very often we were unable to finish setting down at night all that might be useful to us from the show we had seen that evening, and it was the kind of work that had to be done by both of us together, for what one of us failed to remember, the other always did. Macy’s solved the difficulty for us by firing me at the end of the first week, and I then conceived the bright idea of getting a job that required only night work, sleeping a few hours during the day and having the rest of the day and evening free. Eddie was skeptical, but it turned out there was plenty of night work to be had.

  One of the astonishing things about the astounding City of New York is that it contains a large population of people who work only at night. A great portion of the city’s daytime life is supported by these night people, who keep the necessary circulation flowing through the city’s hidden veins at night, so that it comes alive each dawn when other millions of day people continue the city’s life, largely unaware of those others who all through the night have made ready for them.

  The job I selected was at the New York Times, classifying and routing to their proper departments the handwritten want ads that had passed over the Times’ counter during the day. The hours, from eleven P.M. until seven A.M., fitted our requirements perfectly, allowing me to go straight to the Times from the theatre, be home by eight thirty in the morning, sleep until one or two in the afternoon, and be at Eddie’s house by three o’clock to start correlating the material, until it was time to be in front of whatever theatre we were crashing at intermission time that evening.

  After two or three weeks of this I found myself falling asleep in the subway and riding past my station almost every morning, leaning against whatever I could find that was fairly soft and falling promptly to sleep. Strangely enough, I found this rather rugged schedule no hardship at all. For one thing, there was something poetic and quite magical about the city at night which I deeply enjoyed being part of. Our lunch or supper hour at the Times was between the hours of three and four o’clock in the morning. I would eat as quickly as possible, and with another fellow who worked beside me, walk the streets until it was time to get back to work. I have no gift for describing the peculiar quality of magic the city possesses at that hour of the night; but it contains an elusive magic and wonder of its own that is never glimpsed, I am certain, except by night people such as I was then myself.

  Though my eyes kept closing constantly, almost without my being aware of it, so that I sometimes would go to sleep in the middle of a sentence, I felt not in the least tired, but on the contrary remarkably fresh and alive. The prospect of getting away completely for three whole months from the surroundings I had lived in all of my life kept me buoyed up and keyed to a feverish pitch of excitement that seemed to banish fatigue or exhaustion.

  The mere idea, little enough in itself, of not returning home each evening and walking those four flights up the grimy stairway to our apartment, filled me with an almost unbearable sense of exhilaration and freedom such as I had never before known. It is hard to describe or to explain concisely the overwhelming and suffocating boredom that is the essence of being poor. A great deal has been written about the barren drudgery of poverty; but I do not recall that the numbing effect of its boredom has been much written or talked about. Yet boredom is the keynote of poverty—of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with—for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine. To be able to break out of its dark brown sameness, out of the boredom of a world without movement or change, filled me with a deep excitement. The thought of escaping from another city summer, with its front stoops and fire escapes filled with tired, sweating adults and squalling children, into a world of green lawns and shady trees made sleep an unnecessary indulgence, and seemed to give me the energy of ten men my size and weight.

  I realized suddenly and acutely that the summers had always been the worst time of all for me: the season of the year that I hated the most. There is anonymity about poverty in the wintertime; it remains hidden behind drawn curtains or blinds. But in the summer the choking heat of the tenements sends it sprawling out onto the stoops and fire escapes and sidewalks, to be nakedly exposed for the offense and the ugliness that it is. I knew now why I had always dreaded the approach of warm weather, but as this particular spring deepened into early summer, I could almost sniff the aroma of country meadows even in the bowels of the subway or in my cubbyhole at the New York Times.

  When the great day arrived at last for us to leave for Camp Utopia, the moisture in my eyes which my mother mistook for filial sentiment (it was to be my first long absence away from the family) was, I suppose, actually something akin to tears of joy at getting the hell out.

  Rarely have I set forth on a journey with such a lift of the heart. Innocence, however, always carries the seeds of its own destruction and I carried mine to Camp Utopia that glistening summer’s day, like Dick Whittington approaching London with his heart on his sleeve and his possessions on his back, hearing nothing but the lovely sound of Bow bells in the distance.

  CAMP UTOPIA was a fair enough sample of summer camps in general to give me a rough idea of what life as a social director was going to be like.

  The camp nestled beside a pretty pine-wooded lake in the foothills of the Poconos in Pennsylvania; it consisted of a large central building, which housed the dining room, and cabins built along opposite sides of the lake, the lake itself supposedly keeping the men and women apart at night—a remarkably naïve assumption, as though a body of water or even a ring of fire could accomplish the impossible! There were tennis courts, a swimming dock, canoes and rowboats, and a social hall with dance floor and stage, which was the hub and core and heartbeat of everything that took place in camp in the evenings—at least until the lights were turned out, at which time traffic on both sides of the lake front took on the proportions of a rush hour at Times Square.

  Camp Utopia w
as neither the largest nor the smallest of the camps I was to work at in the five years that followed, some of which ranged in accommodations for guests from two hundred to fifteen hundred on crowded weekends. But I remember it kindly, for it had the virtue at that time of being almost brand-new—I believe this was its second summer of operation—so that the clientele was not sufficiently incrusted in its folklore to immediately complain almost before they had unpacked their suitcases that last year’s social staff was infinitely superior to this year’s—a complaint I was to run into with infuriating regularity at every camp I worked at thereafter.

  The world of summer camps, and a very definite world it was, was entirely new to me, of course; and since that world no longer exists as it did in those days, I think it is of some interest, quite apart from myself, as a curious kind of Americana that blossomed and flourished in the 1920’s, for it is unlikely to appear in the same form again. Adult summer camps at that time represented quite a new way of summer vacationing for thousands of young people of ages ranging from twenty to thirty, marking as it did the first breaking away from the old regulation summer hotel, with its standard long front porch where fond mamas rigidly chaperoned demure young daughters, and circumspect young men carefully carried their mandolins along on hayrides and thought twice about asking a girl for a good-night kiss.

  When the first summer-camp owner, whoever he was, hit upon the idea of banishing the front porch and fond mamas in one fell swoop and substituting rustic cabins along a lake front instead, he struck a responsive chord in thousands of rebellious young breasts that beat furiously with the new-found sexual freedom of the early twenties, and they flocked in ever-increasing numbers to sample the particular mixture of free-wheeling camaraderie that each camp cannily offered. I do not mean to suggest that these camps were simply carnal spots set in sylvan glades, and certainly a great show was made of sternly patrolling the cabins; but there can be no question that the firm rock on which the great popularity of summer camps rested was the ageless Gibraltar of sex.