by Moss Hart
Summer camps still exist today, of course; but they are a far cry from the uninhibited ones of my own apprenticeship. Indeed, the camps of today would be almost unrecognizable to a guest or to a social director of those days. Today, the entertainment programs are completely professional and booked into the camp by Broadway agents, and the larger camps frequently have well-known names at large salaries perform for its guests on weekends. The golf course employs not one but usually three golf pros, and the tennis courts and swimming activities are likely to be in the charge of a former college or Olympic champion.
At the time I am speaking of, however, the entertainment in toto was provided by the social director and his staff—every item of every day and evening was devised, rehearsed and presented by him and his assistant, and a back-breaking job it was! Out of the summer camps of those early days emerged such figures as Danny Kaye, Don Hartman, Dore Schary, Lorenz Hart, Garson Kanin, Arthur Kober, Phil Silvers, and countless others. It is constantly suggested in well-meaning press interviews that the summer camps provided the training ground or springboard that enabled these talented gentlemen to make the leap to Broadway and Hollywood. It may be so, and I am not prepared to argue for anyone but myself, but in my own case, social directing provided me with a lifelong disdain for the incredible contortions of the human spirit at play, and a lasting horror of people in the mass seeking pleasure and release in packaged doses. Perhaps the real triumph of those summers was the fact that I survived them at all; not so much in terms of emerging with whatever creative faculties I possess unimpaired, but in the sense that my physical constitution withstood the strain, for at the end of each camp season I was always fifteen to twenty pounds lighter and my outlook on life just about that much more heavily misanthropic.
To understand the stresses and strains a camp season entailed, and which a social director of those days labored under, it is necessary, I think, to set down an actual week’s schedule of camp activity, which was repeated, though with different material of course, every week of the entire camp season.
Monday was campfire night. This was presumably an informal get-together, for the new guests usually arrived on Sunday; and a campfire in the woods, with entertainment provided while marshmallows and hot dogs were being roasted over the fire, was supposed to initiate the new arrival into the carefree camp spirit. I suppose it did—but since the wood for the fire, as well as the hot dogs, marshmallows and the blankets to sit on, had to be dragged out into the woods by the social director and his staff, it did not hold quite the same easygoing informality and gaiety for us that it did for the guests, to say nothing of the fact that the entertainment around the fire had to be devised and rehearsed, and was not informal at all.
Campfire night always held a special kind of torment for me, for Eddie had delegated to me at the beginning of the season the task of leading the community singing that opened the festivities as the campfire was lit, a job that I was unfortunately good at and which I whole-heartedly loathed. There was always a good deal of heckling, actually quite good-natured, as I stood up in front of the fire to start the singing off, and it had to be answered with equally good-natured banter in return on my part. It was a rare campfire night that I did not devoutly wish that I could disappear into the air or sink into the earth.
I had two other regular spots in the campfire programs. One, a Shakespearean recitation, usually a soliloquy out of Hamlet, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, and a “boy and girl” number complete with ukulele, which I strummed and sang to while a female guest, carefully selected that afternoon as the best of a bad lot, sat on my knee and sang along with me. The fact that the crowd was usually insistent that we encore the number by doing the Charleston together did nothing to minimize the deep hatred I held for each Monday night that stretched from June to September.
Tuesday night was costume or dress-up night. Depending upon the whim of the social director and the kind of costumes at hand, the night was designated and proclaimed as “Greenwich Village Night,” “A Night in Old Montmartre” or “The Beaux Arts Ball.” The social hall had to be decorated by the staff to simulate old Montmartre or Greenwich Village, and tables and chairs were set around the hall in night-club fashion. It was imperative, moreover, that the guests, both male and female, turn out in appropriate costumes, for the evening was a failure if they did not; so most of Tuesday afternoon from after lunchtime on was spent in going from cabin to cabin and helping guests prepare their costumes or cajoling them into getting themselves up in one if they showed a disinclination to do so.
Most girls arrived in camp with some sort of catch-all costume for dress-up night, as advised in the camp brochure; but the men usually brought along nothing but the inevitable white flannel trousers and blue sport jackets. We had a supply of costumes in the camp wardrobe that could be used for just such emergencies week after week, and I have yet to see a figure of a French apache on the stage or in the movies that does not give me a shudder as I recall how many unwilling male guests I badgered into being an apache from old Montmartre. We seemed always to have had more apache costumes in the wardrobe trunk than any other kind, though “A Night in Old Japan” was a close runner-up for the male contingent for reasons that now escape me.
For “A Night in Old Montmartre” one or possibly two Grand Guignol sketches were usually presented—with the result that there was almost never any catsup to be had in camp the next day because we used it to simulate the streams of blood always necessary in the Guignol sketches, and the social staff’s hair was usually matted or streaked with catsup that would not come out for the next two days.
On “Greenwich Village Night” there was a good deal of candle-lit free-verse poetry reading, usually done by Eddie, and a good deal of Edna St. Vincent Millay usually read by me. No one was ever more weary of hearing, “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night” than I was by the end of that first summer. And there were quite a few evenings when I was not quite sure that I would last the night myself, Edna St. Vincent Millay or no Edna St. Vincent Millay!
For “A Night in Old Japan” we presented our own version, complete with local jokes and lyrics, of The Mikado, and for “Beaux Arts Night” there were tableaux of guests, decked out in silver and gold gilt paint, gilded and arranged, of course, by a sweating and cursing social staff.
Wednesday evening was “Games Night,” and between dances, potato races, sack races, one-legged races and peanut relay races were run off for prizes, and though no entertainment was deemed necessary by the management for this carefree evening, it was thought essential, nevertheless, for the social staff to encourage participation in the games by setting the example of being the first ones out on the floor for each game and seeing to it that the shy or unattractive girls in particular were included in at least one game during the evening. It is not easy to feel the proper compassion for a shy girl or an ugly duckling when you are tied into a sack with her and are hobbling down the social hall to the finish line. On the contrary, rolling a peanut along the floor side by side with a bad-complexioned girl with thick glasses and unfortunate front teeth does nothing to kindle the fires of pity within you, but instead makes you want to kick her right in her unfortunate teeth.
There was no escape possible from this nightly gallantry, however, for the one camp rule that was inviolate—that could never be broken under any consideration—was that the male members of the social staff dance only with the girls who were not being danced with, and that the shy and ugly ones be “socialized” with first. It was up to the social staff and to the social director and his assistant to set the example for this, not only so far as dancing was concerned, but in every other aspect of camp activity.
There was actually a sound reason for this. The population of every summer camp was always predominantly female—the girls sometimes outnumbering the men two to one—and this thorny problem the wily camp owners met by hiring college boys instead of professional waiters to wait on tables, for these college boys were pa
rt of the social staff after their duties in the dining room were finished.
Indeed, it mattered very little how sloppy a waiter a young medical or legal student might be if he was a good dancer and “mixed and mingled” well in the social hall. The trouble, of course, lay in the fact that the college boys disliked dancing with “the pots,” as they called them, quite as much as we did, and devised all sorts of stratagems to be out on the floor with an attractive girl in their arms almost before the first note of each dance number sounded from the orchestra. It was always necessary to make a blanket rule at the beginning of each season that if a girl was not dancing after the first sixteen bars of music, she must be danced with forthwith. And there was a further ironclad rule that no one girl was to be danced with more than once in an evening, for it was the boys’ practice to latch onto a pretty girl and dance every dance with her, proclaiming loudly and innocently that they had danced every dance that evening and had not sat out one!
By the middle of July in every season, it was always necessary to ship one or two insubordinate waiters home for flouting this rule, for inevitably love blossomed between a waiter and a guest, and when that happened, he would defiantly dance every dance with his beloved. There was nothing to do but ship him home as a stern example to the others. I was not always certain that it was exactly love that blossomed in a waiter’s bosom, for once a waiter glimpsed that unmistakable light in a girl’s eyes, it almost inevitably followed that the hapless girl, for the entire span of her two weeks’ vacation, barely saw the sunlight from then on. Instead, she was in the kitchen most of the time helping him polish silver and make salads, and then setting his tables for him. These poor creatures would arrive in camp with a decent glow of health on their cheeks and leave two weeks later hollow-eyed wrecks.
Curiously enough, this practice of guests’ helping waiters in their work was not frowned upon by camp owners, but in a way had their blessing, for I don’t suppose the waiters could have gone on moonlight canoe rides night after night and been up at six thirty every morning to prepare for breakfast without some sort of unpaid slave labor to help them. And I am certain it was love by and large that kept the camp silverware as clean as it generally was. Week by week one could very often tell whether or not love was rampant among the waiters by the way the tables were set or how the salads were decorated, and when love ran riot in the kitchen, it played hell with the dancing in the social hall at night.
I am certain, too, those camp years ruined the pleasure of dancing for me forever. It is seldom now that I will venture out onto a dance floor. For six whole years I danced with nothing but “the pots,” and that was enough to make me welcome the glorious choice of sitting down for the rest of my life.
The one night in camp when there was no dancing at all was Thursday night, and it may be imagined that sometimes it seemed to the social staff that Thursday was terribly slow in arriving or had disappeared out of the week entirely. That was the night for basketball, played by a team of our own waiters against a team of waiters from a neighboring camp, sometimes in our own social hall and sometimes in theirs.
This night was always held up with a great show of largesse by camp owners as the night that the social staff was entirely free to rehearse the weekend’s play and musical, but it was not entirely as generous as it sounded. Thursday night after the game was the night that the owners always chose to give a party in their own quarters for specially selected guests, and to this party the social staff was not only invited but more or less ordered to appear, for they were expected to supply the necessary entertainment for the festivities. The idea was, I suppose, that since the social staff had not entertained guests for the entire evening, they must now be panting to do so, beginning at midnight.
Another occupational hazard of camp life, and a dire hazard it was, was the parties tossed two or three times each week by the guests themselves in their own cabins after the social hall closed, and to which the social staff was always bidden. It seemed to be taken for granted by any and every guest that included in his weekly rate, was the right to the private as well as the public services of the social staff, a conclusion that most camp owners concurred in, and if you refused to appear at parties, either in self-defense or out of sheer exhaustion, there were always loud and long protests the next morning that the social staff refused to “socialize” and that next summer they would certainly go to a camp that had a social staff that did.
We could escape only some of the parties and the others we suffered through as best we could, for if there was one thing worse than entertaining the guests ourselves, it was being entertained by them at their own parties. Almost every guest who gave parties had a sneaking suspicion that he or she was equally as talented as the social staff. This was their chance to prove it—and the remembrance of various young men, a salami sandwich in one hand and a glass of celery tonic in the other, bellowing out “I’m the Sheik of Araby” can still chill my blood; or the recollection of countless ill-advised girls giving their own rendition of “Dardanella” is enough even now to make me wonder how I lived through six solid years of it, without entering the realm of the demented.
There was one hazard of camp life, however, that the social staff did not share. It was faced exclusively by the guests themselves, and it provided the staff with an endless source of entertainment and pleasure. The hazard was a simple one, but it was unfailing and constant in every camp I ever worked at. Both male and female guests always arrived in complete anonymity except for the initials on their luggage; and when they decked themselves out in their summer finery for their first appearance in the social hall or the dining room, it was impossible to tell whether a shipping clerk or the boss’s son had arrived in camp. By the same token, it was impossible to tell whether a private secretary to a Wall Street broker or a steel executive was making her first appearance, or, what was more likely, a salesgirl from behind the glove counter at Bloomingdale’s was beginning her two-week vacation.
Each suitcase bulged with a hard winter’s saving of every penny that could be spared and strategically spent on a series of flamboyant sport shirts and doeskin trousers, or flowered prints and organdy dresses, to say nothing of the very latest in the way of bathing suits and costumes pour le sport for every hour of the day that might dazzle and titillate a member of the opposite sex. There were, of course, some well-heeled boys and girls among the guests, and I suppose even a boss’s son or a private secretary to a Wall Street broker occasionally turned up. But in the main, the bulk of the contingent that descended on the camps every summer was composed largely of shipping clerks, bookkeepers, law clerks, receptionists, and what-not, who spill out of New York City and its environs for their annual two-week vacation.
And since part of that vacation at camp had as its goal sex on the part of the boys and marriage on the part of the girls, there was a better chance for the achievement of these goals if both partners gave no hint of their true status while in camp, but played the game of letting the other one assume that each was heir to a junior executive’s job or a wealthy father. It was a game of endless variations—a stately minuet of lying and pretense, and the social staff watched it flower and blossom every two weeks with no little delight and a good deal of malice.
We even aided and abetted the masquerade whenever we could, not only as a method of revenge against our mortal enemies—the guests—but because it was uncommonly instructive and somehow wonderfully comic to see the citadel of virginity being stormed each day and wavering uncertainly every evening before a pair of white flannel trousers. It was impossible to tell, of course, if those trousers encased a young man on his way up the executive ladder, or a packer who worked in Gimbel’s basement. Nor could the white flannel trousers themselves tell if the girl beneath the flowered chiffon he held in his arms as he danced around the social-hall floor was really the young lady of means she seemed to be.
We made bets on the outcome of the more spectacular stormings of the fort and we listened with unend
ing pleasure to the lies that blew through camp like thistledown in a field of clover. It was one of the few outlets we had for anything approximating glee as the camp season rolled on. Even this source of amusement was apt to wear a little thin by the time Friday morning came around, for Friday evening was “Drama Night”; and with Eddie’s staggering lack of organization, both Friday and Saturday nights—Saturday being “Musical Comedy Night”—were always torturous and exhausting beyond belief or necessity. It was, of course, no easy task to present two one-act plays each week, as well as what we called “An Original Musical Comedy” on the following night, in addition to all our other activities.
Nevertheless, it could have been done without the back-breaking, brain-fagging effort it always was, if Eddie had made the slightest effort to organize his work at the beginning of the week in even the mildest degree. This, however, he would not or could not do. Parts for the plays would not be distributed until late Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday night Eddie would quite likely change his mind and decide to do two other one-acters instead. We almost never got the script of the musical comedy until Thursday afternoon, and since songs and dance routines had to be learned for this, in addition to the script itself, by Friday morning, rehearsals for both shows were usually shambles.
Invariably, if Eddie switched plays in the middle of the week, the entire staff would have to heave to and help repaint the scenery, to say nothing of the fact that ingenious ways had to be devised to distribute small slips of paper with key speeches typed on them among the props and furniture so that we could have a glance at them occasionally and know what, if anything, we were going to say next. It was somewhat easier to arrange this if the plays called for an exterior set, for the slips could be pinned on the backs of bushes or even pasted unobtrusively on the top of a stone wall or fence. In the interiors, Eddie’s wizardry at devising bits of business that allowed us to walk to a spot that held a piece of paper concealed from the audience’s view, and that seemed part and parcel of the rightful movement of the play, was unparalleled. His genius for this sort of thing reached a new height even for him, when in one particular play which called for an outdoor set, but which had of necessity to be played throughout in extremely dim lighting, he put the typed slips of paper behind rocks and next to each slip of paper a small flashlight. As we switched on the flashlights for a quick glance at the speech coming up, he had one of the characters in the play remark, “An unusual amount of fireflies about for this time of year, aren’t there?” Considering the fact that the play took place in the dead of winter and we were bundled up in coats and mufflers, there were indeed an unusual number of fireflies about. The audience never even sniggered—which was, I chose to think, a rare tribute to the high caliber of our acting.