by Moss Hart
By Thursday evening of almost every week, all-night rehearsals after the camp owner’s party was over were usually an absolute necessity. We would begin rehearsals at about one and continue through in the darkened hall until six or seven o’clock in the morning, and it was under these conditions that Eddie was always at his best. Indeed, it occurred to me more than once that a goodly portion of his disorganized behavior was perhaps an unconscious arranging of just such tension and pressure to allow him to work in the way he enjoyed most. There are a good many theatre people whom I suspect of arranging just a shade more than is absolutely necessary to be under constant fire, merely to indulge themselves in a public exhibition of their innate grace under pressure. Whether Eddie did this unconsciously or not is perhaps beside the point, for it was on these nights, as the hours wore on and everyone else approached the threshold of exhaustion, that Eddie was at the top of his form.
He drank countless cups of black coffee to keep himself awake, ate innumerable Hershey bars to give himself energy, and was capable of quite brilliant bits of invention as the night wore on and he drove the rest of us unmercifully, achieving in one compressed, agonizing rehearsal what might have been easily and just as well accomplished in four leisurely and sensible ones. But that was not his way, and perhaps it was his strength as well as his weakness. Hollow-eyed, we would stagger out of the social hall to get what sleep we could until nine o’clock, when we had to appear in the dining hall for breakfast, ready to joke and “socialize” with the guests and pick up the day’s activities.
At four o’clock that afternoon the doors of the social hall were again closed for our dress rehearsal, and there we stayed until eleven, when the show was over. Then, good or bad, applause or no applause, we scrambled up the hill to the dining hall and ate an enormous meal in the kitchen. Then back down the hill again to the social hall at midnight to go through the same procedure as on the night before. Only this time, since it was the first complete run-through of the “Original Musical Comedy” and the chorus line was made up of guests who had volunteered to be in the show, tempers ran extremely short as the rehearsal veered toward five A.M.
Saturday was a complete repetition of Friday—up at nine and the daytime activities until the dress rehearsal at four; only at this dress rehearsal fulminating pandemonium was the rule. These weekly musicals—stolen, slapdash and amateur though they were—were elaborate and difficult in terms of light cues, props and quick changes of costume and scenery. Since the general level of weariness and irritability was pretty high by Saturday afternoon, the dress rehearsals of the musicals were major horrors that went on until we could see the audience coming down the hill to the social hall. We then drew the curtains and prayed for the best, the hammering and setting up of the scenery sometimes drowning out the overture being played by the six-piece orchestra.
The members of the social staff were barely on speaking terms with the social director or even with each other by the time those curtains drew apart again on the opening number. What usually saved whatever remained of the staff morale by the end of Saturday night was the fact that we were all far too exhausted to remember what the bitter quarrels of the afternoon had been about.
There was always after the Saturday night show the inevitable farewell party of a guest who was leaving the next day, but we were allowed to skip breakfast on Sunday morning and were not expected to make an appearance until the two o’clock buses arrived to take the departing guests to the train. There, standing on the steps of the dining hall, the social staff en masse sang camp songs and parodies of popular songs of the day, with guests’ names and camp catch-phrases scattered through them, and clowned and cavorted and created a general bruhaha until the buses and cars left.
We returned to the steps at three thirty, when the same buses came back from the station with a new load of camp guests for the next two weeks, and a group of welcoming camp songs was then sung for the new arrivals. Here a peak of hilarity was reached by Eddie or myself, pretending to be a dumb bellboy and mixing up the new guests’ luggage, or opening a girl’s suitcase and letting her underthings spill out and then conducting a mock auction of her effects. There was always a large audience for this ridiculous ritual, for the guests remaining in camp always assembled around the steps not only to see the social staff “make fun” but to inspect the new prospects for the two weeks coming up.
Sunday evening was a fairly easy night for the social staff, as a movie was always shown in the social hall. But it was preceded by a “Roxy Presentation,” which served to introduce and show off the social staff individually to the new guests and in which we each did a number, musical or dramatic. Then, sometimes even as the movie screen was being lowered, the social staff was on its way to bed, bone-weary and almost mindless, as another week of camp life dropped behind us. I sometimes fell asleep on the edge of the bed half undressed on Sunday night, only to awake an hour or so later with a groan of recollection, that this time tomorrow night I would be standing in front of the campfire and leading the community singing, and that another week would be starting all over again.
Thus, in somewhat formidable but necessary detail, a social director’s week in camp.
* * *
It must not be supposed, however, that life at camp was completely without its compensations or even actual rewards and enjoyments. For one thing, it was the first time I had ever actually lived in a realm of trees and lawns and flower beds, and the pleasure of awakening in the morning and glimpsing a pine-fringed lake outside the window as I opened my eyes, instead of grimy courtyards and a network of clotheslines, was considerable. Each morning it gave me a moment of undiluted pleasure, and it was a moment that remained undimmed, no matter what other ignominious hours the rest of the day held.
For another thing, the food at camp, while actually no great shakes by gourmet standards, was at least varied, well prepared and decently served, and the fact that I had a choice of what to eat was a special kind of enjoyment. I had not realized how weary I had become of the unending stream of stews and hamburgers which was the general family fare at home, until I sat down to the first three or four meals at camp—each meal different. I ate prodigiously all summer, as though I could see, as each meal slipped by, the slew of stews and hamburgers that was going to face me again all winter.
Perhaps the greatest reward that first summer in camp offered was the fact that I learned how to swim—thanks to being unceremoniously dumped in the lake by a group of waiters that I had penalized the night before for sneaking out of the social hall and skipping the last three sets of dances. Like most city-bred children whose summers have been spent on the curbstone in front of the house or hanging around the candy store on the corner, I was deathly afraid of the water. While I stoutly maintained those first few weeks at camp that I had no time free for anything but a quick shower, secretly I longed to be able to paddle a canoe and get out to the middle of the lake and even hide away alone for a half-hour or so from the hubbub of camp in one of the bends of the shoreline, but non-swimmers were strictly forbidden to use the canoes and a rowboat somehow negated the whole idea of escape. Actually, I was even frightened of being out in a rowboat alone, and so I gave the lake as wide a berth as possible.
After that initial toss into the water, however, and the knowledge that I would not immediately sink and drown, I got up at dawn the following morning and began two weeks of swimming lessons with the lifeguard—a young fellow who rather fancied himself as an actor, but whose pleadings had received short shrift from Eddie. In return for promising him a part in a play to be put on the weekend his girl friend was to be at camp, he used his proper talents and taught me how to swim—not too well, perhaps, for my timidity was still great, but well enough to be able to take out a canoe.
From the moment I pushed that first canoe away from the dock and paddled awkwardly toward the center of the lake, I experienced a lift of the heart that more than made up for all the brainless boy-and-girl numbers I had to sing with
girl guests, or all the Japanese costumes I draped around the men’s unwilling shoulders. It made a vast difference, my being able to swim that first year and all the years thereafter that I spent at camps.
The lifeguard could barely walk across the stage, much less act, but I kept my promise and got him a part the week his girl came to camp, for I knew I was greatly indebted to him. Almost every day after that first canoe ride I managed to steal away for a half-hour and paddle swiftly to the middle of the lake, where the sounds of camp were not only muffled but somehow not unpleasant; I would drift idly, letting the clup-clup of the water against the sides of the canoe lull me into a peaceful ignorance of the fact that in an hour or so I would be doing my impersonation of Fanny Brice as “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach” or leading the Charleston Contest.
Every so often I would manage to skip dinner, and with a couple of bottles of Coca-Cola and some cookies and boxes of raisins in the bottom of the canoe, I would make straight for a little island at the far end of the lake and have as much as two glorious hours all to myself. It was in these hours, as I lay naked on the grass, letting the late afternoon sun dry off the best swim of the day, that I would plan the campaign that was to get me back into the theatre again. This time it was not just dreams of glory or any one grandiose plan, but a slow strategy of gaining a foothold that, if it worked, might fix my feet firmly in the theatre. I did not mention these schemes even to Eddie, for I could not bear to have the fantasy I was building punctured or exploded—at least, not just then. These hours that I managed alone on that island at the end of the lake were a necessary oasis, a refreshment of the spirit, that I needed to see me through that first summer, for I loathed much of what I was doing and the desire to pack up and go home was an almost daily temptation.
I hated being pleasant to large numbers of people, the majority of whom I despised. I resented the meaningless impudence of being on tap as extra entertainment for the bunk parties we were forced to attend, and most of all I hated the ridiculous, clownish figure I was in my own eyes as I capered around the campfire or “made fun” on the dining-room steps. Had I not learned to swim and contrived those occasional hours alone, I very much doubt if I could have lasted out that first season, for I could not shake the inner picture I had of myself that made my days and nights in the social hall acutely painful.
* * *
Lying alone on the little island, I was able not only to make peace with the repugnant tasks I was called upon to do each day, but even to see how summers at camp fitted in perfectly with the plan I was weaving to take me back to the theatre. Anything that served that purpose was endurable, humiliating or not! Also, the moment I was out on the lake, however briefly, I began to see that in spite of the crudity of most of the plays and musicals we did, they were nevertheless pieces of theatre put on behind footlights for an audience’s approval, and as always, the moment one draws a curtain and dims the lights, one begins to learn something of value about the theatre itself. Some of the lessons I learned at camp served me very well later on in the professional theatre, for certain absolutes obtain in the amateur as well as in the professional theatre.
For one thing, I became convinced that talent by itself is not enough, even an authentic and first-rate talent is not enough, nor are brilliance and audacity in themselves sufficient. There remains the ability to translate that talent, whether it be for acting or play-writing, into terms that fulfill the promise of a play so that the performance succeeds in realizing the full measure of its potential. Too many plays emerge better on the printed page than they do behind the footlights. For in the workaday theatre there seems to be a hidden conspiracy to defeat a play the moment “End of Act Three” is typed on the author’s typewriter, and it moves into inexorable operation the day rehearsals begin. The rocky shoals that beset a play’s wavering course to the tempestuous shores of Broadway are strewn with the wreckage of good plays and good actors whose authors or directors grew tired just a trifle too soon in Boston or Philadelphia, or failed to withstand the hurricane blows of New Haven.
In those summers at camp I began to learn to push past exhaustion and to think on my feet, and to become slowly aware that weariness and exhaustion were the twin sirens of the theatrical deep. Let them take over and they will rob one of courage and the ability to improvise in a crisis, for stamina in the long run is as necessary an adjunct to success in the theatre as talent itself. Time after time at camp that first year, I watched Eddie bring order out of chaos and turn a dress rehearsal that was a shambles into a show of considerable merit by the sheer dint of a kind of buoyant and contagious courage that made him deaf to the babble of defeat going on about him, and by an ability to remain untired at all costs. These two priceless assets—qualities that seem to stem one from the other—were as valuable as any talent for the theatre that he possessed, and its lesson was not lost upon me. Years afterwards, both in camp and in the professional theatre, weariness was the villain I fought and wrestled with, much as a revivalist preacher casts out the devil, and three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage was what I prayed for far more than for inspiration or an ingenious device to bring the second-act curtain down.
It was lucky that I made my peace with the camp routine when I did, for as the season rolled on into August, each day’s and night’s activities became doubly difficult. August, and not April, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, was the cruelest month. By August the camp was at its most crowded and noisome, the staff at its lowest ebb in both body and mind, and the petty quarrels that could be smoothed over and forgotten in a day in June or July now flared into bitter open enmity. The social staff barely spoke to one another. Even the waiters risked open rebellion, for they knew they would not be fired in August when the dining room was filled to overflowing and guests were sleeping six to eight in cabins meant to accommodate only four.
To add to our woes, that nightmare of all social directors, a rainy spell, began in the middle of August that year and continued for nine solid days.
The few daytime activities the social staff could take advantage of to give them time to rehearse in order to prepare for the evening’s activities were the tennis tournaments, the swimming meets and the golf matches—and we went to great pains to see that they took place almost daily. Now, with all outdoor activities cut off and the social hall thrown open from ten in the morning until midnight, we were at our wits’ end trying to fill the days as well as the nights of eight hundred sodden, disgruntled and increasingly furious guests.
At nine thirty in the morning, Eddie and I would look out of one of the rain-splashed windows of the social hall and see a long line of yellow raincoats and black umbrellas streaming down the hill toward the social hall—and groan out loud. They had no place else to go, of course; and when they got there they sat in maddened, steaming heaps, smelling of overshoes and mud, and glared balefully at the social staff, daring us to amuse them. Their hard-earned vacations were being hopelessly ruined, but any compassion we may have felt for them was extremely short-lived, for in some inexplicable way they seemed to blame the social staff not only for our inability to keep them entertained fourteen hours a day but for the rain as well.
They complained bitterly to William J. Perleman. By the fifth day of the downpour they checked out of camp in droves, and as the sky showed no signs of turning off its seemingly inexhaustible water tap, Mr. Perleman, driven frantic himself by a mass exodus in the height of the season, lost his proverbial sunny disposition and gave way to immoderate fury, castigated the social staff as slovenly and lazy, and screamed that they were ruining the good reputation of his camp for superior entertainment in good weather or bad. Actually, this was highly unjust, for we were not only doing everything possible to keep the angry guests occupied and amused, but several highly improbable things as well. In addition to treasure hunts, square dances, spelling bees, and a county fair set up inside the social hall, complete with barkers and booths, and a musician dressed up as William Jennings Bryan who fell into a tub of water when
a baseball hit the plank under him, Eddie gave tango lessons and I held symposiums on “Companionate Marriage” and gave character analyses by handwriting. I knew as little of handwriting analysis as Eddie did of the intricacies of the tango, but by the eighth day of rain we were performing in a kind of stupor and not quite in full command of our senses.
On the evening of the ninth day we held our breath as we saw the sun manfully trying to arrange a sunset through the still-lowering clouds, and at that first glimpse of pale sunlight, Eddie, a little hysterical, took a spoonful of mustard he was about to dab on a frankfurter and splashed it across the table at me. I took a spoonful of mustard and returned the same in kind to him. And suddenly, as though at an awaited signal, mustard and chili sauce were being tossed all over the dining room onto faces, dresses, walls and ceiling. It was known as the Great Mustard Fight—and why some four hundred people splashing mustard at each other and screaming with laughter should have considered it hilarious, I cannot explain; but eight days of rain in camp can bring one perilously close to the threshold of insanity. There was a limit, apparently, to what even our healthy young nervous systems could stand, and eight days was that limit. In the years to follow, I went through other rainy spells at other camps and they were always horrors; but nothing ever matched the unremitting downpour at Camp Utopia.