Act One

by Moss Hart

  I was launched even more quickly than I had dared hope. By mid-October I was commuting every other evening between the Upper Bronx and 14th Street, and by November I had already started a play. Even with two groups to direct, the combined fees amounted to less than twenty-eight dollars a week, but it was enough to get thinly by on. The important thing was that I had my days free to write now, and I plunged ahead with a supreme inner confidence and a pencil that never seemed to hesitate above the paper. It had not taken me long to come upon an idea for a play, since I had hit upon, unsurprisingly enough, that most cliché of all play ideas—the boarding house, with each lodger having his own separate dramatic and soul-searing story. It had seemed to me, of course, like an utterly new and God-given inspiration, happily fresh and untouched as a source of stage material.

  All winter long I wrote slowly and carefully each and every day, unconsciously using every timeworn device and cliché-ridden bit of stagecraft I had ever seen, blithely convinced all the while that what I was setting down was completely new and even daring! I wrote happily on, blind to the fact that the dialogue was turgid, the invention imitative, and the style an unholy mélange of Eugene O’Neill and George Kelly.

  Furthermore, in the true classical tradition of a first attempt, it was to be a deeply serious and startlingly candid examination of life’s bitterness and ironies, told with unrelenting rectitude, and making no concessions to the popular taste of the day. It contained among other things my mother as the chief character who ran the boarding house, my father as the janitor and handy man, two immensely talented but unlucky actors easily identifiable as Eddie and myself, and a composite portrait of my aunt and my grandfather embodied in the character of a Southern lady of vanished grandeur around whom the Furies played and whose tragic death gave the play its final curtain, as well as a resounding speech of wisdom and compassion by the author. It was a perfectly terrible play in every respect, but this I did not know—not, at least, immediately.

  I finished the play in mid-February on a note of triumph and with exultant admiration for my own rare gifts as a playwright. But I made myself keep, not without some difficulty, my promise to put the manuscript away for a week and not look at it. Somewhere or other I had picked up the information that veteran playwrights always let a play cool off, so to speak, before they read it through again for a cold, unemotional appraisal. This had struck me as a wonderfully professional custom, and since I considered myself a professional now—though an unproduced Bronx one, to be sure—I was pathetically eager to use every professional trick that came to my attention.

  Accordingly, on a bright February morning a week after I had written The Curtain Slowly Falls, I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and settling myself with a pillow behind me in the empty bathtub, I opened the closely written pages. The play’s awfulness did not dawn on me slowly—the full impact of its hackneyed dreariness hit me by the sixth page. I was hard put to finish it without getting out of the bathtub and flushing it down the toilet, and it was difficult by the second act for me to believe that I had written it at all. I lay there afterward for a long while—wondering at my own naïveté of a week before and marveling at the self-delusion that seems to impose itself on a writer’s senses, even such a neophyte as myself, the moment he picks up a pencil and starts to write. How could I have gone so miserably wrong? Amateur though I was, I should have known better. At least I’d been exposed to enough decently written plays to make the mound of paper lying in the bathtub beside me seem incredibly inept. Not one line of it seemed to me to give the slightest indication that I could write postcards, let alone a play.

  I suspected one way I had gone wrong from the start; and forever afterward it made me more than a little leery of those golden nuggets of advice so capriciously tossed out by elder statesmen of the theatre to credulous beginners, one of which I must have stumbled across and taken to heart: “Begin by writing of what you know best—do not wander off in fields that are strange to you. Take for your setting and characters only the places and people you know and stick to them.” So went this preposterous bit of dramatic wisdom, thereby discounting the vital and immeasurable quality that imagination gives to all writing, whether it be for the stage or anything else. Since this bit of nonsense had issued from the lips of a quite famous playwright, I had slavishly followed it, writing of a place and people I knew, but completely failing to allow imagination to riffle through the pages as it might have done had I chosen a setting and characters not so highly colored by my own attitudes and prejudices. I had simply set down what I knew best, and stuck to it. The play had verity; what it lacked was the breath of life and imagination—two necessary ingredients for what is usually called creative writing.

  Well, the time had not been wasted. To be aware is to be forewarned. I would not, I thought, make the same error again. Yet despite the force with which this simple truth struck me, I kept making this identical mistake for years afterward. Play-writing is a most devilish profession. It is not only the most difficult of literary forms to master—one of the reasons, I suppose, that it pays so handsomely—but it is a craft one never seems to truly learn anything about from one’s past mistakes.

  It is taken for granted that a cabinetmaker or a shoemaker, or a lawyer or a doctor, for that matter, starting with a certain degree of talent for his profession, does, after the practice of that profession for ten or twenty years, learn how to make a good cabinet or a decent pair of shoes, or plead a case or diagnose an illness correctly. Not so the playwright. He is quite capable after twenty years of practice of having a left shoe for the second act when a right shoe is obviously called for, and is as unable to perceive the tumor in the third act that stares him in the face as the merest beginner or even someone who has never written a line for the stage.

  If it maddens and seems inexplicable to the critics and public that a playwright of standing and success should be represented one season by a mature and sure-footed work, and the following season by a most barbarous bit of stagecraft that does not seem to have been written by the same fellow, it frustrates and bewilders the playwright also. He then bitterly asks himself, “Do I know nothing at all about my profession? Is it possible to write a success one season and an abysmal failure the next? Am I never going to learn anything about this craft I practice?”

  The answer I suspect is, “Yes and no.” One does learn a little through the years, of course, but what one learns is the surface tricks of play-writing, never how to avoid the major errors. Perhaps the reason that one can never practice the art of play-writing with any degree of sureness or security is that each play has a peculiar and separate life of its own. The problems of one play are not the problems of another, and the very mistakes that have been avoided in the previous play bear no relationship to mistakes that must be sidestepped in this present one. Unlike the surgeon who knows exactly where he must make the incision and tie off the blood vessels, or the lawyer who has legal precedents on which to base his case, the playwright confronts in each new play an operation that has never been performed before, or a brief that is being written for the first time in the history of legal annals.

  With each new play the playwright is a Columbus sailing uncharted seas, with the unhappy knowledge that those unfriendly Indian tribes—the critics and the public—will be lining the shores at the end of the voyage waiting to scalp him, even if he survives the mutiny. Little wonder that he shivers and shakes and groans too loudly in the public prints and into the ears of his forbearing friends when he writes “Act I” anew. For if he is a man who respects his craft and not merely a dealer in theatrical merchandise, he very well knows that no matter how skillful or successful he may be, each time he scribbles “Act One” on a blank piece of paper he is starting afresh, and, if he will allow himself the full and bitter truth, he is writing a play for the first time. His years of experience and his past successes count for nothing. Each time, if he is honest, he must face his own inadequacy and come to terms with it, for he h
as learned almost nothing about his profession in the meantime.

  There have been times, not unfew, when I considered that I had done neither myself nor the theatre any great service by getting out of that bathtub, tossing the manuscript into a bureau drawer, and resolving to go on being a playwright. At that moment of bright illumination, however, I was so fired with my discovery of what I thought had led me astray and so keen to put my conclusions to the test, that I was ready to begin another play immediately. But I knew that would have to wait.

  Late February and early March were the times when all camps engaged their social directors for the coming summer, and getting a job that would include my father and my brother Bernie was not going to be quite as easy as getting a job alone. But on that score I was determined, no matter what sort of job I had to take or in what kind of place. I ruled out even trying for the big camps or hotels in the Catskills—the area that later became known as the “Borscht Circuit”—on the grounds that my experience of only one summer as an assistant director would preclude my landing a social director’s job, for I knew that only if I were hired as social director could I insist on having my father and brother with me. There would be plenty of other places to pick and choose from, I decided, even without the Catskills. I was wrong.

  Not only were most camps unwilling to take the chance of making a social director out of someone with one summer’s experience as an assistant, and including two members of his family in the contract as well; but the majority of camp owners, unlike the bemused William J. Perleman, were aghast at my suave patter of doing Kelly, Shaw and O’Neill on the stages of their social halls. They were, in fact, appalled at the mere suggestion of such a thing. Too late did I discover that my unquestionably high-falutin’ and foolish approach sent them hurrying to the telephone to call back their old social director of the previous summer, good or bad! I frightened them off one by one by my stupid emphasis on “art and uplift” in the summertime. How could they know I did a wonderful Fanny Brice, an impeccable Charleston, played the ukulele and “made fun” on the dining-room steps, when I talked only of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Lord Dunsany? I ruined every good lead and chance I had, and by the end of March I was desperate. By April, I knew, only the dregs were left, the jobs that no self-respecting social director would even consider taking, since they not only paid the lowest salaries but they no doubt offered the foulest working conditions.

  The owners of these ramshackle resorts, however, no doubt counted on and patiently waited for just such fools as myself to turn up in April, when there was no choice of anything better, and on an unlucky April day I arrived for a fatal interview with Mr. Axeler, the owner and guiding spirit of a summer camp called not “The Dregs,” as it might rightfully have been labeled, but the “Half Moon Country Club.” He was a short and stocky little man with a bright and metallic eye and the mark of a crank stamped clearly all over him.

  I was not especially put off, however, by this, my first impression of him. All camp owners, of course, had something of the crank in their make-up, since no man in his right mind would choose to run a camp as a way of life in the first place. There was money in it, of course, but not enough money to warrant the wear and tear which running a camp entailed, and in point of fact camp owners were not, almost without exception, actually much interested in making money. It was the life itself, the idea of running a summer camp, that they deeply relished.

  They were a special breed of men, these fellows, with the flush of megalomania on their cheeks, the glint of the true hysteric in their eyes; and their camps were their overpowering obsession. They came truly alive only in the summers, and then not with a whimper, but with a great bang. They seemed to hibernate in the winter months, half-heartedly pursuing some trumped-up profession, but it was the happy megalomaniacal summers they waited for, marking time till they could reign as the unrivaled monarchs of all they surveyed.

  They thought of their camps as little kingdoms, where they indeed reigned supreme, and depending upon their inner picture of themselves, which usually resembled Napoleon, they issued their own codes and edicts all summer long in the most regal fashion and their wives and children reigned as the royal family, with a ready-made retinue of poor relations who were being given a two-week vacation free of charge as part of the emperor’s largesse. Their prime minister, of course, was the social director, and woe betide him if he did not stand in well at court, poor relations included!

  I played Disraeli to these idiot Victorias for six damnable years, and it is no small accolade I bestow on Mr. Axeler as the worst by far of them all. In a wide choice of egomaniacal cranks, the laurel wreath is unquestionably his and his alone. For one thing he had charm, which most of the others did not; and for another, he was a pathological liar, and in the end I don’t know which I held most against him, his charm or his lying.

  I sat across the desk from him, carefully screening my answers to his questions; but so genuine was his interest and so refreshing his candor compared with the others I had interviewed, that very soon I was disarmed sufficiently to fall back into my plea for Kelly, Shaw and O’Neill as part of the summer’s dramatic program, in spite of the fact that I had privately sworn to stay clear of these names that had already proven anathema everywhere else.

  Far from being put off, Mr. Axeler seemed quite intrigued. He admitted that the level of entertainment in the social hall of the Half Moon Country Club had not been on so high a plane heretofore, but he saw no reason whatever for not trying to raise that level. He deftly suggested that audiences, even in summer camps, invariably rose to an appreciation of what was offered them if it was properly presented, and moreover, he announced, he would enjoy taking the gamble of doing some of the things other camps had not the courage or the gumption even to try.

  I could hardly believe my ears! I had sat down opposite him with a heavy heart, convinced that I must take this job, if I could get it, under any conditions that were set down, and my first look at him and the fact that at the end of April the Half Moon Country Club was still without a social director, gave me every reason to suppose that this was a camp and a job too shoddy for anyone else to consider. After fifteen minutes of listening to Mr. Axeler talk, I was quite oppositely convinced that I had fallen into a tub of honey—that my luck in being turned down by all the other camps was almost too good to be true. This of all jobs seemed to be the one made to order for me.

  I hesitated and stalled for as long as I dared before I came point-blank to the question of my father and Bernie. With as much bravery as I could summon, for I was not at all certain that I could bear to give the job up if he refused my request, I told Mr. Axeler it would be impossible for me to accept an offer that did not include my father and brother. Again Mr. Axeler astonished me. He would be glad to find a job for my brother in the kitchen and place my father in charge of the canteen in the social hall, in return for a small concession on my part. Would I be willing to go up to camp two weeks earlier than usual and get the social hall in readiness for the Decoration Day weekend?

  The Half Moon Country Club was in Vermont and it was a little more difficult to get everything in order there than it was in camps closer to New York. Of course I would, I assured him immediately; but since next week would be the first of May, how would it be possible to engage a social staff and an orchestra in the short time that remained? All that was already done, he airily explained. The country club was run in conjunction with a boys’ camp on the shores of Lake Champlain, just down the hill from the club itself; and the camp counselors were all young men carefully selected with an eye to their previous dramatic training; they were eager and available at all times to do anything I needed them for. Even the camp nurse was studying to be an opera singer on the side and she, too, was to be considered part of the social staff. An orchestra of six pieces had already been engaged and they also, it seemed, were not only first-rate musicians but had fine singing voices and doubled as actors as well.

  Much as I wanted and ne
eded the job I hesitated. It was unorthodox, to say the least, for a social director not to engage his own social staff—the staff he selected during the winter and the luck or good sense he had in choosing the right one made the difference between a good summer or a terrible one. I had never before heard of a staff being engaged before the social director, and noticing my flicker of hesitation and doubt, Mr. Axeler opened a drawer of his desk and drew out a legal-looking bit of paper.

  “I’m fixing the contract to include your father and brother,” he said, “and don’t worry about the staff—take my word for it. I’m taking a gamble on you—you take a gamble on me. Here—just fill in your father’s and brother’s names and sign it.”

  He smiled that wonderfully candid and honest smile of his and pushed the paper across the desk toward me. I returned his smile even though, as I had suspected, the salary was ridiculously small and my father and brother were to get nothing at all but board and lodging—their salary was to come out of a common pool of tips from the guests, that was divided up among the waiters and other help at the end of the season.

  “Maybe we don’t pay as much as some other camps do,” said Mr. Axeler as I sat staring at the contract in front of me, “but we make up for it in a lot of other ways.” He rose and came from behind the desk, a pen in hand. “By the end of the summer you’ll want to pay us for giving you such a fine vacation.” He chuckled. “Here—sign it—so I can officially welcome the newest member of our Half Moon family.”

  He smiled even more winningly and offered me the pen, his other hand resting paternally on my shoulder. His hand remained on my shoulder while I signed my name in the two spaces indicated, and before I even had time to blot the signatures, he had somehow whisked it from the desk and was escorting me to the door. He stood cordially shaking my hand at the doorway and beaming good will all the way down the corridor.