by Moss Hart
They did not see. They looked at me as though I had taken sudden leave of my wits.
“It’s simple enough,” I went on. “For instance, I’m going to come in to lunch today as a Confederate general.” I held up a bedraggled uniform, its epaulettes hanging over the shoulders in shreds, for illustration. “Get it? Well, you precede me and play ‘Dixie’—play it twice, walking in and out among the tables. Then I’ll make an entrance. And if I come in tonight as Paul Revere, you play ‘Yankee Doodle.’ I’ll always let you know beforehand what I’ll be wearing. It’s a good stunt and it works fine,” I added, with a certainty I was far from feeling as they continued to stare at me.
“Well, it’s ‘Dixie’ for lunch,” I said irritably. “I did this last year at Camp Utopia and it was a big hit, so just do it,” I lied.
“Okay,” said the piano player resentfully, “I guess we have to do it.” They shuffled off, muttering among themselves. This was their usual display of enthusiasm for anything they were asked to do, particularly if the request came from me. They took very little pains to hide their dislike and resentment of me, and I in turn made no bones about how I felt about them. They were a sorry, pimply-faced lot and from my first glimpse of them I had known what to expect in the way of help. It came as no surprise to me that they would not take kindly to the idea of being impressed into The Emperor Jones as jungle natives, of having to black up, not just their faces, but their entire bodies as well; but there was nothing they could do about it.
They walked through the days in a stunned, somnambulistic fashion, as if they had never quite recovered from the initial shock of finding themselves where they were. They had been as stunned, in fact, as I had been by their first look at the Half Moon Country Club, but they played each of their musical instruments so horribly that I could feel no sympathy for any of them, and they had been remarkably lazy and uncooperative in helping to clean out the social hall, and even their own quarters, which were even filthier than mine were.
I watched the trumpet player and the saxophonist take their instruments and walk out of the social hall, and I looked down at the uniform I still held in my hand. It was almost lunchtime, and if I was going to do it, I must do it now, or I knew I might not have the courage to do it at all. I got into the trousers and coat, tied the sash around the middle and placed the hat (at least a size too small for me) on my head. I tried not to look into the mirror but I could not refrain. I looked ridiculous. The effect was lugubrious and sad, somehow, not comic. I looked woebegone and foolish, like a child caught in the act of trying on his father’s clothes, and the expression of exasperated martyrdom on my face added to the impression that someone had just shouted, “Take those things off right away and put them back.”
But I had gone too far now, with both the musicians and myself, to back down, in spite of my image in the mirror; and the effect would be even more ridiculous, I told myself, if I walked into the dining room in a blue serge suit while the trumpet and saxophone played “Dixie.” I grimly glued on a mustache, then watched from the window until I was sure that the last guest had entered the dining room. Then I ran as fast as I could across the fields until I reached the porch of the main building. Being caught in the open sunlight in that outfit, and having to explain why I was got up in such fashion, would have robbed me of whatever little courage I had left.
The two musicians stood waiting sullenly inside the doorway. “All right,” I said, “go on in and play.” They put the horns to their lips and blasted into the opening bars of “Dixie.” From the porch outside I could see every head in the dining room turn. I watched the two musicians march amongst the tables, blaring away, and took a deep breath—they were almost through the second chorus. I had to get in while the music still played or I knew I might turn tail and run.
I took another deep breath and stalked into the dining room, pausing dramatically in the doorway. “General Nuisance of the Deep South,” I announced in a billowing Southern accent, “is up North here in your midst for a short stay to see how you damn Yankees socialize in the hot summer weather, and has been delegated by your social director to make the following announcements of the events of the afternoon.” I stopped and gave what I presumed sounded like a rebel yell. The entire dining room broke into delighted laughter and applause. They had listened thunderstruck for a moment, as well they might have, in stony silence, not knowing quite what was going on; but now they realized that it was the social director “making fun” in the dining room.
They greeted the announcements I made of the afternoon’s events with more shouts of laughter and applause, and I finally sat down at my table to eat lunch, dripping wet and throbbing with embarrassment and rage. The rage was directed at Mr. Axeler, who had appeared in the dining room in the middle of all this and was now moving among the tables and beamingly accepting compliments on how well the new social director “made fun.” He even had the gall some weeks later to suggest that I keep on with it, even after I finally had some clothes of my own, and I strongly suspected him of holding back the twenty-five dollars he grudgingly gave me until the very last moment, for there could be no doubt that the guests liked it. Too well. To my horror they looked forward to these appearances and even tried to guess what disguise I would turn up in next.
That evening I appeared in the social hall as Tecumseh, an old Indian scout, and was greeted by shrieks of appropriate laughter and applause, and the following day at lunch, to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw,” I walked in as Daniel Boone, coonskin cap and all, thereby anticipating the Davy Crockett craze by some twenty-five years. But the more they laughed and applauded, the more I loathed them, myself and my employer. And every time I entered the dining room or social hall in some ridiculous getup I had to take a deep breath the moment before, because I trembled for fear that somehow a stream of filthy epithets would, in spite of myself, issue from my lips, instead of the announcements of the afternoon’s or evening’s activities.
It was in this actively vengeful mood that I went through with the rehearsals of The Emperor Jones, knowing full well it was going to be bad, but never, even in my wildest fantasies of evening the score with Mr. Axeler, imagining just how much of a nightmare that evening was going to turn out to be. It may well be that my appearances as Long John Silver, Louis XIV and Abraham Lincoln during the days preceding the show had ill prepared the audience for my appearance as the Emperor Jones on the social-hall stage that Saturday night. The clientele of the Half Moon Country Club were ill-prepared enough, of course, in quite another way, to witness the O’Neill tragedy. I doubt if ten persons among them had ever heard of O’Neill at that time, and their expectation of the big Saturday night show on the Decoration Day weekend was always of a musical potpourri of some sort, full of topical allusions and camp jokes.
It could have been predicted, I suppose, but it had not occurred to me, that when I came onto the stage as the drunken, tragic emperor, they took it for granted that this was a skit satirizing my own comic getups, and they roared with laughter. The fact that I was in blackface seemed to make it even funnier, and they applauded generously and patiently waited for me to burst forth in song or go into a soft-shoe routine. When it slowly dawned upon them that they were being asked to sit through a serious and tragic play, I could feel them settle back, angry and disappointed. A few people in the front row got up from their seats and walked out, raising their voices above mine on the stage to announce they were going to play cards.
I had other things to worry about, however, than a disgruntled audience and a few walkouts at that moment. Even nature herself, it seemed, had chosen to conspire against me this terrible evening. The day had dawned bright and hot, but suddenly in mid-afternoon the sun had disappeared and a mass of freezing air had settled over the countryside. I learned later that this brief cold spell is something of a Vermont phenomenon, appearing sometimes in late spring or even early summer. An actual frost could make a sudden quick havoc of the Vermont countryside and damage crops and
flowers in its brief overnight stay.
This fiendish cold spell had chosen to make its appearance on the afternoon of the day I was doing The Emperor Jones, the greater portion of which is played by the emperor stumbling through the steaming jungle clad in nothing but a loincloth. I had shivered with more than the cold as I made up, for hailstones as large as marbles had fallen over the camp at dinnertime and immediately afterward the sharp stinging cold of a winter evening had settled in.
The audience had arrived wrapped in sweaters, raincoats and blankets they had taken from the beds, and a biting wind whistled through the open social hall. I was all right, of course, during the first scene, where the emperor makes his appearance in uniform before he flees the palace to the jungle. But what would happen when I appeared in a loincloth and had to speak the recurrent line, “I’se meltin’ wid de heat,” I did not choose to think about.
Sure enough, at my first appearance in the second scene, naked except for the loincloth, and my first cry of “I’se meltin’ wid de heat,” an irrepressible giggle escaped from the darkened hall and swept over the footlights. I quaked inwardly and waited for the worst to happen. The worst was not long in coming.
There were a few “ssh-sshes” from the more well-mannered and sympathetic of the audience; but when the skinny, silly-looking and easily recognizable musicians stepped out from behind the cardboard palm trees and stood there shivering, the entire social hall broke into a gale of uncontainable laughter. They were funny-looking enough, God knows, without their teeth chattering and their legs shaking from the cold, but they had so resented having to put on the black body make-up that they had applied it to themselves in streaks and patches. They looked now like nothing so much as six refugees from a leper colony or the victims of some virulent skin disease.
Moreover, the drummer, who had rather a large pot belly for one of his tender years, had chosen out of some ostrich-like vanity not to apply the black make-up to this portion of his anatomy at all, so that a round white globe swung gently above his loincloth and made him appear about to give birth at any moment. I dared not steal more than a glance at him myself, for shivering and miserable though I was, I would have been hard put not to have joined in the uncontrollable laughter that greeted his every movement across the stage. Not unnaturally he thought his loincloth had come unstuck, and the more frantically he tugged at it and tried to cover himself, the more the audience howled.
To make matters worse, when the tom-toms started, two or three of the musicians gave a terrible start, quite as though they had not heard the drums all through rehearsals, and one of the loincloths actually did come unstuck on one of them. He made a tremendous grab and retrieved it just in the nick of time, but not before the audience had given him a round of applause and shrieked with glee.
My own teeth were chattering now, not only with the cold but with the agony of knowing that I must play it through to the end somehow, for The Emperor Jones is really a lengthy one-act play and is played in its entirety without intermission. There was no chance for me to get off the stage, for either me or the audience to recover ourselves, and I could tell they were now in a state approaching hysteria. They could not help themselves by this time, and laughed at nothing and everything. When this kind of laughter sweeps through an audience it is a kind of mass hysteria.
They laughed in that social hall when there was seemingly nothing whatever to laugh at. Even the recollection of something earlier would send someone in the social hall off into a peal of laughter on his own, and the rest of the audience would helplessly join in. They stamped their feet and banged on the chairs and whistled each time that idiot musician with the pot belly had to cross the stage, exactly as though he were Gypsy Rose Lee doing a strip-tease, and finally they began to beat time with the tom-toms, drowning me out altogether. I was beyond caring now, however. I doggedly mouthed lines and kept thinking of standing under a hot shower and drinking some boiling coffee to get warm again, if ever I could. I seemed to be aching cold in every joint.
At the final moment of the play, when I lifted the revolver to my temple and shouted, “The silver bullet!” and pressed the trigger and the off-stage revolver did not go off, it mattered very little. In an evening of such glorious failure, the traditional blank cartridge failing to go off seemed no more than a slight mistake. Even the audience was too exhausted from laughing to do more than send up a token roar at this ultimate fiasco. I dropped down to the stage anyway, dead in more ways than just play-acting, and waited for the curtains to close. They slowly drew together, and to my amazement the closing was greeted with a tremendous salvo of applause and cheers.
I could not understand the applause at first, until I realized I had evidently given them as good a time for the wrong reasons as if I had put on a funny, regulation Decoration Day show. I took one halfhearted bow and marched wearily off to the showers, the still shivering musicians trailing silently after me. It was over, at any rate, and I could even feel a kind of comradeship for those hapless musicians who had suffered through it with me.
It was not quite over, however. What we did not know until we stood under the showers was that the end of The Emperor Jones was not yet, and that its marks would remain, like the Scarlet Letter, to brand us for quite a while. At first we thought that the black body make-up would not come off our bodies no matter how hard we scrubbed because the water trickling thinly out of the nozzle was, as usual, barely warm. But as we scrubbed and scrubbed each other until our bodies grew red and burning, it became apparent that the body make-up I had found in the make-up box in the dressing room must have been purchased by Mr. Axeler from the leftover stock of some store in the village and had probably been lying on the shelves ever since local minstrel shows had gone out of style in the State of Vermont. Whatever ingredient it originally contained to make it wash off with soap and water had long since evaporated along with minstrel shows.
I dispatched one of the musicians for a can of kerosene and we doused ourselves with it, but the stuff still clung in large black spots to various portions of our bodies and faces with octopus-like tenacity. It did not come off that night or the next morning, or for some weeks following.
The musicians went off the following day and among some secluded rocks began to acquire an all-over tan; this helped somewhat, in the sense that they finally achieved one color all over, with what appeared to be black polka dots underneath. But since I could not take the time out for a suntan, I walked around with my black spots open to view in all sorts of untoward places until the beginning of August. All that finally served to remind me of that night was the mustache I grew to hide an upper lip that still looked as though I might plunge into an imitation of Charlie Chaplin at any moment.
But there was one figure of that summer that was to remain with me for thirty years afterward. His name was Joseph M. Hyman and he was a paying guest of the Half Moon Country Club. He had wandered into one of the last rehearsals of The Emperor Jones and had stood at the back for almost two hours quietly watching us. Now, a social director did not take kindly to guests wandering into the social hall during a rehearsal, but there was not much he or his staff could do about it. Since we could not order a guest out of the hall, our only defense against guests who plunked themselves down on chairs directly in front of the stage and stared at us while we rehearsed, was to give cues to each other in absolute whispers the moment any guests appeared. It always worked well. The starers and gapers, unable to hear anything of the rehearsal, grew bored quickly and usually wandered out of the hall in very short order. This particular guest, however, whom I had glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as he came into the social hall, did not plump himself down into a chair in front of the stage, but remained where he was at the far end of the hall, watching and smoking one cigarette after the other until the rehearsal ended some two hours later.
This was such strange behavior for a guest that I was sufficiently intrigued to come down from the stage, instead of leaving by the back door, and cro
ss the length of the hall to where he still stood.
“You’re a bitter-ender,” I said. “Like what you saw?”
He did not reply, but offered me a cigarette instead. “How did you happen to get to a place like this?” he asked. “You deserve something better.”
“It’s a long story,” I replied. “I’m trapped like a rat for the summer anyway. You interested in the theatre?” I asked.
Again he did not reply directly. “You seem to be pretty shorthanded,” he said. “If you need someone to work the lights and the curtain I’ll be glad to help out. I’ll make myself available for all the rest of the rehearsals whenever you need me.”
I looked at him, for he was obviously dead serious and the offer was a kind one—there was no doubt about how short-handed I was and how desperately I needed someone I could depend on to work the light cues and curtains.
“You mean it?” I asked. “You have to stick around here a good many hours and maybe all night long on Friday. You won’t get much chance to do anything else, you know.”
“I know,” he replied, “but if you want me to, I’ll do it. It’s not such a big favor,” he grinned. “From what I’ve seen of the other guests I won’t be missing much!”
“It’s a big favor to me,” I said gratefully. “Can you meet me back here about five o’clock? I’ll have the light cues all written down for you and we can go over them together.”
“Sure,” he answered, and held out his hand. “My name is Joe Hyman, by the way.”
It was the first time I heard the name of the man that I was to turn to so many times afterward in time of distress or decision. We shook hands and walked down toward the lake together, neither one of us having the faintest awareness that at every critical moment of my life from that time onward Joe Hyman would always be at my side. He was then a man in his middle or late twenties, his gaunt and saturnine features indelibly trademarked by a smile of derision and disbelief that seemed to hover forever about his lips. In spite of his misanthropic mien, however, there was about him an aura of innate goodness that belied the cynical gleam in his eyes. He was stubborn, tactless, outrageously certain of his opinions, anti-social, and chronically unenthusiastic about life in general and people in particular, to almost the same extent that I was opposite in all these things. Two more diverse people in temperament and character would be hard to place side by side in enduring friendship.