Act One

by Moss Hart

  I walked hurriedly away from the building as the moving men started to unload the van. I stopped after a block or so at a candy and stationery store to buy some pads of yellow paper. I also wanted to know if there was another beach this close to Coney Island. It might be a place to work until we got settled in. There was indeed another beach, eight or nine blocks away, straight ahead in the direction I had been going. I bought a supply of candy bars and a box of cheese crackers and headed for it.

  It was a sweet, mild September morning and I was surprised to find the beach deserted. There was not a soul to be seen upon it. It was a stretch of sand that edged the bay, and if it was always as empty as this, I decided, it would be an excellent place to work until the weather drove me indoors. I felt fatigued, but the impulse to get to work was strong. Time presses terribly at twenty, in contradiction to the testimony of the senescent, who claim the years of age fly by with winged speed; or time pressed upon my own impatient spirit with a passionate sense of life passing by that only twenty can feel.

  I looked across the bay to Manhattan, and for a moment my high spirits were dampened as I reflected that I seemed to be moving farther and farther away from Broadway instead of closer to it. Only for a fleeting moment, however. For on this special day nothing could dampen my high spirits for long. It seemed to me I had grasped one of the theatre’s deepest secrets. Survival. This hidden secret is seldom spoken of in books or schools that teach the hopeful how to act or how to write plays. The Art of Survival is seldom even mentioned. Yet it is as prime a requisite for a theatrical career as talent itself, for with an ability to survive, everything is possible, and without it … nothing.

  I knew that I would survive now, that I would get on with the business of writing plays, and keep on with it no matter what other Mr. Axelers the future held in store. To be concerned now about whether any of those plays would ever see a Broadway production seemed like an ungrateful repayment for the almost miraculous good luck that had taken me this far. Whatever guardian angel there was watching benignly over me, he had produced Joe Hyman, some pads of yellow paper, and an empty, sunny beach; and in the light of what had happened these last three days, I could ask for no further guarantees.

  I fixed a mound of sand to lean against, waggled my backside into it for a more comfortable seat, and settled down to write a play.

  PART TWO

  FOUR YEARS later, almost to the exact day and at almost the identical spot on the beach where I had sat four years earlier, I sat again, my pockets stuffed with a supply of candy bars, a pad of yellow paper again on my knees. It seemed to me remarkable that so much and so little had happened since that other September morning when I had first made my way to this same spot.

  I had returned only a day or two before from another season of social directing, but this time as social director of the Flagler Hotel, the Fontainebleau of the Catskills. In those four years I had gone, like Kansas City, about as far as I could go. I was now the most highly paid, the most eagerly sought-after social director of the Borscht Circuit. The summer of my novitiate at Camp Utopia and my summer of serfdom at the Half Moon Country Club were bitter but distant memories, something to be told to the staff as laughable but almost unbelievable tales out of the past, considering my present high eminence.

  This past summer at the Flagler, I had arrived for the beginning of the season with a personal staff of twenty-six people, not including waiters or musicians. The staff included not only a future nightclub headliner and two future soloists of the Philharmonic Orchestra, but it also included as my chief assistant a solemn-faced young man of quiet but unswerving ambition, named Dore Schary. My position as King of the Borscht Circuit was largely undisputed. My chief competitor in the field was one Don Hartman, the social director of Grossinger’s Hotel—a curious quirk of circumstance, considering the fact that Dore Schary was to become head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Hartman the head of Paramount Pictures. Not one of us would have believed this to be in the realm of even remote possibility in that summer of 1929—though we were, all three of us, not inclined to be modest in our estimates of what the future held in store.

  A good deal more than just my own status as a social director had changed during those years. Camps and hotels with social staffs had taken an enormous leap forward. Money was plentiful and the competition keen. Both camps and hotels kept enlarging their social staffs and bettering their ability to provide greater social activities, particularly in the realm of shows, with each new summer.

  The Flagler Hotel, whose proprietors had begun to feel the cutting edge of displacement by their deadliest rival, Grossinger’s, had, the summer before I arrived, decided to build the finest social hall on the Borscht Circuit and engage the best social director, barring Don Hartman, that they could get to run it. They had built what was, when I arrived to take it over, a completely equipped little theatre seating fifteen hundred people, whose electrical switchboard, fly loft and scenery dock compared more than favorably with some New York theatres. It was the pride of the Catskills. Its audience dressed to the hilt for the Friday and Saturday night shows. At the height of the season, such was my weighty reputation as a social director by then, overflow crowds came from other hotels from miles around to see the shows, even though they were charged an admission fee, and on Saturday nights a couple of hundred were always turned away.

  As the director in charge of all this grandeur, I had long since disdained to stoop to such primitive means of thievery as sneaking into theatres during intermissions and standing at the back with a pocket flashlight to scribble notes on a program. My seats to theatres were now paid for by whatever camp I chose to give the benefit of my services the following season, and I was accompanied by a stenographer, also paid for, who at the touch of my fingers at her elbow, would take down exactly and expertly whatever portions I wanted stolen of the particular show we were witnessing.

  Even during the camp season itself, the demands of my time were no longer incessant. I did not participate to any great extent in campfire nights and games nights, and though I still sang “boy and girl” numbers in the musical shows and performed the redoubtable “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach” several times each season, it was the ability, week after week, to present full-length plays like The Show-Off and The Trial of Mary Dugan, and short ones like The Valiant—which Dore Schary played to perfection—that kept the social hall jammed and kept Don Hartman, a few miles away at Grossinger’s, well up on his toes.

  Had I been prepared to derive any sense of pleasure from these triumphs, I would have been forced to agree that I had come a long way from the days when Eddie and I, and afterward I alone, had dragged the wood for the campfires and the blankets for the guests to sit on out to the woods unassisted; a long way indeed from the indignity of wearing, in lieu of my own clothes, the remnants of the camp wardrobe trunk, and a longer way still from being at the mercy of Mr. Axeler and his ilk, or sitting glassy-eyed with exhaustion through bunk parties I dared not refuse to attend.

  But not a long enough way, I thought sardonically, to be any farther than this beach I was still sitting on come each new September. I had now survived six summers of social directing, and six winters of little-theatre work, and with each winter I had faithfully kept to my intent and completed a play. All of them reposed safely and out of sight on the top of an unused shelf in the kitchen. The seventh awaited only the pencil I held in my hand to start taking shape on the yellow pad of blank paper on my knee. I gazed across the bay to Manhattan, as I had done at the start of each of these Septembers, but not quite as hopefully, not with the same certainty that this would be the last September I would be here.

  All six plays had been submitted and read by the play readers of the best managements on Broadway, and all six had been speedily refused and returned. Somewhere or other along the line, I was in error; an error either of thinking or of execution. Each successive play had been better than the one before, of this I was convinced, if only in terms of professionalism. I ha
d taken great pains to better each play’s craftsmanship. I no longer allowed myself to be seduced by the dangerously sweet music of my own words. I played them back, as it were, and listened with a cold and critical ear. The last two had been written, I thought, with a greater degree of economy and a surer sense of the theatre than I had ever achieved before. Yet these, also, had been promptly and unregretfully returned. Unquestionably, some necessary element or ingredient was missing in those plays, some one aspect of writing for the theatre had escaped me—barring, of course, the unpleasant possibility that I lacked any talent for play-writing whatever. I was altogether unprepared to accept this last assumption as a fact, true or not. At least, not yet, but it seemed to me a reckoning of some sort was not only necessary but long overdue. For one thing, I was aware that social directing could not go on forever. Fads and fashions changed in social directing as much as in anything else, so that this year’s top social director might well be the summer after next’s assistant, or even a mere member of the staff. Even so, I roughly estimated that I still had three big-league summers left and I was determined to make the most of them. Making the most of them, however, did not include simply doing more of the same, if that meant finishing a play each winter and returning to this beach each fall to write still another.

  Continuous and heedless writing, a dogged plowing ahead in spite of failure, represents industry and little else if it does not also include a willingness to explore the anatomy of that failure. I was prepared not to set down another word on paper until I had satisfied myself that I was at least using the tools correctly; and I had reached a point where I was no longer certain, in spite of a growing technical dexterity, that this was so. There was an indication of a kind that I was not. In my pocket reposed a letter that was to have a considerable effect upon me. It was from Richard J. Madden, of the American Play Company, to whom I had sent two or three plays, and his letter was one of two rejections I had received at camp a few weeks earlier. Mr. Madden had written at some length explaining his own refusal, and it was not so much what he said as the fact that his words mirrored, to a great extent, the content of the other letter.

  Both readers were kindly disposed to consider future plays of mine, but in Mr. Madden’s words, “Since by far the best part of the plays you have sent us have been the comedic moments, why not try writing a comedy? I am inclined to believe very strongly that you could turn out a good one.” I read the letter through again, then put it back in my pocket, still as frankly and thoroughly puzzled as I had been at its first reading. It had never occurred to me that any of the six dramas I had written contained any comedic moments at all, other than those demanded by the characters themselves and in very sparse terms at that.

  There was a logical reason for this. I was a full-blown snob so far as comedy was concerned. My gods of the theatre still remained Shaw, whom I considered a writer of political and social ideas rather than comedy, and O’Neill, who represented the drama of the emotions. Like all snobs, I dismissed everything in between. I had no taste for the popular comedies of the day and little admiration for those who could turn them out successfully. I had no idea whatever of how to go about writing a comedy, for my own idea of comedy did not seem to be at all the popular conception. Only in the comedies of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly did there seem to be a kinship with my own sense of the ridiculous and the outrageous. They were the exception to my snobbishness. I did not look down my nose so far as Dulcy, To the Ladies, Beggar on Horseback or Merton of the Movies were concerned, but it seemed to me utter foolishness to try to ape these two masters of the form. They ruled unquestioned and absolute in the field of satirical writing for the theatre. Nobody else could touch them.

  With a bravado I did not feel, I considered Madden’s letter again, for if I could bring myself to attempt a comedy it would only be in the tradition of Kaufman and Connelly, or not at all, and I was neither so brave nor so innocent as to consider that an easy undertaking. Nevertheless, if I was going to examine the reasons for my failure realistically, it was pure blockheadedness not to gravely estimate the truth of Madden’s words. If he was right, then I was wasting my time by turning out pseudo Shaw and O’Neill year after year. If whatever capacity or talent I possessed might lean in quite another direction, I could do no better than try to prove it or disprove it to my own satisfaction. I most certainly had little to lose in trying. Again my predilection toward omens and portents played a decisive part. This would be my seventh play, and seven was a lucky number. I decided to try a comedy.

  A little grumpily I removed the mantle of Shaw and O’Neill from my shoulders and regarded the yellow pad of paper on my lap. Without thinking too much about it, I scribbled a title across the blank sheet. I usually came by a title last, sometimes quite a while after the play itself was finished, for titles seemed to me, then as now, the least important part of a play, but I had a slight comedic idea in the back of my mind that this title would fit. It seemed also to suggest neatly what I was certain would be my one and only attempt at writing a comedy. The title I had scribbled across the paper was Once in a Lifetime, and staring down at it, I began to block out in my mind the opening scenes of the play.

  It will be remembered that talking pictures had arrived with the impact of a thunderbolt in 1928, and by 1929 Hollywood, at first skittish and unbelieving, was shaken to its roots and in the midst of a tremendous economic and artistic upheaval. I had, of course, never been anywhere near Hollywood, but this did not stop me from imagining what might conceivably be happening in Hollywood now with the sudden advent of talking pictures.

  A comedy, particularly a satirical comedy, is always conditioned by its author’s attitude to the manners and mores of the climate in which he lives, and it would seem that a thoroughgoing first-hand knowledge of what he is writing about would be his first necessity. This is not always true, particularly so far as satire is concerned. It is sometimes far better for a writer to allow a lively imagination to roam over the field he has chosen than to research that field within an inch of its life—the danger being that what emerges is likely to be all research and no play. By and large, an audience usually knows as much as an author does before he starts his research, and that is all they want to know or should know. The author’s creative imagination and satirical viewpoint must do the rest. An audience is not interested in how hard the author has worked at his research or how much material he has unearthed, and they do not take kindly to his parading in front of the footlights his hard-earned knowledge. They are quite right. They have not come to a schoolroom; they have come to a theatre.

  I did not consider that my complete ignorance of Hollywood or of the making of motion pictures was any bar whatever to my writing about both with the utmost authority, and I proceeded to do so with the invaluable help of that renowned trade paper, Variety. A weekly copy of Variety was the full extent of the research I did on Once in a Lifetime, and I could not have done better. Variety viewed the Hollywood scene with a shrewd and shifty eye. Not taken in by Hollywood’s boasts or wails of protest, its reporting of the current crisis was first-rate. Between the lines of the special language used by its writers to put a declarative sentence into simple English, a cunning eye could catch an enveloping glimpse of the wonderful absurdity of the Hollywood scene. I read every word Variety wrote about it, and no oceanographer or marine botanist ever came up out of the Sargasso Sea with more prime specimens than I did out of those weekly issues. In a very real sense, the play might well have been dedicated “With love” and “Without whom” to that astute and all-knowing journal.

  To my surprise, the play itself was finished in something under three weeks’ time, a fact which I viewed with something akin to alarm. I genuinely mistrusted the ease with which I had written it, for I had never written a play, barring that first abortive effort for Augustus Pitou, in anything short of four to six months’ time. I took it for granted, I do not know quite why, that the more agony a play generated in the writing, the better it was
likely to emerge as a play. I am inclined to believe now that the very opposite is likely to be true. Agonizing effort has a way somehow of permeating the stage and drifting out across the footlights.

  The airiest comedies, the most delightful ones to watch, are usually the ones in which the author has shared some of the audience’s delight beforehand, and there was no question that I had had a very good time indeed in writing Once in a Lifetime—a good enough time to make me thoroughly suspicious of it. I had no idea whether it was very good or no good at all. I read it over several times, trying to measure its worth against the standards of the Kaufman and Connelly comedies, but I could come to no conclusion. It seemed to me the play had a fresh and impertinent quality, but I had no idea whether it was funny or not. I had arbitrarily set myself the task of writing in a style altogether new to me and in a kind of idiomatic language that was foreign to my ear. I had no yardstick by which I could judge it. There was only one way to find out if the play was any good and that was to see whether an audience laughed at it. I decided to create my own audience. I made the decision in the Hudson Tubes, where I was reading over the play for still another time while on my way to an evening rehearsal of a Newark little-theatre group which I was directing for a second season.

  My status as a director of little theatres had changed as sharply for the better as my standing as a social director. I could pick and choose at will which little theatres I would direct now. I had chosen to direct two groups in Brooklyn and one in Newark, and although this necessitated my spending an inordinate amount of time in the Hudson Tubes and the subway, I did not mind. The group in Newark was an interesting one. The people in it were a good deal more mature than any I had ever directed before, and they were in all ways superior to the usual run of little-theatre groups. Dore Schary, the leading spirit of the group, himself engaged in writing plays and short stories on the side, and almost all the others were aspiring scenic artists, directors-to-be or dedicated amateur actors who hoped to graduate into the professional theatre in very short order. They made it their business to see everything worth seeing on Broadway and their critical judgment was generally sound. They would not be an easy or a flattering audience. Quite likely the opposite, which was exactly the test I wished the play to have.