Act One

by Moss Hart

  I had never done such a thing before, but I decided suddenly to call off the evening’s rehearsal and read Once in a Lifetime to them instead. Their reaction, good or bad, would most certainly settle the chief reservation I had in my own mind about the play. I would soon know whether it was funny or not. Laughter cannot be faked, no matter how much good will an audience has toward an author. For an audience, whether it consists of one person or one thousand, shortly becomes a valid one in spite of itself the moment the mechanism of listening starts to operate. Every author, unless he chooses to be willfully self-deluded, carries a Geiger counter in his inner ear that tells him quickly enough whether he has struck the false politeness of hollow laughter or the real thing. There is no mistaking it.

  As I opened the door to the rehearsal hall, I hesitated and briefly reconsidered. Like a man with a toothache, whose pain disappears as he sits waiting in the dentist’s outer office, I was no longer so certain that I wanted to know if the play was good or not. But my curiosity, to say nothing of my vanity, was far too great to allow me to draw back now. I barely acknowledged their good evenings, and quickly trapped myself by making the announcement that there would be no rehearsal tonight and that I would read them the new play I had just finished.

  The announcement was received with considerable excitement. They were well aware that I was a would-be playwright, but it was a part of myself I kept entirely separate from my work with them and seldom discussed. Ever since my first unpleasant experience with little-theatre groups, I had been at some pains to maintain an attitude that was impersonal and scrupulously businesslike, from first rehearsal to last, and I intended, if I could, to keep to that attitude now. I wanted their laughter, not their praise, but I was not unaware of the hushed expectancy in the room as I opened the manuscript and began to read rather nervously. The first laugh was a long time in coming. I was making the mistake, of course, of listening only for laughter, and no play can create laughter at the outset without a necessary exposition of its characters and its premise. Nevertheless, they were a quick and knowing audience. I had not been wrong, at any rate, in one respect. Hollywood and talking pictures were a prime subject for satire, and the time was evidently ripe for it.

  Satire, more than any other form of writing for the stage, depends on timing; the audience must be ready to acknowledge that the culture it accepts and lives by is a proper subject for the playwright’s sharp stings, and ready for the astringent look the satirical playwright is asking them to take at themselves. I read on, not only greatly encouraged by that first laugh but by their immediate perception of what the play intended to say and the way in which it was going to say it. Laughter was coming more often now, and I began to read less nervously and with greater conviction.

  I have always been a good reader of my own work, and that is a danger I have had to make myself aware of and guard against as best I could. If one is going to read a play to a group of people, it is witless to try to read it badly even if one could, and since I read extremely well, I have had to accustom my ear to the nuance of just how much a play’s favorable reception was due to my reading of it and how much to the play itself. The process of reading the first draft of the play aloud can be an excellent barometer of its strength as well as its weaknesses. If one listens correctly and refuses to be fooled by the good nature of the listeners, there is a great deal that can be learned from it. There could be no mistaking now, for example, the fact that I had written a very funny first act, a somewhat unfulfilled and commonplace second act and a quite flat third act. Long before I came to the final curtain, I was completely aware that I had sacrificed a good deal to the speed with which I had written the play, although there was no question that in spite of its obvious lacks, the play had a wonderful surging vitality, which was, perhaps, its most valuable asset. Most remarkable of all, however, was the fact that I could make an audience laugh and that I had an unsuspected and surprising flair for the satirical—and that at last, if this audience was any judge at all, I had written what might very well be my first salable play.

  I was quite as excited, when I finished, as they were, and in the shouting discussion that followed, my mind was more taken up with how quickly I could manage to rewrite the play and get it into Richard Madden’s hands than with what was being said about the play itself. I pricked up my ears, nevertheless, at what Dore Schary was saying now, and I stopped thinking about Richard Madden and, as it turned out, about anything and everything else for the next three weeks, except the name and person of the man he was speaking of. He was speaking of Jed Harris, and in the theatre of the middle and late twenties it was a name to conjure with.

  Harris had sprung out of nowhere with the velocity of a meteor streaking across the sky. He had flashed suddenly across the stodgy theatrical firmament of the early twenties with the hard white light of a winter star, and he continued to light up the theatrical heavens with an unerring touch that had something of the uncanny about it. He could seemingly do no wrong. Production after production, whatever play he turned his hand to, was catapulted into immediate success, and his vagaries, his flaring tempers, his incisive way with a script were already a legend and fast becoming Broadway folklore. I do not think it too great a stretch of either logic or imagination to say that every aspiring playwright’s prayer in those days probably went exactly along the same lines, to wit: “Please, God, let Jed Harris do my play!”

  Above the hubbub in the room, Dore Schary was clamoring for my attention. “Jed Harris would go for this play like a ton of bricks,” he was saying, shouting a little to make himself heard above the others. “Don’t wait to rewrite it—just send it to him the way it is—tomorrow morning, if possible. I’ll make a bet with anybody that he buys it.”

  “It isn’t that easy, Dore,” I protested. “Even if I were willing to send it out in this shape—it isn’t that simple. Every play written is automatically sent to Jed Harris first. What chance would I have of even getting my play read? And if the play’s got anything at all,” I went on, “it’s got a kind of on-the-nose timeliness. If it kicks around too long it will just evaporate into a collection of old Hollywood jokes. I want to get it read as soon as possible.”

  “Wait a minute,” he cried triumphantly, “suppose I could fix it so that you didn’t send it to Jed Harris’ office at all, but right to the hotel where he lives? What about that?”

  I shook my head ruefully at such innocence in the ways of Broadway, and laughed. “Remember what Judge Brack said when Hedda shot herself? ‘People don’t do such things!’ he said. Well, unknown playwrights from Brooklyn don’t send plays to Jed Harris direct—and don’t think his office is going to tell you where he lives, either. They guard that secret with their lives.”

  “Not his office,” he persisted. “His sister. His sister Sylvia lives right here in Newark and I know her. This is where Jed came from originally. I’m going to call her right now.” He turned on his heel and walked out.

  I shrugged my shoulders and began to gather my things together. He would discover quickly enough, I knew, that theatrical producers were as protected and impregnable as a feudal monarch in a turreted castle. He was back, however, almost before I had finished stuffing the manuscript into my briefcase.

  “She says to go ahead and do it,” he cried, decidedly pleased with his success and the look of surprise on my face. “He lives at the Madison Hotel,” he went on, “and she says to send him a telegram saying you want to bring the play to him personally. Then you can do your own talking and get him to read it right away. Well”—he grinned—“how about that? Got any other excuses for not sending it to him now?”

  “No,” I replied, catching something of his excitement. “What do I say in the telegram? You’ve managed everything else so far, you might as well tell me what to say.”

  The whole thing had somehow taken on the aspect of sending off a prize jingle to a national magazine contest. The racket around the table was tremendous. The entire group crowded around us,
offering suggestions at the top of their voices. High-sounding phrases and one or two flagrant untruths were briskly shouted down before we could get enough quiet to compose a telegram that would not obviously find its way into the wastebasket. In the end, what was turned out was a long and rather stiff telegram, its too studied wording, I thought uneasily, having the effect of threatening Jed Harris with the loss of a possible masterpiece. But I was in the mood to go along with anything now. The entire evening’s proceedings, beginning with my sudden decision to read the play, had been so unorthodox that by this time it seemed quite in the nature of things to send off a lengthy telegram to Jed Harris, blithely signed by myself.

  Nor was this the end of it! Everyone trooped down to the Western Union office to see me dispatch the telegram and then went on to an all-night diner for coffee and doughnuts to celebrate, quite as though Jed Harris, now that the telegram was sent, had already bought the play and set a rehearsal date.

  I waited for my train in the Tubes station in Newark, in a foolish and happy daze. I had missed the last express to New York by a good hour and the locals ran on an intermittent and whimsical schedule of their own. The journey home would take a good three hours, but I did not mind. I thought of the telegram winging its way above me as I rode underground and I could not refrain from the warming fantasy of believing that Dore’s words had the ring of truth in them. Jed Harris would read the play at once and buy it.

  I dozed and came awake again, always with the voice of Jed Harris in my ears and the satisfying phrase, “We’ll go into rehearsal in three weeks,” ringing loud and clear. By the time the subway local reached my station in Brooklyn, I had cut the time and the words down to, “We’ll go into rehearsal Monday.”

  IT SEEMED THAT I had only been asleep a bare moment or two when I opened my eyes to see my mother standing over me with an unmistakable yellow envelope in her hand. “It came over an hour ago,” she was saying, “but I didn’t want to wake you. You got in so late last night.”

  “You should have got me up,” I shouted. “Maybe the appointment was for this morning. What time is it?”

  “What appointment?” she asked bewilderedly. “It’s almost twelve o’clock.”

  But I had already snatched the telegram out of her hand and was tearing it open. Half asleep as I was, I knew Jed Harris was going to see me. Theatrical producers did not send telegrams merely to say “No.” I stared down at the curt message on the telegraph blank: “Be at the Madison Hotel at two o’clock this afternoon. Jed Harris.”

  The matter-of-fact words sent me leaping out of bed into the kitchen to gulp down some coffee and to read again and again the telegram which I still clutched in my hand. It is an exhilarating experience to witness for the first time one’s own name coupled with that of a celebrated one. It heightens the illusion of immediate attainment, even though the juxtaposition of names occurs in so slight a way as on a telegram.

  While I shaved and dressed I tried to tell myself that it was absurd to reach this pitch of excitement over what was, after all, merely a summons and nothing more. Obviously, Jed Harris did not produce every play he read. Yet try as I would to keep fact and fantasy from running together, I could do nothing to prevent the laughter of the audience of the evening before from re-echoing in my ears. If the play evoked the same kind of laughter from Jed Harris, then this might well be the last subway ride I would ever take. I had long since known the first use I would make of money. It would be to take taxis whenever and wherever I wished, for so little as a half-block if I chose to, and never ride underground again.

  Above the roar of the subway, now, I tried to fashion in my mind the way the interview might go. To be too much in awe would highlight the eagerness of the unproduced playwright. On the other hand, too great an insistence that he read the play immediately might be equally foolhardy.

  I tried to recall the pictures I had seen of Jed Harris in magazines and newspapers. It was a face that leaped back into one’s memory with razor-sharp definition: the gaunt features, the clean-shaven cheeks thinly ringed even in the pictures by a dark shadow of beard, and the unforgettable hooded eyes, veiled and threatening, with a promise of future rancor even as the lips arranged themselves into the semblance of a makeshift smile. There was no clue whatever as to what to expect or how to behave, for if the eye of the beholder is quite properly the place wherein beauty lies, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the beholder’s unconscious carries along as well a vision that is even sharper than what his eye takes in. He carries into a first meeting with the celebrated a prefabricated legend of a thousand bits and pieces, and it is generally never a person he sees or talks to but the reflection of that legend.

  It puts both parties at a distinct disadvantage. The celebrated figure is almost always a disappointment in terms of the legend, and it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. A first meeting with the famed generally precludes anything but the most strained of conversations and is equally awkward and uncomfortable for both hero and hero-worshipper.

  Nothing, however, could have properly prepared me for the tongue-tied shock of my first visit to the celebrated Jed Harris. Like everything else about him, it was unexpected, perverse, and calculated to disconcert even the most cynical and hardy.

  I gave my name to the clerk at the desk of the Madison Hotel and waited nervously while he muttered into a telephone that was just out of sight. “Mr. Harris wants you to wait,” he reported after a moment. I glanced at the clock over the desk. It was a quarter of two and I was early for the appointment. It had not occurred to me, in my eagerness, to check the time. I walked to a chair in the lobby that faced the clock and sat down.

  The Madison was largely a residential hotel and its walnut-paneled lobby had style and elegance. I watched its well-dressed occupants come out of the elevators and stroll to the desk, to leave keys or receive mail, with the discreet authority and poised assurance of the well-to-do. As I watched, my mind raced ahead ignobly to the pleasantries of behavior that money makes possible. It was a form of daydreaming I often indulged in. A too constant preoccupation with money may seem to indicate the lack of a proper sense of moral values, but I did not consider this to be so. It is not as craven as it may appear to those who have always had money and given little or no thought to its possession. Let them be without it for a while, and they will soon discover how quickly it becomes their chief concern. People with children do not think much about the gift of parenthood, but most childless couples think of little else until such time as they have a child of their own or succeed in adopting one. Parenthood and money are not so disparate as they may seem to be, if one considers how largely these twin obsessions engage the thoughts of a goodly portion of mankind. Once achieved, they soon cease to dazzle and very quickly fall into the natural order of things; but it is surprising how the lack of one or the other, particularly money, can occupy the mind to the exclusion of more noble sentiments. I have always accepted my pleasure in money as something eminently sensible and not as something crass or base in my nature that need be hidden or denied.

  I had become so deeply engrossed in my own daydreams of plenitude that when I next glanced up at the clock it was twenty minutes past two. I rushed up to the clerk at the desk and gave my name again. “Mr. Harris knows you’re here,” he replied. “We’re not allowed to ring him until he calls down.”

  At four o’clock a new desk clerk replaced the one I had spoken to. I tried my luck again, but with no better result. Mr. Harris could not be disturbed. From the clerk’s tone I gathered that orders from Mr. Harris were not lightly trifled with. I walked back to my chair and sat down heavily on the newspapers which I had already read from cover to cover. I had long since passed the point of taking what comfort I could from the well-publicized fact that theatrical people are notoriously late for appointments; and, as usual, nervousness had increased my always large appetite beyond its ordinary limits, but the newsstand in the corner of the lobby was elegantly above carrying anything so plebeian
as candy bars and I had not dared leave the lobby for fear the summons would come while I was gone.

  As the hands on the clock veered toward five, I began to be concerned about my rehearsal in Brooklyn, which was an early one this evening; but I was determined not to jeopardize the chance of having the play read, no matter what. After all, Jed Harris had replied to my telegram with undeniable promptness and I was credulous enough to believe that theatrical history might be in the making upstairs. For all I knew, I told myself reassuringly, a pride of famous names might well be closeted with Jed Harris right now, reshaping the destiny of an as yet unborn hit, and who was I to chafe at being kept waiting.

  For want of anything better to do, I took the manscript of Once in a Lifetime out of the envelope and began to read it. I soon put it back. The dialogue that had seemed sparkling, impudent and twinkling with humor the evening before now seemed astonishingly tepid. The thought of those intense eyes scanning these pages made the idea of sudden flight extremely tempting; but I had witnessed stage fright too many times to give way to it now. Instead, I sat and stared miserably at the clock.