Act One

by Moss Hart

  At twenty minutes past five, the clerk motioned me toward the desk. With what I hoped would appear a casual saunter, I strolled toward him. I might have spared myself the trouble. He was busy riffling through those mysterious bits of red and green strips of paper that desk clerks seem to be endlessly engaged with and did not even look up when I stood in front of him. “Mr. Harris says to leave the manuscript and be here at twelve o’clock tomorrow,” he remarked flatly, and held out his hand for the envelope. I handed it over to him without a word. It had not occurred to me that this meeting which I had been bracing myself to face for three and a half hours, would not take place at all. I felt immeasurably let down and curiously cheated.

  A little dazed I walked out of the lobby and made my way to the nearest drug-store luncheonette. By the third hamburger, I felt a good deal better and of a mind to believe that the postponement was something of a blessing in disguise. After all, he obviously intended to have the play read by tomorrow morning—otherwise, why the instructions to meet him at twelve o’clock? My mood reverted at once to the great expectations of the night before and it was with some difficulty that I could bring any attention to bear on the evening’s rehearsal in Brooklyn.

  Sleep that night was an uneasy business also, and I was up and shaved and dressed long before I needed to have been, in order to be on time for my appointment with the great man. Promptly at noon I presented myself to the same desk clerk, and the same business of muttering into a telephone just out of my sight was gone through again. To my immense surprise, however, the clerk was blandly repeating to me the exact words of the day before. “Mr. Harris wants you to wait,” he said succinctly and disappeared behind the cashier’s window. I stood uncertainly for a moment, not quite prepared to believe what I had just heard, then walked toward the same chair I had sat in yesterday.

  “But it can’t be the same as yesterday,” I thought; “there’s no point to it. Why did he answer my telegram? Why did he ask me to leave the manuscript? Why would he ask me to come back?” I had plenty of time to think these and many other thoughts as well, it turned out. The clock over the desk slowly meted out time from twelve to one, from one to two, and then from two to three. As the hours passed, I veered from bitterness to amusement and back to bitterness again. But I was determined to wait it out, now, if I sat there all night and all of the next day. Some time or other Jed Harris must emerge from one of the elevators I sat facing, and when he did, he would find me keeping a grim vigil!

  I was on my way over to the newsstand to buy some magazines when the clerk signaled to me. “Mr. Harris,” he said, seeming in no way surprised at the extraordinary procedure of the last two days, “Mr. Harris wants to see you at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock sharp,” he added—which was to me one of the great understatements of the time. “Tell Mr. Harris,” I began—and then stopped. If Mr. Harris wanted to play games, I would play along with him. I nodded my head solemnly to the clerk and walked out of the lobby once more. It was not yet four o’clock and I had no rehearsal scheduled for this evening.

  I made my way from the Madison Hotel to a restaurant called Rudley’s at 41st Street and Broadway, where at four o’clock every afternoon a small group, of which I was a member, forgathered for coffee. Whenever I could arrange to be in town from Brooklyn I joined them, and there were many times indeed when I made a special trip in to take part in these daily discussions, for, like myself, it was a group of “have-nots,” an acid brotherhood of kindred spirits all desperately trying to fight their way into the theatre and unseat the mighty.

  A great deal of the satisfaction and pleasure I derived from these meetings was due to the fact that we were all, almost without exception, a supercilious and malicious lot. Having nothing to lose, we had a great deal to say. No aspect of the theatre pleased us. Let Woollcott praise a play, and we immediately damned it and, in the bargain, accused him of logrolling for his Algonquin friends. Let Percy Hammond jeer at a performance and we were quick to defend it. If an actor or actress pleased the public, they did not please us. Our condemnation and contempt were reserved for success, and our enthusiasm for the calamitous failures, usually of the imported kind. Very few American plays or playwrights, particularly the newer and younger playwrights, met with our approval, and when we did give it, it was grudging and reluctant. We were bitter, jealous, prejudiced and thoroughly unfair, and I can recall no discussions on the theatre since then that were as deeply satisfactory.

  The most exhilarating theatrical discussions are usually those denigrating success, and I am certain that in all the little restaurants and bars that dot the theatrical district of today, just such groups are stirring their coffee and pouring their spleen into the hides and reputations of the successful. It is a game as ageless and fascinating as the theatre itself, and each time one of the mighty falls, the glad cry of “Bingo!” is joyfully voiced with all the resonance of a hallelujah chorus.

  There was already a full quorum at work on somebody’s reputation when I entered the restaurant and made my way to the group’s usual table. The more or less permanent members, the ones who were usually to be found in their same uncharitable places every afternoon, were already there. Eddie Chodorov, long since returned from his African journey; Oscar Serlin, the only would-be producer among us; Edward Eliscu, a former social director (like Chodorov and myself) now turned lyricist; and a young man by the name of Lester Sweyd, the acknowledged chairman and arbiter of the group, were already at work, derogatives and disrespect flashing like knife blades on the play which had opened the evening before. The only faces missing were those of Preston Sturges, a young fellow who joined us occasionally and whose views on the theatre were so lofty that he looked down upon even us, and that of a disconsolate young actor named Archie Leach, whose gloom was forever dissipated when he changed his name to Cary Grant later on in Hollywood.

  As usual, Lester Sweyd was banging furiously on the table and trying to stem the drift into disorder. It was never quite clearly known how Lester had assumed his position of leadership, for he was the only one of us with no clear-cut theatrical ambitions of his own. He was, instead, as he himself phrased it, a “believer” in talent, and to disagree with Lester once he “believed” was to open the floodgates of a Niagara-like power of invective that could overflow for days on end. Very few people chose to disagree with him. How he arrived at his choices, or by what standards he chose to “believe” in the talents of certain people and not in those of others, was his own secret and one that no one dared question, once he announced his annual slate.

  He held sway among us for the very good reason that his knowledge of the theatre was boundless and he possessed total recall of everything he had ever seen in a career of theatregoing that had apparently begun at the age of two. Moreover, he kept encyclopedic records and diaries of everything he witnessed and was invaluable as a court of last appeal in a time before theatre yearbooks began to make their appearance. His judgments were not always sound, but the fact that his own ax was already ground and his opinions were untinged with the acrimony and bias of our own separate hobbyhorses and pet hates, allowed him to take precedence in the daily mayhem that went on around the table.

  I was anxious to regale the group with my saga of the Madison Hotel, but I hesitated because I had somehow neglected to inform Lester that I had written a new play. This was lese majesty of a very high order indeed! Quite some time ago Lester had indicated that he “believed” in Oscar Serlin, Archie Leach and myself, and this knighthood rested somewhat heavily on all of our shoulders. We well knew that the conferring of this honor implied a scrupulous and immediate reporting to him of every theatrical activity, large or small, on the part of all three of us. Not to do so was not only to incur a wrath that was Jovian, but also to risk upsetting one of his well-laid campaigns to bring at least one foot of his protégés inside a theatrical door. He was forever accosting play readers, secretaries, casting directors, and even office boys, or whomever else he could waylay
in the streets and alleys around Times Square, and saying, “The best young actor around right now is Archie Leach”; or, “Keep your eye on a writer called Moss Hart—he’s a comer”; or, “If you want to put some money into a play, give it to Oscar Serlin—he’s going to be the big new producer.” His faith in those in whom he “believed” was touching; but like all true zealots his possessiveness was overwhelming.

  He could turn in a flash on one of his selections and toss the crystal ball, through which he had so clearly discerned the talented one’s future, smack into the transgressor’s face. Not the slightest margin for error was allowed. The unspoken rules were expected to be obeyed to the letter, and woe betide the protégé rash enough to break one!

  Nevertheless, the temptation to regale the group with my adventures of the last two days overcame even my timidity in facing Lester. I waited until the play under discussion had been thoroughly drawn and quartered, from the first-night audience reaction down to the reviews in this morning’s newspapers, then leaped headlong into the refreshing pause that always followed a thoroughgoing damnation and told my story.

  Lester’s response was immediate and typical. “You’re wasting your time,” he snapped. “Jed Harris will never do that play.”

  “That’s a damn-fool thing to say,” I retorted in spite of myself. “How do you know? You haven’t even read the play.”

  “I don’t have to read it,” he barked back. “I know he won’t do it. And why haven’t I read it? You let me read all your lousy ones,” he added waspishly.

  “You can read it,” I said placatingly. “I have a carbon copy and I’ll bring it in to you tomorrow.”

  “I’m busy tomorrow,” he said blackly, and left the table and the restaurant.

  I tried to call him back, but the others were too eager to hear about the new play to let me go after him. They insisted, correctly, that he would be unable to resist reading it—which of course he could not, and he at once became Once in a Lifetime’s most fierce and passionate champion.

  That night I went to the theatre alone. I sat in the balcony of the Broadhurst Theatre and watched June Moon being performed on the stage below, much the way a young medical student might sit in a hospital amphitheatre and watch a noted pair of surgeons perform a difficult operation. George Kaufman and Ring Lardner were at their satirical best in June Moon, and the experience of seeing two skilled men function at the top of their form is a very special pleasure. I watched June Moon that evening with a private admiration of my own, for I could not help comparing it with my own first effort at satire. It was not too far removed in attitude from the play I had just written, and in spite of the identification I made between the two plays I did not feel I had come off too badly.

  June Moon was sharp-edged and pointed, where my own play wavered uncertainly, swift and deft, where mine shifted emphasis; and the keen eye and sure hand of George Kaufman were stamped on both play and performance with the indelible professionalism that was his personal trademark. But in spite of Once in a Lifetime’s obvious lacks, I did not feel the same sense of inadequacy at the thought of Jed Harris’ reading the play that I had felt yesterday. I could look him straight in the eye tomorrow when we met, with no false humility—presuming, of course, that we did meet. For I had decided that great man or not, this was the last time I would present myself to that desk clerk.

  At ten o’clock the next morning I stood in front of the desk, and while the clerk went about his usual ritual of muttering into the telephone, I composed in my mind the short note I intended to leave in Mr. Harris’ box when the usual message came through. “Mr. Harris says to come right up,” said the clerk, confounding me and the biting opening sentence I had just contrived. “Suite eight-ten and twelve,” he said a little impatiently, as I continued to stare at him. I looked at him blankly for a moment more and then turned toward the elevators.

  The upper regions of the Madison were thickly carpeted and elegantly empty. I walked down the silent corridor to the door marked eight-ten and twelve, and knocked softly. The door of the suite was more than half open as though its occupant were waiting just inside the doorway, but there was no answer to my knock. I waited and knocked again. There was still no sound from within. I pressed the bell just at the side of the door and heard it buzz loudly inside the apartment.

  After a moment or two, a muted voice, seeming to come from some distance away, called, “Come in; come in.” I pushed the door open, walked past the little foyer and into the living room. The room seemed peculiarly lifeless. There was not a stubbed-out cigarette in any of the ashtrays, not a book or newspaper lying about, not a half-empty glass standing on any of the tables, or any of the other little telltale signs of life that give even hotel rooms an air of occupancy. For a moment I wondered if in my nervousness I had not misunderstood the number the desk clerk gave me. While I stood uncertainly, the voice, this time much clearer, and seeming to come from the bedroom, again called, “Come in!”

  I crossed the living room and walked into the bedroom. One of the twin beds had been slept in, and its covers were kicked off or pushed onto the floor; the two ashtrays on the night table between the beds were filled with half-smoked cigarettes. The table itself was piled high with a mound of play scripts, and on the opposite bed two manuscripts had been carelessly tossed, one of which I noted quickly was the blue-covered manuscript of Once in a Lifetime.

  The shades were still drawn and the room was in half-darkness. Its famous occupant was nowhere to be seen. I stood just inside the doorway not knowing quite what to do. A bedroom, particularly the bedroom of someone whom one has never met, is an extremely personal room to move about in. The voice called out again, “Come in; come in,” this time unmistakably issuing from the bathroom.

  The bathroom door was on the right, just out of my line of vision, and as I turned toward the voice I could see that it was standing open. A little mystified at the strange ways of the celebrated, I moved toward it, and as I reached the threshold I stopped dead. Mr. Harris was in front of the washbasin and mirror, stark naked. He was shaving himself and he did not turn around until he had completed shaving the side of his face he held the razor to. Instead, he addressed my image in the mirror, with the easy politeness of two people greeting each other in a drawing room in Grosvenor Square.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t see you until now.”

  I have no recollection of what I said to this, or even if I made any reply at all. I was suffused with embarrassment. I did not know where to look or what to say. My nervousness at meeting Jed Harris for the first time would have been great in any event, but the shock of coming upon him in this way was overwhelming. I have no idea what the expression on my face in the mirror showed of my feelings, but if he had planned to have my mouth drop open in surprise and dismay, he achieved his goal easily.

  He finished the side of his face he was busy with, held the razor under the water tap, and turned his full nakedness upon me. “I read your play last night,” he said, still as though he were fully clothed, “and I liked a great deal of it.”

  Again, I have no recollection of replying. There is nothing so exasperating, or that succeeds in making one feel quite so foolish, as pretending not to see something that one is seeing. I looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor. I stared at the shower curtain and at the light fixtures above the mirror—I looked everywhere but at the uncovered figure in front of me. Finally I fastened my eyes on the part in his hair and kept them fixed there, looking, I knew, exactly as I felt, an acutely embarrassed and tongue-tied fool.

  So far as Mr. Harris was concerned, he might have been receiving Lord Chesterfield himself for an early-morning call. He was courteous, almost excessively polite and extremely talkative. Unfortunately, I did not hear a great deal of what was being said. I watched him finish shaving, wash and dry his face, and then sit on the edge of the bathtub and delicately pick some dead skin from between his toes. A word or two would penetrate, but that was all
.

  If Mr. Harris noticed my dumb-struck and rigid silence, he gave no sign of it. Talking all the while, he passed by where I still remained in the doorway, and began to dress himself in the bedroom. As he stood in his underwear, finally and at last, I began to hear what he was saying—and I regretted every word I had missed. There is no question in my mind but that Jed Harris is one of the finest conversationalists on the subject of the theatre that I have ever listened to. If there is such a thing as “creative” talk, he possessed this skill to its fullest degree. Only one other person I have listened to since matched him in brilliance: the late Irving Thalberg could generate in a hearer the same sense of excitement, the same tingling stimulation, the same feeling of participating in a discussion that was highly charged with the all too rare atmosphere of listening to a first-rate mind talking with the effortless ease of an accomplished master.

  Even in my present disoriented state, I could tell that this was theatre talk of a kind I had never heard before, and as the haze of my embarrassment began to lift with each succeeding article of clothing that he put on, I began to listen intently. His criticism of Once in a Lifetime was sharp, penetrating, full of a quick apprehension of its potentialities as well as its pitfalls, and included an astonishingly profound understanding of satirical writing in general. His nimble tongue raced from Once in a Lifetime to Chekhov, to a production of Uncle Vanya that he was contemplating, to a scathing denunciation of his fellow producers, to a swift categorizing of certain American playwrights whose plays were not worth the paper they were written on, and back again to Once in a Lifetime—in a dazzling cascade of eagle-winged and mercurial words that left me a little breathless.

  I was too deeply fascinated, too strongly impressed by this burst of eloquence to break in upon it and put the question I was burning to have answered: Did he like Once in a Lifetime well enough to do it? I could not, however, bring myself to speak and break the spell. I listened with all of my mind alert to the rich and unending flow of imagery that poured forth over every aspect of the theatre. And before I was quite aware of what was happening, his coat was over his arm and he was walking out of the bedroom and out of the suite toward the elevator.