by Moss Hart
“I suppose you know what you’re doing, taking all that money,” said my mother warily, “but I wouldn’t touch it until after you’ve worked with this Mr. Kaufman for a while—in case he asks you to give it back. I certainly wouldn’t go around spending it with Eddie Chodorov.”
I lost my temper, picked up the check and what remained of my triumphant glow, and spent the rest of the evening on the telephone rekindling the embers of my triumph with Lester, the unsuspecting Eddie, Joe Hyman, and Dore Schary. And as a consequence and in spite of Max Siegel’s advice I spent an almost sleepless night, chewing over and sorting out the insistent but contradictory advice I had received from each one on how to meet the first test with George S. Kaufman on the morrow.
THE NEXT MORNING at five minutes of eleven, I rang the bell of 158 East 63rd Street. The rather modest brownstone house was a little disappointing to my fancy of how a famous playwright should live, but the street was fashionable and the maid who opened the door was a reassuring sight. She was in uniform, a starched white cap perched correctly on her head. More like it, I thought, as she held the door open for me to pass her. I walked in and glanced quickly down the hall at a dining room leading out into a little garden. There was a bowl of flowers on the polished table flanked by silver candlesticks. Just right, I told myself satisfactorily and looked inquiringly at the stairway.
“Mr. Kaufman is waiting for you,” said the maid. “The top floor, just go right up.”
I walked up the stairs and stopped briefly at the second landing to look at a drawing room and library divided by the stairwell. Both rooms might have come straight out of the movies as far as my innocent eyes were concerned. I knew at once that my first goal the moment the money began to roll in, beyond the taking of taxicabs wherever and whenever I wanted to, would be to live like this. It was an illuminating and expensive moment.
The doors on the third floor—evidently bedrooms—were all tightly closed, and as I reached the fourth-floor landing, Mr. Kaufman stood awaiting me in the doorway of what turned out to be his own bedroom and study combined. After the elegance and style of the drawing room and library, this room was a great blow. It was a small, rather dark room, furnished sparsely with a studio couch, a quite ugly typewriter desk and one easy chair. It was hard for me to believe that a stream of brilliant plays had come out of this monk-like interior. I am not certain what I expected the atelier of Kaufman and Connelly would be like, but it most certainly was the opposite of this. There was no hint of any kind that this room was in any way concerned with the theatre. Not a framed photograph or program hung on its walls, and except for an excellent etching of Mark Twain, it might well have been, I thought regretfully, the bedroom and workroom of a certified public accountant. My initial disappointment was to deepen into an active loathing of that room, but at the moment, my eyes after the first quick look were focused on its occupant.
Mr. Kaufman was in the process of greeting me with what turned out to be his daily supply of enthusiasm so far as the social amenities were concerned; that is to say, one finger was being wearily lifted and his voice was managing a tired “Hi.” He had moved to the window after this display of cordiality and now stood with his back to the room and to me, staring out at the gardens of the houses on 62nd Street. I had not been asked to sit down, but I was too uncomfortable to remain standing and after a moment of waiting I sat down in the armchair and stared at his back. His arm now reached around his neck to scratch his ear, a gesture I was to come to recognize as a prelude to a rearrangement of a scene or the emergence of a new line; now he remained for a few moments engrossed in the movements of a large cat slowly moving along the garden fence as it contemplated a sparrow on one of the leafless trees. This backyard spectacle seemed to hold him in deep fascination until the cat leaped up into the tree and the bird flew off, whereupon he turned from the window with a large sigh.
I looked at him, eager and alert, but there were still other things of moment that caught and held his attention before he addressed me directly. As he turned from the window, he spied two or three pieces of lint on the floor, and these he carefully removed from the carpet with all the deftness of an expert botanist gathering specimens for the Museum of Natural History. This task completed, he turned his eye toward a mound of sharpened pencils on the desk, found two whose points were not razor-sharp or to his liking, and ground them down in a pencil sharpener attached to the wall. In the process of doing so, he discovered some more lint at the side of the desk and this, too, was carefully picked up, after which he held up and inspected a few sheets of carbon paper, found them still usable, and placed them neatly beside a pile of typewriter paper, which he neatly patted until all its edges were perfectly aligned. His eyes darted dolefully around the room again, seeming to be looking for something else—anything at all, it seemed to me!—to engage his attention, but the carpet being quite free of lint, his gaze finally came to rest on the armchair in which I sat, and he addressed me at last.
“Er…” he said, and began to pace rapidly up and down the room. This, too—the word “Er” used as a form of address and followed by a rapid pacing—I was to come to recognize as the actual start of a working session: a signal that lint-picking, cat-watching and pencil-sharpening time was over and that he wanted my attention. During all the time we were engaged together on Once in a Lifetime, he never once addressed me by any other name but “Er,” even in moments of stress or actual crisis. Perhaps he felt, being the innately shy and private person he was, that “Moss” was too intimate a name to call me; and to address me as “Mr. Hart” seemed a little silly, considering the difference in our ages and positions. But somehow or other I recognized at this first meeting that “Er” meant me and not a clearing of the throat, and I waited attentively until Mr. Kaufman stopped his pacing and stood in front of the armchair looking down at me.
“The trouble begins in the third scene of the first act,” he said. “It’s messy and unclear and goes off in the wrong direction. Suppose we start with that.”
I nodded, trying to look agreeable and knowing at the same time; but this, like my disappointment with the workshop of the master, was my second blow of the morning. After the brilliant peroration on satire in the modern theatre that I had heard from Jed Harris, I had been looking forward with great eagerness to that first talk on play-writing by the celebrated Mr. Kaufman. I had expected to make mental notes on everything he said each day and put it all down every evening in a loose-leaf folder I had bought expressly for that purpose. But this flat, unvarnished statement that something was wrong with the third scene of the first act seemed to be all I was going to get, for Mr. Kaufman was already moving past me now on his way to the bathroom. I turned in my chair and looked at him as he stood by the washbasin and slowly and meticulously washed his hands, and I was struck then and forever afterward by the fact that his hands were what one imagines the hands of a great surgeon to be like.
This impression was further implemented by the odd circumstance that he invariably began the day’s work by first washing his hands—a ritual that was, of course, unconscious on his part, but which he would sometimes perform two or three times more during each working session, usually at the beginning of attacking a new scene, as though the anatomy of a play were a living thing whose internal organs were to be explored surgically. I watched him dry his hands and forearms carefully—he took the trouble, I noticed, to undo the cuffs of his shirt and roll them up—and as he came back into the room, walked briskly toward the desk and selected a pencil with just the right pointed sharpness, I was again startled by the inescapable impression that the pencil held poised over the manuscript in those long tensile fingers was a scalpel.
The pencil suddenly darted down onto the paper and moved swiftly along the page, crossing out a line here and there, making a large X through a solid speech, fusing two long sentences into one short one, indicating by an arrow or a question mark the condensation or transference of a section of dialogue so that its point wa
s highlighted and its emphasis sharpened; the operation was repeated with lightning-like precision on the next page and the next, until the end of the scene. Then he picked up the manuscript from the desk and brought it over to me.
“Just cutting away the underbrush,” he said. “See what you think.” I took the manuscript and read with astonishment. The content of the scene remained the same, but its point was unmuddied by repetition, and the economy and clarity with which everything necessary was now said gave the scene a new urgency. The effect of what he had done seemed to me so magical that I could hardly believe I had been so downright repetitive and verbose. I looked up from the manuscript and stared admiringly at the waiting figure by the desk.
Mr. Kaufman evidently mistook my chagrined and admiring silence for pique. “I may have cut too deeply, of course,” he said apologetically. “Is there something you want to have go back?”
“Oh, no,” I replied hastily, “not a word. It’s just wonderful now. Just great! I don’t understand how I could have been so stupid. The scene really works now, doesn’t it?”
It was Mr. Kaufman’s turn to stare at me in silence for a moment, and he looked at me quizzically over the rims of his glasses before he spoke again. “No, it doesn’t work at all,” he said gently. “I thought the cuts would show you why it wouldn’t work.” He sighed and scratched his ear. “Perhaps the trouble starts earlier than I thought.”
He took the play from my lap and placed it on the desk again. “All right. Page one—Scene One. I guess we might as well face it.” He picked up a pencil and held it poised over the manuscript, and I watched fascinated and awestruck as the pencil swooped down on page after page.
* * *
If it is possible for a book of this sort to have a hero, then that hero is George S. Kaufman. In the months that followed that first day’s work, however, my waking nightmare was of a glittering steel pencil suspended over my head that sometimes turned into a scalpel, or a baleful stare over the rims of a huge pair of disembodied tortoise-shell glasses. I do not think it far-fetched to say that such success as I have had in the theatre is due in large part to George Kaufman. I cannot pretend that I was without talent, but such gifts as I possessed were raw and undisciplined. It is one thing to have a flair for play-writing or even a ready wit with dialogue. It is quite another to apply these gifts in the strict and demanding terms of a fully articulated play so that they emerge with explicitness, precision and form. All of this and a great deal more I learned from George Kaufman. And if it is true that no more eager disciple ever sat at the feet of a teacher, it is equally true that no disciple was ever treated with more infinite patience and understanding.
The debt I owe is a large one, for it could not have been easy for him to deal with some of my initial blunderings and gaucheries, particularly in those first early days of our collaboration. He was not at heart a patient man or a man who bothered to tolerate or maintain the fiction of graceful social behavior in the face of other people’s infelicities. In particular, easy admiration distressed him, and any display of emotion filled him with dismay; the aroma of a cigar physically sickened him. I was guilty of all three of these things in daily and constant succession, and since he was too shy or possibly too fearful of hurting my feelings to mention his distress to me, I continued to compound the felony day after day: filling the room with clouds of cigar smoke, being inordinately admiring of everything he did, and in spite of myself, unable to forbear each evening before I left the making of a little speech of gratitude or thanks. His suffering at these moments was acute, but I construed his odd behavior at these times as being merely one more manifestation of the eccentricities that all celebrated people seem to have in such abundance. And the next morning, as I sat down, I would cheerfully light a cigar without pausing to wonder even briefly why Mr. Kaufman was walking as quickly and as far away from me as it was possible for him to get within the confines of that small room.
It did not occur to me, I cannot think why, to be either astonished or confounded by the fact that each time I rose from the armchair and came toward him to speak, he retreated with something akin to terror to the window and stood breathing deeply of such air as was not already swirling with blue cigar smoke. Nor could I understand why, after I fulsomely admired a new line or an acid turn of phrase that he had just suggested that seemed to me downright inspired, he would scratch his ear until I thought it would drop off and stare at me malignantly over the top of his glasses, his face contorted with an emotion that seemed too painful to find expression. Even his passion to remove each dead cigar butt from the room almost before my hand had reached the ashtray with it, and his obsession with keeping the windows wide open on even the most frigid days, did nothing to alert me to his suffering, and I was, seemingly, deaf as well as dense when his diatribes against people who made speeches at each other took on added strength and fervor with each passing day.
I suppose his worst moment of the day came at my leave-taking, when he could sense another little speech coming on. I know now that he evolved various stratagems of his own to escape these eulogies, such as rushing into the bathroom and with the water taps turned full on calling out a good-bye through the closed door, or going to the telephone and with his back to me hurriedly calling a number; but with something approximating genius I nearly always managed to find the moment to have my say. He seldom escaped!
Mr. Kaufman spent a good deal of his time, particularly in the late afternoons, stretched out full length on the floor, and it was usually at one of these unwary moments when he was at his lowest ebb and stretched helplessly below me, that I would stand over him and deliver my captivating compendium of the day’s work. Something like a small moan, which I misinterpreted as agreement, would escape from his lips and he would turn his head away from the sight of my face, much the way a man whose arm is about to be jabbed with a needle averts his gaze to spare himself the extra pain of seeing the needle descend.
All unknowing and delighted with my eloquence, I would light a new cigar, puff a last fresh aromatic cloud of smoke down into his face, and cheerfully reminding him of the splendid ideas he had had for the scene we were going to work on tomorrow, I would take my leave. I have never allowed myself to think of some of the imprecations that must have followed my retreating figure down the stairway, but if I was torturing Mr. Kaufman all unknowingly, the score was not exactly one-sided. Quite unaware that he was doing so, he was on his part providing me with a daily Gethsemane of my own that grew more agonizing with each passing day, and though his suffering was of the spirit and mine was of the flesh, I think our pain in the end was about equal, for I was as incapable of mentioning my distress to him as he was of mentioning his to me.
The cause of my agony was simple enough. Mr. Kaufman cared very little about food. His appetite was not the demanding and capricious one mine was—indeed, his lack of concern with food was quite unlike anyone else’s I have ever known. The joys and pleasures of the table seemed simply to have passed him by in the way that a dazzling sunset must escape the color-blind. He apparently needed very little food to sustain him and cared even less when and how it was served. He had his breakfast at ten o’clock in the morning, and work was enough to nourish him thereafter until evening. His energy, unlike my own, seemed to be attached not to his stomach but to his brain; and his capacity for work, which was enormous, seemed to flourish and grow in ratio to the rattle of a typewriter.
True, every afternoon at about four o’clock, apparently as a concession to some base need he knew existed in other human beings but did not quite understand himself, tea would be brought in by the maid. Six cookies, no more and no less, and on gala occasions two slices of homemade chocolate cake would lie on a plate naked and shimmering to my hunger-glazed eyes; and, as I could sniff the tea coming up the stairs or hear the teacups rattling on the tray outside the door, my stomach would rumble so loudly and my ravenousness would be so mouth-watering, that I would get up and walk about the room, pretending to str
etch my arms and legs, in order to control myself, for it was all I could do not to grab and stuff the minute the maid set the tray down.
My predicament was further complicated by the fact that Mr. Kaufman was always scrupulously polite and devilishly insistent that I help myself first, and since I was only too aware that he took only a sip or two of tea and never more than one cookie, which he absent-mindedly nibbled at, I could never bring myself to do more than slavishly follow his example for fear of being thought ill-mannered or unused to high life—until one day, maddened by hunger, I gobbled up every single cookie and the two slices of chocolate cake while he was in the bathroom washing his hands. Whether it was the mutely empty plate or my guilt-ridden and embarrassed face staring up at him as he approached the tea tray, I do not know; but from that day onward, little sandwiches began to appear, and tea time to my vast relief was moved up an hour earlier.
Meanwhile, in spite of the separate and unwitting mortifications which we daily afflicted on each other, work proceeded with a grueling regularity and an unswerving disregard of endurance, health, well-being or personal life that left me at first flabbergasted and then chastened and awestruck at his unrivaled dedication to the task in hand. It was a kind of unflagging industry and imperturbable concentration that anyone, not just myself, might well marvel at, for this eminently successful man labored each day quite as though our positions had been reversed and this were his first play, not mine; his great chance to make his mark as a Broadway playwright, not my own. There was an element of the demoniacal in his tireless search for just the right word to round a sentence into its proper unity, for the exact juxtaposition of words and movement that would slyly lead the audience along the periphery of a scene to its turning point and then propel them effortlessly to its climax.