by Moss Hart
“Don’t bother about the drink,” said Miss Parker. “Mr. Benchley and Mr. Sherwood are arriving with reinforcements.” Her own slight smile seemed to indicate a willingness to talk, but Mr. Benchley, arriving with the drinks at that moment, came between us, and someone I could not see was putting a pair of arms around her in an embrace. With an inward sigh of relief, I moved toward the center of the room and stood by myself, watching and listening. To my further relief, no one paid the slightest attention to me, and the room was so jammed I felt my clothes would not be much noticed if I made myself as unobtrusive as possible.
A butler nudged my arm and said, “Tea or a drink, sir?” “A drink, thank you,” I replied and took one from the tray. I took a long swallow and looked around me delightedly. Six months ago, I thought contentedly, even six weeks ago, this would have been pure fantasy. Maybe this time next year I’ll be talking to everybody here. A group of people in front of the tea table moved away, and Beatrice Kaufman seated behind it suddenly caught sight of me, smiled brightly and waved her hand. I smiled and waved back.
At the far end of the room someone began to play the piano, and though I could not see who was at the keyboard, I knew that it was probably George Gershwin. I smiled to myself. I remembered how I had stolen some of the songs from Lady Be Good to use in camp, and I listened to him play with a special pleasure of my own. I began to enjoy myself hugely. It was far better, this secret enjoyment, I thought, than any kind of chatter could possibly be, even if I could manage to bring myself to talk to someone. The butler moved by me again and I relinquished my empty glass and took a fresh drink. Herbert Bayard Swope, on his way to join a group near the fireplace, found me directly in his path and said with great heartiness, “Hello, there, how are you?” He had obviously mistaken me for someone he thought he knew; but I smiled back and said, “Fine, how are you?” Speech had not only returned, but I was able to match his own heartiness in reply. I took a long swallow of the drink and looked around the room carefully. Why not talk to someone after all? What a fine, juicy bit it would make to report to the group at Rudley’s. I could already hear myself artfully working a celebrated name into the conversation and then casually remarking, “Oh, yes, I was talking to him just the other afternoon.” It would be a gratifying moment. Whom could I talk to, I wondered, that would impress them the most? There was almost too great a selection of the celebrated to choose from; for nearly all of the figures, which were damned and envied at the table at Rudley’s every afternoon, were scattered around the room.
There was no question, however, as to who would impress them most. I had noticed him at once, even while I stood gaping at the threshold. And my eyes had searched him out several times since then, but always he was the center of a group that seemed to ring him in and roar with laughter at whatever he was saying. I looked around the room once more, and this time to my surprise Alexander Woollcott was alone. He had moved as far away from the piano as he could get and was sitting in a chair in the opposite corner of the room, calmly reading a book amidst all the hubbub. It seemed to me an astonishing thing to be doing at such a time, but then the celebrated seemed to be full of endless and varied eccentricities. By the same token, I reasoned, taking another large swallow of whiskey, he probably would not think it strange if I interrupted his reading and engaged him in conversation.
I made my way slowly over to where he sat and stood for a moment gathering my courage and my wits for the proper opening gambit. I glanced sideways at the title of the book he was reading and saw that it was a new mystery novel that I had just finished reading a few days ago myself. What better opening than that could I possibly have? Alexander Woollcott was a famous connoisseur of murder and mayhem and I was also an aficionado of this particular form of literature. We had that in common to start with, anyway, and then we could branch off into the theatre and all his various enthusiasms, every one of which I knew by heart. I moved closer until I was right beside him, then coughed discreetly to attract his attention.
“You’ll like that very much, Mr. Woollcott,” I said, pointing to the book, and smiled engagingly down at him.
Mr. Woollcott withdrew his gaze slowly from the page, and his eyes, owlish behind the thick spectacles, fixed themselves on mine. “How would you know?” he said.
The tone was so acid that the words seemed to ferment as he delivered them. The owlish eyes gleamed fiercely behind the glasses for a moment more and then removed themselves from mine and returned to the book, quite as though I had splattered against the walls and was no longer visible. I devoutly wished I could have done so. I would indeed have given anything to be able to vanish into thin air in front of him, but I could only stand for still another harrowing moment, rigid with embarrassment, until my legs were able to move me away. I retreated to the center of the room in a cold sweat of self-consciousness. There are moments so mortifying that one’s inner sense of confusion and shame seem completely exposed to the eyes of every passing stranger. I knew well enough that no one had overheard this passage with Woollcott, but I began to tremble with apprehension lest anyone else speak to me. Suddenly, I began to be painfully aware of how raw and unqualified I was to move among these people, and how ludicrous it was to fancy myself ever becoming a part of this exclusive, tight little world. As quickly as I could, I threaded my way through the jammed room and fled down the stairs.
The next morning, my determination to be part of Woollcott’s world more firmly strengthened than ever by the preposterous beginning I had made, I was galvanized into a kind of working fury. Out of just such ignoble moments and motives, do plays and novels sometimes emerge. For I do not think that these vain and foolish spurs to creativity obtained only in my own case. On the contrary, I am inclined to believe that just such petty considerations often seductively quicken the wheels of creation. If we could ever glimpse the inner workings of the creative impulse, coldly and without pretense, I am afraid that to a larger degree than we choose to admit of so exalted a process, we would discover that more often the siren enticements of worldly pleasures and rewards spark it into life than the heroic and consecrated goals we are told inspire it.
I have noticed that the lofty and lonely pinnacles inhabited by the purely creative are sometimes surprisingly and most comfortably furnished by Westinghouse, and a new convertible generally waits outside. There is nothing necessarily unacceptable or unworthy about this, but the pious nonsense that regularly issues from those domiciles—about the lacerations to the spirit that the throes of selfless creation impose and the unworldliness of the rewards these artists seek—is irritating to listen to. I knew what I wanted and why, at any rate. And crass as it may sound, it not only left my creative spirit unblemished but it heightened my capacity to enjoy unashamed the inglorious but satisfying mess of pottage that success offers to the less honorably inspired of us.
I SET SUCH a furious pace in the weeks following Beatrice Kaufman’s tea party that to my own amazement and to Mr. Kaufman’s as well, I think, the second act was completed and the structure of the third act was planned and roughly committed to paper in scenario form. To my further surprise, Mr. Kaufman called a halt. I had begun to think of ourselves as a great force of nature, like Victoria Falls, pouring forth and stopping for nothing. “I think a little breather is indicated before we plunge into the third act,” said Mr. Kaufman. “We’ll take tomorrow off.” And then, accurately gauging the expression on my face to be the onset of a forthcoming burst of eloquence to commemorate the completion of the second act, he added wickedly, “There must be somebody else you want to say a few words to,” and he rushed into the bathroom and turned the water taps full on!
While he was washing his hands, I eased my way over to the desk and stealthily turned over an envelope lying on top of the pile of manuscript to steal a look at the notations typed on the back of it. Mr. Kaufman’s appointments and reminders to himself, which he typed out daily and later stuck in his breast pocket, always fascinated me, and whenever I could, I woul
d shamelessly rubberneck, for they invariably listed meetings with a number of people whose juxtaposition on the same day never ceased to tickle my fancy. The list for tomorrow, freshly and neatly typed, with three dots between appointments, said in part: “Francis Fox … Scalp Treatment”; “Aunt Sidonia … Gloria Swanson.” The jump from Aunt Sidonia to Gloria Swanson was just the kind of unlikely contiguity that delighted me, and there was an even more satisfying conjunction farther down on the envelope, for later in the day, which read: “Inlay … Croquet mallet … Norma Shearer.” Satisfied that Mr. Kaufman’s day would be as piquant and provocative as I had hoped it would, I turned the envelope over again and moved away to consider what my own one-day’s respite would be. It took no great amount of searching to know what would give me the most pleasure. My day would not be as colorful as Mr. Kaufman’s, but it would from my own point of view be equally diverting. I planned simply to stay in bed all day and eat! I would eat until I fell asleep, and when I awoke I would eat again until I dozed off. The very thought of the amount of food I would down filled me with content; but Mr. Kaufman, emerging from the bathroom, put an end to it.
“By the way,” he said, “Sam Harris is back from California and he wants to meet you. I told him we wouldn’t be working tomorrow, and he’d like you to come to the Music Box at eleven o’clock. Is that all right? I’m going to call Max Siegel now.”
I nodded agreeably but seethed inwardly, and instantly made another solemn resolve. From the very first moment I could arrange to do so, I would never put a foot out of bed until noon. The solemn vows of our youth are fervently pledged but usually kept with inconstant faithfulness. This one, however, along with my resolve never to ride in the subway again once I had money enough to take taxis, I have had no trouble in remaining faithful to—and with no little pleasure and profit to myself.
There is ample evidence, I am certain, that the early-morning hours are the golden ones for work, and the testimony of such loiterers as myself on the enduring joys of late-rising carries little weight with folk who are up and about at dawn, busily improving those shining early hours. They continue to have my blessing from the depths of a warm and skeptical bed. I accept their data on the beauties of the early morning along with their thinly veiled scorn of my own pitiable indolence; but the truth is, I have never been able to understand the full extent of my loss. The Bay of Naples and the harbor at Rio de Janeiro were still there at one o’clock in the afternoon when I first laid eyes on them, and were even more beautiful, it seemed to me, for my being wide awake and thoroughly refreshed when I did look upon them. So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o’clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience. Much more likely, if it is worth hearing at all, it will be set down in print where it can be decently enjoyed by dawdling souls, like myself, who lumpishly resist the golden glow of dawn.
* * *
I was not, therefore, in the best of moods for a first meeting with Sam Harris as I climbed the steps to his office the next morning at a little before eleven o’clock, and it is not a small compliment I pay him when I say that after a few minutes in his presence, I no longer regretted that my dream of stuffing and sleeping had come to nothing. Sam Harris was an irresistible human being. From the moment Max Siegel offered his usual introduction, “This is the young author, Mr. Harris,” and Sam Harris came from behind the desk with his hand extended and said, “Hello, kid,” I was in love with him and his willing slave.
This was not, I was to discover, an unusual occurrence. Few people in the theatre or out of it remained aloof to the wise and tender sense of life that seemed to envelop Sam Harris and to touch everything about him. The extraordinary effect he produced on people was somehow made all the more striking by the fact that at first glance he gave the impression of being a most ordinary little man. He was short and chunky, with a pushed-in face that was saved from downright ugliness by a pair of the brightest and kindliest eyes I had ever seen, and a smile of such warm-heartedness and amiability that words like “goodness” and “humanity” leaped foolishly into the mind.
Most amazing of all, perhaps, was how immediately one was persuaded that this ordinary-appearing little man, of obviously little education or learning, was a man of impeccable taste, with a mind of vigor, clarity and freshness. He was elegantly turned out, from the pearl stickpin in his chastely hued tie to the fine linen cuffs appearing with studied correctness from under the sleeves of his beautifully tailored suit. He spoke softly, but with a pithy and trenchant conciseness, and his replies to a question were sometimes startlingly laconic. It made the first few moments with him difficult, for neither Mr. Kaufman nor Max Siegel had forewarned me before this first meeting that Sam Harris was more than a little deaf. He pretended, however, to hear everything, and some of the elliptical conversation that I was puzzled by on that first day was due to the fact that he was as vain about his growing deafness as he was about his appearance. It was the only vice, if vanity is indeed a vice, that I ever discovered he possessed.
He was exceptional also in the sense that a man without vices is usually humdrum and dull, and Sam Harris was anything but dull. He had color and gaiety and humor, and a most marvelous bonhomie with theatre people that extended all the way from stagehands to stars. Everyone in the theatre adored him. In a jungle profession, where the petty snipings of envy and mean-spiritedness are the passports to everyday conversation, the reverence in which he was held was a little awesome. So, too, was his renown for the way he could handle the most difficult of stars. On these vulnerable and trigger-tempered creatures the effect he produced was especially astonishing. An actor locked in a tantrum of rage and frustration at the end of a disastrous dress rehearsal would fall into sweet reasonableness at the sound of the first soft-spoken words uttered by Sam Harris. In a twinkling the hoarse words of rage would be muffled and the gentle voice of Sam Harris would take over. His secret, I think, was a simple one. Violence is strongly attracted by serenity, and Sam Harris was by all odds the most tranquil human being I have ever known. The world he lived and worked in was a world whose daily climate was governed by the uproar of hysteria and turmoil, and against this howling calliope of egomania he moved with a calm and a quietude that instantly subdued the most savage and ungovernable outbursts of temper and temperament. No matter how loud the blast or how extravagant the explosion, his untroubled serenity was the balm that allowed the bluster to die down and the bellowing to slacken into something that approached a common ground peaceable enough for rehearsals to continue.
I would be doing him a disservice to suggest that his nature was entirely saintlike or that he did not possess a good-sized temper of his own. He was too merry a fellow to accommodate much of saintliness, and when his temper flared, as it did occasionally, it was marvelous to see him wrestle with it, for it was a rip-snorting affair while it lasted. Actors themselves seldom provoked it, for he was excessively sentimental about theatre people and notoriously soft-hearted about actors in particular. Their lawyers or agents, however, were the worm in the heart of the rose, and about these he would fulminate with unsentimental gusto. Other than that, little else about the theatre daunted him. He was a gambler of unwavering courage, once he placed his bet on an author or star he believed in; and his single-minded passion to give a good play a fine production remained undiminished to the end of his life. He was a great gentleman of the theatre and, so far as I am concerned, its last aristocrat.
We got along famously, once the first moment or two of stiffness had passed and my enjoyment of him outran my shyness. “How are you two fellows getting along?” he asked. And when I replied, “I’m starving most of the time, but I think we’ve got a good second act,” he roared with laughter. After that, I rattled on unrestrained, telling him all sorts of things about myself I could not recall ever having told anyone else; for it was quite evident that he liked me immediately, and there is nothing
that so quickly opens the floodgates of friendship and intimacy as that light in the other person’s eye that unmistakably signals a delight and pleasure in one’s company.
I must have talked on interminably, for Max Siegel finally reappeared and, surprised to see me still chattering away, said, “You got an appointment at the booking office, haven’t you, Mr. Harris?” Sam Harris nodded and came from behind the desk. He led me toward the door and rested a hand affectionately on my shoulder. “We’ll be seeing more of each other, kid,” he said. “I hope a lot more. I think you’re going to write some interesting plays.” He smiled that special smile of his and waved as I started down the steps. I waved and smiled back and walked out of the Music Box lobby curiously jubilant and elated, though I could not understand why until a few minutes later. Suddenly I knew. Sam Harris had made up my mind for me.
* * *
For some two or three weeks past I had been shirking the making of a decision that had to be made, and now, still without knowing quite why I was doing so, I knew that I had made it. This hour with Sam Harris had pushed me over the brink. The decision was not an easy one to make. It was already March, and the owners of the Flagler Hotel had been pressing me since early February to sign a new contract as social director for the coming summer at the largest salary I had ever received and one which they claimed, truthfully I believe, to be the largest sum ever to be offered a social director in the history of the Borscht Circuit. I had backed and filled and excused and put them off in every way I could think of, but eager as I was to put that part of my life behind me, I had to face the possibility of what I would do if the spring tryout of Once in a Lifetime, which was planned for the last two weeks in May, was a failure. No camp or hotel, of course, could wait until the end of May to engage a social director, no matter how sought-after he was—March, indeed, was the very latest they dared wait and they had so informed me. But suppose Once in a Lifetime was only half-good and needed to be rewritten over the summer—what then? Some plays—in fact, a major proportion of them as I well knew—were summarily abandoned in Asbury Park or Atlantic City and never came to New York at all. If Once in a Lifetime were to meet this same fate on its tryout, how would I get through the summer and what would we live on until the little-theatre groups started up again in November? For though I was earning a good deal more money now, both summers and winters, than I ever had, it seemed to disappear with annoying swiftness—a phenomenon, I might add, that has plagued me down the years with dogged persistence. That morning, however, I had finally come to a decision of sorts—a safe compromise, so it seemed to me: the bright idea of having Dore Schary substitute for me as social director until mid-June, when I would certainly know which way the wind was blowing; and then I could take over myself.