Act One

by Moss Hart

  This was actually what I was on my way to try to do as I walked out of the Music Box. I was fairly certain the proprietors of the Flagler, anxious to have me as they were, would agree to these terms, and I had made the appointment to meet them and sign the contract at two o’clock this afternoon. Instead, I turned into the Piccadilly Hotel, next door to the Music Box, and marched resolutely toward a telephone booth. I dropped a nickel nervously into the slot, and as I closed the door of the booth, I knew I was going to burn the last bridge behind me. Fresh from the presence of Sam Harris, it seemed a simple and easy thing to do—and somewhat shakily I did it. I emerged from the booth and walked out into 45th Street again, a social director no longer, but a playwright come hell or high water—though no one on the street seemed to notice the startling change in me.

  * * *

  The next morning, arriving for work, I was conscious of a subtle difference in the atmosphere. Even before I had settled myself into the armchair and surreptitiously unwrapped the first Hershey bar in my pocket, Mr. Kaufman said, “Er…” and was pacing rapidly up and down the room. Cat-watching, lint-picking, ear-scratching and the straightening out of typewriter and carbon paper seemed to have been dispensed with. Even the pencils had all been sharpened before my arrival, and though Mr. Kaufman proceeded to wash his hands as usual before opening the pile of manuscript on the desk, he washed them hurriedly and kept up a running fire of comment about the third act from within the bathroom. We had long since agreed upon the opening scene and he quickly typed a description of the set, read it aloud, and then turned toward me with a tentative opening line of dialogue. I nodded and suggested a following line, and the opening pages of the third act began to spin from the typewriter.

  I have always been more than a little puzzled by the fascination that the mechanics of collaboration seem to hold for most people, fellow playwrights and laymen alike. I have been endlessly questioned about how one proceeds to write a play in collaboration, a good deal of it on the basis, I am sure, of trying to ferret out just who wrote which particular amusing line in what particular play. But since I considered that no one’s business but our own, I have always deepened the mystery by smiling inscrutably and pointedly turning the conversation into other channels. Actually, the process of collaboration is exactly what the dictionary says it is: a union of two people working in agreement on a common project.

  It requires no special gift except the necessary patience to accommodate one’s own working method harmoniously to that of one’s collaborator. In Once in a Lifetime, it is true, there was a complete play to start from; but other plays were started from scratch and every line and idea, including the idea of the play itself, was so tightly woven into the mosaic of collaboration that it would be impossible to tell who suggested which or what, or how one line sprang full-blown from another. When the basic idea of a play was a good one, our collaboration worked well, and when it was not, it did not work at all. The mechanics of collaboration in the plays we did together remained as simple as putting a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and laboriously plugging away until that page satisfied both of us. It pleased me to make a mystery of our play-writing partnership, for the sole reason that the mechanics of two people writing together are no less dull and flat than the mechanics of one person writing alone, and I preferred to let the inquisitive lady on my right drink her demitasse with the idea still intact in her mind that I was a young man of rare and mysterious gifts.

  There can be no mystery, however, about the fact that collaboration is an infinitely more pleasurable way of working than working alone. Most human beings fear loneliness, and writing is the loneliest of the professions. Writers agonize a great deal about the loneliness of their craft, and though the wailing is apt to be a little deafening at times, they are telling the truth. The hardest part of writing by far is the seeming exclusion from all humankind while work is under way, for the writer at work cannot be gregarious. If he is not alone, if he is with so much as one other person, he is not at work, and it is this feeling of being cut off from his fellows that drives most writers to invent the most elaborate and ingenious excuses to put work aside and escape back into the world again. Collaboration cuts this loneliness in half. When one is at a low point of discouragement, the very presence in the room of another human being, even though he too may be sunk in the same state of gloom, very often gives that dash of valor to the spirit that allows confidence to return and work to resume. Except on the rarest of occasions, writing is a cheerless business. I have not the least doubt that some young writers of promise have retreated to Hollywood or television simply because they hated being alone. I do not blame them, just as I am never unmoved by the suffering of a fellow writer when he cries out that he is “blocked.” It is a protest, I think, against his unalterable fate of being alone, and it is a desperation I can understand and give full sympathy to. When later on I went back to writing plays by myself, I looked back to the warmth and companionship of collaboration with the nostalgia of the exile for his homeland, and I confess that I have moments of missing it still.

  Some of the formal quality of our collaboration began to thaw slightly as we approached the end of the third act. For one thing, Mr. Kaufman suddenly grew talkative as he picked lint off the carpet or watched the cats in the backyard gardens across the way. This was formerly a silent business and I generally used the time to stuff Life Savers and bits of Hershey bars into my mouth, for I knew that nothing was expected of me until Mr. Kaufman was ready to say, “Er…” and begin his pacing. Now, however, he grew downright loquacious for a man of his taciturn bent, and to my vast surprise, I discovered that he loved gossip, the more indiscreet the better. It was a most unlikely side for a man of his nature to have, but there could be no question that he relished and delighted in the peccadilloes and indiscretions that float about the world of theatre folk like motes in the air on a hot summer’s afternoon. He was aware that I was personally unacquainted with most of the people he gossiped about; but I knew the names, of course, and that seemed to be enough for him.

  To my further surprise, he turned abruptly toward me one morning and said, “Let’s have lunch out today. There seems to be a slight household crisis going on at the moment.”

  Lunch! I stared at him—we had never had lunch, as I understood lunch, in the four months I had been sitting starved in that chair. He must have caught my look, and completely misunderstood it, for he added, “You’ll be able to eat something by about one thirty or so, won’t you?” I nodded slowly at him and wondered what in the world he thought the constant chomp-chomp of Hershey bars in my jaws could have meant all through those long afternoons. Obviously, he was still totally unaware that some form of food was a necessity to most ordinary human or animal organisms. A dog, I reflected bitterly, would have slim pickings in Mr. Kaufman’s house if he could not provide himself with a few Hershey bars on the side, or whatever the equivalent of Hershey bars is in dogdom.

  The lunch he provided that afternoon, however, was a full one. During the course of it, I was somewhat startled to sense that he wanted to ask me a question but that he was embarrassed to do so and was hesitating. He seemed to dismiss it from his mind for a moment, but I could see he was going to ask it after all.

  “What would you think,” he finally said, “if I were to play the part of Lawrence Vail? We ought to begin to think about casting pretty soon, now.”

  In spite of myself, I laughed. Scratch a playwright and you find a frustrated actor!

  He joined in my laughter, then added hastily, “Of course, it’s a bit of a trick because I’ve never acted professionally, but I think I can do it and it would give that part the kind of authenticity it should have.”

  “It’s a wonderful idea,” I said, “it couldn’t be cast better.” I meant what I said. The part of Lawrence Vail was that of a famous Broadway playwright who is brought to Hollywood with frantic pleas and pressures for his immediate arrival, and then is kept waiting for six months without bein
g able to see anyone at all or to find anybody who seems to know what he is even there for. The part, though it appeared in the second act only, provided a Greek chorus of sanity to the lunacy prevailing all around it, and it was important to the play that it be played well. Some of my favorite lines in the play were contained in that part, and I knew they would never be acted better than the way Mr. Kaufman had read them in the privacy of his bedroom when he tried some of the scenes aloud for himself and for me. Not all but certainly some playwrights can give a better performance of their plays in a bedroom or study than those plays ever receive on the stage; just as some composers can sing their own songs far better sitting alone at the piano than any great star of the musical stage can sing them with a full orchestra at her feet.

  Mr. Kaufman seemed inordinately pleased at my enthusiasm. So much so, that he seemed to want to hurry me through my cheese and apple pie in order to get back to the typewriter, but I was not to be pushed! I rightly guessed that the next full-sized lunch would be a long time in coming, and I took my own sweet time with each mouthful—in spite of the fact that he called the usual terrorized waiter for the check, paid it, and sat impatiently piling up little blocks of sugar all around the sugar bowl.

  “If you take larger bites,” he finally remarked, “we could finish the third act in a week.”

  He was right to the exact day. A week later he typed “The curtain falls on Act Three” and quickly dashed into the bathroom to escape what he correctly surmised would be a few grandiloquent words from me to set the occasion more firmly in his mind. This time, evidently suspecting a whopper, he turned not only the washbasin taps on full, but the bathtub faucets as well, and began to take off his shirt and tie. He smiled and lifted one finger in farewell, knowing it was impossible even for me to make a speech to a man who was stripping down to get into a tub.

  “The usual time tomorrow,” he called out over the noise of the running water. “We’ll have to let Sam Harris know what we’ll want in the way of actors. We’ll go over the list together up here and then go down to the Music Box,” and a little too pleased with himself, he nudged the door with his foot and carefully closed it.

  MR. KAUFMAN and Sam Harris, in the days that followed, seemed to me to be casting the play a little too quickly for comfort, but as the inexperienced member of the trio I kept my reservations to myself. They were scrupulous about consulting me on every final selection, but I could sense when they both agreed completely on an actor or actress, and for the most part I remained silent or agreed with them. The fact was, I was enjoying these days of preparation for rehearsals far too much to worry over anything. These days were the dividends I had awaited with growing impatience to collect.

  A play for me never really takes on an aspect of reality until it has left the dry air of the study and begins to sniff the musty breezes of a bare stage, with actors reading aloud at auditions. Only then does it begin to come alive. I have never quite understood playwrights who find auditions and rehearsals a grueling bore, or whose real pleasure in their work ends as it leaves their typewriters. For me, the excitement of auditions, the camaraderie of actors in rehearsal, the tight and secret conspiracy against the world, which begins to grow between actors and authors and directors and is the essence of putting on a play—this, to me at any rate, is the really satisfying part of the whole process, and the only thing, I think, that ever persuades me to walk toward a typewriter once again.

  After the grind and imprisonment of those months in 63rd Street, the lazy freedom of sitting through auditions at the Music Box was glorious, to say nothing of the bliss of being able to dash into the little drug store next to the theatre between readings and gorge myself on chocolate malteds and hamburgers. I more than made up for the Spartan diet of tea and cookies I had been on for so long. Each day was a holiday so far as I was concerned, and almost before I was aware of it, or would have dreamed it possible, the play was cast and I was walking toward the Music Box for the first rehearsal. My excitement was intense. The bits and pieces of scenes I had heard read aloud at auditions had whetted my appetite to the bursting point to hear the play read in its entirety and in sequence.

  My impatience was such that I was, unhappily, the first person to arrive. The stage was empty except for the two stage managers who were setting out chairs in a wide semicircle and placing a table in front of the chairs where Mr. Kaufman, Sam Harris and I would sit. They stared at me, surprised at my undignified promptness, and I thought I saw a good-humored wink pass between them, for I had evidently violated by my early arrival one of the major tenets of the code of first rehearsals. There seems to be a rigid code of behavior for the day of a first rehearsal that is as stately and as set in its pattern as a minuet. The minor actors are always the first ones to arrive. Then the principals stroll casually in, depending upon the order of their billing, timing their arrival by some inner clockwork of their own. Just before the appearance of the author, director and producer, the star appears—or if the star is of sufficient magnitude, she will appear last. The wink between the stage managers was a testimony to my newness as an author, but I did not mind. This was where I wanted to be, and it was a mark of what patience I had left that I had not arrived even before the stage managers themselves!

  Gradually, the bit players and minor principals began to arrive; then, since there were no stars in Once in a Lifetime, the leading players—Aline MacMahon, Hugh O’Connell, Blanche Ring and Grant Mills—came onto the stage and took their places in the semicircle of chairs, all of them shining with that false brightness that actors seem to bring to a first rehearsal along with their cigarettes. I could hear Sam Harris and Mr. Kaufman talking in the back of the theatre, and now they came down the aisle together and up onto the stage, Sam Harris greeting all of the company even to the bit players, with a word or two or a pat on the shoulder. Mr. Kaufman muttered something to the first stage manager, and then sat down at the table and motioned me to sit beside him. Sam Harris sat down on the other side of Mr. Kaufman, with Max Siegel in the chair next to him. The stage manager called out, “All right, ladies and gentlemen—will you please be sure to use the fire buckets next to your chairs for your cigarettes. Thank you.” He sat down again and turned toward Mr. Kaufman. I found it difficult to breathe; I cleared my throat with what sounded to my own ears like an artillery barrage.

  Mr. Kaufman opened the manuscript on the table before him and quietly pronounced what have always seemed to me to be the four most dramatic words in the English language: “Act One—Scene One.” There was a fractional pause and then the first line of the play came from the semicircle of chairs. It came rather listlessly and quite flatly, and so did the second and third lines. My own nervousness is affecting my hearing, I thought—and I brushed aside the impression I was receiving of the way the play was being read and tried to listen less nervously. It was not, however, just my own taut nerves that were making the opening lines sound so trite. The lines that followed were coming out dull and flat as well, and the play itself sounded entirely lifeless even in this opening scene. It seemed increasingly lifeless as the second scene droned on. I glanced sideways at Mr. Kaufman to see if his face was mirroring my own disturbance, but he seemed to be unaware of how badly the play was emerging. He was busily making notations on each page of the manuscript and seemed not to be listening at all. I looked past him at Sam Harris and Max Siegel, but they too seemed undisturbed. I could not understand it. Surely they were hearing what I was hearing—the sogginess and downright dullness of the play must certainly have been as apparent to them as it was to me. How, then, could they sit there so placidly unconcerned while my own ears were rejecting every line as it was read!

  What I did not know, of course, was that all plays sound frightful at the first reading. It appears that still another aspect of the code of behavior of a first rehearsal is that actors, for reasons known only to themselves, consider it a breach of professional etiquette to read the play well the first time through. The stars or the princi
pals mumble through their parts in a hopeless monotone, and if one of the minor players, new like myself to the proper procedure, reads his one or two speeches with a semblance of performance peeping through, he is stared at and contemptuously dismissed as a “good reader” or “radio actor,” and the mumbling goes agonizingly on. The result of this witless but unshakable convention is that a new playwright will listen to his play being read for the first time by the company that is going to perform it and quake in his boots, wondering as he suffers through it what in the world he has wasted two years of his life on. Actors, of course, maintain that no such code exists at all and that their own nervousness and nothing else makes them read so execrably, but I have never quite believed it. They may well be telling the truth, but twice I have listened to a first reading in which the stars gave as brilliant a performance at the first reading as they subsequently gave on the stage, and I have never ceased to be grateful to them for it.