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Act One

Page 39

by Moss Hart


  I waited now for Eddie and Dore and the others to come up the aisle. They, at least, wished me well and I wanted desperately to hear something good about the play, no matter what, in spite of what my eyes and ears so plainly told me. They were slower this time in coming up the aisle and their faces were the unsmiling ones. For a brief moment I felt sorry for them. Greeting an author on the opening night of a play that is going badly is in some ways comparable to taking a marriage vow. You are damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t. Not to greet him if he catches your eye is impossible as well as painfully obvious, and to murmur evasively when one stands face to face with him is nothing short of outright cruelty. Yet the truth is too painful for him to hear, even if one has the courage to state it, and the truth is exactly what he least wishes to know. It is an impossible moment. Politeness does not suffice and good manners are somehow an affront. I have evolved a credo of my own which serves the occasion but does not attempt to solve the insoluble. Simply stated, I tell the truth to an author on an opening night out of town, and on an opening night in New York I do not. The truth is not always a virtue. There are times when the truth is unnecessary as well as needlessly cruel, and a New York opening night is one of those times. By then the die is cast, and at that moment the author is at his most vulnerable. It is unfriendly not to tell him the truth out of town when it may yet do some good, but by the same token it is nonsense to do so at a time when it can be of no service whatever. The truth at that moment can only succeed in giving the teller the smug satisfaction of virtuous honesty and do the author no good at all. The truth will be his soon enough and he will nourish it for a long time to come.

  My friends cushioned the truth and made it as palatable as they could—there was no way of making it pleasant and I did not press them. What, after all, was there to say after that painfully weak second act? It was Joe Hyman, as it turned out, who bore the brunt of my explosive behavior that evening, when he gravely remarked, with that edge of mockery in his voice, “What happened to all that work you were supposed to be doing? This is the same play I saw in Atlantic City.” My rage found a target. The defeat of my hopes uncoiled like a cobra within me and I lashed out at him with almost a sense of relief at no longer having to repress the black sense of fury and defeat I had kept concealed from everyone, myself included, until that moment. He did not answer, nor did anyone else interrupt me. When I finished I turned and walked out of the theatre. I felt strangely better. The worst had become true and there was only one more act to live through. I had the courage not to return to the theatre for the third act. Not until I had seen the last of the audience, including my family, leave the theatre and the lights on the marquee go out, did I venture to go backstage to find out what Mr. Kaufman’s working plans might be for the following day.

  Mr. Kaufman was not there nor had he left a message for me. Neither Sam Harris nor Max Siegel was to be seen either, all three of them, it seemed, having driven back to New York together immediately after the third-act curtain had fallen.

  As usual, there was that minor player, about to deposit his dressing-room key with the stage doorman, who informed me brightly that he thought the play had gone wonderfully and that all of his friends were certain we were in for a long run on Broadway. I am ashamed to record that my ego was so limp and my spirit so impoverished that I walked him to the subway to hear in greater detail just how wonderful his friends had thought it was. I willingly paid the blackmail of having to listen to how his own part could be strengthened to the greater good of the play. At that particular moment it was worth it.

  * * *

  There is this much to be said for the value of out-of-town notices. If they are good, they can be acknowledged as good for business and for the morale of the actors. If they are bad, they can be brushed aside as out-of-town notices and what do out-of-town critics know anyway? My mother achieved this solid professional viewpoint in exactly one night, or by the time I had awakened the next morning. Standing over me she announced that she had read the local papers and compared their notices to the review in Variety. Her pronouncement was professional and exact. “What do Brooklyn papers know about a play, anyway? If they were real critics they wouldn’t be here in Brooklyn!” She handed them over, and my own professionalism being neither as steadfast nor as flourishing as her own, I read them avidly and not without a painful twinge or two. The worst, naturally, was the paper I happened to pick up first. “It is probably unfair,” the notice ran, “to infer that the good parts of a play are written by one man and the inferior parts by another, but judging by the records of both names listed on the program last night, the first act and a half of Once in a Lifetime, which is very good indeed, was written by George S. Kaufman, and the rest by Moss Hart. Mr. Kaufman’s witty hand is everywhere in evidence during the hilarious first part, but he seems to have left the typewriter in the custody of Mr. Hart for the rest of the play. He had better get back to it as fast as he can, if the lavish Sam H. Harris production unveiled at the Brighton Beach Theatre last evening, etc., etc.” The other Brooklyn papers were less damning, but meager indeed in their praise, which consisted mainly of listing the actors and saying they were all good. “Well, bully for the actors’ morale,” I thought briefly. “I hope it’s in better shape than my own.”

  I glanced sourly up at my mother, who stood rereading the Variety notice and smiling and nodding her head in agreement, and got out of bed and out of the house as fast as I could. I had no wish to hear how much the neighbors had liked it or how violently they disagreed with what the local papers said, which I could see she was firmly determined to tell me, neighbor by neighbor. I went to the drug store on the corner and telephoned Mr. Kaufman from there. If the news was going to be bad, I wanted to be alone to hear it. “Were you planning to work today, Mr. Kaufman?” I asked with as much casualness as I could summon into my voice when his hello came through the receiver.

  “I think we both need a respite for a couple of days before we tackle it again,” he replied. “By the way,” he went on, “don’t let yourself be upset by what that silly bastard said. How the hell would he or anyone else know who wrote which parts of a play? It’s damned infuriating.”

  “I’m not upset,” I said almost jubilantly. As long as we were going to tackle it again, what difference did it make what anyone said?

  “Good,” he said. “See you there tonight.” And the connection clicked off.

  I made another telephone call to apologize to Joe Hyman and then returned home to eat a huge breakfast, my mind tumbling with ideas about the play and as refreshed as though I had returned from a month in the country. It is possible that fear in one form or another is as much responsible for that occupational illness, writer’s block, as any of the traumatic experiences a writer may have gathered in his childhood.

  The second night’s performance of a comedy is generally a letdown for both actors and audience. It is a letdown, that is, unless the second-night audience has been told by the reviewers in their morning newspapers that the play is funny. Having thus been relieved of having to exercise their own judgment, they then enter the theatre laughing at the ushers as they receive their programs, and the actors have only to stroll through their parts to be hilariously accepted and applauded. It is a sheeplike exhibition and a dispiriting one to watch. The second-night audience of Once in a Lifetime, having been told what to expect, entered the theatre feeling already cheated. One could almost feel them stiffen against the play as they settled into their seats. They opened their programs with an air of preparing themselves not to be amused. Actors can do little with a disgruntled audience. They can win over a cold audience, but not a disapproving one. Even the first act, which contained genuine laughter if an audience met it halfway, played soggily. Moreover, the actors, keyed to the quick perception of the audience of the night before, suddenly found themselves adrift in a sea of unknowing silence, where before waves of laughter had always safely borne them along. Perhaps even more disconcerting than t
his unexpected stillness was the sound of a single laugh that kept staunchly and hollowly resounding through the silences. It was my mother’s laugh, and I could easily have throttled her! The actors gave up when the biggest laugh in the first act was again met with a thudding silence, and played from that point onward with an air of undisguised martyrdom that made the play seem endless.

  Mr. Kaufman, other than giving me his traditional single finger lifted in silent greeting, spoke not a word during the first act nor throughout the rest of the evening. If he was dismayed by the dismal reception the play was receiving, he gave no sign of it. His pacing continued, but it was neither more nor less fervent than it had been on any of the other evenings I had watched him. I chose to interpret his silence as a tacit agreement that this was one of those evenings and one of those audiences that must somehow be lived through and on which comment was superfluous. One could only blot it out and hope that by tomorrow evening the memory of those notices would be partially dimmed. Not everyone in Brooklyn, I thought grimly, reads the newspapers or they would vote more sensibly and spend less time at the ball park.

  To a large degree this was true. As the week wore on, the audiences grew noticeably better, though increasingly smaller in number. There were, it seemed, just so many friends and neighbors of my mother and they apparently all sat in the balcony. Her faith in the play remained unshaken and her ringing laughter cut through each silence, but her influence on the Brooklyn theatregoing public was obviously negligible. By Thursday evening the gaps in the back rows of the orchestra were alarming. I had another and deeper cause for alarm by Thursday evening, however. Sam Harris and Max Siegel had appeared only once since the opening night at Brighton Beach. They sat through the second performance, but I had purposely evaded meeting them on that depressing evening. Their absence was unsettling, but I refused to let it or the fact that Mr. Kaufman had given no sign of being ready to go to work yet disquiet me unduly. Perhaps it was pointless for them to keep coming back to look at the play until we knew how we were going to fix it, and Mr. Kaufman had said he had wanted a respite before we tackled the play again. He was not a man to equivocate or to give his word lightly where work was concerned. I could not completely down, however, a feeling of haunting uneasiness as each night’s performance came to an end and there was no suggestion of a meeting for the following day, and I took what comfort I could in the fact that he still gave notes to the actors after each performance and continued to make little cuts in scenes. There was, moreover, the solid certainty of his presence in the theatre each night as the curtain rose and the reassuring sight of his pacing back and forth until the last curtain fell.

  When he did not appear as the house lights dimmed for the final performance on Saturday night, my stomach took a nasty turn. The absence of that familiar figure pacing to and fro in the dark suddenly exploded all the gnawing doubts I had been able to keep within bounds until now. I paced back and forth alone for a while and then gave it up. I realized that I was hearing not one word that came across the footlights. I left the theatre and scanned the street outside.

  The street had that special emptiness of streets outside of theatres after the curtain has risen. For some inexplicable reason no one seems to pass by after curtain time. The street goes as silent and dead as it might in the middle of the night. The only sign of life now on either side of the street was the Negro attendant sweeping up the ticket envelopes and cigarette stubs in the lobby behind me. I walked to the corner and stood there aimlessly, chilled by the emptiness around me but unable to go back into the theatre until I could stem the sense of unease Mr. Kaufman’s absence had stirred up. He would have to be there, I knew, in time for his appearance in the second act, but his failure to turn up in time for the first act took on a growing but deadly significance in my mind. It was unlike him not to appear tonight of all nights. He was a bitter-ender, for one thing, and for another he was scrupulous about watching each performance from the beginning, no matter how well or how badly the play might be going. Short of a traffic accident, I could not account for his absence, and the longer I waited the more forbidding his lateness seemed to become.

  I did not see a car pull up and stop in front of the theatre until I became aware that the figure helping someone alight from the car was Mr. Kaufman himself and the woman he was helping out was Beatrice Kaufman. He looked quite startled, as well he might have, when my own figure dashed out of the shadows and ran toward him yelling, “The curtain’s up,” in a tone of wild jubilation. I stood in front of them both, grinning foolishly, so relieved at seeing him that I was unconscious of how idiotic my behavior must seem.

  Beatrice Kaufman gave me a puzzled hello, and after a moment Mr. Kaufman recovered himself sufficiently to ask, “How is it going?”

  “Great,” I found myself unexpectedly replying, though I had barely seen any of it.

  “Well, that’ll be a nice change,” he remarked and started toward the lobby.

  Fortunately, they entered the theatre on a burst of laughter, so that I was not made out a complete fool—but laughter, even with this easily pleased Saturday night audience, stopped exactly where it had always stopped before. At Mr. Kaufman’s exit, dead center in the middle of the second act—almost as though some hand had pulled a hidden switch that controlled the audience’s mirth—all laughter ceased abruptly. For the first time, however, I listened for the expected silence, and when it came I did not, as I had done throughout every other performance, quail inwardly. That long-awaited signal from Mr. Kaufman had been given and it remained in my ears now, filling in the silence. At the end of the first act he had approached me and said, “Come back to the dressing room at the end of the show so that we can talk for a few minutes, will you?” And from that point onward I had hardly bothered to listen to the play at all.

  In the middle of the third act, a portion of the evening’s listening that was always the hardest for me to bear, I walked out into the lobby for a smoke. Now that I knew we were actually going to work I could spare myself the needless pain of watching scenes that were going to be tossed out or completely rewritten.

  A playwright is almost invariably to be found in the lobby throughout one of the bad scenes of his play—during the very scenes, in fact, that warrant his most serious attention; but these are the scenes, of course, that he finds the most painful to watch. No matter how inveterate a smoker he may be, he will somehow manage to contain his longing for a cigarette through the good scenes. Indeed, it would be hard to drag him out of the theatre then under any pretext. Ten lines before a bad scene approaches, however, his need to smoke becomes savage beyond endurance and he gives way to it. He remains puffing away in the lobby until the scene is over, timing his re-entrance with a splendid ingenuity. He can somehow manage to escape the scenes most in need of work until the last possible moment. His excuse to himself and to others is a valid one—he needs the solace of a smoke. It is hard after all to deny a man the steadying influence of a cigarette. The practiced “out-of-town” eye, however, can tell to a nicety just how badly a play is still in need of fixing by the length of time an author spends smoking in the lobby.

  I felt no sense of guilt about stealing out to the lobby, for we obviously were going to arrive at an entirely new last act, and I began to sort out some possibilities in my mind. I have had the good fortune of being able to work almost anywhere at all. I have written in subways, on shipboard with people chattering away in deck chairs on either side of me, in theatre lounges with actors rehearsing on the stage above, in kitchens, in automobiles, and on beaches or beside swimming pools with children cavorting about in the water. No particular exercise of discipline is inherent in this ability to work in whatever setting happens to fall my way—it is a lucky or accidental gift of concentration and I have always been grateful for it.

  I walked up and down the empty lobby, hardly conscious of where I was, and when one of the doors of the theatre opened, I was so immersed in a tangle of thoughts for a new last act that I star
ed unseeingly at Beatrice Kaufman for a good thirty seconds before I recognized her and smiled back. She stopped to light a cigarette before she moved toward me, and I was conscious once again that she somehow managed to infuse even so small an action as the lighting of a cigarette with a distinctive quality of her own—just as the way she puffed on the cigarette in its green paper holder was peculiarly hers, fastidious and feminine, yet with a delicate sensuality. The gray smoke curled lazily around her face until it blended with the color of her hair, and she seldom removed the holder from her lips while she talked, so that her entire head was usually haloed in a haze of smoke that made her own bluish-white hair seem to rise out of the smoke and become a part of it. It lent a frisky and rakish air to everything she said and made it sound faintly reckless.

  We talked for a few moments about the play, easily and lightly. Her very presence was enlivening after the dreariness of this past week—there had been little chance to talk to her in Atlantic City—and as always, her effect on people and certainly on myself was to induce a sense of exhilaration and gaiety.

  I heard myself saying now with the intimacy of old acquaintance, “We’ll probably be seeing a good deal of each other during the rewrite this summer.”

  She did not pause in her reply, but her expression changed slightly. “I won’t be here this summer,” she said. “We’ve taken a villa in France for three months—in Antibes—Woollcott and Harpo and Alice Miller and I. I’m leaving next week.” I sensed she was about to go on, but my face must have shown such open mouth-watering envy that she burst into laughter instead, and said, “I hope it’s as good as all that! Will you tell George I’ve gone on to the Dietzes’ and that I’ll send the car back for him?” She held out her hand. “Good-bye,” she said and started for the street door.

 

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