by Moss Hart
She had half opened the door when she turned and came back. She hesitated and seemed to be searching for the right words, but they eluded her, for she sighed and somewhat nervously, I thought, lit another cigarette. She smiled uncertainly for a moment before she spoke. “You’ll be spending summers in Europe yourself some day,” she said. “You’re going to be a very successful playwright. You’ll be writing other plays.”
Again it seemed to me she seemed to be regretting the impulse that had made her return and speak at all. She moved quickly to the door, smiled another good-bye over her shoulder, and was gone.
I looked after her for a moment, a little warning flick of panic beginning to flutter once more. I suppose the difference between the chronic worrier, the man who seizes on words or even nuances of voice to feed the mainstream of his fears, and the man who worries not at all until catastrophe is full upon him, is only an apparent difference, since both attitudes are aspects of the same neurosis. Given a choice, I should unhesitatingly choose the latter kind, for if catastrophe is inevitable it is at least less painful to meet it in one piece rather than in sections, but one is given little choice in such matters. I seem to have been born a chronic and fretful worrier with an antenna capable of picking up stray words and looks that to a nature other than my own would be imperceptible or nonexistent. I picked up the phrase, “You’ll be writing other plays,” and bit into it, turning it over and over, screening it from every angle of the disquiet that I felt mounting within me. I seized on the word “other” and could not let it go. The word had an ugly connotation. What did it mean? There were no “other” plays but this one, so far as I was concerned. Why had Beatrice Kaufman turned back, and having decided to speak, why had she been reluctant to say what she evidently had meant to say, except in those veiled and shadowy terms? There had been an undercurrent of downright compassion in her tone that I did not like. I liked it less and less, the more I thought about it.
I waited impatiently for the third act to end. I watched Mr. Kaufman take his bow and then hurried backstage. Actually, I think I knew what he was going to say before he spoke. He was experiencing the same difficulty finding the right words that Beatrice Kaufman had encountered, and his first words confirmed the truth that I was already half prepared for.
“This has not been an easy decision for me to make,” he said slowly and then paused. “It’s taken me all week to come to it,” he went on, “but I’m certain now that I haven’t anything more to offer to this play. Someone else, or maybe you alone, would be better than I would be from here on. I’ve gone dry on it or maybe I’ve lost my taste for it. That happens sometimes.”
He picked up a towel and began to wipe the cold cream from his face, waiting for some kind of response from me. I stared at his image in the mirror, unable to utter a sound.
“I’m sure you’ll get it done again,” he said finally. “There’s a lot of good stuff there and you may suddenly get an idea that will crack the second and third acts. I wanted you to know that I want no part of any rights or royalties for whatever work I’ve done. It’s yours free and clear. I’ve spoken to Sam Harris and he’ll make a very generous arrangement on the scenery and costumes with any producer who wants to do it. Sam Harris would like you to come in and see him on Monday, by the way. I imagine he wants to tell you himself that…”
He left the sentence eloquently unfinished. I had my breath and my wits back again and I could see he was embarrassed and unhappy. He was waiting for me to speak but I could still find nothing to say. At least he had spared us both such grubby phrases as, “I’m sorry it had to turn out this way,” or, “I hope you’ll call me some time,” and I was silently grateful to him for it.
“You’re sure you’ve gone dry on it, Mr. Kaufman?” I finally asked.
He nodded slowly. “I’d be no use to you any more,” he said and looked longingly at the door.
“I see,” I said and moved toward the doorway. He looked grateful in his turn that there were to be no speeches on my part, and he solved the question of how to have the agony over and done with as quickly as possible by raising that one finger in a gesture of goodbye. I murmured, “Good-bye,” and closed the door behind me.
* * *
There is a certain excitement about bad news that is curiously sustaining and in a strange way almost stimulating. Until the shock of it has worn off and reality comes back into focus again, there is a heightened sense of being alive, almost a buoyancy of the spirit, until its import reaches through the walls of self-defense and what has seemed impossible to accept becomes an actuality. I walked along the boardwalk surprised and then astonished to find that I was not feeling bad at all. Other than that first crushing moment in the dressing room, I had felt nothing except the pressing necessity of getting out of the room and the theatre as fast as possible. Now I was conscious only of a weariness that held something akin to boredom in it. If Once in a Lifetime had reached a point of no return, so had I. It was almost a relief to know at last that it was over, for there was no doubt in my mind that this was the end of it.
Mr. Kaufman had colored the truth more than a little when he said that there would doubtless be another production under a different management. It was understandable that he should do so under the stress of the moment, but it was not true and he must have known it was not true with the same certainty that I did. If George Kaufman and Sam Harris relinquished a play as unfixable, there was little or no likelihood of another management’s picking up the challenge. George Kaufman was usually the man they called in to fix the unfixable. His reason for dropping Once in a Lifetime was obvious, and since there are no secrets in the world of the theatre, this one would be common gossip up and down Broadway by Monday morning, no matter what carefully worded announcement from the Harris office appeared in the theatre columns of the Times. I leaned over the railing and looked out at the ocean and began to whistle an old camp song. I would be back in camp next summer no doubt, but by the following winter I might have another play. Once in a Lifetime had ended, but the world hadn’t and neither had I. It was the mark of a professional, I decided, to be able to take it this easily.
It was not until I sat down on a bench and, for want of anything better to do, began idly to watch the passers-by, that my mood changed, with a swiftness that at first startled and then overwhelmed me, from one of relief to one of black despair. The charge that detonates the explosions of rage or bitterness which occur within us is often disguised quite innocently. The boardwalk that evening was full of couples my own age and younger, for though it was only the end of May, it was like a midsummer night. They strolled slowly and happily along, hand in hand or arms around each other’s waists, heads pressed closely together. Without knowing that I was doing so, I must have made a bitter identification with them and with my own youth. I stared at these strangers passing in front of me, and all the hopelessness I had been unable to feel before welled up now, transformed into a rage that was like pain. I had had no youth as these young people were having it—no idle sweet time to savor the illusion that life was beginning and that love was the key to its mystery and its flavor. I had let the theatre rob me of mine. With a stab of grinding jealousy I realized I had never gone “steady” with a girl—the small fugitive attempts I had made had always ended quickly, with the knowledge that I had neither the time nor the money necessary for it. Time that was free I had hoarded as something to be used only for work, and money that could be spared was already earmarked for plays that must be seen. I had walked through the years, single-minded, shutting out everything but the goal I had seen shining so steadily in front of me—averting my eyes from everything but the glow of footlights—and now those years were over and done with, as irretrievably finished as Once in a Lifetime. These light-hearted couples seemed to crystallize the waste I had made of them—a waste that seemed to have led me nowhere but to this boardwalk tonight.
In the bleakness of that realization it seemed to me that this life-long intoxication with t
he theatre had been a barren and unprofitable waste. I could hardly bear to look at those unconcerned carefree figures. Regret and even self-recrimination are bearable emotions. The unbearable one, for me at least, is the hatred of one’s self that follows waste, the waste of one’s talent or one’s affections. The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise—the sterility of a thankless affection. I leaned over the back of the bench and turned toward the sea again to shut out the sight of those couples passing before me.
I have no idea how long I remained there, staring out at the ocean, but if I were asked to pinpoint the exact moment or moments that have marked a turning point for me, I should unhesitatingly choose this as one of the decisive ones. In every career, in every profession, there must occur a like moment: when the will to survive falters and almost ceases to exist—when the last reserves of ability to pick up and go on seem to have been used up. This was that moment for me, and its saving grace was a strongly developed sense of irony that began to break through and give me a glimpse of the truth. It rescued me then, and it has come to my rescue many times since. A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity. It can be, as it was for me then, the beginning of the first small steps toward clarity; for the truth, of course, as I began to glimpse it slowly, was that it was more than a little ironic for me to envy now what I had never envied before and nonsense to consider as wasted the years in which I had chosen to do exactly what I wanted to do.
It was not accidental that I was sitting on this bench, nor would I have had it otherwise. I had never wanted any idle sweet time to savor anything other than the mystery of how to get through a stage door. I had what I wanted even now, just as I had always had what I wanted, and just as these boys and girls had exactly what they wanted. I would be no whit happier in their shoes, and never would have been, than they would have been in mine. The true waste of these years would be to let them slip through my fingers tonight—to accept as final the decision that George Kaufman had lost his faith in the play or had gone dry on it. If he had gone dry, he must be led to the well again—if he had gone stale, he must be refreshed. Just how this was to be accomplished I had no idea, but it must be done speedily. Delay would produce a finality of its own. I got up from the bench, walked back along the boardwalk to where the streetcar stopped and waited for one to take me home. The streetcar was full of the same young couples, but I looked at them now with neither envy nor jealousy. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I wanted a good night’s sleep more than anything in the world right now, and fortunately I got one. I slept as though someone had hit me over the head.
* * *
My relationship with George Kaufman did not include intimacy. His nature did not allow him those easy interchanges between people that ripen into swift friendship. The paradox was that he had a quick sympathy and understanding that made one feel at times that one was on the brink of intimacy, but he invariably retreated behind a barrier of cool detachment that he either chose to maintain or could do nothing about. I had sensed this quickly and had respected it, and I had never tried to pass beyond the limits he himself set. Ours was purely a working relationship that was comfortable and friendly during working hours, but remained aloof and distant away from the typewriter. It precluded any personal appeal to him on my part on the basis of sentiment. Mr. Kaufman would be reached, if indeed he could be reached, on the specific level of work or not at all. Anything else was a waste of time or plain wishful thinking.
Early the following morning I walked back to the little beach where I had written Once in a Lifetime and arranged to go to work—a supply of yellow pads in one hand and a bag of sandwiches and soda pop in the other. The one good chance of winning Mr. Kaufman back to the play was to devise new second and third acts that might strike him as worth the extra gamble of picking up the pieces again, considering the time and effort he had already put into it. The difficulty lay in the fact that they must be invented today and presented to him if possible not later than tomorrow, or it might well be too late. He was the most sought-after director in the theatre, and for all I knew might already have embarked on some other venture. He usually went from one play right on to another, sometimes being represented by two or even three plays in the same season. It was unlikely that he would remain inactive with the new season stretching this far in front of him. His telephone was probably jingling with offers right now. It was an unpleasant thought and I did not allow myself to linger on it. I put it firmly out of my mind and stared down at the yellow pad resting on my knees. I had enough to think about otherwise. To ask him to rewrite two full acts, even if I were lucky enough to come up with them, was rather a large order, but there was time enough to do it if I could get him to agree. It had been done before—that was what spring tryouts were for, or some of the solid hits of every other season would never have reached Broadway, and a number of new playwrights would have expired with them.
The formula of the spring tryout was a boon to a new playwright. The two or three months’ layoff for rewriting, after which the play was reopened, was economically possible to the theatre of those days; and it gave the playwright a decent chance to redo his play and, more important, to learn his craft without the shadow of theatre party dates that must be met, booking jams on the road and the scarcity of New York theatres looming constantly over his shoulder. There are plays that can be rewritten in two or three weeks on the road and there are plays that cannot. It takes time to unravel the mechanism of a play without destroying its over-all structure, time to think through and select the good and bad of audience reaction and friendly advice, and more time still to reach a fresh viewpoint or attitude on the work to be done if one is not to make the same mistakes all over again. It is difficult for the new or even the practiced playwright to work well under conditions which include the inevitable deadline of a New York opening only two weeks away, let alone to learn anything worth knowing in the only laboratory where the art of play-writing can be successfully taught, which is back of the proscenium. I was fortunate to have been a new playwright in a time when the theatre contained a reasonable continuity and did not resemble a wild game of roulette played on the lucky chance that a play either opened in not too great trouble or closed a month later in New York. In the theatre of today, it would have been impossible to do what needed to be done within the limits of the lunatic immediate-hit or immediate-flop procedure that now prevails; nor would I have had the irreplaceable opportunity of learning my profession with the proper tools, the most important of which is not a pencil or a typewriter, but the necessary time to think before using them.
It was almost dark when I started for home, my pockets stuffed with pages of yellow paper scribbled over with a rough scenario of new second and third acts. That there were still great unresolved holes in it, I knew, but what it lacked in finesse it made up for, I thought, in new invention. Of necessity I had had to leave certain troublesome areas untouched and plunge ahead, but I had had a bit of luck now and then along the way—enough at any rate to make me feel that there was an outside chance that Mr. Kaufman might accept it. The trick now was to smooth it out and be able to present it to him as skillfully as possible. There is nothing deadlier than having someone read aloud the outline of a play, and it is equally deadly to read a typed résumé full of careful omissions that only serve to highlight the weaknesses and bury the good points. It was far better, I knew, to memorize the scenario completely and rely on my ability to present it sharply and adroitly, covering its lacks and taking advantage of every one of its virtues. I was convinced it had several, and I did not intend to ad lib them tomorrow or trust to the inspiration of the moment.
I chased my mother out of the kitchen, with the supper dishes still unwashed in the sink, put a chair against the door to bar any interruptions and sat down to memorize the outline incident by incident, strengthening its weak spots and heightening i
ts strong points as I went along. It held up well, even under my anxious testing. The thinking was fresh, the invention seemed amusing and the construction was sound. If only I could tell it to Mr. Kaufman tomorrow as well as I was telling it to the kitchen sink now, all would be well.
I presented myself to the maid who opened the door of 158 East 63rd Street at ten o’clock the next morning, and smilingly walked past her into the house. She had no reason to suppose that I was not simply reporting again for work with Mr. Kaufman as I had done all winter, and this, of course, was what I had counted on. I had decided it was much too risky to telephone for an appointment first, and I had come early enough to insure his being in. She returned my good morning and indicated that Mr. Kaufman was upstairs as usual, and I walked up the stairs and into his room without knocking.
He was having his breakfast and in the middle of a phone call, and he was very surprised indeed to see me. The startled look he gave me over his glasses was quite as though he had seen a ghost or some forgotten figure out of the dim past. While he finished his telephone conversation I walked over and stole a sideways glance at the pile of manuscripts on his night table. The top one was titled Grand Hotel, and the pile was thick enough to make me feel I had been wise not to let another day pass in getting here. He hung up and said, “Good morning,” pleasantly enough, though his voice still held a tone of puzzled surprise in it.