by Moss Hart
I knew better now than to make any kind of prefacing speech. Instead, I took out an envelope from my inside pocket, much like the one he himself used each day, and glanced briefly at the notes I had typed on one side of it as a guide to help me begin. “I worked out a new second and third act, Mr. Kaufman,” I said, “and I’d like you to hear it.”
“Right now?” he asked, looking quickly at his watch.
“It won’t take long,” I lied, knowing full well it would take at least an hour or as long as I needed to finish.
“Mind if I keep eating?” he said.
“Not at all,” I answered. “I’ll just keep talking.”
I started right off. The crackle of cornflakes followed by the crunch of toast is not the most helpful of accompaniments to the telling of a story, particularly of so crucial a story as this one represented to me. The sound was terribly disconcerting, but there was no help for it. I was lucky to catch him and have him listen, and the very fact that he was willing to listen I took as a sign that he was still uncommitted to any one of those manuscripts on the night table. I consciously slowed down until he had finished the second cup of coffee, though he was giving me all of his attention, and mentally noted that memorizing the scenario had been a stroke of absolute genius! I could watch him intently now, the outline thoroughly in my head, hastening the telling when his interest seemed to flag or matching the glint of interest that came into his eyes occasionally with an excitement of my own. He smiled once or twice and laughed outright at an old line of dialogue we had discarded and which I had purposely stuck back in a new place when it fitted perfectly. It had been a favorite line of his which had never worked, and I used it craftily. I knew it would please him. Had there been other little wiles I could have thought of or used I would have used them all shamelessly. Sometimes play-writing only begins when “End of Act Three” is typed on the manuscript.
I finished at last, flushed and a little breathless. I looked at my watch. It had taken just over an hour, even rushing it a bit now and then. Toward the end Mr. Kaufman had retreated to his favorite position, stretched out flat on the floor, and now he slowly and silently arose. He walked to the window and stood staring out at that damned cat which seemed to hold such fascination for him. He turned back toward the room and picked a few bits of lint off the carpet before he looked directly at me.
“What’s the matter?” he asked suddenly, giving me a strange look
I must have been holding my breath without being aware of it and I imagine it gave my eyes a somewhat bug-eyed expression. “Nothing is the matter,” I answered. “I’m just waiting.”
“How soon could you move in here?” he said.
“In here—with you?” I asked stupidly.
“Not in this room, no,” he said not unkindly. “In the house. Beatrice goes to Europe today and Ann is leaving for camp. I meant Ann’s room. That’s a full summer’s work you’ve laid out, you know, with evenings included. We could get into rehearsal by August, I think, if you moved in here and we worked straight through.”
“I’ll go home and pack a suitcase and be right back,” I said and started for the door.
“Tomorrow morning will do,” he called sharply after me. “I’ll be looking at you all summer.”
“You had a whole day off yesterday,” I called back and closed the door behind me.
It was done—and I had also achieved the first moment of intimacy I had ever been able to allow myself with him. I celebrated both victories by having a full-course steak dinner as a second breakfast. The occasion seemed to call for nothing short of that.
PLAY-WRITING, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession. I had privately decided that with an outline before us and armed with the knowledge those two weeks of playing before audiences had given us, we could finish the revision in a month or very little more. I soon saw, however, that Mr. Kaufman was not far wrong in his estimate. He did indeed look at me almost all summer long, including most of the evenings. What I failed to take into account was that an outline or scenario is an imprecise instrument at best. It cannot be followed slavishly, for as the outline is translated into dialogue, it shifts mercurially under one’s fingers, and the emphasis of a scene or sometimes a whole act will twist out of control, taking with it large parts of the carefully plotted scenario that follows after.
We spent the first few days painstakingly setting down and enlarging the outline I had memorized, but by the third day of actual work many of the things that had seemed so promising on yellow paper disappeared under the harsh glare of the sheet of white paper in the typewriter. Nevertheless, some of the better invention remained and even what was unusable served a purpose; but it was apparent not only that there was a full summer’s work ahead but that we would actually be lucky to complete it by August. Mr. Kaufman accepted the fact without complaint, and for my own part I was too pleased and grateful to be back at work to mind, however long it took. What I minded, as we settled down into a daily grind, was not work, but the heat and hunger, one or the other of which seemed to be ever present, and which in combination became my chief concern. New York, that summer, was teaching those unlucky enough to have to remain in the city that the Upper Reaches of the Amazon, though not in the same latitude, were perhaps no hotter than the Jewel of the East could be if it chose to rub its inhabitants’ noses into a bit of subtropical weather. Heat wave after heat wave broiled the buildings and the pavements with almost no respite, so that even in the evenings the baked brick and stone seemed to give off a heat much like that of a baker’s oven that had not yet cooled. The tar in the asphalt paving melted each day and oozed blackly from the cracks, and the parched people still trapped in the city walked heavily along the streets looking wilted and beaten. The weather made the headlines in every edition, and the heat headache I awoke with every morning seemed to throb a little more dully as I read, “Heat Wave Unbroken” or “No Relief in Sight.”
The heat became a living and evil thing, for air conditioning, that most glorious of mankind’s inventions since the discovery of the wheel, was not in general use—and if it had been, I doubt whether Mr. Kaufman would have considered it anything more than an unnecessary or unworkable toy. He seemed impervious to the heat, and other than washing his hands more often than usual, his only concession to it—made, I think, more for my sake than for his own—was a small electric fan that tiredly plop-plopped around in an uneven contest with the waves of hot air that came in through the windows from the furnace outside. This useless object was placed on the floor in a far corner of the room so as not to ruffle the papers on the desk. Once, in extremis, I moved it to a chair where I fancied some of the slight air it circulated might blow directly on me. Instead, it blew the papers from the desk all over the room and four or five pages blew right out the window and skittered into the adjoining yard. I had to hurry downstairs and retrieve them under Mr. Kaufman’s baleful eye, and to make matters worse, I got stuck trying to climb back over the fence of the house next door and had to call for the maid to help me down, while Mr. Kaufman watched from the upstairs window. It was an ignominious performance, and after that I let the fan remain where it was and sat as still as I could in the leather chair trying not to think of either the heat or food.
Heat, of course, is supposed to diminish or even rob one entirely of appetite, but my unfortunate appetite was apparently sturdy or robust enough to defy, like the United States mails, heat or sleet or snow and let nothing deter it! There were even times when I grew hungry enough to forget about the heat and to see mirages of food heaped in front of me, for Mr. Kaufman’s delicate appetite, slim enough in the winter, seemed to all but disappear with the first robin. With warm weather, long before the first heat wave enveloped the city, a salad and a not too lavish plate of thinly sliced cold meat became the unvarying menu of each day’s main meal, and when on a coolish day lamb chops occasionally appeared, my old struggle not to grab and stuff was like a man wrestling with his faith. I had made the
terrible mistake, when he asked me the first evening of my arrival what I took each morning for breakfast, to reply genteelly, “Oh, just orange juice, toast and coffee.” And I had watched him write it down on a slip of paper and hand it to the maid to give to the cook, knowing even as the words left my lips that I had made a fatal error. It was impossible after that to fill up with a decent breakfast to fortify myself against the rest of a day where lunch remained as always tea and cookies and little cucumber or watercress sandwiches served in the middle of the afternoon, and though cookies and a full pitcher of iced tea were left on the desk, when evening came and that tidy little salad and platter of cold meats stared up at me from the table I was always ravenous.
By the third week of my sojourn, when I was not lying awake all night cursing the heat and my ungovernable appetite, I sat staring during the day at Mr. Kaufman from the depths of the leather chair, not thinking of the next line or scene, but torturing myself with fantasies of thick roast-beef sandwiches or chicken soup with the chicken still floating around in it. He must at times have thought I had taken leave of my senses, for I caught him once or twice staring at me malignantly over his glasses. My own eyes were glazed, not with inattention or boredom, but with hunger.
By Thursday evening of each week, which was the evening Mr. Kaufman played poker and I returned to Brooklyn to visit my family, even my mother’s cooking, ordinary at best, seemed positively Lucullan, and the relish and appetite with which I ate everything set before me must have given her the impression that she had turned into Escoffier, or at the very least the best cook in Brooklyn. I was always sprightlier and more nimble-witted on Friday morning than on any other day during the week, a fact which seemed to puzzle Mr. Kaufman considerably.
By the middle of July, Mr. Kaufman became aware that something was wrong with the weather. Even an extra washing of the hands did not quite do the trick, and toward the end of an unbroken two-week stretch of scorching days and nights he suddenly announced that he was taking the weekend off to play in a croquet tournament in Long Island. I could hardly believe my ears. I had been sitting glassy-eyed all that day, watching the perspiration from his forehead drip slowly onto the typewriter and marveling at the fact that he would pass his limp handkerchief over his face and never once make the slightest reference to the weather. It was positively inhuman, I had been thinking to myself just before he spoke, not only to be nobly above man’s baser appetites, but to be hermetically sealed in against the weather as well! I was human enough to be meanly delighted that the heat had finally got him. He was pale and drawn, and looking at him, I decided I probably looked even worse. I had not realized that after six years of camp—of being out of the city all summer long—I was now starving for the feel of grass under my feet instead of pavement and longing for the sight of trees and water and an expanse of sky. I could barely wait for the day’s work to end.
Five minutes after he placed the cover over the typewriter I telephoned the Flagler and asked if they would have me as guest performer for the weekend. They would be delighted, it seemed, and I managed to catch the evening train for the Catskills.
That weekend was the last time I did a boy-and-girl number in a revue, “To be or not to be” at the campfire, “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach” in the Saturday night musical, and used my full bag of social-director tricks in the dining room, at the indoor games and around the swimming pool. I was welcomed back like a reigning opera star and I did my stint gladly to pay for my free weekend; but even while I performed, and afterward when I mingled with the guests and staff, I wondered how I had ever lasted through six summers of it. I shuddered to think that I might have to come back and do it again, if Once in a Lifetime failed. The things that are bearable at a certain period of one’s life, out of necessity or made possible by youth itself, are unbearable to contemplate doing again when that time is over. By Sunday night I was champing to return to the city. Those three days, though I did not realize it at the time, did more than just rescue me from the city’s heat—they were a blessing in disguise. That weekend, and all that it implied, was just what I needed to see me down the home stretch, for without wanting to or meaning to, I had been faltering and dragging my heels.
* * *
As a rule, the writing of a second act seems to drag on forever. It is the danger spot of every play—the soft underbelly of play-writing, as Mr. Churchill might put it—and it is well to be aware of it. A first act carries an impetus of its own that is almost sufficient to carry the writer along with it—the excitement of a new play seems to supply the energy and freshness needed for each day’s work at the typewriter, and there are some first acts that literally seem to write themselves. That is why, perhaps, Bernard Shaw is said to have remarked, “Anyone who cannot write a good first act might just as well give up play-writing entirely.” It is second acts that separate the men from the boys. We were still mired in the second act when Mr. Kaufman gave way to the heat, and I suspect his giving way to it may have been partly due to his sensing that a point had been reached where a halt might be not only helpful but downright necessary.
Whatever the reason, he returned from his own weekend refreshed and fired as I was with brand-new first-act energy. Cooler weather also coincided with our return—an omen I was quick to seize on as a good one and which was borne out by the fact that lamb chops as well as dessert appeared on the table twice that week. By the middle of the following week, the second act was finished and we both seemed to breathe more freely.
With the beginning of the third act the pace accelerated. We were due to go into rehearsal the beginning of the second week in August, and Mr. Kaufman passed up several of his poker evenings and worked straight through. We were losing part of each day’s working time now for recasting and sessions with the scenic artist and costume designer. Two new scenes had been added, one of them quite elaborate and calling for the interior of a Hollywood night club called the Pigeon’s Egg, where the patrons sat at tables encased in huge cracked eggs and the waitresses were attired as pigeons, feathers and all. This was one of the new inventions I had concocted during my solitary day on the beach.
There was some doubt now in both our minds that we would finish in time, and Mr. Kaufman grew noticeably edgy. But four days before rehearsals were scheduled to begin he turned toward me and said, “I think you ought to stand up or lie down or shut up or go away or something—I’m about to type ‘The End.’”He typed the two words and grinned. “No farewell speech to the troops?” he asked. He was delighted, I could tell, to have finished with a few days to spare.
I shook my head and grinned back, but I did not share his pleasure. I had secretly hoped that we might have to work right through until the evening before rehearsal. The truth was, I hated the idea of this four-day wait, for eager as I had been before to have rehearsals start, as each day brought them closer, I pushed the thought firmly out of my mind and tried to maintain the illusion that they were still far off. While one is in the throes of work it is easy to hold to the fantasy that success is almost certain to crown so sterling an effort, but as the day of rehearsal relentlessly approaches, the fantasy begins to chip away around the edges and the certainty seems to grow slimmer and slimmer until it is swallowed up by a new dogmatism—the certainty of failure. It is commonly called “rehearsal jitters” and I evidently had a severe case of it. I packed my suitcase reluctantly and went back to Brooklyn to wait.
It is not the best time in the world to be around one’s family, and I mooned about the house for those four days, succeeding in making both my family and myself utterly miserable. Only those who have lived at close quarters with a bad case of pre-rehearsal nerves understand in some measure the unbalanced behavior of the schizophrenic. Brooklyn is a large borough, but it seemed to me that I walked over most of it in those four days, for there was not enough money to do much else but walk, and when I could no longer stay in my skin and remain in the apartment I got out and walked. In the evenings I twisted the dial of the radio from stat
ion to station until it drove them all crazy, or flew out of the house in a temper when I was asked to stop. In a decently arranged world playwrights would be allowed, or even made, to go, a week before rehearsals begin, to some isolated spot not even within flying distance of their families, where their wants would be attended to in silence and their lunacy understood.
I think even my mother was glad to see me leave for rehearsal on Monday morning. She reminded me that a mother’s heart went with me, but its balm did not last out the subway ride to Times Square, and I walked through the stage door of the Music Box with that age-old mixture of foreboding and cowardice that marks the true professional. It seemed to me I was some light-years removed from the wide-eyed hopeful who had walked shyly through this same stage door last spring, overawed by the stage managers, embarrassed at being too early, and ridiculously eager for a sniff of the excitement and glamor of a first rehearsal. I was arriving now not ahead of the actors but with the management this time, and I would not panic at that mumbled first reading of the play, but behind my professional manner lay the cowardice gained by a knowledge I had not had before. I knew now that beyond this first rehearsal lay those minutes alone in the hotel room before going down to the theatre to face the first performance. I knew the torment of pacing up and down in the dark, waiting for the sting of an audience’s silence when laughter did not come, and the pain of watching those faces come up the aisle. I could almost feel the fatigue of night-long revisions and the weariness of waiting for dawn to come through the blinds so that we could stop rewriting and get some sleep before the next day’s rehearsal—and I shrank from facing it all again. I longed to settle back into my ignorance of last spring. It was all to be gone through once more, but this time there was the added knowledge of knowing that the stakes were higher. I had had my second chance.
Sam Harris, coming through the stage door just behind me, phrased it neatly with that facility he had for putting everything there was to say into a short sentence. “Hi, kid,” he greeted me, “we’re playing for keeps this time, eh?” I nodded glumly and walked to the table where Mr. Kaufman already sat waiting, and a few moments later the stage manager rapped on the table and called the company to attention.