Act One

by Moss Hart

  All the little absurdities and affectations of a first rehearsal were again present, but I did not suffer from them too greatly. The actors heaved and mumbled, and Max Siegel smiled sunnily at everything. Mr. Kaufman made his coded chicken marks on the manuscript, seeming not to listen to a word that was being said, and Sam Harris sat rigidly in his chair, his face inscrutable. There were the usual long pauses that had maddened me before, where the parts had been typed incorrectly, and the resultant frenzied search for a pencil by the actor whose part was wrong and who had apparently never thought of bringing a pencil to rehearsal, though he had been in the theatre for forty years. An actor’s pained surprise at the need of a pencil at a first rehearsal runs parallel to his bewilderment at having to open a door or a window for the first time at a dress rehearsal in the actual set. He seems never to have opened a door or a window in his life, or even to have seen one before, and he will fiddle with one or the other and delay the proceedings until one has the impulse to leap over the footlights and hit him—or better still, push him straight through it. The rococo politeness and hoary theatrical jokes that always accompany the search for a pencil, while the sense and meaning of the scene being read is lost entirely, is hard to bear, for of course the actor who now has a pencil cannot then find his place.

  I sat patiently through it all. My chief interest was in listening, or trying to listen, to Jean Dixon, who had replaced Aline MacMahon in the leading role, and Spring Byington, who had taken over the role of the Hollywood gossip columnist played in the tryout by Blanche Ring. Miss Dixon was a prime mumbler and nervous as a cocker spaniel to boot, but every so often in spite of her mumbling an incisive manner and a corrosive delivery of a line with just the right emphasis shone brilliantly through, and Spring Byington’s motherly, wide-eyed mendacity hit the exact fraudulent key the part called for.

  I tried now and then to gauge how the new second and third acts might be going by darting overt glances at Sam Harris’ face, but I might have spared myself the trouble. It remained throughout like something carved out of stone on Mount Rushmore, nor could I much blame him. It was hard to tell from the way it was being read whether those two acts had been improved or were even worse than they had been, though the actors laughed helpfully as actors always do. They had laughed just as appreciatively last spring and were just as surprised as we were when the audience did not laugh after the curtain was up. Reliance on actors’ laughter is the furthest reach in self-deceit, and I shut my ears to it. The second act actually did seem better, but I could tell nothing whatever about the new third act because the typist’s errors were so numerous and the scrambling for pencils and the hemming and hawing of correcting parts so distracting that it made any kind of judgment impossible. I gave up listening entirely and made chicken marks of my own on the stage manager’s pad until the reading was finished. I would have to contain myself as best I could until the play was roughly staged. The typist had either been typing some other play or we had worked badly. What little I heard sounded terrible.

  * * *

  The rehearsal period of Once in a Lifetime’s reopening was perhaps the worst three weeks I have ever spent in rehearsal in the theatre. I knew well enough by now that Mr. Kaufman’s directorial method of whispered consultation with each separate actor was unendurable to watch for more than one or two days at the most, and where before I had been content to watch the play grow slowly, sitting through the false starts and the fumblings until play and performance developed, now I wandered restlessly in and out of the theatre and even tried staying away from rehearsals for two full days, in order, so I told myself, to get a fresher look. It was a useless dodge. I was unhappy in the theatre and miserable away from it. The truth of the matter was that I was no longer willing or able to trust my own theatrical instinct or judgment—it had been wrong before, so my reasoning went, therefore how could I judge what was good or bad now? I had not thought the old second and third acts were bad originally—ergo, how could I tell now if they were any better? I walked to rehearsals under an umbrella of disquietude and held it open over my head in the theatre through every rehearsal that I watched. When this happens, the playwright is incapable of judging a baby contest at Asbury Park, much less a play. Everything takes on the coloration of his own anxiety, and what he sees invariably looks not better but worse. I longed for Mr. Kaufman to break his rule and allow a few friends in for the first run-through, but I did not have the courage to suggest such a thing—indeed, I barely had enough courage to come to it myself!

  At the end of the first week, the same slim audience of Sam Harris, Max Siegel, Mr. Kaufman and myself sat solemnly through the first run-through and solemnly said good night afterward. It was a little more than I could bear, and I found enough courage when Mr. Kaufman was out of earshot to grab Max Siegel firmly by the lapels and whisper, “What did Mr. Harris think of it?”

  “He didn’t say,” was Max Siegel’s unsatisfactory reply. “But I think he liked it or he would have said something. I liked it, if that’s any consolation.”

  It was not—and I realized dully that it would not have mattered if Sam Harris had gone out of his way to praise it, for his praise in my present state of mind would have lasted only long enough for me to tell myself that neither he nor anybody else would really know anything until the curtain rose in front of that first audience in Philadelphia.

  I seemed to have spent the final two weeks of rehearsal almost continuously in the company of Max Siegel. I would dutifully appear at the beginning of each day’s rehearsal, remain long enough to make Mr. Kaufman aware of my presence, and then streak upstairs to the Sam Harris office and by hook or crook inveigle Max Siegel to come with me to the drug store next door. I used his sunny nature and God-given optimism the way a dentist uses novocaine on a throbbing molar. Max Siegel had apparently emerged from the womb liking the world and everything in it, and he liked everything we had done to the play. He liked everything he saw at every run-through, and every actor in the cast; and seated on a stool next to him at the drugstore counter I ate hamburger after hamburger and let him dull my pain. Each day I increased the amount of anesthesia he provided, so that finally not only was he having lunch and dinner with me, but he was walking me around the streets at night after rehearsals were over and until he had to go home to his wife. I think if he had not been married I would have insisted that he come home with me, and the night of the last run-through in New York I almost asked him to take me home with him!

  THERE IS a phrase that has gone out of fashion now, but it aptly describes the mood of my leave-taking for Philadelphia: the “white feather” was not painted on my suitcase, but it might just as well have been, or stuck in the band of my hat. I said good-bye to my family, a far soberer good-bye on their part this time than the roseate good wishes that had sped me off to Atlantic City. Even my mother now dimly realized that my new profession was largely a gamble in uncertainties so far as eating and paying the rent were concerned, for we were once again coming to a dangerously low ebb financially. Indeed, without my brother, who had his first job that summer, I doubt that we could have managed at all. It seemed to me that the white feather fluttered in the breeze for all to see as I walked down the subway steps to take the train to Pennsylvania Station.

  This time I did not need Max Siegel’s invitation to join him in a drink. I borrowed his flask and had two stiff drinks before the train was well out of the tunnel. They helped considerably; and the atmosphere of a company on the way to an out-of-town opening is always so sanguine and high-spirited that it is hard to remain downcast, surrounded by so much good cheer and hopeful expectation. Apart from the buoyant spirits actors carry with them on any journey, they usually carry along as well for these three or four weeks out of town their cats, their dogs, their parakeets and canaries, and sometimes even their tropical fish, all of which lend a carnival air to even a journey to Philadelphia. By the time the train pulled into the Broad Street Station I was feeling surprisingly cheerful. I had been t
oo greatly dispirited during rehearsals to try to restore my lack of confidence by searching for a good omen, but I felt so much better now that I began the search as the train slowly moved into the station. I did not have to search far or for long. The heat, as we stepped down from the train onto the station platform, was grisly. The dogs and cats began to pant at once, and their owners drooped visibly, along with my new-found cheerfulness. The true believer does not pick and choose his omens. The range is limited and the selection strict. The first one is the one that counts, and according to the rules of the game this was it.

  I picked up my suitcase and followed Mr. Kaufman heavily toward the taxi stand, my shirt already beginning to stick to my back. Cool and unwilted, Mr. Kaufman ordered our bags dropped with the doorman at the hotel, then drove straight on to the theatre to have a look at the new set which he had ordered to be put up first. I could not believe, as the taxicab stopped in front of what looked to me like an armory, that this was the theatre we were going to play, in spite of the posters outside. It seemed to cover a square block. The Lyric Theatre in Philadelphia, now mercifully torn down, was a great barn of a place, about as appropriate for the playing of a comedy as the interior of a steel mill in Pittsburgh and just about as hot. It was, in fact, where large touring musicals generally played, but it was the only theatre on the road at this time that was free and Sam Harris had taken it.

  It seems incredible now that theatres in New York and all the other major cities of the East remained open all summer long without benefit of air conditioning, but they did, and people astonishingly enough went to them uncomplainingly. Two giant-sized electric fans on either side of every theatre proscenium were kept running until the house lights dimmed, and were turned on again for each intermission, but the heat generated by an audience on a hot night was still formidable. The make-up ran down the actors’ faces, and the audience itself was a sea of waving programs and palm-leaf fans, the rustle of which sometimes drowned out the actors altogether. Nevertheless, summer-long runs in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington and Chicago, with every theatre in full swing, were an accepted fact, and the new season in New York actually began on August 15, or at the latest Labor Day, heat waves or no heat waves.

  I followed Mr. Kaufman through the stage door and wandered aimlessly about while he conferred with the carpenter and electrician. The Lyric Theatre backstage smelled stalely of that last touring musical, and the auditorium, of its last perspiring audience. I looked up and counted what seemed to me to be at least seven balconies running clear up to the roof, and I wondered briefly why anyone would climb up there in the heat and how they would manage to hear anything if they got there. The back rows of the huge orchestra seemed difficult enough to reach with the loudest human voice, and my heart sank as I visualized subtle comedy lines being shouted into that vastness. I slid down into a seat and stared at the asbestos curtain. It would have been far better, it seemed to me, to open cold in New York and take our chances than to try the play out in this monstrous cave. It would not have astonished me to see a covey of bats fly down from the balcony or out of one of the boxes. As if to illustrate my thoughts, two moths rose slowly from the red plush a few seats away from me and flew languidly off. I watched them settle on the back of the seat in the row in front and was suddenly in good humor again. I think the idea of the animal or insect world ultimately taking over this rookery delighted me. It was certainly the last place for humans to witness a sparkling new satirical comedy, but my cheerfulness had returned.

  A good many of the company had wandered into the auditorium from backstage to have a first look at the Pigeon’s Egg from out front, and in a few minutes Mr. Kaufman came through the fire door and the asbestos curtain was taken up. The company burst into laughter and then into applause. It was a remarkable set—an immense baroque affair that in terms of decor and good taste might have been termed Early Frankenstein—and a wonderful conception of Hollywood extravagance at its wildest. Even without the actors in it, it was preposterous enough to be amusing all by itself. I was delighted with it. It seemed to me that every funny line in the scene would be enhanced by this setting, and fortunately it was the last scene in the play. Everything seemed suddenly and miraculously better. Though it was tempting fate to switch omens, I decided that those two moths were the omen I had been looking for and moreover that it would be foolish to dampen my sudden good spirits by sitting through hours of scenic and light rehearsals where nothing much happened except the slow rotting of my mind. I got up from my seat and walked out of the theatre, leaving Mr. Kaufman in full charge of the drudgery that lay ahead. I had read somewhere that some playwrights filled in these useless hours by visiting a museum or even going to a movie, and while I was incapable of such blithe behavior, I had a pleasing enough prospect of my own in view. An author’s living expenses out of town are always paid for by the management, including the food he eats, as long as he eats it at the hotel, and the hotel was just where I was going. I could do nothing about the heat, but this time at least I would not go hungry.

  * * *

  Some of the world’s pleasantest reading is contained in a good hotel menu, and I sent for one before I even unpacked my suitcase; I also found out just how late room service remained open at night. I had eaten scarcely anything through the four days and nights of dress rehearsals in Atlantic City, though I had known that Sam Harris was footing the bill, and I was not going to be the same kind of fool again. Fresh from Mr. Kaufman’s Spartan teas of watercress and cucumber sandwiches, I ordered an afternoon tea of my own. It was extraordinary how much smaller the Lyric Theatre seemed in my mind’s eye after Lobster Newburg and Baked Alaska, and I took care to see to it that my mind’s eye remained on that same crystal-clear level.

  I ate my way through four days and nights of dress rehearsals in Philadelphia and slept beautifully in spite of the heat. Everyone noticed my changed demeanor, and Max Siegel commented on it, but I could hardly explain that a midnight snack each night, and a waiter staggering through the door with a loaded breakfast tray every morning, was the source of my wholesale enthusiasm for everything about the play and the performance. The company manager might have a nasty moment when he looked at my bill, but it was certainly to Sam Harris’ advantage to have me as fresh as possible for whatever work needed to be done after we opened. My soaring good spirits had even dissipated my fears about facing the opening—never, in fact, had the play’s chances seemed so bright. This almost fatuous optimism was not entirely due to food, I suppose, but to the fact that anxiety had taken a manic swing, as anxiety has a way of doing, but I have an idea that a full stomach was not unhelpful in keeping the swing upward.

  I was not even particularly unhappy when Joe Hyman telephoned on the morning of the opening to say that he had a bad summer cold and would have to come down to Philadelphia later in the week. He was surprised at how cheerful and well I sounded, and indeed it was hard for me to recall the abject terror in which I had spent the hours waiting for his arrival in Atlantic City. I felt entirely capable of going through this opening alone and actually impatient of the hours that remained until it was time to go to the theatre and see the curtain rise.

  I sat pleasantly through a final light rehearsal and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find a dozen different ways of working the title of the play into those traditionally funny telegrams to the cast. I was surprised to find that it was suddenly six o’clock and time to get ready. I looked out the window and saw, of all things, a rainbow. To a man who was willing to believe that moths constituted a good omen, that rainbow seemed to be the ultimate sign that everything now seemed to be conspiring in our favor, including the weather. A fierce thunderstorm late in the afternoon had bathed the city in coolness and I leaned out the window and felt the first breeze that hinted of fall. That fresh cool air would certainly put any audience in the best of possible moods, and while I was not yet ready to accept such a heresy as a painless opening, I could not deny the fact that contrary to the way I’d
expected to feel, I was not only feeling no pain at all but a distinctly pleasant excitement. The rainbow seemed to call for something more than just staring at it, and obeying a sudden impulse, I went to the telephone and asked the bell captain if he could get me a bottle of Scotch. Rich people in the movies were always sipping Scotch highballs while they dressed for dinner, and though Sam Harris was paying for this one, I sipped it slowly in the bathtub and mused on how pleasant might be the shape of things to come—large sums of money in particular. I was sorry now that Joe Hyman was not here to lift a glass to the future with me and then walk serenely off to the opening.

  * * *

  Even Mr. Kaufman seemed to have an unwonted air of gaiety when I ran into him backstage on my rounds of wishing the cast good luck, and Sam Harris in the lobby gaily reported that the absence of a full quorum of the wrecking crew tonight was due to the fact that so many plays were opening out of town all at once that they had to make a choice of the one that would give them the most pleasure to see fail. “Looks like they’ve written us off already.” He laughed. “But I have an idea we may fool them.” It seemed to me that he exuded a note of confidence tonight that had not been there before, and the Lyric Theatre, with its orchestra almost entirely filled, did not seem nearly so barnlike or impossible to play in. I looked impatiently at the last stragglers going down the aisle. I wanted not so much for the play to begin as to have the first act over and done with. I knew they would laugh at the first act. What happened after Mr. Kaufman’s exit in the second act would be the test of how well we had worked. I kept watching the giant fans on each side of the proscenium, and at last they slowed down to a whirr and the house lights dimmed and the footlights came on.