Act One

by Moss Hart

  There can be no false economies in the rich full life. Excess is the keynote or it cannot be enjoyed at all. I gave the bellboy two brand-new one-dollar bills and was rewarded by a rich full bellboy smile. We both knew that I was overtipping outrageously and we both enjoyed it, each for his own reasons. The bellboy bowed himself out and closed the door, and I walked to the window, opened it and then leaned over the sill staring at the marquee of the Music Box across the street. There was an impersonality about my name looked at from this height. This is the way my name would look to strangers. I stared down at it with the utmost pleasure. Only three short city blocks separated the New Amsterdam Theatre from the Music Box, but the journey between them had been a long one. Whatever the outcome of tonight, my name next to George Kaufman’s on that marquee represented triumph. I remained at the window for quite a while. I lowered the shade reluctantly, afraid that I would have trouble getting to sleep now, but my head had barely touched the pillow before I was off into the kind of sleep that only babies and old dogs in front of fires are supposed to enjoy.

  THERE ARE more expert masseurs, I have since found out, than the gentleman who woke me up at nine o’clock the next morning and proceeded to go to work on me, but it was the first massage I had ever had and I have never enjoyed any since then as much. Every twist and stroke of his fingers represented part of that hundred-dollar bill, and my muscles seemed to know it and respond with pleasure. The barber and the manicurist timed their arrival perfectly to his departure, and I sat contentedly for my first manicure and my first shave in a private suite. The barber and the manicurist were somewhat startled to find their client with a bedsheet wrapped around himself toga-fashion, but I explained that I had needed to have my suit pressed immediately, and the reason for my overnight stay. They were at once all solicitude and understanding. Barbers and manicurists who cater to theatre folk are a special breed—they know how to be silent after failure and talkative following success, and the Astor made a specialty of caring for theatre people. Those two knew all about every new play coming in. They had taken care of Sam Harris, Arthur Hopkins, Charles Dillingham and practically everybody else for years. The barber insisted on calling down to the men’s shop in the lobby and ordering me a new shirt for the opening, once he caught a glimpse of my wrinkled and soiled one hanging over the chair, and after they had finished, all three of us stood by the window and looked down at the marquee of the Music Box as they wished me good luck.

  No day of an opening, it seemed to me, could possibly be starting better than this one.

  I could easily have eaten two full breakfasts, but there was barely time to get downstairs, pay my bill, and be across the street for rehearsal at eleven. I took a last look out the window and a quick glimpse at myself in the mirror before I closed the door. There was no question but that the rich full life agreed with me. I looked as smoothed out and as fresh as I felt. Whatever I had spent, I had had more than full value in return. It did not occur to me until I was going down in the elevator that what with overtipping the barber, the manicurist, the valet and the masseur, I might very well have overspent, but I had not. I had fifteen dollars left, and I walked through the stage door of the Music Box the most relaxed and satisfied of mortals. Appropriately enough, Sam Harris was the first person I saw.

  “Get any sleep, kid?” he greeted me, and grinned.

  “Best sleep I’ve had in years, Mr. Harris,” I replied truthfully enough.

  George Kaufman, standing beside him, remarked, “That’s the time to sleep—before the notices.”

  But nothing could shake my eighty-five dollars’ worth of well-being. I turned a Max Siegel smile on everyone in sight.

  The rehearsal was a short one—a last unnecessary running over of lines in the lounge of the theatre. Actually, there was no reason for a rehearsal at all, except to provide a common meeting ground for opening-night nerves, and the cast was dismissed at one o’clock. It left a long afternoon stretching ominously in front of me and my high spirits, which I was determined not to lose. Once again I turned to Joe Hyman. I called him and asked him to please drop everything and meet me in front of the Plaza Hotel at two o’clock.

  * * *

  There are certain days when everything one touches, when every idea that comes to mind, is completely right, just as there are certain years in the theatre when one can seemingly do no wrong. They are balanced by those other years when it seems impossible to do anything except to do it badly; but I did not know this then. Today anything I chose to do seemed inspired. I had often longed to take a hansom cab for a ride through the park, and it had always seemed a ridiculous indulgence, but I had fifteen dollars left out of that hundred-dollar bill, it was a beautiful September afternoon, and this of all days seemed the proper time for extravagance. I could not have hit upon a better way of weathering these hours of waiting.

  We rode around the park together, Joe Hyman and I, by turns talkative and silent, but the awareness in each of our minds of the opening just a few hours away seemed to heighten the color of the leaves on the trees and etch the buildings more sharply against the sky. There is a kind of inner excitement, of pain that is somehow pleasurable, that adds an extra dimension to our awareness of the visible world—the eye seems to look at old scenes and see them with a new depth and clarity. I looked at the Central Park I had always taken for granted and watched it unfold before me with unexpected and surprising beauty. We rode four times around the park and might easily have gone round a fifth time, for Joe Hyman refused to let me pay for anything today and the time seemed to flash by with unnecessary speed. It was suddenly time to send telegrams to the company and to meet the family for dinner, and just as suddenly, in the way time seemed to be rushing headlong toward eight thirty, it was time to leave them in Joe’s charge and go on ahead to the theatre to wish the company good luck. Time seems to quicken on opening nights and take on a velocity of its own, just as, I imagine, time must seem to hasten for the very old, accelerating with a swiftness imperceptible to the rest of us.

  * * *

  I walked toward Once in a Lifetime for the last time—that final walk every playwright takes toward his play, knowing that it is no longer his, that it belongs to the actors and the audience now, that a part of himself is to be judged by strangers and that he can only watch it as a stranger himself. The main consideration of his day, the keystone that has dictated his every waking moment, the cause that has enlisted his being for all these months, is at an end. He moves toward his destination with mixed emotions—it is the completion he has sought, but there is the ache of finality in it. He is at last a spectator—a spectator with the largest stake in the gamble of the evening, but a spectator nonetheless.

  There was already quite a sizable crowd of first-night gawkers and autograph hounds in front of the Music Box as I hurried toward it, and the two mounted policemen trying to herd them to the opposite side of the street were having rather a hard time of it. The crowd ducked out of the way of the policemen and their horses with practiced skill, and the few who were pushed to the opposite curb were smartly back at their old positions in front of the theatre in no time at all. It had the brisk and innocent liveliness of a children’s game, with no malice on either side, and as I pushed my own way through the crowd to the stage door I was tempted to turn and shout, “It’s not so wonderful being on the inside as you think—you’re better off out here!” The panic I had managed to postpone all through the day had suddenly caught up with me. The timetable of the theatre is never very far off. It may vary a little, but opening-night nerves always arrive more or less as promised. Mine had merely been delayed.

  I took the bundle of telegrams the stage doorman handed me as though he had put a red-hot poker in my hands and then promptly dropped them on the floor. He picked them up and stuffed them into my pocket without a word, as though he had performed the same service several times before this evening and expected to do it a few more times as well, and I started up the stairway for the dressing roo
ms on legs that seemed to have no relationship whatever to my body. Two sticks carried me along, and the hand with which I tried to open the first dressing-room door shook so that I could not turn the knob. Hugh O’Connell opened the door from the inside and then stood there looking at me like a rabbit trapped in the glare of automobile headlights. He kept wetting his lips to speak, but no words emerged, or it may be that I did not hear them, for my ears had gone the way of my legs.

  It was just as well that my high spirits had vanished in one fell swoop. Even false cheerfulness would have withered quickly in those dressing rooms. The atmosphere in each varied from calm to controlled hysteria, depending upon the opening-night temperature of its occupant. Jean Dixon, vacant-eyed and pale in spite of her make-up, stared at me for a long moment as if trying to focus on who I was, nodded abstractedly, and then resumed a panther-like stalk up and down her dressing room.

  Next door, Grant Mills sat looking at himself in the mirror and grinning idiotically. He kept bobbing his head up and down and rubbing his hands together in some silent colloquy with himself. Spring Byington looked so near to being embalmed as she sat solemn and still amidst the mounds of flowers in her dressing room, that I decided to go downstairs and sit on the stage for a while before continuing the rounds.

  I seemed to be having a little difficulty breathing myself. I sat on a chair in the stage manager’s corner and took the bundle of telegrams out of my pocket, and by purest accident the first two telegrams I opened were from the barber and the manicurist of the Astor Hotel. It was just the sort of happy coincidence to steady the nerves and to restore the faith of a believer in omens. Immediately some of the bright promise of the morning, some of the buoyancy of that ride around the park, began to return.

  My spirits lifted with each telegram that I opened. Opening-night telegrams may seem a foolish and perfunctory convention, but they are not. However naive or fatuous their phrasing may be, those words are the only ones likely to penetrate the minds and warm the hearts of the people who receive them at this particular moment. They may seem dull-witted and senseless the next morning, but opened backstage in that chill interval of waiting for the house lights to darken and the curtain to rise, they perform the admirable function of saying that hope still runs high. Far-fetched little jokes seem uncommonly humorous in opening-night telegrams, and ten words with an unexpected name signed to them can be strangely touching.

  There were a good many unexpected names in the telegrams I opened now, as touching to me as those two from the barber and the manicurist. That bundle of telegrams seemed to contain a cross section of the years: the names scrambled the years in wild disorder—George Steinberg and Irving Morrison; the box-office man at the Mayfair Theatre, where I had played The Emperor Jones; guests from camp I had all but forgotten; Augustus Pitou; a group of the boys to whom I had told those stories on the stoop outside the candy store, who carefully explained who they were; Priestly Morrison and Mrs. Henry B. Harris; some old neighbors in the Bronx; all the little-theatre groups; Mr. Neuburger of my fur-vault days; Mr. Perleman of the Labor Temple; the tongue-tied athletic instructor who had taught me how to swim, Herb of the Half Moon Country Club … The years leaped out of each envelope with quicksilver flashes of memory, the old jumbled with the new. Time seemed to stop as I looked at each name and the years each name recalled, and something like calm began to settle over me.

  In the darkness of the stage manager’s corner the years that I held in my hand seemed somehow to have been arranged in a design of marvelous felicity, all of them taking me to this hidden corner tonight. I looked around me with an air of wonder and of disbelief. The green shade of the electric-light bulb on the stage manager’s stand was focused not only on the prompt script of a play, but on what had once been an impossible dream and was now a reality. The muted sound of the audience out front, the muffled gabble of the stagehands as they called a reminder to each other of a changed light cue or prop, the colored gelatins in the banks of the lights above me, the stage manager’s checking the set for the last time, the minor players already beginning to hover in the wings, the voiceless hum of excitement all around me—these were the sights and sounds that no longer belonged to an old dream, but to this corner where I sat and was part of them. I sat on in the chair, riffling through the telegrams again, forgetting that I had not wished the rest of the cast good luck, that I had not yet seen Sam Harris or Mr. Kaufman—I sat on, unwilling to relinquish the serenity this spot seemed to give me.

  Not until I heard Max Siegel’s voice saying to the stage manager, “They’re all in; take the house lights down,” could I bring myself to move. I walked through the pass door into the theatre, and in the half-light I peeked through the curtain below the stage box to steal a quick look at the audience—that foolish and hopeful look a playwright sometimes takes in those last few minutes before the curtain rises. What he sees is almost always the same sea of faces—the same well-wishers and ill-wishers, the same critics, the same agents, the same columnists, the very same first-night faces in exactly the same seats they have always sat in, the old faces a little older, the young faces a little stonier—and why he expects some miracle to have changed them into tender and benevolent faces I do not know, but he does. Perhaps the miracle lies in the fact that he should persist in thinking that tonight, for this opening, the miracle will have occurred; but as he anxiously scans row after flinty row, he sees that no miracle has taken place, except the dubious one that the same people have managed to be sitting in the same seats again, and he closes the curtains hastily. No group of people can look as hard and unyielding as first-nighters seem to look, viewed from that vantage point. Even the faces of one’s friends seem to be set in concrete, and each critic as one spots him appears to be hewn from the same block of granite as his heart.

  I fled up the aisle and almost collided with Mr. Kaufman, whose pacing had already begun. He muttered something that might have been either “Good luck” or “God damn it” and was on his way again. Applause turned me toward the stage. The curtain was rising, and Hugh O’Connell and the set were receiving their regulation round of applause. Jean Dixon made her entrance, the applause swelled, and as it died down she spoke the opening lines. I held my breath to wait for the first laugh, which always came on her second or third line. No sound, however, appeared to be issuing from her lips. One could see her lips moving, but that was all. No sound came forth. Hugh O’Connell spoke, but no sound came from his lips, either. They seemed to be two people talking to each other behind a glass wall.

  The audience began to murmur and turn to each other in their seats. My heart skipped a beat and I looked wildly toward Mr. Kaufman. He stood frozen in his tracks, staring at the stage. Jean Dixon and Hugh O’Connell were talking steadily on, unaware that they could not be heard, but aware that something was gravely wrong, for the murmur from the audience was loud enough for them to hear it now and I could see Jean Dixon’s hand shake as she lit a cigarette. Still no sound came from the stage, and in the silence a man’s voice from the balcony rang out loud and clear: “It’s the fans—turn off the fans!”

  The audience broke into relieved laughter and applause. I saw Mr. Kaufman make a dash for the pass door that led backstage, but before he was halfway down the aisle, the fans on either side of the proscenium began to slow down. In the opening-night excitement, the electrician had simply forgotten to turn off the fans—one of those simple little opening-night mistakes that lessen the life span of everyone concerned by five or ten years! The nightmare had lasted no more than a minute in all, but it is not one of the minutes I should choose to live over again. Invariably, when horrors of this kind occur, the audience behaves admirably and they did so now. They not only applauded that unknown hero in the balcony, but they rewarded Jean Dixon with a generous round of applause when she went back and started the scene all over again. She could not, of course, go off the stage and re-enter, but aware that not a word of the scene had been heard, she calmly took a puff or two of her
cigarette, waited until the fans had stopped, and began the scene anew.

  * * *

  From that moment onward, both play and audience took on something of the quality of fantasy—it was being played and received like a playwright’s dream of a perfect opening night. The performance was brilliant and the audience matched it in their response. One of the theatre’s most steadfast beliefs is that there is never again a sound of trumpets like the sound of a New York opening-night audience giving a play its unreserved approval. It is a valid belief. Bitter words have been written about the first-night audience, but the fact remains that there is no audience ever again like it—no audience as keen, as alive, as exciting and as overwhelmingly satisfactory as a first-night audience taking a play to its heart. It can unfurl the tricolor of its acclamation and make flags seem to wave from every box; just as in reverse its dissent can seem to dangle the Jolly Roger from the center chandelier and blanket the auditorium in leaden disapproval.

  The sound of the audience’s approval was unmistakable, even to my own anxious ears. At the end of each act the applause broke before the curtain had quite touched the floor. The second act played better than the first, and the third act—that vulnerable, exasperating third act, the act which had held the play in jeopardy for so long—seemed to have written itself, so effortlessly and winningly was it playing. It was almost irritating to watch it play with such inevitable rightness and ease, remembering the bitter struggle it had given us. The final lines of the play were being spoken now, and then it came—an explosive crash of applause as the curtain fell. It came like a thunderclap, full and tumultuous. I tried to disengage myself and measure the kind of applause it was, but I could not. It sounded like hit applause to me, and it was keeping up. Except for one or two critics with early deadlines dashing up the aisle, the entire audience was remaining in its seats and keeping the curtain going up and down. The cast stood bowing and smiling—they had taken their individual calls and the entire company was lined up on the stage. No other calls had been set, and the company was bowing and smiling somewhat awkwardly now, in the way actors do when they are no longer in the frame of the play; but still the applause showed no sign of diminishing.