by Moss Hart
To my amazement, I saw Mr. Kaufman step forward and signal the stage manager to keep the curtain up. I stared at the stage in disbelief. He was about to do something so implausible that I could hardly conceive of his doing it—he was about to make a curtain speech. I could not believe my eyes. More than once he had expressed his scorn for authors who made opening-night speeches, and he had expressed it in such scathing terms that it seemed impossible that he was about to make one himself. The audience seemed almost as surprised as I was. The applause stilled immediately and an eager “shushing” took its place. He came forward another step, peered at them over his glasses, and waited for complete quiet.
“I would like this audience to know,” he said carefully and slowly, “that eighty per cent of this play is Moss Hart.” That was all. He stepped back and signaled the stage manager to lower the curtain. The audience sat bewildered for a full moment and then broke into perfunctory applause. They had expected a witty speech in the manner of the play—or in the caustic tradition of George S. Kaufman. Their disappointment and their lack of interest in what he said was clear, but they obligingly applauded for another curtain.
I stood staring at the stage and at George Kaufman. Generosity does not flower easily or often in the rocky soil of the theatre. Few are uncorrupted by its ceaseless warfare over credit and billing, its jealousies and envies, its constant temptations toward pettiness and mean-spiritedness. It is not only a hard and exacting profession but the most public one as well. It does not breed magnanimity, and unselfishness is not one of its strong points. Not often is a young playwright welcomed into it with a beau geste as gallant and selfless as the one that had just come over those footlights.
A hand was tugging at my sleeve and Max Siegel was whispering some words in my ear, but I moved quickly away without answering. I did not trust my voice, and I was ashamed to have him see that my eyes were blurred.
THE PROCEEDINGS which take place backstage on an opening night, immediately following the fall of the curtain, follow a set pattern and are almost a law unto themselves. At least half of the audience hurries through the stage door to jam the stairways, throng the dressing rooms and overflow onto the stage itself. A kind of formalized bedlam ensues in which the same words echo up and down the halls and float out the open doors of every dressing room. No one is expected to believe the words which are being spoken or the emotional kisses and embraces which usually precede them; they are always the same and are used for both failure or success. Not to come backstage and speak them, however, is considered a remission of friendship or downright cowardice. Both sides know exactly what is expected of them, and the performance backstage sometimes equals or betters the one which has just taken place in front of the footlights. With an obvious failure, or what seems to be an obvious failure, the embraces and kisses are of necessity a little more flamboyant, the words a little more belligerent, and the recurring phrase, “Well, I loved it,” uttered with great vehemence, is to be heard on all sides. No one is actually lying, for short of a blatant or outright fiasco, everyone is aware of the complete untrustworthiness of critics. Everyone knows that it is just as likely for the certain failure to be greeted the following morning with glowing and triumphant notices as it is for the apparent success to receive its death sentence.
There are some opening nights, however, when a play seems destined for success in spite of critical perfidy, and on these nights the backstage throng assumes the proportions of a hysterical and unruly mob. On these occasions a backstage appearance is no longer an unpleasant duty, but a vital necessity—it seems to contain some basic need of human beings to identify themselves or to be identified with success. On such nights the dressing rooms and stairways are a solid mass of humanity crushed one against the other into every available inch of space. Once in a Lifetime must have had all the earmarks of such an evening, for I could hardly fight my way through the stage door. I struggled up the stairway to reach Mr. Kaufman’s dressing room, but there was a great horde of people clustered in front of it waiting for the crowd within to come out. Beatrice Kaufman caught sight of me, blew me a kiss and waved to me to make my way in, but I shook my head. What I wanted to say to him could not be said in front of strangers. I shouted back, “Tell him I was here,” and pushed my way down the stairs again.
Each dressing room and every landing was jammed—swarms of people surged in and out of the densely packed rooms, all talking at once. I caught a glimpse of Jean Dixon and Hugh O’Connell over the tops of heads and started toward them, but the congestion was too great, and as I reached the stage I heard Sam Harris’ soft laughter rise from the crowd that surrounded him; but I made no attempt to go toward him.
I felt unaccountably disconnected from the uproar that was taking place all around me; none of it seemed to have any connection with what had made the evening possible—with hotel rooms, a typewriter and curtains drawn against the light; with pacing up and down in the dark; with actors in bathrobes standing on a stage after a performance, the pilot light etching the exhaustion on each face under the make-up—none of this seemed to have anything to do with any of the people who had been part of all that had gone before. Those people were disappearing under my eyes, had vanished already in fact, and suddenly I knew what was vanishing along with them: that tight little cabal against the world—the conspiracy that had begun with the first day’s rehearsal and had been pledged in stale sandwiches and cold coffee in cardboard containers, the unspoken compact of long days on dim stages and dirty out-of-town dressing rooms, the common bond of the same shared hopes and fears—that sustaining conspiracy was over and the world had moved in. That old secret world removed and remote from everything but the play and ourselves had ended.
I walked across the stage to where my family and friends stood waiting, a little knot of alien corn in the mass of black ties and jewels and evening gowns that swirled all around them. I felt as alien as they looked. We stood uncomfortably together, not quite knowing what to do. After I had kissed my mother and father and listened to the congratulations of Dore and Lester and Eddie and the others, I stood helplessly rooted to the spot. I felt my face freeze into an apelike grin and tried to unleash my tongue, but I could not; nor could I think of what to do next. I had lived for this moment for so long that it was difficult to accept it as reality—even now it still seemed frozen in fantasy. I have always understood the unbelieving look in the eyes of those whom success touches early—it is a look half fearful, as though the dream were still in the process of being dreamed and to move or to speak would shatter it.
It was Joe Hyman, not I, who finally shepherded all of us toward the stage door and took everyone to a restaurant to wait for the notices. Somewhere or other along the line of that long wait I began to believe that a play of mine had opened on Broadway and that the notices I was waiting to read might transform that lifelong fantasy into a reality that would change my life from this moment onward. Someone gave me a drink and I began to shake so that it was impossible to lift the second drink to my lips—a fortunate moment of panic, I believe, for two drinks under the circumstances might easily have made me quite drunk and would have robbed me of the pleasure of being able to hear the notices read aloud. That fateful moment is not one to be missed. Whatever the state of one’s nerves, it is wise at all costs to remain clear-headed on the gambler’s chance that the notices will be good, for good notices read aloud are a joy not to be cheated out of. In that first reading, each word is glorious, and no words of praise afterward will ever shine with the same splendor.
The notices of Once in a Lifetime as I listened to them were a blaze of glory—each word incrusted with a special luster of its own, and I made the sound decision never to look at them again. They could not possibly be as brilliant, as peerless, as superlative or as downright wonderful as I now thought them to be, and I paid them the honor of letting them remain an imperishable memory. When the last notice had been read, I took that second drink, for I knew now that my life was indeed cha
nged forever—and I drank a silent toast to the new one.
* * *
Is success—in any other profession as dazzling, as deeply satisfying, as it is in the theatre? I cannot pretend to know, but I doubt it. There are other professions where the rewards are as great or greater than those the theatre offers, there are professions where the fruits of success are as immediate, and still others where the pursuit of a more admirable goal undoubtedly brings a nobler sense of fulfillment. But I wonder if success in any of them tastes as sweet. Again, I am inclined to doubt it. There is an intensity, an extravagance, an abundant and unequivocal gratification to the vanity and the ego that can be satisfied more richly and more fully by success in the theatre than in any other calling. Like everything else about the theatre, its success is emphatic and immoderate. Perhaps what makes it so marvelously satisfying is that it is a success that is anything but lonely—everyone seems to share in it, friends and strangers alike—and a first success in the theatre is the most intoxicating and beguiling time imaginable. No success afterward surpasses it. It roars and thumps and thunders through the blood the way that second drink seemed to be coursing through my veins right now, so that it seemed hardly bearable to have to wait until tomorrow to start savoring it.
I asked someone what time it was and blinked my surprise when I was told it was four thirty in the morning. It seemed but a few short minutes since we had waited impatiently for two thirty to come to be able to read the first notice in the Times. The morning editions appeared very much later in those days, and it was the custom to go directly to each newspaper in turn and wait for the first copies to roll off the presses. Everyone in the theatre knew what time each paper would appear and where to go for them. The Times appeared first at about two thirty, the Tribune about three, and the Daily News last at four o’clock in the morning. The World was far downtown on Park Row and would have to wait until tomorrow, but with three ecstatic notices under my arm, the World, in more ways than just the name of a newspaper, could wait.
We were all standing outside the News Building, where the last notice had been read—or, rather, acted out brilliantly by Dore Schary—and just as it seemed to me but a few moments ago that he had read aloud those exalted words in the Times, so it seemed now to be some years ago and not just yesterday that I had watched another dawn lighten the sky, as it was about to do once more. It seemed impossible that it could have been only yesterday that I had sat listening to Sam Harris tell me the story of Once in a Lifetime—it seemed to have been someone other than I who walked out of the Music Box with him to see that other dawn beginning. That other I now seemed someone infinitely different from my present self—a fearful, inept, wretchedly uncertain fellow. He was someone I knew and remembered very well, but it was a memory already growing shadowy and dim.
Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does! Only one aspect of that other self remained to spill over into the new. I was once again wolfishly, overpoweringly hungry. It would take at least two more successes to make me lose my appetite, and it is only fair to point out that success can and does accomplish this, too. Everyone but me, however, had eaten during the long wait for the notices, and only that bitter-ender, Joe Hyman, was not too exhausted by this time to declare himself ready to sit through a full meal with me. The others were visibly wilting and I did not press them to stay. My family had long since gone home on the strength of that first glowing notice in the Times—indeed, their own glow must have sped the train halfway to Brooklyn with no help from the subway system at all.
I protested a little during the good-byes, but I was secretly relieved that the others were going now, too, for a childish reason of my own. It satisfied my sense of drama to complete the full circle of Once in a Lifetime alone with Joe Hyman—the circle that had begun with a dinner alone with him before the opening in Atlantic City and would end with this dinner alone with him now after the opening in New York. It is a childish game I have always played and have never been able to resist—a game of arranging life, whenever possible, in a series of scenes that make perfect first-act or third-act curtains. When it works, and it often does, it lends an extra zest and a keener sense of enjoyment to whatever the occasion may be where my thirst for drama has contrived to make life imitate a good third act. It worked beautifully now.
I cannot recall one word that was exchanged between us, but it must have taken a fairly long time to satisfy my sense of the dramatic entities, for when we came out of the restaurant it was six o’clock in the morning and broad daylight. For the second dawn in a row I peered down the streets of a sleeping city, searching for a taxi. This dawn, however, was going to usher in an historic moment. My last subway ride was behind me. Never again would I descend those dingy steps or hear those turnstiles click off another somber day behind me.
Joe Hyman asked, “Got enough money to get to Brooklyn?”
I nodded. That fifteen dollars was still intact—there could not be a better way to spend it than to keep that long-ago promise to myself, and a taxi ride to Brooklyn was keeping it with a vengeance.
A cab pulled up beside us and Joe Hyman and I silently shook hands. The driver eyed me warily when I gave him a Brooklyn address, and I was conscious, looking at Joe Hyman, of how disreputable I too must look. I looked at him again and burst into laughter. His eyes were red-rimmed with excitement and weariness, his face grimy with a full day-and-night’s growth of beard, and his suit looked as though he had slept in it. The driver obviously and quite rightly was wondering if there was enough money between us to pay for that long ride, or if we had not already spent every cent in some speakeasy. I took a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and waved it at him and climbed into the cab. I waved at Joe Hyman through the rear window until the cab turned the corner, and then settled back in the seat, determined that I would not fall asleep. I had no intention of dozing through the first ride to Brooklyn above ground—I intended to enjoy every visible moment of it and I very shortly reaped the reward for staying awake.
* * *
No one has ever seen the skyline of the city from Brooklyn Bridge as I saw it that morning with three hit notices under my arm. The face of the city is always invested with grandeur, but grandeur can be chilling. The overpowering symmetry of that skyline can crush the spirit and make the city seem forbidding and impenetrable, but today it seemed to emerge from cold anonymity and grant its acknowledgment and acceptance. There was no sunlight—it was a gray day and the buildings were half shrouded in mist, but it was a city that would know my name today, a city that had not turned me aside, and a city that I loved. Unexpectedly and without warning a great wave of feeling for this proud and beautiful city swept over me. We were off the bridge now and driving through the sprawling, ugly area of tenements that stretch interminably over the approaches to each of its boroughs. They are the first in the city to awake, and the long unending rows of drab, identical houses were already stirring with life. Laundry was being strung out to dry along roof tops and fire escapes, men with lunch boxes were coming out of the houses, and children returning from the corner grocery with bottles of milk and loaves of bread were hurrying up the steps and into the doorways.
I stared through the taxi window at a pinch-faced ten-year-old hurrying down the steps on some morning errand before school, and I thought of myself hurrying down the street on so many gray mornings out of a doorway and a house much the same as this one. My mind jumped backward in time and then whirled forward, like a many-faceted prism—flashing our old neighborhood in front of me, the house, the steps, the candy store—and then shifted to the skyline I had just passed by, the opening last night, and the notices I still hugged tightly under my arm. It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy—for any of its millions—to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what
they wished. Wealth, rank or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from. I watched the boy disappear into a tailor shop and a surge of shamefaced patriotism overwhelmed me. I might have been watching a victory parade on a flag-draped Fifth Avenue instead of the mean streets of a city slum. A feeling of patriotism, however, is not always limited to the feverish emotions called forth by war. It can sometimes be felt as profoundly and perhaps more truly at a moment such as this.
It had suddenly begun to rain very hard and in a few minutes I could no longer see much of anything through the windows. All too quickly I made that swift turnabout from patriotism to enlightened self-interest. I closed my eyes and thought about how I would spend the money that would soon start to pour in. To my surprise, affluence did not seem nearly as easy to settle into as I had always imagined it would be. Try as I would, I could not think of how to begin or in what ways I wanted to spend the large sums that would now be mine to command. I could think of little ways to spend it—new suits, new shirts, new ties, new overcoats—but after that my mind went disappointingly blank. In some ways sudden riches are no easier to live with than poverty. Both demand artistry of a kind, if one or the other is not to leave the mark of a sour and lingering cynicism, and opulence in many ways is harder to manage than penury. It is, however, one of the pleasantest problems with which to drift off to sleep. It is a problem that apparently also induces the deepest and most refreshing kind of sleep. I cheated myself out of the major portion of that first taxi ride by sleeping soundly through the rest of it. The driver had to leave his seat and shake me awake to collect his fare.