Act One

by Moss Hart

  I was wide awake again, thoroughly wide awake, and disappointed to find the shades still drawn and the family fast asleep when I unlocked the door and stepped into the apartment. It was, of course, only a little after seven o’clock in the morning, but today was too memorable a day to waste on anything so commonplace as sleep. I was tempted to wake them up at once and show them the other notices, but I went into the kitchen instead and fixed a pot of coffee. I wanted a little more time alone to think about something.

  I stood in the doorway of the kitchen while I waited for the water to boil and gazed at the sleeping figure of my brother on the daybed in the dining room, and beyond it at the closed door of the one bedroom where my parents slept. The frayed carpet on the floor was the carpet I had crawled over before I could walk. Each flower in the badly faded and worn design was sharply etched in my mind. Each piece of furniture in the cramped dim room seemed mildewed with a thousand double-edged memories. The ghosts of a thousand leaden meals hovered over the dining-room table. The dust of countless black-hearted days clung to every crevice of the squalid ugly furniture I had known since childhood. To walk out of it forever—not piecemeal, but completely—would give meaning to the wonder of what had happened to me, make success tangible, decisive.

  The goal behind the struggle for success is not always one goal, but many—some real, some hidden; some impossible to achieve, even with success piled upon success. The goal differs with each of us in the mysterious and wonderful way each human being is different from any other, in the way each of us is the sum total of the unexpressed longings and desires that strew the seas of childhood and are glimpsed long afterward from a safe distance—a submerged iceberg, only the tip of which is seen.

  Whatever dominant force in my nature shaped the blind demands that made it imperative to me to make the theatre my goal, had taken possession of me early and I was still possessed by it. What fulfillment it held I would know only when I walked resolutely out of one world and into another. I poured myself a cup of coffee, and by the time I had finished it, my mind was made up.

  It is always best if one is about to embark on a wild or reckless venture not to discuss it with anybody beforehand. Talk will rob the scheme of its fire and make what seemed mettlesome and daring merely foolhardy. It is easier on everyone concerned to present it as an accomplished fact, turn a deaf ear to argument, and go ahead with it.

  I awakened my brother by dumping the papers on the bed for him to read and then called through the bedroom door to my mother and father to get up right away. I gave them barely enough time to read the notices and then plunged. “We’re moving into New York today—as soon as you have a cup of coffee—and we’re not taking anything with us. We’re walking out of here with just the clothes on our backs and nothing else. The coffee’s on the stove, so hurry up and get dressed.”

  My mother stared at me and then spoke quietly, as if a raised voice at this moment might send me further out of my senses. “Where are we going?” she asked logically enough.

  “To a hotel,” I said, “until we find an apartment and furnish it.” There was a stunned silence and before anyone else could speak, I spoke again, not impatiently but as if what I was saying was inarguable. “There’s nothing to pack; we just walk out of the door. No,” I added in answer to my mother’s mute startled look around the room, “not a thing. We leave it all here just as it stands, and close the door. We don’t take anything—not even a toothbrush, a bathrobe, pajamas or nightgown. We buy it all new in New York. We’re walking out of here and starting fresh.”

  My mother walked to the window and pulled up the shades as though she might hear or understand what I was saying better with more light, and then turned helplessly toward my father.

  He was the first to recover his breath and his wits. “We just paid two months’ rent in advance,” he said, as though that solid fact would help me recover my own.

  “That gives us the right to let this stuff sit here and rot, or you can give it to the janitor,” I replied. “We’re walking out of here with just what clothes you put on and tomorrow we’ll get rid of those, too.”

  This second bit of information created an even more astonished silence than the first. “Don’t you understand?” I heard myself shouting. “All I’m asking you to do now is—”

  “I’m not walking out of here without the pictures,” my mother said with great firmness.

  It was my turn to be astonished. “What pictures?” I asked.

  “All the pictures,” she replied. “The baby pictures of you and Bernie and the pictures of my father and my sister, and Bernie’s diploma and your letters, and all the other pictures and things I’ve got in the closet in that big box.”

  I threw my arms around her and kissed her. I had won. It was being accepted as a fact—incomprehensible but settled.

  “One suitcase,” I ordered. “Put it all into one suitcase, but one suitcase—that’s all.”

  I looked at my brother, who had remained silent through all of this. He handed the papers back to me with a flourish and winked. “Don’t you have to give some of the money to George Kaufman?” he said.

  “Half,” I replied. “But my share will be over a thousand dollars a week.”

  “That’ll buy a lot of toothbrushes,” he said. “I’m going to get ready.” And he climbed out of bed.

  My mother and father stared at us as if to make sure we were not indulging in some elaborate joke for their benefit.

  “It’s true,” I said soberly. “It’s not a salary. I get a percentage of every dollar that comes into the box office. Don’t you understand how it works?”

  Obviously, they did not, and I realized somewhat belatedly that it had never occurred to either of them to translate good fortune in the theatre into anything more than what my mother’s friends defined as “making a good living.” No wonder my proposal had sounded lunatic, but now as the belief came to them that what I had just said might be the literal truth, they were suddenly seized with some of my own excitement. My mother’s reaction was a curious one. She burst into a peal of laughter. She had a merry and ringing laugh and it was contagious. My father and I joined in her laughter, though we would have been hard put to tell exactly what we were laughing at. I was reminded of that moment and of her laughter long, long afterward, when I heard someone say, “Nothing makes people laugh like money—the rich get wrinkles from laughing.” It was said sardonically, of course, but it is not without an element of truth. Money does generate its own kind of excitement, and its sudden acquisition creates an ambiance of gaiety and merriment that it would be nonsense to deny or not to enjoy. It induces, moreover, a momentum of its own. Everything moves with an unaccustomed and almost miraculous speed.

  We were all ready to leave in less than an hour, despite the fact that there were more things of heaven and earth in that box in the closet than could be contained in one suitcase. I carried the box, my father and brother each carried a suitcase, and my mother, her victory complete, hugged a brown paper parcel of last-minute treasures that had turned up in an old tin box. We walked out of the door and waited in the lobby while my brother hurried out in the rain to try to get a taxi. The rain was pouring down in a great solid sheet now and gusts of wind were slashing it against the building. I watched it burst savagely against the glass doors of the lobby and was seized by a sudden and irresistible impulse.

  “I forgot something,” I said shortly. “I’ll be right back.”

  I unlocked the door of the empty apartment and closed and locked it again carefully behind me. I took one quick look around to keep the memory of that room forever verdant and then walked to each window and threw it wide open. The rain whipped in through the windows like a broadside of artillery fire. I watched a large puddle form on the floor and spread darkly over the carpet. The rain streamed across the top and down the legs of the dining-room table and splashed over the sideboard and the china closet. It soaked the armchair and cascaded down the sofa. It peppered the wallpaper
with large wet blotches and the wind sent two lamps crashing to the floor. I kicked them out of my way and walked over to the daybed, which was still dry, and pulled it out into the middle of the room, where a fresh onset of wind and rain immediately drenched it. I looked around me with satisfaction, feeling neither guilty nor foolish. More reasonable gestures have seldom succeeded in giving me half the pleasure this meaningless one did. It was the hallmark, the final signature, of defiance and liberation. Short of arson, I could do no more.

  I slammed the door behind me without looking back.

  * * *

  To everyone’s surprise, including my own, a strange silence fell upon us in the taxi, in spite of the fact that my brother read aloud the glowing notice in the World, which he had picked up on his way to get the cab. Instead of heightening our excitement or reinforcing our high spirits, it seemed, curiously enough, to put a damper on them. My brother stared out the window and my mother and father stared straight ahead, silent and solemn. I talked on for a moment or two and then grew silent myself. Perhaps there was in all of us, including myself, a feeling of unreality in what we were doing or a separate awareness in each of us that this great change—this almost too great change in our life—would change us, too, as a family; that the struggle which had welded us so tightly together was over now, and success in some mysterious way might separate us, each from the other.

  My mother, still silent, took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. They were not, I suspected, tears of joy for my success. They were not tears for the beginning of something, but for the end of something none of us could name. Not until we came within sight of Brooklyn Bridge did anyone speak. Then, as suddenly as it had fallen, the silence lifted. Crossing the bridge, as it had for me earlier that morning, seemed to put an old way of life behind us and make inevitable the new one we were rushing headlong into. We started to talk, all of us at once, almost at the same moment, as if crossing the bridge had cut the ties irrevocably and was a symbol of entry into a world as dazzling as the skyline in front of us.

  Suddenly no one seemed to have an unexpressed thought. Everyone talked incessantly, oblivious of what anyone else might be saying. We were at 34th Street before I thought to glance out the window. I had told the driver to take us to the Edison Hotel on 47th Street, for no other reason except that it was practically around the corner from the Music Box and seemed more of a family hotel than any other I could think of; but as the cab moved into Times Square, I asked the driver to stop first at the Music Box.

  Even through the rain-splashed windows of the cab, I could see a long double line of people extending the full length of the lobby from the box office. The line spilled out under the marquee where another line was patiently forming under umbrellas. I got out of the cab and walked into the lobby and stood gaping at all the people. It was not yet half-past nine in the morning. How long I stood there, forgetful of everything else but the wonder of that line, I do not know, but the box-office man, looking up for a moment to glance across the lobby, caught sight of me and smiled. There is no smile as bright as the smile of a box-office man the morning after a hit. It flashes with the iridescence of stage jewelry under spotlights and is as wide as the proscenium itself. His smile did not waver—it grew more brilliant as the telephones jangled behind him and visions of ticket speculators, like sugar plums, danced across his mind. He waved me over to the head of the line and stuck his hand out through the opening in the grille to shake my own.

  “A year at least,” he said, “It’s the hottest ticket in town. What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to draw $500.00,” I said quickly. “I’m moving into town.”

  “Sure, sure—anything you want,” he said. He reached for an I.O.U. slip and rapidly filled it in. “How do you want it?” he asked.

  “A few fifties,” I replied, “the rest in twenties and tens.”

  I signed the slip as he counted out the money, conscious that the people immediately in back of me were whispering to each other. “It is not George Kaufman,” I heard a woman’s voice say. “It must be the other one.”

  As nearly as I could, I tried to achieve a look of modesty with the back of my head while I waited for him to finish. He pushed the rather formidable stack of bills toward me and his smile floodlit the box office. “Come around any time,” he said, “we’ll be here for a long, long time.”

  I doubled the bills in my fist and walked out and into the taxi. Without a word I went through the pretense of counting the money, thoroughly aware of the awed silence around me.

  “When,” my brother said quietly, “do they change the name of the theatre to the Money Box?”

  It was the first of a perpetual and unremitting series of bad puns that he was to launch and send racketing down the years, and the effect of this historic first one was not only uproarious but explosive. We started to laugh and could not stop. We laughed as though we were out of our wits, uncontrolled and breathless with laughter, and startled because we could not stop laughing, try as we would. My brother’s words seemed to have touched off the edge of hysteria our overwrought state had brought us to. The exhaustion and excitement of the last few days and of this morning needed a release, and that atrocious pun had been both a means and a blessing. We laughed as though we might never stop.

  The driver, too, started to shake with laughter and turned around apologetically. “I don’t know what you’re laughing at, folks,” he said, “but it must be pretty good to make people laugh that way.” No one could answer him; we were all still helpless. He burst into laughter again himself and turned the cab toward Broadway.

  My fatal weakness for standing aside from whatever was happening around me and translating it into vignettes of drama overcame me once more. I could hear myself telling the whole story to Sam Harris. Unresisting, I let it assemble and take shape in my mind. The wait for the notices, the first taxi ride home, the decision to walk out and leave everything behind us, the trip back to open the windows and let the rain pour in—I could hear myself telling it all to him, right down to counting the money in the cab, our paroxysm of laughter, and the cab driver turning around to add the final touch. I could see myself some time later this afternoon standing in his office in the Music Box and telling it to him with the proper embellishment, making it all come out a rounded, dramatic entity. I could see his eyes squint with amusement as I told it and hear his soft laughter afterward. I could even, I thought, hear his comment.

  “Not bad, kid,” he would say. “Not a bad curtain for a first act.”

  INTERMISSION

  ACT ONE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Copyright © 1959 by Catharine Carlisle Hart and Joseph M. Hyman, Trustees, renewed 1987. Foreword copyright © 2014 by Christopher Hart. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  First published in the United States by Random House

  First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: October 1989

  Second St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: February 2014

  eISBN 9781466864603

  First eBook edition: December 2013