ACT ONE - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Winter 2014 Issue No. 62

ACT ONE

Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Winter 2014, Issue Number 62 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack

An instant classic, an icon, a landmark publication—when Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, was published in 1959, it was a sensation, staying on the New York Times best-seller list for forty-one weeks; it was the book that everyone was reading, from New York City to Wichita. It is a glorious rags-to-riches tale, a love song to New York, and an intimate portrait of the theater life that still resonates today. For fifty-five years, the book has entertained and inspired readers, and now it is enjoying a very suitable second act, as a play written and directed by James Lapine, who spoke to us about bringing the book to the stage.

Act One limns Hart’s early life, his astounding collaboration with George S. Kaufman on his first Broadway success, Once in a Lifetime, but it was written and published when Hart was in his

ACT ONE

prime—one of the most successful and beloved playwrights and directors working on Broadway.

So we wanted to reveal both acts of Moss Hart’s life—the young boy fighting to make it and the man in his prime.

Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

Lucky Guy

by Laurence Maslon The Art of Collaboration: An Interview with James Lapine

that Hart loved. Our two interviews with Hart’s children, Christopher and Catherine, provide a rare

7

glimpse into domestic life with their famous parents, and George S. Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, depicts the deep affection and successful collaboration between her father and Moss Hart. We’ve A Lasting Impression

9

also collected the memories, responses, and thoughts of award-winning actors, directors, playwrights, and choreographers familiar to Lincoln Center Theater audiences who have all been marked

Silver Spoon Life: An Interview with Christopher Hart A Daughter’s Reflection

by Anne Kaufman

by Moss Hart’s transformative book. Finally, because Act One is an indelible story of making it in

11

New York, we chose an essay by Damaras Obi, a student at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, who is dreaming of a career in the arts.

15

Moss Hart’s story is timeless, and in this issue we celebrate the passion and drive and creativity that he has inspired in generations of artists in the theater world and beyond. —The Editors

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Here Is New York

by E. B. White

18

The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

In Her Father’s Eyes: An Interview with Catherine Hart

20

One Day Soon

by Damaras Obi

23

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Cover photograph of Moss Hart using a god mike at rehearsal at the peak of his career, many years after the events depicted in Act One took place.

Courtesy of Catherine Hart.

© 2014 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Back cover photograph © Steve Wood.

An Unsentimental Profession © 1953 by Moss Hart. Used by permission of the Hart estate.

16

This Act One edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.

Laurence Maslon paints the Broadway world Moss Hart belonged to in living color, and we have included an excerpt from E. B. White’s Here Is New York that encapsulates the pulse of the city

Moss Hart’s Life

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

In this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, we throw open a window into Hart’s universe:

4

In the section that precedes this excerpt from the foreword to Moss Hart’s play, The Climate of Eden, Hart writes that this is the most interesting work he’s done, and goes on to summarize his career.

I am conscious, as I write, of the faintly obituary flavor of the foregoing, to say nothing of the fact that it would seem that I am taking myself pretty seriously, to put the matter mildly. The only truthful answer to be given is an uninhibited “yes.” Of course I am taking myself seriously and I always

have; as does any playwright worth his salt. Playwrighting is not a gentle or sentimental profession, nor, may I add, is any part or portion of the Theatre. It is ironic indeed that the public at large thinks of us all, playwrights, actors, composers, et al., as “show-folks”; a wonderfully childish and sentimental lot. They could not be less right….Actually, we are the least sentimental people in the world, and woe betide the amateur of any kind who wanders into the coldly surgical precincts of the professional theatre. It is the audiences, thank God, and

bless them in their ignorance, who are sentimental about the Theatre and its people, and long may they continue to remain so.

But the practicing playwright must take himself seriously, whether he writes comedies, satires, farces or tragedies. For make no mistake about it—I do not look down my nose at comedies; they are an ancient and honorable form of making certain truths palatable with laughter, and an age can be understood as well by its comedies as by its tragic dramas.

3

Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Winter 2014, Issue Number 62 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack

An instant classic, an icon, a landmark publication—when Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, was published in 1959, it was a sensation, staying on the New York Times best-seller list for forty-one weeks; it was the book that everyone was reading, from New York City to Wichita. It is a glorious rags-to-riches tale, a love song to New York, and an intimate portrait of the theater life that still resonates today. For fifty-five years, the book has entertained and inspired readers, and now it is enjoying a very suitable second act, as a play written and directed by James Lapine, who spoke to us about bringing the book to the stage.

Act One limns Hart’s early life, his astounding collaboration with George S. Kaufman on his first Broadway success, Once in a Lifetime, but it was written and published when Hart was in his

ACT ONE

prime—one of the most successful and beloved playwrights and directors working on Broadway.

So we wanted to reveal both acts of Moss Hart’s life—the young boy fighting to make it and the man in his prime.

Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

Lucky Guy

by Laurence Maslon The Art of Collaboration: An Interview with James Lapine

that Hart loved. Our two interviews with Hart’s children, Christopher and Catherine, provide a rare

7

glimpse into domestic life with their famous parents, and George S. Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, depicts the deep affection and successful collaboration between her father and Moss Hart. We’ve A Lasting Impression

9

also collected the memories, responses, and thoughts of award-winning actors, directors, playwrights, and choreographers familiar to Lincoln Center Theater audiences who have all been marked

Silver Spoon Life: An Interview with Christopher Hart A Daughter’s Reflection

by Anne Kaufman

by Moss Hart’s transformative book. Finally, because Act One is an indelible story of making it in

11

New York, we chose an essay by Damaras Obi, a student at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, who is dreaming of a career in the arts.

15

Moss Hart’s story is timeless, and in this issue we celebrate the passion and drive and creativity that he has inspired in generations of artists in the theater world and beyond. —The Editors

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Here Is New York

by E. B. White

18

The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

In Her Father’s Eyes: An Interview with Catherine Hart

20

One Day Soon

by Damaras Obi

23

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

Cover photograph of Moss Hart using a god mike at rehearsal at the peak of his career, many years after the events depicted in Act One took place.

Courtesy of Catherine Hart.

© 2014 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Back cover photograph © Steve Wood.

An Unsentimental Profession © 1953 by Moss Hart. Used by permission of the Hart estate.

16

This Act One edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.

Laurence Maslon paints the Broadway world Moss Hart belonged to in living color, and we have included an excerpt from E. B. White’s Here Is New York that encapsulates the pulse of the city

Moss Hart’s Life

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

In this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, we throw open a window into Hart’s universe:

4

In the section that precedes this excerpt from the foreword to Moss Hart’s play, The Climate of Eden, Hart writes that this is the most interesting work he’s done, and goes on to summarize his career.

I am conscious, as I write, of the faintly obituary flavor of the foregoing, to say nothing of the fact that it would seem that I am taking myself pretty seriously, to put the matter mildly. The only truthful answer to be given is an uninhibited “yes.” Of course I am taking myself seriously and I always

have; as does any playwright worth his salt. Playwrighting is not a gentle or sentimental profession, nor, may I add, is any part or portion of the Theatre. It is ironic indeed that the public at large thinks of us all, playwrights, actors, composers, et al., as “show-folks”; a wonderfully childish and sentimental lot. They could not be less right….Actually, we are the least sentimental people in the world, and woe betide the amateur of any kind who wanders into the coldly surgical precincts of the professional theatre. It is the audiences, thank God, and

bless them in their ignorance, who are sentimental about the Theatre and its people, and long may they continue to remain so.

But the practicing playwright must take himself seriously, whether he writes comedies, satires, farces or tragedies. For make no mistake about it—I do not look down my nose at comedies; they are an ancient and honorable form of making certain truths palatable with laughter, and an age can be understood as well by its comedies as by its tragic dramas.

3

LUCKY GUY

by Laurence Maslon

Photograph top by Edwin Levick, 1921, Getty Images. Photograph bottom by P. L. Sperr, 1937, Getty Images.

Among the unresolved phenomena of the human experience, “coincidence” surely has to rank as one of the most confounding. Is it, as some scientists aver, simply a matter of random happenstance, or is coincidence, as the mystically inclined believe, a synchronicity of profound events?

Whatever debates rage between scientists and philosophers regarding the nature of coincidence, among playwrights the conclusion is unavoidable: in a play, too much coincidence is not a good thing. Therefore, it’s remarkable that the impeccably talented playwright Moss Hart would pen a memoir that features so much coincidence—or, as he refers to it, variously and in the course of his own early life, “luck,” “chance,” and “serendipity.” The real coincidence in Act One, however, comes not from random events in Hart’s life but from the very fact that he came of age during the most fertile period in the American theater and crossed paths, in one way or another, with most of the era’s major players.

When Moss Hart got his first glimpse of the Theater District in 1916, he was twelve years old—the same age as the Times Square subway stop from whence he emerged. In 1904, the Times Square subway stop formed the epicenter of a new Theater District; by the end of World War I, Times Square had been transformed into the mecca of American entertainment. The upbeat economy of the postwar years fueled the disposable income of the leisure class, and there was much along Broadway on which to dispose of one’s income. The entertainment bandwidth ushered in by the 1920s contained the glory days of vaudeville; the refinement of the silent movie, screened in palatial theaters; and the flowering of the legitimate theater—all while radio was still in its infancy.

Eager to get out of their cramped apartments, urban residents flocked to Forty-second Street and its environs, thrilled to share these variegated spectacles cheek by jowl with thousands of their fellow men and women.

Nightclubs, restaurants, lobster palaces, and hot-dog stands catered to these consumers; even drugstores had luncheon counters—where, among the younger, hungrier set, many an argument occurred over the future of the American theater. Prohibition didn’t inhibit the hordes of spectators and thrill-seekers; speakeasies and clubs dotted the Theater District, if one knew how to look for them; and the mayoral administration of James J. Walker was far more interested in revels than in regulations.

(Walker himself, a married man, was having an open affair with a Broadway showgirl.) The city’s theatrical life was covered by fifteen newspapers published for readers in Manhattan and Brooklyn; the rock star (as it were) among these daily reviewers was indisputably Alexander Woollcott, an owlish, venomous Pillsbury Doughboy of a figure, who dispensed violets and vitriol in equal doses in the columns that he wrote for various newspapers throughout the 1920s. (His diatribes were avidly devoured

by Hart, who would later immortalize Woollcott as the Man Who Came to Dinner in the eponymous 1939 comedy written in collaboration with George S. Kaufman.)

In the 1920s, for the first and last time, vaudeville theaters, legitimate theaters, and movie theaters would exist together along the fifteen-block stretch that spanned Thirty-eighth Street, north to Fifty-third (and beyond); by 1928, there were

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK, IN 1921 AND 1937.

seventy theaters in the Times Square area. If the Theater District was America’s most sophisticated playground, the Magic Castle that towered above it was not the Times Tower but, rather, the New Amsterdam Theatre, half a block to the west along Forty-second Street. (Indeed, it is even more of a Magic Castle since its purchase, in 1994, by the Disney Company.) It was here, in 1913, that the great producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., moved his empire, presenting his annual Follies on its glorious Beaux Arts stage; two years later, he opened up a roof-garden nightclub on the New Amsterdam’s tenth floor, as a showcase for new talent, such as Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers. Before the war, and into the 1920s, one could easily have seen these performers, along with Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, and W. C. Fields, strolling in and out of the stage door, or taking the gilded elevators to Ziegfeld’s office in order to negotiate a new contract. Imagine the thrill for a stagestruck teenager to get an office job in such hallowed halls, as Moss Hart did (for another producer) at the start of the 1920s. What would the fifteen-year-old Hart have made of the fact that, more than a quarter of a century later, he would be directing one of the twentieth century’s greatest musicals—My Fair Lady—on the tenth floor of the same New Amsterdam, Ziegfeld’s former glamorous roof garden turned into a rehearsal hall?

The Follies also provided fertile material for Hart when he started a career, in his twenties, as the entertainment director of a Jewish summer resort in the Catskills; Hart staged streamlined versions of every Ziegfeld Follies revue comedy sketch he could remember, and whatever he didn’t remember he simply rewrote. The Jewish summer-camp entertainment circle was Hart’s MFA playwriting degree.

Hart’s own embryonic attempts at serious playwriting were influenced by the most important dramatic force of the 1920s: Eugene O’Neill. As one contemporary wag put it, “Before him, the United States had theater; after him, we had drama.”

O’Neill’s effect on the younger, post–World War I generation cannot be overestimated; he was at once the most imitated of American playwrights and the most inimitable. Drawing on his burdensome wealth of personal and familial dysfunctionality, he turned his inner turmoil into jagged, emotionally excavated tales that resonated with universality. O’Neill’s plays from the 1920s were electrifying in their experimentation and their eclecticism. Some were long and ambitious, such as Strange Interlude, from 1928, which won O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize in the 1920s; others were short and ambitious, such as the Expressionistic psychodrama The Emperor Jones. The Emperor Jones made its début in Greenwich Village in 1920; its leading role of a conscience-stricken, self-ordained black dictator was nearly impossible to cast. Luckily, the Provincetown Players tracked down an exceptional African-American thespian, a Broadway veteran reduced by the paucity of respectable roles for black actors to working as an elevator operator. His name was Charles Gilpin.

After his triumph in the original production, Gilpin found it difficult to sustain an acting career—indeed, he went back to running an elevator for a while—but throughout the 1920s he frequently revived the part of Brutus Jones in increasingly threadbare productions across the country. In the fall of 1926, Gilpin dragged his emperor’s jacket and riding boots out of the 5

LUCKY GUY

by Laurence Maslon

Photograph top by Edwin Levick, 1921, Getty Images. Photograph bottom by P. L. Sperr, 1937, Getty Images.

Among the unresolved phenomena of the human experience, “coincidence” surely has to rank as one of the most confounding. Is it, as some scientists aver, simply a matter of random happenstance, or is coincidence, as the mystically inclined believe, a synchronicity of profound events?

Whatever debates rage between scientists and philosophers regarding the nature of coincidence, among playwrights the conclusion is unavoidable: in a play, too much coincidence is not a good thing. Therefore, it’s remarkable that the impeccably talented playwright Moss Hart would pen a memoir that features so much coincidence—or, as he refers to it, variously and in the course of his own early life, “luck,” “chance,” and “serendipity.” The real coincidence in Act One, however, comes not from random events in Hart’s life but from the very fact that he came of age during the most fertile period in the American theater and crossed paths, in one way or another, with most of the era’s major players.

When Moss Hart got his first glimpse of the Theater District in 1916, he was twelve years old—the same age as the Times Square subway stop from whence he emerged. In 1904, the Times Square subway stop formed the epicenter of a new Theater District; by the end of World War I, Times Square had been transformed into the mecca of American entertainment. The upbeat economy of the postwar years fueled the disposable income of the leisure class, and there was much along Broadway on which to dispose of one’s income. The entertainment bandwidth ushered in by the 1920s contained the glory days of vaudeville; the refinement of the silent movie, screened in palatial theaters; and the flowering of the legitimate theater—all while radio was still in its infancy.

Eager to get out of their cramped apartments, urban residents flocked to Forty-second Street and its environs, thrilled to share these variegated spectacles cheek by jowl with thousands of their fellow men and women.

Nightclubs, restaurants, lobster palaces, and hot-dog stands catered to these consumers; even drugstores had luncheon counters—where, among the younger, hungrier set, many an argument occurred over the future of the American theater. Prohibition didn’t inhibit the hordes of spectators and thrill-seekers; speakeasies and clubs dotted the Theater District, if one knew how to look for them; and the mayoral administration of James J. Walker was far more interested in revels than in regulations.

(Walker himself, a married man, was having an open affair with a Broadway showgirl.) The city’s theatrical life was covered by fifteen newspapers published for readers in Manhattan and Brooklyn; the rock star (as it were) among these daily reviewers was indisputably Alexander Woollcott, an owlish, venomous Pillsbury Doughboy of a figure, who dispensed violets and vitriol in equal doses in the columns that he wrote for various newspapers throughout the 1920s. (His diatribes were avidly devoured

by Hart, who would later immortalize Woollcott as the Man Who Came to Dinner in the eponymous 1939 comedy written in collaboration with George S. Kaufman.)

In the 1920s, for the first and last time, vaudeville theaters, legitimate theaters, and movie theaters would exist together along the fifteen-block stretch that spanned Thirty-eighth Street, north to Fifty-third (and beyond); by 1928, there were

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK, IN 1921 AND 1937.

seventy theaters in the Times Square area. If the Theater District was America’s most sophisticated playground, the Magic Castle that towered above it was not the Times Tower but, rather, the New Amsterdam Theatre, half a block to the west along Forty-second Street. (Indeed, it is even more of a Magic Castle since its purchase, in 1994, by the Disney Company.) It was here, in 1913, that the great producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., moved his empire, presenting his annual Follies on its glorious Beaux Arts stage; two years later, he opened up a roof-garden nightclub on the New Amsterdam’s tenth floor, as a showcase for new talent, such as Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers. Before the war, and into the 1920s, one could easily have seen these performers, along with Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, and W. C. Fields, strolling in and out of the stage door, or taking the gilded elevators to Ziegfeld’s office in order to negotiate a new contract. Imagine the thrill for a stagestruck teenager to get an office job in such hallowed halls, as Moss Hart did (for another producer) at the start of the 1920s. What would the fifteen-year-old Hart have made of the fact that, more than a quarter of a century later, he would be directing one of the twentieth century’s greatest musicals—My Fair Lady—on the tenth floor of the same New Amsterdam, Ziegfeld’s former glamorous roof garden turned into a rehearsal hall?

The Follies also provided fertile material for Hart when he started a career, in his twenties, as the entertainment director of a Jewish summer resort in the Catskills; Hart staged streamlined versions of every Ziegfeld Follies revue comedy sketch he could remember, and whatever he didn’t remember he simply rewrote. The Jewish summer-camp entertainment circle was Hart’s MFA playwriting degree.

Hart’s own embryonic attempts at serious playwriting were influenced by the most important dramatic force of the 1920s: Eugene O’Neill. As one contemporary wag put it, “Before him, the United States had theater; after him, we had drama.”

O’Neill’s effect on the younger, post–World War I generation cannot be overestimated; he was at once the most imitated of American playwrights and the most inimitable. Drawing on his burdensome wealth of personal and familial dysfunctionality, he turned his inner turmoil into jagged, emotionally excavated tales that resonated with universality. O’Neill’s plays from the 1920s were electrifying in their experimentation and their eclecticism. Some were long and ambitious, such as Strange Interlude, from 1928, which won O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize in the 1920s; others were short and ambitious, such as the Expressionistic psychodrama The Emperor Jones. The Emperor Jones made its début in Greenwich Village in 1920; its leading role of a conscience-stricken, self-ordained black dictator was nearly impossible to cast. Luckily, the Provincetown Players tracked down an exceptional African-American thespian, a Broadway veteran reduced by the paucity of respectable roles for black actors to working as an elevator operator. His name was Charles Gilpin.

After his triumph in the original production, Gilpin found it difficult to sustain an acting career—indeed, he went back to running an elevator for a while—but throughout the 1920s he frequently revived the part of Brutus Jones in increasingly threadbare productions across the country. In the fall of 1926, Gilpin dragged his emperor’s jacket and riding boots out of the 5

The Art of CollabOration: An Interview with James Lapine

trunk one more time for a two-month engagement at the tiny Mayfair Theatre, on West Forty-fourth Street. He shared the stage—insofar as the egocentric and often inebriated Gilpin shared anything—with a terrified actor in his early twenties named Moss Hart.

Within a few months of his brief encounter acting the words of O’Neill, Hart decided that he was neither an actor nor an O’Neill. Increasingly, his tastes veered toward comedy, or, rather, toward the insights and perceptions that a good comedy can reveal. Here, too, Hart was extraordinarily lucky, in that his own artistic growth coincided with a major development in American stage comedy.

If Eugene O’Neill could be considered to represent the tragic mask of American theater, then George S. Kaufman could surely

Hart caught a performance of “June Moon” from the balcony of the Broadhurst Theatre only two weeks before the stock-market crash. The crash provided the final curtain for the most extraordinary decade Broadway—and perhaps any entertainment industry— would ever have. lay claim to its comic counterpart. The lanky, laconic Kaufman was a Pittsburgh native who, by the time the 1920s began, was heading the Drama Desk at the New York Times as well as beginning his own career as a Broadway playwright. American comedy before Kaufman was rather like low-grade plywood; it was a poor substitute for the real thing, had a thin veneer, and was best deployed for construction. The big comedy smash of the 1916–17 season was typical of the lot: Nothing But the Truth, in which a stockbroker named Bob Bennett takes up a bet that he can tell the truth for twenty-four hours, while his friends try to trip him up. That was as deep as it got, folks.

Kaufman wrote virtually all of his comedies in collaboration; in the 1920s, his main partner was Marc Connelly, another Pennsylvanian who plied the journalism trade in New York.

Their collaborations were those rare comedies with a point of view, usually featuring an innocent and honest Joe (or Joan) who triumphed over the forces of avarice or hypocrisy, embodied by some sort of societal or economic authoritarian structure.

Beggar on Horseback (1924), for example, tackled the soul-killing snobbery of the urban cultural scene. When Moss Hart caught the Chicago road company of Beggar on Horseback in 1926, he knew instinctively that this was exactly the kind of purposeful, satirical comedy he was destined to write.

By then, Kaufman had diversified his comic portfolio in even more extraordinary ways; he had written the Marx Brothers’ first real musical comedy for Broadway, The Cocoanuts, and had emerged as the premier comedy sketch writer for musical revues. As the decade panted to an exhausted close, Kaufman would write another show for the Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers); a theatrical comedy of manners with a new collaborator,

6

Edna Ferber (The Royal Family); and a brilliant satire of meretricious Tin Pan Alley tunesmithery, June Moon, a 1929 collaboration with the acerbic Ring Lardner. Hart was enthralled with June Moon as well; indeed, the comedy’s portrait of corporate fatuousness would provide a virtual blueprint for Once in a Lifetime, Hart’s own attempt at skewering the frenetic Hollywood of the early sound era.

Hart caught a performance of June Moon from the balcony of the Broadhurst Theatre only two weeks before the stock-market crash. The crash provided the final curtain for the most extraordinary decade Broadway—and perhaps any entertainment industry—would ever have. During the 1927–28 season, a remarkable 267 shows opened on Broadway. (By way of contrast, the number of shows that have opened on Broadway each season in the past decade has hovered below forty.) Mind you, a fair amount of that was dreck, but during Christmas week of 1927 eighteen shows opened, including new plays by Philip Barry, Rachel Crothers, and George Kelly, as well as Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family, plus a little thing called Show Boat (based on Ferber’s novel—some week for her!).

Two seismic events of the late 1920s would carry Moss Hart’s burgeoning career along like a tidal wave: the release, in October 1927, of The Jazz Singer, the first talking-picture narrative, and, almost exactly two years later, the stock-market crash. The former would essentially put an end to vaudeville and create a brand-new, highly anxious and highly profitable era of sound film, while the latter would put a huge dent in Broadway’s fortunes and drive countless creative talents to the West Coast and Hollywood’s seductive charms. Those two events would also create the context for Once in a Lifetime; when that comic masterpiece opened in the fall of 1930, it would, ironically, lift Moss Hart out of the dull, incessant burden of poverty that oppressed him during the first quarter century of his life, while, at the same time, millions of Americans would slide down the Roaring Twenties’ gilded ladder of success and descend into a decade-long sentence of deprivation.

“I was fortunate to have been a new playwright in a time when the theatre contained a reasonable continuity and did not resemble a wild game of roulette...today, it would have been impossible to do what needed to be done within the limits of the lunatic immediate-hit or immediate-flop procedure that now prevails,” Hart wrote in Act One, back in 1959. Goodness knows what he would have made of the “wild game[s] of roulette” played on Broadway in the twenty-first century, but what he wrote was incontrovertibly true—he was indeed fortunate to have learned his craft during a magical and unprecedented time. And the serendipity of Moss Hart’s talent for the stage extends across the decades, forward to us, nearly a century later.

Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program. This spring, the Library of America will publish a two-volume set, American Musicals 1927–1969, edited by Maslon, and including Moss Hart and Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer.

This winter, André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, sat down in his office with our editor and James Lapine, the director and Tony Award-winning librettist of musicals like Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George. With a first edition of Act One, inscribed to Irving Berlin, sitting on the desk between them, the two men spoke about their long friendship, the process of collaboration, and the appeal of translating Moss Hart’s Act One into a play.

Editor: Where did you two meet?

James Lapine: André was taking tickets for an 11:00 PM show of Wendy Wasserstein’s musical Montpelier Pizazz, at Playwrights Horizons. He took my ticket, and I walked onto the sticky floor of Playwrights Horizons for the first time. They had just taken up residence in a former porn house/massage parlor.

Ed: It was a sticky floor!

JL: I don’t remember where we met thereafter.

André Bishop: I saw you again when we were helping a mutual friend move. I remember lugging stuff off a truck and that it was summer and very hot, but I can’t remember who it was.

Ed: When did you have your first conversation about creating a play of Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One? JL: About two and a half years ago. I think André was having a six-minute egg and I was having a four-minute egg at Le Pain Quotidien.

AB: I think I was having a twelve-minute egg.

JL: We were talking about doing something together, and I brought this up.

AB: And the minute you brought it up I said, “Yes, yes, yes!” It’s my favorite book about the theater.

Ed: When did you first read Act One? JL: I wasn’t one of those people who read the book in my youth. I read it much later in life, probably in my forties, because I’d heard so much about it through the years. In many ways it struck me as such a timeless story for anyone who has ever worked in the theater.

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN AND MOSS HART AT WORK.

Ed: Did you know immediately that you wanted to create something based on the book?

JL: I thought it would make a good movie, but I didn’t do much about it. The thing that resonates the most with me in the book is the collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. I was a young, inexperienced writer and director when I met Sondheim.

The situation felt oddly familiar. And the subject of collaboration has always interested me as a topic to dramatize. Then I had this idea of doing a sort of Nicholas Nickleby version of the book, with a lot of characters and actors playing many parts. When I first wrote it, I think it was three acts, and then we whittled it down to two. It’s a big book to figure out.

Ed: It’s interesting that you were reading it when you were in your film mode. You’ve had many modes—the graphic-designer mode, the theater mode.

JL: The photographer mode. The secretary mode. The waiter mode. (Laughter) Ed: Do you think a certain kind of person loves Act One? Or is it universal?

JL: I think it’s a kind of book that you relate to differently depending on where you are in

your life when you read it. If you’re reading it as a kid, it’s almost an adventure story.

AB: It’s like a Dickens novel. You can’t put it down. It’s David Copperfield goes to Broadway. It’s a rags-to-riches tale of this kid who wanted to be in the theater and at the end, after many trials and tribulations, he gets in.

JL: It’s also a story about people who escape their lives by going into the theater— we are adults who have chosen a career creating make-believe worlds.

AB: Well, as Moss Hart says, “The theater is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.”

JL: André, how old were you when you read it?

AB: I was eleven. I read it when it came out, because my parents had it. It wouldn’t happen today, but the book was a best-seller.

Everybody, not just theater people but people like my parents, who were not remotely in the theater, everyone had a copy of Act One. My mother read it and loved it.

My stepfather read it and loved it. I read it and loved it.

A few years later, I went to college with Moss Hart’s son, Chris. We were in the same acting class together as freshmen, so it was this strange continuation. And I knew Kitty

7

The Art of CollabOration: An Interview with James Lapine

trunk one more time for a two-month engagement at the tiny Mayfair Theatre, on West Forty-fourth Street. He shared the stage—insofar as the egocentric and often inebriated Gilpin shared anything—with a terrified actor in his early twenties named Moss Hart.

Within a few months of his brief encounter acting the words of O’Neill, Hart decided that he was neither an actor nor an O’Neill. Increasingly, his tastes veered toward comedy, or, rather, toward the insights and perceptions that a good comedy can reveal. Here, too, Hart was extraordinarily lucky, in that his own artistic growth coincided with a major development in American stage comedy.

If Eugene O’Neill could be considered to represent the tragic mask of American theater, then George S. Kaufman could surely

Hart caught a performance of “June Moon” from the balcony of the Broadhurst Theatre only two weeks before the stock-market crash. The crash provided the final curtain for the most extraordinary decade Broadway—and perhaps any entertainment industry— would ever have. lay claim to its comic counterpart. The lanky, laconic Kaufman was a Pittsburgh native who, by the time the 1920s began, was heading the Drama Desk at the New York Times as well as beginning his own career as a Broadway playwright. American comedy before Kaufman was rather like low-grade plywood; it was a poor substitute for the real thing, had a thin veneer, and was best deployed for construction. The big comedy smash of the 1916–17 season was typical of the lot: Nothing But the Truth, in which a stockbroker named Bob Bennett takes up a bet that he can tell the truth for twenty-four hours, while his friends try to trip him up. That was as deep as it got, folks.

Kaufman wrote virtually all of his comedies in collaboration; in the 1920s, his main partner was Marc Connelly, another Pennsylvanian who plied the journalism trade in New York.

Their collaborations were those rare comedies with a point of view, usually featuring an innocent and honest Joe (or Joan) who triumphed over the forces of avarice or hypocrisy, embodied by some sort of societal or economic authoritarian structure.

Beggar on Horseback (1924), for example, tackled the soul-killing snobbery of the urban cultural scene. When Moss Hart caught the Chicago road company of Beggar on Horseback in 1926, he knew instinctively that this was exactly the kind of purposeful, satirical comedy he was destined to write.

By then, Kaufman had diversified his comic portfolio in even more extraordinary ways; he had written the Marx Brothers’ first real musical comedy for Broadway, The Cocoanuts, and had emerged as the premier comedy sketch writer for musical revues. As the decade panted to an exhausted close, Kaufman would write another show for the Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers); a theatrical comedy of manners with a new collaborator,

6

Edna Ferber (The Royal Family); and a brilliant satire of meretricious Tin Pan Alley tunesmithery, June Moon, a 1929 collaboration with the acerbic Ring Lardner. Hart was enthralled with June Moon as well; indeed, the comedy’s portrait of corporate fatuousness would provide a virtual blueprint for Once in a Lifetime, Hart’s own attempt at skewering the frenetic Hollywood of the early sound era.

Hart caught a performance of June Moon from the balcony of the Broadhurst Theatre only two weeks before the stock-market crash. The crash provided the final curtain for the most extraordinary decade Broadway—and perhaps any entertainment industry—would ever have. During the 1927–28 season, a remarkable 267 shows opened on Broadway. (By way of contrast, the number of shows that have opened on Broadway each season in the past decade has hovered below forty.) Mind you, a fair amount of that was dreck, but during Christmas week of 1927 eighteen shows opened, including new plays by Philip Barry, Rachel Crothers, and George Kelly, as well as Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family, plus a little thing called Show Boat (based on Ferber’s novel—some week for her!).

Two seismic events of the late 1920s would carry Moss Hart’s burgeoning career along like a tidal wave: the release, in October 1927, of The Jazz Singer, the first talking-picture narrative, and, almost exactly two years later, the stock-market crash. The former would essentially put an end to vaudeville and create a brand-new, highly anxious and highly profitable era of sound film, while the latter would put a huge dent in Broadway’s fortunes and drive countless creative talents to the West Coast and Hollywood’s seductive charms. Those two events would also create the context for Once in a Lifetime; when that comic masterpiece opened in the fall of 1930, it would, ironically, lift Moss Hart out of the dull, incessant burden of poverty that oppressed him during the first quarter century of his life, while, at the same time, millions of Americans would slide down the Roaring Twenties’ gilded ladder of success and descend into a decade-long sentence of deprivation.

“I was fortunate to have been a new playwright in a time when the theatre contained a reasonable continuity and did not resemble a wild game of roulette...today, it would have been impossible to do what needed to be done within the limits of the lunatic immediate-hit or immediate-flop procedure that now prevails,” Hart wrote in Act One, back in 1959. Goodness knows what he would have made of the “wild game[s] of roulette” played on Broadway in the twenty-first century, but what he wrote was incontrovertibly true—he was indeed fortunate to have learned his craft during a magical and unprecedented time. And the serendipity of Moss Hart’s talent for the stage extends across the decades, forward to us, nearly a century later.

Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program. This spring, the Library of America will publish a two-volume set, American Musicals 1927–1969, edited by Maslon, and including Moss Hart and Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer.

This winter, André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, sat down in his office with our editor and James Lapine, the director and Tony Award-winning librettist of musicals like Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George. With a first edition of Act One, inscribed to Irving Berlin, sitting on the desk between them, the two men spoke about their long friendship, the process of collaboration, and the appeal of translating Moss Hart’s Act One into a play.

Editor: Where did you two meet?

James Lapine: André was taking tickets for an 11:00 PM show of Wendy Wasserstein’s musical Montpelier Pizazz, at Playwrights Horizons. He took my ticket, and I walked onto the sticky floor of Playwrights Horizons for the first time. They had just taken up residence in a former porn house/massage parlor.

Ed: It was a sticky floor!

JL: I don’t remember where we met thereafter.

André Bishop: I saw you again when we were helping a mutual friend move. I remember lugging stuff off a truck and that it was summer and very hot, but I can’t remember who it was.

Ed: When did you have your first conversation about creating a play of Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One? JL: About two and a half years ago. I think André was having a six-minute egg and I was having a four-minute egg at Le Pain Quotidien.

AB: I think I was having a twelve-minute egg.

JL: We were talking about doing something together, and I brought this up.

AB: And the minute you brought it up I said, “Yes, yes, yes!” It’s my favorite book about the theater.

Ed: When did you first read Act One? JL: I wasn’t one of those people who read the book in my youth. I read it much later in life, probably in my forties, because I’d heard so much about it through the years. In many ways it struck me as such a timeless story for anyone who has ever worked in the theater.

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN AND MOSS HART AT WORK.

Ed: Did you know immediately that you wanted to create something based on the book?

JL: I thought it would make a good movie, but I didn’t do much about it. The thing that resonates the most with me in the book is the collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. I was a young, inexperienced writer and director when I met Sondheim.

The situation felt oddly familiar. And the subject of collaboration has always interested me as a topic to dramatize. Then I had this idea of doing a sort of Nicholas Nickleby version of the book, with a lot of characters and actors playing many parts. When I first wrote it, I think it was three acts, and then we whittled it down to two. It’s a big book to figure out.

Ed: It’s interesting that you were reading it when you were in your film mode. You’ve had many modes—the graphic-designer mode, the theater mode.

JL: The photographer mode. The secretary mode. The waiter mode. (Laughter) Ed: Do you think a certain kind of person loves Act One? Or is it universal?

JL: I think it’s a kind of book that you relate to differently depending on where you are in

your life when you read it. If you’re reading it as a kid, it’s almost an adventure story.

AB: It’s like a Dickens novel. You can’t put it down. It’s David Copperfield goes to Broadway. It’s a rags-to-riches tale of this kid who wanted to be in the theater and at the end, after many trials and tribulations, he gets in.

JL: It’s also a story about people who escape their lives by going into the theater— we are adults who have chosen a career creating make-believe worlds.

AB: Well, as Moss Hart says, “The theater is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.”

JL: André, how old were you when you read it?

AB: I was eleven. I read it when it came out, because my parents had it. It wouldn’t happen today, but the book was a best-seller.

Everybody, not just theater people but people like my parents, who were not remotely in the theater, everyone had a copy of Act One. My mother read it and loved it.

My stepfather read it and loved it. I read it and loved it.

A few years later, I went to college with Moss Hart’s son, Chris. We were in the same acting class together as freshmen, so it was this strange continuation. And I knew Kitty

7

A Lasting Impression Carlisle, Moss Hart’s wife, a little bit, because she was on a committee that visited the drama students at Harvard and I got to escort her to all the dinners and take her to the plays.

Ed: That was the beginning of a long and happy relationship.

AB: Well, she was so charming. Then my first job in New York, strangely, was working for Moss Hart’s great friend Dore Schary, when he was the commissioner of cultural affairs.

JL: Dore Schary actually wrote and directed the movie of Act One, with George Hamilton as Moss Hart and Jason Robards as Kaufman.

Ed: Your play is so much about the collaboration between Moss Hart and George Kaufman and just how hard they worked to make Once in a Lifetime. How did you dramatize that process?

JL: That was the challenge, making that dramatic. It’s very hard to find a compelling way to get an audience to understand that process, particularly when they don’t know the play that Hart and Kaufman were writing, Once in a Lifetime. So it’s tricky.

It’s hard to explain to an audience how you come up with an idea. Hart does not go very deeply into the specifics in his book.

In order for it to work on the stage and as a story, you have to help the audience understand—what did they change, what were they struggling with as dramatists, and how did they improve it? To that end, I tracked down the very first draft that Moss Hart wrote of the play, and then compared it to the finished play in order to speculate on what they had done to bring it to its ultimate version.

Ed: Where did you find that first draft?

JL: Through the Hart Papers, which are at the Historical Society in Wisconsin. They had the very first draft of Once in a Lifetime that was sent to Kaufman to see if he would be interested in working on it. I referenced that draft a lot, and it’s quite different from the final draft. Kaufman was not only the writer but also the director, and ultimately an actor in the production. Imagine! What I also discovered was that for a spell he was also a critic for the New York Times. Of course, in those days there were, like, seven openings a week, so there were probably five theater critics at the Times.

When they were doing the show out of town, it wasn’t going very well after the second act, so Harpo Marx got on the stage with, I don’t know, George Jessel,

8

and they entertained the audience between the second and third acts. I don’t know exactly what wasn’t working, but it was fun to imagine what the problems were, or to make them up for the purposes of this play.

Originally, Kaufman was only in one scene in the out-of-town performances of the play, but by the time it opened he was in two. So I thought, Oh, well, they figured the audience loved his character so they probably wrote him into another scene before it opened in New York.

Ed: You are no stranger to collaboration.

You’ve worked with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn. I’m wondering what struck you about the collaboration between Hart and Kaufman.

It’s like a Dickens novel.

You can’t put it down.

It’s David Copperfield goes to Broadway. It’s a rags-to-riches tale of this kid who wanted to be in the theater and at the end, after many trials and tribulations, he gets in.

JL: I was especially interested in the fact that Kaufman was an established figure in the theater, and that he was collaborating with someone who was younger and untested. Sometimes I’ve worked with younger people, and it’s interesting how a kind of freshness and almost naïveté about the work bounces well off someone who has the craft down but has lost the initial excitement of writing. This is very different from, say, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who were like one. This is more of a story about two people who come from very different worlds meeting in the middle and pulling the best out of each other.

AB: Hearing you talk about collaboration, I remembered that when I was at Playwrights Horizons I was lucky enough to be in on your first collaboration with Sondheim. We had commissioned you to write a musical yourself. (I remember lending you all my original cast albums for inspiration.) Then I remember you saying, in your modest way, “Well, you know, that commission, what would you think if I used the commission to do a show with Stephen Sondheim?” And

that turned into Sunday in the Park with George. So I was very much the observer in those early days with you and Steve—not in the writing, obviously, because that was private, but in the rehearsal of it and then the working on it at Playwrights Horizons and then on Broadway.

JL: I remember the very first reading we did for you. It was just the first act. You got this room and a piano and everything, expecting to hear a complete new musical, and Steve played the opening chords and then came and sat down next to me. That was it.

He had written absolutely nothing else at this point, and I had already finished the first act. (Laughter) Ed: Did you feel beholden to the facts of Act One? JL: One of the interesting things about Moss Hart’s writing of this autobiography is that he was a little loose with some of the facts, dramatizing them in a way that made it a more interesting read.

Ed: Is that your prerogative—that when you write your autobiography you get to write it your way?

JL: Well, I feel it’s my prerogative—that as a playwright adapting an autobiography it is my personal take on the material. People who have read the book and know it well are going to ask, “Why isn’t this in it? Why isn’t that in it? Why did you spend time on this and not on that?” And, once it went from a three-act to a two-act, I had to decide which of the stories I was going to tell and how I was going to tell them—during that process the play really becomes a reflection of the adapter and the director.

Ed: Now, you don’t start rehearsals for another two months, but is there anything you can tell us about the production?

JL: Well, the sets are all designed. It’s an ambitious production, because there are so many locations and so many characters.

We’re creating a show about creating a show, and part of what the designers—the set designer, Beowulf Boritt; the costume designer, Jane Greenwood; the lighting designer, Ken Billington; the sound designer, Dan Moses Schreier; and the composer, Louis Rosen—and I talked a lot about was how we can deliver the theatricality and excitement of putting on a show of this scale without weighing it down. These are glorious characters, and we don’t want anything to get in the way of them telling their story.

Moss Hart’s tenacity and passion, evident on each page of Act One, inspired the theater careers of countless people. Here are a few recollections from actors, directors, choreographers, and playwrights familiar to Lincoln Center Theater audiences, upon whom Act One has made a lasting impression.

1959: I was a junior at the University of Michigan, and, true to the tradition of my own generation, was preoccupied with soaking up every single bit of information, insight, rumor, and innuendo about anyone who was remotely successful in the theater. I was also, I recall, simply enthralled with having just discovered the work of the Messrs. Hart and Kaufman, rapaciously devouring everything they wrote—beginning with Once in a Lifetime and continuing through the blur of Merrily We Roll Along, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and even George Washington Slept Here. Act One was published, and I was poleaxed! The real voice! The actual journey! The glorious truth, from the horse’s mouth! What did I know of fact and fiction, and, ultimately, who cares! What a read then, and what a read NOW!—Jack

O’Brien

I read Act One in the late sixties, when I started assisting Michael Bennett and discovering the complexity and magic of creating a musical. What I remember most about the book is how, in spite of the problems and frustrations the work in the theater is sprinkled with, Moss Hart seemed to live through it all with a great sense of humor. I still try to follow that path.—Graciela

Daniele

Indeed, I did read Act One, once as a very young man just starting out in the theater as a set designer, and I found it inspirational. Then I read it again almost forty years later, and I deeply felt Moss Hart’s pain and joy, as these emotions were now part of my own life experience. My more adult self saw that he was in the process of making a story and a metaphor for the “entering show business” life experience.—John

Lee Beatty

I read Act One when I was still at Yale. I can remember reading and laughing while walking on the crossover between Jonathan Edwards College and Branford College that leads to Yale’s theater. I can remember being bowled over by Moss Hart’s urbanity, wit, pluck, kindliness, and salt, and being knocked out. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what’s in the book. I’ve forgotten all that. All that remains is the general impression that he got a huge amount done and had a very good time doing it, which a life in show business gives to the very luckiest of us. I know the book encouraged me to think that such an outcome was a possibility, including for me, and just look.—Sam

Waterston

I not only read it; I had dinner with it. In 1957, I was a scatterbrained young thing in my first professional role as Second Dead Woman, in Our Town. The director, José Quintero, invited me to supper on his terrace, in his new penthouse apartment, with his friends Kitty and Moss. I had no idea who they were. In my very faulty memory, Kitty was wearing a blue feather boa, and Moss described at length a room he’d like to own, an empty room with walls of solid gold. I thought he was a banker. Moss Hart was at this time the preeminent Broadway “show doctor.” I found that out later. Act One came out in 1959. I read it avidly.—Mary

Louise Wilson

I had my first encounter with this extraordinary book while doing research for a production of Once in a Lifetime for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, directed by Trevor Nunn, in 1979. The cast included Ian Charleson, David Suchet, and the late Richard Griffiths. I discovered a copy on my parents’ bookshelf. It had such hope, tenacity, and optimism. It gave me insight into the life and times from which American theater was developing. A major chapter in its history. I have given copies to a few young struggling actors as gifts, in order to pass on the passion. To remind them why they do what they do. Because of this production, which became a big hit, I met Kitty Carlisle and Anne Kaufman Schneider. We became friends. Another gift. It was a very powerful event in my life.—Zoë

Wanamaker 9

A Lasting Impression Carlisle, Moss Hart’s wife, a little bit, because she was on a committee that visited the drama students at Harvard and I got to escort her to all the dinners and take her to the plays.

Ed: That was the beginning of a long and happy relationship.

AB: Well, she was so charming. Then my first job in New York, strangely, was working for Moss Hart’s great friend Dore Schary, when he was the commissioner of cultural affairs.

JL: Dore Schary actually wrote and directed the movie of Act One, with George Hamilton as Moss Hart and Jason Robards as Kaufman.

Ed: Your play is so much about the collaboration between Moss Hart and George Kaufman and just how hard they worked to make Once in a Lifetime. How did you dramatize that process?

JL: That was the challenge, making that dramatic. It’s very hard to find a compelling way to get an audience to understand that process, particularly when they don’t know the play that Hart and Kaufman were writing, Once in a Lifetime. So it’s tricky.

It’s hard to explain to an audience how you come up with an idea. Hart does not go very deeply into the specifics in his book.

In order for it to work on the stage and as a story, you have to help the audience understand—what did they change, what were they struggling with as dramatists, and how did they improve it? To that end, I tracked down the very first draft that Moss Hart wrote of the play, and then compared it to the finished play in order to speculate on what they had done to bring it to its ultimate version.

Ed: Where did you find that first draft?

JL: Through the Hart Papers, which are at the Historical Society in Wisconsin. They had the very first draft of Once in a Lifetime that was sent to Kaufman to see if he would be interested in working on it. I referenced that draft a lot, and it’s quite different from the final draft. Kaufman was not only the writer but also the director, and ultimately an actor in the production. Imagine! What I also discovered was that for a spell he was also a critic for the New York Times. Of course, in those days there were, like, seven openings a week, so there were probably five theater critics at the Times.

When they were doing the show out of town, it wasn’t going very well after the second act, so Harpo Marx got on the stage with, I don’t know, George Jessel,

8

and they entertained the audience between the second and third acts. I don’t know exactly what wasn’t working, but it was fun to imagine what the problems were, or to make them up for the purposes of this play.

Originally, Kaufman was only in one scene in the out-of-town performances of the play, but by the time it opened he was in two. So I thought, Oh, well, they figured the audience loved his character so they probably wrote him into another scene before it opened in New York.

Ed: You are no stranger to collaboration.

You’ve worked with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn. I’m wondering what struck you about the collaboration between Hart and Kaufman.

It’s like a Dickens novel.

You can’t put it down.

It’s David Copperfield goes to Broadway. It’s a rags-to-riches tale of this kid who wanted to be in the theater and at the end, after many trials and tribulations, he gets in.

JL: I was especially interested in the fact that Kaufman was an established figure in the theater, and that he was collaborating with someone who was younger and untested. Sometimes I’ve worked with younger people, and it’s interesting how a kind of freshness and almost naïveté about the work bounces well off someone who has the craft down but has lost the initial excitement of writing. This is very different from, say, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who were like one. This is more of a story about two people who come from very different worlds meeting in the middle and pulling the best out of each other.

AB: Hearing you talk about collaboration, I remembered that when I was at Playwrights Horizons I was lucky enough to be in on your first collaboration with Sondheim. We had commissioned you to write a musical yourself. (I remember lending you all my original cast albums for inspiration.) Then I remember you saying, in your modest way, “Well, you know, that commission, what would you think if I used the commission to do a show with Stephen Sondheim?” And

that turned into Sunday in the Park with George. So I was very much the observer in those early days with you and Steve—not in the writing, obviously, because that was private, but in the rehearsal of it and then the working on it at Playwrights Horizons and then on Broadway.

JL: I remember the very first reading we did for you. It was just the first act. You got this room and a piano and everything, expecting to hear a complete new musical, and Steve played the opening chords and then came and sat down next to me. That was it.

He had written absolutely nothing else at this point, and I had already finished the first act. (Laughter) Ed: Did you feel beholden to the facts of Act One? JL: One of the interesting things about Moss Hart’s writing of this autobiography is that he was a little loose with some of the facts, dramatizing them in a way that made it a more interesting read.

Ed: Is that your prerogative—that when you write your autobiography you get to write it your way?

JL: Well, I feel it’s my prerogative—that as a playwright adapting an autobiography it is my personal take on the material. People who have read the book and know it well are going to ask, “Why isn’t this in it? Why isn’t that in it? Why did you spend time on this and not on that?” And, once it went from a three-act to a two-act, I had to decide which of the stories I was going to tell and how I was going to tell them—during that process the play really becomes a reflection of the adapter and the director.

Ed: Now, you don’t start rehearsals for another two months, but is there anything you can tell us about the production?

JL: Well, the sets are all designed. It’s an ambitious production, because there are so many locations and so many characters.

We’re creating a show about creating a show, and part of what the designers—the set designer, Beowulf Boritt; the costume designer, Jane Greenwood; the lighting designer, Ken Billington; the sound designer, Dan Moses Schreier; and the composer, Louis Rosen—and I talked a lot about was how we can deliver the theatricality and excitement of putting on a show of this scale without weighing it down. These are glorious characters, and we don’t want anything to get in the way of them telling their story.

Moss Hart’s tenacity and passion, evident on each page of Act One, inspired the theater careers of countless people. Here are a few recollections from actors, directors, choreographers, and playwrights familiar to Lincoln Center Theater audiences, upon whom Act One has made a lasting impression.

1959: I was a junior at the University of Michigan, and, true to the tradition of my own generation, was preoccupied with soaking up every single bit of information, insight, rumor, and innuendo about anyone who was remotely successful in the theater. I was also, I recall, simply enthralled with having just discovered the work of the Messrs. Hart and Kaufman, rapaciously devouring everything they wrote—beginning with Once in a Lifetime and continuing through the blur of Merrily We Roll Along, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and even George Washington Slept Here. Act One was published, and I was poleaxed! The real voice! The actual journey! The glorious truth, from the horse’s mouth! What did I know of fact and fiction, and, ultimately, who cares! What a read then, and what a read NOW!—Jack

O’Brien

I read Act One in the late sixties, when I started assisting Michael Bennett and discovering the complexity and magic of creating a musical. What I remember most about the book is how, in spite of the problems and frustrations the work in the theater is sprinkled with, Moss Hart seemed to live through it all with a great sense of humor. I still try to follow that path.—Graciela

Daniele

Indeed, I did read Act One, once as a very young man just starting out in the theater as a set designer, and I found it inspirational. Then I read it again almost forty years later, and I deeply felt Moss Hart’s pain and joy, as these emotions were now part of my own life experience. My more adult self saw that he was in the process of making a story and a metaphor for the “entering show business” life experience.—John

Lee Beatty

I read Act One when I was still at Yale. I can remember reading and laughing while walking on the crossover between Jonathan Edwards College and Branford College that leads to Yale’s theater. I can remember being bowled over by Moss Hart’s urbanity, wit, pluck, kindliness, and salt, and being knocked out. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what’s in the book. I’ve forgotten all that. All that remains is the general impression that he got a huge amount done and had a very good time doing it, which a life in show business gives to the very luckiest of us. I know the book encouraged me to think that such an outcome was a possibility, including for me, and just look.—Sam

Waterston

I not only read it; I had dinner with it. In 1957, I was a scatterbrained young thing in my first professional role as Second Dead Woman, in Our Town. The director, José Quintero, invited me to supper on his terrace, in his new penthouse apartment, with his friends Kitty and Moss. I had no idea who they were. In my very faulty memory, Kitty was wearing a blue feather boa, and Moss described at length a room he’d like to own, an empty room with walls of solid gold. I thought he was a banker. Moss Hart was at this time the preeminent Broadway “show doctor.” I found that out later. Act One came out in 1959. I read it avidly.—Mary

Louise Wilson

I had my first encounter with this extraordinary book while doing research for a production of Once in a Lifetime for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, directed by Trevor Nunn, in 1979. The cast included Ian Charleson, David Suchet, and the late Richard Griffiths. I discovered a copy on my parents’ bookshelf. It had such hope, tenacity, and optimism. It gave me insight into the life and times from which American theater was developing. A major chapter in its history. I have given copies to a few young struggling actors as gifts, in order to pass on the passion. To remind them why they do what they do. Because of this production, which became a big hit, I met Kitty Carlisle and Anne Kaufman Schneider. We became friends. Another gift. It was a very powerful event in my life.—Zoë

Wanamaker 9

Silver Spoon Life:

An Interview with Christopher Hart In the best of Moss Hart’s work, a successful striving for the appearance of spontaneous wit alongside a carelessly worn erudition exists in an aesthetic that allows for both formal experimentation and an equally powerful desire for box-office success. It is worth noting that Hart belongs to the same era as Eugene O’Neill, a time before American democracy became so magically and seamlessly fused, in the minds of her citizens, with capitalism post–World War II. Much of the joyous combustibility in Hart’s work results from the friction between these seemingly contradictory aspects and aspirations.

Today’s mainstream theater artists have a harder time spinning with anything approaching Hart’s élan, at least in part because the heterogeneous, largely middle-class audience that Hart aimed to serve no longer attends, if it even exists in the kinds of numbers as before. The vast and unimaginable wealth accrued by the likes of the Brothers Koch has all but driven the idea of a common good from our collective forebrains. It’s hard to achieve spontaneous anything at current ticket prices, or if the middle class has nowhere to go but down. If today’s theatrical era is a kind of Act Two to the one created and chronicled so eloquently by Hart, what might give us the optimism to proceed from here, as Hart would surely ask us to? For one thing, we might join his frequent writing partner, George S. Kaufman, in asking, as he is said to have done when approached by a salesperson at Macy’s, “What have you got in Act Two curtains?”—Craig

Lucas

I read Act One when I was twenty-one years old and doing summer stock at the Robin Hood Theatre, in Ardentown, Delaware. It was a serendipitous read, in that I was able to model much of my behavior that summer on events in the book.—Daniel

Sullivan

I believe Paul Schmidt, Harvey Schmidt’s nephew, gave me the book to read when we were both in high school, in Dallas (Paul and I, that is). I still have that same copy, and it is totally falling apart and held together by rubber bands, paper clips, and a little bit of hope. I was completely inspired by the joy of that book, and its message for me, as a young person, was unmistakable: everybody has to start somewhere. The recounting and retracing of a career, especially from the vantage point of success, gave me a great thrill, and I gave copies to everyone I loved. I even wrote out a proposal to adapt it for a musical as my application for NYU’s graduate musical-theater writing program. I still have it somewhere. It is the quintessential theater story, and it belongs onstage.—Victoria

Clark

Our co-executive editor, John Guare, sat down with Christopher Hart—Moss Hart’s son and a director—at Lincoln Center Theater to talk about his childhood memories and the process of bringing Act One to the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

More than anything ever written, Act One captures the interior landscape of the American playwright’s psyche. I read the book in my twenties, and again in my late thirties, when one of the great periods of black becalmed stasis had set in, and everything Hart conveys—the endless slog to opening night, the last-minute epiphanies in the nick of time (or too late), the battle to find the play secreted away within the play—all the emotions I thought too hard to describe, he rendered perfectly. It’s a kind of comfort to know that there are some constants in the artist’s processes.

Hart became a playwright so as to escape from something—call it invisibility, call it muteness, call it the evil of banality—and the book has some of the exhilaration of a prison-break story. And, in so doing, he saves his family, and he does it through the most precise combination of stamina, honor, and lacerating self-doubt. Hart told us that you could succeed at a life in the theater, despite everything. The odds, the ill-wishers, the whisperers down the lane, the chaos, the simple bad luck. And he was right about all of it. More than anything, the book reminded me that all playwrights are self-made creatures, and all you can do—all any of us can ever do—is do it again.

One thing struck me while rereading the book—the question of how an author finds his voice, which is, in Hart’s case, a tortuous route, with stops at pastiche, Ibsen, and O’Neill before he is placed, providentially, with Mr. Kaufman.

He’s a young man with a great facility, and yet that urgency, by his own admission, has no governor at the beginning of his writing life, which is not uncommon. He is not Odets, burning to write large the story of market forces working on the individual, etc.; he is not O’Neill, with an almost mystical sense of inner torment. He wants—he knows—only one thing: how to entertain, which is, paradoxically, much harder to pull off successfully than a play that is filled with pain. Later on, playwrights like Wendy Wasserstein were able to marry the pain to the delight, a path paved by Kaufman and Hart again by his own admission, for being funny. A writer finds his voice through terrible trial and worse error, and it doesn’t matter if that voice just wants to amuse. It’s as hard to get there as it is to make people cry. Harder sometimes. So the subtext of the book, and a worthwhile one to think about, is the journey that a writer has to take in order to find his vocabulary, which is sometimes very different from the one the heart wants. IT tells YOU.—Jon

10

Robin Baitz

Photograph courtesy of Christopher Hart.

and Neil Simon. But Hart had to find the freedom to be funny, and he had the young writer’s rather pretentious contempt,

John Guare: You were born in 1948?

Christopher Hart: Yes, he had just written Christopher Blake, and I have a feeling that had something to do with my naming.

JG: Oh, I was wondering about that.

CH: Christopher Blake is about a young boy in the midst of a divorce. I always thought that was a great piece of writing, because he knew nothing of divorce and had no children at that time.

JG: But Christopher Blake’s experience was very different from yours.

CH: I was the firstborn male child. I always say I was born with a silver spoon coming out of every orifice. My parents lived in a duplex penthouse on Park Avenue, and I had everything I could possibly want. Except that, in those days, children were way down the totem pole in their parents’ social life.

JG: Did you have a nanny?

CH: A nanny and servants, and so forth.

JG: Who stayed with you for years?

CH: My parents could see that the nannies

of the children of other famous parents became more important in the children’s lives, so they purposefully fired the nannies every year or two so that we wouldn’t get too attached.

JG: Did they also bring you into their social life? Did they take you to the theater?

CH: Yes, but we were an accoutrement to their lives.

JG: You must have been aware from the moment you could blink that your parents had a different light shining out of them. Were you aware of their fame?

CH: A little bit, but you’re never a hero in your own land. They were still Mom and Dad to us. But I do remember that I would bring my buddies home and show them this ridiculous twenty-room apartment with a fountain! My father had installed a fountain in his office, with a statue that spurted water and made a little jingly noise. I had found the switch, and I would turn on the fountain to show my friends. That was a big deal when I was seven or eight. He actually put his office in the children’s wing, for some reason.

JG: His office wasn’t outside the house?

CH: No. He worked in this soundproofed office. So he had double doors put in, and this fountain that still didn’t shut us out of his ear range.

JG: What was his office like?

CH: It was pretty huge, just a big desk with a bust of George Bernard Shaw on it and the fountain. He had a little kitchenette, and there was a bathroom and a terrace. We were on the top floor of 1185 Park Avenue.

JG: Did he have a faithful secretary?

CH: No. He had a Dictaphone, and he would dictate letters and things that he was writing, and then he’d send these little disks out to the secretary to get typed. He loved gadgets, miniature cameras like the classic Minox spy camera.

JG: Did he have to say, “Don’t talk to Daddy, he’s working”?

CH: When he was onto something, he would make it very clear that it was quiet time. I remember, when we were out at Long Beach Island, watching him go into this little cabana on the beach and sort of close himself off. When he was writing Act One, he would just go in there in the morning, and it was known that you didn’t mess with him while he was in there. But if you caught him in the water or walking down the beach he was fair game, and you could have fun.

JG: I remember your mother saying, “I don’t know why we went to Long Beach Island.

We all would pack up there every summer,

11

Silver Spoon Life:

An Interview with Christopher Hart In the best of Moss Hart’s work, a successful striving for the appearance of spontaneous wit alongside a carelessly worn erudition exists in an aesthetic that allows for both formal experimentation and an equally powerful desire for box-office success. It is worth noting that Hart belongs to the same era as Eugene O’Neill, a time before American democracy became so magically and seamlessly fused, in the minds of her citizens, with capitalism post–World War II. Much of the joyous combustibility in Hart’s work results from the friction between these seemingly contradictory aspects and aspirations.

Today’s mainstream theater artists have a harder time spinning with anything approaching Hart’s élan, at least in part because the heterogeneous, largely middle-class audience that Hart aimed to serve no longer attends, if it even exists in the kinds of numbers as before. The vast and unimaginable wealth accrued by the likes of the Brothers Koch has all but driven the idea of a common good from our collective forebrains. It’s hard to achieve spontaneous anything at current ticket prices, or if the middle class has nowhere to go but down. If today’s theatrical era is a kind of Act Two to the one created and chronicled so eloquently by Hart, what might give us the optimism to proceed from here, as Hart would surely ask us to? For one thing, we might join his frequent writing partner, George S. Kaufman, in asking, as he is said to have done when approached by a salesperson at Macy’s, “What have you got in Act Two curtains?”—Craig

Lucas

I read Act One when I was twenty-one years old and doing summer stock at the Robin Hood Theatre, in Ardentown, Delaware. It was a serendipitous read, in that I was able to model much of my behavior that summer on events in the book.—Daniel

Sullivan

I believe Paul Schmidt, Harvey Schmidt’s nephew, gave me the book to read when we were both in high school, in Dallas (Paul and I, that is). I still have that same copy, and it is totally falling apart and held together by rubber bands, paper clips, and a little bit of hope. I was completely inspired by the joy of that book, and its message for me, as a young person, was unmistakable: everybody has to start somewhere. The recounting and retracing of a career, especially from the vantage point of success, gave me a great thrill, and I gave copies to everyone I loved. I even wrote out a proposal to adapt it for a musical as my application for NYU’s graduate musical-theater writing program. I still have it somewhere. It is the quintessential theater story, and it belongs onstage.—Victoria

Clark

Our co-executive editor, John Guare, sat down with Christopher Hart—Moss Hart’s son and a director—at Lincoln Center Theater to talk about his childhood memories and the process of bringing Act One to the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

More than anything ever written, Act One captures the interior landscape of the American playwright’s psyche. I read the book in my twenties, and again in my late thirties, when one of the great periods of black becalmed stasis had set in, and everything Hart conveys—the endless slog to opening night, the last-minute epiphanies in the nick of time (or too late), the battle to find the play secreted away within the play—all the emotions I thought too hard to describe, he rendered perfectly. It’s a kind of comfort to know that there are some constants in the artist’s processes.

Hart became a playwright so as to escape from something—call it invisibility, call it muteness, call it the evil of banality—and the book has some of the exhilaration of a prison-break story. And, in so doing, he saves his family, and he does it through the most precise combination of stamina, honor, and lacerating self-doubt. Hart told us that you could succeed at a life in the theater, despite everything. The odds, the ill-wishers, the whisperers down the lane, the chaos, the simple bad luck. And he was right about all of it. More than anything, the book reminded me that all playwrights are self-made creatures, and all you can do—all any of us can ever do—is do it again.

One thing struck me while rereading the book—the question of how an author finds his voice, which is, in Hart’s case, a tortuous route, with stops at pastiche, Ibsen, and O’Neill before he is placed, providentially, with Mr. Kaufman.

He’s a young man with a great facility, and yet that urgency, by his own admission, has no governor at the beginning of his writing life, which is not uncommon. He is not Odets, burning to write large the story of market forces working on the individual, etc.; he is not O’Neill, with an almost mystical sense of inner torment. He wants—he knows—only one thing: how to entertain, which is, paradoxically, much harder to pull off successfully than a play that is filled with pain. Later on, playwrights like Wendy Wasserstein were able to marry the pain to the delight, a path paved by Kaufman and Hart again by his own admission, for being funny. A writer finds his voice through terrible trial and worse error, and it doesn’t matter if that voice just wants to amuse. It’s as hard to get there as it is to make people cry. Harder sometimes. So the subtext of the book, and a worthwhile one to think about, is the journey that a writer has to take in order to find his vocabulary, which is sometimes very different from the one the heart wants. IT tells YOU.—Jon

10

Robin Baitz

Photograph courtesy of Christopher Hart.

and Neil Simon. But Hart had to find the freedom to be funny, and he had the young writer’s rather pretentious contempt,

John Guare: You were born in 1948?

Christopher Hart: Yes, he had just written Christopher Blake, and I have a feeling that had something to do with my naming.

JG: Oh, I was wondering about that.

CH: Christopher Blake is about a young boy in the midst of a divorce. I always thought that was a great piece of writing, because he knew nothing of divorce and had no children at that time.

JG: But Christopher Blake’s experience was very different from yours.

CH: I was the firstborn male child. I always say I was born with a silver spoon coming out of every orifice. My parents lived in a duplex penthouse on Park Avenue, and I had everything I could possibly want. Except that, in those days, children were way down the totem pole in their parents’ social life.

JG: Did you have a nanny?

CH: A nanny and servants, and so forth.

JG: Who stayed with you for years?

CH: My parents could see that the nannies

of the children of other famous parents became more important in the children’s lives, so they purposefully fired the nannies every year or two so that we wouldn’t get too attached.

JG: Did they also bring you into their social life? Did they take you to the theater?

CH: Yes, but we were an accoutrement to their lives.

JG: You must have been aware from the moment you could blink that your parents had a different light shining out of them. Were you aware of their fame?

CH: A little bit, but you’re never a hero in your own land. They were still Mom and Dad to us. But I do remember that I would bring my buddies home and show them this ridiculous twenty-room apartment with a fountain! My father had installed a fountain in his office, with a statue that spurted water and made a little jingly noise. I had found the switch, and I would turn on the fountain to show my friends. That was a big deal when I was seven or eight. He actually put his office in the children’s wing, for some reason.

JG: His office wasn’t outside the house?

CH: No. He worked in this soundproofed office. So he had double doors put in, and this fountain that still didn’t shut us out of his ear range.

JG: What was his office like?

CH: It was pretty huge, just a big desk with a bust of George Bernard Shaw on it and the fountain. He had a little kitchenette, and there was a bathroom and a terrace. We were on the top floor of 1185 Park Avenue.

JG: Did he have a faithful secretary?

CH: No. He had a Dictaphone, and he would dictate letters and things that he was writing, and then he’d send these little disks out to the secretary to get typed. He loved gadgets, miniature cameras like the classic Minox spy camera.

JG: Did he have to say, “Don’t talk to Daddy, he’s working”?

CH: When he was onto something, he would make it very clear that it was quiet time. I remember, when we were out at Long Beach Island, watching him go into this little cabana on the beach and sort of close himself off. When he was writing Act One, he would just go in there in the morning, and it was known that you didn’t mess with him while he was in there. But if you caught him in the water or walking down the beach he was fair game, and you could have fun.

JG: I remember your mother saying, “I don’t know why we went to Long Beach Island.

We all would pack up there every summer,

11

12

CH: I was not as aware of it as Mom, and he had sort of found a way to deal with it by the time I was around. But people told me stories about his darker moments, moments that they were afraid for him. I know from talking to Alan J. Lerner that he went to Dr. Lawrence Kubie twice a day toward the end of his life.

JG: Did you know your father’s past—where he was born, or the path of his success?

CH: I knew some of it—but he didn’t talk about Aunt Kate, he didn’t talk about his mother. I didn’t find out that he didn’t really get along with his mother until I read the book.

JG: When did you read the book for the first time?

CH: When I was eight or nine years old I had talked about being an actor, so when the book came out, he sweetly took me aside and said, “Well, now, if you’re going to be an actor I think you should wait a few years before you read this book, because it’ll mean a lot more to you when you’re seventeen or eighteen.” I didn’t wait that long, but I did wait until I was about sixteen. It meant a lot to me for him to take my dreams seriously.

JG: What effect did it have on you? You must still have been reeling from his death.

CH: According to my shrink, thirteen is a particularly bad time to lose your dad. I’m not sure there’s ever a good time. I was very close to him; I have a lot of good memories of him. And he was very helpful in dealing with my mother, who was, shall we say, high-spirited. There were a lot of clashes between me and my mother as I was growing up, and he was a mediating force. But it was really quite funny, because his parenting was totally different from hers. They were both good parents—they were wonderful parents!—but he was a talker and she was

a smacker. With her, it was basically: give him a smack on the behind or on the back of the head, get it over with, and move on.

My father would “explain” my transgression to the point where I would feel monstrously guilty over whatever thing I’d done, and she would be standing behind him saying, “Just hit him, will you? Get it over with.” (Chuckles) “He’s not listening.” It was very funny to see these two styles battling it out. But what was really interesting was that these two very high-strung, very emotional people never had a cross word. I never heard a voice raised or a door slammed, and these were people who had huge tempers. There was lots of high-strung goings-on, but never between them. They made some sort of deal about that. It was an amazing relationship. It was also the era of Dr. Spock and progressive ideas concerning not hitting children. I think he took a page out of my mother’s playbook and wrote an ironic and very funny essay about modern parenting called “The Clobber Method.”

JG: Many people must have said, “I want to dramatize Act One.” I’m sure you’ve been very protective of the rights.

CH: I have.

JG: What made you, after all these years, say, “I think it’s time. I’m going to trust it to Lincoln Center Theater and James Lapine?”

CH: There had been a stage production by somebody in Australia, and we had limited his rights to Australia. I had a reading of it in Los Angeles with some of my own people, and it was okay, but it was pretty straightforward. Then I remembered James Lapine’s work on Dirty Blonde, about Mae West.

So I went to him with this idea of adapting Act One for the stage. I knew, somehow, that this was the right guy for the job.

James’s relationship with Stephen Sondheim

Photographs courtesy of Christopher Hart and Catherine Hart.

and to this day I still don’t know why Mossy liked it so much.”

CH: You know, it was what he was used to.

I mean, he used to go to Brighton Beach.

That was the big deal when he was growing up. And that’s where he wrote Once in a Lifetime, on the beach. He was used to that kind of low-rent vacation. He could’ve gone to the Hamptons or Fire Island or something hipper, but he was used to this middle-class lifestyle. And, of course, when he became successful he had to have the biggest house on the block. (Laughter) JG: Would stars come down, too?

CH: Yes. It was a big house, and we’d have servants who would take care of guests on the weekend. Everybody came down there.

One of the things he did in the summer was have readings of his plays on rainy days with the celebrity guests.

JG: What he was working on, or his old plays?

CH: Old plays. I had a one-line part in The Man Who Came to Dinner. I was one of the convicts, and hearing Moss play Whiteside was pretty exciting.

JG: Did he ever play it?

CH: He toured the play for the troops in the South Pacific during World War II, as part of his contribution to the war effort. He also did it at the Bucks County Playhouse, with Kitty playing Maggie. He always wanted to be an actor.

JG: Was he good onstage?

CH: I was six months old, and I was presented to the audience at a matinée by my mother at the curtain call, so it was hard to tell.

JG: One doesn’t think of Moss Hart having dark moments.

CH: No, but he was a classic manic-depressive, and in his era there was no lithium, there was no Zoloft, there was no anything.

JG: Was it scary for you?

was so similar to my father’s relationship with Kaufman—they had both found their heroes and had made them their mentors.

And André and I were at Harvard together, so it just seemed like a good trio.

JG: How long has James been working on it?

CH: I guess he started not this summer but the summer before this, with a workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. He told me he was having a reading with some local actors.

These actors—I thought they were, you know, community theater people, but they included Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams.

I didn’t see this first workshop. He said he was nervous and he didn’t want me to come up and look at it. And then, about a year ago, I did see a reading. The really difficult part of translating the book to the stage is how you take all of this wonderful material, literally hundreds of stories that everybody loves, and boil it down. James found a remarkably inventive and theatrical way of condensing the material by making three Moss Harts to distill the narrative and tell the story from multiple points of view.

JG: So much of the book is about persistence.

The lesson I took from the book, which I bought and read on the day it was published, was that Moss Hart did not let go.

CH: Absolutely right. When Moss got the rights to Once in a Lifetime, and the script back from George Kaufman, and George said, “I’ve run dry on this. I want you to have it. It’s free and clear, it’s all yours,” Moss would not accept that. He knew only that he had a day to convince George.

George and his wife, Beatrice, had already bought tickets on a boat to Europe. Dad also knew that he had to present it as a memorized piece, so it sounded like it was coming off the top of his head fully formed.

And so he wrote a presentation, memorized it, and presented it in twenty-four hours— and changed George’s mind for the third time. They had had two complete tryouts that didn’t work.

JG: Somebody recently told me that the first draft, the one that was sent to George Kaufman, isn’t that different from the final version.

CH: I would buy into that. James has taken a look at it, and I’ve seen versions. But the structure’s essentially the same.

JG: This summer I was watching TCM [Turner Classic Movies]—God bless them—and a movie with Wallace Beery from 1932 was on, and when the credits came up I saw “Dialogue by Moss Hart.” The writing was so snappy. He understood how to work both sides of the street, which is so rare for a playwright.

CH: Yes, but for some reason he didn’t like Hollywood. Irving P. Lazar—“Swifty”—Dad’s agent, had gotten a deal of all deals for him.

A multipicture “event” at Paramount, and it was worth millions. Irving had trumpeted that this was the greatest screenwriting deal of all time. And, after about twenty-four hours, my father said, “I’m getting cold feet.

I don’t want this hanging over me.”

He had already done A Star Is Born, Gentleman’s Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, and Prince of Players. But he just said, “I don’t like being out here. I want to be in New York. You have to get me out of this.”

Irving was just reeling; he tried to talk Moss out of it, but in the end he got him out of the deal.

JG: What do you think your father liked about New York?

CH: That’s where the theater lived for him.

That’s what he had always dreamed about.

At the end of the book, he takes that taxi ride into the city from the Bronx and throws the windows of his parents’ tenement open

in the rain. And he never took a subway or a bus ever again.

JG: What was life like in Bucks County?

CH: I loved that place. I was seven, and he took me—because he knew I loved the place—down to close it up for the last time.

That was just before we moved to Long Beach Island. And it was just fabulous.

JG: Does it still exist, that estate?

CH: Yes. The guy who bought it sold it to a notorious swindler, the Madoff of his era, and so the bank owned it for fifteen or twenty years. And whoever it was rented to couldn’t do anything to it. When my sister, Cathy, was in medical school at Penn, I said, “Let’s go look at the old place.” She said, “How are you going to find this place?” We went for a drive, and even though I was seven the last time I saw it, I went there like I had a GPS. I just knew where it was. We got to go inside, but it was really sad. It was a mess; it had fallen apart completely, but it had all the same stuff. It was like Miss Havisham’s.

The same furniture and everything. Anyway, another five years go by and they resolve the issue with the swindler, and they sell it to a person who put a lot of money into fixing it up. And it’s lovely, and it’s a showplace, and it has the same charm as the old estate.

JG: Did Moss and George stop working together?

CH: They were always doing other things while they worked together. And I think they probably thought if one came up with an idea that the other would be suitable for they would do another project. There was never a breakup or a formal parting of the ways.

JG: Is it true that whoever had the idea first got the top billing?

CH: No. The way it worked was every other show they swapped top billing, and it just so happened that my dad got all the good shows. (Chuckles) It was by accident that You Can’t Take It with You and Once in a Lifetime and The Man Who Came to Dinner are all Hart and Kaufman. And all the flops were Kaufman and Hart.

They also felt that way about who wrote what. They weren’t into assigning authorship to jokes. Although most people believe, by looking at Kaufman’s other work, that my father brought the heart and the sentimentality to some of the things, because Kaufman was so...He could barely sit and watch the love scenes while he was directing these shows. He would actually leave, and

13

12

CH: I was not as aware of it as Mom, and he had sort of found a way to deal with it by the time I was around. But people told me stories about his darker moments, moments that they were afraid for him. I know from talking to Alan J. Lerner that he went to Dr. Lawrence Kubie twice a day toward the end of his life.

JG: Did you know your father’s past—where he was born, or the path of his success?

CH: I knew some of it—but he didn’t talk about Aunt Kate, he didn’t talk about his mother. I didn’t find out that he didn’t really get along with his mother until I read the book.

JG: When did you read the book for the first time?

CH: When I was eight or nine years old I had talked about being an actor, so when the book came out, he sweetly took me aside and said, “Well, now, if you’re going to be an actor I think you should wait a few years before you read this book, because it’ll mean a lot more to you when you’re seventeen or eighteen.” I didn’t wait that long, but I did wait until I was about sixteen. It meant a lot to me for him to take my dreams seriously.

JG: What effect did it have on you? You must still have been reeling from his death.

CH: According to my shrink, thirteen is a particularly bad time to lose your dad. I’m not sure there’s ever a good time. I was very close to him; I have a lot of good memories of him. And he was very helpful in dealing with my mother, who was, shall we say, high-spirited. There were a lot of clashes between me and my mother as I was growing up, and he was a mediating force. But it was really quite funny, because his parenting was totally different from hers. They were both good parents—they were wonderful parents!—but he was a talker and she was

a smacker. With her, it was basically: give him a smack on the behind or on the back of the head, get it over with, and move on.

My father would “explain” my transgression to the point where I would feel monstrously guilty over whatever thing I’d done, and she would be standing behind him saying, “Just hit him, will you? Get it over with.” (Chuckles) “He’s not listening.” It was very funny to see these two styles battling it out. But what was really interesting was that these two very high-strung, very emotional people never had a cross word. I never heard a voice raised or a door slammed, and these were people who had huge tempers. There was lots of high-strung goings-on, but never between them. They made some sort of deal about that. It was an amazing relationship. It was also the era of Dr. Spock and progressive ideas concerning not hitting children. I think he took a page out of my mother’s playbook and wrote an ironic and very funny essay about modern parenting called “The Clobber Method.”

JG: Many people must have said, “I want to dramatize Act One.” I’m sure you’ve been very protective of the rights.

CH: I have.

JG: What made you, after all these years, say, “I think it’s time. I’m going to trust it to Lincoln Center Theater and James Lapine?”

CH: There had been a stage production by somebody in Australia, and we had limited his rights to Australia. I had a reading of it in Los Angeles with some of my own people, and it was okay, but it was pretty straightforward. Then I remembered James Lapine’s work on Dirty Blonde, about Mae West.

So I went to him with this idea of adapting Act One for the stage. I knew, somehow, that this was the right guy for the job.

James’s relationship with Stephen Sondheim

Photographs courtesy of Christopher Hart and Catherine Hart.

and to this day I still don’t know why Mossy liked it so much.”

CH: You know, it was what he was used to.

I mean, he used to go to Brighton Beach.

That was the big deal when he was growing up. And that’s where he wrote Once in a Lifetime, on the beach. He was used to that kind of low-rent vacation. He could’ve gone to the Hamptons or Fire Island or something hipper, but he was used to this middle-class lifestyle. And, of course, when he became successful he had to have the biggest house on the block. (Laughter) JG: Would stars come down, too?

CH: Yes. It was a big house, and we’d have servants who would take care of guests on the weekend. Everybody came down there.

One of the things he did in the summer was have readings of his plays on rainy days with the celebrity guests.

JG: What he was working on, or his old plays?

CH: Old plays. I had a one-line part in The Man Who Came to Dinner. I was one of the convicts, and hearing Moss play Whiteside was pretty exciting.

JG: Did he ever play it?

CH: He toured the play for the troops in the South Pacific during World War II, as part of his contribution to the war effort. He also did it at the Bucks County Playhouse, with Kitty playing Maggie. He always wanted to be an actor.

JG: Was he good onstage?

CH: I was six months old, and I was presented to the audience at a matinée by my mother at the curtain call, so it was hard to tell.

JG: One doesn’t think of Moss Hart having dark moments.

CH: No, but he was a classic manic-depressive, and in his era there was no lithium, there was no Zoloft, there was no anything.

JG: Was it scary for you?

was so similar to my father’s relationship with Kaufman—they had both found their heroes and had made them their mentors.

And André and I were at Harvard together, so it just seemed like a good trio.

JG: How long has James been working on it?

CH: I guess he started not this summer but the summer before this, with a workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. He told me he was having a reading with some local actors.

These actors—I thought they were, you know, community theater people, but they included Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams.

I didn’t see this first workshop. He said he was nervous and he didn’t want me to come up and look at it. And then, about a year ago, I did see a reading. The really difficult part of translating the book to the stage is how you take all of this wonderful material, literally hundreds of stories that everybody loves, and boil it down. James found a remarkably inventive and theatrical way of condensing the material by making three Moss Harts to distill the narrative and tell the story from multiple points of view.

JG: So much of the book is about persistence.

The lesson I took from the book, which I bought and read on the day it was published, was that Moss Hart did not let go.

CH: Absolutely right. When Moss got the rights to Once in a Lifetime, and the script back from George Kaufman, and George said, “I’ve run dry on this. I want you to have it. It’s free and clear, it’s all yours,” Moss would not accept that. He knew only that he had a day to convince George.

George and his wife, Beatrice, had already bought tickets on a boat to Europe. Dad also knew that he had to present it as a memorized piece, so it sounded like it was coming off the top of his head fully formed.

And so he wrote a presentation, memorized it, and presented it in twenty-four hours— and changed George’s mind for the third time. They had had two complete tryouts that didn’t work.

JG: Somebody recently told me that the first draft, the one that was sent to George Kaufman, isn’t that different from the final version.

CH: I would buy into that. James has taken a look at it, and I’ve seen versions. But the structure’s essentially the same.

JG: This summer I was watching TCM [Turner Classic Movies]—God bless them—and a movie with Wallace Beery from 1932 was on, and when the credits came up I saw “Dialogue by Moss Hart.” The writing was so snappy. He understood how to work both sides of the street, which is so rare for a playwright.

CH: Yes, but for some reason he didn’t like Hollywood. Irving P. Lazar—“Swifty”—Dad’s agent, had gotten a deal of all deals for him.

A multipicture “event” at Paramount, and it was worth millions. Irving had trumpeted that this was the greatest screenwriting deal of all time. And, after about twenty-four hours, my father said, “I’m getting cold feet.

I don’t want this hanging over me.”

He had already done A Star Is Born, Gentleman’s Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, and Prince of Players. But he just said, “I don’t like being out here. I want to be in New York. You have to get me out of this.”

Irving was just reeling; he tried to talk Moss out of it, but in the end he got him out of the deal.

JG: What do you think your father liked about New York?

CH: That’s where the theater lived for him.

That’s what he had always dreamed about.

At the end of the book, he takes that taxi ride into the city from the Bronx and throws the windows of his parents’ tenement open

in the rain. And he never took a subway or a bus ever again.

JG: What was life like in Bucks County?

CH: I loved that place. I was seven, and he took me—because he knew I loved the place—down to close it up for the last time.

That was just before we moved to Long Beach Island. And it was just fabulous.

JG: Does it still exist, that estate?

CH: Yes. The guy who bought it sold it to a notorious swindler, the Madoff of his era, and so the bank owned it for fifteen or twenty years. And whoever it was rented to couldn’t do anything to it. When my sister, Cathy, was in medical school at Penn, I said, “Let’s go look at the old place.” She said, “How are you going to find this place?” We went for a drive, and even though I was seven the last time I saw it, I went there like I had a GPS. I just knew where it was. We got to go inside, but it was really sad. It was a mess; it had fallen apart completely, but it had all the same stuff. It was like Miss Havisham’s.

The same furniture and everything. Anyway, another five years go by and they resolve the issue with the swindler, and they sell it to a person who put a lot of money into fixing it up. And it’s lovely, and it’s a showplace, and it has the same charm as the old estate.

JG: Did Moss and George stop working together?

CH: They were always doing other things while they worked together. And I think they probably thought if one came up with an idea that the other would be suitable for they would do another project. There was never a breakup or a formal parting of the ways.

JG: Is it true that whoever had the idea first got the top billing?

CH: No. The way it worked was every other show they swapped top billing, and it just so happened that my dad got all the good shows. (Chuckles) It was by accident that You Can’t Take It with You and Once in a Lifetime and The Man Who Came to Dinner are all Hart and Kaufman. And all the flops were Kaufman and Hart.

They also felt that way about who wrote what. They weren’t into assigning authorship to jokes. Although most people believe, by looking at Kaufman’s other work, that my father brought the heart and the sentimentality to some of the things, because Kaufman was so...He could barely sit and watch the love scenes while he was directing these shows. He would actually leave, and

13

A Daughter’s ReFLECTION

By Anne Kaufman

I still think this story of commitment to your art is still valid, and that it is still inspiring.

Everybody who reads it, even the people who’ve never heard of it before, say, “Wow, I was so thrilled that you gave me this book to read, because it still is unimaginably worthwhile.” return when the love scene between Alice and Tony, for instance, in You Can’t Take It with You, was over.

JG: Did George recognize this lack in himself?

CH: He had to. Here’s a guy who wouldn’t shake your hand—he washed his hands maybe a thousand times a day—who had all these OCD problems. It was hard for him to get in and out of public restaurants and rest rooms, but he was the most, next to Wilt Chamberlain, marathon womanizer in the history of New York.

JG: Oh, the diary of Mary Astor is legendary.

CH: Right. So here’s a guy who pointed at you instead of shaking your hand, but he would nail anything that moved.

JG: When your mother was on television did you think, Mommy isn’t home tonight, she’s on television.

CH: Kids want to be like everybody else.

They don’t want to be special or singled out, and Mom was not about to dress down for me. Or my classmates, or my school. So she would show up, and it would be like RuPaul coming into the classroom. Just completely inappropriately done up—for me, you know—with jewelry and the red, red lipstick and the outfits, and so forth.

But, as self-conscious as I was about her, I was also happy to get all the benefits that celebrity brought and get to go to shows. But it was also a burden. I mean, I hated it when they got special treatment and I wasn’t al-

14

lowed to stand in line in the rain like everybody else to go to the movies. Their attitude was “You go right ahead, darling. We’ll meet you inside.” And I would stand there in the rain, because it was just so embarrassing to be ushered in ahead of everyone.

JG: If your father hadn’t died so young, what would his life have been like?

CH: He was only fifty-five, and he was at the top of his game at that point. All the stuff that he was doing was kind of coming together. I think he was finally figuring out how to utilize all these things that he’d invented. You know, he invented the three turntables for Lady in the Dark, which became the three identical turntables for My Fair Lady and Camelot. I think what he was bringing to the musical theater was good story. In the old days, the libretto was just an excuse to hang some songs on. He was one of the people who were taking the musical in a direction that Stephen Sondheim followed. They shifted things so that the story was being told through the book as well; the songs were helping to move the story along. And Moss also had incredible taste; he was able to bring the musical to a whole different level. You know, I think he worked very closely with Alan on the book for My Fair Lady, and Alan credits him with finding the right tone that perfectly melded Lerner with one of Dad’s idols, Shaw.

JG: I heard that Julie Andrews was terrible in rehearsal, and that he shut down rehearsals and worked with her for twenty-four hours.

CH: Yes. JG: What did he do?

CH: He did what every director is told not to do: he pasted the part on her and he gave her line readings. In her book, Julie credits him with doing that. And my mother said, “I could hear Moss’s line readings every time she opened her mouth.”

JG: And she kept them?

CH: She was very grateful. In the end, I’m sure she found a way to make the part her own, but, supposedly, he said, “If I was Belasco, I’d take her off for a weekend and I’d get it done.” And my mother said, “Well, do it.” And he did. They were at the New Amsterdam, and he shut the entire production down for a weekend.

JG: If he had lived, do you think he would have written another autobiography?

CH: I was looking through some old papers, and Kitty had annotated one of them.

Somebody had said Act One was obviously the first of many memoirs, and she made it very clear that this wasn’t true, that he never intended to write more than Act One. He always felt that anything more would’ve been superfluous. That the only interesting part was the part he told.

JG: What do you hope a young person seeing this dramatization of Act One will say?

CH: I think this story of commitment to your art is still valid, and that it is still inspiring.

Everybody who reads it, even the people who’ve never heard of it before, say, “Wow, I was so thrilled that you gave me this book to read, because it still is unimaginably worthwhile.”

JG: Is the book in print now?

CH: Actually, this production is very helpful in getting a new American edition from St. Martin’s Press on sale. I’m thrilled to be able to have worked on it a little bit, and written a foreword. The book really does move you.

And it translates from the page—the play is very moving. The theater is the love story.

And Moss’s determination is amazing. I still marvel at that.

JG: The persistent determination, yes, that’s the glory of the book.

CH: Most people think there’s luck involved, or that they’ve put something over, but it’s really that determination.

JG: Neither of your parents ever lost that.

CH: No. Kitty was always looking for a new gig. She was doing that one-woman show of hers the last year of her life, at ninety-six!

My mother took me to see Once in a Lifetime shortly after it opened on Broadway. I was around seven years old, and this was my first trip to the theater. My mother dressed me nicely and told me to behave and to sit up straight and concentrate, and I did. We went backstage at the end, and the entire company came to meet me. I remember that Daddy, who was appearing in the play, crouched down and said, “Well, darling, what did you think of the play?”

“I want to meet the man who made the train noises” was all I had to say. They should have thrown me out right then and there, but Daddy laughed and laughed. He told me that story many times. Maybe it was because of all the trouble they had with the scenes set on the train. Once in a Lifetime remains my favorite of their plays—it is the sharpest and the least sentimental.

My father loved Moss, and their friendship went on way after their writing partnership ended. I never knew exactly why they stopped writing together; I guess Moss wanted to strike out on his own, and my father always wrote with a collaborator. Even though he wasn’t enormously open or gregarious, he loved having someone in the room to bounce ideas off.

My memory of how they worked—and neither of them liked discussing their process or working habits—is that Moss roamed around the room, throwing out ideas and looking for things to eat, and my father sat and did the typing, using only two fingers. They both shared a stick-to-itiveness; they didn’t like giving up on anything, even when Daddy withdrew (temporarily) from their first play.

I suspect that my father was excellent on structure (as he was in life), and that Moss made their characters more human.

Moss was the more sentimental of the two, and was unafraid of showing it.

Moss was born into poverty; my father came from a solid middle-class Pittsburgh family.

The two men were the exact opposite of each other: Moss was open, sociable, gracious, fun, and easy to talk to. Daddy was shy and fixed in his ways. My father had no vanity; he just loved to work. I remember waiting for him at home after he won the Tony Award for directing Guys and Dolls. I wanted to see what a Tony looked like (different in those days). He didn’t have it! He had thrown it away before getting into the taxi to come home.

My father was probably closer to Moss than he was to anyone else. Perhaps Moss was the son he never had—his only son was stillborn. He was never as close to any of his other collaborators. We spent a lot of time together as families. My daughter and Moss and Kitty’s son, Chris, were born four days apart and in the same hospital. Variety headlined a story, “Kaufman and Hart Have Done It Again!” We bought a house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the late thirties, and Moss followed us there and bought a lovely house on a hill but with no grass, no trees, no garden. The land was horrible. We were dismayed. A few weeks later, Moss invited us over, and we couldn’t believe it: rolling green lawns, huge trees, flowering gardens— all looking as if they had been there forever. My father made one of his greatest quips that day as he gazed about in wonder: “It’s what God would have done if he had the money!”

Moss was the first one to reach me and tell me to come home from Boston because my father had died. He opened the door to Daddy’s house to let me in when I arrived. Moss gave his eulogy. They died within six months of each other—my father, in June, just before my birthday, and Moss just before Christmas, having already sent out all his Christmas presents!

I hope I’ve made it clear that my father loved Moss. He loved his glamour and his spirit and his openness to life—all the things my father didn’t really possess. And Moss loved my father for his discipline, his wit, his vast theatrical experience, and his shy generosity.

I like to think of myself as a keeper of my father’s flame, with great help from all of my dear friends who are related to the many other of my father’s collaborators. We are all blessed by the amazing number of schools all over the country, summer stock companies, and even theaters abroad that produced the plays. I’ve been lucky enough to see them in France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Holland, and England, and they work in every language—I can tell by the laughs.

15

A Daughter’s ReFLECTION

By Anne Kaufman

I still think this story of commitment to your art is still valid, and that it is still inspiring.

Everybody who reads it, even the people who’ve never heard of it before, say, “Wow, I was so thrilled that you gave me this book to read, because it still is unimaginably worthwhile.” return when the love scene between Alice and Tony, for instance, in You Can’t Take It with You, was over.

JG: Did George recognize this lack in himself?

CH: He had to. Here’s a guy who wouldn’t shake your hand—he washed his hands maybe a thousand times a day—who had all these OCD problems. It was hard for him to get in and out of public restaurants and rest rooms, but he was the most, next to Wilt Chamberlain, marathon womanizer in the history of New York.

JG: Oh, the diary of Mary Astor is legendary.

CH: Right. So here’s a guy who pointed at you instead of shaking your hand, but he would nail anything that moved.

JG: When your mother was on television did you think, Mommy isn’t home tonight, she’s on television.

CH: Kids want to be like everybody else.

They don’t want to be special or singled out, and Mom was not about to dress down for me. Or my classmates, or my school. So she would show up, and it would be like RuPaul coming into the classroom. Just completely inappropriately done up—for me, you know—with jewelry and the red, red lipstick and the outfits, and so forth.

But, as self-conscious as I was about her, I was also happy to get all the benefits that celebrity brought and get to go to shows. But it was also a burden. I mean, I hated it when they got special treatment and I wasn’t al-

14

lowed to stand in line in the rain like everybody else to go to the movies. Their attitude was “You go right ahead, darling. We’ll meet you inside.” And I would stand there in the rain, because it was just so embarrassing to be ushered in ahead of everyone.

JG: If your father hadn’t died so young, what would his life have been like?

CH: He was only fifty-five, and he was at the top of his game at that point. All the stuff that he was doing was kind of coming together. I think he was finally figuring out how to utilize all these things that he’d invented. You know, he invented the three turntables for Lady in the Dark, which became the three identical turntables for My Fair Lady and Camelot. I think what he was bringing to the musical theater was good story. In the old days, the libretto was just an excuse to hang some songs on. He was one of the people who were taking the musical in a direction that Stephen Sondheim followed. They shifted things so that the story was being told through the book as well; the songs were helping to move the story along. And Moss also had incredible taste; he was able to bring the musical to a whole different level. You know, I think he worked very closely with Alan on the book for My Fair Lady, and Alan credits him with finding the right tone that perfectly melded Lerner with one of Dad’s idols, Shaw.

JG: I heard that Julie Andrews was terrible in rehearsal, and that he shut down rehearsals and worked with her for twenty-four hours.

CH: Yes. JG: What did he do?

CH: He did what every director is told not to do: he pasted the part on her and he gave her line readings. In her book, Julie credits him with doing that. And my mother said, “I could hear Moss’s line readings every time she opened her mouth.”

JG: And she kept them?

CH: She was very grateful. In the end, I’m sure she found a way to make the part her own, but, supposedly, he said, “If I was Belasco, I’d take her off for a weekend and I’d get it done.” And my mother said, “Well, do it.” And he did. They were at the New Amsterdam, and he shut the entire production down for a weekend.

JG: If he had lived, do you think he would have written another autobiography?

CH: I was looking through some old papers, and Kitty had annotated one of them.

Somebody had said Act One was obviously the first of many memoirs, and she made it very clear that this wasn’t true, that he never intended to write more than Act One. He always felt that anything more would’ve been superfluous. That the only interesting part was the part he told.

JG: What do you hope a young person seeing this dramatization of Act One will say?

CH: I think this story of commitment to your art is still valid, and that it is still inspiring.

Everybody who reads it, even the people who’ve never heard of it before, say, “Wow, I was so thrilled that you gave me this book to read, because it still is unimaginably worthwhile.”

JG: Is the book in print now?

CH: Actually, this production is very helpful in getting a new American edition from St. Martin’s Press on sale. I’m thrilled to be able to have worked on it a little bit, and written a foreword. The book really does move you.

And it translates from the page—the play is very moving. The theater is the love story.

And Moss’s determination is amazing. I still marvel at that.

JG: The persistent determination, yes, that’s the glory of the book.

CH: Most people think there’s luck involved, or that they’ve put something over, but it’s really that determination.

JG: Neither of your parents ever lost that.

CH: No. Kitty was always looking for a new gig. She was doing that one-woman show of hers the last year of her life, at ninety-six!

My mother took me to see Once in a Lifetime shortly after it opened on Broadway. I was around seven years old, and this was my first trip to the theater. My mother dressed me nicely and told me to behave and to sit up straight and concentrate, and I did. We went backstage at the end, and the entire company came to meet me. I remember that Daddy, who was appearing in the play, crouched down and said, “Well, darling, what did you think of the play?”

“I want to meet the man who made the train noises” was all I had to say. They should have thrown me out right then and there, but Daddy laughed and laughed. He told me that story many times. Maybe it was because of all the trouble they had with the scenes set on the train. Once in a Lifetime remains my favorite of their plays—it is the sharpest and the least sentimental.

My father loved Moss, and their friendship went on way after their writing partnership ended. I never knew exactly why they stopped writing together; I guess Moss wanted to strike out on his own, and my father always wrote with a collaborator. Even though he wasn’t enormously open or gregarious, he loved having someone in the room to bounce ideas off.

My memory of how they worked—and neither of them liked discussing their process or working habits—is that Moss roamed around the room, throwing out ideas and looking for things to eat, and my father sat and did the typing, using only two fingers. They both shared a stick-to-itiveness; they didn’t like giving up on anything, even when Daddy withdrew (temporarily) from their first play.

I suspect that my father was excellent on structure (as he was in life), and that Moss made their characters more human.

Moss was the more sentimental of the two, and was unafraid of showing it.

Moss was born into poverty; my father came from a solid middle-class Pittsburgh family.

The two men were the exact opposite of each other: Moss was open, sociable, gracious, fun, and easy to talk to. Daddy was shy and fixed in his ways. My father had no vanity; he just loved to work. I remember waiting for him at home after he won the Tony Award for directing Guys and Dolls. I wanted to see what a Tony looked like (different in those days). He didn’t have it! He had thrown it away before getting into the taxi to come home.

My father was probably closer to Moss than he was to anyone else. Perhaps Moss was the son he never had—his only son was stillborn. He was never as close to any of his other collaborators. We spent a lot of time together as families. My daughter and Moss and Kitty’s son, Chris, were born four days apart and in the same hospital. Variety headlined a story, “Kaufman and Hart Have Done It Again!” We bought a house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the late thirties, and Moss followed us there and bought a lovely house on a hill but with no grass, no trees, no garden. The land was horrible. We were dismayed. A few weeks later, Moss invited us over, and we couldn’t believe it: rolling green lawns, huge trees, flowering gardens— all looking as if they had been there forever. My father made one of his greatest quips that day as he gazed about in wonder: “It’s what God would have done if he had the money!”

Moss was the first one to reach me and tell me to come home from Boston because my father had died. He opened the door to Daddy’s house to let me in when I arrived. Moss gave his eulogy. They died within six months of each other—my father, in June, just before my birthday, and Moss just before Christmas, having already sent out all his Christmas presents!

I hope I’ve made it clear that my father loved Moss. He loved his glamour and his spirit and his openness to life—all the things my father didn’t really possess. And Moss loved my father for his discipline, his wit, his vast theatrical experience, and his shy generosity.

I like to think of myself as a keeper of my father’s flame, with great help from all of my dear friends who are related to the many other of my father’s collaborators. We are all blessed by the amazing number of schools all over the country, summer stock companies, and even theaters abroad that produced the plays. I’ve been lucky enough to see them in France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Holland, and England, and they work in every language—I can tell by the laughs.

15

MOSS HART’S LIFE MY FAIR LADY, 1956

WINGED VICTORY, 1943

ONCE IN A LIFETIME, 1930

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, 1936

LIGHT UP THE SKY, 1948

CAMELOT, 1960

1925 As an office boy for the theatrical road producer Augustus Pitou, Hart wrote a play called, variously, The Hold-Up Man or The Beloved Bandit. It was written under a pseudonym and first produced in Chicago, where it flopped.

1925–29 Hart became “the most highly paid, most eagerly sought-after social director of the Borscht Belt Circuit,” and started directing at small theaters in New York and New Jersey.

1930 Once in a Lifetime, written with George S. Kaufman, opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, to rave reviews. In an astonishingly uncharacteristic curtain speech, Kaufman (who directed as well as played a supporting part) said, “I would like the audi16

ence to know that eighty percent of this play is Moss Hart.”

1932 Hart wrote Face the Music, a musical revue, in collaboration with Irving Berlin, and As Thousands Cheer, a popular musical satirical comedy, also with Irving Berlin.

1934 Hart wrote the book adaptation for The Great Waltz, and teamed up again with Kaufman to write Merrily We Roll Along, which told the story of a Broadway playwright in reverse chronological order.

1935 Hart collaborated with Cole Porter on Jubilee, a musical satire of British royalty.

1936 Hart teamed up with Kaufman again for one of their most successful plays, You Can’t Take It with You, for which the authors won the Pulitzer Prize.

1937 Hart and Kaufman wrote the book for I’d Rather Be Right, a provocative musical portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (no relation).

1938 Hart and Kaufman collaborated on The Fabulous Invalid, a cavalcade of the American theater.

1939 Hart and Kaufman collaborated on The American Way. Neither this production nor The Fabulous Invalid found favor with audiences.

1940 Hart and Kaufman collaborated on an Standing Room Only satirical play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, about their friend Alexander Woollcott, a critic and a radio personality.

1941 Hart and Kaufman’s final collaboration, George Washington Slept Here, was a successful and charming comedic look at the inconveniences of country life. (They both had summer homes in Bucks County.)

1941 Hart wrote the book for Lady in the Dark, based on his play I Am Listening. It was the first musical to tackle the subject of psychoanalysis. Kurt Weill wrote the music,

© The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. All rights reserved. www.alhirschfeldfoundation.com

Born October 24, 1904 he moved to the Bronx and then to Brooklyn. Hart, by his own admission, “grew up in an atmosphere of unrelieved poverty with…the grim smell of actual want always at the end of my nose.”

Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics, and Gertrude Lawrence played the main character. Directed by Hart, the musical takes place during three dream sequences, which were as elaborate (necessitating three turntables below stage level, turned by two dozen stage hands) as they were incisive.

1943 Winged Victory, Hart’s contribution to the war effort, was another large-scale extravaganza, with 250 soldiers from the Army Air Corps, who marched to rehearsal from the Upper West Side, down Broadway, in uniform. The $1 million sale of the film rights for the play, which Hart also directed, set a record for the time. Hart donated the entire proceeds to the Army Air Corps.

1946 Married Kitty Carlisle.

1947 Hart wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood film Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

1948 Hart wrote and directed Light Up the Sky, a behind-the-scenes comic valentine to the Golden Age of Broadway.

1948 His son, Christopher Hart, was born.

1950 His daughter, Catherine Hart, was born.

1952 Hart wrote the screenplay for Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye.

1941–54 Hart directed shows that were not his own productions, such as Junior Miss (1941), Dear Ruth (1944), and Anniversary Waltz (1954).

1953 Hart’s play The Climate of Eden was based on a novel by Edgar Mittelholzer, Shadows Move Among Them, about a missionary family in British Guiana.

1946 Christopher Blake, for which Hart was both the playwright and the director, was staged.

1954 Hart wrote the screenplay for A Star Is Born, starring Judy Garland.

1955 Hart wrote the screenplay for Prince of Players, starring a very young Richard Burton.

1956 Hart directed My Fair Lady, with music and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It was one of the most successful productions in the history of musical theater. Hart also helped Alan Jay Lerner craft the libretto.

1959 Act One, Hart’s autobiography, dealing with the early years of his life and the making of Once in a Lifetime, stayed on the best-seller list for forty-one weeks.

1960 Hart directed Camelot, a Lerner and Loewe musical based on T. H. White’s book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews.

Hart died on December 20, 1961, at the pinnacle of his artistic career.

17

MOSS HART’S LIFE MY FAIR LADY, 1956

WINGED VICTORY, 1943

ONCE IN A LIFETIME, 1930

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, 1936

LIGHT UP THE SKY, 1948

CAMELOT, 1960

1925 As an office boy for the theatrical road producer Augustus Pitou, Hart wrote a play called, variously, The Hold-Up Man or The Beloved Bandit. It was written under a pseudonym and first produced in Chicago, where it flopped.

1925–29 Hart became “the most highly paid, most eagerly sought-after social director of the Borscht Belt Circuit,” and started directing at small theaters in New York and New Jersey.

1930 Once in a Lifetime, written with George S. Kaufman, opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, to rave reviews. In an astonishingly uncharacteristic curtain speech, Kaufman (who directed as well as played a supporting part) said, “I would like the audi16

ence to know that eighty percent of this play is Moss Hart.”

1932 Hart wrote Face the Music, a musical revue, in collaboration with Irving Berlin, and As Thousands Cheer, a popular musical satirical comedy, also with Irving Berlin.

1934 Hart wrote the book adaptation for The Great Waltz, and teamed up again with Kaufman to write Merrily We Roll Along, which told the story of a Broadway playwright in reverse chronological order.

1935 Hart collaborated with Cole Porter on Jubilee, a musical satire of British royalty.

1936 Hart teamed up with Kaufman again for one of their most successful plays, You Can’t Take It with You, for which the authors won the Pulitzer Prize.

1937 Hart and Kaufman wrote the book for I’d Rather Be Right, a provocative musical portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (no relation).

1938 Hart and Kaufman collaborated on The Fabulous Invalid, a cavalcade of the American theater.

1939 Hart and Kaufman collaborated on The American Way. Neither this production nor The Fabulous Invalid found favor with audiences.

1940 Hart and Kaufman collaborated on an Standing Room Only satirical play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, about their friend Alexander Woollcott, a critic and a radio personality.

1941 Hart and Kaufman’s final collaboration, George Washington Slept Here, was a successful and charming comedic look at the inconveniences of country life. (They both had summer homes in Bucks County.)

1941 Hart wrote the book for Lady in the Dark, based on his play I Am Listening. It was the first musical to tackle the subject of psychoanalysis. Kurt Weill wrote the music,

© The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. All rights reserved. www.alhirschfeldfoundation.com

Born October 24, 1904 he moved to the Bronx and then to Brooklyn. Hart, by his own admission, “grew up in an atmosphere of unrelieved poverty with…the grim smell of actual want always at the end of my nose.”

Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics, and Gertrude Lawrence played the main character. Directed by Hart, the musical takes place during three dream sequences, which were as elaborate (necessitating three turntables below stage level, turned by two dozen stage hands) as they were incisive.

1943 Winged Victory, Hart’s contribution to the war effort, was another large-scale extravaganza, with 250 soldiers from the Army Air Corps, who marched to rehearsal from the Upper West Side, down Broadway, in uniform. The $1 million sale of the film rights for the play, which Hart also directed, set a record for the time. Hart donated the entire proceeds to the Army Air Corps.

1946 Married Kitty Carlisle.

1947 Hart wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood film Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

1948 Hart wrote and directed Light Up the Sky, a behind-the-scenes comic valentine to the Golden Age of Broadway.

1948 His son, Christopher Hart, was born.

1950 His daughter, Catherine Hart, was born.

1952 Hart wrote the screenplay for Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye.

1941–54 Hart directed shows that were not his own productions, such as Junior Miss (1941), Dear Ruth (1944), and Anniversary Waltz (1954).

1953 Hart’s play The Climate of Eden was based on a novel by Edgar Mittelholzer, Shadows Move Among Them, about a missionary family in British Guiana.

1946 Christopher Blake, for which Hart was both the playwright and the director, was staged.

1954 Hart wrote the screenplay for A Star Is Born, starring Judy Garland.

1955 Hart wrote the screenplay for Prince of Players, starring a very young Richard Burton.

1956 Hart directed My Fair Lady, with music and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It was one of the most successful productions in the history of musical theater. Hart also helped Alan Jay Lerner craft the libretto.

1959 Act One, Hart’s autobiography, dealing with the early years of his life and the making of Once in a Lifetime, stayed on the best-seller list for forty-one weeks.

1960 Hart directed Camelot, a Lerner and Loewe musical based on T. H. White’s book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews.

Hart died on December 20, 1961, at the pinnacle of his artistic career.

17

Here Is New York

By E. B. White

E. B. White (1899–1985), the author of such beloved children’s classics as Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, was also well known for his essays, which appeared in The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. He won countless awards, including the National Medal for Literature and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.

18

© 1949 by E.B. White. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. Photograph © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York.

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher’s office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only a hundred and twelve blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the Elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.

When I went down to lunch a few minutes ago I noticed that the man sitting next to me (about eighteen inches away along the wall) was Fred Stone. The eighteen inches were both the connection and the separation that New York provides for its inhabitants. My only connection with Fred Stone was that I saw him in The Wizard of Oz around the beginning of the century. But our waiter felt the same stimulus from being close to a man from Oz, and after Mr. Stone left the room the waiter told me that when he (the waiter) was a young man just arrived in this country and before he could understand a word of English, he had taken his girl for their first theater date to The Wizard of Oz. It was a wonderful show, the waiter recalled—a man of straw, a man of tin. Wonderful! (And still only eighteen inches away.) “Mr. Stone is a very hearty eater,” said the waiter thoughtfully, content with this fragile participation in destiny, this link with Oz....

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s highstrung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

Here Is New York

By E. B. White

E. B. White (1899–1985), the author of such beloved children’s classics as Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, was also well known for his essays, which appeared in The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. He won countless awards, including the National Medal for Literature and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.

18

© 1949 by E.B. White. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. Photograph © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York.

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher’s office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only a hundred and twelve blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the Elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.

When I went down to lunch a few minutes ago I noticed that the man sitting next to me (about eighteen inches away along the wall) was Fred Stone. The eighteen inches were both the connection and the separation that New York provides for its inhabitants. My only connection with Fred Stone was that I saw him in The Wizard of Oz around the beginning of the century. But our waiter felt the same stimulus from being close to a man from Oz, and after Mr. Stone left the room the waiter told me that when he (the waiter) was a young man just arrived in this country and before he could understand a word of English, he had taken his girl for their first theater date to The Wizard of Oz. It was a wonderful show, the waiter recalled—a man of straw, a man of tin. Wonderful! (And still only eighteen inches away.) “Mr. Stone is a very hearty eater,” said the waiter thoughtfully, content with this fragile participation in destiny, this link with Oz....

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s highstrung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

In Her Father’s Eyes:

An Interview with Catherine Hart

This winter, Catherine Hart, the daughter of Moss Hart and a doctor of internal medicine, sat down with our co-executive editor, John Guare, to share some of her recollections of her beloved father.

20

plays. I went to an all-girl’s school, Spence, so I even played Macbeth. So, I thought, I’m going to pursue this. And that summer I was reviewed by Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe. I got the worst notices any actress has ever gotten, but even before the review I had decided that I really had absolutely no talent whatsoever, and if I wanted to do something with my life I had to find a different profession. And, at that point, I was segueing into the health field.

When I told my mother that I was going into medicine, she was shocked. She said, “What? Medical school?” She had no idea that I’d chosen this path. But I had worked for a little bit at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, and I’d done some psychology work.

JG: Did you have fantasies that you could have saved your father?

CH: I never thought that, had I been a physician at the time, I could have made a difference. But now, because the landscape of medicine and preventative medicine and being proactive about cardiac health is so different—I mean, it exists now, which it didn’t before—when patients give me their histories I often wonder what it would’ve been like had he lived another fifteen or twenty years.

JG: Well, he wouldn’t have been Moss Hart.

Photograph courtesy of Catherine Hart.

John Guare: Did you and Chris have different childhoods?

Catherine Hart: Completely different. I think we had two completely different sets of parents. Our memories are different, our perceptions are different. We can remember the same moment and it’ll be as if he’s describing something completely different.

JG: Were you closer to your mother or your father?

CH: I had a lifetime with my mother and a very short time with Moss. I have little snippets of memories of him, but I also have lots of memories that have been told to me about him, which take up almost more emotional space than the experience I had growing up with him.

JG: When did you first realize that your parents had this very public life?

CH: I was probably in my teens. It was normal to me that Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Adolph Green, and Bennett Cerf would come over; these were my parents’ friends. We would go to Cerf’s house in Mount Kisco and hang out with Jonathan and Christopher Cerf.

JG: Did you play dress-up with your mother?

CH: No. No, she wasn’t that kind of mother.

(Laughter) JG: When she was out, would you go into her closet and put on her dresses?

CH: No, no. I was not that kind of girl. When I was getting married, I was very busy doing my medical training and she went to the store to look at wedding dresses for me and tried one on and bought it. She called me after the fact and said, “Darling, I found the perfect dress. I tried it on. It fits.”

JG: And you wore it?

CH: I wore it, yes. Dutifully.

JG: Did you like it?

CH: It was okay, but I probably would’ve bought something else. (Laughter) JG: Was becoming a doctor an act of rebellion?

CH: No, not at all. I think it was a way to distinguish myself from my family, but in a positive, “I want my own identity and my own space” kind of way. Also, one summer, when I was about twenty, I went on tour with my mother in summer stock and it was a great lark. I joined Equity. I played her daughter onstage.

In high school, I thought, growing up in my family, that acting was the most exciting, the most interesting, the most vibrant, the only thing to do. So I played in all the

He belongs to that time. I was always fascinated by your mother’s saying that she never understood Moss’s love of Long Beach Island.

CH: Well, all those years at the beach were hard for Kitty. I think it was hard for her because she was expected to entertain in the manner in which you entertain in the city. And, back then, on Long Beach Island there was nothing. It was this little spit of a barrier island, eighteen miles with nothing.

And she was expected to entertain the Rodgers, and the Cerfs, and the Hornblowers, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. I remember there was one weekend they came and played some of My Fair Lady for the first time, so Moss and Kitty could hear it. She was expected to kind of weave something out of nothing. So she really worked hard those summers. I, as a kid, loved it. And as an adult, when my husband and I got married and we were looking for places to go for weekends, we went back to Long Beach Island. We went back to the southern end of the beach, and we tried to find the house.

But it had, just the summer before, been razed. That was so sad not to have been able to see the old house. But I remember it so well. It was this huge house with plate-glass windows facing the ocean. People would walk down to the beach and say, “That’s where Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle live,” and point at us. Then I was embarrassed, thinking, Go away, go away. We’re just a normal household. But I loved it so much that my husband and I ended up going down summer after summer, and eventually bought a house on Long Beach Island, in 1992. Our kids have grown up there. And Kitty would come as a guest and grew to love it.

JG: Were you aware of the trajectory of your father’s life?

CH: Yes. JG: Would he tell you about it?

CH: A little bit. Really, I learned more about it when I read Act One. JG: How old were you when you first read it?

CH: It was toward the end of high school.

And that was the first time that I really had a sense of where he had come from. What I saw, and what I think they probably wanted me to see, because I didn’t know much about the struggles, was how much he loved being who he was, being able to be larger than life and as grand as he was, and as generous. I didn’t see the depression and the struggle.

JG: Do you have any memories from when the book was published?

CH: He called us the Lear Kids (as in King Lear).

JG: No! The Lear Kids?

CH: The Lear Kids. Well, he asked Bennett Cerf—one of the founders of Random House—how much he thought the book was going to make. And Bennett said, “Well, you know, theatrical memoirs don’t usually sell that well.” So Dad said, “Well, I’m going to give all the copyrights to Chris and Cathy.”

Then, of course, it became a huge success, and they sold the film rights and it made a boatload of money, and every time he saw Bennett he’d say, “Bennett, I can’t believe it. You let me give all the money to these kids. I’m calling them the Lear Kids; they’re getting all the dough!”

Oh, and there was a big book party for Act One. And, of course, because Moss was a writer and director, he took it under his wing and basically wrote and directed it. It was held at a restaurant called Mamma Leone’s, and Moss wrote these skits—there was one in which Moss, Adolph Green, Bennett Cerf, and Martin Gabel dressed in cleaning-lady outfits and they all had these little ditties about what was found in the wastepaper baskets of Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Little, Brown. (Laughter) JG: Did the book surprise you in any way when you read it?

CH: In some ways it seemed like it was about someone else, it wasn’t really my father. The memories I had of him were of spending the summers with him on the beach; I didn’t really know him in his professional life at all. I’ve asked my kids—I have a twentysix-year-old son and a twenty-four-year-old daughter—how they felt about the book, and they both said that even though it was directed toward the theater, you could apply it to anything. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about the book. It’s very, very specific in terms of his trajectory and his path, but I think it’s universal in terms of struggle and going after what you feel is right for you and just going forward.

JG: Did you have any special time with your father?

CH: I must have, but I don’t recall. One of the things that people say about him is how he would imbue people with a personality that they might not have had otherwise.

My mother’s mother was—she probably had some specific psychiatric diagnosis—really pretty crazy, and kind of mean and very difficult for my mother. Very domineering. Her name was Hortense, but my father renamed her Hydrangea, and took her on and made her this eccentric, wonderful, interesting, funny personality, and she became that person for him.

The winter just before he died, I was eleven, and we were chatting before dinner and he asked me something about the day and I started telling him this story and he started laughing and bringing me out more in the story. And as I was telling him this I really felt, because of the way he was responding to me, that I could tell a story and I was funny. I was seeing myself reflected in his vision, and it was lovely.

JG: That’s very profound.

CH: I wish I had had more of those memories.

JG: After he died, was he kept alive for you in any way?

CH: Very much so. People would regale me with stories, and Kitty talked about him all the time. She had many beaus on the beau tree, but he was it as far as she was concerned. So I feel like, growing up, he was really a presence in our lives.

JG: Do you think about what your relationship would have been?

CH: I do, I do. You know, I hope he would’ve been...I’m teary...well, I think he would’ve been proud.

JG: Do your kids ask about your parents?

CH: Well, they knew Kitty quite well, and loved her. She was a wonderful grandparent.

Wonderful. A very strict parent. Very strict.

JG: In what way?

CH: She was a wonderful parent but, you know, you did things right and she was exacting. She was a better parent than her mother was. But she was a much better grandparent in terms of just being kind of looser.

JG: Well, they must’ve been afraid, knowing what happens to child actors.

CH: Oh, absolutely. When I was in high school, or even younger, I must’ve said, at one point, “I want to become an actor,” though back then you said actress, and they both said, “You can do whatever you want, but you need to finish high school, go to college, and then decide what you want to do. And if you still, at the end of that, want to go into the theater, go ahead. But you need your education.” Because they knew all those 21

In Her Father’s Eyes:

An Interview with Catherine Hart

This winter, Catherine Hart, the daughter of Moss Hart and a doctor of internal medicine, sat down with our co-executive editor, John Guare, to share some of her recollections of her beloved father.

20

plays. I went to an all-girl’s school, Spence, so I even played Macbeth. So, I thought, I’m going to pursue this. And that summer I was reviewed by Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe. I got the worst notices any actress has ever gotten, but even before the review I had decided that I really had absolutely no talent whatsoever, and if I wanted to do something with my life I had to find a different profession. And, at that point, I was segueing into the health field.

When I told my mother that I was going into medicine, she was shocked. She said, “What? Medical school?” She had no idea that I’d chosen this path. But I had worked for a little bit at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, and I’d done some psychology work.

JG: Did you have fantasies that you could have saved your father?

CH: I never thought that, had I been a physician at the time, I could have made a difference. But now, because the landscape of medicine and preventative medicine and being proactive about cardiac health is so different—I mean, it exists now, which it didn’t before—when patients give me their histories I often wonder what it would’ve been like had he lived another fifteen or twenty years.

JG: Well, he wouldn’t have been Moss Hart.

Photograph courtesy of Catherine Hart.

John Guare: Did you and Chris have different childhoods?

Catherine Hart: Completely different. I think we had two completely different sets of parents. Our memories are different, our perceptions are different. We can remember the same moment and it’ll be as if he’s describing something completely different.

JG: Were you closer to your mother or your father?

CH: I had a lifetime with my mother and a very short time with Moss. I have little snippets of memories of him, but I also have lots of memories that have been told to me about him, which take up almost more emotional space than the experience I had growing up with him.

JG: When did you first realize that your parents had this very public life?

CH: I was probably in my teens. It was normal to me that Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Adolph Green, and Bennett Cerf would come over; these were my parents’ friends. We would go to Cerf’s house in Mount Kisco and hang out with Jonathan and Christopher Cerf.

JG: Did you play dress-up with your mother?

CH: No. No, she wasn’t that kind of mother.

(Laughter) JG: When she was out, would you go into her closet and put on her dresses?

CH: No, no. I was not that kind of girl. When I was getting married, I was very busy doing my medical training and she went to the store to look at wedding dresses for me and tried one on and bought it. She called me after the fact and said, “Darling, I found the perfect dress. I tried it on. It fits.”

JG: And you wore it?

CH: I wore it, yes. Dutifully.

JG: Did you like it?

CH: It was okay, but I probably would’ve bought something else. (Laughter) JG: Was becoming a doctor an act of rebellion?

CH: No, not at all. I think it was a way to distinguish myself from my family, but in a positive, “I want my own identity and my own space” kind of way. Also, one summer, when I was about twenty, I went on tour with my mother in summer stock and it was a great lark. I joined Equity. I played her daughter onstage.

In high school, I thought, growing up in my family, that acting was the most exciting, the most interesting, the most vibrant, the only thing to do. So I played in all the

He belongs to that time. I was always fascinated by your mother’s saying that she never understood Moss’s love of Long Beach Island.

CH: Well, all those years at the beach were hard for Kitty. I think it was hard for her because she was expected to entertain in the manner in which you entertain in the city. And, back then, on Long Beach Island there was nothing. It was this little spit of a barrier island, eighteen miles with nothing.

And she was expected to entertain the Rodgers, and the Cerfs, and the Hornblowers, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. I remember there was one weekend they came and played some of My Fair Lady for the first time, so Moss and Kitty could hear it. She was expected to kind of weave something out of nothing. So she really worked hard those summers. I, as a kid, loved it. And as an adult, when my husband and I got married and we were looking for places to go for weekends, we went back to Long Beach Island. We went back to the southern end of the beach, and we tried to find the house.

But it had, just the summer before, been razed. That was so sad not to have been able to see the old house. But I remember it so well. It was this huge house with plate-glass windows facing the ocean. People would walk down to the beach and say, “That’s where Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle live,” and point at us. Then I was embarrassed, thinking, Go away, go away. We’re just a normal household. But I loved it so much that my husband and I ended up going down summer after summer, and eventually bought a house on Long Beach Island, in 1992. Our kids have grown up there. And Kitty would come as a guest and grew to love it.

JG: Were you aware of the trajectory of your father’s life?

CH: Yes. JG: Would he tell you about it?

CH: A little bit. Really, I learned more about it when I read Act One. JG: How old were you when you first read it?

CH: It was toward the end of high school.

And that was the first time that I really had a sense of where he had come from. What I saw, and what I think they probably wanted me to see, because I didn’t know much about the struggles, was how much he loved being who he was, being able to be larger than life and as grand as he was, and as generous. I didn’t see the depression and the struggle.

JG: Do you have any memories from when the book was published?

CH: He called us the Lear Kids (as in King Lear).

JG: No! The Lear Kids?

CH: The Lear Kids. Well, he asked Bennett Cerf—one of the founders of Random House—how much he thought the book was going to make. And Bennett said, “Well, you know, theatrical memoirs don’t usually sell that well.” So Dad said, “Well, I’m going to give all the copyrights to Chris and Cathy.”

Then, of course, it became a huge success, and they sold the film rights and it made a boatload of money, and every time he saw Bennett he’d say, “Bennett, I can’t believe it. You let me give all the money to these kids. I’m calling them the Lear Kids; they’re getting all the dough!”

Oh, and there was a big book party for Act One. And, of course, because Moss was a writer and director, he took it under his wing and basically wrote and directed it. It was held at a restaurant called Mamma Leone’s, and Moss wrote these skits—there was one in which Moss, Adolph Green, Bennett Cerf, and Martin Gabel dressed in cleaning-lady outfits and they all had these little ditties about what was found in the wastepaper baskets of Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Little, Brown. (Laughter) JG: Did the book surprise you in any way when you read it?

CH: In some ways it seemed like it was about someone else, it wasn’t really my father. The memories I had of him were of spending the summers with him on the beach; I didn’t really know him in his professional life at all. I’ve asked my kids—I have a twentysix-year-old son and a twenty-four-year-old daughter—how they felt about the book, and they both said that even though it was directed toward the theater, you could apply it to anything. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about the book. It’s very, very specific in terms of his trajectory and his path, but I think it’s universal in terms of struggle and going after what you feel is right for you and just going forward.

JG: Did you have any special time with your father?

CH: I must have, but I don’t recall. One of the things that people say about him is how he would imbue people with a personality that they might not have had otherwise.

My mother’s mother was—she probably had some specific psychiatric diagnosis—really pretty crazy, and kind of mean and very difficult for my mother. Very domineering. Her name was Hortense, but my father renamed her Hydrangea, and took her on and made her this eccentric, wonderful, interesting, funny personality, and she became that person for him.

The winter just before he died, I was eleven, and we were chatting before dinner and he asked me something about the day and I started telling him this story and he started laughing and bringing me out more in the story. And as I was telling him this I really felt, because of the way he was responding to me, that I could tell a story and I was funny. I was seeing myself reflected in his vision, and it was lovely.

JG: That’s very profound.

CH: I wish I had had more of those memories.

JG: After he died, was he kept alive for you in any way?

CH: Very much so. People would regale me with stories, and Kitty talked about him all the time. She had many beaus on the beau tree, but he was it as far as she was concerned. So I feel like, growing up, he was really a presence in our lives.

JG: Do you think about what your relationship would have been?

CH: I do, I do. You know, I hope he would’ve been...I’m teary...well, I think he would’ve been proud.

JG: Do your kids ask about your parents?

CH: Well, they knew Kitty quite well, and loved her. She was a wonderful grandparent.

Wonderful. A very strict parent. Very strict.

JG: In what way?

CH: She was a wonderful parent but, you know, you did things right and she was exacting. She was a better parent than her mother was. But she was a much better grandparent in terms of just being kind of looser.

JG: Well, they must’ve been afraid, knowing what happens to child actors.

CH: Oh, absolutely. When I was in high school, or even younger, I must’ve said, at one point, “I want to become an actor,” though back then you said actress, and they both said, “You can do whatever you want, but you need to finish high school, go to college, and then decide what you want to do. And if you still, at the end of that, want to go into the theater, go ahead. But you need your education.” Because they knew all those 21

ONE DAY SOON

By Damaras Obi

child actors who had grown up to have terrible issues.

I remember them together having a wonderful relationship. I remember seeing them and never feeling that they had any issues at all. You know, we had dinners together most evenings, even though they went out a lot. I remember so many dinners where it was just the four of us….And the butler and the cook and the nanny. But in the dining room it was just us.

JG: Chris told me that you had a different nanny every year, so you wouldn’t grow attached to her.

CH: They did come and go. I don’t know why that was.

JG: Did you go to the show rehearsals?

CH: I remember Camelot. I remember Robert Goulet and Richard Burton and being quite enamored, even at eight or nine. I don’t remember Moss at rehearsal. I just remember being there and thinking, at the time, that this was the most fascinating, wonderful, magical thing to do.

JG: What was your idea of what Moss did in his office?

CH: At the time, I just knew that was where Daddy went to work. And that it was absolutely verboten to go in there. I mean, you had to have your head cut off and be holding it in your hands to be able to go in the room.

JG: What would you ask your father if you could see him today?

CH: I’d like to know what his perceptions of his moods were.

JG: Were you aware of the darkness?

CH: No. Not at all. He never showed that.

JG: Did they frighten Kitty?

CH: Yes, I think they did. I think she felt that she didn’t have any handle on it; she didn’t know how to help him.

JG: It was an old-fashioned heart attack that killed him? Was this during Camelot?

CH: No, that was his second heart attack.

He was in Toronto, in the hotel. And Kitty and Chris and I were coming up to see him.

We’re in a cab, and Chris is in the front seat and he’s sort of fiddling with the radio, and we hear something about Hart, and that’s all we hear. And my mother says, “Flip back to that station,” and Chris tries to find the station, but we can’t find anything more about it—just all the baseball numbers. Then we get to the hotel, we go up to the floor that he’s on. It’s a long hallway and his room is at the very end of this long hallway, and the

22

door is open and there are a lot of people in his hotel suite sort of peeling out into the hallway. And I just remember my mother running down this long hallway and being told that he had already been taken to the hospital and that he had had a heart attack.

I don’t remember anything else about that trip. That’s it. Done. (Snaps) Boom.

It was the third heart attack that killed him. During the first two he had pain in his jaw, sometimes a symptom of a heart attack.

On the morning he died, it was about seven-thirty, and he was in the driveway in Palm Springs going to the dentist because he had

I started telling him this story and he started laughing and bringing me out more in the story. And as I was telling him this I really felt, because of the way he was responding to me, that I could tell a story and I was funny. I was seeing myself reflected in his vision, and it was lovely. another toothache. It was just before Christmas, December twentieth. Chris was home from boarding school. Moss didn’t even get to the car. He collapsed in the driveway. And he was dead by the time they brought him into the living room. They called the doctor.

The doctor came to the house. . . .

I remember hearing some strange voices in the living room. I started to feel uneasy, because nobody came into the house that early in the morning. I was in my bedroom, and the only thing I remember is my mother coming in and sitting on the bed with me, and she said, “Daddy’s gone.” And it wasn’t too specific, but I got it. I knew that something terrible had happened.

JG: Were you worried after the first two heart attacks? Were you old enough to be afraid that he would die?

CH: No, I really wasn’t. I don’t really think I knew that he had been sick. That’s how much they protected us.

JG: What do you hope the outcome of this production will be?

CH: My hope is that this will present him to a new generation. My kids know him, obvi-

ously, and their friends probably do, and if they don’t they shouldn’t be their friends.

(Laughter) JG: Even though the world is different, that perseverance he possessed—to just keep doing the thing you love until something gives.

CH: That’s right. The humanity is the same.

The individual striving for something that they have real passion about, that they need to make happen. I think that’s universal.

One of the things that I do remember about him is his joy in his own success. He was always very upbeat and happy about things that were occurring in his life. Bennett Cerf would call up and read the fan mail to Moss after Act One came out. And Moss had the same joy whether it was Sinclair Lewis or a lady in Wichita. Once, they were walking down the street and they saw an older man trudging up Madison Avenue, and he had Act One tucked under his arm, and Moss said, “Sir, sir! I’m the man who wrote that. I wrote that!” And he stopped him and he autographed it right there. And the man walked on, beaming.

JG: Do you have other memories of him?

CH: I remember that he took me to Peter Pan, with Mary Martin. We went backstage to see Mary and we passed Edna Ferber, also there to say hello to Mary, in the corridor. He loved Edna, but there were lots of times when they would battle, and this was during one of the battles. I didn’t really know her, but I felt that there was something that happened as they passed. I asked, “Daddy, who’s that?” And he turned and looked at me, and he pointed. He said, “That, my sweet girl, is Captain Hook!” in a very loud voice. (Laughter) There was another moment I remember—I was eleven years old and a horse lover, and they gave me my own horse and I was in love, love, love with this horse I named Chester. And Moss used to say that if I ever met a man named Chester I’d throw a horse blanket over him and marry him.

(Laughter) JG: When you fell and scraped your knee or were unhappy about a school mark, did he comfort you?

CH: I don’t remember that. I remember feeling completely and totally loved by him.

JG: It’s interesting, having memories as a child who lost your father and having memories that are shared by so many other people.

CH: That’s okay. I’m generous. I’m willing to share, as long as they appreciate him.

Act One is a classic tale of making it in New York and an inspiring story about a young man’s deep passion for theater, so we went to the next generation of young people dreaming about a life in the arts. Here is an essay from Damaras Obi, an eleventh-grade student at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

I smiled and laughed, emitting all the confidence everyone expected to see. I was never questioned. Instead, I was labeled arrogant, intimidating, but these were just masks I was given to wear. Until one day the masks went up in flames. There were screams and cries. There was fear. I am still haunted, and I often wonder, without the fire, where would I be in life?

As I watched my mom scream from a third-story window, everything clicked.

It was like a picture being put into perspective. So I started to write. When I picked up a pen, all my thoughts flowed. Writing became a form of expression, an open door for release. All my pain disappeared when characters spoke. I could solve their problems.

After the fire, I lost everything I’d ever known. My family moved into a shelter.

My mother began to receive welfare. Having no privacy, no home, made it hard to hope for anything better. My parents became my strongholds. While they held me, I grappled to find footing, to learn how to stand. During that year of turmoil, I wrote stories and poems engraved with my desire to perform, to speak to people about life. I acquired this need to accomplish something, to touch someone with pictures and words.

That year I wrote a book, I wasn’t labeled, I tried being me. I became enticed by film. I auditioned for high schools that catered to the arts, and LaGuardia embraced me. I know now that my struggles don’t make me weak. If anything, they give me strength. I wake up every day with my mission: to perform, to send the world a message. I smile every day, because it’s not over, and the world hasn’t met me yet.

But one day soon, they will.

ONE DAY SOON

By Damaras Obi

child actors who had grown up to have terrible issues.

I remember them together having a wonderful relationship. I remember seeing them and never feeling that they had any issues at all. You know, we had dinners together most evenings, even though they went out a lot. I remember so many dinners where it was just the four of us….And the butler and the cook and the nanny. But in the dining room it was just us.

JG: Chris told me that you had a different nanny every year, so you wouldn’t grow attached to her.

CH: They did come and go. I don’t know why that was.

JG: Did you go to the show rehearsals?

CH: I remember Camelot. I remember Robert Goulet and Richard Burton and being quite enamored, even at eight or nine. I don’t remember Moss at rehearsal. I just remember being there and thinking, at the time, that this was the most fascinating, wonderful, magical thing to do.

JG: What was your idea of what Moss did in his office?

CH: At the time, I just knew that was where Daddy went to work. And that it was absolutely verboten to go in there. I mean, you had to have your head cut off and be holding it in your hands to be able to go in the room.

JG: What would you ask your father if you could see him today?

CH: I’d like to know what his perceptions of his moods were.

JG: Were you aware of the darkness?

CH: No. Not at all. He never showed that.

JG: Did they frighten Kitty?

CH: Yes, I think they did. I think she felt that she didn’t have any handle on it; she didn’t know how to help him.

JG: It was an old-fashioned heart attack that killed him? Was this during Camelot?

CH: No, that was his second heart attack.

He was in Toronto, in the hotel. And Kitty and Chris and I were coming up to see him.

We’re in a cab, and Chris is in the front seat and he’s sort of fiddling with the radio, and we hear something about Hart, and that’s all we hear. And my mother says, “Flip back to that station,” and Chris tries to find the station, but we can’t find anything more about it—just all the baseball numbers. Then we get to the hotel, we go up to the floor that he’s on. It’s a long hallway and his room is at the very end of this long hallway, and the

22

door is open and there are a lot of people in his hotel suite sort of peeling out into the hallway. And I just remember my mother running down this long hallway and being told that he had already been taken to the hospital and that he had had a heart attack.

I don’t remember anything else about that trip. That’s it. Done. (Snaps) Boom.

It was the third heart attack that killed him. During the first two he had pain in his jaw, sometimes a symptom of a heart attack.

On the morning he died, it was about seven-thirty, and he was in the driveway in Palm Springs going to the dentist because he had

I started telling him this story and he started laughing and bringing me out more in the story. And as I was telling him this I really felt, because of the way he was responding to me, that I could tell a story and I was funny. I was seeing myself reflected in his vision, and it was lovely. another toothache. It was just before Christmas, December twentieth. Chris was home from boarding school. Moss didn’t even get to the car. He collapsed in the driveway. And he was dead by the time they brought him into the living room. They called the doctor.

The doctor came to the house. . . .

I remember hearing some strange voices in the living room. I started to feel uneasy, because nobody came into the house that early in the morning. I was in my bedroom, and the only thing I remember is my mother coming in and sitting on the bed with me, and she said, “Daddy’s gone.” And it wasn’t too specific, but I got it. I knew that something terrible had happened.

JG: Were you worried after the first two heart attacks? Were you old enough to be afraid that he would die?

CH: No, I really wasn’t. I don’t really think I knew that he had been sick. That’s how much they protected us.

JG: What do you hope the outcome of this production will be?

CH: My hope is that this will present him to a new generation. My kids know him, obvi-

ously, and their friends probably do, and if they don’t they shouldn’t be their friends.

(Laughter) JG: Even though the world is different, that perseverance he possessed—to just keep doing the thing you love until something gives.

CH: That’s right. The humanity is the same.

The individual striving for something that they have real passion about, that they need to make happen. I think that’s universal.

One of the things that I do remember about him is his joy in his own success. He was always very upbeat and happy about things that were occurring in his life. Bennett Cerf would call up and read the fan mail to Moss after Act One came out. And Moss had the same joy whether it was Sinclair Lewis or a lady in Wichita. Once, they were walking down the street and they saw an older man trudging up Madison Avenue, and he had Act One tucked under his arm, and Moss said, “Sir, sir! I’m the man who wrote that. I wrote that!” And he stopped him and he autographed it right there. And the man walked on, beaming.

JG: Do you have other memories of him?

CH: I remember that he took me to Peter Pan, with Mary Martin. We went backstage to see Mary and we passed Edna Ferber, also there to say hello to Mary, in the corridor. He loved Edna, but there were lots of times when they would battle, and this was during one of the battles. I didn’t really know her, but I felt that there was something that happened as they passed. I asked, “Daddy, who’s that?” And he turned and looked at me, and he pointed. He said, “That, my sweet girl, is Captain Hook!” in a very loud voice. (Laughter) There was another moment I remember—I was eleven years old and a horse lover, and they gave me my own horse and I was in love, love, love with this horse I named Chester. And Moss used to say that if I ever met a man named Chester I’d throw a horse blanket over him and marry him.

(Laughter) JG: When you fell and scraped your knee or were unhappy about a school mark, did he comfort you?

CH: I don’t remember that. I remember feeling completely and totally loved by him.

JG: It’s interesting, having memories as a child who lost your father and having memories that are shared by so many other people.

CH: That’s okay. I’m generous. I’m willing to share, as long as they appreciate him.

Act One is a classic tale of making it in New York and an inspiring story about a young man’s deep passion for theater, so we went to the next generation of young people dreaming about a life in the arts. Here is an essay from Damaras Obi, an eleventh-grade student at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

I smiled and laughed, emitting all the confidence everyone expected to see. I was never questioned. Instead, I was labeled arrogant, intimidating, but these were just masks I was given to wear. Until one day the masks went up in flames. There were screams and cries. There was fear. I am still haunted, and I often wonder, without the fire, where would I be in life?

As I watched my mom scream from a third-story window, everything clicked.

It was like a picture being put into perspective. So I started to write. When I picked up a pen, all my thoughts flowed. Writing became a form of expression, an open door for release. All my pain disappeared when characters spoke. I could solve their problems.

After the fire, I lost everything I’d ever known. My family moved into a shelter.

My mother began to receive welfare. Having no privacy, no home, made it hard to hope for anything better. My parents became my strongholds. While they held me, I grappled to find footing, to learn how to stand. During that year of turmoil, I wrote stories and poems engraved with my desire to perform, to speak to people about life. I acquired this need to accomplish something, to touch someone with pictures and words.

That year I wrote a book, I wasn’t labeled, I tried being me. I became enticed by film. I auditioned for high schools that catered to the arts, and LaGuardia embraced me. I know now that my struggles don’t make me weak. If anything, they give me strength. I wake up every day with my mission: to perform, to send the world a message. I smile every day, because it’s not over, and the world hasn’t met me yet.

But one day soon, they will.