A Sound of Trumpets

"Playwriting," says Moss Hart, "like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession." On the face of it, Playwright Hart has little to be humble about. As co-author of such comedy classics as The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You, as librettist of Lady in the Dark and director of My Fair Lady, he will hold top billing in the American popular theater for a long time to come. But he has not had a play of his own on Broadway since the earnest, charming Climate of Eden in 1952. (There were those who loved it, but it flopped.) To get over that humiliation, Playwright Hart began to jot down his recollections. With great skill and an understanding gentleness toward stage folk that all good men harbor for children and the feebleminded, Moss Hart has written one of the best memoirs of this or any other theatrical generation.

Though it was written to get away from playwriting. Act One (Random House; $5) in a sense is still a play. It is a collection of fascinating characters whom the author parades before the footlights of his wit and warmth. There is first of all the character who dominated Moss Hart's poverty-ridden Bronx childhood: a grandfather, whom a casual neighbor might well have regarded as simply an embittered, ill-tempered old cigar maker, pathetically attached to his past friendship with the great labor leader, Sam Gompers. But in Moss Hart's telling, he becomes "an Everest of Victorian tyranny," the black sheep of a wealthy English-Jewish family, who married beneath his station--his wife could neither read nor write. Of an evening in their shabby flat, he would read Dickens to the illiterate woman--and punish her with awful silence if something displeased him.

Mad Cossack. Then there was Aunt Kate, who seemed to some merely an aging spinster, slightly touched in the head. But on Moss Hart's stage she emerges as a kind of Bronx Blanche DuBois, a woman defying her mean surroundings by living in a world of her own with smelling salts and trailing dresses and a stubborn refusal to go to work "no matter how needy the rest of the family might be. She was "a touching combination of the sane and the ludicrous along with some secret splendor within herself." Come debt or hunger, she would go to the theater, taking her nephew with her, and when there wasn't even a quarter for the gas meter, she would read her novels by candlelight, teaching Moss that the mind can be its own grand and inviolable theater.

Then there was Mr. Axeler, the "Mad Cossack" of the Half Moon Country Club --one of the summer camps for manhunting secretaries and girl-hunting clerks in which young Moss served six miserable years as "social director" and resident clown. The sleepless grind of "making fun" for the guests--an occupation also survived by Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Herman Wouk and dozens of others--consisted of reciting Shakespeare by the campfire, impersonating Fanny Brice, staging a full-length musical each week, supervising endless Spanish Fiestas and Greenwich Village Frolics. Mr. Axeler's establishment in Vermont was really more a concentration than a summer camp, with the red-shirted boss terrorizing the staff from horseback and always galloping well out of reach when it came time to meet the payroll. The Mad Cossack even bamboozled his social director out of a wardrobe, so that Hart was reduced to appearing in the dining hall dressed in the camp theater's flyblown, sweat-stained costumes, impersonating Robert E. Lee or Davy Crockett or Napoleon, telling jokes while his stomach curdled with rage and embarrassment.

Legendary Lancelot. There are other characters--Augustus Pitou, the "King of the One-Night Stands," for whom Office Boy Hart wrote his first play at the rate of one act a night; legendary, spiteful Producer Jed Harris, who received Hart while standing stark naked in his hotel suite. But the greatest of all is probably Playwright George S. Kaufman, legendary Lancelot of the Algonquin Round Table. When Kaufman agreed to collaborate with the unknown young Hart on Once in a Lifetime, there started a gentle comedy of errors almost as funny as the play itself. If Kaufman hated anything, it was cigar smoke and emotion; throughout their working sessions Hart puffed huge cigars and kept insisting on thanking his benefactor, not understanding why Kaufman kept rushing to the bathroom for refuge. On the other hand, Hart was a compulsive eater (success has since cured him of the affliction), but was too shy to admit his ravenous hunger; while Kaufman operated on their scripts with innumerable scalpel-sharp pencils, Hart would nearly faint on dainty watercress sandwiches or sickening fudge cooked up by the great playwright himself.

While Author Hart guides his characters through their scenes, he also manages some fascinating asides. There is Hart's quick test of tryout success (when a play is doing well, room service is always prompt, but when it is in trouble, the waiters are always late and the sandwiches soggy); there is Hart's law for the aspiring director (the less sure he is of himself, the tougher he must be with the cast). Hart knows how to interpret all the sounds made by an audience: the implications of their coughs, the degrees of their laughter, the intensity of their applause--and he also knows that "there is never again the sound of trumpets like the sound of the New York opening-night audience giving a play its unreserved approval." After all the agonies of the road, that is what happened with Once in a Lifetime, and then the beggar-playwright, rattling his cup for a kind word, was transformed into a maharajah. The day after Once in a Lifetime opened, Moss Hart staged a melodramatic epilogue: he rushed his family out of their cheap apartment, forcing them to leave the very plates on the table and the toothbrushes in their racks, and moved them to a posh Manhattan hotel; along the way, in a driving rain, he stopped at the Music Box theater, where people were lining up at the box office, and drew a $500 advance.

Almost anybody watching that scene could hear the trumpets.

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