Published in 1959, Moss Hart’s glorious memoir, Act One, has been a lasting inspiration for theater buffs, as well as a 1963 movie starring George Hamilton and Jason Robards. Now it’s being reincarnated as a Broadway play. But the legendary playwright-director’s life had a much darker finale.
From the Everett Collection; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark.
Not since the critic John Simon shuffled off into semi-retirement to give his fangs a long-overdue rest has Broadway enjoyed a more hissable villain than the New York Post’s theater columnist Michael Riedel, who feasts on rumors of major productions about to go under like a vulture wearing a dinner bib. Like Simon, Riedel relishes playing up his demon-barber reputation for melodramatic effect (the payoff: cameos as his wicked self on the NBC series Smash, the musical drama about two dessert toppings battling for the role of Marilyn Monroe), and, like Simon, he likes to reveal a soft spot now and then, just to prove he isn’t all snake venom. On July 17, Riedel reported that the acclaimed writer and director James Lapine was adapting Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, for the stage, news which made Riedel’s peach-pit heart dance a merry jig. Lapine, a scenarist known best for his collaborations with composer Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George), directed a workshop reading of his adaptation of Act One on Martha’s Vineyard in July. The adaptation is being developed by the Vineyard Arts Project, and among those taking part in the public readings were a pair of primetime-TV familiars, Debra Monk (Damages, Grey’s Anatomy) and Tony Shalhoub (who polished a lot of doorknobs as the O.C.D. detective on Monk). Riedel: “Ask anybody who works in show business to name his favorite book about the theater, and I’ll lay you 10-to-1 the answer will be Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One.” Riedel himself was besotted with the book, gulping it down in one reading and later doing a holy tour of the major stops in Hart’s story, including the “mecca of meccas,” George S. Kaufman’s town house at 158 East 63rd Street, where a creative bromance was born. A best-seller when it was published in 1959 and an inspirational fable for theater buffs ever since, Act One is the Song of Bernadette of Broadway memoirs, the hillside vision of the Virgin Mary replaced by the bathing light of the theater marquee at dusk, the magic hour before showtime. Many a young man and woman have paused and drunk in that glow, dreaming of crowning success and being catapulted into the stars, but to Moss Hart it actually happened. Overnight, he turned into money, the ring of the box-office cash registers tolling like chapel bells.
Born in 1904, the young Moss Hart was the sole over-achiever in a household where a cloud of failure and poverty hung low. With his father usually unemployed (and not just because of the Depression—he was a cigar-maker who found himself obsolete after the invention of the mechanical cigar roller), the family’s financial well-being rode largely on Moss’s back. It put a hustle in his step. He dropped out of school at age 12 and worked as a stockroom boy, then as an entertainment director in the Catskills, a fine training ground for a future career in show business and aggravation. Having gotten the theater bug from his Aunt Kate, who took him to matinees when he was a child (she later lost her mental bearings, turning pyromaniac), he acted in, wrote, and directed plays, his first produced comedy—The Beloved Bandit—a costly flop. Although Hart longed to enter the profound fraternity of weighty shovelers of social significance and charcoaled gloom such as Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice, he realized that, flop or no flop, comedy was the way to go. He wrote a romping farce about the early days of talkies called Once in a Lifetime, which the producer Sam H. Harris found promising but all over the lot—a garrulous sprawl in need of grid work. Harris said he would take on the play if Hart would submit to the practiced hand and expert eye of George S. Kaufman, who’d whip this baby into shape. Would he? By golly, you bet! Who wouldn’t?
Kaufman was the king of Broadway comedy in the 20s and beyond, his collaborations with Ring Lardner (June Moon), Marc Connelly (Merton of the Movies), Morrie Ryskind (The Cocoanuts, which became the first Marx Brothers movie), and Ryskind again (Animal Crackers, which became the second Marx Brothers movie) yielding a parade of crowd-pleasers. He also helped elevate the wisecrack into a new genus of American epigram as one of the presiding wits at the Algonquin Round Table. Meeting his senior partner for the first time in the study of Kaufman’s town house, Hart marveled as, with a minimum of pleasantries, Kaufman’s editing pencil proceeded to lay into his script like a scythe. “Just cutting away the underbrush,” Kaufman mildly said after his virtuoso application of arrows, X marks, and cross-outs. It would be the first of many tissue removals. But no matter how hard the two sliced and contoured, the play harbored an inscrutable flaw, a fundamental impediment that didn’t reveal itself until perilously late in the game, after so many preview performances had gone down in defeat that the indomitable Kaufman was ready to rip up his voodoo-doctor diploma and quit. Even though the reader knows that the backstage travails of Once in a Lifetime have a happy ending, Act One generates cliff-hanger suspense as opening night draws near, conveying the hum in everyone’s nerves. It would seem to have had all of the makings of a swelluva movie.
Born in 1904, the young Moss Hart was the sole over-achiever in a household where a cloud of failure and poverty hung low. With his father usually unemployed (and not just because of the Depression—he was a cigar-maker who found himself obsolete after the invention of the mechanical cigar roller), the family’s financial well-being rode largely on Moss’s back. It put a hustle in his step. He dropped out of school at age 12 and worked as a stockroom boy, then as an entertainment director in the Catskills, a fine training ground for a future career in show business and aggravation. Having gotten the theater bug from his Aunt Kate, who took him to matinees when he was a child (she later lost her mental bearings, turning pyromaniac), he acted in, wrote, and directed plays, his first produced comedy—The Beloved Bandit—a costly flop. Although Hart longed to enter the profound fraternity of weighty shovelers of social significance and charcoaled gloom such as Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice, he realized that, flop or no flop, comedy was the way to go. He wrote a romping farce about the early days of talkies called Once in a Lifetime, which the producer Sam H. Harris found promising but all over the lot—a garrulous sprawl in need of grid work. Harris said he would take on the play if Hart would submit to the practiced hand and expert eye of George S. Kaufman, who’d whip this baby into shape. Would he? By golly, you bet! Who wouldn’t?
Kaufman was the king of Broadway comedy in the 20s and beyond, his collaborations with Ring Lardner (June Moon), Marc Connelly (Merton of the Movies), Morrie Ryskind (The Cocoanuts, which became the first Marx Brothers movie), and Ryskind again (Animal Crackers, which became the second Marx Brothers movie) yielding a parade of crowd-pleasers. He also helped elevate the wisecrack into a new genus of American epigram as one of the presiding wits at the Algonquin Round Table. Meeting his senior partner for the first time in the study of Kaufman’s town house, Hart marveled as, with a minimum of pleasantries, Kaufman’s editing pencil proceeded to lay into his script like a scythe. “Just cutting away the underbrush,” Kaufman mildly said after his virtuoso application of arrows, X marks, and cross-outs. It would be the first of many tissue removals. But no matter how hard the two sliced and contoured, the play harbored an inscrutable flaw, a fundamental impediment that didn’t reveal itself until perilously late in the game, after so many preview performances had gone down in defeat that the indomitable Kaufman was ready to rip up his voodoo-doctor diploma and quit. Even though the reader knows that the backstage travails of Once in a Lifetime have a happy ending, Act One generates cliff-hanger suspense as opening night draws near, conveying the hum in everyone’s nerves. It would seem to have had all of the makings of a swelluva movie.
By Cathy Crawford.
Alas. In 1963, Act One was released as a motion picture directed by Hart’s longtime friend the producer Dore Schary and starring George Hamilton as the fledgling playwright learning to flap. Although set in the 30s and shot in the 60s, Act One has a very 50s feel, more of a boxy affinity with the Golden Age of TV than anything released in a film canister. It abbreviates the birth pangs and floor-pacing agonies of Once in a Lifetime’s gestation, the torturous rounds of re-writes and previews, sugarcoating everything about the romance of the theater that All About Eve had salted and pickled. But then, Margo Channing’s eyelids drooped from having seen it all, whereas Hamilton’s Moss Hart is in the gawky stage of wide-eyed wonder: the classic young man from the provinces intent on conquering the city, the provinces in this case being the elbow of Brooklyn. In his New York Times review of the film, Bosley Crowther described Hamilton’s Hart as “a lack-wit who at times appears a downright dunce.” Hamilton isn’t that bad, but playing an underdog of raging literal and metaphorical appetite, he purrs as a screen presence, his matinee-idol profile belying his character’s self-doubt. Nothing needy thumps around inside him. (Had Act One been made a decade later, Richard Dreyfuss would have been perfect.) What makes this Act One work are the crafty scene-stealers cast against Hamilton’s ingenuous Hart: Eli Wallach, as Warren Stone, a producer modeled on the Machiavellian and much-loathed Jed Harris; Jack Klugman, as a mensch; and, most of all, Jason Robards as George S. Kaufman. With high-top hair, skeptical eyebrows that lift like Groucho Marx’s, and a resigned posture suggesting a body that’s a dried rind, Robards’s Kaufman is an Al Hirschfeld caricature come to life. Wallach, Klugman, and Robards—each had a distinctive grain to his voice, a variable velocity in his delivery. The contrast between these shrewd operators and the freshman crew playing Hart’s smart-aleck pals—among them future star George Segal as Hart’s personal prophet of doom—gives the movie its rustling texture as a Hollywood artifact, nearly everybody in it destined for greater glories on-screen.
Hart was primed for greater glories, too. He proved to be no one-hit wonder—he and Kaufman would team up on You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, among others—and as the money rolled in, he rolled around in it. Profiling Hart for The New Yorker in 1943, reporter and author Margaret Case Harriman took partial inventory of her subject’s big-spender purchases, a veritable department store of jewelry, gewgaws, gadgets, major appliances, cribbage boards, elephant tusks, tobacco pipes (he had switched to pipe smoking after Kaufman indicated he’d endured Hart’s foul cigars in close quarters long enough), and a fancy cowboy outfit in case he ran into a dude ranch somewhere. No American playwright, not even Neil Simon at his commercial pinnacle, has ever done himself up as such a grand vizier. Few resented Hart’s indulgences, because he took such enthusiastic delight in his latest toys. But as an analysand for decades (he based his venturous Freudian musical, Lady in the Dark, which launched the career of Danny Kaye, on his own sessions with his psychoanalyst), Hart must have glimmered that his shopping sprees weren’t only endorphin highs but acts of overcompensation, gold fillings for crying holes. From Meryl Gordon’s Vanity Fair Web exclusive, “He’d Rather Be Right” (May 30, 2012), based on Hart’s private papers housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, we learn that, in a diary kept in 1953 and 1954, Hart was confiding feelings and opinions far blacker than anything in the amber Act One. Famous faces have gone to seed and once vibrant collaborators have become dull clams. Far from being buoyant and confident, he secretly bares himself as afflicted with writer’s block, resentful of George S. Kaufman (as contrasted with his lionization of G.S.K. in Act One), and disenchanted with Broadway, finding it “almost intolerably ugly.” Although Hart had a long, devoted marriage to socialite, singer, and game-show panelist Kitty Carlisle, he was haunted by sexual-identity issues at a time when most closets remained closed. Despite triumph after triumph (he would go on to direct My Fair Lady in 1956, his biggest hit of all), personal depression was the dark backing on the mirror reflecting his grinning face to the world.
Will any of this be foreshadowed in the forthcoming Act One? Probably not, and why should it? The mission of the showman is to send everyone home happy. That he’s not happy himself—that’s just part of the price of everyone else’s admission.
Hart was primed for greater glories, too. He proved to be no one-hit wonder—he and Kaufman would team up on You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, among others—and as the money rolled in, he rolled around in it. Profiling Hart for The New Yorker in 1943, reporter and author Margaret Case Harriman took partial inventory of her subject’s big-spender purchases, a veritable department store of jewelry, gewgaws, gadgets, major appliances, cribbage boards, elephant tusks, tobacco pipes (he had switched to pipe smoking after Kaufman indicated he’d endured Hart’s foul cigars in close quarters long enough), and a fancy cowboy outfit in case he ran into a dude ranch somewhere. No American playwright, not even Neil Simon at his commercial pinnacle, has ever done himself up as such a grand vizier. Few resented Hart’s indulgences, because he took such enthusiastic delight in his latest toys. But as an analysand for decades (he based his venturous Freudian musical, Lady in the Dark, which launched the career of Danny Kaye, on his own sessions with his psychoanalyst), Hart must have glimmered that his shopping sprees weren’t only endorphin highs but acts of overcompensation, gold fillings for crying holes. From Meryl Gordon’s Vanity Fair Web exclusive, “He’d Rather Be Right” (May 30, 2012), based on Hart’s private papers housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, we learn that, in a diary kept in 1953 and 1954, Hart was confiding feelings and opinions far blacker than anything in the amber Act One. Famous faces have gone to seed and once vibrant collaborators have become dull clams. Far from being buoyant and confident, he secretly bares himself as afflicted with writer’s block, resentful of George S. Kaufman (as contrasted with his lionization of G.S.K. in Act One), and disenchanted with Broadway, finding it “almost intolerably ugly.” Although Hart had a long, devoted marriage to socialite, singer, and game-show panelist Kitty Carlisle, he was haunted by sexual-identity issues at a time when most closets remained closed. Despite triumph after triumph (he would go on to direct My Fair Lady in 1956, his biggest hit of all), personal depression was the dark backing on the mirror reflecting his grinning face to the world.
Will any of this be foreshadowed in the forthcoming Act One? Probably not, and why should it? The mission of the showman is to send everyone home happy. That he’s not happy himself—that’s just part of the price of everyone else’s admission.
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