Word: hartness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...tawny-blonde pinups who have fared better on film than Lola Jean Albright, and the jukeboxes rattle with records made by singers who sell more songs. But when Lola's latest release, Dreamsville, went out to the deejays last week, its fans were readymade. For Lola is Edie Hart, the slim, smoky-voiced saloon singer, the girl wrho keeps the fires warm for TV's Private Eye Peter Gunn, the blue-eyed sentimentalist who can whisper into the mike and convince a million televiewers that she is alone with each one of them. The songs...