Word: moss
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...