Moss Hart
A
love for musical theater would eventually propel one young boy into a
trail-blazing playwriting career that would span the generations. Born in New York City
on October 24, 1904, Moss Hart worked on Broadway plays and musicals with
the greatest talents of his day, including Irving Berlin, Lerner and Loewe,
and his lifelong friend and collaborator, George Kaufman.
Hart's father was a cigar maker who lost his business when
the mechanical cigar roller was invented, and his eccentric
Aunt Kate began taking him out of school on Thursdays to accompany her to
theatrical matinees. He later called the trips "the beginning of a lifelong
infection" with the theater. Later, he would learn that his aunt
suffered
from mental illness and had a habit of setting fires in the theaters she
visited.
By the time Hart was a teenager, Broadway was at its Golden
Age. More than 90 major theaters called New York City home. They
produced an average of 225 new plays or musicals each year. Plays and
musicals were the most popular form of entertainment, surpassing movies by
far. Broadway was the most glamorous place in America, and Moss Hart
wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.
When the family's fortunes worsened, Hart dropped out of
high school to take a job as a clothing folder at a garment factory.
He was so enterprising that his boss agreed to let him write and produce a
musical review in order to highlight the company's latest clothing line.
A few years later, Hart took a job as the entertainment
director for a series of summer resorts along the Borscht Belt in the
Catskills. He later said that keeping city folks sufficiently
entertained when they are confronted with a few weeks of nature was the
toughest job he ever had, but he learned a lot about drama from the
experience.
But Hart's sights were set on bigger game. He wanted
to write big, sprawling plays the way his idol, Eugene O'Neill, did.
But all the major producers kept turning him down, telling him that they
wanted comedies. Eventually, Hart decided to give them what they
wanted and wrote the play, Once in a Lifetime. He enlisted
legendary playwright George S. Kaufman to help fine-tune the script, which
the two of them worked on for months. They showed rough versions of
the play to audiences and noted what made people laugh and what didn't.
When it was finally fully released in 1930, it was a huge success, and Moss
Hart found himself rich and famous almost overnight. He was only 25.
Over the course of his career, Hart created some of the
best known and beloved musicals in Broadway history, including My
Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960). When he came onstage
opening night to introduce Camelot, which he directed, he announced: "Camelot
is lovely. Camelot is going to be glorious. Camelot is
long. You're going to be a lot older when you get out of here
tonight." The play's first performance ran four-and-a-half hours,
ending at 1:00 AM. Hart eventually made several deep cuts to the show, and
it became a hit.
Although
he wrote with great humor, as in the 1939 comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner,
Hart led a life that was often devoid of smiles. He suffered from long
bouts of depression. Once, he had a nervous breakdown before the
opening of one of his plays. His illness became national news.
He isolated himself and slowly recovered, later calling the period of his illness his
"siege," a part of the writer's life about which little has been written.
The
main reason for the secrecy is Hart's surviving widow, Kitty Carlisle Hart,
an actress and game show participant who, as a remnant of New York's
powerful showbiz society, chose to keep it secret. She has often declined cooperation with Hart's
numerous biographers and has
reportedly implored friends to do the same. The reason for her
non-cooperation is that, although fathering two children, Hart was gay.
For the first few decades of his career in the theater, he was forced to
live beneath the strain of carrying on two divergent lifestyles, an uneasy
task that left the writer confused and depressed.
Even during
the worst periods of his depression, though, Hart
continued to write. He worked with Kaufman on the Pulitzer
Prize-winning play You Can't Take It With You (1936). The play
was set in a living room where an eccentric family spends its time writing
plays, playing the xylophone, making candy, and collecting snakes.
In
addition to writing plays for Broadway, Hart also wrote for Hollywood,
mostly
for MGM. He wrote A Star Is Born (1954) for Judy Garland, and
he wrote the script for Hans Christian Anderson (1952), a musical
about the life and work of the famous Danish fairy-tale author. He
also penned the screenplay for A Gentlemen's Agreement (1947).
The film adaptation of a Laura Z. Hobson novel, starring Gregory Peck and
Dorothy McGuire and directed by Elia Kazan, won three Academy Awards for
Twentieth Century Fox.
Moss Hart said, "All the mistakes I ever made were when I
wanted to say 'no' and said 'yes'." In his own autobiography,
Act One, he wrote eloquently and with great humor about his childhood in
the Bronx--the formative years that eventually led to his introduction and
acceptance into the world of the theater at the age of 26 and into Hollywood
shortly thereafter. The book is widely considered to be one of the
best ever written about life in the theater. It’s still in print more
than four decades after it was first published. Moss Hart, who
once said that all successful people in the theater came from an unhappy
childhood, died in 1961.
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