The Prince of Broadway

From the Hollywood send-up “Once in a Lifetime” in 1930 to the “Camelot” of King Arthur’s court in 1960, Moss Hart was a prince of Broadway in its regal age. If, lamentably, his name is not immediately recognizable to some, then neither is the Great White Way that he personified nor the theater that was his realm. Movies have eclipsed the theater, and well-crafted plays have largely been replaced by extravaganzas or revivals. Hart lived in a time when playwrights were cultural heroes, and he was among the most revered. In “Dazzler,” Steven Bach superbly re-creates the world of American theater during what many consider its golden era and gracefully brings to life a man who was as dark and complicated as he was engaging and brilliant. Even if Hart has faded from memory, Bach neatly hauls him back to center stage and shows why he is worth remembering.

With George S. Kaufman, Hart wrote “You Can’t Take It With You” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner”; his own plays include “Lady in the Dark” (music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin), “As Thousands Cheer” (songs by Irving Berlin) and “Jubilee” (music and lyrics by Cole Porter), as well as the screenplays for “Gentlemen’s Agreement” and the Judy Garland version of “A Star Is Born.” (He would have written the script for “The Wizard of Oz” had Berlin agreed to write the score.) With a little bit of luck along with a lot of talent, he directed the perfect Broadway musical, “My Fair Lady.”

As an actor, director and writer, Hart invented enough memorable characters to fill a theater, so it is hardly surprising to learn from Bach that in his acclaimed 1959 autobiography “Act One,” Hart sometimes invented or rewrote himself to make a better story. Like its protagonist, “Act One” is witty, urbane and irresistible; Hart’s almost modest account of his hardscrabble youth, tenacity and good fortune is like a Pied Piper’s song to anyone with even a modicum of interest in the theater. The pages of “Act One” almost shriek, “Escape poverty!” “Be freed of your overbearing mother!” “Overcome your natural timidity in defense of your artistic ideas!” “Heaven and Earth intersect at 42nd Street!” “When your play is a hit there, you, too, can call the Music Box Theater the Money Box!” Reading “Act One” (it ends with Hart just 25) four decades after it was published made me want to live it, not write about it, so it is easy to imagine the dreams the book kindled in Bach, who read it when it was fresh and he was a teenager in Pocatello, Idaho.

But the truth and a good story often sleep in different beds. The Broadway giant George Abbott diplomatically told Hart that he had contrived a “truth-ier truth”; another friend wryly said that “you omitted, but hell, you undertook to write ‘Act One’ and not ‘Chapter and Verse.’ ” Chapter and verse, stylishly written with little omitted, is what Bach gives us.

Before Bach turned to writing he was, with apparently no small debt to Hart’s example, a theatrical and film producer. As worldwide head of production at United Artists, he was involved with “Raging Bull,” “Manhattan,” “La Cage aux Folles” and, famously, the financially ruinous “Heaven’s Gate.” When Bach realized that the picture was as uncontrollable as a typhoon, and his job was in jeopardy, he pointed no fingers, made no excuses but instead took out a notebook and carefully wrote down all that happened. The result was both a seamless career change and “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of ‘ “Heaven’s Gate.’ ” Nearly 20 years later, it remains one of the best books about the movie business.

Hart was born in 1904 in a New York tenement on East 105th Street, a neighborhood, Bach writes, “of dray wagons, pushcarts, and immigrants

“At seven,” he told a reporter, “I swore off spinach. The only other wise thing I have done is to forswear marriage.” Hart finally did get married, when he was 41, to actress Kitty Carlisle, with whom he had a son and a daughter and many years of happiness. But through Hart’s teens and into his 30s, Bach writes, the only young ladies who figured in his life were “Miss Melody,” “Miss Plot,” and “Miss Jazz.” Bach presents compelling if circumstantial evidence that in these early years, Hart was at the least sexually ambiguous and probably gay. Although the people in Hart’s circle often knew of one another’s sexual adventures, they didn’t talk about them. The code of the day, as Bach quotes one observer of the times, was not so much “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as it was “Do more, say less.” Bach also doesn’t make too much of this. He just offers the facts and moves on to more important matters. It is what Hart wrote and directed, not what he did in private, that makes him worthwhile.

Bach’s sensitive handling of the private and public man weaves a life that is balanced, whole and fascinating. He also gives flesh and bones to dozens of people important to Hart. Kaufman was 40, an established playwright and drama critic for The New York Times, when his collaboration with Hart began in 1930. Hart was 25 and the author of five plays with fewer than 75 performances all told; he called his partner “Mr. Kaufman” then and for years after. Even though they are consistently referred to as Kaufman and Hart, Hart and Kaufman is more appropriate; Hart had top billing on five of the eight plays they wrote together, including their first, “Once in a Lifetime.” On opening night , Kaufman told the audience from the stage that “eighty percent of this play is Moss Hart.”

While Hart was good looking, charming, and eager to please, Kaufman, Bach writes, “was not an easy man. Tall, gaunt, and remote, he wore horn-rimmed glasses that rode low on an awesome nose and had a smile that one of his employees at the Times called “hardly more than a baring of the teeth.” He was a lifelong hypochondriac who shunned physical contact and consequently waved the long fingers of his bony hand in greeting. He would have been altogether intimidating were it not for the hair that rose from his lofty brow as if electrified, making him look oddly like Abraham Lincoln impersonating one of the Marx Brothers.” It was their contrasts that suited Hart and Kaufman to one other. “One warmed while the other cooled. They would become like a chessboard: you couldn’t tell if it was black squares on red or red squares on black, and that’s the way they wanted it.”

Hart had a particular gift for creating characters at once horrifying and funny who in lesser hands would be simply one-dimensional monsters. For instance, Sheridan Whiteside, the eponymous diner in “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” is as famous as he is uncaring that he is also solipsistic, egocentric and disdainful to the point of cruelty; the play is about the license of celebrities to behave however they please. Yet for all the broadness of Whiteside’s character, he is so perfectly drawn that he is a masterpiece of comedy. (Whiteside was modeled on--and played by--Hart’s and also Kaufman’s sometime collaborator Alexander Woollcott.) “Shall I tell you something, Sherry?” Whiteside’s once-devoted secretary Maggie Cutler says after he has temporarily withered her budding love affair with a young playwright. “I think you are a selfish, petty egomaniac who would see his mother burned at the stake if that was the only way he could light his cigarette. I think you’d sacrifice your best friend without a moment’s hesitation if he disturbed the sacred routine of your self-centered, paltry little life. I think you are incapable of any human emotion that goes higher up than your stomach, and I was the fool of the world for ever thinking I could trust you.”

Taken aback but hardly repentant, Whiteside’s indignant reply is, “Well, as long as I live, I shall never do anyone a good turn again.”

Hart encountered the spirit of Whiteside in Rex Harrison when rehearsals for “My Fair Lady” began in January 1956. For someone who grew up in a home where his parents played the original cast recording every day for months on end, Bach’s account is riveting. Harrison at first “terrified” Julie Andrews, and no wonder; he “hated the whole idea of working with this silly little girl” who had just turned 20 and who, as Hart himself admitted, “didn’t have a clue” about playing Eliza Doolittle. Some time during that first week, Harrison screamed, “If that girl is here on Monday giving the same goddam performance, I am out of this show.” Several witnesses recall more vulgar nouns than “girl.” Hart, venting his frustration to his wife, said that if he were the legendary producer David Belasco, he would lock Andrews in a room for the weekend and “paste the part on her.” Carlisle reminded Hart that he had done that with her. Why not with Andrews? He did, and two days later Andrews had become Eliza. “She has that terrible English strength that makes you wonder why they lost India,” Hart said afterward. Andrews sailed on from there while Harrison became frightened and petty. On opening night in New Haven, the last stop before Broadway, Harrison, paralyzed with fear, refused to go on. No one could dissuade him. A few hours before curtain time, radio announcements were made that the show that night was canceled for “technical reasons” but because of a blizzard, anxious ticket holders came early and so missed the news. As they milled in the lobby, Harrison’s agent marched into his dressing room and told him “he was likely never to work again if word got out, and he would personally see to it that word got out.” An hour and a quarter late, the show began. It was Andrews who provided the calm onstage. There was no such thing for the audience, who were “cheering, laughing, screaming, stomping, whooping, and bringing the show to a standstill” during “The Rain in Spain.” “My Fair Lady” became the longest-running musical to that date by almost 500 performances. It played on Broadway for nearly seven years--10 months past the day that Hart died of a heart attack in Palm Springs. He was 57.