They just gotta have Hart

Moss HART -- playwright, memoirist, librettist, screenwriter, stage director and producer -- clawed his way from grayest poverty in the early 20th century Bronx to a theatrical life rare in diversity and achievement and perhaps unrivaled in its devotion to living large with splashy wit and stylish aplomb.

With stage-struck ambition, plus talent and luck, he went from carting pelts through a furrier’s warehouse -- a job that made his fellow New York subway straphangers recoil from his stench -- to a degree of wealth and fame that enabled him to fulfill a youthful vow that, once established, he would never ride the subway again.

Had Hart, the son of a little-employed Jewish immigrant cigar-roller, not overcome the odds, some notable show business triumphs would never have occurred.

Instead of being propelled to stardom, Julie Andrews might have bombed in “My Fair Lady” -- Hart not having been on hand to serve as her personal trainer. Isolated in a rehearsal room and working one-on-one for two full days, Hart, the show’s director, bulked up the confidence and interpretive muscles of his initially clueless and intimidated 20-year-old leading lady so that she could understand the complex part of Eliza Doolittle and effectively stand up to Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins in the landmark 1956 stage production.

Judy Garland, tarred as unreliable and humiliatingly cashiered by MGM in 1950, would not have been able to handpick Hart to tailor the script for her grand, Oscar-nominated 1954 comeback turn in “A Star is Born.” “Gentleman’s Agreement,” honored with 1947 Oscars for best picture and director (Elia Kazan), also would have been missing its Hart-penned screenplay.

Oscars history would have suffered another prominent white-out, lacking, in a Hart-less world, “You Can’t Take It With You,” winner of 1938 awards for best picture and best director (Frank Capra). The original stage comedy premiered on Broadway in 1936, earning Hart and his writing partner, George S. Kaufman, the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Woody Allen and Neil Simon might not have found suitable role models. Both were smitten as youngsters by the humor of Hart and the older Kaufman, already a famous playwright and renowned public wit when he teamed with the unknown and penniless Hart in 1930 for “Once in a Lifetime,” the first of their nine collaborations. Although Hart broke up the partnership to go solo in 1940 they remained devoted friends until 1961, when Kaufman died at 71. Hart, a four-packs-a-day cigarette smoker and corned beef sandwich lover until it was too late, survived Kaufman by six months, dying of his third heart attack at age 57.

A young Jacqueline Bouvier, blueblood future first lady of a White House known as “Camelot” (after the 1960 musical Hart directed, starring Andrews, Richard Burton and Robert Goulet), never would have played Essie, the dizzy ballet dancer, in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

This last tidbit, from Hart’s 94-year-old widow, Kitty Carlisle Hart, may be the most telling of all for her husband’s legacy, because every year thousands of amateur thespians follow in Jackie O’s footsteps. Since the beginning of 2004, reports Craig Pospisil of Dramatists Play Service Inc., a leading performing rights agency, 565 licenses have been issued for nonprofessional productions of “You Can’t Take It With You” and an additional 231 for “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” another foolproof Kaufman-Hart show. “They are almost always in the Top 10 of our most-produced plays, year after year, and ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ frequently tops that list,” Pospisil said.

Hart would be 100 now; the Geffen Playhouse is marking his centennial with a revival of “You Can’t Take It With You,” directed by Christopher Hart, the coauthor’s son. It’s one of at least 11 professional productions of the play this year in the United States, according to Samuel French Inc., which administers the show’s professional rights.

“The plays are so beautifully constructed,” says Nathan Lane, who starred as the outrageously cantankerous, manipulative and rapier-witted Sheridan Whiteside in a 2000 Broadway revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

“That’s why if you see them in a high school production, even though the acting may not be of the highest quality, the plays hold up,” he adds. “And there are such wonderful parts for actors that they always will be done.”

Reading “Act One,” Hart’s 1959 memoir of his early life from tenement squalor to Broadway acclaim, helped cement Lane’s youthful enchantment with the theater. “For anyone who does love the theater, you see all the symptoms in his book -- that need to do it and to escape into that world,” Lane says.

Hart and Kaufman never divulged the who-did-what mechanics of their collaboration, even to confidants. Whatever the division of labor, they were huge earners. Hart had to drop out of school after the seventh grade to take a series of grim jobs so that he, his distant, uncommunicative and defeated parents and his younger brother could subsist. Like some of today’s ghetto-to-Grammys rap stars, he had no compunctions when it came to lavishly displaying the fruits of success: elegant clothes, dazzling jewelry and sumptuous digs, including a Colonial-era summer home on an 87-acre estate in rural Pennsylvania that he dubbed Fairview Farm. Where rappers crave street cred, Hart cultivated salon cred, to the point where his wife sometimes caught him rehearsing quips in the bathroom before a soiree.

Actor John Cullum, a two-time Tony Award winner who made his Broadway debut in “Camelot,” once attended a party at the Harts’ grand Park Avenue home, where a fountain in the playwright’s study helped mask the sound of Christopher and his younger sister, Catherine (now a physician), at play in nearby rooms.

“He and Kitty came sweeping down these winding staircases, looking like a prince and a princess,” Cullum recalls. “Everything was elegant and very much staged. Everything was done for style and presentation. He used his director’s sense in his living. He created an aura.”

“He was larger than life in every way,” says biographer Jared Brown, a retired theater professor from Illinois Wesleyan University, whose book, tentatively titled “Moss Hart: A Prince of the Theatre,” is being edited for publication. “He seemed to arrange his life as if it was a play in which he was the leading character.”

Flamboyant highs, secret lows

Hart’s expansive, attention-grabbing personal style had enough charm to pull most people in rather than putting them off, says Steven Bach, a former head of film production at United Artists whose “Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart” was published in 2001.

In his seven years of work on the biography, Bach says, “I never ran across anybody who wanted to say, ‘Let me give you the lowdown on this guy who was a monster.’ The people who come out of the woodwork are the people who’ve got grudges, and I never encountered them.”

The outwardly effervescent Hart had a nasty enough foe inside his own head. He was subject to terrible bouts of depression, and for most of his adult life he saw a psychiatrist five days a week -- and sometimes twice or even three times a day.

“His depressions were very trying for both of us. He would go down so fast, and it would take two or three weeks to recover,” recalls Carlisle Hart by phone from her home in New York City. “There would be a big party, and I would say, ‘Darling, you don’t have to go.’ He would say, ‘You don’t escape from life, you escape into it.’ ” Still a trouper in her mid-90s after many years as a mainstay of the television game show “To Tell the Truth” and a 20-year tenure chairing the New York State Council on the Arts, Carlisle Hart has been performing a cabaret show of songs and reminiscences that she’ll bring to the Geffen Monday night.

Bach’s book offers evidence that Moss Hart had a sexual interest in men before embarking, at 41, on what by all accounts was a happy and tightknit marriage. But Bach, who did not receive cooperation from Hart’s family, doubts that a search for sexual identity was the source of the playwright’s anguish. “I don’t think he was tortured by it. Everything about him was aimed at achieving a kind of conventional success, and that would naturally include wanting to be married, wanting to have children.”

In “You Can’t Take It With You,” Kaufman and Hart created one of the most memorable comedic households ever seen on stage: the Sycamores of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, who passionately follow a variety of eccentric pursuits, riding out the Great Depression with zaniness and warmth. Their ob-la-di, ob-la-da philosophy of life -- to borrow a phrase from another famed creative duo -- eventually rubs off on the primly proper, disapproving parents of the youngest Sycamore daughter’s rich and adoring fiance.

‘No other feeling like it’

Christopher HART says he learned how finely balanced and seamlessly woven the play is in plot and characterization when he produced a television sitcom version of “You Can’t Take It With You” for NBC in 1987-88. The show, set in contemporary Staten Island, lasted just one season, and Hart thinks a crucial mistake was changing one of the Sycamore daughters from a married woman to a girl in her early teens. The network wanted a character who would appeal to kids.

“The whole dynamic changed, because people thought, ‘Who is looking after this poor little girl with all this craziness going on?’ A little thing made a big difference.”

“Nothing that they wrote was casual; everything was there for a reason,” concurs James Lipton, the “Inside the Actors Studio” TV host who immersed himself in the inner workings of Kaufman-Hart comedy while writing the book and lyrics for “Sherry!” a 1967 musical adaptation of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

One thing that rankled Moss Hart was the failure of the serious dramas he sometimes wrote to duplicate the success he regularly achieved with musicals and comedy. His final and most determined bid was “The Climate of Eden,” a darkly tinged 1952 play about an English missionary in Africa. It lasted just 20 performances, the shortest run of Hart’s playwriting career.

“I just remember his kindness and his keeping our spirits up when we realized that perhaps things weren’t going as planned,” recalls Rosemary Harris, who made her Broadway debut in the show. “We were crushed, because we all loved the play.”

Harris excuses herself from the phone for a moment and retrieves a scrapbook from the spot in her Winston-Salem, N.C., home where she keeps memorabilia from a 54-year acting career that includes playing Tobey Maguire’s Aunt May in the two “Spider-Man” movies.

She begins reading, in a fond, cultured voice, from a yellowed newspaper article that Moss Hart wrote as “The Climate of Eden” was about to open. Harris thinks it’s something people should hear if they want to know what Hart was about.

“I have said that the theater is a foolish profession. It is. To depend on it for an honest livelihood is lunacy, and its working conditions are idiotic. But there is no other profession, I think, that can possibly give one that feeling of exhilaration and joy, that indescribable excitement of walking toward a first rehearsal with a play under your arm that you believe in, to meet the cast that is going to bring that play alive. There is no other feeling like it in the world.”

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‘You Can’t Take It With You’

Where: Geffen Playhouse at the Brentwood Theatre, Veterans Administration grounds, 11301 Wilshire Blvd.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: May 22

Price: $31.50 to $52

Contact: (310) 208-5454, www.geffenplayhouse.com

Also

Kitty Carlisle Hart in “Here’s to Life”; 7:30 p.m. April 18; Brentwood Theatre; $49; (310) 208-5454