Almost Famous. - Review - book review

National Review, May 28, 2001 by Terry Teachout

Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart, by Steven Bach (Knopf, 462 pp., $29.95)

Back in the golden age of radio, there was a popular series called The First Nighter Program whose eponymous host, Mr. First Nighter, had fourth-row-center seats each week for the opening of a brand-new Broadway show at "the little theater off Times Square." It was, of course, a ruse-the series was actually produced in Chicago, and the scripts were soppy, soapy romances-but listeners kept tuning in anyway, because the word "Broadway" meant something unimaginably glamorous to ordinary folks out in the hinterlands. Those were the days when hit shows spawned road companies that crisscrossed the country, when Katharine Cornell and the Lunts could occasionally be seen on the stage of your local theater, and when everybody in the world knew who George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were.

That may be overstating the case slightly, but Kaufman and Hart were at least as famous in the Thirties as Andrew Lloyd Webber is now. They wrote eight shows together, four of which were hits and two of which continue to be performed by regional and amateur theater companies in need of surefire fare. The Man Who Came to Dinner was revived last year on Broadway in a briskly funny production starring Nathan Lane that was telecast by PBS, while You Can't Take It with You, winner of the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama, spawned a Frank Capra-directed movie version that collected two Oscars and still turns up from time to time on cable TV. Short of being Shakespeare or Shaw, no playwright could reasonably hope for greater posthumous success.

But while George S. Kaufman's name is fairly familiar to most well-read Americans, if only because he was also a member in good standing of the Algonquin Round Table, Moss Hart has become an all-but-forgotten man, even though his resume was very nearly as impressive as Kaufman's and Act One, his bestselling 1959 autobiography, is still in print. Unless you're a theater buff of the highest caliber, you probably don't know the names of any of the plays he wrote without Kaufman (none of which was any good), or that he directed the original productions of My Fair Lady and Camelot and wrote the screenplay for A Star Is Born. As far as posterity is concerned, he was the back end of Kaufman & Hart, Inc., and nothing more.

It is doubtless for this reason that most of the buzz surrounding the publication of Dazzler, the first biography of Hart, has been centered on Steven Bach's utterly non-surprising "revelation" that Hart was a homosexual or, to put it more precisely, that he appears to have slept with both men and women until he married, after which he appears to have remained faithful to his wife. I'm not quite sure what that makes him, but whatever it was, it isn't news: Rumors about his sexuality have circulated for years, and as far as actual firsthand testimony goes, Dazzler contains a lot more bark than bite. Still, there's nothing like gay gossip to get journalists talking, which is why Hart is in the news again for the first time since his untimely death in 1961.

Also not surprisingly, Kitty Carlisle Hart declined to cooperate with Bach, which is why Dazzler contains no quotations from Moss Hart's correspondence, diaries, or other unpublished papers. Instead, Bach has been forced to rely on clips, interviews with Hart's surviving friends and colleagues, and his own coarsely jokey prose style ("This Hart's beat was Broadway"). I can't really blame Mrs. Hart for steering clear of a biographer whose intentions she had ample reason to suspect, but it isn't likely that anyone else will write a book about her husband, and her decision to withhold access to his private papers necessarily means that Dazzler is dead at the center: We never hear directly from the offstage Hart, a man who was far more complicated than he cared to admit in public.

That Bach has nonetheless managed to write an informative and readable book speaks well of his skills as a researcher, not to mention the indelible vividness of Act One, whose working title was "From the Bronx to Broadway." To be sure, Hart's grim reminiscences of his loveless, poverty-stricken youth are far from strictly factual, and Bach has gone to considerable lengths to show how extensively Hart edited and simplified the story of his rise to fame in order to make it more emblematic. Not that these sins of omission make Act One a bad book. Most memoirists shade the truth, but the unadorned facts-though less obviously dramatic-are just as interesting.

Hart was born in 1904, the oldest son of a Cockney cigarmaker who moved to America just in time to see his trade wiped out by the advent of the machine-manufactured cigar. Desperate to escape from what he later called "the grim smell of actual want," young Moss retreated into his imagination, retelling the stories of the library books he read to the tough kids on the block (he started off with Sister Carrie) and eventually landing a job as office boy to a small-time producer of road shows. One thing gradually led to another, and by a fantastic skein of coincidence rendered only slightly less plausible-sounding in Act One, he managed to get George Kaufman to read one of his scripts, a satire of Hollywood in the early days of talking pictures. The already-famous Kaufman agreed to rewrite the play in collaboration with Hart and direct the finished product. Though Kaufman treated his new partner with frighteningly cool reserve and the show nearly died in previews, the unlikely duo revised the last act at the last minute, and Once in a Lifetime (Hart's title) opened on Broadway to once-in-a-lifetime reviews.