Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart - Hardcover

Bach, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679441549 ISBN 13: 9780679441540

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

The first full-scale biography of the “Prince of Broadway,” the brilliant playwright and director Moss Hart.
No one loomed larger in Broadway’s golden age. Hart’s memoir, Act One, which told of a youth lived in poverty and his early success on Broadway, became the most successful and most loved book ever published about the lure of the theater. But it ended at the beginning—when Hart was only twenty-five—and at times embroidered or skirted the facts. Now, at last, we have the full and far richer story.

Hart exemplified wit, urbanity, and grace. He knew everybody, from the Algonquin Round Table crowd
to the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Cole Porter, and the Hollywood moguls. His passion for the theater gave wings to his long playwriting collaboration with George S. Kaufman; together they gave us such classic comedies as You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. On his own Hart wrote the stunning Lady in the Dark and Light Up the Sky. His screenplays include Gentleman’s Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. His career as a director was crowned by the creation of My Fair Lady and Camelot, his last two shows. They were still on Broadway when he died in 1961 at the age of fifty-seven.

But Hart’s life was not always golden, in spite of a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Awards, and Oscar nominations. His successes were shadowed by the unpredictable and often debilitating mood swings of manic depression. And he struggled with issues of sexual identity—documented here for the first time—finally marrying and fathering children in his forties.

Dazzler is the story of the seen and unseen struggles that beset Hart in a life crowded with friends, glamour, and achievements, a life that seemed to be one triumph and delight after another. But it was actually a life tormented in ways we didn’t know, and thus, heroic. It isn’t just that Hart rose from humble beginnings to fame and fortune. It’s that he rose above his private demons to achieve a kind of happiness that survives him still. He used to say, even in the face of failure, “Well, we aspired.” Aspiration was a key to his life, and the key to this superb biography.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Bach was a theatrical and film producer before heading worldwide production at United Artists, where he was involved in such films as Raging Bull, Manhattan, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, La Cage aux Folles, and Heaven’s Gate, about which he wrote the brilliant best-seller Final Cut. He is also the author of Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. He teaches at Columbia University and Bennington College and divides his time between Europe and the United States.

From the Back Cover

"Legendary playwright and director Moss Hart's memoir Act One is still
required reading for anyone who dreams of a career on the stage, although
it only tells about half the tales of Hart's extraordinary life in and out
of the theatre. Fortunately, author Steven Bach has come along to fill in
the gaps with his new and long-awaited biography of the great man himself,
Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (Alfred A. Knopf). Bach
brilliantly illuminates the complicated genius responsible for co-writing
some of the American theatre's greatest comedies, including The Man Who
Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It With You, and directing two of the
world's most beloved musicals, My Fair Lady and Camelot. Bursting with
history and anecdote, Dazzler is a must-read for anyone who cares about the
mysterious process of artistic collaboration." --Encore

“Steven Bach has evoked a glittering picture of backstage Broadway, in the years that Broadway was the center of theatrical glamour. More importantly, he has understood and brilliantly written the life of the complicated genius, Moss Hart, whose dazzling talent was at the center of the vortex.”--Dominick Dunne

“An exhilarating record of a man who made and saved shows and always raised spirits. It is also the touching portrait of the Moss Hart who could not save or reassure himself. It’s Dazzler in the Dark.”--David Thomson

“A fabulously entertaining life story that is also a searching meditation on show business, celebrity, sex and ego.”--Patrick McGilligan

“Ironic, knowing, tartly sympathetic and written with rare wit, pace and grace. It is a superb evocation of that lost (and never-to-return) era when Broadway, ruled by a handful of writers, stars and producers was, for good and ill, the prime source of energy and ideas, talent and glamour for all of American show business. Bach doesn’t nostalgize that little world, but he understands it fully, and infects us with Moss Hart joy in conquering it.”--Richard Schickel

“A wonderful book about a man who dazzled in a heady time that is long gone. Bach is compulsively readable, and what he has written about both Moss Hart and his time is well worth remembering.”--Walter Bernstein

"Steven Bach is no mean Dazzler himself. His biography of Moss Hart is not only a vivid portrait of a witty but tortured man. It's a wonderfully entertaining guided tour of Broadway's most entertaining age, and the personalities who helped create it."--Gavin Lambert

"A bountifully entertaining biography
…a bonanza for the perpetually famished acolytes of show-biz lore and dish."
–Jan Stuart, Newsday

"A Who's Who of the theatre's golden age."
–Janet Maslin, New York Times

Reviews

theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in his obituary of this flamboyant figure's "unconquerable enthusiasm for life." Bach's lively, stylishly written chronicle perfectly captures this enthusiasm, along with the wit, the prodigious talent and above all the "unabashed love for the Broadway he came to personify" and that Hart lavished on an astonishing array of theatrical endeavors. Born in 1904 in a New York City tenement, Moss wrote and directed his first Broadway play at age 17. In 1930, he began collaborating with writer/raconteur George S. Kaufman forming one of the most famous partnerships in theater history and creating two enduring classics, The Man Who Came to Dinner and the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It with You. Hart's subsequent achievements included musical comedy collaborations (with Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and Irving Berlin) and a number of screenplays (among them, Gentleman's Agreement, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born). In 1956, he directed Broadway's My Fair Lady "not only the biggest hit of Hart's life, but also the biggest hit in the life of everyone connected with it." Throughout his many triumphs and the occasional failure Hart was given to severe bouts of depression, which Bach presents in an admirably evenhanded tone; nor does the author shy away from suggestions of Hart's homosexuality. Despite being surrounded by a luminous, vividly depicted "supporting cast," Hart and his indelible contributions to the theater shine through this fascinating portrait, in a work that truly merits its title. 16-page photo insert. (Apr. 29) Forecast: That Hart's widow, Kitty Carlisle Hart, "chose not to cooperate" with Bach has already brought Dazzler some off-the-book-page attention and may well garner more. An excerpt in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair will certainly boost word-of-mouth, and Knopf's 100,000 printing (as well as selection by QPB and for a BOMC alternate) will ensure that copies are everywhere.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

One of the Internet's most profound effects, at least for librarians and researchers, is that it makes available to many individuals information and materials that were previously accessible to just a few. An excellent example of the wider array of resources now within easy reach is the Library of Congress's American Memory Collections. This site is part of the National Digital Library Program, "an effort to digitize and deliver electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at the Library of Congress, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, recorded sound, and moving pictures." Collections from other libraries are also part of the program.Currently, American Memory has more than 90 collections, most of them quite extensive. They include pieces of African American sheet music from 1850 to 1920; baseball cards from 1887 to 1914; Civil War maps and photographs; early films and sound recordings from the Edison Company; and the complete papers of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. A recent addition is "Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements," a preview of a donation from the Coca-Cola Company. This donation, consisting of 20,000 ads being given over a period of years, is the largest donation of corporate advertising in the library's history. Among collections currently in progress are some 12,500 items on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese immigration to California and the West and more than 1,600 National Press Club sound recordings going back to 1952.Most of the collections are searchable and have their own search tools. Users can also search multiple collections by keyword and type of material. A Collection Finder feature offers searching by topic, original format of material (manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, etc.), time period, place, Library of Congress division, and digital format (e.g., QuickTime, TIFF). Some of these categories, most notably topic and place, are quite broad, but more specificity may be added in the future, along with the ability to combine searches from different categories. Another feature, The Learning Page, offers resources and activities for students and teachers.There is greater curricular emphasis on primary source materials, and many reference publishers are responding by including more of these materials in their publications. But no printed work can match the richness available in the American Memory Collections. The site offers a wonderful example of how digital collections can work together with more traditional library holdings--the Web offering access to manuscripts, music, photographs, and so on and the books providing background, context, and analysis.One of the great autobiographies of American theater is Moss Hart's compelling Act One (1962). That work, however, only covers Hart's life from his birth in 1904 into a poor Jewish family in Manhattan to 1930, the year of his first Broadway hit, Once in a Lifetime, written in collaboration with George S. Kaufman. Hart never wrote an Act Two, which is a shame, because his career following the opening of Once in a Lifetime was every bit as complex, dramatic, and trouble-filled as the initial 26 years leading up to his first great hit. Bach's fascinating, well-researched, immensely readable biography fills this gap, chronicling the full sweep of Hart's life, his early successes, his artistic missteps in middle age, and his later-life triumphs in the 1950s and 1960s as the screenwriter of the 1954 remake of A Start Is Born and the director of My Fair Lady and Camelot. This book corrects some of the elisions and memory lapses in Hart's own book, most notably his transformation of his psychologically troubled spinster Aunt Kate into a lovable eccentric whom, Moss argued, saved him in his poverty-filled youth by encouraging his creativity and his love of theater. Bach also tackles the tangled subject of Hart's ambivalent sexuality. His widow, Kitty Carlisle Hart, has always maintained Hart was straight as a blade. But Bach provides plenty of evidence to show that, at least until he married Carlisle and began to have kids, his sexual gate swung both ways. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Hart overcame his impoverished background with enormous talent and the will to succeed. By the end of his short life (he was only 57 when he suffered a fatal heart attack), he had successful careers in the theater and Hollywood and won numerous awards. He had the golden touch. Hart co-wrote the oft-revived The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You; wrote the screenplays for A Star Is Born and Gentleman's Agreement; directed My Fair Lady; and directed and helped rewrite Camelot, which would have bombed without his show biz skills. Yet battles with manic depression and issues with his sexuality took much of his energy and time away from his family and career. Bach (Final Cut, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend), who has a deep appreciation for Hart's talent and the entertainment industry, has done the needed research to give the reader a fascinating and detailed look into this world and Hart's contributions to it. An essential purchase for all academic and public libraries. (Index not seen..
- Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Broadway Baby

The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. --E. B. White

"I was born on Fifth Avenue," Moss Hart liked to say. Then, when eyebrows had gone up all over the room, he would ricochet the very notion with a punch line: "The wrong end!" The joke always worked, but was never as self-deprecating as it sounded; he wanted you to know how far he'd come.

Wherever he was--in the precincts of the Shuberts and Ziegfelds or the playgrounds of the Thalbergs and Zanucks, on croquet lawns or in paneled drawing rooms--was Broadway. When he walked into the room, people say, the party got better, and because it did he loved to call himself "the Darling of Everyone there," no matter where "there" was. But the airy witticism floated oh so casually over cocktails or at Sardi's had been as carefully rehearsed in the shaving mirror as any actor's speech on any stage. He had a performer's timing and need for applause and a style so theatrical no mere actor would have dared pull it off. What made his grand manner easy to like was his unabashed love for the Broadway he came to personify. Even when his ardor for it was unrequited, he couldn't wait to entertain you with tales of his rejection, hilarious or heart-rending or both.

He was not born on any end of Fifth Avenue, but in a tenement at 74 East 105th Street, a neighborhood not of carriages and hansom cabs, but of dray wagons, pushcarts, and immigrants. It was an uptown version of the Lower East Side and not much farther from Broadway, he liked to quip, than, say, Yakima, Washington.

The tenement he was born in fell long ago to the wrecker's ball. In its place stands the DeWitt Clinton housing project, just where East 105th Street is interrupted by a hard-packed urban playground behind a chain-link fence. Aromas in the air today are not from the shtetl, but from the islands. Neighborhood wisdom comes not from rabbis, but from psychics and palm readers who hang neon promises in storefront windows. One suspects that few of them know or care that just a few blocks away a museum dedicated to the city of New York celebrates Hart as a son of this very neighborhood. What remains of him uptown is mostly behind glass: some glossy eight-by-tens, a tarnishing cigarette case, and dog-eared contracts that hint at the terms and conditions of fame and fortune on Broadway.

On the day Hart was born--October 24, 1904--this part of town was dominated not by nearby Central Park, but by the New York Central Railroad roaring north and rattling fire escapes all the way to the East River. The trains rumbled through a tunnel beneath what we now call Park Avenue and emerged into daylight, as it does today, at Ninety-sixth Street, where the tracks climb above ground to run in the channel of a stone viaduct. Those massive walls built to protect Upper East Siders from the railroad--and vice versa--must have looked like the walls of a prison in 1904. They still do, but modernity and mobility were popular issues early in the century and, to prove it, three days after Moss was born the New York subway system opened for business.

Hart's birthplace on East 105th Street drifted with railroad soot and smelled of failure and cigars. "Shabby gentility," he called it, though it was closer to bare subsistence. The flat was ruled by his grandfather Solomon, whose daughter Lillie was Moss's mother. Barnett--"Barney"--Solomon was a cigarmaker born in London in 1833, a man of "enormous vitality, color and salt" according to his grandson. He was also vain and a tyrant and a thwarted visionary outraged by life's injustices, so many of them aimed at him. He had confounded immigrant clich? by working his way not up but down from comfortable respectability in England to near-penury in New York. For the rest of his life he fulminated with bitter tales of the wealthy and distinguished family he had left behind, and the stories were true.

The Solomons he came from were a generation removed from Holland, where they had been silversmiths in Amsterdam. The original spelling had been Salamon or Salaman. In England, Barney's older brother Joseph, a less mercurial and more prudent Solomon, worked his way from apprenticeship in a leather factory in Bermondsey to ownership of one of his own. He grew so affluent that he established night classes for his workers in keeping with his fervor for moral uplift and self-improvement. He improved himself into a London town house designed by John Nash, who had built Regent Street, Trafalgar Square, and Buckingham Palace. There he founded a small dynasty of Solomon sons (seven) and daughters (five), who would pursue and achieve distinction in the arts and professions even as his brother Barney raged at the social order that bestowed wealth on Joseph and hardship on himself. Just as well, perhaps, that Barney didn't live to know that a granddaughter of Joseph would play violin at Albert Hall with Mischa Elman; or that a painter son, grandly named Solomon J. Solomon, would become the second Jewish member of the Royal Academy, exhibiting his portraits of Members of Parliament and the aristocracy, and even of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote Eliza Doolittle, a character to return to these pages.

A Shavian family note was apt in any event, for Joseph Solomon declared himself a Shaw disciple and liked to quote the playwright's definition of a gentleman as one who tried "to put at least as much into life as [he] took out of it." Solomon put more Solomons into life, some of them eccentrics, including suffragettes, Zionists, and at least one hotair balloonist. When young Moss was growing up in humble American obscurity, a British writer was noting among the Solomons in England "such a surprising number of persons who have won eminence in Art, Music, and the Drama as has probably created a record!" Their eccentricities would--much later and much Americanized--find life on Broadway, as they pursued their individual creative talents or whims without a worry in the world because, as one of them would put it, you can't take it with you.

On East 105th Street, by contrast, there was nothing but resentment and grievance, for Barney Solomon had never shared his brother's diligence and piety. Even as a youth he was deemed a "ne'er do well," a firebrand and malcontent. In his thirties he was "cast off to El Dorado," a family member recalled, to pursue his personal crusades out of sight and out of mind.

His bride, Rose Lewis, was not only uncultivated, she was illiterate. She may have been non-Jewish as well, a factor that probably did not recommend her to Joseph Solomon, by now a warden at London's Bayswater Synagogue. Whatever her shortcomings, by the time of Barney's expulsion from the family circle Rose had presented him with a family of his own: daughters Kate in 1868 and Lillie in 1870. Shortly thereafter the family set sail for America.

In El Dorado Barney pursued cigarmaking, which provided him with a job, a friend, and a cause. Samuel Gompers was London-born, too, and a fellow cigarmaker rolling tobacco leaves (family legend has it) at the very next bench. Gompers was unburdened by wife or family and had only the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor to worry about, a social club with ambitions to become a trade union. Gompers's slogan--"Reward Your Friends and Punish Your Enemies"--was just the sort of incendiary cry to appeal to Barney's own sense of injury and injustice.

Gompers was elected president of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, but if Barney was at his side he left no traces on union history, though family apocrypha had him marching with Gompers and even rivaling him for leadership. The story Moss told had something to do with who got to carry a briefcase into union meetings. In fact, Barney's reward as Gompers's friend was the picket line, where he and the other faithful punished Gompers's enemies (and themselves) with a thousand strikes a year until the end of the century.

Sometimes Barney was a passionate crusader and sometimes he merely sulked in the cramped quarters he shared with his wife and daughters. On occasions of nostalgia for England, when not locked in his private world of rage or depression, he used storytelling as an antidote to the dispiriting realities of the Land of Liberty. Moss wrote that the defeated cigarmaker read aloud serial installments of Dickens's latest novel (though Dickens had died in 1870, making them very back numbers indeed), thrilling his daughters with Victorian cliff-hangers and tutoring Rose with the only education she was ever to receive. When he detected or imagined flagging attention, he refused to continue reading, locked Dickens in the closet, and brooded in ominous silence for days on end. He would bequeath his love of stories and his unpredictable moods to his grandson.

During the strikes of 1892, which halted the production of iron and steel as well as cigars, Rose revealed that she had somehow salted away enough pennies to finance a family excursion back to England. Her husband, idle for months, erupted at the treachery of wherewithal withheld, before agreeing that an ocean voyage might relieve the frustrations of striking and brighten his mood, maybe even his prospects.

Rose may have had family assistance in mind, but Barney's hat would be on his head, not in his hand. He appropriated funds from her hoard to indulge a fit of extravagance and vanity. He dyed hair, mustache, and goatee jet-black, the better to set off the Panama hat and bravado with which he crowned the whole ensemble.

Joseph Solomon's children thought his sartorial pretensions...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0679441549
• ISBN 13: 9780679441540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480