Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (review)

The Broadway theatre of the 1930s and 1940s has almost disappeared from the New York landscape, leaving behind but a few buildings and a lot of legends that seem to expand with the years. Also disappearing rapidly from the scene is an entire generation of playgoers that would know immediately whom you meant by Noël and Cole, Woollcott and Woolley, and Kaufman and Hart. There was something glamorous about Broadway in the decade before World War II, even with the stock market tumbling and unemployment rising, when writers, actors, and producers were shuttling between New York and Hollywood, turning a hit in the former into a product for mass tastes in the latter. There were cruises to Europe and to other exotic places by popular stars, authors, and composers that seemed to epitomize the lifestyle of the rich and famous. All of this and much more is contained in Steven Bach's excellent new biography of one of the most talented of these "beautiful people," the playwright and director Moss Hart. Given his eminence in the theatre world, it is difficult to believe that there has been no biography of Hart since his own Act One: An Autobiography was published in 1959. Regrettably, his wife Kitty Carlisle Hart "chose not to cooperate" (xii) in the writing of this book. Her insights, especially in regard to Hart's personal life, would have been invaluable.

Steven Bach begins his biography at the beginning, which is to say with Moss Hart's birth in 1904 in a tenement house on East 105th Street in New York. We learn quickly about grandparents and parents, and Hart's relationship with his extended family as Bach moves us through the playwright's first sixteen years in eighteen pages, giving us only the essentials about the people and events that would shape his career. His spinster aunt Kate introduced him to theatre. At age seventeen, Hart worked for producer Gus Pitou and learned about New York show business. He wrote sketches and jokes that he would recycle again and again in his plays. His first big break came when the need to write a vehicle for an Irish tenor drove him and a friend to cobble together a play from The Taming of the Shrew and James M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton. It was a flop, but Hart learned about creating dialogue and exciting dramatic situations. The New York theatre in the 1920s served as training school for Hart as he acted, directed, wrote sketches, and acquired from experience a deep understanding of the professional theatre and what it would take to be successful in it. Bach's obvious joy in writing about his subject comes through clearly in his prose: "Moss loved actors—their gifts and their foibles—and they loved him back. It wasn't just that he had been one, though that helped. It was that he believed in the 'magic of personal chemistry' that was beyond prediction or manufacture. Actors would be the enduring love of his life, the subject and theme of his life's work" (39).

Hart's success in the 1930s begins with Once in a Lifetime and his collaboration with George S. Kaufman, and the book provides us with a rich recounting of that important artistic partnership. We learn about Hart's relationship with Kaufman and his wife, Beatrice, and with the Algonquin wits who were friends of the Kaufmans. The 1930s introduced Hart to Hollywood and brought him success and money far greater than he had ever imagined. He met practically everybody who was anybody in show business, and Bach wraps his narrative around these relationships to tell us a great deal about theatre of the period. He also tells us a great deal about Hart's private life, covering not just the Bronx origins but also exotic world cruises, a cottage in Bucks County, his...