"Playwriting," says Moss Hart, "like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession." On the face of it, Playwright Hart has little to be humble about. As co-author of such comedy classics as The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You, as librettist of Lady in the Dark and director of My Fair Lady, he will hold top billing in the American popular theater for a long time to come. But he has not had a play of his own on Broadway since the earnest, charming Climate of Eden in 1952. (There were those who loved it, but it flopped.) To get over that humiliation, Playwright Hart began to jot down his recollections. With great skill and an understanding gentleness toward stage folk that all good men harbor for children and the feebleminded, Moss Hart has written one of the best memoirs of this or any other theatrical generation.
Though it was written to get away from playwriting. Act One (Random House; $5) in a sense is still a play. It is a collection of fascinating characters whom the author parades before the footlights of his wit and warmth. There is first of all the character who dominated Moss Hart's poverty-ridden Bronx childhood: a grandfather, whom a casual neighbor might well have regarded as simply an embittered, ill-tempered old cigar maker, pathetically attached to his past friendship with the great labor leader, Sam Gompers. But in Moss Hart's telling, he becomes "an Everest of Victorian tyranny," the black sheep of a wealthy English-Jewish family, who married beneath his station—his wife could neither read nor write. Of an evening in their shabby flat, he would read Dickens to the illiterate woman—and punish her with awful silence if something displeased him.
Mad Cossack. Then there was Aunt Kate, who seemed to some merely an aging spinster, slightly touched in the head. But on Moss Hart's stage she emerges as a kind of Bronx Blanche DuBois, a woman defying her mean surroundings by living in a world of her own with smelling salts and trailing dresses and a stubborn refusal to go to work "no matter how needy the rest of the family might be. She was "a touching combination of the sane and the ludicrous along with some secret splendor within herself." Come debt or hunger, she would go to the theater, taking her nephew with her, and when there wasn't even a quarter for the gas meter, she would read her novels by candlelight, teaching Moss that the mind can be its own grand and inviolable theater.