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Then there was Mr. Axeler, the "Mad Cossack" of the Half Moon Country Club —one of the summer camps for manhunting secretaries and girl-hunting clerks in which young Moss served six miserable years as "social director" and resident clown. The sleepless grind of "making fun" for the guests—an occupation also survived by Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Herman Wouk and dozens of others—consisted of reciting Shakespeare by the campfire, impersonating Fanny Brice, staging a full-length musical each week, supervising endless Spanish Fiestas and Greenwich Village Frolics. Mr. Axeler's establishment in Vermont was really more a concentration than a summer camp, with the red-shirted boss terrorizing the staff from horseback and always galloping well out of reach when it came time to meet the payroll. The Mad Cossack even bamboozled his social director out of a wardrobe, so that Hart was reduced to appearing in the dining hall dressed in the camp theater's flyblown, sweat-stained costumes, impersonating Robert E. Lee or Davy Crockett or Napoleon, telling jokes while his stomach curdled with rage and embarrassment.
Legendary Lancelot. There are other characters—Augustus Pitou, the "King of the One-Night Stands," for whom Office Boy Hart wrote his first play at the rate of one act a night; legendary, spiteful Producer Jed Harris, who received Hart while standing stark naked in his hotel suite. But the greatest of all is probably Playwright George S. Kaufman, legendary Lancelot of the Algonquin Round Table. When Kaufman agreed to collaborate with the unknown young Hart on Once in a Lifetime, there started a gentle comedy of errors almost as funny as the play itself. If Kaufman hated anything, it was cigar smoke and emotion; throughout their working sessions Hart puffed huge cigars and kept insisting on thanking his benefactor, not understanding why Kaufman kept rushing to the bathroom for refuge. On the other hand, Hart was a compulsive eater (success has since cured him of the affliction), but was too shy to admit his ravenous hunger; while Kaufman operated on their scripts with innumerable scalpel-sharp pencils, Hart would nearly faint on dainty watercress sandwiches or sickening fudge cooked up by the great playwright himself.