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While Author Hart guides his characters through their scenes, he also manages some fascinating asides. There is Hart's quick test of tryout success (when a play is doing well, room service is always prompt, but when it is in trouble, the waiters are always late and the sandwiches soggy); there is Hart's law for the aspiring director (the less sure he is of himself, the tougher he must be with the cast). Hart knows how to interpret all the sounds made by an audience: the implications of their coughs, the degrees of their laughter, the intensity of their applause—and he also knows that "there is never again the sound of trumpets like the sound of the New York opening-night audience giving a play its unreserved approval." After all the agonies of the road, that is what happened with Once in a Lifetime, and then the beggar-playwright, rattling his cup for a kind word, was transformed into a maharajah. The day after Once in a Lifetime opened, Moss Hart staged a melodramatic epilogue: he rushed his family out of their cheap apartment, forcing them to leave the very plates on the table and the toothbrushes in their racks, and moved them to a posh Manhattan hotel; along the way, in a driving rain, he stopped at the Music Box theater, where people were lining up at the box office, and drew a $500 advance.
Almost anybody watching that scene could hear the trumpets.