The night before 26-year-old Moss Hart’s first play was to open on Broadway he was given $100 by the show’s producer Max Siegel. That was a lot of money back in 1930. After a late night final rehearsal for Once in a Lifetime, Siegel encouraged Hart to get a hotel room instead of traveling home to Brooklyn since they had to be back at the theatre the next morning.
Uncertain if the play would succeed, Hart didn’t know when he’d see $100 again so he decided to spurge for the night and stayed at the Astor Hotel. From his room he was able to see his name in lights at the Music Box Theatre. He wrote that night he got “the kind of sleep that only babies and old dogs in front of fires are supposed to enjoy.”
In the morning he got a massage, a haircut, a manicure, bought a new shirt, and gladly overtipped whoever he could. It was the best $85 he’d ever spent and a great start to what would be the best day of his life up until that point.
There were additional rehearsals starting at 11AM, and then the wait to see how the New York audience would receive the play that he and George S. Kaufman had spent so much time working on in the past year. The play had gotten lukewarm receptions in Atlantic City and Philadelphia and it was time to see if their last minute changes had saved the play.
The play was met with laughter and applause from beginning to the end. And this is how Hart explained what happened after all of the actors took their final bows:
“To my amazement, I saw Mr. Kaufman step forward and signal the stage manager to keep the curtain up. I stared at the stage in disbelief. He was about to do something so implausible that I could hardly conceive of his doing—he was about to make a curtain speech. . . . The audience seemed almost as surprised an I was. The applause stilled immediately and an eager ‘shushing’ took its place. He came forward another step, peered at them over his glasses, and waited for complete quiet.
“‘I would like this audience to know,’ he said carefully and slowly, ‘that eighty per cent of this play is Moss Hart.’ That was all. He stepped back and signaled the stage manager to lower the curtain. . . . I stood staring at the stage and at George S. Kaufman. Generosity does not flower easily or often in the rocky soil of the theatre. Few are uncorrupted by its ceaseless warfare over credit and billing, its jealousies and envies, its constant temptations toward pettiness and mean-spiritedness. It is not only a hard and exacting profession but the most public one as well. It does not breed magnanimity, and unselfishness is not one of its strong points. Not often is a young playwright welcomed into it with beau geste as gallant and selfless as the one that had just some over those footlights.
“A hand was tugging at my sleeve and Max Siegal was whispering some words in my ear, but I moved quickly away without answering. I did not trust my voice, and I was ashamed to have him see that my eyes were blurred.”
Moss Hart
Act One, pages 427-428
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‘Helping others rarely hurts anyone, particularly yourself’—Ted Hope