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![[Book reviews]](/images/boston/arts/books_header.gif){kind=small}
Steven Bach’s life of Moss Hart by Steve Vineberg
Dazzler: The Life andTimes of Moss Hart
A college friend gave me a copy of Moss Hart’s Act One for my 19th birthday, and like many another kid in love with the theater, I devoured and cherished it. It may be the funniest and most vivid book ever written about a life in the theater, though it covers only the early part of Hart’s — up through the triumphant 1930 opening night of Once in a Lifetime, which began his collaboration with the seasoned veteran George S. Kaufman and made him famous at 26. In Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart, Steven Bach breaks the news that Hart embellished his own story to such an extent that some scenes in Act One — like my personal favorite, the description of the disastrous opening night of his first professional play, The Beloved Bandit — are almost pure invention. But if Bach is obliged to dismantle Hart’s lies, he does so sweetly. In Bach’s view, Act One (the last piece of writing Hart ever completed, in 1959) belongs among his best entertainments, dedicated — like Once in a Lifetime, You Can’t Take It with You, The Man Who Came to Dinner, like the smart musicals he turned out with Irving Berlin in the early ’30s, and like his celebrated direction of My Fair Lady and Camelot — to giving audiences a grand time. Dazzler is an affectionate chronicle of Hart’s life, and Bach — a former United Artists executive who wrote Final Cut, the book about the Heaven’s Gate fiasco that brought down UA — can be a perceptive analyst. He’s extremely sharp on the Kaufman-Hart chemistry: They had very little in common at twenty-five and forty besides being tall, dark, and Jewish. Moss was exuberant; Kaufman, dour. Moss was handsome; Kaufman, homely. Moss was self-taught; Kaufman had studied law and playwriting at Columbia. Moss wrote purple poems to friendship; Kaufman cringed at displays of emotion and abhorred sentimentality. Moss was outside; Kaufman was as inside as one could get. Even their senses of humor were different. Moss was the ingratiating charmer, transparently eager to please. Kaufman was the " master of the destructive jest, " as Brooks Atkinson noted, his wit barbed, caustic, and feared. The contrasts were what suited them to each other. They meshed. One warmed while the other cooled. Bach is interesting on Hart’s bisexuality, his manic depression, his addiction to psychoanalysis. (It was his therapist, Lawrence Kubie, whose disapproval of his gay alliances ultimately led to his adopting an entirely heterosexual lifestyle, which culminated in his long marriage to the singer and actress Kitty Carlisle.) But he’s less surefooted in the area of dramaturgy. He overrates Hart’s work as a book writer on the Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark and as a screenwriter on the Judy Garland A Star Is Born. He doesn’t seem to understand the different kinds of comic conventions Hart and Kaufman were handling in the three hit plays they wrote together: the hard-boiled comedy Once in a Lifetime, the high comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, and the zany farce You Can’t Take It with You, which combined the comedy of manners with romantic comedy. When Bach claims that there’s no genuine romance in any of the Kaufman-Hart collaborations because " tenderness and sentimentality weren’t in Kaufman’s inventory and frank sexual attraction wasn’t in Moss’s, " he’s projecting what he’s deduced about Hart’s psychological make-up onto his work. Actually, the romance of Alice and Tony is the backbone of You Can’t Take It with You: the only completely successful production I’ve seen of the play, the 1979 TV rendition directed by Paul Bogart, puts the lovers (played by Blythe Danner and Barry Bostwick) at the emotional center. The writing Bach cites as the most emotionally satisfying in The Man Who Came to Dinner is found in the dreary, comeuppance speeches that weaken it — just as they weaken You Can’t Take It with You. (He’s right in saying that Frank Capra’s movie version wrecked YCTIWY, but Capra was drawn to the moralism inherent in the script.) But he’s very informative about the sources of The Man Who Came to Dinner, which was only partly based on the columnist Alexander Woollcott. If Bach isn’t a dramaturg, he’s certainly a historian. I’ve read quite a lot about the history of My Fair Lady, but the chapter on it in Dazzler is full of fresh insights, and it’s gripping. The book ends high, with Bach’s insights into Hart’s work on the Lerner-Loewe musicals and the publication of Act One. This is one of the few theatrical biographies I know that saves its best material for last. Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001
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