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cimorene1558's review against another edition
5.0
Lovely theatrical autobiography, a genre to which I have a minor addiction (only old ones; no interest in autobiographies of anyone who hasn't hit their seventies by now, and most of the best ones are by people who died at least ten years ago and/or in their nineties). I've read most of the major English ones--being an Anglophile and a stage, rather than screen person--and this is a lovely way to start on Americans. Moss Hart was obviously a nice man, as well as a talented one, and that helps a lot: a little bitchy gossip is nice, but who wants to read a whole book of real-life but long ago whining, complaining, or gossiping? The only sad things about this book are that a)he obviously had a pretty rotten childhood, and b)he died shortly after this was published, so no second act.
Oh, and another nice thing: obviously a man who enjoyed money and fame to the hilt. Does anyone else get tired of people who spend half a book whining about how poor they are, and the other about how rich?
Oh, and another nice thing: obviously a man who enjoyed money and fame to the hilt. Does anyone else get tired of people who spend half a book whining about how poor they are, and the other about how rich?
momlovesbooks17's review against another edition
4.0
This one took me a while but I enjoyed it. It's the story of how playwright, director, producer Moss Hart got his start in the business in the 1930s. A behind the scenes look at what it took to write (and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again) a play to turn it into a Broadway hit.
wolfsonarchitect's review against another edition
5.0
This is a terrific, page-turner story of Moss Hart’s path from poverty in the Bronx to success on Broadway. On another level, it’s wonderful to learn social history through this first person account- about Broadway in the 20s, the Borscht Belt, and creative collaboration. As an autobiography, it’s not the whole story. You can read articles online about his mental illness and sexuality.
timg's review against another edition
emotional
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
juliana_aldous's review against another edition
5.0
This is great American tale about hard work, making the big time and the love of the theater. Written in 1957 shortly before he died Moss Hart was the playwright for You Can't Take it With You, My Fair Lady and dozens of others of hits during the thirties through the fifties. This is a delightful story of Hart's early days growing up poor, working his way through his first broadway Hit--Once in a Lifetime. This memoir was recently turned into a play itself starring Tony Shaloub. I hope they make a movie with Shaloub!
peteradamson's review against another edition
4.0
This book has some renown among theater aficionados; as a time capsule of East Coast theater in the early 20th century, it works wonderfully. If you ever saw LIGHT UP THE SKY (his play about a play opening out of town), you have a good sense of his experience getting ONCE IN A LIFETIME produced.
Is Moss Hart the first person to perfect the art of humblebragging? Perhaps; he seems like the sort of person I would not like in real life. He is very focused on money (and lack thereof) and eating, and he has a very high opinion of himself and his abilities.
Related to the above: his writing is so florid and theatrical it was often hard to tell what parts of his stories are fictionalized and what parts are real. For example, his Aunt Kate met a MUCH different fate than what he presented here. Why would he change that?
At any rate, I think I enjoyed the summer camp chapters the most, with his family and youth a close second. Interestingly, the theater aspects were the least compelling parts of the book.
Is Moss Hart the first person to perfect the art of humblebragging? Perhaps; he seems like the sort of person I would not like in real life. He is very focused on money (and lack thereof) and eating, and he has a very high opinion of himself and his abilities.
Related to the above: his writing is so florid and theatrical it was often hard to tell what parts of his stories are fictionalized and what parts are real. For example, his Aunt Kate met a MUCH different fate than what he presented here. Why would he change that?
At any rate, I think I enjoyed the summer camp chapters the most, with his family and youth a close second. Interestingly, the theater aspects were the least compelling parts of the book.
reeeeedmg_123's review against another edition
5.0
Another stunning biography. I saw a lot of myself in this author and his story. It’s a story filled with turns and twists that you would not expect but it is filled with such heart. I truly enjoyed this story.
cleheny's review against another edition
5.0
The acclaim for Moss Hart's autobiography is well deserved. The prose is lively and engaging, and frequently very funny. What comes through most clearly is Hart’s love for the theater and those who work in it.
But there is poignancy, too, in Hart's discussion of the poverty that marked the first 26 or so years of his life. Hart sees nothing noble in poverty, nor does he appear to paint a worse picture than his family experienced. They were not, for example, homeless (well, they were for a very brief period of time), and they did not starve. But Hart focuses on the bleak sameness of it all--the difficulty of escape from often living hand to mouth (and sometimes nothing more than on credit from neighborhood grocers and butchers)—and the absence of things that the more privileged (even lower middle class) might take for granted, such as privacy. His relationship with his immediate family was strained for most of his childhood/young adulthood, though, with time, he was able to understand (if not always like) his family members a bit more. There are two sections concerning his father, in particular, that I found quite moving. First, the first Christmas after his beloved Aunt Kate no longer lived with his family, in which his father clearly wanted to buy his son a present but couldn’t afford one. Second, his father’s blossoming as he worked in a canteen at an awful summer camp where Hart was social director. What sets these sequences apart is Hart’s recognition that his father was more than the ineffectual and apparently-emotionally distant man that his maternal family’s dynamics seems to have forced him into.
The first part concerns Hart’s life up to the time he was about 20 or 21. Its primary focus is his enduring love of the theater—how it developed (through his Aunt Kate), his dedication to making it his career, how luck played a significant role in his eventual success, and the people he met/became friends with who themselves were devoted to the stage. Hart is explicit that he was often lucky, but it was his hard work and willingness to take risks that put him in position to receive the benefits of a lucky break or acquaintance. Even during some of the darkest moments, Hart tells his story with a combination of self-effacement, humor, and huge affection for those who, like him, loved the stage.
In the second part, Hart focuses in on about a year or so in which he wrote his first successful play, Once in a Lifetime, a 1930 farce about the early sound era in Hollywood. The chance to collaborate with George Kaufman, with whom he wrote his most famous works, came about through the determined offices of a friend who appears to have desired the role of “tastemaker.” Hart describes this first collaborative effort in detail, and his stories about his working sessions with Kaufman, who doesn’t seem to have ever figured out that Hart’s far-greater appetite required more sustenance than a light afternoon tea, are funny (though I imagine that they are not particularly illuminating if the reader is a would-be playwright hoping to glean insight into how to write a successful farce). Once in a Lifetime’s success resulted from hard work by both playwrights, and significant determination from Hart, who—because this was his first “real” play (his prior terrible melodrama written under a pseudonym)—was more desperate to get it done when hurdles arose.
After I finished Act One, I did some further research and learned that Kaufman commented that he expected much of the book to be fictionalized. And there is evidence to support that. First, in a diary written around the same time as he wrote his autobiography (but not available for review until after his wife’s death in 2007), Hart appears to have been (at least at times) quite vicious about some of the people Hart praised in Act One: The Bitter Barbs of the Hidden Moss Hart Diary | Vanity Fair”. What is a reader to make of his odes to these individuals in his autobiography? Was he intentionally lying? Determined to put a good face on his various interactions? Attempting to reimagine his life and his theater family like the Vanderhof-Sycamore-Carmichael clan of You Can’t Take It With You? Accurately remembering them as he thought of them then, not as he thought of them, almost 30 years later, when he wrote Act One? It’s hard to know, but, given the warmth and hope I was left with at the end of Act One, I hope it was the latter (unlikely as that may be).
Second, Hart is completely silent about his sexuality—indeed, any sexuality on his part. Based on some further reading, it’s apparent that Hart was a closeted gay man. It’s possible—given his marriage and the resulting children—that he was bisexual, but he may have been in such deep denial that he entered into marriage without any actual sexual desire for his wife. There’s nothing in Act One that hints at any same-sex attraction, but, notably, there’s nothing in the autobiography that hints at Hart being attracted to women. In fact, the autobiography is largely free of any references to romance or sex. The only reference to any kind of true-life romance is Hart’s explanation that young men and women attended the summer camps in the hope of meeting life partners (and he hints quite generally that illicit sexual liaisons often occurred). Hart portrays Kaufman as an apparently-happily married man and whose social life appeared to be largely intellectual. But Kaufman was an inveterate womanizer, and it’s hard to believe that, in the year or so that they worked together on this first play, Hart saw no evidence of that. Did Hart leave out that side of his collaborator because it didn’t fit into the largely-wholesome image depicted in his autobiography, or because talking about it would highlight the absence of any discussion about Hart’s romantic/sexual adventures? I suspect both reasons contributed to the decision. It saddens me that a man who writes with such love and joy of the theater could not be honest with his public (or, perhaps, himself) about his other desires.
Third, and this may be the most poignant for me, is Hart’s fiction regarding an important family member.
Fourth, nothing in Act One hints at the debilitating mental illness Hart suffered, which appears to have been manic depression. Hart must have endured at least some of the symptoms in the first quarter or so of his life (they often manifest in late adolescence, if not before), but the self-picture he paints is one of great determination and forward-movement, even if he has to acknowledge that he could be more “timid” than some of his bolder friends.
Even with these (very significant) departures from absolute truth, I think Frank Rich has the right of it (taken from “The Greatest Showbiz Book Ever Written” in New Yorker magazine):
But there is poignancy, too, in Hart's discussion of the poverty that marked the first 26 or so years of his life. Hart sees nothing noble in poverty, nor does he appear to paint a worse picture than his family experienced. They were not, for example, homeless (well, they were for a very brief period of time), and they did not starve. But Hart focuses on the bleak sameness of it all--the difficulty of escape from often living hand to mouth (and sometimes nothing more than on credit from neighborhood grocers and butchers)—and the absence of things that the more privileged (even lower middle class) might take for granted, such as privacy. His relationship with his immediate family was strained for most of his childhood/young adulthood, though, with time, he was able to understand (if not always like) his family members a bit more. There are two sections concerning his father, in particular, that I found quite moving. First, the first Christmas after his beloved Aunt Kate no longer lived with his family, in which his father clearly wanted to buy his son a present but couldn’t afford one. Second, his father’s blossoming as he worked in a canteen at an awful summer camp where Hart was social director. What sets these sequences apart is Hart’s recognition that his father was more than the ineffectual and apparently-emotionally distant man that his maternal family’s dynamics seems to have forced him into.
The first part concerns Hart’s life up to the time he was about 20 or 21. Its primary focus is his enduring love of the theater—how it developed (through his Aunt Kate), his dedication to making it his career, how luck played a significant role in his eventual success, and the people he met/became friends with who themselves were devoted to the stage. Hart is explicit that he was often lucky, but it was his hard work and willingness to take risks that put him in position to receive the benefits of a lucky break or acquaintance. Even during some of the darkest moments, Hart tells his story with a combination of self-effacement, humor, and huge affection for those who, like him, loved the stage.
In the second part, Hart focuses in on about a year or so in which he wrote his first successful play, Once in a Lifetime, a 1930 farce about the early sound era in Hollywood. The chance to collaborate with George Kaufman, with whom he wrote his most famous works, came about through the determined offices of a friend who appears to have desired the role of “tastemaker.” Hart describes this first collaborative effort in detail, and his stories about his working sessions with Kaufman, who doesn’t seem to have ever figured out that Hart’s far-greater appetite required more sustenance than a light afternoon tea, are funny (though I imagine that they are not particularly illuminating if the reader is a would-be playwright hoping to glean insight into how to write a successful farce). Once in a Lifetime’s success resulted from hard work by both playwrights, and significant determination from Hart, who—because this was his first “real” play (his prior terrible melodrama written under a pseudonym)—was more desperate to get it done when hurdles arose.
After I finished Act One, I did some further research and learned that Kaufman commented that he expected much of the book to be fictionalized. And there is evidence to support that. First, in a diary written around the same time as he wrote his autobiography (but not available for review until after his wife’s death in 2007), Hart appears to have been (at least at times) quite vicious about some of the people Hart praised in Act One: The Bitter Barbs of the Hidden Moss Hart Diary | Vanity Fair”. What is a reader to make of his odes to these individuals in his autobiography? Was he intentionally lying? Determined to put a good face on his various interactions? Attempting to reimagine his life and his theater family like the Vanderhof-Sycamore-Carmichael clan of You Can’t Take It With You? Accurately remembering them as he thought of them then, not as he thought of them, almost 30 years later, when he wrote Act One? It’s hard to know, but, given the warmth and hope I was left with at the end of Act One, I hope it was the latter (unlikely as that may be).
Second, Hart is completely silent about his sexuality—indeed, any sexuality on his part. Based on some further reading, it’s apparent that Hart was a closeted gay man. It’s possible—given his marriage and the resulting children—that he was bisexual, but he may have been in such deep denial that he entered into marriage without any actual sexual desire for his wife. There’s nothing in Act One that hints at any same-sex attraction, but, notably, there’s nothing in the autobiography that hints at Hart being attracted to women. In fact, the autobiography is largely free of any references to romance or sex. The only reference to any kind of true-life romance is Hart’s explanation that young men and women attended the summer camps in the hope of meeting life partners (and he hints quite generally that illicit sexual liaisons often occurred). Hart portrays Kaufman as an apparently-happily married man and whose social life appeared to be largely intellectual. But Kaufman was an inveterate womanizer, and it’s hard to believe that, in the year or so that they worked together on this first play, Hart saw no evidence of that. Did Hart leave out that side of his collaborator because it didn’t fit into the largely-wholesome image depicted in his autobiography, or because talking about it would highlight the absence of any discussion about Hart’s romantic/sexual adventures? I suspect both reasons contributed to the decision. It saddens me that a man who writes with such love and joy of the theater could not be honest with his public (or, perhaps, himself) about his other desires.
Third, and this may be the most poignant for me, is Hart’s fiction regarding an important family member.
Spoiler
Hart’s Aunt Kate is critically important as the person who exposed him to the theater and who powerfully communicated to him her love of it. Hart writes movingly of her ejection from his family apartment after years of selfish behavior on her part and his reconnection with her some years later as a young man with a foot just barely inside the theater world, even as she lived in what seems fairly desperate circumstances. According to Act One, Aunt Kate dies while Hart is at an out-of-town tryout of his doomed melodrama. In actuality, Aunt Kate lived on and was a destructive presence in Hart’s adult life. Per Frank Rich (in his New Yorker article, “The Greatest Showbiz Book Ever Written”: “Aunt Kate was not a colorful, poignant eccentric so much as a destructive psychotic. Contrary to Act One’s narrative, she lived on long after her eviction from the Hart household and resurfaced in a spiteful criminal incident aimed at Moss after he achieved success.”Fourth, nothing in Act One hints at the debilitating mental illness Hart suffered, which appears to have been manic depression. Hart must have endured at least some of the symptoms in the first quarter or so of his life (they often manifest in late adolescence, if not before), but the self-picture he paints is one of great determination and forward-movement, even if he has to acknowledge that he could be more “timid” than some of his bolder friends.
Even with these (very significant) departures from absolute truth, I think Frank Rich has the right of it (taken from “The Greatest Showbiz Book Ever Written” in New Yorker magazine):
“You’d think that to reread Act One in the context of this diary and Dazzler [n.b. a 2001 biography] would be disillusioning for anyone who has spent much of a lifetime admiring the “Moss Hart” of his memoir. But that’s not the case. While Hart sometimes fictionalized his own story, “it didn’t matter if it was literally true,” as [a later biographer] wisely concluded, because the book’s core is true. Hart’s self-mythologizing is within a long-established tradition of American letters dating back to the mythmaking of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Clemens’s reinvention of himself as Mark Twain. . . .
That Hart wrote a book showing that it was possible to escape so horrific a childhood—at least until Intermission—is a gift to lonely and troubled kids everywhere. And it was not an easy gift to deliver, since it required him to quarantine the sadness of his second act to keep it from contaminating his genuine joy and pride in his escape at the end of the first. Adult readers, if not young ones, will recognize that the happy ending is by definition provisional anyway. No one can escape the scars of childhood simply by slamming the door. But that’s another story.”
lucyames's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
so so beautifully written and inspiring! moss hart is so articulate and writes with such heart and empathy, his passion and love of the theatre is palpable and so endearing! a very well written theatre memoir :))
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