Once a Prince of Broadway

...Act One, published to virtually unanimous raves in 1959, has never been out of print and has done more than any single book, play or film to establish the image of Broadway as the Promised Land...

...Why would someone in a situation as enviable as Hart's create such a hateful lie...

...Nevertheless, Bach plowed ahead, emerging with Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart...

...Bach reveals that she actually lived a dozen years beyond her supposed demise, and that her eccentricity deepened into apparent psychosis...

...Hart's autobiography is still read for its moving and well-told version of the classic "rags to riches" tale...

...His second career, as a director, started with that show and culminated in 1956 with My Fair Lady, generally considered the greatest Broadway musical ever...

...when the writer does take a detour from Hart's story it is a well-worn one—for example, a character sketch of Alexander Woollcott (Hart and Kaufman's target in The Man Who Came to Dinner), orablow-byblow of the complicated transformation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion into a Broadway musical...

...It has been my experience that a satisfaction of biography-writing is the opportunity to use the subject's life as a jumping off point for a variety of relevant explorations...

...His first professionally produced play, The Beloved Bandit, was cowritten with a buddy, who is conveniently airbrushed out of Act One...

...While growing up in the Bronx (a time memorably evoked in his autobiography, Act One) he constantly fantasized about Broadway...

...But its subject matter was rapidly receding into the hazy meadows of memory even when it first appeared...

...Indeed, it becomes clear that perhaps Hart's greatest biographical value is as a symbol of an era...

...In narrating its subject's life, Dazzler is both gossipy and credible, a relatively rare and laudable combination...

...on the gay theatrical subculture of the '20s through the '50s...

...In the entertainment cosmos it has become a rather small planet—certainly far less capacious than that other show business metonym called Hollywood...

...The book is heavy on the life and light on the times...

...It was the center of a significant industry that directly or indirectly employed tens of thousands of people...

...He enjoyed sex as a pastime readily available to him, but it never ruled his life...

...If that is what you want to know about, then Dazzler is the book for you...

...As an apprentice in the late 1920s he directed Little Theater and summer camp productions with the goal of one day making it to Broadway...

...The date partially explains why his name, momentous a mere four decades ago, today sounds antique and obscure...

...But some of the daunting difficulties that he faced help to explain why there have been no previous full-scale Hart studies, and perhaps why the author put this project aside for a decade...

...Reviewed by Ben Yagoda Author, "Will Rogers: A Biography," "About Town: The 'New Yorker' and the World It Made" Moss Hart died at the age of 57 in 1961...

...And virtually all of his other intimates—such as Kaufman, the producer Sam Harris, Irving Berlin, movie executive Dore Schary (a childhood friend), and My Fair Lady lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner—were gone by the time Bach started in earnest...

...Finally, there is the matter of Hart's stature...

...These incidents became well known on Broadway...

...Hart's world revolved around the stage...

...Think of all the set-pieces the author could have essayed: on the nature of theatrical collaboration in the '20s and '30s...

...From the 1920s through the 1950s, Broadway represented a particular cultural universe...

...The Great White Way is still white with illumination, of course, but its greatness has waned...

...Most intriguing is the case of Hart's eccentric Aunt Kate, his mother's sister...

...Shockingly, Bach tells us, Hart implied to reporters that they were the work of his mother...

...In addition, Hart's widow, Kitty Carlisle, who is still going strong at 90, declined to cooperate...

...By all evidence, Hart devoted much of his immense wit and energy to applying and polishing a, yes, dazzling sheen around his inner life...

...Though less successful on his own, Hart was the author of 13 productions between 1932 and 1953, most notably the 1941 Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark...

...But Bach keeps his eyes on the prize, and to him the prize is Moss Hart's life...

...He married Kitty Carlisle when he was almost 42, fathered two children, and apparently was a contented husband...

...his other plays, including those collaborated on with Kaufman, have aged poorly...

...When Steven Bach initially embarked on a biography of Moss Hart in 1985, the opportunity it offered to explore a lost era must have been one of its enticements...

...Where Bach is concerned, this approach would have had the further benefit of compensating for the frequent opaqueness of his biographee— and for the limitations of Hart's talent as well...

...Hart also ventured to Hollywood on occasion—usually when he had bills to pay—writing the screenplays for Gentleman's Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, A Star is Born and several other films...

...Moreover, succeeding there meant being talked about with a certain level of respect, if not awe, and all kinds of professional and social doors were opened...

...Bach establishes that Hart was attracted to other men, and acted on that attraction in his youth...

...Hart was universally deemed to have a masterful director's touch, but how is one to write about it with no visual record of the plays he staged and few surviving witnesses to his technique...

...She introduced the boy to the theater and is given a poignant death scene in the autobiography...

...Bach has fact-checked/to One, uncovering a number of instances where Hart twisted or outand-out falsified the truth...

...The author succumbs to graceless platitude, presumably because with all routes to Hart's soul blocked off, it is the only course he has left...

...The same question applies to Hart's sexuality...

...The two went on to write a total of seven plays or musicals together, including The Man Who Came to Dinner and the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take it With You...

...Never afflicted with false modesty, Hart once referred to Noël Coward as "the English Moss Hart," but in truth he lacked the Englishman's wit and scope...

...on the art and craft of Broadway directing...

...You Can Ì Take it With You and Lady in the Dark are still revived and can be carried off...

...To begin with, a book about Hart is like one about St...

...This is a question that Dazzler, despite its own talent to amuse, is not equipped to answer...

...With the scent cold for 40 years, however, how could a mere biographer be expected to penetrate it...

...He was a wonderful companion, host and raconteur, with what Coward (referring to himself) called "a talent to amuse," but all that is similarly difficult to put on paper...

...Sometimes she snuck backstage at Hart productions and destroyed props, other times she carved curses and obscure symbols into his apartment door...

...Bach writes: "It seems clear that his sexuality had never been rigidly this or that and that he functioned sexually at various times in various ways...

...Augustine, Rousseau or Henry Adams—it has the burden of competing with a classic autobiography...

...on how voguish psychoanalysis was in midcentury New York and Hollywood (Lady in the Dark was informed by Hart's own decades-long analysis...

...on Broadway comedy in the '30s and '40s...

...The situational jokes feel forced, the topical jokes fall flat or are baffling, and the sentiment seems sticky...

...And for three decades following the triumphant 1930 opening of the comedy Once in a Lifetime, cowritten by Hart and George S. Kaufman, he was a prince of Broadway...

...It is now a place where musical extravaganzas exist to entertain outof-towners from Chicago to Shanghai, and where the occasional serious play or intelligent comedy (usually a London import) only manages to slip in for a couple of months...