Moss Hart

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Moss Hart (October 24, 1904 - December 20, 1961) was a Jewish-American playwright and director of plays and musical theater. His youth and early career are detailed in his autobiography, Act One, a highly factual account of his breakthrough into fame.

1 Biography
2 Selected list of works
3 External links
4 References

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Biography

As a young boy he grew up on 74 East 105th Street in Manhattan, “a neighborhood not of carriages and hansom cabs, but of dray wagons, pushcarts, and immigrants” (Bach 1). Early on he had a strong relationship with his Aunt Kate, whom he later lost contact with because of a falling out between her and his parents, and her weakening mental state. She is the one who got him interested in the theater and would take him to see performances often. Hart even went so far as to create an "alternate ending" to her life in his autobiography. He writes that she died while he was working on out-of-town tryouts for his flop, "The Beloved Bandit". Later, Kate would become quite eccentric, vandalising Hart's home, writing threatening letters, and even setting fires backstage during rehearsals for Jubilee. But his relationship with Kate was life-forming. This was a “beginning of a lifelong infection…. He understood that the theater made possible ‘the art of being somebody else’…not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name…and a mother who was a distant drudge” (Bach 13). Moss was obviously not entirely content with his life at home and even with his own appearance.

Moss had his share of hard times in the form of flopped shows and deaths in the family, but by the late 1930s he was doing fairly well for himself. He went on to work on a Cole Porter-collaborated musical, Jubilee. It opened on October 12, 1935 and received mostly positive reviews. Brook Atkinson found it “a rapturous masquerade… a tapestry of showshop delights” (Bach 141). One of the most popular songs of the show, “Begin the Beguine”, later got its break when it was featured in MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell.

Hart was also a successful director. He directed the original Broadway productions of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's My Fair Lady, helping transform a young Julie Andrews into a powerful stage presence and keep the difficult star Rex Harrison under control. Hart also directed the original production of the musical Camelot, but died of a heart attack while the show was in out-of-town tryouts in Toronto.

Moody, irritable, and often depressed, he was married to Kitty Carlisle, but the well-dressed and longtime bachelor was regarded as homosexual by many of his friends and reportedly spent much time in therapy regarding his attraction to men. (Carlisle did ask Hart if he was gay before they married and he responded that he was not.) Among his reported amours was the actor turned writer Gordon Merrick. In his screenplay for the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen, Hart wrote the following lines for bisexual actor Danny Kaye as the title character: "You'd be surprised how many kings are only a queen with a moustache."

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