Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart

1 Broadway Baby The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. --E. B. White "I was born on Fifth Avenue," Moss Hart liked to say. Then, when eyebrows had gone up all over the room, he would ricochet the very notion with a punch line: "The wrong end!" The joke always worked, but was never as self-deprecating as it sounded; he wanted you to know how far he'd come. Wherever he was--in the precincts of the Shuberts and Ziegfelds or the playgrounds of the Thalbergs and Zanucks, on croquet lawns or in paneled drawing rooms--was Broadway. When he walked into the room, people say, the party got better, and because it did he loved to call himself "the Darling of Everyone there," no matter where "there" was. But the airy witticism floated oh so casually over cocktails or at Sardi's had been as carefully rehearsed in the shaving mirror as any actor's speech on any stage. He had a performer's timing and need for applause and a style so theatrical no mere actor would have dared pull it off. What made his grand manner easy to like was his unabashed love for the Broadway he came to personify. Even when his ardor for it was unrequited, he couldn't wait to entertain you with tales of his rejection, hilarious or heart-rending or both. He was not born on any end of Fifth Avenue, but in a tenement at 74 East 105th Street, a neighborhood not of carriages and hansom cabs, but of dray wagons, pushcarts, and immigrants. It was an uptown version of the Lower East Side and not much farther from Broadway, he liked to quip, than, say, Yakima, Washington. The tenement he was born in fell long ago to the wrecker's ball. In its place stands the DeWitt Clinton housing project, just where East 105th Street is interrupted by a hard-packed urban playground behind a chain-link fence. Aromas in the air today are not from the shtetl, but from the islands. Neighborhood wisdom comes not from rabbis, but from psychics and palm readers who hang neon promises in storefront windows. One suspects that few of them know or care that just a few blocks away a museum dedicated to the city of New York celebrates Hart as a son of this very neighborhood. What remains of him uptown is mostly behind glass: some glossy eight-by-tens, a tarnishing cigarette case, and dog-eared contracts that hint at the terms and conditions of fame and fortune on Broadway. On the day Hart was born--October 24, 1904--this part of town was dominated not by nearby Central Park, but by the New York Central Railroad roaring north and rattling fire escapes all the way to the East River. The trains rumbled through a tunnel beneath what we now call Park Avenue and emerged into daylight, as it does today, at Ninety-sixth Street, where the tracks climb above ground to run in the channel of a stone viaduct. Those massive walls built to protect Upper East Siders from the railroad--and vice versa--must have looked like the walls of a prison in 1904. They still do, but modernity and mobility were popular issues early in the century and, to prove it, three days after Moss was born the New York subway system opened for business. Hart's birthplace on East 105th Street drifted with railroad soot and smelled of failure and cigars. "Shabby gentility," he called it, though it was closer to bare subsistence. The flat was ruled by his grandfather Solomon, whose daughter Lillie was Moss's mother. Barnett--"Barney"--Solomon was a cigarmaker born in London in 1833, a man of "enormous vitality, color and salt" according to hisBach, Steven is the author of 'Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart' with ISBN 9780679441540 and ISBN 0679441549.