Profile of Moss Hart on Famous Like Me

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.

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 to 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. 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.

• George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart plays:
  • 1930 Once in a Lifetime
  • 1934 Merrily We Roll Along
  • 1936 You Can't Take It With You (won a Pulitzer Prize)
  • 1937 I'd Rather Be Right
  • 1939 The Man Who Came to Dinner
  • 1940 George Washington Slept Here

• Other plays by Hart:
  • 1941 Lady in the Dark, with Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin
  • 1943 Winged Victory

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