Act One by Moss Hart

Author:Moss Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

PART TWO

FOUR YEARS later, almost to the exact day and at almost the identical spot on the beach where I had sat four years earlier, I sat again, my pockets stuffed with a supply of candy bars, a pad of yellow paper again on my knees. It seemed to me remarkable that so much and so little had happened since that other September morning when I had first made my way to this same spot.

I had returned only a day or two before from another season of social directing, but this time as social director of the Flagler Hotel, the Fontainebleau of the Catskills. In those four years I had gone, like Kansas City, about as far as I could go. I was now the most highly paid, the most eagerly sought-after social director of the Borscht Circuit. The summer of my novitiate at Camp Utopia and my summer of serfdom at the Half Moon Country Club were bitter but distant memories, something to be told to the staff as laughable but almost unbelievable tales out of the past, considering my present high eminence.

This past summer at the Flagler, I had arrived for the beginning of the season with a personal staff of twenty-six people, not including waiters or musicians. The staff included not only a future nightclub headliner and two future soloists of the Philharmonic Orchestra, but it also included as my chief assistant a solemn-faced young man of quiet but unswerving ambition, named Dore Schary. My position as King of the Borscht Circuit was largely undisputed. My chief competitor in the field was one Don Hartman, the social director of Grossinger’s Hotel—a curious quirk of circumstance, considering the fact that Dore Schary was to become head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Hartman the head of Paramount Pictures. Not one of us would have believed this to be in the realm of even remote possibility in that summer of 1929—though we were, all three of us, not inclined to be modest in our estimates of what the future held in store.

A good deal more than just my own status as a social director had changed during those years. Camps and hotels with social staffs had taken an enormous leap forward. Money was plentiful and the competition keen. Both camps and hotels kept enlarging their social staffs and bettering their ability to provide greater social activities, particularly in the realm of shows, with each new summer.

The Flagler Hotel, whose proprietors had begun to feel the cutting edge of displacement by their deadliest rival, Grossinger’s, had, the summer before I arrived, decided to build the finest social hall on the Borscht Circuit and engage the best social director, barring Don Hartman, that they could get to run it. They had built what was, when I arrived to take it over, a completely equipped little theatre seating fifteen hundred people, whose electrical switchboard, fly loft and scenery dock compared more than favorably with some New York theatres. It was the pride of the Catskills. Its audience dressed to the hilt for the Friday and Saturday night shows.

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