New Play in Manhattan

Winged Victory (by Moss Hart; produced by the U.S. Army Air Forces) takes off with a roar, will keep flying till God knows when. A salute to the Air Forces, it is simple, warmhearted, big--and served up with a rousing Army Band. As a play, it never once batters the mind. But as a show it often whops the emotions, as a spectacle often tingles the blood.

Against a swarming background, Playwright Hart tells the story of six typical young flyers. First half of Winged Victory spans the 15-month training period, from a rowdy first glimpse of camp to a jubilant parade-ground graduation. Betweenwhiles, the boys slog away, go on solo flights, snatch moments with their girls and wives. One of the six washes out, another is killed night-flying.

Then, while their wives cling to one another in a dreary hotel room, the boys zoom off for combat overseas. Winged Victory ends in the South Pacific, with a Jap raid that explodes upon a camp Christmas shindig, sends the flyers into action.

Winged Victory is more a paean to youth than a picture of war. Incorrigibly boyish in tone, it might plead that most Air Forces cadets are little more than little boys. But the boyishness, which merely prettifies the first half of Winged Victory, somewhat falsifies the second half. Far from toughening Playwright Hart's flyers, actual war makes them almost more tender. The later scenes taper off anyhow, like postscripts in a cruder scrawl. Playwright Hart's real play is the training of a cadet. That story is not only vivid and self-contained, but it is one that Moss Hart watched with his own eyes.

Okay, Young Man. One Sunday last spring while Moss Hart was having a drink in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, a young Air Forces lieutenant breezed over to his table, introduced himself, said: "Would you like to do a play about the Air Forces?" "Certainly," answered Hart, as the readiest way of getting rid of him. But ten days later Hart was in Washington, face to face with General H. H. Arnold. Hart stated his terms: "I must be boss." Said Arnold: "Okay, young man."

Three days later, Hart, who detests flying, left on a 28,000-mile trip by bomber. Into two months he had to pack the experience of 15. Using a fake name and wearing a phony uniform, he tasted basic training in Mississippi, sampled college training in Missouri, took classification tests in California. He wound up his training when the nose of his companions' ship "pointed south--for combat."

Tough Weeks. He wrote Winged Victory in less than a month, had 17 days, as his own director, to put the show on. For the cast, 7,000 applicants were once-overed, classified 1-A, 1-B, 4-F as in the draft, pared down to 350. Every rehearsal was "like an invasion"--350 performers, 70 stagehands, five revolving stages, 17 scenes. Haggard and jittery, Hart managed "to stay calm till I got to my bedroom at night, when I went crazy." Though he had waived every cent of royalties (in various forms Winged Victory may gross $10,000,000 for Army Emergency Relief) the show, for him, was the most important thing he had ever done.

Winged Victory is also important to Hart as his first complete theatrical solo flight. Though one of the best-known of U.S. playwrights, for over ten years after he hit Broadway in 1930 he always collaborated--and with better-known men than he. He wrote Once in a Lifetime, You Can't Take It With You, I'd Rather Be Right, The Man Who Came to Dinner with George S. Kaufman; Face the Music and As Thousands Cheer with Irving Berlin; Jubilee with Cole Porter. In 1941 he all but set up for himself with Lady in the Dark, but Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin hovered about with music and lyrics.

From the start, Hart was a blazing success as a comedy writer. But inside him kept stirring the comedy writer's desire to write Hamlet--a desire that led to such misses as the Kaufman & Hart The Fabulous Invalid and The American Way. Like many jesters, Hart thought the only alternative to the funnybone was the tear duct. Not till Lady in the Dark did he contrive a really successful piece of serious theater.

Tough Years. Once asked where he was born, Hart replied, "Fifth Avenue," adding--as eyebrows went up--"the wrong end." Son of an unsuccessful English Jew, Moss was dragged around The Bronx before he grew up, around Brooklyn before he grew famous. He bearded Broadway early, became office boy for Augustus Pitou, "The Road King." Pitou paid him $15 a week, but sank $45,000 in a teenage play of Hart's called The Beloved Bandit.

After knocking about in Little Theaters and borsch-belt summer camps, at 25 Hart wrote Once in a Lifetime, then rewrote it with George Kaufman. Awestruck by the great man, Hart called him "Mr. Kaufman." Kaufman called Hart "Er. . . ."

When Once in a Lifetime proved a smash, Hart unabashedly began what his friends call "the gold garter period" of his life. The story goes that he and his family swept out of their dingy Brooklyn quarters without so much as a toothbrush, moved grandly into a Manhattan apartment hotel. His new bedroom had four sets of curtains--net, chiffon, satin, velvet. Explained Hart: "I never had any curtains when I was poor, so I thought I'd like to have plenty."

As success topped success, the garters got golder and golder. Moss dressed fit to kill: "He is monogrammed," said Edna Ferber once, "in the most improbable places." He had himself a town place and an estate in rurally sophisticated Bucks County, Pa. He choked with television sets, color cameras, electric toothbrushes. For his farm he transplanted thousands of pine trees, elms and maples, at fabulous expense. Cracked a visitor: "It just goes to show you what God could do if He had money."

Tougher Hide. But with further success, the joy in success abated. Today, at 39, Hart is no caviar-for-breakfast fellow, but a pretty sober citizen. His chief indulgence is his farm, now more arboreal than ever. Tall, dark and glittering, with Mephistophelean eyebrows and Biblical eyes, for six years he has been going to a psychoanalyst, quips: "I ought to get my F (for Freud) any day now." The visits have helped dispel the dark self-doubts from which the bright gadgets offered escape. They have given him, among other things, the courage to write alone. But he still has his moments of funk. He still spends an opening night in the men's room. He still dramatizes everything: he proudly arrived at the Kaufmans' with affidavits from three dentists, stating that they had collectively worked on him for 15 straight hours.

A well-liked, generous, hostess-hounded bachelor who wants some day to marry, Hart has probably made more than $1,000,000 in show business. He is chary of discussing finances. Says he: "I have so many relatives. . . . Why, my aunt has only to read a good review in the Times and there's another operation."

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