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Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart

 


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Steven Bach was a theatrical and film producer before heading worldwide production at United Artists, where he was involved in such films as Raging Bull, Manhattan, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, La Cage aux Folles, and Heaven’s Gate, about which he wrote the brilliant best-seller Final Cut. He is also the author of Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. He teaches at Columbia University and Bennington College and divides his time between Europe and the United States.


The first full-scale biography of the “Prince of Broadway,” the brilliant playwright and director Moss Hart.

No one loomed larger in Broadway’s golden age. Hart’s memoir, Act One, which told of a youth lived in poverty and his early success on Broadway, became the most successful and most loved book ever published about the lure of the theater. But it ended at the beginning—when Hart was only twenty-five—and at times embroidered or skirted the facts. Now, at last, we have the full and far richer story.

Hart exemplified wit, urbanity, and grace. He knew everybody, from the Algonquin Round Table crowd to the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Cole Porter, and the Hollywood moguls. His passion for the theater gave wings to his long playwriting collaboration with George S. Kaufman; together they gave us such classic comedies as You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. On his own Hart wrote the stunning Lady in the Dark and Light Up the Sky. His screenplays include Gentleman’s Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. His career as a director was crowned by the creation of My Fair Lady and Camelot, his last two shows. They were still on Broadway when he died in 1961 at the age of fifty-seven.

But Hart’s life was not always golden, in spite of a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Awards, and Oscar nominations. His successes were shadowed by the unpredictable and often debilitating mood swings of manic depression. And he struggled with issues of sexual identity—documented here for the first time—finally marrying and fathering children in his forties.

Dazzler is the story of the seen and unseen struggles that beset Hart in a life crowded with friends, glamour, and achievements, a life that seemed to be one triumph and delight after another. But it was actually a life tormented in ways we didn’t know, and thus, heroic. It isn’t just that Hart rose from humble beginnings to fame and fortune. It’s that he rose above his private demons to achieve a kind of happiness that survives him still. He used to say, even in the face of failure, “Well, we aspired.” Aspiration was a key to his life, and the key to this superb biography.


"Legendary playwright and director Moss Hart's memoir Act One is still
required reading for anyone who dreams of a career on the stage, although
it only tells about half the tales of Hart's extraordinary life in and out
of the theatre. Fortunately, author Steven Bach has come along to fill in
the gaps with his new and long-awaited biography of the great man himself,
Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (Alfred A. Knopf). Bach
brilliantly illuminates the complicated genius responsible for co-writing
some of the American theatre's greatest comedies, including The Man Who
Came to Dinner
and You Can't Take It With You, and directing two of the
world's most beloved musicals, My Fair Lady and Camelot. Bursting with
history and anecdote, Dazzler is a must-read for anyone who cares about the
mysterious process of artistic collaboration." --Encore

“Steven Bach has evoked a glittering picture of backstage Broadway, in the years that Broadway was the center of theatrical glamour. More importantly, he has understood and brilliantly written the life of the complicated genius, Moss Hart, whose dazzling talent was at the center of the vortex.”--Dominick Dunne

“An exhilarating record of a man who made and saved shows and always raised spirits. It is also the touching portrait of the Moss Hart who could not save or reassure himself. It’s Dazzler in the Dark.”--David Thomson

“A fabulously entertaining life story that is also a searching meditation on show business, celebrity, sex and ego.”--Patrick McGilligan

“Ironic, knowing, tartly sympathetic and written with rare wit, pace and grace. It is a superb evocation of that lost (and never-to-return) era when Broadway, ruled by a handful of writers, stars and producers was, for good and ill, the prime source of energy and ideas, talent and glamour for all of American show business. Bach doesn’t nostalgize that little world, but he understands it fully, and infects us with Moss Hart joy in conquering it.”--Richard Schickel

“A wonderful book about a man who dazzled in a heady time that is long gone. Bach is compulsively readable, and what he has written about both Moss Hart and his time is well worth remembering.”--Walter Bernstein

"Steven Bach is no mean Dazzler himself. His biography of Moss Hart is not only a vivid portrait of a witty but tortured man. It's a wonderfully entertaining guided tour of Broadway's most entertaining age, and the personalities who helped create it."--Gavin Lambert

"A bountifully entertaining biography
…a bonanza for the perpetually famished acolytes of show-biz lore and dish."
–Jan Stuart, Newsday

"A Who's Who of the theatre's golden age."
–Janet Maslin, New York Times