While looking up information about something in the 20th century entertainment biz, I stumbled across a usage I was unfamiliar with and now it’s bugging me.
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman were fixtures of the Broadway theater. Among other things, they wrote a series of comedies between 1930 and 1950, including The Man who came to Dinner, You Can’t Take it With You, Merrily we Roll along and others.
Ordinarily, you refer to such collaborating pairs by their last names, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Lerner and Loewe. But I found many references in the newspapers to the pair as “Moss and Hart”, rather than “Hart and Kaufman”.
Howcum?
I couldn’t find any explanation for the peculiarity, referring to a talented due by the first and last names of one of the pair.
I’m tempted to say “it’s theater thing”. Like the way playwright Albert R. Gurney was always referred to as “Pete”.
Anybody know anything? Exapno – you must have some insight, with Kafman being a scripter for The Marx Brothers.
Boy, I hope this isn’t the real explanation. I turned this up Googling “Moss and Hart” just now:
It’d be pretty grim if the “joke” was using the decades-old lynching of two black guys to refer to a pair of comic playwrights, the name of one of which could be broken up into those two names.
The usage of “Moss and Hart” seems to first appear in 2001 referring to a revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner. Two examples are from the same review on different web pages.
I’m guessing it was a brain fart typo that got replicated. The repeated article says it’s by “Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman” at the head of the review, but uses “Moss & Hart” in the body.
Are there any earlier examples? If not, that would indicate it was used by people who didn’t know their theater history.
No – there are examples of it in newspapers going back to the 1930s, when Moss Hart and George Kaufman were still writing their plays, and were still known to some of the writers. It’s not a typo or “brain fart”. It looks like a deliberate coinage.
Huh. I’ve read tons of stuff about this era and I’ve never come across this at all.
Cal, how did you find the older newspaper references? Both newspapers.com and newspaperarchive.com give thousands of hits, but they all seem to refer to Moss Hart, not Moss and Hart, even with quote marks. Google Books has no matches. Google just gives the 21st century examples that Chuck found.
I looked at my Kaufman biographies and they all use Kaufman and Hart for the duo.
I would say with Chuck that it’s a brain fart. But there are many examples, none of which make any sense to me. Moss and Hart is ludicrous; any editor should have caught it instantly.
Cal, you have to give links to your finds, else I can’t believe my eyes.
That’s exactly what I was using. I don’t know why you haven’t found cases of “Moss and Hart”. I’ll have a look later and post references. But it’s definitely not a recent mistake that has been perpetuated by a single example.
Dammit! I wish I’d saved them – I can remember seeing the quotes from newspapewrs when I did this the other day, but I can’t bring them up now.
Here’s the Google N0Gram view of “Moss and Hart”, and you can see the bump in the 1930s. (The bump in the 1970s is probably due to Congressional hearings involving a different Moss and Hart)
Try here
The Butte Daily Post
Thu, Oct 24, 1935 ·Page 9
THis is defintely a case of error – they cite “Moss and Hart’s” “The Man who Came to Dinner”
The Lewiston Daily Sun
Thu, Apr 24, 1975 ·Page 2
Also here:
New York Daily News
Wed, Aug 06, 1980 ·Page 187
The Montana Standard
Thu, Oct 24, 1935 ·Page 7
Staten Island Advance
Fri, Nov 22, 1985 ·Page 48
There DO appear to be more cases, more definitely linked to their verifiable plays after 1975, though. But I can’t see these cases as stemming from ne mistake in one account. I’d find it more believable if Samuel Frenmch or some publisher put the authorship as “Moss and Hart”. THAT I could se being repeated.
“The play by itself is hilarious but it’s the cast that really brings out the brilliance of Moss and Hart’s writing. Every actor on that stage invested completely in their character and the show. No matter the size of their role was, they brought something very special to the show and allowed us to enjoy every moment.”
The ngram viewer I see doesn’t have a bump in the 1930s. The kicker is that below the chart the site breaks the hits down into “Moss”, “and”, and “Hart” separately, not as a phrase. They don’t return the phrase if I click on them, either.
The two Montana hits from 1935 are the same article. Both refer to “Moss & Hart’s” “Yellow Jacket,” a play. Although a couple of “Yellow Jacket” plays are findable, neither have any connection to either Kaufman or Hart or Moss. “The Man Who Came to Dinner” is not on either page. Kaufman’s “Merrily We Roll Along” is properly credited.
I do see that something happened a half century later and the inexplicable occurred, and reoccurred. I’m staggered.
One possible if far-fetched explanation for it happening once. I can find many ads for revivals of their plays that give the billing something like this, only better formatted:
George Moss
&
Kaufman Hart
I could imagine someone giving that a glance and writing Moss & Hart.
" Oct 28, 1974 — A mild mannered utopia reigned in the auditorium for the Moss & Hart play,. You Can’t Take It With You when the meeting of a pair ot …"
… an almost sleepless night anticipating my first test with George S. Kaufman. (Moss and Hart exit as the lights fade to black.) End of Act One 47 ACT TWO Scene 1 : Kaufman Townhouse / Penn Station ACT ONE.indd 47 11/5/2015 6:45:42 PM.
Note: There’s something weird here. Act One is based on Moss Hart’s autobiography of the same name, but some pages have “Moss” and “Hart” as two separate characters. I can’t unscramble it because I can’t see the whole thing.
… Moss & Hart play told it , “ You can’t take it with you . ” Andrew Carnegie had famously believed that it was a crime to die rich , giving away 350 million before he went to the big steel mill in the sky , which left a mere 50 …
Still yet nmore examples of “Moss and Hart” being used instead of “Hart and Kaufman”. These are all cases definitely referring to Hart and Kaufman plats
These are from the New York Hostoric Newspapers site
The East Hampton Star 30 September 1943
… swing. The play, di■ted by Mark Hall, is the Moss and Hart comedy of the trials of In addition …
For 40 years, the Shaw Festival, in historic Niagara-on-the-Lake, has been providing professional-quality theatre to the Niagara Peninsula. If recent years are any indication, things are only getting better. This year’s selection includes Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, playing at the Festival Theatre until Nov. 10.
The Man Who Came to Dinner premiered in New York City in 1939, and has been revamped in many subsequent stage and media forms in the six decades since. It was one of many wildly successful collaborations for Moss and Hart, amongst such classics as You Can’t Take It With You. The show is both a lampoon and loving tribute to various aspects of the play’s time period, from celebrity to small-town America.
Moss and Hart based the protagonist on Alexander Woollcott, a theater critic who once stayed at Hart’s estate bullying the staff and making himself obnoxious. Woollcott’s behavior led them to create the Whiteside character and the foundation for “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”
Though the Sycamores try their best to stay in line for Alice, the unexpected arrival of a few extra guests brings their true natures to light. The chaos and absurdity that follows is a comedic formula perfected by Moss and Hart keeping audiences gripping their sides all night long.
Disappointingly, Capra also saw here something less divine than a roomful of quirky characters: he remakes this play about unconventionality into something decidely more conventional, shifting the love story centre-stage and backgrounding the richly detailed communalism that gives context not only for the romance but for the unabashed individualism of its proto-hippy free spirits. Moss and Hart’s gently anarchic celebration of good old Yankee eccentricity frames the virtues of idiosyncracy in community: the Vanderhof-Sycamore clan may be self-directed, but never self-serving or self-sufficient.
You Can’t Take it With You by Moss and Hart (16-20 parts)
Join Collective Soles Arts Group Community Theater Project for the classic, delightfully wacky play “You Can’t Take It With You” by Moss and Hart.
The two indoor productions, “Richard III” and “You Can’t Take it With You,” present a thought-provoking study in contrasts.While England’s short-lived monarch is ambitious to a fault, Moss and Hart’s 1930s classic presents the revolutionary idea that ambition and success don’t necessarily lead to happiness
Jul 20, 2023 9:05am PT
Jim Gaffigan on Unusual Path to Stand-Up, Seeking Serious Roles and Staying True to Himself
Gaffigan only ever did one play — the Moss and Hart classic “You Can’t Take It with You,” where he played the eccentric grandfather.
Join us for one of the most well loved plays of the American Stage as The Player’s Studio presents Moss and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. T
God, there’s no end of them. I can’t find the early newspaper examples that, I swear, I found a couple of days ago. But people seem to have been writing “Moss and Hart” in place of “Hart and Kaufman” since at least 1943.
I’m tempted to say that people are getting confused by the musical team of “Rodgers and Hart”, but I’ll bet most people today don’t know that Richard Rodgers had other collaborators besides Oscar Hammerstein III. It could just be because “Moss and Hart” sounds right, like the name of a believable team. And people know there’s a “Moss” and a “Hart” in the names.
“Kaufman & Hart” doesn’t flow like “Rogers & Hart” so for some reason more than a couple sloppy writers and their editors have somehow all unconsciously erred with “Moss & Hart”.