On a warm night in October, 1959, I was bidden to a party at Mamma Leone’s, a restaurant on Forty-eighth Street that was (and is) one of the largest and most popular in Manhattan’s theater district. Random House had taken it over for the evening to celebrate the publication of “Act One,” the first volume of Moss Hart’s autobiography, which in no way surprised its publishers by turning out to be a best-seller.
A further excuse for festivity was the fact that the author’s fifty-fifth birthday was to take place the following day. By any standards, the guest list—some two hundred strong—was fairly eye-catching. In addition to a favored bunch of critics and columnists, it included a representative selection of the show-business celebrities then in New York, among them Claudette Colbert, John Gielgud, Sam Goldwyn, Margaret Leighton, Ed Sullivan, Alan Jay Lerner, Yves Montand , Simone Signoret, Ethel Merman, Alec Guinness, Truman Capote, Rosalind Russell, and Marlene Dietrich—at which point my memory gives out.
A group of Moss Hart’s admirers had put together an entertainment in his honor, and this was already under way when I arrived. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were just finishing a routine that satirized some of the more disastrous ways in which “Act One” might be adapted for the screen.
During the applause I was burrowing through the resplendent mob, and, like many of my fellow-guests, I failed to catch the names of the next performers when they were introduced by the master of ceremonies, Phil Silvers.