and he relentlessly pursued – some say pestered – Broadway producers with his scripts until one of his draft comedies led to work with George S. Moss Hart, known as a stage director as well as a playwright, was raised in a poor section of the Bronx, but he enjoyed telling people he was born on New York’s fabled Fifth Avenue, quickly adding “at the wrong end.” His career in the theater began as an office boy in a New York agency, and he later eked out a livelihood by directing amateur productions and musicals in the “Borscht Belt” summer camps and resorts of New York’s Catskill Mountains, which catered primarily to Jewish vacationers. Together, Hart and Kaufman wrote eight comedies. Anne Kaufman Schneider is the daughter of the playwright and his wife Beatrice, both early members of the Algonquin Hotel’s celebrated Round Table, a group of literary wits who lunched together that included Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Harold Ross. Moss Hart (1904-1961), who, with his partner George S. born Catherine Conn in 1914 to Joseph and Hortense Holtzman Conn, was married to one of Broadway’s boy wonders.

The other is a daughter of his collaborator, a world-renowned writer whose name is known throughout the world for his wit and genius. These are two women of the American theater. Their reminiscences of life more than a half-century ago – and seemingly a world away from the magic of the Great White Way – amaze and amuse. With every word, every phrase, the air grows electric.

Inside this elegant Manhattan apartment, though, all is still – except for the recollections of two women, one beautiful, the other handsome, whose lives are inextricably bound together, and tied to Broadway legends and, incredulous as it may seem, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Outside, down below, on the streets in this concrete canyon known as New York City, traffic roars, searing the frosty air with the screams of wailing sirens, the staccato of blaring taxi cab horns, and the shouts of frenzied (if not frightened) pedestrians. The late afternoon sun streams brightly through large windows, belying the simple fact that it is mid-February.

The Siren's Tale by Anne Carlisle