The Essential Kaufman

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Having long ago attained immortality, George S. Kaufman now achieves respectability. The Library of America, de facto arbiter of our literary pantheon, is about to publish a collection of his plays. He joins Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams as the only playwrights to escape the grubby clutches of Broadway this way, to drink the same sherry as the Whitmans, Hemingways, and Pounds.


Why so few playwrights, the indignant theater fan wants to know. Actually, why so many? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the honors, particularly where Kaufman is concerned. From the 1920s to the 1950s – that is, when Broadway really mattered, and deserved to – probably no one did more to shape the American theater. As his biographer and sometime collaborator Howard Teichmann put it, Kaufman was “the Great Professional of the Golden Age of the American theatre.”


He exerted himself through his comedies (“You Can’t Take It With You,” “The Royal Family”), his musical libretti (“Of Thee I Sing,” “The Cocoanuts”), his direction (“The Front Page,” “Of Mice and Men”), and his script-doctoring (“Guys and Dolls,” which he also directed). Every one of those shows was a hit; two of them won the Pulitzer Prize. Much of what Kaufman did, he did as well as any American has ever done it.


The new collection, “Kaufman & Co: Broadway Comedies” (860 pages, $35) proves a welcome reminder of his importance. Laurence Maslon has done a commendable job of choosing nine representative works from Kaufman’s many collaborations (almost all his plays were collaborations): three with Moss Hart, three with Edna Ferber, two with Morrie Ryskind, one with Ring Lardner.


Between these covers you’ll find some of the jewels of the American stage, from the Hollywood satire of “Once in a Lifetime” to the Marx Brothers lunacy of “Animal Crackers” to the deep melancholy of “Dinner at Eight.” The trouble with plays, comedies in particular, is that they can’t really be squeezed into covers. Kaufman’s Library of America volume is a bit like a trophy cup: wonderful for the honor it represents, handsome on a shelf, but not much good for daily use.


So varied were Kaufman’s accomplishments, so slow is the going through the plays themselves, that the real pleasure of this volume lies in the author chronology. He was born in 1889, from German-Jewish stock, in Pittsburgh. The family, never secure financially, had moved to Paterson, N.J., by the time the teenage George Kaufman started contributing items to Franklin P. Adams’s humor column in the New York Evening Mail. (His middle initial dates from these years – he invented it so he could sign items “GSK.”)


A picture of Mark Twain graced Kaufman’s study throughout his life. Like his hero, he started out in newspapers, but redeemed himself. (“Not Twain yet but doing my damnedest,” he once wrote to his sister.) When an anti-Semitic editor fired him from the Washington Times, Kaufman worked as a drama editor and critic, first at the New York Tribune, then at the Times. He was an anchor member of the Algonquin Round Table, and proved it in his reviews. “I saw the play at a disadvantage,” he wrote. “The curtain was up.”


Kaufman was tall, skinny, nervous, bespectacled, and crested by unruly dark hair. He was quiet and unapproachable; Brooks Atkinson called him “the gloomy dean of Broadway wits.” Still he became known as a lady’s man, particularly after the revealing diary of one paramour, Mary Astor, made headlines nationwide. But his really fascinating scandal is the one that didn’t happen. For 13 years, Kaufman wrote hit comedies for Broadway while editing drama coverage for the Times. He even served as first chairman of the Dramatists Guild. And nobody pushed him out.


Today, this arrangement would send various media hysterics into convulsions; righteous heads would righteously explode. It sounds naive, but the truth is that Kaufman had integrity, and his editors and readers trusted him to exercise it. In 1922, he and Marc Connelly wrote “To the Ladies,” a hit for Helen Hayes. Her manager wanted to know what he had to do to get more coverage of the starlet in the Times. “Shoot her,” Kaufman replied.


By the time he left the paper – voluntarily – in 1930, he was among the foremost comic writers in the country. He had begun writing for movies, and had found his ideal collaborator in Moss Hart, a younger man who idolized him. He never did become Twain, but succeeded at the next best thing: translating Twain’s dry, distinctly American satire to the stage. Kaufman’s directing, like his writing, was celebrated for its concision and exquisite craft. The gushy romance was generally left to his collaborators. As the plays in this collection testify, the arrangement tended to work beautifully.


Even as this volume lets you marvel anew at the ingenious Vanderhofs, or the outsized Sheridan Whiteside, it frustrates. These plays were designed for actors and a room full of happy spectators, and aren’t much fun when you laugh alone. (Though I promise you’ll laugh anyway, as at this line for Groucho’s Captain Spaulding: “We left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 2nd. After 15 days on the water and six on the boat, we arrived in Africa.”) Hypothetically, I guess you could curl up with an O’Neill drama or Williams play on some surly night. But Kaufman’s comedies crave the stage.


The Library of America volume will accomplish what it sets out to accomplish: elevating Kaufman to the ranks of literary giants, and recognizing that comedy counts. It will perform another, more vital public service if it makes people notice what a terrible job the New York theater does of tending its classics. Kaufman has done well by regional theaters lately, like “Once in a Lifetime” in Williamstown two years ago, and “Of Thee I Sing” at Paper Mill right now. But “You Can’t Take It With You” hasn’t seen Broadway in 20 years, “The Royal Family” in almost 30. If opera audiences get to see their favorites every couple of years, why not theatricals?


Producers, not publishers, are the only ones who can honor Kaufman the way he deserves – producers and audiences. The real tribute to his accomplishments is the way people cheered Byron Jennings four years ago, as he twirled through the Noel Coward role in “The Man Who Came to Dinner”; or how it fell silent two years ago at “Dinner at Eight,” when Marian Seldes delivered the heartbreaking speech about old New York, “I belong to the Delmonico’s period.” All these years later, Kaufman & Co. can still deliver, if we let them.


The New York Sun

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