Past Master

THE THEATRE

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The creative spirit dwells celibate and solitary. All history yields hardly a famous poem representing a marriage of two minds, and only a few famous works of fiction--the novels of Erckmann-Chatrian, the fairy stories of the brothers Grimm. But in the theatre, which is always the product of many hands, collaboration has long and royally flourished, producing such well-known partnerships as the Elizabethan Beaumont & Fletcher, the Victorian Gilbert & Sullivan, the contemporary Hecht & MacArthur.

But only once in the history of the English-speaking theatre has one man been a partner in two firms that have both become household names. In the 1920s, the best-known playwrighting partnership in the U. S. was that of Kaufman & Connelly. In the 1930s it has been that of Kaufman & Hart.

Amazing as the success of these two comedy-writing firms has been, more amazing still is the fact that, in addition to serving as a full-time partner in each, George S. (for nothing) Kaufman has also set up in the play business with at least 22 other people, once conducting a thriving emporium with the late Ring Lardner, a going concern with Morrie Ryskind, four swanky shops with Edna Ferber, two small hamburger stands with Alexander Woollcott, a pushcart with Howard Dietz, and a sidewalk trade out of a suitcase with Herman J. Mankiewicz.

This week, while celebrating his 50th birthday, the greatest collaborator of his time can look back on a career in the theatre that would be spectacular in a man of 100. Kaufman's current collaboration with Moss Hart, The Man Who Came to Dinner (TIME, Oct. 30), is one of the biggest smash hits of the last ten years. Kaufman's unequaled record: at least one show on Broadway every year since 1921. Fifteen of those shows Burns Mantle has included in various annual volumes of the Best Plays. One of them (You Can't Take It With You) had the fifth longest run (837 performances) in the history of Broadway; 14 others ran close to 200 performances or better. Two won the Pulitzer Prize. Twenty were sold to the movies for a total of over $1,500,000. Further, Kaufman ranks as one of the best directors in show business, and off the stage as well as on, as one of Manhattan's greatest wits. Once, just for the hell of it, he wrote a play all by himself--and that was a hit.

Such a career argues more than a brilliant writer of comedy. It proclaims a past master of show business, who has learned every trick of the trade and invented many a new one. It proclaims an amazing foresight in always taking the pulse of Broadway as the clue to its heart, a habit of always writing fashionable plays and never revolutionary ones. It proclaims a playwright who has made sport of everything while never giving offense to anybody. It proclaims a really great practical theatre mind, with no philosophy except that the theatre is entertainment, and that good entertainment pays.

Not that Kaufman's record is devoid of flops. Of 34 productions, eleven lost money, five others would have, except for movie sales. But a record which includes Dulcy, Merton of the Movies, Beggar on Horseback, The Butter and Egg Man, The Royal Family, June Moon, Once in a Lifetime, Of Thee I Sing, Dinner at Eight, You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner implies as great a knowledge of what the public will laugh at as of how to keep it laughing. Kaufman beat all his rivals at comedy and satire because what really concerned him was never the nature of the target, but only the location of the bull's-eye.

Teamwork. Probably this lack of passionate convictions has helped make Kaufman the ideal collaborator. His adaptable, accommodating mind is geared to avoid collisions. It is also geared to let the other fellow's personality, rather than Kaufman's, permeate the play. What colors Beggar on Horseback, for example, is the pleasantly housebroken imaginativeness of Marc Connelly; what colors The Royal Family is the romantic bustle of Edna Ferber. The plays Kaufman has written with Moss Hart are better fused because, as comic playwrights, the two men are cut to much the same pattern.

Kaufman's own reason for constantly collaborating is simply that he needs collaborators, that he doesn't think his plays would be very good if he worked alone. Every collaboration is an evenly shared two-man job, with long preliminary stretches for working out every detail of plot, until suddenly "a bell rings" and the collaborators start their "star-chamber sessions" of writing. Every line of dialogue is written together. From start to finish, a play takes anything from five weeks (You Can't Take It With You) to seven months (The Royal Family), depending on the trouble it causes and the make-up of Kaufman's collaborator. Kaufman & Hart usually work much faster than Kaufman & Ferber.

Kaufman & Connelly separated, amicably, long ago. Connelly, Broadway has always intimated, was too "sot" in his ideas to work smoothly in harness. Of Hart, 15 years his junior, Kaufman says: "I have been smart enough as I grew older to attach to myself the most promising lad that came along in the theatre."

Working with Kaufman means working with a perfectionist. Hart called their first job together "The Days of the Terror." The daily schedule was from 10 a. m. "until exhausted," which meant until starved as well, since Kaufman cares nothing for food. They would spend two hours shaping one short sentence, a whole day discussing an exit. Kaufman's working habits are notorious. "In the throes of composition," Collaborator Alexander Woollcott once said, "he seems to crawl up the walls of the apartment in the manner of the late Count Dracula."

It was perfectionism which also turned Kaufman into a director. He used to be driven half-crazy seeing other directors maul his lines, twist their meanings, spot a laugh where there was none. He first took over direction in 1925, on the only play he has written by himself, The Butter and Egg Man. He lacked confidence to finish the job, or even his next two or three, but since then he has directed almost all his own shows.

He loves directing, though he belittles it as "a lot of over-rated goings-on." His ability to keep things moving and get every last chuckle out of a funny line is based on pounding away tirelessly at details, and on an infallible ear for the rhythm of conversation. He will rehearse a play for 15 minutes without looking at the stage, only listening to the dialogue. Suddenly he will call a halt, take out one word which interrupts the flow. No actor has ever managed to ad-lib even a syllable into his lines without Kaufman's spotting it.

Take. As a playwright, Kaufman has been the biggest money-maker in the contemporary U. S. theatre. His share in his movie sales alone comes close to $400,000. His biggest hit, You Can't Take It With You, grossed around $2,000,000 in Manhattan and on tour, showed almost $1,000,000 clear profit. Since Kaufman has a cut in his shows as well as royalties from them, he has made a small fortune on hit after hit. There have been lean seasons, even bad ones. But in a big year he makes easily $250,000.

Broadway is a gold mine for Kaufman, but he never rests on his ores. He is just as apt to start thinking up a new play when he has a smash hit as when he has a flop. A friend has said that if Kaufman isn't a millionaire, he'll do until one comes along; but Kaufman may not be altogether fooling when he insists that constant work is something of a financial necessity. A generous man, he has never worshipped at the shrine of Compound Interest. "All I know," he once said, "is that I have earned a great deal of money and I haven't got any of it. If I don't get a hit each year I am in a damned bad way."

Travels. Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh of a middle-class Jewish family who "managed to get in on every business as it was finishing, and made a total of $4 among them." After leaving high school, George started studying law because it seemed a good way to put off working for several years. But after three months he quit, because he couldn't make heads or tails of it all.

Then the family moved to Paterson, N. J. Having no idea where Paterson was, Kaufman was delighted to find it within commuting distance of New York. He was soon commuting regularly--to work in a hatband factory. He also began contributing to F.P.A.'s column in the old Evening Mail. Eventually F.P.A. invited him to lunch, disillusioned him as to what writers looked like, but found a job for him on the Washington Times. When he lost that, Adams got him another on the New York Tribune. Later he became a dramatic reporter on the Tribune, when Heywood Broun was dramatic critic. Broun--who wanted to work at something else--in "a burst of bad judgment" lent his job to Kaufman. After reading Kaufman's reviews, Broun took the job back.

Kaufman traveled to the Times, where for the next 13 years--years that made him wealthy and famous--he remained, at a very unimportant salary, as dramatic editor. To a worrisome man who never felt secure, the job was a backlog; to an easily bored one, it was an excuse for leaving dull dinner-parties early. As dramatic editor, Kaufman left his mark. Before his time, Manhattan's dramatic pages were stodgy affairs, choked with publicity handouts. Kaufman tabooed these "dog stories," brought a light touch--which has become standard--to the writing of copy. When an underling became ponderous by introducing into his stories fancy footnotes requiring asterisks, daggers and signs of the zodiac, Kaufman cured him by throwing in a footnote of his own, reading: "Does not carry dining car."

Thanatopsis. When Kaufman & Connelly hit the limelight with Dulcy in 1921, it was as more than rising young playwrights. They were part of a group which, by virtue of talent, wit and hobnobbing together, was coming to dominate the sophisticated Manhattan scene. Their lunch club, the Algonquin Hotel, had waked up one morning to find itself famous, and celebrity-chasers flocked there, as to a play, to observe Kaufman. Connelly, Broun, Woollcott, Benchley, Dorothy Parker, F.P.A. & Co. at lunch, and to hear their laughter, though not what gave rise to it. The male members enhanced their glamor by forming the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, whose legendary sessions, devoted to poker and wisecracks, F.P.A. reported in his column.

The Algonquin's Round Table perished years ago, but it bequeathed Kaufman, Benchley and Dorothy Parker as the town's great wits. Kaufman has proved almost as much of a spout offstage as on. His puns are endless: "One man's Mede is another man's Persian" or (of a college girl who eloped) "She put the heart before the course." So are his retorts discourteous. When Adolph Zukor, then president of Paramount, offered Kaufman $30,000 for movie rights on a play, Kaufman, who thought the rights worth much more, replied: "I guess not. But I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll give you $40,000 for Paramount." So are his crazy cracks. A high-pressure salesman trying to sell Kaufman some goldmine stock spieled dramatically: "You can shovel the gold right off the ground into wheelbarrows." "What!" exclaimed Kaufman. "You have to stoop for it?"

Twists. Like most wits, Kaufman cracks his jokes with a dead pan, goes through life with a mournful one. Rangy and restless, hard to know, harder to understand, always blunt, often brusque, occasionally brutal, he is completely free from affectations but bulging with quirks. He is frightened of growing old, or being considered rich, or losing his hair. He forms friendships slowly, feels he has few friends. He talks to himself, makes strange faces, nods his head --a woman who sat opposite his desk at the Times for a long time wondered why he was always graciously bowing to her.

Lacking the courage to stay away, he goes to all his openings (arriving with the ushers) and suffers through them. He hates first-night audiences--the swishiest and toughest gang in the world--and usually hangs backstage, "so I don't have to look at all those bastards out front." He is in a constant dither that his show will flop. After one opening that had the audience rolling in the aisles, the leading man found Kaufman crushed against a wall "looking a little like the late Marie Antoinette in the tumbril."

Social rigmarole bores him stiff: he detests dinner-parties, loathes travel, has never been to the opera, took his first drink at 30 and has taken few since. He fights innovation, was almost the last person to adopt soft collars and a wrist watch, was once told by his wife "It's a good thing you were not the world's first baby, or you'd still be crawling."

He is completely unathletic. "Ring Lardner once told me that the only exercise he got was when he took the links out of one shirt and put them in another. That goes for me too." He does play croquet, however--with a fierce desire to win, as he plays parlor games and bridge. Called by Ely Culbertson "the best amateur bridge player in the U. S.," he hates playing with his dub friends, tackles the experts without getting hurt, peppers the game with such comments as "I'd like a review of the bidding, with the original inflections."

With his wife and 14-year-old daughter, he lives part of the time in a big Manhattan town house, part of the time on a 50-acre estate in Pennsylvania's literary-minded Bucks County. Dark-eyed, grey-haired Beatrice Kaufman, whom he married in 1917, is gay, sociable, hostessy, keeps her husband in touch with such friends as Woollcott, Harpo Marx, the Robert Sherwoods, the Irving Berlins. To Woollcott, whom Kaufman has hilariously scalped in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and who has been at different times his collaborator, brief biographer and boss, he is devoted. Talking to him, he says, "is like holding your face before an open drain," but Woollcott is "an entrancing companion."

The most successful comedy writer of his generation, Kaufman talks, half-vaguely, half-excitedly, of writing a really serious play--a play about Jews which he and Edna Ferber have been turning over in their minds for the past five years. Then, distinctly as an afterthought, he maintains that he has written two serious plays already--Merrily We Roll Along, in 1934, and last season's The American Way.

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