One Man's Mede

An influenza epidemic and George S. Kaufman's first play opened in Manhattan in 1918, and the play was vastly less contagious. With dour glee, the 28-year-old writer went around advising people to avoid crowds--see Someone in the House." The flop was satisfying proof to Kaufman of "the gross inadequacies of the human race"--from which, as his collaborator Moss Hart observed, the playwright suffered daily. But he mined his suffering profitably; over the years he produced more memorable wisecracks and more hit comedies than anyone else in the U.S. theater. Last week. Kaufman died, at 71, after a series of strokes, leaving behind both fact and legend of having been Broadway's brightest wit.

A rumpled man with hair like a boxwood hedge and a permanent expression of bereavement. Kaufman hid a marshmallow heart with a manner that discouraged nicknames. To the actors in the 40 plays he directed (many of his own. and such others as Of Mice and Men, My Sister Eileen and Guys and Dolls), he spoke like a young mother. But he terrified waiters, suffered fools badly, and did not welcome familiarity from underlings--or from overlings either, as Critic Alexander Woollcott. his boss when Kauf man was on the drama desk of the New York Times, reported with asperity. "I can testify," said Woollcott. '"that he was always careful to treat me like dirt." Folding Tens. In his plays he could be fey and even sentimental, as in Yon Can't Take It With Yon, the saga of the lovably eccentric Vanderhofs, and he could turn out straight living-room drama, as in Dinner at Eight (with Edna Ferber).

But he was at his best when he put his cantankerousness on the stage. Once in a Lifetime still remains the funniest Hollywood satire ever written, memorable among other things for the Schlepkin (read Warner) Brothers, marching from the wings in military formation; The Man Who Came to Dinner portrayed a porcupine in the shape of a man. un mistakably Woollcott with more than a few quills of Kaufman; and Of Thee I, Sing, a spoof that could teach a few mocking lessons to the Mort Sahl generation created the unforgettable Throttlebottom as well as the national committeeman who sold Rhode Island ("Nobody missed it!").

Apart from his theatrical successes including two Pulitzer Prizes, Georges' (for the hell of it) Kaufman left an impressive and wildly varied shelf of gold cups. Ely Culbertson called him "the best amateur bridge player in the country," and Actress Mary Astor, in her celebrated diary, described him as the "perfect" lover. "I take no games lightly," said the playwright, and he did not. He played croquet, his literary set's favorite outdoor pastime, with ferocity, assuming a stance that reminded Woollcott of "a morning-glory vine climbing a pole." He was one of the deadliest pot rakers of the most famous seated gathering since King Arthur's, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club; and when he failed to prosper, he beleaguered Heywood Broun, Harpo Marx, Herbert Bayard Swope and the rest with puns: "I fold my tens and silently steal away," or, apropos of nothing important, "One man's Mede is another man's Persian."

Satire Closes. Kaufman's tongue could cut, although he denied a persistently told story that he had telegraphed a miscreant leading man: "I am watching your performance from the back row. Wish you were here." But he did puncture a blooded bore by recalling that "Sir Roderick Kaufman," one of his ancestors, had taken part in the Crusades--"as a spy, of course." He dismissed the movie version of Stage Door as "Screen Door," and when Hollywood's Adolph Zukor offered him a piffling $30,000 for movie rights to a play, the dramatist soberly offered Zukor $40,000 for Paramount.

Kaufman's quirks--he despised airplanes, wore stiff collars well into the 20th century, fueled himself with sickening fudge that he made himself--never interrupted his enormous output of hit plays. Starting in 1920, he had had at least one play on Broadway every season for 21 years, with astonishingly few flops. As with most celebrated sourballs, his hermitry was bogus, and he worked with collaborators on 43 of his 44 plays (to prove that he could, he wrote The Butter and Egg Man alone; it was a hit). His partners never elaborated on who wrote what, and Kaufman was generous in his accounting; at the opening of Once in a Lifetime, his first play with an unknown, Kaufman made a one-line curtain speech: "I would like this audience to know that 80% of this play is Moss Hart."

In the last decade or so, his health as well as his productivity declined. It has been six years since one of his plays appeared on Broadway (the musical, Silk Stockings, in 1955). A critic with stomach strong enough to survey the subsequent seasons might recall the playwright's crack that "Satire is something that closes on Saturday night." It was always a good line; since George S. Kaufman's shows stopped appearing, almost every night has been Saturday night on Broadway.

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