George S. Kaufman and His Friends
Buckley, Christopher
Book Review/Christopher Buckley He Made America Laugh • • Shakespeare was sublime, but George Kaufman was prolific. Beyond belief. He wrote 75 plays in collaboration with 22 other dramatists,...
...He wrote 75 plays in collaboration with 22 other dramatists, including three early Marx Brothers comedies, Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, and A Night at the opera...
...Kaufman seldom did venture further than Times Square...
...He directed 46 plays, and some 48 films have been made from his productions...
...He didn't ensnare, though...
...He has created not so much an engaging narrative, but as an enormously successful reference book...
...He interviewed and corresponded with scores of people who knew Kaufman and worked with him...
...Marc Connelly, who was both very bald and Kaufman's first collaborator, was sitting in a -estaurant when a friend came up and -ubbed his hand over Connelly's bare ;kull, saying, "This feels just like my Aide's behind...
...This figure does not include, of course, the thousands of reviews he did as a staffer for the New York Times, where he worked as drama editor, resigning in 1930...
...everybody who, the book jacket might as well have said, was somebody when Broadway was the Great White Way...
...He threw himself into gothic fits of gloom before an opening, even if everyone else connected with the play, including the ever-vigilant producer, was sure of success...
...His wife, Beatrice, was unable to have intercourse with him, having gone through agonizing labor pains which produced a stillborn child...
...A failure is somehow more satisfying all around...
...My own notion of an ideal biography of the Primus mobile of the Great White Way would be a book researched by Scott Meredith and written by George S. Kaufman...
...He was charismatic in an age when charisma was undefined and the Camelot gang were attending English public schools...
...When it came to sharing his success with his collaborators, he was self-effacing to the point of selflessness...
...Kaufman wrote his first play when he was 14, and was working on one when he died in 1961 at the age of 72...
...The trouble with the book is that while Meredith often induces us to smile, he seldom makes us laugh...
...But the tuthor is always informative, occasionallyto the point of maddening irrelevance...
...GSKAHF brims over with anecdotage, a compendium of tales drawn from the lives of myriad playwrights, composers, journalists, editors, actors, wits, and wags who made up New York's smart set when, as the book jacket tells us, "Broadway wa,7 the Great White Way...
...and in action like the same craft with a few tattered sails flying in a force eight wind...
...Though Kaufman devoted his life to making America laugh, he had a keen grasp of tragedy...
...What flows inbetween is, ;iggle-wise, less satisfying...
...Meredith's research is flawless...
...And it was Kaufman who did all the worrying for his collaborators...
...When Once in a Lifetime, which he wrote with a young nobody, opened in 1930 and the audience raved, Kaufman walked out on stage after the final curtain and announced to the crowd, "I want you to know this play is eighty percent Moss Hart...
...And, finally, in an era when so many of the Great White Way people were dashing off to Hollywood, or the south of France to lunch with Somerset Maugham and dine with George Bernard Shaw, he was always provincial...
...In the years of success that followed, he was called every name, from "a cheap play doctor" to "genius...
...Meredith tells us a great deal...
...His labor of love has a bibliography of 320 books and ten thousand clippings...
...He also managed to write 59 major humor pieces for the Nation, the Saturday Review, and the New Yorker...
...It is not the fault of the subjects, many of whose Algonquin Round Table aphorisms still surface today in well-heeled cocktail parties...
...He attracted...
...The book is amply punctuated with ;uch chestnuts...
...His friends were usually close by, either at the Round Table luncheons, or at the gang's regular poker games, which they called "regular meetings of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club...
...Of his personal life, we find that Kaufman's karma was coated not with glitter, but with trauma and phobias...
...Dorothy Parker, he once said, was "a mixture of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth," while another member of the Round Table, Harold Ross, "looked like a dishonest Abe Lincoln...
...There is Robert Benchley's "I'd like to get out of this wet suit and into a dry martini," Dorothy Parker's "If all the girls at Smith and Bennington were laid t:nd to end, I wouldn't be surprised," and hundreds of mano ,‘z mano's...
...When it came to describing Kaufman, there was plenty of wit, but never any backstabbing...
...Socially, he was a combination of Calvin Coolidge and Groucho Marx: he spoke when he had something stunningly funny to say, and that meant he often only spoke three times during a party...
...He was no one's fool...
...The two major kudos came when he won Pulitzer Prizes, the first for Of Thee I Sing, written with Morrie Ryskind, and the second for The Man Who Came to Dinner, a Moss Hart collaboration...
...Alexander Woollcott was particularly deft at witty, back-stabbing-but-alwaysin- the-spirit-of-fun caricature...
...As for Kaufman, he wanders through the pages like a benign spider, spinning a web...
...I never want to be anyplace," he once told a friend, "where I can't be back in Times Square in thirty minutes...
...This was no neurotic pessimism, however...
...This skeletal diagram of his opus begs the question, Did success spoil George Kaufman...
...I'll be damned," quipped Connelly, "so it does...
...For anyone who has wondered how the New Yorker got its name, or who was really responsible for the Citizen Kane screenplay, or even about Harpo Marx's Weltanschauung, it provides answers...
...Thanatopsis means contemplation of death...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 27...
...There was never any need to lay him low, even in jest...
...There, in a way, you have it all...
...he pathologically loathed waiters and cabdrivers...
...he was a "cantankerous croquet player" and a demanding bridge partner...
...America first started to laugh when Dulcy, a Kaufman-Connelly collaboration, appeared in 1921...
...their marital relationship was a real life parallel to Leopold and Molly Bloom's...
...And it was quite a gathering of butterflies: Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Alexander Woollcott, George and Ira Gershwin, Herbert Bayard Swope, Heywood Broun, Moss Hart, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman and His Friends by Scott Meredith Doubleday $12.95 Cole Porter, James Thurber, John Stein-beck...
...Success never spoiled George Kaufman...
...Which is a result of flabby prose and overscrupulous attention to minutiae...
...Groucho Marx, who made his name for himself with Kaufman scripts, said that his "notion of an ideal date was a girl who looked like Marilyn Monroe and talked like George Kaufman...
...But, alas, in the presence of so much detail, the greatness of a man like Kaufman fades in puddles of trivia, no matter how funny...
...He was a hypochondriac, had phobias about touching people, flying, germs...
...The stars of these New York gatherings were the best at describing themselves and their friends...
...When he died, Groucho Marx came up with the condign epitaph, "He made America laugh for over forty years...
...Author Meredith, in his behemoth, 652-page-cum-appendixes biography has written a masterful encyclopedia of Kaufman's world...
...He was never one of the "beautiful people," at least according to Irwin Shaw, who described him physically: "Like a small schooner built in a local New England shipyard by a boatwright with noble intentions but rough tools...
...How many people," he once said to Connelly, the sanguine optimist of the pair, "really hope for your success on opening night...
Vol. 8 • August 1975 • No. 10
