November 16, 1889—George S. Kaufman, synonymous with urban wit as a member of the
Algonquin “Roundtable” and as a playwright and director who preferred to work
with others, was born in what many in his circle would have regarded as the
sticks—Pittsburgh.
Nowadays, it is not unusual for theater
professionals to hone their craft in this area of western Pennsylvania—brother
and sister Rob and Kathleen Marshall (director-choreographers of, respectively,
Chicago and The Pajama Game), for instance, cut their teeth in the theater
program at Carnegie-Mellon, in Pittsburgh. But Kaufman’s path was more
circuitous, and less happy.
With his long face, tortoiseshell spectacles and bushy
hair brushed upward into a preposterous pompadour (a look appropriated for John
Turturro’s Clifford Odets-like playwright in Barton Fink), Kaufman in adulthood appeared—not to put a fine point
on it—like a grown version of a nerd. Indeed, his childhood was given over far
more to books than to play.
But the cosseted circumstances that limited his
physical activities early on derived from an understandable reason on his
parents’ part: the loss of an older brother. The library became George’s
favorite place, and something involving writing—in the end, journalism—his
intended profession.
In his 20s, Kaufman wrote for a number of Washington
and New York newspapers, including a stint as drama editor for The New York Times. That work was
distinguished by a penchant for one-liners that made him a regular at the fabled Algonquin Round Table of Twenties wits, and became a hallmark of his later
comedies. (For instance, in one review, he noted caustically, "There was
laughter in the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was
telling jokes back there.") He made his debut as a Broadway playwright
with Some One in the House in 1918.
The presence of two co-authors, Larry Evans and W.
C. Percival, might indicate that the rookie playwright required the assistance
of more seasoned professionals, but in fact this became Kaufman’s preferred
mode of working for the rest of his four-decade career. “With few exceptions,
all of
[Kaufman’s] forty-five librettos and nonmusicals were written with
somebody else,” noted Thomas S. Hischak in Boy Loses Girl: Broadway's Librettists
(2002). His collaborators included neophyte playwrights (Ring Lardner, John
Marquand, even “stripper-intellectual” Gypsy Rose Lee) and other, more established figures who, with
him, formed, in the interwar period, the closest thing that America has had to
Restoration Comedy (Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Morrie Ryskind, and, most
significantly, Moss Hart).
Hart’s Act One, perhaps the best-loved of
all show business memoirs, exhibits extraordinary respect for his senior (by 15
years) partner while also spelling out Kaufman’s individual, unusual, sometimes
downright eccentric working methods: sessions that began at noon and continued,
without food, for another 4½ hours; lying on his back as he tried out ideas;
devoting as much as two hours to a single line of dialogue, or a whole afternoon
to an entrance or exit.
In that attempt to create comic machinery as
smoothly running as a Swiss watch, along with an aversion to sentimentality so
intense that he would run to the bathroom to wash his hands to avoid one of
Hart’s effusive expressions of gratitude, Kaufman resembles nobody so much as Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. In
fact, a Myra Chanin article in The Huffington Post last month
referred to Kaufman as “the Larry David of that day…a major maven of human
imperfections.”
Kaufman would share the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
twice, for his work with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin, on the musical satire
Of Thee I Sing (1932), and with Hart for You Can’t Take It With You
(1936). (I will eventually review the latter, now being revived on Broadway
with James Earl Jones.)
The influence of Kaufman, as playwright and
director, extended not only from every year from 1921 (when his second play, Dulcy, opened) to 1958 (when a comedy he
directed, Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff and
Juliet, closed) but even down to the present day. Woody Allen, Larry
Gelbart and Neil Simon are just a few of the comic writers who have cited Kaufman
and Hart as major influences on their own style growing up. In addition, two
shows he wrote in the 1920s for the Marx Brothers, The Cocoanuts and Animal
Crackers, were adapted to film, becoming crucial in creating their
cinematic persona. "My dad gave Groucho his walk and his talk," Kaufman’s
daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider said in a 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
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