GEORGE S!
January 23, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler
It’s a pity that today, for the most part, George S. Kaufman is largely forgotten. Though dead more than sixty years now, he can still boast a number of remarkable statistics that haven’t been topped — like this one: Between 1921 through 1958, every Broadway season had a play written or directed by him. Thirty-seven years straight. Think about that for a minute.
It’s impossible to compare Kaufman’s career with anyone who’s come along since. When he died in 1961 at age seventy-one, he’d collaborated as a writer on forty Broadway shows, twenty-four of which were hits. He won two Pulitzer Prizes and had the Tonys been invited prior to 1947, there’s no doubt he would have been awarded a slew of them. His death in 1961 meant that he left the scene before American plays and musicals started to be revived with such urgent frequency. And it’s important to note that not only was he a famous playwright who worked with an extraordinary array of both male and female partners, but he was also a director of some of the most influential productions of the 20th century: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928), considered by many to be one of the great American comedies; George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize, which he co-wrote with Morrie Ryskind; Of Mice and Men(1937), John Steinbeck’s adaptation of his acclaimed novella, and Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1950), one of the all-time Broadway musicals. He also staged many of his own plays, such as Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936), both co-written with Edna Ferber, and all eight collaborations with Hart that included Once in a Lifetime (1930), You Can’t Take It With You (1937), and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939).
Mind you, that’s nine shows; not even close to a complete list.
In addition to all that, he was a noted play doctor who would graciously help friends in need when an out-of-town show was in trouble. On occasion, Kaufman acted in his own plays and was known to millions by his appearing on a regular basis as a radio and television personality. He also served as a drama critic for the New York Times between 1917 and 1930 while his career was in its ascendency. To say he had influence is an understatement.
Effortlessly funny, Kaufman was an esteemed member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, sharing bon mots with such salient minds as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woolcott. He coined witticisms like “Satire is what closes on Saturday Night” and wrote such famous Groucho Marx lines as this one from A Night at the Opera: “When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That’s the price she has to pay.”
His caustic nature, however, could sting. Playwright Elmer Rice once said, “Kaufman was a man who said many devastatingly witty things, but never a kind one.”
There are so many aspects of Kaufman’s life in show business to concentrate on, but for the purposes of a 1,300 word column, I’ll confine myself to his work as a director, since it’s probably something most people know little about. Of course, with his final credit in 1957, the year I was born, I have no idea what a show staged by Kaufman might have looked or felt like. But there’s no question he knew where the funny was as he wrote everything from the low rent comedy of the Marx Brothers’ Cocoanuts (1927) and Animal Crackers (1928) to the elegantly sophisticated Dinner at Eight, co-written with Edna Ferber. He turned to directing mostly out of self-protection. A dozen years later, a burgeoning number of screenwriters began doing the same thing. John Huston, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder got so fed up with their work being mangled they started directing their own movies.
It was 1926 when, after eleven Broadway plays, musicals and revues of his were produced over an eight-year span, Kaufman took on directing his first play, The Good Fellow. Co-written with his friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who would later share credit on Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, The Good Fellow ran a week, the shortest run of any play Kaufman wrote. Discouraged, he didn’t direct his next new play, 1927’s The Royal Family (co-written with Edna Ferber), which became a great big hit. It was produced (and some say all but directed) by Jed Harris who, at twenty-seven, was already the most feared and highly successful producer-director of the day (Noël Coward dubbed him “Destiny’s Tot”). A year later, Harris handed Kaufman the plumb assignment of directing Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht’s The Front Page, which put Kaufman on the map forever forward as a sought-after director. It’s widely known that he contributed a great deal to The Front Page’s overall construction and execution since its authors, as former newspaper men, were neophyte playwrights. No question Harris was well aware of the gift he was giving the team when he dropped their play in Kaufman’s lap; a journalist who knew the terrain intimately.
Often described as taciturn, Abe Burrows, who worked closely with Kaufman as the adapter of Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls, was exposed to a different side of the writer as director. “I have known many actresses who have worked with him,” he wrote in his autobiography, Honest Abe, “and they all tell me that once they got over their early shakes, they found him to be the kindest director they have ever known. These actresses gradually found out, as I did, that behind his formal — make that formidable — austerity was a lot of pussycat… all the ladies seemed to spot the pussycat in him.”
For the record, the thrice-married Kaufman had multiple affairs. An entire column could be devoted to all that (and actually an entire book was — Edward Sorrel’s Mary Astor’s Purple Diary ). It tells the story of his affair with the actress Mary Astor who, during a combative custody trial with her ex-husband, was forced to produce her diary which had lengthy passages committed to Kaufman’s prowess as a passionate lover. Quite the scandal in 1936.
As a director, Kaufman didn’t care for innovation or about painting lovely stage pictures, There’s scant evidence of any flourishes from Kaufman more associated with advanced practitioners of the art like Elia Kazan in the 1950s or Harold Prince in the 1970s, but he surely knew his business when it came to pace and comedic timing. In that 1939 Time magazine cover story, Kaufman talks about directing as “a lot of over-rated goings-on.” But the author of the piece while trailing Kaufman observed that he possessed “an infallible ear for the rhythm of conversation. Going on, he wrote: “[Kaufman] will rehearse a play for 15 minutes without looking at the stage, only listening to the dialogue. Suddenly he will call a halt and 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.”
Considering that he began his work in the theatre in 1918, it’s hard to blame Kaufman for slowing down considerably by 1957. This was the year that would mark his last directing assignment and the experience of working on Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet was a rough exit for a noble career. The idea to hire him came from the sometimes diabolical David Merrick who, as it would turn out this time, was uncharacteristically kind to the old gentleman who showed up for the first day of rehearsal a weakened shell of his former self. Kaufman had suffered some small strokes and certainly had difficulties in communicating that were problematic for the company. Ustinov was mercilessly unsympathetic towards him and, since he was also starring in his own play, took to directing the actors on his own. He demanded Merrick fire Kaufman but the steely Merrick steadfastly refused to do so, telling Ustinov, “I will close the show if you want me to, but I will not fire George S. Kaufman.” Ultimately, Romanoff and Juliet received good notices and ran nearly a year, so in the public’s eye, Kaufman went out with a hit, but the truth how his stamina and talents were diminished devastated the frail, sixty-eight-year-old. The handwriting was on the wall and he knew this would be his final bow. He passed away quietly four years later.
Rather than end on such a sad note, a return to the wit that made Kaufman so special seems in order. Among my favorites is the oft-told story of when, disproving of certain “embellishments” the actor William Gaxton worked into his performance while starring in Of Thee I Sing, Kaufman sent a telegram backstage during the show.
It read: “Am in back of the house. Wish you were here.”
Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and “Theatre Yesterday and Today” columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.
