The Theatre: Past Master

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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.