The Theatre: Past Master

(5 of 5)

Lacking the courage to stay away, he goes to all his openings (arriving with the ushers) and suffers through them. He hates first-night audiences—the swishiest and toughest gang in the world—and usually hangs backstage, "so I don't have to look at all those bastards out front." He is in a constant dither that his show will flop. After one opening that had the audience rolling in the aisles, the leading man found Kaufman crushed against a wall "looking a little like the late Marie Antoinette in the tumbril."

Social rigmarole bores him stiff: he detests dinner-parties, loathes travel, has never been to the opera, took his first drink at 30 and has taken few since. He fights innovation, was almost the last person to adopt soft collars and a wrist watch, was once told by his wife "It's a good thing you were not the world's first baby, or you'd still be crawling."

He is completely unathletic. "Ring Lardner once told me that the only exercise he got was when he took the links out of one shirt and put them in another. That goes for me too." He does play croquet, however—with a fierce desire to win, as he plays parlor games and bridge. Called by Ely Culbertson "the best amateur bridge player in the U. S.," he hates playing with his dub friends, tackles the experts without getting hurt, peppers the game with such comments as "I'd like a review of the bidding, with the original inflections."

With his wife and 14-year-old daughter, he lives part of the time in a big Manhattan town house, part of the time on a 50-acre estate in Pennsylvania's literary-minded Bucks County. Dark-eyed, grey-haired Beatrice Kaufman, whom he married in 1917, is gay, sociable, hostessy, keeps her husband in touch with such friends as Woollcott, Harpo Marx, the Robert Sherwoods, the Irving Berlins. To Woollcott, whom Kaufman has hilariously scalped in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and who has been at different times his collaborator, brief biographer and boss, he is devoted. Talking to him, he says, "is like holding your face before an open drain," but Woollcott is "an entrancing companion."

The most successful comedy writer of his generation, Kaufman talks, half-vaguely, half-excitedly, of writing a really serious play—a play about Jews which he and Edna Ferber have been turning over in their minds for the past five years. Then, distinctly as an afterthought, he maintains that he has written two serious plays already—Merrily We Roll Along, in 1934, and last season's The American Way.