GEORGE S. KAUFMAN
The Wittiest Man in America

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN was one of the most successful and prolific playwrights in the history of Broadway and one of America’s greatest wits. He was born George Kaufman on November 16, 1889, in Pittsburgh to German-Jewish parents. He was raised by a neurotic mother who had lost her first child and was determined to protect George from “germs” by preparing all his food in sterile conditions and preventing him from going outdoors. The pampering instilled in him a lifelong fear of disease and death.

He was a skinny, unathletic, bespectacled kid who responded to the bullying of his schoolmates with quips instead of fists. He wrote stories and poems for his high-school paper and at the age of fourteen collaborated on a play with another boy. He was a devoted reader of “The Conning Tower,” Franklin P. Adams’s column in the New York Evening Mail, and by the age of fifteen he had become a regular contributor under the byline “G. S. K.” (Kaufman added the middle initial for euphony.)

His father wanted him to be a lawyer, but George was stricken with pleurisy during his first year of college. The doctor prescribed an outdoor job to hasten his recovery, so George was apprenticed to a land surveyor. By his own account he was an inept surveyor and no lover of the outdoors and was delighted when Adams recommended him for a job writing a humor column at the Washington Times. But within a year he was unemployed: One day he was at his desk at the Times when the owner, the newspaper mogul Frank Munsey, walked in, took one look at Kaufman, and bellowed, “What’s that Jew doing in my city room?” Adams eventually got him a job on the New York Evening Mail as a staff writer. He moved from there to the New York Tribune, where he began writing theater criticism, and within a few years he became drama editor at The New York Times.

In 1917, at the age of twenty-eight, he married Beatrice Bakrow, the daughter of a wealthy Rochester, New York, clothing manufacturer. After their first child was stillborn, they realized they were sexually incompatible and agreed to an “arrangement” whereby each was free to have extramarital affairs but remained devoted to each other in every other way. He was devastated by her sudden death in 1945.

Kaufman’s first attempt as a professional playwright was a rewrite of Someone in the House, a 1918 play by Larry Evans and Walter Percival. It was a box office disaster on its own, but a flu epidemic didn’t help, which prompted Kaufman to write an ad for the show:

BEWARE OF FLU
AVOID CROWDS
SEE “SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE”

He collaborated with Marc Connelly on three plays, beginning with Dulcy in 1921. He went on to work with Moss Hart, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, Abe Burrows, Herman Mankiewicz, and Howard Dietz. Kaufman’s many stage hits included The Butter and Egg Man, The Solid Gold Cadillac, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. He won two Pulitzer Prizes—for Of Thee I Sing, the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, and You Can’t Take It With You. He cowrote, (with Morrie Ryskind) Animal Crackers, The Cocoanuts, and A Night at the Opera for the Marx Brothers.

Kaufman was tall and lanky, with a prominent nose and thick hair combed into a high pompadour. He was excruciatingly shy: Many of his friends and collaborators described his habit of avoiding eye contact by bending down to pick up imaginary pieces of lint from the carpet. He had a cleanliness compulsion, abhorred outward displays of affection, and hated physical contact except, presumably, with his many sexual conquests (the Broadway producer Max Gordon called him a “male nymphomaniac,” and he had a brief affair with Mary Astor which erupted into scandal when her estranged husband published her diary in which she described Kaufman’s sexual prowess).

He was an insomniac, a hypochondriac, and a pathologically fussy eater: Though he regularly dined in the finest restaurants, he ordered simple food and avoided sauces because he could not be sure of their ingredients.

Kaufman was a soft-spoken, self-deprecating pessimist who was plagued by self-doubt in spite of repeated success. He was insecure about the value of his work and was convinced that each hit would be his last. He thought himself an impostor who would be found out when the current play finally opened. He was usually wrong. His only real deficiency as a playwright was his reticence about love scenes; he categorically refused to write them, abdicating the responsibility to his collaborators.

His professional generosity was demonstrated in a curtain speech he delivered following the opening of Once in a Lifetime (which he wrote with Moss Hart): “I would like the audience to know that eighty percent of this play is Moss Hart.” It was probably the other way around, since Once in a Lifetime was Hart’s first play, and Hart tried to set the record straight in his own curtain speech. Kaufman habitually minimized his own importance in his many collaborative efforts and often refused credit and compensation for his contributions as a playwright, play doctor, and director.

Kaufman was generally polite and considerate, but he had a maniacal hatred for cabdrivers and waiters. He was in a constant state of war with them throughout his adult life. He insisted that waiters took training in ways to exasperate customers, and he treated them accordingly. His mock epitaph for a departed waiter: “God finally caught his eye.”

He seldom used four-letter words but could be caustic when provoked by insincerity or stupidity: He once said to a female acquaintance, “You’re a birdbrain, and I mean that as an insult to birds.” He was not a raconteur but a conversational guerrilla fighter. He would retreat within himself and appear bored and distracted, all the while listening intensely, waiting for the right moment to get off a devastating line.

His dour persona was a fraud. He actually liked people and was generous and compassionate. He cultivated a reputation for penuriousness but was really a soft touch who lent money on the condition the borrower keep quiet about it lest Kaufman’s “reputation” be ruined. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he financed the evacuation from Germany of scores of Jews, stood as their financial sponsor when they arrived in the United States, and actually supported many of them until they were settled.

During the late fifties he suffered a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed and blind in one eye. Toward the end of his life he seemed to have come to terms with his fear of death. He died on June 2, 1961.

Moss Hart eulogized him as follows: “The paradox of his nature was that he felt deeply, yet he sheered from any display of emotion. Almost always, it remained unexpressed.”