*ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE & MARX BROTHERS: GEORGE S KAUFMAN 1936 PHOTO SEX SCANDAL*

Description

A rare original 1936 photograph of the Algonquin Round Table member, friend to Groucho and Harpo Marx, and co-author of the Marx Brothers plays and films The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers (and several Pulitzer Prize winning plays) after a sex scandal that rocked America in the 1930s--he was named in the actress Mary Astor's diary as having canoodled with her. Newspapers called him "Public Lover Number One." Dimensions eight and a half by six and a half inches. Light wear and 1930s newspaper markings otherwise good. See George S. Kaufman' amazing biography and the story of the Algonquin Round Table below.
Buyer pays USPS insured shipping. Reduced postage for buyers of multiple items. Credit cards accepted with Paypal. Inquiries always welcome. Please visit my other eBay auctions and Buy It Now items for more early theatre, opera and historical autographs, photographs, broadsides and programs and great singer, actor and actress cabinet photos and CDV's.
From Wikipedia:
The
Algonquin Round Table
was a group of
New York City
writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a
practical joke
, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the
Algonquin Hotel
from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country.
Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. The entire group worked together successfully only once, however, to create a
revue
called
No Sirree!
which helped launch a Hollywood career for Round Tabler
Robert Benchley
.
In its ten years of association, the Round Table and a number of its members acquired national reputations, both for their contributions to literature and for their sparkling wit. Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution.
The group that would become the Round Table began meeting in June 1919 as the result of a practical joke carried out by theatrical press agent
John Peter Toohey
. Toohey, annoyed at
The New York Times
drama critic
Alexander Woollcott
for refusing to plug one of Toohey's clients (
Eugene O'Neill
) in his column, organized a luncheon supposedly to welcome Woollcott back from
World War I
, where he had been a correspondent for
Stars and Stripes
. Instead Toohey used the occasion to poke fun at Woollcott on a number of fronts. Woollcott's enjoyment of the joke and the success of the event prompted Toohey to suggest that the group in attendance meet at the Algonquin each day for lunch.
[1]
The group first gathered in the Algonquin's Pergola Room (later called the
Oak Room
) at a long rectangular table. As they increased in number, Algonquin manager
Frank Case
moved them to the Rose Room and a round table.
[2]
Initially the group called itself "The Board" and the luncheons "Board meetings". After being assigned a waiter named Luigi, the group re-christened itself "Luigi Board". Finally they became "The Vicious Circle" although "The Round Table" gained wide currency after a
caricature
by cartoonist
Edmund Duffy
of the
Brooklyn Eagle
portrayed the group sitting at a round table and wearing armor.
[3]
Membership
Charter members of the Round Table included:
Franklin Pierce Adams
, columnist
Robert Benchley
, humorist and actor
Heywood Broun
, columnist and sportswriter (married to Ruth Hale)
Marc Connelly
, playwright
Ruth Hale
, freelance writer who worked for women's rights
George S. Kaufman
, playwright and director
Dorothy Parker
, critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter
Brock Pemberton
,
Broadway
producer
[4]
Murdock Pemberton
,
Broadway
publicist, writer
[5]
Harold Ross
,
The New Yorker
editor
Robert E. Sherwood
, author and playwright
John Peter Toohey
,
Broadway
publicist
Alexander Woollcott
, critic and journalist
[6]
Membership was not official or fixed for so many others who moved in and out of the Circle. Some of these included:
Tallulah Bankhead
, actress
Norman Bel Geddes
, stage and industrial designer
[7]
Noël Coward
, playwright
[8]
Blyth Daly
, actress
Edna Ferber
, author and playwright
Eva Le Gallienne
, actress
Margalo Gillmore
, actress
Jane Grant
, journalist and feminist (married to Harold Ross)
Beatrice Kaufman
, editor and playwright (married to George S. Kaufman)
Margaret Leech
, writer and historian
Herman J. Mankiewicz
, screenwriter
Harpo Marx
, comedian and film star
Neysa McMein
, magazine illustrator
Alice Duer Miller
, writer
Donald Ogden Stewart
, playwright and screenwriter
Frank Sullivan
, journalist and humorist
Deems Taylor
, composer
Estelle Winwood
, actress and comedian
Peggy Wood
, actress
[9]
Activities
In addition to the daily luncheons, members of the Round Table worked and associated with each other almost constantly. The group was devoted to games, including
cribbage
and
poker
. The group had its own poker club, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, which met at the hotel on Saturday nights. Regulars at the game included Kaufman, Adams, Broun, Ross and Woollcott, with non-Round Tablers
Herbert Bayard Swope
, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, baking heir Raoul Fleischmann, actor
Harpo Marx
, and writer
Ring Lardner
sometimes sitting in.
[10]
The group also played
charades
(which they called simply "The Game") and the "I can give you a sentence" game, which spawned Dorothy Parker's memorable sentence using the word
horticulture
: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
[11]
Members often visited
Neshobe Island
, a private island co-owned by several "Algonks"—but governed by Woollcott as a "benevolent tyrant", as his biographer
Samuel Hopkins Adams
charitably put it
[12]
—located on several acres in the middle of
Lake Bomoseen
in
Vermont
.
[13]
There they would engage in their usual array of games including
Wink murder
, which they called simply "Murder", plus
croquet
.
A number of Round Tablers were inveterate practical jokers, constantly pulling pranks on one another. As time went on the jokes became ever more elaborate. Harold Ross and Jane Grant once spent weeks playing a particularly memorable joke on Woollcott involving a prized portrait of himself. They had several copies made, each slightly more askew than the last, and would periodically secretly swap them out and then later comment to Woollcott "What on earth is wrong with your portrait?" until Woollcott was beside himself. Eventually they returned the original portrait.
[14]
No Sirree!
Given the literary and theatrical activities of the Round Table members, it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue.
No Sirree!
, staged for one night only in April 1922, was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called
La Chauve-Souris
, directed by
Nikita Balieff
.
[15]
No Sirree!
had its genesis at the studio of
Neysa McMein
, which served as something of a
salon
for Round Tablers away from the Algonquin. Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist
Jascha Heifetz
providing offstage, off-key accompaniment; "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood accompanied by "chorus girls" including
Tallulah Bankhead
,
Helen Hayes
,
Ruth Gillmore
,
Lenore Ulric
and Mary Brandon; "Zowie, or the Curse of an
Akins
Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an
O'Neill
Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; and "Mr. Whim Passes By—An
A. A. Milne
Play."
[16]
The only item of note to emerge from
No Sirree!
was Robert Benchley's contribution,
The Treasurer's Report
. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance that
Irving Berlin
hired Benchley in 1923 to deliver the
Report
as part of Berlin's
Music Box Revue
for 0 a week.
[17]
In 1928,
Report
was later made into a
short
sound film
in the
Fox Movietone
sound-on-film system by
Fox Film Corporation
. The film marked the beginning of a second career for Benchley in
Hollywood
.
With the success of
No Sirree!
the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official" Vicious Circle production open to the public with material performed by professional actors. Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named
The Forty-niners
.
[18]
The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances.
[19]
Decline
As members of the Round Table moved into ventures outside New York City, inevitably the group drifted apart. By the early 1930s the Vicious Circle was broken. Edna Ferber said she realized it when she arrived at the Rose Room for lunch one day in 1932 and found the group's table occupied by a family from Kansas. Frank Case was asked what happened to the group. He shrugged and replied, "What became of the
reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street
? These things do not last forever."
[20]
Some members of the group remained friends after its dissolution. Parker and Benchley in particular remained close up until his death in 1945, although her political leanings did strain their relationship.
[21]
Others, as the group itself would come to understand when it gathered following Woollcott's death in 1943, simply realized that they had nothing to say to one another.
Public response and legacy
Because a number of the members of the Round Table had regular newspaper columns, the activities and quips of various Round Table members were reported in the national press. This brought Round Tablers widely into the public consciousness as renowned wits.
Not all of their contemporaries were fans of the group. Their critics accused them of
logrolling
, or exchanging favorable plugs of one another's works, and of rehearsing their witticisms in advance.
[22]
James Thurber
(who lived in the hotel) was a detractor of the group, accusing them of being too consumed by their elaborate practical jokes.
H. L. Mencken
, who was much admired by many in the Circle, was also a critic, commenting to fellow writer
Anita Loos
that "their ideals were those of a
vaudeville
actor, one who is extremely 'in the know' and inordinately trashy".
[23]
The group showed up in the 1923 best-seller
Black Oxen
by
Gertrude Atherton
. She sarcastically described a group she called "the Sophisticates":
They met at the sign of the Indian Chief where the cleverest of them—and those who were so excitedly sure of their cleverness that for the moment they convinced others as well as themselves—foregathered daily. There was a great deal of scintillating talk in this group of the significant books and tendencies of the day....They appraised, debated, rejected, finally placed the seal of their august approval upon a favored few.
[24]
Groucho Marx
, brother of Round Table associate Harpo, was never comfortable amidst the viciousness of the Vicious Circle. Therein he remarked "The price of admission is a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed
stiletto
."
[25]
Even some members of the Round Table disparaged it later in life. Dorothy Parker in particular criticized the group.
These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—
Lardner
,
Fitzgerald
,
Faulkner
and
Hemingway
. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them....There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth...
[26]
Despite Parker's bleak assessment and while it is true that some members of the Round Table are perhaps now "
famous for being famous
" instead of for their literary output, Round Table members and associates contributed to the literary landscape, including
Pulitzer Prize
-winning work by Circle members Kaufman, Connelly and Sherwood (who won four) and by associate Ferber and the legacy of Ross's
New Yorker
. Others made lasting contributions to the realms of stage and screen —
Tallulah Bankhead
and
Eva Le Gallienne
became Broadway greats and the films of Harpo and Benchley remain popular; and Parker has remained renowned for her short stories and literary reviews.
Algonquin Hotel Landmark Sign
The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other literary and theatrical greats who lodged there, helped earn the Algonquin Hotel its status as a
New York City Historic Landmark
. The hotel was so designated in 1987.
[27]
In 1996 the hotel was designated a national literary landmark by the
Friends of Libraries USA
based on the contributions of "The Round Table Wits". The organization's bronze plaque is attached to the front of the hotel.
[28]
Although the Rose Room was removed from the Algonquin in a 1998 remodel, the hotel paid tribute to the group by commissioning and hanging the painting
A Vicious Circle
by
Natalie Ascencios
, depicting the Round Table and also created a replica of the original table.
[29]
The hotel occasionally stages an original musical production,
The Talk of the Town
, in the Oak Room. Its latest production started September 11, 2007 and ran through the end of the year.
[30]
A film about the members,
The Ten-Year Lunch
(1987), won the
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature
.
[31]
The dramatic film
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
(1994) recounts the Round Table from the perspective of Dorothy Parker.
In popular culture
Portions of the 1981 film
Rich and Famous
were set in the Algonquin and one of the film's characters, Liz Hamilton (played by
Jacqueline Bisset
), refers to the Round Table during the film.
[32]
In 1991, the Algonquin Round Table was mentioned in the
Seinfeld
season 2 episode "
The Phone Message
".
[
citation needed
]
The Algonquin Round Table was featured in "
The Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920
", a 1993 episode of the TV series
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
, in which the title character meets the group and attends at least two lunches.
Wonderful Nonsense - The Algonquin Round Table
is a documentary produced for the DVD release of that film in 2008.
[33]
Alan Rudolph
directed and wrote (with former
Washington Star
reporter Randy Sue Coburn) the 1994 film
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
, about Dorothy Parker and her relationship with the Robert Benchley and the larger group.
In 1997, a reference was made to the "Algonquin Kid's Table" in the Season 4, Episode 3 episode, "The One with the Cuffs" of
Friends
.
In 2009, Robert Benchley's grandson,
Nat Benchley
, and co-editor
Kevin C. Fitzpatrick
published
The Lost Algonquin Round Table
, a collection of the early writings of the group.
George Simon Kaufman
(November 16, 1889 – June 2, 1961) was an American
playwright
,
theatre director
and
producer
,
humorist
, and
drama critic
. In addition to comedies and political satire, he wrote several musicals for the
Marx Brothers
and others. He won the
Pulitzer Prize
for Drama for the musical
Of Thee I Sing
(with
Morrie Ryskind
and
Ira Gershwin
) in 1932, and won again in 1937 for the play
You Can't Take It with You
(with
Moss Hart
). He also won the
Tony Award
for Best Director in 1951 for the musical Guys and Dolls.
George S. Kaufman was born to Joseph S. Kaufman, a hatband manufacturer,
[1]
and Nettie Meyers
[2]
in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
. He had a younger sister, Ruth.
[1]
His other sister was Helen, nicknamed "Helse." Kaufman's family were Jewish. He graduated from high school in 1907 and studied law for three months. He grew disenchanted and took on a series of odd jobs,
[3]
selling silk
[1]
and working in wholesale ribbon sales.
[4]
Career
Kaufman began contributing humorous material to the column that
Franklin P. Adams
wrote for the
New York Mail
. He became close friends with Adams, who helped him get his first newspaper job—humor columnist for
The Washington Times
—in 1912. By 1915 he was a drama reporter on
The New York Tribune
, working under
Heywood Broun
. In 1917 Kaufman joined
The New York Times
, becoming drama editor and staying with the newspaper until 1930.
[4]
Kaufman took his editorial responsibilities seriously. According to legend, on one occasion a press agent asked: "How do I get our leading lady's name in the
Times
?" Kaufman: "Shoot her."
[5]
Theatre
George S. Kaufman and
Moss Hart
in 1937
Kaufman's
Broadway
debut was September 4, 1918 at the
Knickerbocker Theatre
, with the premiere of the melodrama
Someone in the House
.
[6]
[7]
He coauthored the play with
Walter C. Percival
, based on a magazine story written by Larry Evans.
[8]
The play opened on Broadway (running for only 32 performances) during
that year's serious flu epidemic
, when people were being advised to avoid crowds. With "dour glee", Kaufman suggested that the best way to avoid crowds in New York City was to attend his play.
[9]
In every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958, there was a play written or directed by Kaufman. Since Kaufman's death in 1961,
[9]
there have been revivals of his work on Broadway in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s and the 2010s.
[7]
Kaufman wrote only one play alone,
The Butter and Egg Man
in 1925.
[10]
With
Marc Connelly
, he wrote
Merton of the Movies
,
Dulcy
, and
Beggar on Horseback
; with
Ring Lardner
he wrote
June Moon
; with
Edna Ferber
he wrote
The Royal Family
,
Dinner at Eight
, and
Stage Door
; with
John P. Marquand
he wrote a stage adaptation of Marquand's novel
The Late George Apley
; and with Howard Teichmann he wrote
The Solid Gold Cadillac
. According to his biography on PBS, "he wrote some of the American theater's most enduring comedies" with
Moss Hart
.
[11]
Their work includes
Once in a Lifetime
(in which he also performed),
Merrily We Roll Along
,
The Man Who Came to Dinner
and
You Can't Take It with You
, which won the
Pulitzer Prize
in 1937.
[12]
For a period, Kaufman lived at 158 West 58th Street in New York City. The building later would be the setting for
Stage Door
.
[13]
It is now the Park Savoy Hotel and for many years was considered a
single room occupancy
hotel.
[14]
Musical theatre
Despite his claim that he knew nothing about music and hated it in the theatre, Kaufman collaborated on many
musical theatre
projects. His most successful of such efforts include two Broadway shows crafted for the Marx Brothers,
The Cocoanuts
, written with
Irving Berlin
, and
Animal Crackers
, written with
Morrie Ryskind
,
Bert Kalmar
, and
Harry Ruby
. According to Charlotte Chandler, "By the time
Animal Crackers
opened ... the Marx Brothers were becoming famous enough to interest Hollywood. Paramount signed them to a contract".
[15]
Kaufman was one of the writers who excelled in writing intelligent nonsense for
Groucho Marx
, a process that was collaborative, given Groucho's skills at expanding upon the scripted material. Though the Marx Brothers were notoriously critical of their writers, Groucho and
Harpo Marx
expressed admiration and gratitude towards Kaufman.
Dick Cavett
, introducing Groucho onstage at
Carnegie Hall
in 1972, told the audience that Groucho considered Kaufman to be "his god".
While
The Cocoanuts
was being developed in Atlantic City, Irving Berlin was hugely enthusiastic about including the song "
Always
", which he had written as a wedding present for his bride.
[a]
Kaufman was less enthusiastic, and refused to rework the libretto to include this number. The song ultimately became a huge hit for Berlin, recorded by many popular performers. According to Laurence Bergreen, "Kaufman's lack of enthusiasm caused Irving to lose confidence in the song, and 'Always' was deleted from the score of
The Cocoanuts
– though not from its creator's memory. ... Kaufman, a confirmed misogynist, had had no use for the song in
The Cocoanuts
but his disapproval did not deter Berlin from saving it for a more important occasion."
[19]
The Cocoanuts
would remain Irving Berlin's only Broadway musical – until his last one,
Mr. President
– that did not include at least one eventual hit song.
Kaufman recalled the matter differently. In an article in "Stage" magazine, he recalled that Berlin woke him up at 5 a.m. one morning to play a new song he had just written. "Even
my
deficient musical sense recognized that here was a song that was going to be popular. I listened to it two or three times, then took a stab at it myself, and as dawn came up over the Atlantic Irving and I were happily singing "Always" together—its first performance on any stage. I went back to bed a happy man, and stayed happy until rehearsals started, when it turned out that "Always" had not been written for our show at all, but purely for Irving's music-publishing house. In its place in
The Cocoanuts
was a song called "A Little Bungalow," which we never could reprise in Act Two because the actors couldn't remember it that long." ("Music to My Ears,"
Stage
, August 1938. Reprinted in
By George: A Kaufman Collection
, 1979)
Humor derived from political situations was of particular interest to Kaufman. He collaborated on the hit musical
Of Thee I Sing
, which won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, the first musical so honored,
[12]
and its sequel
Let 'Em Eat Cake
, as well as one troubled but eventually successful satire that had several incarnations,
Strike Up the Band
. Working with Kaufman on these ventures were Ryskind,
George Gershwin
, and
Ira Gershwin
. Also, Kaufman, with Moss Hart, wrote the book to
I'd Rather Be Right
, a musical starring
George M. Cohan
as
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(the U.S. president at the time), with songs by
Richard Rodgers
and
Lorenz Hart
. He also co-wrote the 1935 comedy-drama
First Lady
. In 1945, Kaufman adapted
H.M.S. Pinafore
into
Hollywood Pinafore
.
Kaufman also contributed to major New York revues, including
The Band Wagon
(which shared songs but not plot with the 1953 film version) with
Arthur Schwartz
and
Howard Dietz
. His often anthologized sketch "The Still Alarm" from the revue
The Little Show
lasted long after the show closed. Another well-known sketch of his is "If Men Played Cards As Women Do." There have also been musicals based on Kaufman properties, such as the 1981 musical version of
Merrily We Roll Along
, adapted by
George Furth
and
Stephen Sondheim
.
[20]
The musical
Sherry!
(1967) was based on his play
The Man Who Came to Dinner
.
[21]
Directing and producing
The Front Page
(1928)
Of Mice and Men
(1937), with
Wallace Ford
and
Broderick Crawford
Kaufman directed the original or revival stage productions of many plays and musicals, including
The Front Page
by
Charles MacArthur
and
Ben Hecht
(1928),
Of Thee I Sing
(1931 and 1952),
Of Mice and Men
by
John Steinbeck
(1937),
My Sister Eileen
by
Joseph Fields
and
Jerome Chodorov
(1940),
Hollywood Pinafore
(1945),
The Next Half Hour
(1945),
Park Avenue
(1946, also co-wrote the book),
Town House
(1948),
Bravo!
(1948, also co-wrote the script),
Metropole
(1949), the
Frank Loesser
musical
Guys and Dolls
, for which he won the 1951 Best Director
Tony Award
,
The Enchanted
(1950),
The Small Hours
(1951, also co-wrote the script),
Fancy Meeting You Again
(1952, also co-wrote the script),
The Solid Gold Cadillac
(1953, also co-wrote the script), and
Romanoff and Juliet
by
Peter Ustinov
(1957).
[7]
Kaufman produced many of his own plays as well as those of other writers. For a short time, approximately from 1940 to circa 1946, Kaufman, with Moss Hart and Max Gordon, owned and operated the
Lyceum Theatre
.
[22]
Film and television
Many of Kaufman's plays were adapted into Hollywood and British films. Among the more well-received were
Dinner At Eight
,
Stage Door
(almost completely rewritten by others for the film version) and
You Can't Take It with You
(changed significantly by others for the film version), which won the Best Picture
Oscar
in 1938, and
The Dark Tower (1943 film)
. He also occasionally wrote directly for the movies, most significantly the screenplay for
A Night at the Opera
for the Marx Brothers. His only credit as a
film director
was
The Senator Was Indiscreet
(1947) starring William Powell.
From 1949 until midway through the 1952–1953 season, he appeared as a panelist on the
CBS
television series
This Is Show Business
.
[23]
[24]
Kaufman made a remark about the excessive airing of "
Silent Night
" during the
Christmas
season, "Let's make this one program," he said, "on which no one sings 'Silent Night'." The resulting public outcry prompted his dismissal by CBS.
[25]
In response,
Fred Allen
said, "There were only two wits on television:
Groucho Marx
and George S. Kaufman. Without Kaufman, television has reverted to being half-witted."
[26]
It would be more than a year before Kaufman appeared on TV again.
[25]
Bridge
Kaufman was a prominent player of bridge, probably both
auction bridge
and
contract bridge
.
The New Yorker
published many of his humorous items about the card game; at least some have been reprinted more than once, including:
"Kibitzers' Revolt"
[
when?
]
and the suggestion that bridge clubs should post notice whether the North–South or the East–West pairs are holding good cards.
[27]
Kaufman was notoriously impatient with poor players. One such partner asked permission to use the men's room, according to legend, and Kaufman replied: "Gladly. For the first time today I'll know what you have in your hand."
[27]
[28]
On sitting South: (1) "No matter who writes the books or articles, South holds the most terrific cards I ever saw. There is a lucky fellow if ever I saw one."
[29]
(2)
Oswald Jacoby
reported a deal that Kaufman played marvelously in 1952, after which he cracked, "I'd rather sit South than be the
President
."
[27]
On
coffeehousing
, "I'd like a review of the bidding with all the original inflections."
[30]
His first wife
Beatrice Bakrow Kaufman
was also an avid bridge player, and an occasional poker player with
Algonquin
men, who wrote at least one
New Yorker
article on bridge herself, in 1928.
[31]
Personal life
Beatrice Kaufman
in 1934
In the 1920s, Kaufman was a member of the
Algonquin Round Table
, a circle of writers and show business people. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Kaufman was as well known for his personality as he was for his writing.
[
citation needed
]
In the
Moss Hart
autobiography
Act One
, Hart portrayed Kaufman as a morose and intimidating figure, uncomfortable with any expressions of affection between human beings—in life or on the page. Hart writes that Max Siegel said: "Maybe I should have warned you. Mr Kaufman hates any kind of sentimentality—can't stand it!"
[32]
This perspective, along with a number of taciturn observations made by Kaufman himself, led to a simplistic but commonly held belief that Hart was the emotional soul of the creative team while Kaufman was a misanthropic writer of punchlines. Kaufman preferred never to leave Manhattan. He once said: "I never want to go any place where I can't get back to Broadway and 44th by midnight."
[33]
Called "Public Lover Number One", he "dated some of the most beautiful women on Broadway".
[34]
Kaufman found himself in the center of a scandal in 1936 when, in the midst of a child custody suit, the former husband of actress
Mary Astor
threatened to publish one of Astor's diaries purportedly containing extremely explicit details of an affair between Kaufman and the actress.
[34]
The diary was eventually destroyed unread by the courts in 1952, but details of the supposed contents were published in
Confidential
magazine,
Hollywood Babylon
by
Kenneth Anger
, and various other scandal sheets. Some of the sexually explicit portion, involving Kaufman, were reprinted in
New York
magazine in 2012 and
Vanity Fair
magazine in 2016.
[35]
[36]
Kaufman had an affair with actress
Natalie Schafer
during the 1940s.
[37]
Kaufman joined the theatre club, The Lambs, in 1944.
[38]
Kaufman was married to his first wife Beatrice from 1917 until her death in 1945.
[31]
[39]
They had one daughter, Anne Kaufman (Booth).
[31]
Four years later, he married actress
Leueen MacGrath
on May 26, 1949,
[40]
with whom he collaborated on a number of plays before their divorce in August 1957. Kaufman died in New York City on June 2, 1961, at the age of 71.
[4]
His granddaughter,
Beatrice Colen
, was an actress who had recurring appearances on both
Happy Days
and
Wonder Woman
.
[41]
In 1979,
Donald Oliver
compiled and edited a collection of Kaufman's humorous pieces, with a foreword by
Dick Cavett
.
[42]
Portrayals
Kaufman was portrayed by the actor
David Thornton
in the 1994 film
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
[43]
and by
Jason Robards
in the 1963 film
Act One
. In the 2014 Broadway adaptation of the latter by
James Lapine
, he was played by
Tony Shalhoub
.
The title character of the 1991
Coen brothers
film
Barton Fink
, who is a playwright, bears a strong physical resemblance to Kaufman.
[44]
Kaufman is portrayed in the film
Mank
by actor Adam Shapiro.