'Kaufman & Co.'

KAUFMAN & CO.

Broadway Comedies

By George S. Kaufman with Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, Ring Lardner and Morrie Ryskind

Library of America. 911 pp. $35

Like many uncommonly funny people, George S. Kaufman could be difficult, headstrong, irascible, arrogant and overbearing, yet he was the ultimate team player. If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, Kaufman was the Great Collaborator. Over a show-business career that spanned more than four decades, he teamed up with various gifted writers to produce hugely popular Broadway plays and musicals, many of which were turned into hugely popular Hollywood movies -- "Of Thee I Sing," "Dinner at Eight," "Stage Door," "You Can't Take It With You," "The Man Who Came to Dinner" -- and he directed many of them as well, which is to say that he presided over collaborative undertakings involving scores, even hundreds, of people.

When word arrived that Kaufman was to be honored with his own volume in the Library of America, I was delighted. As an adolescent in the 1950s and a young man in the 1960s, I was a passionate Kaufmanite. My worn copy of the Modern Library's Six Plays by Kaufman & Hart was my bedside companion and my vade mecum, accompanying me from one place to another, providing endless laughter and delight. Precisely when and why I stopped reading Kaufman's plays I cannot say, but they remained fixed in memory among the great pleasures of youth.

Of the six plays in that volume, plays upon which Kaufman collaborated with Moss Hart, only three make it into the Library of America collection: "Once in a Lifetime," "You Can't Take It With You" and "The Man Who Came to Dinner." The ones missing are "Merrily We Roll Along," "The American Way" and "George Washington Slept Here." Instead we are given three plays that Kaufman wrote with Edna Ferber ("The Royal Family," "Dinner at Eight" and "Stage Door"), two he wrote with Morrie Ryskind ("Animal Crackers" and "Of Thee I Sing"), and one he wrote with Ring Lardner ("June Moon"). This doubtless is more representative of Kaufman's busy and varied career, but it has an unfortunate and presumably unintended side effect: It leaves no doubt that when Kaufman wasn't collaborating with Hart, the quality of his work went way, way down.

With the exception of "Of Thee I Sing," the plays Kaufman wrote with Ferber, Ryskind and Lardner -- plays produced over nine years, beginning with "The Royal Family" in December 1927 -- are period pieces now, and even "Of Thee I Sing" barely makes the cut; its dialogue is snappy but dated, rescued from oblivion by Ira Gershwin's lyrics (included here) and George Gershwin's music (you'll have to get the album). Thirty pages of small-type notes are required at the end of the volume, mostly to identify the celebrities of the 1920s and 1930s whose names were immediately recognized by audiences of the day but are almost entirely unknown now: Father Divine, Polly Adler, Philo Vance, Grover Whalen, William E. Borah, Hattie Carnegie, Milt Gross, Kay Francis, John L. Sullivan, Peter Arno, Primo Carnera, Clara Bow. Sic transit gloria mundi, and sic transit yesterday's laughs.

Of the non-Hart collaborations, only "Animal Crackers" is genuinely funny, and one senses that Kaufman and Ryskind had relatively little to do with its laughs. These almost certainly were contributed (mostly ad lib) by Harpo, Zeppo and, most especially, Groucho Marx, who starred in the original 1928 production. One of the many anecdotes reported elsewhere about Kaufman takes place during a rehearsal of "Animal Crackers." Kaufman listened to the Marx Brothers have their way with his script before finally complaining: "Excuse me for interrupting, but I thought for a minute I actually heard a line I wrote." The following bit of patter is Marx to the core. It begins with Mrs. Rittenhouse, the hostess, meeting a musician named Emanuel Ravelli. "You are one of the musicians? But you were not due until tomorrow," she says. Ravelli and Captain Spaulding, the explorer played by Groucho, then get rolling:

"RAVELLI: We couldn't come tomorrow. It was too quick.

"SPAULDING: Say, you're lucky they didn't come yesterday.

"RAVELLI: We were busy yesterday, but we charge you just the same.

"SPAULDING: This is better than exploring. What do you fellows get an hour?

"RAVELLI: For playing we get ten dollars an hour.