Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherds the plays of her father George S. Kaufman, a Titan of 20th century American theatrical wit, died in the 21st century, all of his own, in his own right, in his Manhattan home. She was 99 years old.
Her enforcer, Lawrence Maslon, confirmed her death.
“It's difficult for a stubborn girl,” Kaufman Schneider once told The New York Times. And it started early. Because there was no talk about the baby. We went to the theatre together when we were 4 years old. Now I have made his work my agenda in life. ”
George Kaufman's stellar career as a hit-making play light and stage director, in 1937, won two Pulitzer Prizes, “I can't take it with you.” The other scored in 1932 by George and Ira Gershwin, satirical political music co-written with Morrie Ryskind.
Still, after his death in 1961 at the age of 71, Kaufman was a fierce selling point for the theatre revival.
“It was very rare,” Kaufman Schneider once said, “until Ellis Love revived “I can't take it with you” for the APA/Phoenix Theatre in 1965. Ellis proved that these are classic American theatres. (The Produced Artists Association, founded by APA actor and director Rabb, was well known for adopting a revival after merging with another Broadway house, the Phoenix Theatre.)
Kaufman Schneider oversaw his father's Renaissance for the next 50 years.
She encouraged countless local theatre productions and helped lead two of them to Broadway. Love's “You can't take it with you,” said Ann Arbor, Michigan and Edna Felber's “Crown” revivals first announced at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. We arrived on Broadway in December 1975.
She also helped raise the “Kaufmania” festival at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC for her father Centennial in 1989, and the major revival of the Lincoln Center for “Eight Dinners at Dinners” by Kaufman and Farber in 2002.
“A wiser and more wiser than all men” was the way Kaufman Schneider defined the classic Kaufman heroine. “In a way, I model myself. I unconsciously hope. It's the kind of woman he admired.”
She was born on June 23, 1925 and was recruited three months later by Kaufman, a drama editor for the New York Times, and her wife Beatrice (Bakrow) Kaufman, who was known as Bee, her own literary figure as editor and tastemaker.
In 1918 Kaufman began writing with another future Pulitzer winner, Mark Connery, who wrote five Broadway comedies over four years, including 1922's Merton of the Movies and 1924's “Be Food on a Horse.”
Kaufman was the infamous Alaf Zimaphobe, who washed his hands after contact with other humans, and was not a paternal candidate. Conversely, his marriage and fiercely social social Bee Kaufman became an affectionate but chaste person after her early miscarriage. Both publicly pursued extramarital issues.
With this strange family, Menage has entered Anne. Anne grew up on removal from her parents, and instead proved a series of foreign-born governors, nannies and maids, Kaufman's biography and interviews with Kaufman Schneider.
Her mother called out her buttons and her father escaped “slow pork” her pork. Her most regular family contact was in the stage play “Good night” at their celebrity-studded dinner party. Little Anne discovers that the sharp exit Quips makes his father laugh with his pride.
On Sunday, a help holiday, the mother handed her over to her father with warning. Do something with her. On his own, Kaufman did two main things. He made theatre and play cards and was excellent in both. He took his daughter to a club on his bridge, where she saw in the store and developed what would be a lifelong disgust to the card game. He also took her to the theatre, where their deepest bond was born.
Anne attended five famous private schools in a row: Walden, Lincoln, Todd Hunter and Dalton in Manhattan, Pennsylvania, near the family's country home. She grew up in a small apartment adjacent to a palace house, mainly at 200 West 58th Avenue in Manhattan. Her parents acquired it just for her upbringing. She later lived with them in a series of elegant East Side addresses.
He was admitted to the University of Chicago in 1943 at the age of 18 and instead married a young New York Times reporter named John Booth. During World War II, when he was shipped abroad as a soldier six months later, she returned home with her parents, and when Mr. Booth returned from military duty, she divorced him. She married magazine editor Bruce Collen in 1947, and was with him the following year before her daughter Beatrice divorced him.
In 1960 she married Irving Schneider, general manager of theater producer Irene Mayer Selznick. He was the assistant stage manager for the original 1934 production of the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play “Merrily We Roll Atlon” (later adapted by Stephen Sondheim as a musical). The marriage continued until Schneider's death in 1997.
After joining her starring Eva Le Gallienne in the 1975 “The Royal” revival and stage actress Eva Le Gallienne, Kaufman Schneider was a dedicated friend and constant companion to her until the death of Le Gallien in 1991 at the age of 92.
Beatrice Koren Cronin, daughter of Kaufman Schneider, passed away in 1999. Two grandchildren survived.
Of many of his father's collaborators, including Edna Faber, Ring Lardner and John P. Marcand, Moss Hart was his favourite, Kaufman Schneider said. “They are very mentors and apprentices, and even fathers and sons spoke in a 2022 interview with the Times.
Kaufman Schneider first met Hart's future wife, singer, actress and later arts manager Kitty Carlisle on the set of the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera (1935). Carlisle was co-starring in a film co-written by George Kaufman. The two women reconnected when Carlisle married Mr Hart in 1946, and, in Kaufman Schneider's words, became “inseparable” especially after the deaths of both men in 1961.
Their friendship grew into something like their later roadshow, working together for talks around the world on the subject of Kaufman and Hart.
“Two girls with six names,” Kaufman Schneider liked to say.
“I'm very grateful to Anne,” Carlisle Hart once told The Times. “Anne took on the drama's heavy burden, their second life.”
In 2004, with a little less to his daughter's recovery efforts, George S. Kaufman officially entered the theatre Pantheon with the publication of Kaufman & Company, the library's “Kaufman & Company,” nine collections of his co-comic Masterworks.
Still, “ultimately, for Anne, I was never happier than seeing my father's play in front of his father's play,” said Maslon, a NYU art professor and theater scholar who edited “Kauffman & Co.” And along with actor David Pitt, he is the enforcer of the George S. Kaufman Literary Trust. “'Em Up!' Anne's watch cried.”
Preserving his father's play also allowed Kaufman Schneider to maintain the love they found difficult to express themselves to each.
“Well, sir, we're here again,” she wrote on Kaufman's 51st birthday. In the meantime, I can make those gobs – I remember what we do together. What you say; however, they are not the reason why people write birthday letters to people – they are some reasons why they like you. It's hard for others to say – it's hard to define in words that you think of yourself. ”
