Co-Authored ‘The Solid Gold Cadillac’ : Writer Howard Miles Teichmann

Howard Miles Teichmann, the amiable wit and stylish writer whose biographies of fascinating folk became as popular as the subjects themselves, is dead of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The co-author with George S. Kaufman of the 1953 comedy triumph, “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” was 71 when he died Tuesday in New York City of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Unlike many biographers of the rich and famous, Teichmann had become an intimate of Kaufman and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, before he became their Boswell.

Close to Henry Fonda

Only with Henry Fonda did he deal with a subject rather than a friend, but the writer and actor became close during the months of work on “Fonda: My Life” to a point where Fonda’s voice could later be heard on Teichmann’s telephone answering machine (complaining that he hadn’t read the fine print of his contract with Teichmann and that “people are always taking advantage of actors”).

Teichmann was known in the literary world as a raconteur whose verbal barbs were aimed at targets ranging from big business to politicians.

Teichmann had intended to become an historian during his days at the University of Wisconsin.

But, as he told The Times in a 1976 interview in connection with his Alexander Woollcott biography: “Smart Aleck, the Wit World and Life of Alexander Woollcott,” “I loved history but I didn’t want to teach it.”

Taught at Barnard

He did however become a 40-year classroom veteran at Barnard College, where he taught stage, screen, film and television writing.

Teichmann somehow wangled an introduction to Orson Welles who hired him as stage manager for his Mercury Theater of the Air. In the late 1930s and early ‘40s he wrote for the long-running radio serials, “The Road of Life” and “Valiant Lady,” before World War II service as an editor for the Office of War Information.

After the war, he returned to radio, writing for “Helen Hayes Theater,” “The Gertrude Lawrence Revue” and “Cavalcade of America.”

For television he wrote “A Day in the Life of a Chorus Girl” and “The American Road,” the Ford Motor Co.’s golden anniversary show.

Then he teamed with Kaufman, author of such theater classics as “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “You Can’t Take It With You” for his most popular work, “The Solid Gold Cadillac.”

Spoof of Business

Starring Josephine Hull on Broadway (and later Judy Holliday on film), the play was a ribald spoof of a rebellious stockholder who succeeds in not only embarrassing the corporation in which she owns a minute interest but eventually taking it over.

That was the dawn of an alliance that eventually spawned one of his best-received biographies, “George S. Kaufman: An Intimate Portrait.” Kaufman’s remembrances of Woollcott, gleaned during the 10 years Teichmann spent with the famed playwright and satirist, led to the later Woollcott biography.

Other Teichmann plays included “The Girls in 509,” a satire of party politics, and “A Rainy Day in Newark,” a spearing of organized labor. He also adapted “Miss Lonelyhearts,” a Nathanael West novel about an advice columnist, for the stage.

Teichmann viewed his biographical work as part of the sense of history that had attracted him as a youth.

Books Come Full Circle

“What brings all this (the books) full circle,” he said in 1976, “is that Woollcott got Orson (Welles) his first job and Orson got me mine. . . . “

And it was Woollcott who gave Kaufman his start as Woollcott’s assistant at the New York Times in an era that has been described as the most extraordinary for stimulating conversation since Dr. Samuel Johnson presided over London’s Literary Club in the 18th Century. At that club there also was a bemused and properly reverential James Boswell, later to become Johnson’s biographer.