Kaufman’s Daughter Recalls Idyllic Childhood

In the annals of show business childhoods, preoccupied as they are with horror stories, few sound more golden than Anne Kaufman Schneider’s. Her father was playwright George S. Kaufman, the acerbic and celebrated Broadway figure who brought people like Irving Berlin, Moss Hart, Groucho Marx and Alexander Woollcott home to dinner.

“To me it was a normal childhood,” remembers Schneider. “I mean, there would be George Gershwin playing the piano. Once Charlie Chaplin came to a party. He had the smallest hands and feet of anyone I ever saw.”

Tonight Schneider, 63, will attend the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion opening of her father’s “Strike Up the Band,” the meticulously reconstructed 1927 musical (with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin) in the third and last stand of an unusual three-way producing venture among the California Music Theatre, the Music Center Operating Company and the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Schneider doesn’t remember the original. She was 2 years old when it flopped out of town in Philadelphia. Kaufman’s libretto satirizing mindless patriotism and war profiteering was ahead of its time. (A watered-down version, revised by Morrie Ryskind, did succeed on Broadway in 1930.)

“The real hero of this production,” Schneider said, “aided by the Gershwins and my father, is Tommy Krasker,” a musical theater scholar who reconstituted the 1927 script and score. Since Kaufman’s death at 71 in 1961, Schneider’s life work has been running her father’s literary estate. “I’m the keeper of the flame,” she smiled.

That means frequent travel to openings of Kaufman revivals (including a recent production in Czechoslovakia of “The Man Who Came to Dinner”). It entails negotiating with the executors of the estates of Kaufman’s several famous collaborators, such as Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly, Morrie Ryskind and Moss Hart.

“He loved Hart best,” Schneider offered. “My father once said ‘life with Moss was like a marriage--and we had eight beautiful children.’ ” Among them were “Once in a Lifetime,” “You Can’t Take It With You” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” The last was Hart’s idea, inspired, said Schneider, “when Moss invited Woollcott to his house, and it was a ghastly weekend.”

Kaufman’s caustic legacy has had a renaissance of sorts. Among recent revivals are a pair of stage shows he wrote in the ‘20s for the Marx Brothers (while he was still a drama critic on the New York Times): “The Cocoanuts,” which just closed at the Arena Theatre in Washington, and “Animal Crackers,” a spring-summer hit in Boston that is moving to Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Sept. 6.

“My dad gave Groucho his walk and his talk,” Schneider said.

The current megabuck development in Kaufmania is Columbia Pictures’ recent purchase of a three-year option on Kaufman’s last Broadway hit, “The Solid Gold Cadillac” (written with Howard Teichmann in 1953). Columbia made the 1956 film adaptation starring Judy Holliday, but let the rights lapse and had to buy them “all over again.”

This story of a very modern woman who seems dumb but is smarter than the corporate daddies around her was terribly iffy in tryouts in Hartford, Conn., and Washington. Reminisced Schneider: “Moss Hart told my father ‘don’t bring the show into New York.’ But it was a smash. ‘Solid Gold Cadillac’ was one of his last great thrills. The morning after opening night, (he) hired a limo and he, me and my stepmother parked in a snowstorm across the street from the Belasco Theatre and sat gleefully watching the long lines queued up to buy tickets.”

Kaufman’s first wife, stylish, robust Beatrice Bakrow, had died at 50 in 1945. They’d been married since 1917 and she’s the namesake for Schneider’s own daughter.

“I was adopted (as an infant in 1925),” Schneider said. “I am a great living argument for environment over heredity. I couldn’t be more like my mom and dad. And I’m not sure they didn’t love me more because of the adoption. They always said ‘we chose you.’

“My father was a private, unfrivolous, reticent man,” she added, “publicly austere, and he could be quite frightening to other people. He did not admire Eugene O’Neill. He thought (him) pretentious. To me, (he) was a warm father. I did not have a devil of a time.”

Schneider acknowledges the printed stories of Kaufman’s compulsive extramarital dalliances (Mary Astor being the biggest scandal), but said her parents had “an understanding. It was unheard of then in upper-middle-class German-Jewish families, (but) my folks were happy and fulfilled.”

The project currently dearest to Schneider, who goes home to New York on Saturday, is a hoped-for Broadway revival next year of the under-revived “Dinner at Eight.”

“I call Ellis Rabb every two months. I want him to re-stage (it) because he dug underneath so well in his revivals of ‘The Royal Family’ and ‘You Can’t Take It With You.’ The last time I talked to him I said, ‘If Rosemary Harris would love to play Marie Dressler’s part, we could go from there.’ ”

Dressler starred in the MGM version of “Dinner at Eight.”

“With a director and actress like that, you know you can you work it into something.” Schneider paused wistfully. “And 1989 will be my father’s centennial year.”