![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The first, when Kaufman was fourteen and growing up in Pittsburgh, was Irving Pichel, who was to become a Hollywood director the play was a father-son melodrama called “The Failure.” Needless to say, nothing came of it. There had been many collaborators before Teichmann. And if I don’t know about collaboration who the hell does?” The total result is frequently far more than the combined abilities of two people might give you…. But pay no attention to them, because in one respect at least it is wonderful. It is marriage without sex, and subject to many vexations. To Howard Teichmann, the co-author of his last hit play, “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” he wrote, “A thought on collaboration. Presumably, he did it to show that he could, but, despite its success, he went right back to working with others. ![]() Why “& Co.”? Because Kaufman (he pronounced it “Koffman”) was the American theatre’s busiest collaborator: of the dozens of straight plays he wrote, only one-“The Butter and Egg Man”-was by him solo. Kaufman, a founding wit of the Algonquin Round Table and probably the greatest hitmaker in Broadway history-“You Can’t Take It with You,” “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “Of Thee I Sing,” and a score more-is currently being celebrated, or, you might say, exhumed, by the Library of America, in a volume of nine plays called “Kaufman & Co.” ($35). ![]()
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