Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherded the performs of her father, George S. Kaufman, a titan of Twentieth-century American theatrical wit, into the twenty first century with an acerbic sagacity all her personal, died on Thursday at her dwelling in Manhattan. She was 99.
Her executor, Laurence Maslon, confirmed her demise.
“Headstrong ladies are troublesome,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider as soon as advised The New York Instances, “however that was the supply of my good relationship with my father. And it began early. As a result of there wasn’t any child speak. We went to the theater collectively beginning after I was 4. Now I’ve made his work my agenda in life.”
George Kaufman’s stellar profession as a hit-making playwright and stage director included successful two Pulitzer Prizes — one, in 1937, for “You Can’t Take It With You,” a comedy he created together with his most fixed collaborator, Moss Hart; the opposite, in 1932, for “Of Thee I Sing,” a satirical political musical co-written with Morrie Ryskind to a rating by George and Ira Gershwin.
Even so, after his demise in 1961 on the age of 71, Kaufman was a tough promote for theatrical revivals.
“Little or no occurred in any respect,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider as soon as recalled, “till Ellis Rabb revived ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ for the A.P.A./Phoenix Theater in 1965. Ellis proved that these are basic American performs.” (Based by Mr. Rabb, an actor and director, the A.P.A., formally the Affiliation of Producing Artists, was a Broadway entity notable for mounting revivals after it merged with the Phoenix Theater, one other Broadway home.)
Ms. Kaufman Schneider proceeded to supervise her father’s renaissance over the subsequent 50-plus years — a time period of service that outdistanced his personal residing stewardship of his profession.
She inspired numerous regional theater productions and helped steer two of them to Broadway: Mr. Rabb’s “You Can’t Take It With You,” which originated in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a revival of Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “The Royal Household,” which was first introduced on the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; it reached Broadway in December 1975.
She additionally helped nurture a “Kaufmania” pageant at Enviornment Stage in Washington, D.C., for her father’s centennial in 1989 and a serious Lincoln Middle revival of Kaufman and Ferber’s “Dinner at Eight” in 2002.
“The wisecracking girl who’s smarter than all the boys,” was how Ms. Kaufman Schneider outlined a basic Kaufman heroine. “Which in some methods is what I modeled myself after — I hope unconsciously. That’s the sort of girl he admired.’‘
She was born on June 23, 1925, and adopted three months later by Kaufman, then the drama editor of The New York Instances, and his spouse, Beatrice (Bakrow) Kaufman, who was often called Bea, a literary determine in her personal proper as an editor and tastemaker.
Kaufman, in 1918, had begun writing performs on the facet, virtually all the time with collaborators, notably Marc Connelly, one other future Pulitzer winner, who scripted 5 Broadway comedies with him in 4 years, together with “Merton of the Motion pictures” in 1922 and “Beggar on Horseback” in 1924. (Kaufman wrote just one play solo, “The Butter and Egg Man,” which was additionally a success, in 1925.)
A notoriously aloof germaphobe who washed his arms after any contact with one other human being, Kaufman was hardly a probable candidate for fatherhood. His marriage to the conversely gregarious and vigorously social Bea Kaufman had turn into a loving however chaste one after she suffered an early miscarriage; each overtly pursued extramarital affairs.
Into this odd household ménage entered Anne, who grew up at a take away from her dad and mom, attentively raised as an alternative by a succession of foreign-born governesses, nannies and maids, as biographies of Kaufman and interviews with Ms. Kaufman Schneider have attested.
Her mom referred to as her Button and her father referred to as her Poke, an eliding of “gradual poke.” Her most common household contact with them was in stagy “goodnights” at their celebrity-studded dinner events. Little Anne found that sharp exit quips made her father snigger with paternal satisfaction.
On Sundays, the assistance’s break day, her mom handed her over to her father with the admonition: Do one thing together with her. On his personal, Kaufman did primarily two issues: make theater and play playing cards, and he excelled at each. He took his daughter to his bridge membership, the place she stoically regarded on, creating what can be a lifelong aversion to card video games. He would additionally take her to the theater, the place their deepest bond was born.
Anne attended 5 prestigious non-public colleges in succession: Walden, Lincoln, Todhunter and Dalton in Manhattan and Holmquist in Pennsylvania, close to the household’s nation home. She largely grew up in a small house adjoining to their palatial dwelling at 200 West 58th Road in Manhattan; her dad and mom had acquired it only for her upbringing. She later lived with them in a sequence of stylish East Aspect addresses.
Admitted to the College of Chicago in 1943 at age 18, she as an alternative married a younger New York Instances reporter named John Sales space. When, throughout World Warfare II, he was shipped abroad as a soldier six months later, she moved again dwelling together with her dad and mom, and when Mr. Sales space returned from navy responsibility, she divorced him. She married Bruce Colen, {a magazine} editor, in 1947 and had a daughter, Beatrice, with him the subsequent yr earlier than divorcing him, too.
In 1960, she married Irving Schneider, the final supervisor for the theatrical producer Irene Mayer Selznick. He had been an assistant stage supervisor on the unique 1934 manufacturing of Kaufman and Hart’s play “Merrily We Roll Alongside” (later tailored by Stephen Sondheim as a musical). That marriage lasted till Mr. Schneider’s demise in 1997.
After bonding with the stage actress Eva Le Gallienne throughout her starring run within the 1975 revival of “The Royal Household,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider turned her devoted buddy and fixed companion till Ms. Le Gallienne’s demise in 1991 at age 92.
Ms. Kaufman Schneider’s daughter, Beatrice Colen Cronin, died in 1999. Two grandsons survive.
Of all her father’s many collaborators — together with Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner and John P. Marquand — Moss Hart was his favourite, Ms. Kaufman Schneider stated. “I believe they have been very a lot mentor and apprentice, even father and son,” she stated in a 2022 interview with The Instances.
Ms. Kaufman Schneider first met Hart’s future spouse, the singer, actress and later arts administrator Kitty Carlisle, on the set of the Marx Brothers film “A Night time On the Opera” (1935); Ms. Carlisle was co-starring within the movie, which George Kaufman had co-written. The 2 ladies reconnected when Ms. Carlisle married Mr. Hart in 1946, changing into, in Ms. Kaufman Schneider’s phrases, “inseparable,” notably after the deaths of each males in 1961.
Their friendship grew into one thing of a highway present of their later years, as they teamed up for talking engagements all around the world with reference to Kaufman and Hart.
“Simply two ladies with six names,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider preferred to say.
“I’m very grateful to Anne,” Ms. Carlisle Hart as soon as advised The Instances. “Anne has taken on the main burden of the performs, their second life.”
In 2004, due in no small measure to his daughter’s restorative efforts, George S. Kaufman formally entered the theatrical pantheon with the Library of America’s publication of “Kaufman & Co.”, a group of 9 of his collaborative comedian masterworks.
Nonetheless, “for Anne, in the long run, nothing made her happier than seeing her father’s performs in entrance of audiences,” stated her executor, Mr. Maslon, an N.Y.U. arts professor and theater scholar who edited “Kaufman & Co.” and who, with the actor David Pittu, is an executor of the George S. Kaufman Literary Belief. “‘Get ’em up!’ was Anne’s watch cry.”
Preserving her father’s performs allowed Ms. Kaufman Schneider additionally to protect the love that they every had typically discovered exhausting to precise.
“Properly, sir, right here we’re once more,” she wrote on Kaufman’s 51st birthday, when she was practically 16. “Yearly right now I need to write you a very nice letter and yearly I’m simply as a lot at a loss as I used to be the yr earlier than. In between occasions I could make up gobs of them — I keep in mind issues we do collectively; humorous belongings you say; however these aren’t causes for writing folks birthday letters — these are only a few causes for liking you. Others are exhausting to say — exhausting even to outline in pondering phrases to oneself.”
