The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [37]
The frankly commercial art being pumped out of Times Square was taken seriously for the first time. Not only Broadway figures like Broun, Adams, and George Jean Nathan, editor of The Smart Set, but mandarin intellectuals like Edmund Wilson and Joseph Wood Krutch wrote about Irving Berlin and jazz music and the revues. The most ardent vindication of the new art forms came with the publication of Gilbert Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts in 1924. Seldes, erudite and grounded in the classics, nevertheless championed jazz, vaudeville, Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan, the Krazy Kat comics, and Mack Sennett movies. He referred to these topical and transitory forms, hell-bent on pleasing the customer, as the lively arts—what we would today call popular culture. These minor art forms, Seldes wrote, “are, to an extent, an opiate—or rather they trick our hunger for a moment, and we are able to sleep. They do not wholly satisfy, but they do not corrupt. And they, too, have their moments of intensity.” Seldes went on to describe the ecstasy he found stealing over him in the presence of the great vaudevillians. This was Broadway in the twenties—the epicenter and apogee of the lively arts.
GEORGES. KAUFMAN was a comfortably middle-class Jewish boy from Pittsburgh who, like so many clever and ambitious young men and women of the time, was magnetically attracted to Broadway. In an age of wits, Kaufman was the wisecracker-in-chief, a man whose lightning verbal reflexes would have served him well in an eighteenth-century salon. He once bumped into the playwright S. N. Behrman in the wilds of Hollywood and said, “Ah, forgotten but not gone.” When Moss Hart, having catapulted to sudden wealth, appeared one day in a glittering cowboy suit, Kaufman hailed him with “Hiyo, platinum!” Kaufman began his career, as did many another aspiring wag, contributing funny items to FPA’s column in the Tribune, and went on to write a humor column of his own.
Kaufman knocked around until age thirty, when he got a job in the drama department of the Times, working under the imperious Woollcott. In later years, Woollcott claimed to have been thoroughly intimidated by his brilliant and gloomy underling, who was wont to deliver devastating quips without so much as cracking a smile. Though Kaufman was more or less happily married, financially successful, and devoted heart and soul to his work, his deep discomfort with life was impervious to his external circumstances. “He was so nervous,” a biographer writes, “that he veered between bursts of rapid speech and periods of shy and total silence.” He was terrified of long elevator rides and hazardous street crossings, though his chosen mode of existence required that he confront both all the time. Phobic about germs, Kaufman shied away from all forms of physical contact, especially handshakes.
Kaufman’s wit, indeed his whole temperament, was shaped around an intense aversion to uninflected emotion. Moss Hart, who as an untried novice collaborated with the already titanic Kaufman, describes addressing a heartfelt speech of thanks to the bundle of limbs that was the playwright slumped, apparently inert, in an armchair. “To my horror,” Hart writes, “the legs unwound themselves with an acrobatic rapidity I would not have believed possible, and the figure in the chair leaped up and out of it in one astonishing movement like a large bird frightened out of its solitude in the marshes.” Kaufman literally could not write love scenes; the love interest in The Butter and Egg Man, the only play he wrote by himself, is so