Word: likings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...delighted to find it within commuting distance of New York. He was soon commuting regularly-to work in a hatband factory. He also began contributing to F.P.A.'s column in the old Evening Mail. Eventually F.P.A. invited him to lunch, disillusioned him as to what writers looked like, but found a job for him on the Washington Times. When he lost that, Adams got him another on the New York Tribune. Later he became a dramatic reporter on the Tribune, when Heywood Broun was dramatic critic. Broun-who wanted to work at something else-in "a burst...
...Twists. Like most wits, Kaufman cracks his jokes with a dead pan, goes through life with a mournful one. Rangy and restless, hard to know, harder to understand, always blunt, often brusque, occasionally brutal, he is completely free from affectations but bulging with quirks. He is frightened of growing old, or being considered rich, or losing his hair. He forms friendships slowly, feels he has few friends. He talks to himself, makes strange faces, nods his head -a woman who sat opposite his desk at the Times for a long time wondered why he was always graciously bowing...
...backstage, "so I don't have to look at all those bastards out front." He is in a constant dither that his show will flop. After one opening that had the audience rolling in the aisles, the leading man found Kaufman crushed against a wall "looking a little like the late Marie Antoinette in the tumbril...
...with a fierce desire to win, as he plays parlor games and bridge. Called by Ely Culbertson "the best amateur bridge player in the U. S.," he hates playing with his dub friends, tackles the experts without getting hurt, peppers the game with such comments as "I'd like a review of the bidding, with the original inflections...
...with such friends as Woollcott, Harpo Marx, the Robert Sherwoods, the Irving Berlins. To Woollcott, whom Kaufman has hilariously scalped in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and who has been at different times his collaborator, brief biographer and boss, he is devoted. Talking to him, he says, "is like holding your face before an open drain," but Woollcott is "an entrancing companion...