Word: playing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rising young playwrights. They were part of a group which, by virtue of talent, wit and hobnobbing together, was coming to dominate the sophisticated Manhattan scene. Their lunch club, the Algonquin Hotel, had waked up one morning to find itself famous, and celebrity-chasers flocked there, as to a play, to observe Kaufman. Connelly, Broun, Woollcott, Benchley, Dorothy Parker, F.P.A. & Co. at lunch, and to hear their laughter, though not what gave rise to it. The male members enhanced their glamor by forming the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, whose legendary sessions, devoted to poker and wisecracks, F.P.A. reported...
...puns are endless: "One man's Mede is another man's Persian" or (of a college girl who eloped) "She put the heart before the course." So are his retorts discourteous. When Adolph Zukor, then president of Paramount, offered Kaufman $30,000 for movie rights on a play, Kaufman, who thought the rights worth much more, replied: "I guess not. But I'll tell you what I'll do-I'll give you $40,000 for Paramount." So are his crazy cracks. A high-pressure salesman trying to sell Kaufman some goldmine stock spieled dramatically...
...completely unathletic. "Ring Lardner once told me that the only exercise he got was when he took the links out of one shirt and put them in another. That goes for me too." He does play croquet, however-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...
...most successful comedy writer of his generation, Kaufman talks, half-vaguely, half-excitedly, of writing a really serious play-a play about Jews which he and Edna Ferber have been turning over in their minds for the past five years. Then, distinctly as an afterthought, he maintains that he has written two serious plays already-Merrily We Roll Along, in 1934, and last season's The American...
...while his Vinnie (Dorothy Stickney) scoops up the prizes. Given to impulses and to oldfashioned, faintly apoplectic swearing, Father understands very little of the world, and nothing at all of his wife. He would certainly not understand, for example, why for stage reasons his family is shown, in the play, eating breakfast in the living room. "My God, Vinnie!" he would howl, "a gentleman eats breakfast in the dining room...