'THE DAUGHTER HERSELF': ANNE KAUFMAN SCHNEIDER N.Y. TIMES OBIT

Growing up, I was so smitten with the comedic plays of George S. Kaufman (and the writers who wrote with him) that I would read the plays aloud with my little brother and sister on slow Saturday afternoons. Then one day in 1998, my theater editor at the N.Y. Times, Andrea Stevens, phoned me and, in a supreme feat of aesthetic intuition, announced that Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, and Kitty Carlisle Hart, his playwrighting partner Moss Hart’s widow, needed to be interviewed about an impending revival of Kaufman & Hart’s maiden collaboration, Once in a Lifetime, and that I was the guy to do it. At the Algonquin hotel, no less — where Kaufman had reigned in the 1920s as the slyest wit of the storied Algonquin Round Table.

I’ll say I was!

I wound up interviewing Anne twice (the second time in 2002, for a revival of Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Dinner at Eight ). We laughed a lot together. And you could not get any closer to my idol, GSK, than his daughter Anne, who passed yesterday at the age of 99.

My New York Times obituary of her is online HERE, and in the newspaper this weekend.