New York
Anne Kaufman Schneider, 99, Ardent Keeper of Her Father’s Plays, Dies
Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherded the plays of her father, George S. Kaufman, a titan of 20th-century American theatrical wit, into the 21st century with an acerbic sagacity all her own, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.
Her executor, Laurence Maslon, confirmed the death.
“Headstrong girls are difficult,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider once told The New York Times, “but that was the source of my good relationship with my father. And it started early. Because there wasn’t any baby talk. We went to the theater together starting when I was 4. Now I have made his work my agenda in life.”
George Kaufman’s stellar career as a hit-making playwright and stage director included two Pulitzer Prizes — one, in 1937, for “You Can’t Take It With You,” a comedy he created with his most constant collaborator, Moss Hart; the other, in 1932, for “Of Thee I Sing,” a satirical political musical he wrote with Morrie Ryskind to a score by George and Ira Gershwin.
Even so, after his death in 1961 at the age of 71, Kaufman was a hard sell for theatrical revivals.
“Very little happened at all,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider later recalled, “until Ellis Rabb revived ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ for the A.P.A./Phoenix Theater in 1965. Ellis proved that these are classic American plays.” (Founded by Mr. Rabb, an actor and director, the A.P.A., formally the Association of Producing Artists, was a Broadway entity notable for mounting revivals after it merged with the Phoenix Theater, another Broadway house.)
Ms. Kaufman Schneider proceeded to oversee her father’s renaissance over the next 50-plus years — a term of service that outdistanced his own living stewardship of his career.
She encouraged countless 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 Family,” which was first presented at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., and reached Broadway in December 1975.
She also helped nurture a “Kaufmania” festival at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., for her father’s centennial in 1989 and a major Lincoln Center revival of Kaufman and Ferber’s “Dinner at Eight” in 2002.
“The wisecracking woman who is smarter than all the men” was how Ms. Kaufman Schneider defined a classic Kaufman heroine. “Which in some ways is what I modeled myself after — I hope unconsciously. That’s the kind of woman he admired.”
She was born on June 23, 1925, and adopted three months later by Kaufman, then the drama editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Beatrice (Bakrow) Kaufman, who was known as Bea, a literary figure in her own right as an editor and tastemaker.
Kaufman had begun writing plays on the side in 1918, almost always with collaborators, particularly Marc Connelly, another future Pulitzer winner, who scripted five Broadway comedies with him in four years, including “Merton of the Movies” in 1922 and “Beggar on Horseback” in 1924. (Kaufman wrote only one play solo,: “The Butter and Egg Man,” which was also a hit, in 1925.)
A notoriously aloof germaphobe who washed his hands after any contact with another human being, Kaufman was hardly a likely candidate for fatherhood. His marriage to the conversely gregarious and vigorously social Bea Kaufman had become a loving but chaste one after she suffered an early miscarriage; both openly pursued extramarital affairs.
Into this odd family ménage entered Anne, who grew up at a remove from her parents, attentively raised instead by a succession of foreign-born governesses, nannies and maids, as biographies of Kaufman and interviews with Ms. Kaufman Schneider have attested.
Her mother called her Button and her father called her Poke, an eliding of “slow poke.” Her most regular family contact with them was in stagy “good nights” at their celebrity-studded dinner parties. Little Anne discovered that sharp exit quips made her father laugh with paternal pride.
On Sundays, the help’s day off, her mother handed her over to her father with an admonition: Do something with her. On his own, Kaufman mainly did two things, make theater and play cards, and he excelled at both. He took his daughter to his bridge club, where she stoically looked on, developing what would be a lifelong aversion to card games. He would also take her to the theater, where their deepest bond was born.
Anne attended five prestigious private schools in succession: Walden, Lincoln, Todhunter and Dalton in Manhattan and Holmquist in Pennsylvania, near the family’s country house. She largely grew up in a small apartment adjacent to their palatial home at 200 West 58th Street in Manhattan; her parents had acquired it just for her upbringing. She later lived with them in a series of elegant East Side addresses.
Admitted to the University of Chicago in 1943 at 18, she instead married a young New York Times reporter named John Booth. When, during World War II, he was shipped overseas as a soldier six months later, she moved back home with her parents; when Mr. Booth returned from military duty, she divorced him. She married Bruce Colen, a magazine editor, in 1947 and had a daughter, Beatrice, with him the next year before divorcing him, too.
In 1960, she married Irving Schneider, the general manager for the theatrical producer Irene Mayer Selznick. He had been an assistant stage manager on the original 1934 production of Kaufman and Hart’s play “Merrily We Roll Along” (later adapted by Stephen Sondheim as a musical). That marriage lasted until Mr. Schneider’s death in 1997.
After bonding with the stage actress Eva Le Gallienne during her starring run in the 1975 revival of “The Royal Family,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider became her devoted friend and constant companion until Ms. Le Gallienne’s death 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 — including Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner and John P. Marquand — Moss Hart was his favorite, Ms. Kaufman Schneider said. “I think they were very much mentor and apprentice, even father and son,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Times.
Ms. Kaufman Schneider first met Mr. Hart’s future wife, the singer, actress and later arts administrator Kitty Carlisle, on the set of the Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera” (1935); Ms. Carlisle was co-starring in the film, which George Kaufman had co-written. The two women reconnected when Ms. Carlisle married Mr. Hart in 1946, becoming, in Ms. Kaufman Schneider’s words, “inseparable,” particularly after the deaths of both men in 1961.
Their friendship grew into something of a road show in their later years, as they teamed up for speaking engagements all over the world on the subject of Kaufman and Hart.
“Just two girls with six names,” Ms. Kaufman Schneider liked to say.
“I am very grateful to Anne,” Ms. Carlisle Hart once told The Times. “Anne has taken on the major burden of the plays, 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 collection of nine of his collaborative comic masterworks.
Still, “for Anne, in the end, nothing made her happier than seeing her father’s plays in front of audiences,” said 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 Trust. “‘Get ’em up!’ was Anne’s watch cry.”
Preserving her father’s plays also allowed Ms. Kaufman Schneider to preserve the love that they each had sometimes found hard to express.
“Well, sir, here we are again,” she wrote on Kaufman’s 51st birthday, when she was nearly 16. “Every year at this time I want to write you a really nice letter and every year I’m just as much at a loss as I was the year before. In between times I can make up gobs of them — I remember things we do together; funny things you say; but those aren’t reasons for writing people birthday letters — those are just a few reasons for liking you. Others are hard to say — hard even to define in thinking terms to oneself.”
A 76-year-old man died on Friday after being shoved down the stairs at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan, and the police arrested a suspect who had been arrested multiple times in recent months and had been discharged from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward just hours before.
The victim, Ross Falzone, landed on his head at the bottom of the stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a fractured rib after a stranger rushed forward and pushed him, the police said.
Mr. Falzone had been walking north on Seventh Avenue toward the subway station in the Chelsea neighborhood on Thursday evening, said Brad Weekes, assistant commissioner of public information for the Police Department. Walking about 30 yards behind him was the stranger, according to surveillance footage from the scene, Mr. Weekes said. As Mr. Falzone reached the station, the man rushed forward and pushed him down the stairs. He was taken to Bellevue where he died shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday.
The death sparked outrage at City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly called for an investigation into how Bellevue handled the discharge of the suspect and suggested that institutional problems at the hospital might have led to the random attack.
“I am horrified by the killing of Ross Falzone and the circumstances that led to it,” Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Friday, in which he ordered “an immediate investigation on what steps should have been taken to prevent this tragedy.”
Police identified the suspect as Rhamell Burke, 32.
In the three months preceding the attack, Mr. Burke was arrested four times, Mr. Weekes said, including an arrest on Feb. 2 in connection with an assault on a Port Authority police officer.
Mr. Burke’s most recent interaction with the police began at around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when he approached a group of N.Y.P.D. officers outside the 17th Precinct station house on East 51st Street, Mr. Weekes said. He grabbed a stick from a pile of garbage on the street and approached the officers, who told him to drop the stick. When he did, officers placed Mr. Burke in a police vehicle and drove him to Bellevue, where he was admitted to the emergency room at around 3:40 p.m., Mr. Weekes said. Mr. Burke was taken to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program for evaluation and treatment, Mr. Weekes said, and was released from the hospital one hour later.
He was just a mile and a half from the hospital when he encountered Mr. Falzone at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, police officers found Mr. Burke in Penn Station, where they arrested him. He was in custody on Friday evening. It was unclear Friday if Mr. Burke had a lawyer.
The mayor said he had requested help from the New York State Department of Health, which will investigate the decision to release Mr. Burke from Bellevue and conduct a review of similar cases at the hospital. The state agency also will investigate psychiatric evaluation and discharge procedures across NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, according to the news release.
Mr. Falzone was a retired high school teacher who lived alone for many years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. His friends were in shock on Friday about his death. They shared memories of an affable but private man who rarely spoke about his family or personal life.
Mr. Falzone had been recovering from a recent surgery and seemed more mobile and happy, said Marc Stager, 78, Mr. Falzone’s next-door neighbor on a tree-lined block of West 85th Street. He was known as a cheerful “yapper,” said Briel Waxman, a neighbor. He was the kind of New Yorker who enjoyed chatting with neighbors about historical details of his building and seeing performances at Lincoln Center with friends.
“He was always out and about,” said Ms. Waxman, 35, who often returned to her apartment at midnight or 1 a.m. to find Mr. Falzone arriving home at the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m proud of you or embarrassed of myself,’” she remembered telling him.
Mr. Falzone had wide taste in music — opera, classical, jazz, pop — and neighbors could tell he was home when they heard notes escaping from under his apartment door, Mr. Stager said.
He was “a helpless old guy,” said Mr. Stager, who added that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing” as shove such a defenseless person down the stairs.
When Ms. Waxman moved into the building five years ago, Mr. Falzone was among the first people to welcome her, she said. He once brought a package to her door that had been delivered to the wrong unit and shared that what is now a blank wall in her apartment had once been a fireplace.
Ms. Waxman sat in her living room on Friday and cried as she talked, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She remembered Mr. Falzone as “just overall, nice, talkative, genuine human.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
It has become an article of faith in the New York State Capitol that when Gov. Kathy Hochul enters the Red Room on the building’s second floor to announce a budget agreement, the deal is actually far from sealed.
This year was no different.
Despite declaring that “today is the day” to announce an agreement on a $268 billion state budget, Ms. Hochul on Thursday acknowledged that several key initiatives — including a new tax surcharge on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City — had been agreed on in principle, but that the details still needed work.
Even the top-line figure had not been finalized.
Lawmakers are fond of saying that the devil is in the details. But in the absence of the lengthy budget bills that include those details, which have yet to be printed and voted on, a host of unanswered questions remain.
Here are five of them:
Why did Hochul announce a deal when one hadn’t really been made yet?
New York’s opaque budget process, which starts in January with the State of the State address and is supposed to be completed by April 1, has become far more than a negotiation over a fiscal document.
Governors have tended to use the budget to wedge in legislative priorities, wielding their leverage over billions of dollars to get their way.
Ms. Hochul has embraced this practice. And, in a re-election year, she wanted to convey to voters that she intended to stand up to President Trump’s immigration crackdown, help out New York City and lower costs for everyday New Yorkers.
She made that case on Thursday at a news conference flanked by several of her top aides. Notably missing were the leaders of the State Assembly and Senate.
When will the budget actually be passed?
Not this week. The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, said on Thursday that it was “very premature” of the governor to say a deal had been reached. He would not even say that the Legislature had agreed to the $268 billion figure.
He complained about Ms. Hochul’s penchant for jamming nonfiscal policies into the budget and said he would not discuss such matters with his members until he had a better sense of the total amount the state would be spending.
As he spoke, members of the Senate and Assembly, who are currently not being paid, were wrapping up their legislative business for the week in a rush to return to their districts. They will be back in Albany on Monday; it is unclear what bill language, if any, will have been printed and distributed by then.
Did Zohran Mamdani get what he wanted?
Mr. Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, campaigned on wresting more than $10 billion in tax increases from the state to pay for his ambitious agenda. That will not happen this year.
Ms. Hochul did accede to a new tax on second homes that targets the city’s richest property owners whose primary residences are outside New York City. The goal is to raise $500 million each year, which will go toward closing the city’s estimated $5.4 billion budget deficit.
But she spurned the mayor’s request to make changes to a tax credit called the Pass Through Entity Tax that is used by some business owners. Mr. Mamdani had said that the measure, which was also backed by the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, could raise up to $1 billion a year in tax revenue.
Aside from tax increases, Mr. Mamdani’s overarching priority has been expanding child care in the city. Ms. Hochul’s budget does just that, with $4.5 billion allotted for child care and prekindergarten programs across the state.
It’s not the whole loaf, or even half. But Mr. Mamdani can point to that funding and say that he is advancing toward his goal of providing free child care for every New York City child under 5. And while the governor rejected his efforts to fund a program to make buses free, she directed more than $1 billion in additional aid to the city that, combined with revenue from the second-home tax and other proposed measures like delays in pension payments, could help Mr. Mamdani work to close its budget gap.
How will the tax on pieds-à-terre work?
State lawmakers — and just about everyone else — are scratching their heads about the details of this tax surcharge, which Ms. Hochul proposed with great fanfare last month. The New York Times previously reported that one proposal being discussed would apply one tax rate to pieds-à-terre with values between $5 million and $15 million; a higher rate for ones valued between $15 million and $25 million; and an even higher rate for properties valued at $25 million or more, according to three people familiar with the matter.
How much the property owners would pay is still up in the air. Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that more details would be coming in the near future and that the tax would apply to units worth $5 million or more.
Also being sorted out is how, exactly, the value of each co-op or apartment would be determined.
“It’s going to take some time to get to the right number to assess that,” the governor said, noting the city’s complex system for calculating a property’s assessed value.
“We’re looking at the difference between what is currently assessed but what is market value,” she added. “We’re working it out with the city. We have had some really good conversations.”
How will pensions change for state workers?
Facing pressure from the state’s largest public unions, Ms. Hochul has been trying to determine how to restore certain pension benefits that had been cut for public employees hired after 2012.
Any changes could end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, while also saddling local municipalities and school districts with increased spending burdens. Several of the labor groups have prioritized lowering the minimum retirement age to 55 from 63.
Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that the particulars were still being negotiated, but stressed that the cost to the state and local governments would be less than the $1.5 billion that has been requested by the unions.
“We are willing to look at this and make changes, but a much more scaled-back monetary proposal,” she said.
“We will release these numbers as soon as it’s absolutely done,” she added.
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