Hollywood writers love to be thought of as iconoclasts in a world of idols. It was never less true than in the case of Garson Kanin, who has died at the age of 86. He was an icon to generations who followed him in his craft, truly a screenwriter's screenwriter.
This can be hardly surprising to anyone who realises that he penned - or at least clunked on his manual typewriter - the words that spewed out of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's mouths in movies like Pat and Mike and the seminal Adam's Rib. His award-winning play Born Yesterday starring Judy Holliday in the lead part of Billie Dawn was plainly in the same gritty, sophisticated genre - although he would never have got Hepburn to recite one of the most famous lines in movie history: 'Do me a favour, will you? Drop dead!' screams Judy Holliday, in her high-C, low-Brooklyn accent, at her co-star Paul Douglas. The phrase entered the English language of the early 1950s. So did his name. Writers would talk of 'doing a Kanin' - which meant telling the Hollywood story with a particular kind of enviable wit.
His book, called simply Hollywood, is a masterly example of describing the film capital - complete with anecdotes about his first mentor there, Samuel Goldwyn, and of the love habits of people like Clark Gable and Carole Lombard - and turning it into a work of literature. Similarly, his biography of the two stars who most helped create his reputation, Tracy and Hepburn ('Why in that order?' he was asked. 'It's not a lifeboat,' he memorably replied) tells more about them and their famed love affair than a thousand documentaries and press articles.
Kanin was born in Rochester, New York State, and went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn - a spawning ground for a generation of Jewish American playwrights - but dropped out in 1929. He thought he could help raise some money for the family by joining a jazz band. He played saxophone and had his own outfit, Garson Kay and His Red Peppers (a title that later got him into trouble with Senator Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee who found it difficult to believe that anyone would want the word 'Red' in the title of anything in which they were involved).
But he turned to acting, attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which helped him land a part in a play about a reform school, Little Ol'Boy. Later, he borrowed money from his friend Sam Levene (so that he could pay to have his hair dyed to audition for George Abbott's play Ladies Money). Mr. Abbott, as he was always known, even by his closest intimates, thought he was ideal material. 'And he was to be my right-hand man for many years.' Soon, he cut his teeth as a director, working on touring productions of Abbott plays and shows. It was during this period that he met Thornton Wilder who was amazed that not only had Kanin not gone to college, but had not completed his high school education either. But, he said, Wilder 'took me in hand, took pity on me, I suppose you would say, and for the next 40 years, just looked after me.'
Wilder it was who persuaded him to write plays of his own, but not before going to Hollywood in 1937 where he was discovered by another mentor, Sam Goldwyn. In Hollywood he fell under the spell of Frank Capra - who provided him the inspiration for another of his stylistic language somersaults. 'I'd rather be Capra than God,' he said. 'If there is a Capra.' His Hollywood career was interrupted by the second world war, but he stayed in films. It was during his war service that he wrote Born Yesterday, described by the Roman Catholic Press as 'Marxist satire'. That, too, was enough to get Senator McCarthy busy, although Kanin was never blacklisted.
In 1942, he had met the eminent playwright and actress Ruth Gordon. They were married for 43 years, until her death in 1985. It was in collaboration with her that he produced some of his most brilliant work, including the Tracy-Hepburn pictures, for each of which they had Academy Award nominations Regularly they were seen at New York's Russian Tea Room, close to Carnegie Hall. Kanin, almost painfully thin, never seemed to bother to eat. He and Ruth would talk shop and shout at each other. When she died, he said: 'I'm half dead. If you understand what it's like to be a team, with Ruth no longer here, I feel half alive, that's all... '
Without her, he wrote and directed the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, for which he prepared by going to Amsterdam and meeting Otto Frank, Anne's father. He also directed Barbra Streisand's first hit show - later to become a film - Funny Girl. Altogether, he wrote or directed 32 plays - in eight of which he acted - worked on 29 films and wrote more than 12 books and hundreds of short stories and articles. 'I become physically ill if I don't work for three days,' he said. In 1990 he married his second wife, the actress Marian Seldes, who survives him.
Garson Kanin, director and playwright, born November 24, 1912; died March 13 1999.