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published in lovely book form. They'll fight for a play that's run a week.

Could you describe George Kaufman at all--the kind of person he was?

I wrote a whole piece about him in Try and Stop Me!, which I'll come to.

Maybe you'd want to put it in here?

No, we'll come around later to it. When I get to Try and Stop Me!, we'll have a lot of the personalities that went into it--when I began really to write up all the people I knew.

I'd like to go into the trip I took in 1935 to England, because a couple of wonderful things happened to me on that trip. At this time, having done a lot of plays, I got the idea of doing a volume called The Theater Guild Anthology, which was to include 20 of the big successes of the Theater Guild.

Now, the two keystones of this volume had to be Eugene O'Neill's “Strange Interlude” and Bernard Shaw's “St. Joan,” the Guild's greatest triumphs. We had no trouble with any of the other plays we wanted--getting permission. Gene O'Neill of course presented no problem--he was my friend--but the great stumbling block was George Bernard Shaw, who never allowed any play of his to go into an anthology. Oh, what a shrewd old boy he was! I wrote him a letter and got back a very curt reply