In a Golden Era, Her Family Shined

Fay Kanin has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. In fact, she and her parents moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles before her senior year in college so she could be closer to the dream factory. And it wasn’t long before Hollywood fell in love with a charming, witty and unpretentious writer.

Kanin and her late husband, Michael Kanin, were responsible for writing such snappy comedies as “Teacher’s Pet” (1958), one of the best films ever made about journalism. As a solo writer, Kanin penned the hit 1949 Broadway comedy “Goodbye, My Fancy” and numerous acclaimed TV movies such as “Hustling” (1975), “Friendly Fire” (1977) and “Heartsounds” (1984). She was only the second woman to be named president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Relaxing in the living room of her airy and light Santa Monica beach house, the sophisticated Kanin treats a visitor like an old friend. Her house is filled with exquisite bronze sculptures of the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx made by her husband, who died in 1993. Adorning the walls are Michael Kanin’s equally accomplished paintings, including a study of the two of them walking along the beach.

As Kanin puts it, “I’ve had a charmed life.”

Cari Beauchamp, a film writer and historian, says of her good friend Kanin: “There is not an ounce of pretension, but there is also no false modesty. She is very proud, thank you, of what she did. She refuses to be negative....We go to the academy and the parking attendants know her by name. I am in awe of her stamina.

Beginning Friday, the Los Angeles County of Museum of Art is paying tribute to the Kanins--Fay and Michael as well as Michael’s younger brother, Garson, and his wife, Ruth Gordon. Garson Kanin died in 1999; Gordon died in 1985. For nearly 40 years, individually or as a team, these two couples wrote, directed, produced and/or acted in a vast array of films, including “Adam’s Rib,” “Woman of the Year” and “A Double Life.” The two-week film festival, “The Kanins--A Remarkable Family,” came out of left field, Kanin, 84, says. She hadn’t a clue that LACMA’s film department had scheduled the tribute until the department head, Ian Birnie, informed her earlier this year. “The academy did one about eight or nine years ago, both here and New York. That was lovely. I hope we get an audience.”

Kanin helped pick the films for the festival, which also includes “Harold and Maude” and a screening of her TV movie about Vietnam, “Friendly Fire,” at the Museum of Television & Radio. “We tried to pick the ones we thought had at least stars in them [audiences] would recognize and ones we thought they would maybe enjoying seeing.”

Also in the festival is the 1954 drama “Rhapsody,” which was written by Fay and Michael Kanin and directed by Charles Vidor. “‘Rhapsody’ rescued us from what they called the ‘gray list,”’ she says. Although being on this list wasn’t as dire as being on the Hollywood blacklist, the Kanins couldn’t find work in Hollywood for two years. “We went to Broadway and did a show,” she says matter-of-factly. “We kept busy.”

Although they were liberals with friends who had been Communist Party members, they didn’t know why they had been shunned. A lawyer they hired discovered why. “He said, ‘You won’t believe this, but you are on this list because you, Fay, took acting lessons at the Actors Lab on Sunset, and the teachers were people from the Group Theatre.”’ Because several actors in the legendary theater group were blacklisted, Kanin was tainted. As she recalls, “There was no way to fight it.”

Then Vidor came along and asked them to rewrite “Rhapsody” for him. The Kanins told him they couldn’t because of the gray list.

“He said, ‘Let me handle it,”’ Kanin says. “I’ll never get over this. He went to MGM and said to them, ‘I want the Kanins on this movie. If you tell me I can’t have them and you give me all of those phony excuses, I’m going to go to the press and bust this wide open.’ We got ‘Rhapsody.”’ Kanin went to USC for her senior year, and was editor of the yearbook and the literary magazine. “I always wrote, so I had a lot of stories,” Kanin says. After her graduation in the late 1930s, she decided it was time to conquer Hollywood. “I had an uncle who was not in show business, but he knew a lot of people [in the business]. He got me interviews with story editors and I went around to show them my stories.”

At MGM, she told story editor Sam Marx, who later became a great friend, that she thought she would be perfect to write the screenplay for “Gone With the Wind.”

Kanin bursts out laughing. “I mean, think about it. I said to Sam years later, ‘Sam, you kept such a straight face. You were terrific.’ He said [at the meeting], ‘My dear, I think they have in mind a more expensive writer.’ I love the word--’expensive.’ I told him I would take as much money as they wanted [to give me].”

Eventually she ended up at RKO. “I would say I graduated from USC and RKO--they were my two schools.” Kanin found a mentor in a story editor named Bob Sparks, who sent her to a producer, Al Lewis, because he was willing to hire young writers.

“He gave me a job as a junior writer, I think for $55 a week,” Kanin recalls. Two months later, though, the top brass at RKO changed and Lewis lost his job. So did Kanin. Sparks came to her rescue and gave her a job as a reader in the story department. “I gave myself a film education,” Kanin says. “When they broke for lunch, I went on the sets and sniffed around and made friends with anyone who happened to be there.”

She caught the eye of Michael Kanin, who was a writer in the B movie unit at the studio At the time, she was appearing in the play “Bury the Dead” at the studio. “We had a little stock company of contract players and a few [nonactors],” Kanin says. “He had a friend introduce us, and Michael claims he said, ‘How do you do? Will you marry me?’ He thought it was cute.”

Cute or not, Kanin had no intention of getting married. “I really was so happy. I had a salary. I knew everybody on the lot. I was loving it. But I did fall in love, and in about a year and a half we did get married.”

They wrote their first script together on their honeymoon in 1940. They had purchased for very little money the rights to a story published in the New Yorker about a boardinghouse of prizefighters. “We took a house in Malibu. We went out there and wrote the screenplay in that house. We put [the screenplay] on the market and we sold it to MGM. It’s called ‘Sunday Punch.”’

When the two collaborated, they would first talk out the story and break down each scene. “Then we would take individual scenes,” Kanin says. “I’d say, ‘I want that one and I want to write that one.’ So we divided up the story and we each wrote a version. Then we would turn over the one’s writing to the other and we would make [revisions]. Then one of us--we would alternate--would take it and make it into a final version. That is the way we wrote for 15 years.”

Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr. won Oscars for the 1942 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedy “Woman of the Year.” The Kanins picked up a nomination for best original screenplay for “Teacher’s Pet,” which focuses on the relationship between a self-taught newspaper editor (Clark Gable) who loathes the intelligentsia and a perky journalism professor (Doris Day).

Kanin points out that they originally wrote “Teacher’s Pet” as a serious movie. They sent out their script and no one bought it. “We always sold our originals,” she says. “So we thought about it. I said let’s put it away and think about it.”

She realized that her brother-in-law Garson Kanin had tackled serious subjects in his hit Broadway play “Born Yesterday,” but he had disguised it as a comedy. “I said ‘Let’s do ‘Teacher’s Pet’ as a comedy,’ so we went back and made it a comedy.” They sent it out to the studios and it was snapped up by Paramount.

“When you wrote a comedy in those days you always saw Cary Grant in the leading role,” she says. “I guess [the producers] showed it to Cary, and either he was busy or he couldn’t do it. A week or so later they said, ‘How do you feel about Jimmy Stewart? Then Jimmy Stewart couldn’t do it for whatever reason. Two weeks went by and they said, ‘How do you feel about Clark Gable?”’

Kanin’s eyes dance as she mentions Gable. “We said that happens to be the perfect casting. Nobody could do this better than Gable.”

From 1979 to 1983, Kanin was president of the academy. Bette Davis was the first female president, but she left after six weeks because of an argument with the board. The academy’s current director of communications, John Pavlik, was an executive administrator during Kanin’s term.

“She was a great representative for the academy,” he says. “She was so personable. She was willing to meet people and go out and do things.”

In fact, says Pavlik, Kanin was the academy’s first international ambassador. “One of the first things she did when she took the job was to organize a six-city European tour with the chairman of the foreign-language film award committee. Later on in 1981, she took a big tour of China. Michael was still alive in those days, and she and Michael were everywhere. She was such a kick.”

She’s still very involved in academy affairs. “She’s on a number of committees and she’s on the board of directors,” Pavlik says. “She comes to as many events as she possibly can.”

Kanin quit writing about two years ago. “All the movies I did were done as I wrote them. It was just great,” she says. “Then when I went into television movies, I never had people rewrite me.

“When it started that development people would come down and change everything, I decided it was enough. I had done it for 50 years.” *

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Tribute to the Kanins

“The Kanins--A Tribute to a Remarkable Family” begins Friday at the Leo S. Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Admission is $5 for museum and American Film Institute members, seniors older than 62 and students with ID, and $7 for general admission. Information: (877) 522-6225.

All programs at the Bing begin at 7:30 p.m.:

Friday: “Adam’s Rib” and “Rhapsody.”

Saturday: “Teacher’s Pet” and a conversation between Fay Kanin and film writer-historian Cari Beauchamp.

Sept. 14: “Woman of the Year” and “Harold and Maude.”

Sept. 15: “A Double Life” and “The Outrage.”

Sept. 21: “Friendly Fire”--7 p.m. at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills.