The checkered cab slid to a smooth stop at the curb, and the doorman rushed to open the back door, a knightly gesture that unfortunately demanded he also shift the umbrella he held over my head, thus exposing me to the warm July drizzle. The hot sidewalk sizzled under the surprise rain shower.

"Mr. Kaufman," James purred, spotting the familiar face in the backseat. "A pleasure."

George leaned over and nodded at him. He was grinning widely, a dangerous sign, surely. "Edna, you're late."

"I am not." I glanced at my watch. "You're late."

"We've circled the block two times. It's maddening."

I smiled. "George, your inner clock is always set at ... Pittsburgh."

"For God's sake, Edna, get in. James is getting wet."

I tucked myself into the backseat as the cab sped off—a little too Wild West for my taste. We slipped breezily across two jam-packed lanes, narrowly missing a lumbering city bus. I turned to George. "I really didn't expect you this afternoon, George. Your phone call took me by surprise." My tone purposely suggested that his presence was not only unexpected but unwanted.

But with that wide, feckless grin still plastered on his face, he drummed his fingers on the back of the driver's seat. "Edna dear, there are some events in life you don't want to miss: your wedding—mine, not yours, of course—a corned-beef-on-rye sandwich at the Carnegie Deli, and the redoubtable Edna Ferber making a fool of herself."

I bristled. "George, really. Have you ever seen me make a fool of myself?"

"Give me a day to think about it. Surely any human being on this Earth—"

I broke in. "I am not any human being. You should know that by now."

"But you have to admit, Edna, that this ... this middle-aged adventure of yours is the stuff of Arthurian—or at least Broadway—legend."

I repeated the feeble rationale I'd rehearsed and meekly delivered for a month now. "It's just a lark, George. A lovely lark."

That quizzical smile persisted, though his words now betrayed an icy sharpness. "Your enemies are already sharpening their swords. Or should I say pencils?"

For a moment, quaking, I glanced out the window. Crowds shuffled along, lost under umbrellas. As the cab began moving through Central Park—purposely searching for puddles, it seemed—I felt a little dizzy. I turned back, faced him. "I have no enemies, George."

Now the smile broke into hearty laughter, uncontrolled. That was not like George S. Kaufman, esteemed American playwright and celebrated humorist. A knife-in-the-gut kind of wit, this writer, and never the rollicking barrel of laughs. Sardonic humor, sly innuendo, tricky phraseology, smart talk, outright sass—all his hallmarks, but rarely vaudevillian laugh-in-the-aisles guffaws. Until now—on this bizarre cab ride. And thus troublesome. When George approached the freedom of utter abandonment, he was at his most dangerous. Cruel, deliberate, hurtful, a man to be avoided. He was especially menacing around close friends. And I was a good and true friend, and one of his most successful collaborators on Broadway hits.

"Why didn't you stay at the farm in Pennsylvania?" I asked him.

"Well, I have a surprise, which you'll probably not welcome. I had a talk with Cheryl a few days ago, and we discussed your ... folly. Ferber's Folly, I termed it. Then last night she called, one of her panicky calls, and I told her I'd be in the city today and would gather you from your expensive lair. I invited myself to visit with you and Cheryl."

I smiled. "So you've chosen to be the pesky fly that annoys innocent folks having coffee."

"Exactly." His eyes twinkled. "Edna Ferber the actress, the venerable Fanny Cavendish of The Royal Family in summer stock ... in ... good God! Oh no! ... New Jersey."

"George, you know that I've always wanted to be onstage. I've bored enough dinner parties with that declaration. I've always seen myself as a blighted Bernhardt."

He stifled a laugh. "Edna, playwrights usually run for cover. We hide behind our typewriters."

I didn't like myself betraying such a weakness. "It's something I always wanted to do."

"Edna, I'd like to do a lot of things, but I resist the impulse."

I sucked in my cheeks. "That's the difference between us, George. I like the novelty of surprise. You are surprised by novelty."

"Lord, Edna, are we rewriting The Royal Family in the backseat of a cab?"

Now I smiled. "George, behave yourself today."

"Why start now?'

He sat back, this string bean of a man, all angles, with his long quirky face hidden behind huge tortoise-shell glasses that exaggerated his huge nose. A high forehead under that Cliffs-of-Dover pompadour of uncombed pitch-black hair. Dressed in an expensive charcoal-gray suit with a wide burgundy tie, he pulled at the cuffs of his sleeves, a nervous gesture I'd become familiar with. That, and his constant tying and retying of his shoelaces. A fussbudget, nosy, abrupt, and acerbic, he looked the gangly nebbish, the butt of nickelodeon humor; but there was something else about the man. A first glance at him suggested an unattractive, bumbling sort, a sad sack; but when his face moved, when the long arms gesticulated like wild birds, there suddenly was a fierce beauty about him—an inner heat that drew you in. You saw it when he maneuvered his way around people, especially the fresh young backstage chorines he pursued feverishly. Those times revealed a magnetism that compelled, startled.

I saw it now, in the backseat of that jerky cab. His rollicking, uncharacteristic laughter made him dreadfully irritating—but oddly seductive.

It drove me mad, that warring mixture of personality. Aleck Woollcott, my sometime friend and chronic enemy, chided that I had a schoolgirl crush on the estimable George S. Kaufman. I suppose I did, but a slight, curable one. Of course, I'd never confess that to anyone. All my clandestine affairs of the heart migrated into the romantic lives of my feisty heroines.

The cab wove through the park, turned onto Columbus and over to Riverside, stopping in front of a weather-beaten building that fronted the Hudson River. Here producer Cheryl Crawford rented a furnished pied-à-terre on the top floor. Coffee, she'd said yesterday on the phone, just the two of us, an informal talk about my playing the matriarch Fanny Cavendish in her summer-stock production of The Royal Family, the hit play George and I wrote some thirteen years earlier, now to be resurrected in suburban New Jersey. Resurrected, I thought, with the end of tremendously amusing George and others of my friends. Edna gets to play actress, mouthing lines she wrote. Let's see her succumb to stage fright, to missed cues, to blathered, tangled dialogue. To abject panic, the deer in the headlights. Summer fun for the Manhattan cosmopolites. Something to do in the hot summer of 1940 as the world out there readied for another cataclysmic war.

"George," I mumbled as I stepped out of the cab, "just why are you here today?"

"I wouldn't miss this for the world." Then, a crooked smile. "And there are surprises in store for you."

Cheryl Crawford seemed thrilled to see George. He nodded at her—he felt shaking hands with folks spread Bubonic plague—and handed her a bouquet of roses I'd not noticed until he stepped out of the cab.

"Cheryl, dear, Edna insists I go everywhere...