She wrote Goodbye, My Fancy, whose congresswoman hero was modeled on Eleanor Roosevelt.  A huge hit on Broadway in 1948, she declared "I'm a big feminist. I've put into my play my feeling that women should never back away from life."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FAY KANIN
(May 9, 1917 - March 27, 2013)

She was resourceful, fearless, enchanted by films and performers. At age 12, according to Harriet Reisen, (Jewish Women's Archive) she won a state spelling contest and met New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was "smitten" with both Roosevelts, who maintained a connection with her. Too young to vote, she was a speaker for FDR in the 1932 presidential campaign and later visited the Roosevelts at the White House.
                               
                                     After earning a B.A. at the University of Southern California, she became a

script reader at RKO Studios.  "I stayed on at night to do my own writing. I walked on sets, invaded editing rooms, snooped, made friends. Hollywood was like all your childhood fantasies come true, full of beautiful people having a simply marvelous time."  She met Michael Kanin (Garson Kanin's brother) at RKO, married him in 1940 and they spent their honeymoon writing a screenplay.  After buying a New Yorker short story by A. J. Liebling about a boarding house for boxers, they spent six months writing an adaptation entitled Sunday Punch (1942). MGM bought the screenplay.

FAY AND MICHAEL'S ART OF COLLABORATION

"We would make a story outline together with rather detailed descriptions of the scenes. Then we divided up the writing, each taking the scenes we felt strongly about. Then one or the other of us would put it all together into a single draft.
We did find a common voice, though we had different strengths....Writing with someone else always requires some degree of compromise, as does marriage.
    We became hyphenated in people's minds: Fay-and-Michael Kanin. To become Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin took some doing."
    Their first broadway hit (Goodbye, My Fancy) starred Madeleine Carroll (on the Playbill cover) Conrad Nagel and Shirley Booth and was later filmed by Vincent Sherman in 1951 starring Joan Crawford and Robert Young.

              THE BLACKLIST


While they were on holiday in Europe they learned that they had been blacklisted by the HUAC.  "What they had against us was that I had taken classes at the Actors Lab in Hollywood where some of the teachers were from the Group Theater and therefore suspect, and we had been members of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, an organization in support of World War ll to which almost all of Hollywood's writers belonged. There was nothing we could do about it. We took a larger mortgage on the house and started writing a play, but we didn't work in films for almost two years."   The noted film director Charles Vidor insisted that MGM hire them for Rhapsody starring Elizabeth Taylor.


For Teacher's Pet (1958), a romantic comedy about a crabby and dismissive newspaper editor played by Clark Gable and a spunky journalism teacher played by Doris Day, the Kanins were nominated for an Academy Award. Other films include The Opposite Sex starring  June Allyson in 1956, a musical adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce's play The Women.

RASHOMON

         They also adapted Akira Kurasawa's Rashomon for the Broadway play of the same name.  It starred Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger and was later adapted as a western film called The Outrage, with a cast including Ms. Bloom, Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.

TELEVISION FILMS

        Because Hollywood wisdom deemed women fit to write only women's pictures, "small" stories of character and relationships supposedly unsuited to the big screen, she turned to the new TV movie genre where a writer (especially if she co-produced) could see her conception realized. She wrote or adapted and co-produced Tell Me Where It Hurts (1974), Hustling (1975), Friendly Fire (1979), and Heartsounds (1984), movies featuring women's lives and issues.  
      She called her TV films the blossoming of her own personal statements.  She combined a journalist's curiosity and a dramatist's appreciation for points of view. Embraced by women as a model and trailblazer, she responded, "I don't think you think of yourself as a pioneer. I just felt very fortunate."