Whimsically funny, gentle, and generous to a fault, Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse laid to rest forever the claim that nice guys finish last. They were the most successful team of playwrights in the history of the American stage. And in this double portrait their story is told by a gifted writer who is also one of the great ladies of the theatre.

From their first collaboration on Anything Goes! in the mid 1930's, the names of Lindsay and Grouse were synonymous with great hits: Arsenic and Old Lace, State of the Union, Call Me Madam, The Sound of Music and, of course, Life with Father - the longest running play in the annals of Broadway. Cornelia Otis Skinner's biography offers glimpses of such famous figures as living Berlin, Alexander Woollcott, Eugene O'NeilI, Frank Sullivan, the Lunts, the Round Table Group, Ethel Merman, and Bob Hope. Around them bubble marvelous anecdotes of Broadway and the boondocks, by turns tart, endearing and hilarious.

As Brooks Atkinson observes in his foreword, Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse 'loved the vitality and variety of theatre people and the excitement and insanity of the theatre's business methods. Miss Skinner also reminds us that in and out of the theatre they were thoroughbreds.'