[1] They specialized in providing sketches for shows, and their material, and performers such as Phil Baker and Lou Holtz,[1] played the Keith and Orpheum circuits.
[2] One of his first great hits was the original stage production of The Jazz Singer, on which he partnered with Lewis, which ran from September 1925 to June 1926.
By 1932, broke and suffering from a nervous breakdown, friends provided financial support; his biographer Margaret Case Harriman reports that "George Kaufman offered him fifteen hundred of the sixteen hundred dollars Kaufman had at that time, and Harpo Marx came to see him in the hospital with his pockets stuffed with cash and strewed it over the bed..."[1] In the 1930s, Gordon became playwright and director George Kaufman's producer of choice, staging ten shows in 25 years, beginning in 1931 with Adele and Fred Astaire's last joint performance in the musical The Bandwagon.
Kanin's Born Yesterday (1946) ran for 1,642 performances, and remains the seventh longest-running non-musical play in Broadway history.
His reputation in the early 1930s was immortalized in Cole Porter's song "Anything Goes" from the 1934 musical of the same name: When Rockefeller still can hoard Enough money to let Max Gordon Produce his shows Anything goes[12]