Ben Hecht, the greatest of American screenwriters, produced, near the end of his career, a garrulous autobiography, “A Child of the Century,” in which he tells us the following: In 1910, at the age of sixteen, he left the University of Wisconsin after attending for three days and took a train to Chicago. He had fifty dollars in his pocket. Having slept on a bench in the Chicago railroad station, he tried to go see a show at the Majestic Vaudeville Theatre, only to be accosted by a distant relative, Manny Moyses, a liquor salesman “with a large red nose.” Moyses pried him loose from the ticket line and brought him to meet a client who also had a red nose, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Journal, one John C. Eastman. The publisher was throwing a party that night and needed something he could show off. He told the young man that he would hire him if he wrote a profane poem—a poem about a bull that swallows a bumblebee. (Don’t ask.) Hecht wrote the poem while Eastman was out to lunch, and got the job. For some months, he wrote nothing for the Journal, but made himself useful by invading the homes of people suffering one tragedy or another and stealing a picture of the victim, usually a woman, which would then appear in the paper. At the age of seventeen, he became a full-time reporter, and attained what he called a “bug-in-a-rug citizenship” of Chicago. In his book, Hecht recalls the local-journalism obsessions in the nineteen-tens and twenties—spectacular crimes and municipal frauds, a general atmosphere of license, exploitation, and swindle. “The Stockyards’ owners imported Billy Sunday to divert their underpaid hunkies from going on strike by shouting them dizzy with God,” he tells us.
How many of these details are true? It’s impossible to say, but truth, in this case, may not be the point. As Norman Mailer noted in 1973, Hecht was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.” Hecht’s gift for confabulated anecdote suggests one reason that he became so successful as a Hollywood entertainer. What Hecht got out of his ruffian journalistic years shaped his temperament, and that temperament in turn shaped American movies in the thirties. The raffishness, the abruptness, the fusillade of insults and wisecracks; the fascination with violence and the illicit; the division of the world into the knowing (typically urban and male) and the saps (often rural)—such qualities made the comedies and the melodramas of the Depression a hardheaded new American art, an art that moved faster and ran shallower than life.
Hecht’s film résumé is difficult to sort out, in part because he was indifferent to getting screen credit, though not to getting paid. He worked on “Underworld,” “The Front Page” (which yielded the sensationally effective remake “His Girl Friday”), “Scarface,” “Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Nothing Sacred,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Gunga Din,” “Notorious,” various minor but potent noir movies, and many other things. Some of these were original screenplays, some were adaptations, some were collaborations (with his pals Charles MacArthur or Charles Lederer); a few times he simply provided an indelible story and moved on. Hecht also pulled together and revivified a stalled “Gone with the Wind” and worked as a last-minute fixer on “Stagecoach,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” “Foreign Correspondent,” and “Gilda.” An enormously talented man—“He invented eighty per cent of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968—he was also frivolous, ornery, and contradictory. The best screenwriter in Hollywood was contemptuous of movies as an art form (“an outhouse on the Parnassus,” Hecht declared), and had little trust in the wisdom of studio bosses and producers (“nitwits on a par with the lower run of politicians I had known”). Always a writer, he was uncertain of his identity in other ways. He said that he never thought of himself as a Jew until the late nineteen-thirties, but, in the following years, he struggled to rouse concern in Hollywood and New York about the ongoing massacres in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Adina Hoffman’s superb “Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures” (in the Yale Jewish Lives series) loads Hecht’s staggering contradictions into a compact but abounding two hundred and twenty pages. Hoffman, born in Mississippi, has lived in Israel and has devoted books to the city of Jerusalem and to the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, in addition to serving time as a movie critic (for the Jerusalem Post and The American Prospect). In her biography of Hecht, she expertly links Hollywood and New York, American Jewish conundrums and the intricacies of Zionist politics. Immersing herself in Hecht’s novels and tracts (no easy task), she writes with enormous flair about a marginal figure in literature but a major influence on twentieth-century popular culture.
Hecht was born in 1893 (or thereabouts) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a child of immigrant Jews from Belarus and Ukraine. He spent the first few years of his life in the crowded ghetto, amid colorful aunts and uncles and with exciting visits from luminaries of the Yiddish theatre. When he was nine or ten, the family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan, where Hecht, by his own account, had a thrilling all-American boyhood of adventure, reading, and sex. He also played the violin well and performed, for a summer, as an apprentice trapeze artist with a local circus. “I yearned, swelled, wept, ravished, splashed through mud and rolled in flowers,” he tells us, “and was never injured, and hurt no one.” This boastful catalogue attempts to echo Whitman. Carl Sandburg, who met Hecht later, in Chicago, called him “a Jewish Huck Finn.” Either way, he was a fearless boy leaping from the nineteenth century into the maelstrom of the twentieth.
What Hecht remembers best about his uneducated parents is that they purchased, as a bar-mitzvah present, four crates packed with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain—the home-library sets that were once so popular in America. They asked little of him after that: “The fact that I was going to school and that I stayed awake half the night reading books of every sort set me apart from them.” He always read voraciously but, as he admits, with little memory of what he read and less taste. Words entered and left his mind in a ceaseless flow.
The Chicago press, in the nineteen-tens, included journalists doing serious work as muckrakers or as war reporters, but Hecht was fascinated by the male subculture of crime and politics reporting, with its cigars and spittoons, its saloons and brothels, and its sour views about women. From his unsavory but enjoyable sojourns among these bookish lowlifes—they all quoted literature—Hecht extracted something memorable, the myth of the newspaperman. In “A Child of the Century,” he recalled the type:
Hecht himself became a famous reporter in town. After transferring to the Chicago Daily News, he wrote an innovative daily column called “1,001 Afternoons in Chicago.” He would wander about the city and spend time with “ordinary” people—an anticipation of the warm-spirited columns that Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill wrote years later about working-class New Yorkers. Barely in his twenties, he hung out in Chicago’s literary bohemia, drinking and exchanging ideas and manuscripts with Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sandburg, and many other members of what became known as the Chicago Literary Renaissance. He wrote satirical stories for H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set and Margaret Anderson’s brilliant journal of new writing, The Little Review, and, in 1921, published an ambitious novel, “Erik Dorn.” The book has some effective passages, in which a solitary man wanders through the flux of a great modern city, but the good moments get lost in endless political and erotic musing. As Adina Hoffman says, the style is all over the place—veering from modernist free association to pulpy bodice-ripping. Hecht published other experiments, including an obscene novel that appears to have been an attempt to get himself thrown in jail as a martyr to free speech. He lacked the patience and discipline for literature—though he might have become, if he had stuck to journalism, a second Mencken, dispensing pungently funny observations of everyone and everything. The best evidence of the road not taken can be found in “A Child of the Century.”
In his early twenties, Hecht married a fellow-reporter, Marie Armstrong, but within a few years took up with the writer and actress Rose Caylor, moving back and forth between the two women, which led each to write a book denouncing the other. Barrel-chested, fumy from cigars, a non-stop talker, Hecht was nevertheless some sort of prize. By the age of thirty, he had exhausted Chicago journalism. In 1924, he and Caylor, soon to be married, moved to New York, where they lived happily, if well beyond their means. Hecht set up a playwriting partnership with Charles MacArthur, another escapee from Chicago’s newspapers, and, for a while, joined the journalistic and theatrical wits of the Algonquin Round Table, some of them contributors to the fledgling New Yorker. He parted with them, he says, as an act of self-preservation. He was a writer still in search of a medium.
In late 1926, broke and lying in bed reading “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” he received what Hoffman describes as “the most legendary telegram in American movie history.” The message was from his friend Herman Mankiewicz, the future writer of “Citizen Kane” and another member, briefly, of the Algonquin group, who had moved to Hollywood earlier that year and was lonely for New York company:
When Hecht arrived in Hollywood, Mankiewicz laid down some rules of composition: “The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.” Not all of this was true. No one would have mistaken the silent-film vamp Theda Bara for a virgin; tough, sexually aggressive women flourished in the talkies until the Production Code took hold, in 1934. But Hecht’s response is significant. He decided to “skip the heroes and heroines, to write a movie containing only villains and bawds,” as he recalls in his memoir. “I would not have to tell any lies then.”
His first script was for Josef von Sternberg’s silent gangster movie “Underworld” (1927), which Hecht claimed to have based on tales he was told by a Chicago stoolie he met by chance in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He worked on the scenario for a week, creating two gangsters—one thuggish, one swank—and a flapper attracted to both, and von Sternberg turned the story into a darkly brooding composition of shadows and fleeting figures. Hecht, whose grasp of the visual nature of movies was never strong, dismissed von Sternberg’s distinctive directorial touches as “sentimental.” To his astonishment, the story of “Underworld” brought him an Academy Award. He initially refused the statue, and then promised to use it as a doorstop.
Howard Hawks’s “Scarface” (1932) has a different kind of poetry—the pell-mell fury of ceaseless gang war, with square-backed cars racing down dark, shiny streets, tommy guns blazing out of their open windows. Hecht knew from his reporting days that audiences loved flamboyant people who broke all the rules and then paid dearly for it, so he created, for Hawks, a story about the rise and fall of an unlettered thug, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), who whistles a tune from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” when killing his enemies. Tony commits violence so suddenly that he takes your breath away; he dies under an electric billboard that says “THE WORLD IS YOURS.”
The brutal and sardonic “Scarface” has served as the inspiration for many gangster movies, including, of course, Brian De Palma’s scabrous remake, from 1983, in which the same mocking epitaph shows up in lights borne aloft by a blimp. The pace of De Palma’s version, which stars Al Pacino as a Cuban-born drug dealer, is slow, the atmosphere either languorous or chainsaw-red violent. Hawks moved swiftly, and with malicious wit; so did Martin Scorsese, in another celebrated descendant, “Goodfellas” (1990), a gangster movie in the mode of vicious comedy, featuring the same kind of abrupt savagery as the Hawks film. In “The Departed,” from 2006, Scorsese saluted the old movie yet again, putting the same passage from “Lucia” on the soundtrack.
“Scarface” came out a year after the first movie adaptation of “The Front Page,” a satirical Broadway farce that Hecht and MacArthur had concocted in 1928. This hard-charging comedy—Tennessee Williams, Kenneth Tynan, and Tom Stoppard all viewed it as a milestone—is set in a courthouse pressroom, where a heartless group of reporters sit around waiting for an anarchist schnook to be hanged. The men are like tangled electric wires, sparking one another into insult, retort, slander; they talk over and through one another, shouting at city-desk anchorites on the other end of the phone line. (“Listen, Duffy—I want you to tear out the whole front page. . . . To hell with the Chinese earthquake!”) The plot is a tempestuous male love story: the star reporter, a fellow named Hildy Johnson, wants to decamp for marriage and respectability, and his unscrupulous editor, Walter Burns, does everything he can to keep him on the paper. The material works best in the hetero movie version that Hawks directed in 1940, “His Girl Friday,” in which Cary Grant plays Walter Burns as a brilliant heel, while Rosalind Russell, in a striped suit, is Hildy, Walter’s ex-wife and the best reporter in town. Much of the Hecht-MacArthur language remains intact—we hear the relentless rhythm that Neil Simon picked up for “The Odd Couple” and many other comedies, all much softer than this one, along with the wised-up and dressed-down style of verbal combat that Aaron Sorkin came to specialize in.
What Hecht and MacArthur created became one of the prime archetypes in the movies of the thirties and after—the newspaperman as hero, a man without illusions, contemptuous of society and authority. Clark Gable played the role to the hilt in “It Happened One Night”; Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Fredric March, and many other actors also played cocky reporters, while Jean Arthur and Katharine Hepburn, as well as Rosalind Russell, did the intrepid female versions. By the forties, violence and sexuality had been added to the plot, producing a new figure, the private eye, lonely but potent, intimate with criminal ways. Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe is an insolent free man.
Hecht sensed that the growing urban audience of the Depression wanted the fast life; it wanted high-octane banter and sex as warfare. In another Hawks-Hecht collaboration, “Twentieth Century” (1934), the warfare passed into sophisticated slapstick: John Barrymore’s egotistical theatre producer roars at Carole Lombard’s actress, and she fights back with insults and ridicule. “Twentieth Century” was one of the movies that set the template for a new genre, the screwball romantic comedy, with its sparring lovers issuing taunts and epigrams—verbal mayhem that brushed aside the sentimental tone of conventional entertainment. The picture makes fun of religious fanatics; “Nothing Sacred,” the hit comedy that Hecht wrote for the director William Wellman in 1937, spoofs the monosyllabic folk in a small Vermont town, and then turns on the verbose, self-admiring swells in New York. Again, a newspaper setting: a star reporter, Wally Cook, and an editor, Oliver Stone, both hungry for sensational copy, convince themselves that a beautiful young woman is dying of radium poisoning; they foist this swindle onto their tearful and fascinated readers. When the truth comes out (the girl is perfectly healthy), the editor wails and the reporter rails:
The satire is all-encompassing: journalists and their readers get scuffed, and so do hostile little children and high-principled women who refuse to admit that they’ve been taken in. “Nothing Sacred” is Hecht’s Sinclair Lewis novel on film.
What was his problem with Hollywood, anyway? Hoffman puzzles over it at length. Inventing genres, character types, and moods, Hecht was a major creative figure. For years, he was the best-paid writer in town, a celebrity in his own right. He even enjoyed, at least a little, the atmosphere of studio collaboration—“You wrote with the phone ringing like a firehouse bell, with the boss charging in and out of the atelier, with the director grimacing and grunting in an adjoining armchair”—which sounds a bit like the newsrooms that he relished, and hardly like forced labor with a pickaxe. In any case, he never stayed very long. He made more than twenty trips to the West Coast (taking servants, oil paintings, and records with him), enjoying abundant food and drink when he wasn’t working, and then hastening back to Nyack, a town on the Hudson twenty-five miles north of New York, where he and Rose lived near MacArthur and his wife, the actress Helen Hayes.
Many good and great writers, including Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, were lured to Hollywood in the thirties and forties by easy money and by the chance to do something exciting in a still young art form, only to come away frustrated, even disgusted. But Hecht had few illusions to lose. As a screenwriter, he stuck to the newspaperman’s ethos of working fast and not caring much (or seeming not to care much) about the results. By exercising his right of contempt, he succeeded, at least in his own mind, in not becoming a victim, though he may have become something else—a cynic who undervalued the art that he helped produce.
Or was he just pretending? No one who was completely jaundiced could have worked on so many good pictures. Nor would he have attempted to direct movies himself—seven in all, some of them made with MacArthur in the Astoria studio, in Queens, and a couple made in Hollywood—including “Angels Over Broadway,” with Rita Hayworth and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. None of them, alas, is very good. His direction lacks rhythm and pace, and, as Hoffman says, the dialogue in his own movies grew florid. The truth is that he needed the demands of popular storytelling, and even the meddling of vulgarian producers, to do his best work. Irony is central to Hecht’s temper, but his life was enfolded in an irony that he couldn’t admit: what he respected (literature) he couldn’t pull off, and what he scorned (writing movies) he excelled at. He’s a little like Sir Arthur Sullivan, who wanted to be the British Mendelssohn and produced dull symphonic pieces and choral music, only to attain immortality with the scintillating comic operettas that he wrote with W. S. Gilbert. This kind of split between talent and aspiration can be sad or comical, depending on how much the artist suffers. The writer who described himself as “an errand boy with an oil magnate’s salary” did not suffer, but, in Hollywood, he was never whole, never satisfied, never quite a man he could admire.
Hecht was not religious in any way, and ignored Jewish organizations and political causes in general. But in 1937 and 1938, as the threat to European Jews grew, he wrote a collection of tales on Jewish themes, called “A Book of Miracles.” In one of the fables, Americans opened their newspapers and discovered that “five hundred thousand Jews had been murdered in Germany, Italy, Rumania, and Poland. Another million or so had been driven from their homes and hunted into forests, deserts, and mountains.” Hecht anticipated the Holocaust, as it was eventually called, and he was enraged a few years later when it was actually happening and few Americans wanted to hear about it. In November, 1942, the State Department confirmed reports that two million Jews had been murdered, with no end in sight; the Washington Post put the news on page 6, the Times on page 10. The Times continued to downplay the Jewish catastrophe throughout the war. (In 2001, Max Frankel, a former executive editor of the paper, called the negligent coverage “the century’s bitterest journalistic failure.”)
As a teen-age picture thief, Hecht had made use of other people’s identities. In the war years, he became obsessed with preserving and asserting an identity of his own. Memories of the big families and bustling social life of his childhood came flooding back, and, sick of Jewish victimhood, he issued blistering articles and sarcastic newspaper ads about the slaughter, intended to awaken American Jews from complacency. He also created a memorial pageant for the dead, staged in Madison Square Garden, and a play devoted to the Zionist cause, both with music by Kurt Weill, and both widely seen; he propagandized for the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group in Palestine which was committed to violence against the British, who controlled the territory. Hecht became so pugnacious in his attacks that his films were later boycotted in the United Kingdom. In America, established Jewish groups and even friends turned against him. If the Lower East Side had spoken, it would have called him a kochleffel, meaning, literally, a cooking spoon—a man who stirs the pot.
His new fervor also produced a great screenplay. In Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946), a seemingly worthless party girl (Ingrid Bergman) goes to work after the war for an American intelligence agent (Cary Grant) and penetrates a dangerous Nazi circle in Brazil. Hecht refined and subtilized the banter of the old screwball comedies into ironic japery, and Hitchcock directed with an unparalleled mastery of sexual tension. The party girl finds a useful life, even redemption, and Hecht, with this anti-Nazi movie, may have wanted to do the same for himself.
After the war, ensconced in Nyack, he wrote plays, more fiction, angry reflections on Jewish identity and the new state of Israel (a country he perversely never visited). And, in 1954, he published “A Child of the Century,” that vast compendium of period evocation, juiced anecdotes, and dubious philosophy. Hecht’s fiction can’t be revived, but “Child,” a book both candid about appetite and generous in portraiture and appreciation, could be strategically edited into an American classic, a stepchild of Mark Twain’s autobiography.
Meanwhile, until he died of a heart attack, in 1964, Hecht continued to work on film scripts. But the British boycott had crippled his commercial reputation; his price had fallen, and he often labored under pseudonyms, like a blacklisted screenwriter. And Hollywood changed: the studio bosses Hecht had ridiculed were dead or gone; censorship had partially faded; the old genres had become heavily psychological, while the new crop of sex comedies were often obvious and gross. Although the movies were made with slightly more freedom, Hecht’s talent for cynical satire no longer fit, and, apart from a few noirs for Otto Preminger, he produced little of value. He was both the crown prince and the natural-born jester of the old system. The court changed beyond recognition, but his laughter still rings out loudly enough for anyone to hear. ♦
