Ben Hecht, Hollywood's Shakespeare

Ever think of what you would do if you had another life to lead. Mine would not involve adventure, except maybe the vicarious sort. Sometimes, I think I’d like to be a historian, and recently, I’ve thought I would like to write a biography ... of someone like Ben Hecht.

Hecht (1893-1964) was first known as a Chicago newspaperman in the second and third decades of the 20th Century, part of an era that set the mood for what was to become the dominant popular culture.

In the 1920's, he and fellow newsman, Charles McArthur, moved to New York where they wrote plays, including two of the most influential hits of the decade, "The Front Page" and "Twentieth Century", and hobnobbed with the Algonquin literary crowd and the Broadway smart set.

Moving to Hollywood in 1927 at the instigation of his pal, Herman Mankiewicz, Hecht soon became known as the best screenwriter and script doctor in town. For more than 20 years, he was the "go to" repairman, called on by such as Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitch, Alfred Hitchcock, and David O. Selznick to fix damaged scripts.

His credited successes include many of the best films of the era, including several that defined genres that have become identified with the most memorable movies of the the era — gangster films: winning the first original screenplay Oscar in 1927 for "Underworld" and another for "Scarface" (1933); screwball comedies: including his adaptations of his plays, "Twentieth Century" (1934) and "The Front Page" ("His Girl Friday" (1940)), adaptation of Noel Coward’s "Design For Living" (1933) and the Carole Lombard newspaper caper, "Nothing Sacred" (1937); film noir: "Angels Over Broadway" (1940); suspense: "Spellbound"(1944) and "Notorious" (1945); action: "Viva Villa"(1936) and "Gunga Din" (1939); gothic romance: "Wuthering Heights" (1939).

His autobiography is appropriately titled "Child Of The Century" (1954). Like many of his generation, Hecht wants to be thought of as an artist — poet, serious author of short stories and novels. He admired and befriended and was considered an equal of many of those considered first rate literati of his era: Dreiser, Mencken, Sandburg, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Maxwell Anderson, Sherwood Anderson. He frequently minimizes his own work and scorns the businesses that provided the lucre that made him rich and famous. He admits to writing "creative" stories as a reporter the competitive Chicago tabloid world of his time; Broadway and Hollywood are hopelessly corrupted by commercial needs.

Hecht’s work contains the sophisticated, cynical voice that was characteristic of the best commercial writing of the period between the wars, and still rings true to our ears today. Amusement at the foibles of official corruption, hypocrisy, greed, irony, double dealing, with a heavy ladling of doses of wit and sarcasm, the writing grinds sparks of truth telling. If the goal of "Art" is to tell the truth, Hecht’s best stage and film work must qualify.

As a "child of his century," Hecht’s vocabulary is replete with Freudian references, revealing attitudes toward women (including several wives, daughters, mistresses, actresses, and whores — who are nostalgically credited as mentors), sexual obsession, Jewish mothers and aunts, male pals — confidantes, drinking buddies, raconteurs, comrades. He complains that movies of his era destroyed American culture, creating and promulgating lies (primarily about sex and morals, heroism, social justice, race) that he feared would permanently distort the reality of American life.

Although he acquainted and sympathized with radicals from the Left as early as 1911, he was never caught up the Hollywood Blacklist. But during and after World War II, he became committed to the cause of a Jewish state in Palestine. His activism included financing and organizing support for arms shipments to Menachem Begin’s Irgun, the radical terrorist anti-British Jewish army. These actions led to a blacklist of Hecht’s movies by Great Britain.

At 16, Ben Hecht went from his family home in Racine, Wisconsin to Chicago, to work for newspapers. His first job was as a "picture chaser", who snatched photos of tabloid subjects — murdered or murdering wives, cuckolded husbands. Assigned to night criminal courts, he found himself drawn to the "victims" of the sad system, often the whores and madams, petty thieves and eccentrics who populated the night. Many of the characters who show up in his columns, short stories, plays and screenplays, began their "lives" there. Hecht’s autobiography mentions real newspapermen named "Duffy" and Roy Benzinger", names which he later attached to characters in "The Front Page".

Among the many criminals he knew, he describes a stranger who bought drinks for Hecht and his friend, surprised by the generosity until Hecht discovers the man’s arrest as an embezzler. Hecht takes this experience and converts in into a column which is included in his collection, "1001 Afternoons in Chicago", in which the donor later commits suicide. Still later, Hecht’s nascent film noir, "Angels Over Broadway" includes an suicidal embezzler who is helped by three Broadway denizens played by Doug Fairbanks, Jr., Thomas Mitchell, and Rita Hayworth.

My interest in Hecht stems partly from my own experiences in criminal courts. He writes about what goes on in court houses among prosecutors, cops, reporters, lawyers, witnesses, defendants with a voice that rings true to my experience, even though his preceded my own by roughly fifty years and mine was in far less exotic Los Angeles. In his autobiography, he explains that his sympathies, or at least his interests, were more often with the culprits, the desperate men and women whose crimes led them to the courts and newspapers headlines. Hecht witnessed seventeen hangings and colorfully describes the events and the characters involved in them — the police, hangmen, the hangman’s daughter, the other wisecracking reporters, mostly the hanged.

Of the seventeen hangings he witnessed, several exposed to the young reporter human traits that surprised him and were vividly etched in his memory. He tells of the two brothers who were jointly accused of murder. All throughout the trial and sentencing, the older brother swore that he alone was responsible, trying to save his kid brother. Then at the moment both are brought to the gallows, he changes his tune, insisting they hang his guilty brother first. Hecht’s conclusion: a man will give up any principle or loved one for a few more seconds of life. He also reports of the man who, with the rope around his neck, is asked if he has any last words, and responds, "Not at this time."