| Ben Hecht | |
| Birth Date: | 28 February 1894 |
| Birth Place: | New York City, U.S. |
| Death Place: | New York City, U.S. |
| Years Active: | 1916-1964 |
| Style: | Comedy, newspapers, gangster |
| Spouse: | Marie Armstrong (1915; divorced) |
| Children: | 2 |
Ben Hecht (; February 28, 1894[1] [2] – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films.
After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht ran away to Chicago, where, in his own words, he "haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops." In the 1910s and 1920s, Hecht became a noted journalist, foreign correspondent, and literary figure. In the late 1920s, his co-authored, reporter-themed play, The Front Page, became a Broadway hit. The Dictionary of Literary Biography – American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures". Hecht received the first Academy Award for Best Story for Underworld (1927). Many of the screenplays he worked on are now considered classics. He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach (1939). Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the Hollywood screenwriter", someone who "personified Hollywood itself". In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed Angels Over Broadway, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.
Hecht became an active Zionist (supporter of a Jewish "national home" in The Levant) after meeting Peter Bergson, who came to the United States near the start of World War II. Motivated by what became the Holocaust—the mass-murder of Jews in Europe—Hecht wrote articles and plays, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946.[3] Thereafter, he wrote many screenplays anonymously to avoid a British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British Mandate for Palestine forces, during which time a Zionist force's supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht (nl)(he).
In 1954, Hecht published his highly regarded autobiography, A Child of the Century. According to it, he did not hold screenwriting (in contrast to journalism) in high esteem, and never spent more than eight weeks on a script. In 1983, 19 years after his death, Ben Hecht was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.[4]
Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Belarusian-Jewish immigrants.[5] His father, Joseph Hecht, worked in the garment industry. His father and mother, Sarah Swernofsky Hecht, had emigrated to New York from Minsk, Russian Empire. The Hechts married in 1892.[6]
The family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where Ben attended high school. For his bar mitzvah, his parents bought him four crates full of the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain.[7] When Hecht was in his early teens, he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago. On the road much of the time, his father did not have much effect on Hecht's childhood, and his mother was busy managing a store in downtown Racine. Film author Scott Siegal wrote, "He was considered a child prodigy at age ten, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later was performing as a circus acrobat".[8]
After graduating from Racine High School in 1910, Hecht attended the University of Wisconsin for three days before leaving for Chicago at the age of 16 or 17.[7] He lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism.[9] He won a job with the Chicago Daily Journal after writing a profane poem for publisher John C. Eastman to entertain guests at a party. By age seventeen Hecht was a full-time reporter, first with the Daily Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News.[7] He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers.[10] In the aftermath of World War I, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin for the Daily News. While there he also wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn (1921).[11] It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.[6]
The 1969 movie, Gaily, Gaily, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Beau Bridges as "Ben Harvey", was based on Hecht's life during his early years working as a reporter in Chicago. The film was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiography, A Child of the Century.
From 1918 to 1919, Hecht served as war correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. According to Barbara and Scott Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter[12] while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles".[8]
In 1921, Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column, One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. While it lasted, the column was enormously influential. His editor, Henry Justin Smith, later said it represented a new concept in journalism:
While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the 1921 "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, about the murder of Carl Wanderer's wife, which led to the trial and execution of war hero Carl Wanderer. In Chicago, he also met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim, an American poet and novelist, later known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians, and with whom he became a lifelong friend.
After concluding One Thousand and One Afternoons, Hecht went on to produce novels, plays, screenplays, and memoirs, but for him, none of these eclipsed his early success in finding the stuff of literature in city life. Recalling that period, Hecht wrote, "I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me".
Besides working as reporter in Chicago, "he also contributed to literary magazines including the [his friend, [[Margaret C. Anderson]]'s] Little Review. After World War I he was sent by the Chicago Daily News to Berlin to witness the revolutionary movements, which gave him the material for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921).[<ref name="gutenberg.org"/>] ... A daily column he wrote, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, was later collected into a book, and brought Hecht fame". These works enhanced his reputation in the literary scene as a reporter, columnist, short story writer, and novelist. After leaving the News in 1923, he started his own newspaper, The Chicago Literary Times.[13]
According to biographer Eddy Applegate, "Hecht read voraciously the works of Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, and developed a style that was extraordinary and imaginative. The use of metaphor, imagery, and vivid phrases made his writing distinct ... again and again Hecht showed an uncanny ability to picture the strange jumble of events in strokes as vivid and touching as the brushmarks of a novelist".
"Ben Hecht was the enfant terrible of American letters in the first half of the twentieth century", wrote author Sanford Sternlicht. "If Hecht was consistently opposed to anything, it was to censorship of literature, art, and film by either the government or self-appointed guardians of public morality". He adds, "Even though he never attended college, Hecht became a successful novelist, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His star has sunk below the horizon now, but in his own lifetime Hecht became one of the most famous American literary and entertainment figures".[6]
Eventually Hecht became associated with the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Carl Sandburg, and Pascal Covici. He knew Margaret Anderson, and contributed to her Little Review, the magazine of the Chicago "literary renaissance", and to Smart Set.[14]
New Yorker film critic David Denby begins a discussion of Hecht's screenwriting by recounting a long story from his autobiography. He then asks, "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. Denby calls this Hecht's "gift for confabulated anecdote". Near the end of the article, Denby returns to A Child of the Century, "that vast compendium of period evocation, juiced anecdotes, and dubious philosophy".[18]
According to her biographer, Sarah Churchwell, Monroe was "persuaded to capitalize on her newfound celebrity by beginning an autobiography. It was born out of a collaboration with journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, hired as a ghostwriter".[20] Churchwell adds that the facts in her story were highly selective. "Hecht reported to his editor during the interviews that he was sometimes sure Marilyn was fabricating. He explained, 'When I say lying, I mean she isn't telling the truth. I don't think so much that she is trying to deceive me as that she is a fantasizer.[20]
Beginning with a series of one-acts in 1914, he began writing plays. His first full-length play was The Egotist, and it was produced in New York in 1922. While living in Chicago, he met fellow reporter Charles MacArthur and together they moved to New York to collaborate on their Chicago-crime-reporter themed play, The Front Page. It was widely acclaimed and had a successful run on Broadway of 281 performances, beginning August 1928. In 1931, it was turned into a successful film, which was nominated for three Oscars.
Film historian Richard Corliss writes, "Ben Hecht was the Hollywood screenwriter ... [and] it can be said without too much exaggeration that Hecht personifies Hollywood itself." Movie columnist Pauline Kael says, "between them, Hecht and Jules Furthman wrote most of the best American talkies".[21] His movie career can be defined by about twenty credited screenplays he wrote for Hawks, Hitchcock, Hathaway, Lubitsch, Wellman, Sternberg, and himself. He wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators, Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer.
While living in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently moved to Los Angeles. "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." As a writer in need of money, he traveled to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested.[8]
Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing", writes film historian Carol Easton.[24] Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money".
Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover ... It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk, as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures."[25]
Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to Samuel Goldwyn biographer, Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner Charles MacArthur, he "knocked out The Unholy Garden in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.:
It was produced exactly as written, and 'became one of the biggest, yet funniest, bombs ever made by a studio'."[24]
At least part of the reason for this was due to the industry's system of censorship. Black writes, "as Mankiewicz, Selznick, and Hecht knew all too well, much of the blame for the failure of the movies to deal more frankly and honestly with life, lay with a rigid censorship imposed on the industry ... [and] on the content of films during its golden era of studio production." Because the costs of production and distribution were so high, the primary "goal of the studios was profit, not art ... [and] fearful of losing any segment of their audiences, the studios either carefully avoided controversial topics or presented them in a way that evaded larger issues", thereby creating only "harmless entertainment".[26]
According to historian David Thomson, "to their own minds, Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht both died morose and frustrated. Neither of them had written the great books they believed possible."[27]
Nothing Sacred is probably the "most famous of all the Carole Lombard films next to My Man Godfrey", wrote movie historian James Harvey. And it impressed people at the time with its evident ambition "and Selznick determined to make the classiest of all screwball comedies, turned to Lombard as a necessity, but also to Ben Hecht, nearly the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, especially for comedy. ... it was also the first screwball comedy to lay apparent claim to larger satiric meanings, to make scathing observations about American life and society."[28]
In an interview with Irene Selznick, ex-wife of producer David O. Selznick, she discussed the other leading screenwriters of that time:
According to Siegel, "The talkie era put writers like Hecht at a premium because they could write dialogue in the quirky, idiosyncratic style of the common man. Hecht, in particular, was wonderful with slang, and he peppered his films with the argot of the streets. He also had a lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to ground even the most outrageous stories successfully with credible, fast-paced plots."[8] Hecht, his friend Budd Schulberg wrote many years ago, "seemed the personification of the writer at the top of his game, the top of his world, not gnawing at doubting himself as great writers were said to do, but with every word and every gesture indicating the animal pleasure he took in writing well".[29]
"Movies", Hecht was to recall, "were seldom written. In 1927, they were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels, and all-night poker games. Movie sets roared with arguments and organ music."
He was best known for two specific and contrasting types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies.[8] Among crime thrillers, Hecht was responsible for such films as The Unholy Night (1929), the classic Scarface (1932), and Hitchcock's Notorious. Among his comedies, there were The Front Page, which led to many remakes, Noël Coward's Design for Living (1933), Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, and Howard Hawks's Monkey Business (1952).
Film historian Richard Corliss wrote, "it is his crisp, frenetic, sensational prose and dialogue style that elevates his work above that of the dozens of other reporters who streamed west to cover and exploit Hollywood's biggest 'story': the talkie revolution."[21]
He married Marie Armstrong (1892–1956), a gentile, in 1915, when he was 21, and they had a daughter, Edwina, who became actress Edwina Armstrong (1916–1991). He later met Rose Caylor, a writer, and together they left Chicago (and his family) in 1924, moving to New York. He was divorced from Armstrong in 1925. He married Caylor that same year, and they remained married until Hecht's death in 1964.[30]
On July 30, 1943, Ben and Rose had a daughter, Jenny Hecht, who became an actress at the age of 8. She died of a drug overdose on March 25, 1971, at the age of 27, shortly after completing her third movie appearance. A play about Jenny's brief life, The Screenwriter's Daughter by Larry Mollin, was staged in London in October 2015.[31]
According to Hecht historian Florice Whyte Kovan, he became active in promoting civil rights early in his career.
Hecht was among a number of signers of a formal statement, issued in July 1941, calling for the "utmost material assistance by our government to England, the Soviet Union, and China". Among those who signed were former Nobel Prize winners in science and other people eminent in education, literature, and the arts. It advocated
Later that year, he had his first large-scale musical collaboration with symphonic composer Ferde Grofe on their patriotic cantata, Uncle Sam Stands Up.[32]
Hecht claimed that he had never experienced anti-Semitism in his life, and claimed to have had little to do with Judaism, but "was drawn back to the Lower East Side late in life and lived for a while on Henry Street, where he could absorb the energy and social consciousness of the ghetto", wrote author Sanford Sternlicht.[6] In 1931, he published a novel, A Jew in Love, for which he was called, a "self-hating Jew", and which has been analysed as a product of a generation of Jewish writers seeking to escape their parent's immigrant past.[33] [34]
His indifference to Jewish issues changed when he met Peter Bergson, who was drumming up American assistance for the Zionist group Irgun.[35] Hecht wrote in his book, Perfidy, that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history: that is, the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). As Hecht relates it in A Child of the Century, he didn't feel particularly Jewish in his daily life until Bergson shook him out of his assimilated complacency: Bergson invited Hecht to ask three close friends whether, in their opinion, Hecht was an American or a Jew. All three replied that he was a Jew. (This is incorrect; in his book, A Child of the Century, Hecht says that he used that line to convince David Selznick to sponsor a mass meeting at the Hollywood canteen.)
Like many stories Hecht told about his life, that tale may be apocryphal, but after meeting Bergson, Hecht quickly became a member of his inner circle and dedicated himself to some goals of the group, particularly the rescue of Europe's Jews.
Hecht "took on a ten-year commitment to publicize the atrocities befalling his own religious minority, the Jews of Europe, and the quest for survivors to find a permanent home in the Middle East". In 1943, during the midst of the Holocaust, he predicted, in a widely published article in Reader's Digest magazine,
Also in 1943, "out of frustration over American policy, and outrage at Hollywood's fear of offending its European markets", he organized and wrote a pageant, We Will Never Die, which was produced by Billy Rose and Ernst Lubitsch, with the help of composer Kurt Weill and staging by Moss Hart. The pageant was performed at Madison Square Garden for two shows in front of 40,000 people in March 1943. It then traveled nationwide, including a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Hecht was disappointed nonetheless. As Weill noted afterward, "The pageant has accomplished nothing. Actually, all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment."[36]
Following the war, Hecht openly supported the Jewish insurgency in Palestine, a campaign of violence being waged by underground Zionist groups (the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi) in Palestine. Hecht was a member of the Bergson Group, an Irgun front group in the United States run by Peter Bergson, which was active in raising money for the Irgun's activities and disseminating Irgun propaganda.
Hecht wrote the script for the Bergson Group's production of A Flag is Born, which opened on September 5, 1946, at the Alvin Playhouse in New York City. The play, which compared the Zionist underground's campaign in Palestine to the American Revolution, was intended to increase public support for the Zionist cause in the United States. The play starred Marlon Brando and Paul Muni during its various productions. The proceeds from the play were used to purchase a ship that was renamed the MS Ben Hecht, which carried 900 Holocaust survivors to Palestine in March 1947. The Royal Navy captured the ship after it docked, and 600 of its passengers were detained as illegal immigrants and sent to the Cyprus internment camps. The SS Ben Hecht later became the flagship of the Israeli Navy. The crew was imprisoned by the British authorities in Acre Prison, and assisted in the preparations for the Acre Prison break.[37] [38] [39]
His most controversial action during this period was writing an open letter to the Jewish insurgents in May 1947 which openly praised underground violence against the British. It included the highly controversial passage:
Six months after the establishment of Israel, the Bergson Group was dissolved, followed by a dinner in New York City where former Irgun commander Menachem Begin appeared, saying,
Thanks to his fundraising, speeches, and jawboning, Sternlicht writes,
In October 1948, the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association, a trade union representing about 4,700 British film theaters, announced a ban on all films in which Hecht had a role.[40] [41] This was a result of "his intemperate utterances on the Palestine problem", according to one source. As a result, filmmakers, concerned with jeopardizing the British market, became more reluctant to hire Hecht. Hecht cut his fee in half and wrote screenplays under pseudonyms or completely anonymously to evade the boycott, which was lifted in 1952.[5]
Hecht was noted for confronting producers and directors when he wasn't satisfied with the way they used his scripts. For this film, at one point he demanded that its director, Josef von Sternberg, remove his name from the credits since Sternberg unilaterally changed one scene. Afterward, however, he relented and took credit for the film's story, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay – the first year the awards were presented.[9] [42]
Of the original play, theater producer and writer Jed Harris writes,
The story of how Scarface came to be written represents Hecht's writing style in those days. Film historian Max Wilk interviewed Leyland Hayward, an independent literary agent, who, in 1931, managed to convince Hecht that a young oil tycoon in Texas named Howard Hughes wanted him to write the screenplay to his first book. Hayward wrote about that period:
It is "a fast-paced, witty film that contains the rapid-fire dialogue for which Hecht became famous. It is one of the first, and finest, of the screwball comedies of the 1930s."[9]
In a letter from the film's producer, David O. Selznick, to studio head Louis B. Mayer, Selznick discussed the need for a script rewrite:
In the script, he experimented with "reflections of life – as if a ghost were drifting in the rain". These "reflections" of sidewalks, bridges, glass, and neon make the film a visual prototype of the nineteen-forties film noir.[21]
Among the better-known films he helped write without being credited are Gone with the Wind, The Shop Around the Corner, Foreign Correspondent, His Girl Friday (the second film version of his play The Front Page), The Sun Also Rises, Mutiny on the Bounty, Casino Royale (1967), and The Greatest Show on Earth.[22] According to Edward White, Hecht's last minute script rewrite for Gone with the Wind (Hecht had never read the novel), likely saved it from box office disaster, lending credence to Hecht's nickname as the "Shakespeare of Hollywood", even though Hecht saw it as an example of how bad Hollywood's movies really are.[34]
Often, the only evidence of Hecht's involvement in a movie screenplay has come from letters.
The following are snippets of letters discussing The Sun Also Rises, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway:[43]
Letter by David O. Selznick to Hecht, December 19, 1956:
Letter by Selznick to John Huston, April 3, 1957:
The following letter discusses Portrait of Jennie (1948):[43]
Letter by Selznick to Hecht, November 24, 1948:
Producer David O. Selznick replaced the film's director three weeks into filming and then had the script rewritten. He sought out director Victor Fleming, who, at the time, was directing The Wizard of Oz. Fleming was dissatisfied with the script, so Selznick brought in famed writer Ben Hecht to rewrite the entire screenplay within five days.[44]
Hecht was not credited, however, for his contribution, and Sidney Howard received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.
In a letter from Selznick to film editor O'Shea [October 19, 1939], Selznick discussed how the writing credits should appear, taking into consideration that Sidney Howard had died a few months earlier after a farm-tractor accident at his home in Massachusetts:
In a letter [September 25, 1939] from Selznick to Hecht, regarding writing introductory sequences and titles, which were used to set the scene and condense the narrative throughout the movie, Selznick wrote,
The D.C. Examiner writes,
A few days before the final screenplay was announced to the press, Hecht died of a heart attack at his home.[45]
Duns compares Hecht's unpublished screenplay with the final rewritten film:
| Year | Category | Work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1927/28 | Best Writing (Original Story) | Underworld | |
| 1934 | Best Adaptation | Viva Villa! | |
| 1935 | Best Original Story | The Scoundrel | |
| 1939 | Best Screenplay | Wuthering Heights | |
| 1940 | Best Original Screenplay | Angels Over Broadway | |
| 1946 | Best Original Screenplay | Notorious | |
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