Author Hecht Ben

ront Page, Twentieth Century (1934), Barbary Coast (1935), Stagecoach, Some Like It Hot, Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights, (all 1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Monkey Business, A Farewell to Arms (1957), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and Casino Royale (posthumously, in 1967). 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. He became an active Zionist shortly before the Holocaust began in Germany, and as a result wrote articles and plays about the plight of Europe's Jews, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946. Of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of the Zionist movement in Palestine, during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht. He could produce a screenplay in two weeks and, according to his autobiography, never spent more than eight weeks on a script. Yet he was still able to produce mostly rich, well-plotted, and witty screenplays. His scripts included virtually every movie genre: adventures, musicals, and impassioned romances. But ultimately, he was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Despite his success, however, he disliked the effect that movies were having on the theater, American cultural standards, and on his own creativity. Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian–Jewish immigrants. Hecht’s father, Joseph Hecht, was a garment worker whose specialty was cutting cloth to patterns. He and his future wife, Sarah Swernofski, had immigrated to the Lower East Side from Minsk, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. The family language was Yiddish. The Hechts married on the Lower East Side in 1892 and Ben was born the next year.[1] :107 The family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where Ben attended high school. 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 the store outlet in downtown Racine. Film author Scott Siegal wrote, "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later was performing as a circus acrobat."[2]. After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht moved to Chicago, lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News.[3] He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers. After World War I, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. There he wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn (1921). It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.[1]:108 The 1969 movie, Gaily, Gaily, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Beau Bridges as "Ben Harvey", was based on his life during his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and 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 Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles."[2]. In 1921, Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column called 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 who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians and who became a lifelong friend. After concluding One Thousand and One Afternoons, Hecht went on to produce novels, plays, screenplays, and memoirs, but 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."[5] He began writing plays beginning with a series of one-acts in 1914. His first full-length play was The Egotist, and 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 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. Besides working as reporter in Chicago, "he also contributed to literary magazines including the 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). ... 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.[6] According to biographer author Eddy Applegate, "Hecht read voraciously the works of Gautier, Adelaide, Mallarme, 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."[7] "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..."[1]:107 Eventually Hecht became associated with the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Carl Sandberg, and Pascal Covici. He knew Margaret Anderson and contributed to her Little Review, the magazine of the Chicago "literary renaissance," and to Smart Set.[7] In 1954 Hecht published his autobiography, A Child of the Century, which, according to literary critic Robert Schmuhl, "received such extensive critical acclaim that his literary reputation improved markedly during the last decade of his life... Hecht's vibrant and candid memoir of more than six hundred pages restored him to the stature of a serious and significant American writer."[8] Novelist Saul Bellow commented about the book for the New York Times: "His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting...If he is occasionally slick, he is also independent, forthright and original. Among the pussycats who write of social issues today he roars like an old-fashioned lion."[9] Besides working on novels and short stories (see book list), he has been credited with ghostwriting books, including Marilyn Monroe's autobiography My Story. "The reprint of Marilyn Monroe's memoir, My Story, in the year 2000, by Cooper Square Press, correctly credits Ben Hecht as an author, ending a period of almost 50 years in which Hecht's role was denied...Hecht himself publicly denied writing it until much later..."[10] According to Monroe 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 ..."[11] :77 Churchwell adds that the truths 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.'"[11]:106 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 wrote that "between them, Hecht and Jules Furthman wrote most of the best American talkies."[12]:5 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.