Ben Hecht:
The Man Behind the Legend
By William MacAdams
Scribners, 366 pages, $22.50
People never talk about Chicago movies. It`s always Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood. Yet the modern American film industry was partly created by a hardboiled, fiercely cynical, Chicago-shaped boy named Ben Hecht, ”the most influential writer in American movies” as biographer William MacAdams rightly calls him. The book more accurately should have been titled ”Hecht in Hollywood.”
This ”fast, unpretentious screenwriter”-maker of the words behind
”Scarface,” ”The Front Page,” ”Nothing Sacred,” and almost too many other sparkling pictures to mention (among them ”Foreign Correspondent,”
”His Girl Friday” and ”Wuthering Heights”)-had enormous contempt for the status and trappings of ”the Hollywood writer,” maybe even for the scripts themselves. All he seemed to care about was the money. Yet, almost by the way, hardly pausing to take screen credit, Hecht stamped the `20s Chicago mystique-”rumbunctious, crazy, melodramatic, comedic”-on a major library of American movies, almost all of which have stood the test of time. Lord only knows how many millions of Americans and foreigners of how many generations have had their deepest movie-going psyches permanently branded by the work of this scriptwriting Speedy Gonzales, who would have died laughing at the mere thought that his dialogue and throwaway ideas (he idly invented John Ford`s
”Stagecoach”) would end up as ”classic.”
Originally, Hecht was a Lower East Side boy whose papa, a Minsk-born clothcutter, moved the family to Racine, Wis. For Ben`s bar mitzvah, his father gave him 137 books by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Twain and Dickens, as well as a 52-volume world history. He might as well have struck his son with lightning.
Early on, Ben took off for Chicago, where in 1910, at age 18, he became an ace crime reporter for the Journal, a no-holds-barred scandal sheet. Newspapers then weren`t the computerized cathedrals they`ve since become. You didn`t get fired, but often were promoted, for drunkenness, lying, plagiarism, brawling and general hellraising. The important thing was to be good company over lunch and let that sort of exuberance feed into your deadline pieces. If you couldn`t get the story, you invented it, including the photographs. (Hecht began as a ”picture chaser,” grabbing photos from the bereaved before the competition or police arrived.)
Hoaxes were routine, including the Great Chicago Earthquake that Hecht concocted on a dull day simply by digging a trench in Lincoln Park to imitate a fissure. Perhaps most importantly for his movie work, ”whereas newspaper pieces today are more or less straightforward reports of events,” MacAdams says, around World War I ”a journalist had to set a scene like a novelist or playwright, introduce his characters and develop his plot in a format as tight as a short story.” Thus, all those great films were written in first draft as Chicago crime stories.
MacAdams, a film scholar, does justice, but little more, to Hecht`s Chicago period, including his active involvement with the literary renaissance that spawned Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg. Hecht, influenced by misogynistic H.L. Mencken (as who wasn`t?), wrote several novels and some plays that were sprawlingly so-so. But perhaps sensing he`d never be a truly first-rate novelist or brilliant Broadway hitman, Hecht changed direction to go for the money. Almost overnight, he became to Hollywood what Willie Sutton was to banks: its most talented safecracker. There was no crazy producer, no half-baked idea, no idiot-run studio Hecht balked at. Without pause, he ground `em out like grocery lists. Why, then, was his stuff so good?
Call it life-force: a slapdash irreverence mixed with an instinctive care for craft, an elitist loathing of the ”little man” but an absolute refusal to shortchange him at the box office, a love of, but no phony reverence for, the word, a tough no-nonsense attitude to sex: all these, plus. The plus in Hecht`s case was the river of cynical ferocity that ran in his veins
(undoubtedly learned in Chicago newspapers and Chicago barrooms). It informed not only his finest crime movies but also the zany comedies
(including the great Chicago laugh-vehicle, ”Roxie Hart”) that marked a high point for unsentimental breeziness and sexual realism.
The pictures Hecht wrote, touched up, rewrote or contributed to in some way-he didn`t give a damn which it was, at $30,000 a script-were hack work of an order incomparably superior to many of today`s films for which the writer demands, and gets, top-line credit for ideas Hecht would have tossed off and promptly forgotten. He took himself too seriously as a novelist and playwright, but left us a wonderful film legacy because he couldn`t take
”talkies” seriously enough to slow them down and art them up with a significance they never were meant to bear. Personally, I think what made him an immortal craftsman was that he had fun without responsibility, pleasure without guilt. Most unusual for a Jewish boy.
Until news of the Nazi death camps emerged, Hecht was politically neutral. But during World War II, his passion became a Jewish Palestine. He collected money for the right-wing Irgun, which he felt was the only organized force that would defend Jews against Roosevelt`s and the Allies` ”betrayal.” Toward the end of his life, Hecht, horrified and shaken by world events, became nostalgic for ”the last high old time when news was made by madcaps rather than madmen.” Bristly and cantankerous, he became a local TV talk host in New York in the late 1950s, but of course the sponsors, offended by his openness and exuberance, pulled the show. (Do kinescopes exist, and can we see them?)
MacAdams` immense research and many interviews (including with Hecht`s spiky widow, Rose) have paid off handsomely in a fact-filled, Hollywood-focused book that probably is the best we`ll get on Hecht for a long while. It`s a lovely start on reconsidering a truly great Chicago talent.
