![]() ![]() 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”). 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. 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. 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. ![]() Hecht’s film résumé is difficult to sort out, in part because he was indifferent to getting screen credit, though not to getting paid. ![]() 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. What Hecht got out of his ruffian journalistic years shaped his temperament, and that temperament in turn shaped American movies in the thirties. 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. How many of these details are true? It’s impossible to say, but truth, in this case, may not be the point. “The Stockyards’ owners imported Billy Sunday to divert their underpaid hunkies from going on strike by shouting them dizzy with God,” he tells us. 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. At the age of seventeen, he became a full-time reporter, and attained what he called a “bug-in-a-rug citizenship” of Chicago. 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. (Don’t ask.) Hecht wrote the poem while Eastman was out to lunch, and got the job. 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. ![]() The publisher was throwing a party that night and needed something he could show off. 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. 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. ![]()
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