Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht 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, including six Academy Award nominations and two wins.
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. Many of the screenplays he worked on are now considered classics. He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach. 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.
Hecht became an active Zionist after meeting Peter Bergson, who came to the United States near the start of World War II. Motivated by what became the Holocaust Hecht wrote articles and plays, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946. 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.
In 1954, Hecht published his highly regarded autobiography, A Child of the Century. According to it, he did not hold screenwriting 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.
Early years
Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants Joseph Hecht, a worker in the garment industry, and his wife Sarah. The couple was from Minsk, Russian Empire, and had married in 1892.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. 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".
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. He lived with relatives and started a career in journalism. 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. 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. It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.
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. It was also from his 1963 book Gaily, Gaily.
Writing career
Journalist
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 while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles".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 war hero Carl Wanderer's wife, which led to Wanderer's trial and execution. 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".
Novelist and short-story writer
Besides working as reporter in Chicago, Hecht also contributed short stories to literary magazines, including his friend, Margaret C. Anderson's, Little Review. His reporting on revolutionary movements from Berlin after World War I, his first novel, Erik Dorn drawn from that experience, and his daily column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, later collected into a book, enhanced his reputation in the literary scene. After leaving the News in 1923, he started his own newspaper, The Chicago Literary Times.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 in 2004. "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".
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.
;A Child of the Century
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". Novelist Saul Bellow reviewed 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." In 2011, Richard Corliss, announced the Time editorial board named Hecht's autobiography to the Time 100 best non-fiction books list.
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".
;Ghostwriting Marilyn Monroe's biography
Besides working on novels and short stories, he has been credited with ghostwriting books, including Marilyn Monroe's autobiography My Story. "The reprint of Marilyn Monroe's memoir, My Story, in 2000, by Cooper Square Press, correctly credits Hecht as an author, ending a period of almost fifty years in which Hecht's role was denied ... Hecht himself, however, kept denying it publicly".
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". 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.