SOURCE: “The Great Hack Genius,” in Commentary, Vol. 90, No. 6, December, 1990, pp. 40–8

Nowadays, as the media boys down at the ad agency are likely to tell you, the name Ben Hecht doesn't have much carry. Ben Hecht, Ben Huebsch, Ben Hur, one can easily imagine a crossword-puzzle or Trivial Pursuit addict struggling to get the name straight. Persons now of a certain age will recall Hecht as the co-author, with Charles MacArthur, of the play The Front Page, subsequently made into three different film versions. The movie-minded will remember that Ben Hecht was perhaps the foremost Hollywood screenwriter of his day: “the giant,” as Degas said of Meissonier, “of the dwarfs”—a sentiment with which Hecht himself would probably have agreed. Fewer people figure to remember that Ben Hecht was a uniquely blacklisted screenwriter: unique in that the films he worked on were blacklisted not in America but by the British. In his day Ben Hecht was also a journalist, novelist, poet, autobiographer, and movie director, ran a television talk show, and in his spare time was a fairly serious woman chaser.

No one could ever accuse Ben Hecht of concentrating his efforts, husbanding his substance, spending his talent wisely and well. Profligate in the root and every other sense of the word, Hecht was a man whose failures are perhaps more instructive than his successes, and who—one may as well admit it at the outset—was a good deal more interesting than significant. But interesting he genuinely was. “He was a pretty devious guy with lots of different sides to him,” said the movie director Howard Hawks. Hecht turned out a vast quantity of garbagey commercial writing yet seemed not particularly driven by greed or delighted by the rewards brought by money. He was never taken in by the radical politics of the 1930's—“Once a revolutionist,” he noted, “always a hack”—yet risked his reputation and his earning power by openly supporting the Irgun in Mandatory Palestine from the 1940's onward (which is what gained him the enmity of the British). He was until late in life an agnostic yet was obsessed by, sometimes brutal toward, and often sentimental about, his fellow Jews.

From Ben Hecht's earliest adult years there was about him the aura of the legendary. As a young journalist in Chicago, he was a relentless scoopster and, later, he famously brought the use of novelistic detail to the newspaper column. As a short-story writer, he contributed to Margaret Anderson's Little Review and H. L. Mencken's Smart Set and American Mercury; the critic Harry Hansen called him “the Pagliacci of the fire escape”; and the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, when asked why he chose not to return to his native country, replied that “there is only one intelligent man in the whole United States to talk to—Ben Hecht.” Both the French director Jean-Luc Godard and the American producer David O. Selznick claimed that, as a screenwriter, Hecht was the best in the business, ever; and the film critic Pauline Kael, after Hecht's death, remarked that he had had a hand in roughly half the most entertaining movies produced in Hollywood. Of such stuff are legends made.

Now a biography of Ben Hecht has appeared, written by William MacAdams, a journalist who specializes in the movies, and it does indeed carry the subtitle, “The Man Behind the Legend.” One is reminded of the story the pianist Oscar Levant told about meeting Greta Garbo after his friend, the playwright S. N. Behrman, had told her about Levant's legendary wit. Thrown by so glamorous a movie star, Levant, upon introduction, burbled something about not quite catching her name. At this Greta Garbo, turning to Behrman, remarked, “It is better that he should remain a legend.” Is the same true of Ben Hecht? Will modern biography, with its propensity for digging up hallowed ground, reveal him to have been a greatly overrated, or dreary, or finally quite disgusting character? Will it prove better that Ben Hecht, too, should remain a legend?

Hecht's parents emigrated to New York from Minsk, in southern Russia, in 1878. Joseph Hecht worked as a cutter in the garment district; in 1899, when Ben was six, the family moved to Chicago. Four years later, Joseph Hecht took his family to Racine, Wisconsin, where he began manufacturing his own line of women's dresses, which he not only designed but pushed as a salesman on the road. His wife, Sarah, sold these dresses in a shop she ran in downtown Racine. In A Child of the Century, his autobiography, Ben Hecht reports that his father was a delusionist. “He savored success before it came. He rolled in millions when only pennies were in the safe. … He never had any profits to share with his family, except for the happy smile of his daydreams.”

But business failure did not issue in family unhappiness. Hecht grew up loving his parents and his large, extended, nutty Jewish family of wild uncles and half-mad aunts, among them Tante Chasha, who advised the young Benjamin to “shun small women because they had large vaginas.” The central, the essential character in Hecht's youth was his mother. She, he writes, “disdained sentimentality, bristled at flattery, sneered at hypocrites, and God—Whom she respected—was less to her than honesty.” It must have been from his mother that Hecht's high opinion of himself derived. “She never sought to instruct me or improve me. She deemed me moral and upright as herself, as a queen might deem her son to be of royal blood.” A man confident of his mother's love, said Freud, is a conqueror. He might also, Freud neglected to add, have to become a con man. Hecht continues: “I never gave her even a hint of what sort of unroyal fellow I actually was. She would probably have loved me no less had she known. But that sort of gamble was beyond me in the boyhood days when I fashioned myself into a liar for her sake.”

If con came readily enough to Hecht, so did confidence, for which throughout his life he never wanted. For some people the world represents terror, for others adventure. Ben Hecht was one of the others. To him security was never a serious concern, or even a legitimate category, and he appears never to have done anything with it in mind. He walked away from a university education, for example, having lasted three days at the University of Wisconsin; he claimed to have read most of the books in the school's Arts and Sciences prospectus, which might even have been true, since he was an omnivorous boy who had made his way through 19th-century novels, Shakespeare, world histories, and other steaming literary dishes from the autodidact's table.

As it turned out, Ben Hecht had no real need of a university. Four years in such an institution might have sufficed to kill off all that was most original and vital in him. Instead he went to that other, perhaps greater, university—let us call it, in lower-case letters, city college—the American newspaper. Apart from those who came from well-to-do, or possibly socially nervous, families, most of the best American writers of the time, from Theodore Dreiser through Ernest Hemingway, acquired their education this way. H. L. Mencken, whose family did have the money to send him to college and who was a good and conscientious student, chose instead to work on a Baltimore daily. He said the choice was between covering murders, fires, and raids on bordellos, and sitting in the stands of a stadium on a cold day in a raccoon coat waving a pennant—not, as Mencken saw it, much of a choice.

Hecht's first newspaper job was on the Chicago Daily Journal. He was seventeen when he began, but he already knew that he was where he was meant to be. Journalism provided, he would later write, “a world that offered no discipline, that demanded no alteration in me. It bade me to go out and look at life, devour it, enjoy it, report it. There were no responsibilities beyond enthusiasm.” Hecht's initial assignment on the Journal was that of picture-chaser, whose task it was to come up with photographs of the recently scandalized, the violated, or violently dead: the divorced, the raped, the murdered. Since families of these victims were not generally keen to have such photographs in the press, the job of picture-chaser called for ingenuity—and a pretty good set of burglary tools. Hecht brought both to the job, along with much youthful energy. Once he smoked a family out of its house in winter by sealing off the chimney, then proceeded to enter and begin his search. Another time he shocked even his case-hardened employers by stealing a four-foot-square oil painting of a murdered Pole. “I'd go a little easy if I were you,” the assistant city editor instructed him.

Before long the young Ben Hecht was made a reporter and given journalistic run of Chicago. This meant that he covered whorehouses and madhouses, courtrooms and poolrooms, hangings and fires, riots and theatricals. When he couldn't find a story, he made one up. He worked among men with odd erudition and even odder appetities who filled him in on how the world worked. He much admired Sherman Duffy, then the sports editor of the Journal, a horticulturalist specializing in irises, a Phi Beta Kappa, and the paper's most capacious drinker. “Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender,” Duffy once pronounced, “but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.” Under men like Duffy, Hecht learned this, too. He also learned, in those early Chicago days, that he loved life—a love he could never shake. “Now after long immersion in the brutishness and lunacy of events and with the vision in me that tomorrow is a hammer swinging at the skull of man,” he would write in A Child of the Century, “I still glow with this first love.”

Although Hecht spent most of his childhood in Wisconsin, and much the greater part of his adult life in New York and Hollywood, he continues to be thought of as a Chicago writer. True enough, his years in Chicago—he worked there from 1910 until 1924, with a year out as a correspondent in Germany—did seem to form him. Chicago in those days presented the grand spectacle of the nation's most cynical politics, endless opportunities for big financial scores, and assorted social classes, ethnic groups, hustlers, marks, freaks, dorks, and yokels going at one another nearly full-time. Such a spectacle would tend to leave its imprint on a young man, especially one paid to write about it and make it seem even more lively than it already was. Chicago stirred both Ben Hecht's cynicism (“You'll find out that's the easiest thing people can do,” his mentor Sherman Duffy said, “change into swine”) and his sentimentality (“There was no money in his pocket, no food in his stomach,” Hecht wrote in one of his many columns about the defeated in Chicago, “no hope in his heart”).

Not only the city of Chicago but its newspapers were wide open: one could still print, over the story of a dentist arrested for rape, the headline “Dentist Filled Wrong Cavity’, one could still quote a man, asked on the gallows if he had anything further to say, answering, “Not at this time.” Through energy and skill, Hecht was eventually promoted from reporter to columnist. His column, appearing in the Chicago Daily News under the rubric “One Thousand and One Afternoons,” was a great success in its day. In ours the best that can be said is that it still has its moments. If much of the material now seems cliché-ridden, one does well to recall that Hecht invented many of those clichés. The work-worn mother of the young whore, the con man down on his uppers, the busted-out man of letters, the heavily hit-upon manicurist, the foreign-born laborer whose wife has deserted him—Hecht did what used to be called “human interest” (is there another kind?). He served it up, in the literary pre-cholesterol era, with plenty of schmaltz. And yet he could ruminate on why people who look too long at Lake Michigan tend to grow sad, or how Michigan Boulevard (“this Circe of streets”) allows Chicagoans to dream of a more heroic life than was (or remains) available on the city's commercial streets, and do so in ways that make a pleasing ping on the truth gong even today.

Ben Hecht not only had a strong appetite for life, an abundant flow of energy, and a high threshold for chaos, such as only the top journalists possess, but he could write. He loved words; he could construct interesting sentences. He also knew that “phrases, not ideas, are the tools for recreating life.” That he had also acquired a strong penchant for overwriting, let pass for now.

But then newspapers were more literary in those days. When the New Yorker started up in 1926, it was staffed chiefly by people—James Thurber, E. B. White, Katherine Angell, its editor Harold Ross himself—whose experience came chiefly from newspapers. The Chicago Renaissance, the curious gathering of writers that led H. L. Mencken in Baltimore to call Chicago “the literary capital of the U.S.,” was made up almost exclusively of newspapermen (with the exception of Sherwood Anderson, who was first in the paint and then the advertising business). Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Vachel Lindsay all put in their time on newspapers; so did such lesser-known figures as Vincent Starrett, Harry Hansen, Francis Hackett, and Burton Rascoe. Literary historians have set different dates for the Chicago Renaissance, but most agree that it began roughly with the founding in Chicago of Harriet Monroe's Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in 1912 (Margaret Anderson's Little Review, the first American magazine to run fragments of James Joyce's Ulysses, was also published in Chicago until it was moved to New York in 1916 and thence to Paris in 1919, where it folded) and closed with Ben Hecht's departure for New York in the spring of 1924.

A false rebirth, the Chicago Renaissance did not come to much—“Would that our writing had been as fine as our lunches,” was Hecht's own final word on the phenomenon—but while it lasted it must have been a hell of a lot of fun. It was bohemian in style and avant-garde in spirit. During these years Hecht, while continuing his newspaper job, wrote a number of novels and much poetry that took their aesthetic lead from Imagism, German Dadaism, and other European imports. All are today quite unreadable. Always prolific, always in need of a few extra bucks—he had married in 1915, at the age of twenty-two, and soon acquired the habit of living grandly—Hecht also pumped out a large number of stories for H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set. At the Dill Pickle Club, scene in Chicago of poetry readings, one-act plays, and other excruciating evenings of advanced culture, Hecht once engaged to debate Maxwell Bodenheim over the question, “That People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Imbeciles.” Hecht began by announcing that the affirmative side rested, Bodenheim followed with “You win,” and the two men walked off with the evening's receipts.

One of Hecht's novels, Fantazius Mallare (1922), had the good fortune to be censored for obscenity and to become thereby a cause célèbre. It was defended (unsuccessfully) by the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow—a man who seems to have lost an inordinate number of cases—and the episode ended with Hecht being fired from his newspaper job. He next began, with Maxwell Bodenheim as associate editor, a larky, bohemian-spirited paper called the Chicago Literary Times, though in the last three months of its roughly sixteen-month existence it was known as Ben Hecht's Chicago Literary Times. Hecht and Bodenheim would also use each other as characters in novels. Bodenheim, in his, wrote of his Hecht character:

He wanted to be an affluent, luxurious, commercial panderer, tossing off flashy bilge with his tongue in his cheek, and also an unruly, brilliant, slashing intellect in more serious talk and creations … he wanted to be supreme in both camps, commercial and artistic, without pledging allegiance to either one. …

It was only after Hecht left Chicago for New York that this split in him between the serious and the commercial—the one writing for the show, the other for the dough—became an issue in his career. The need for money was now there. He had shed his first wife in Chicago, and taken the woman who would be his second (and final) wife with him to New York. He had debts, fairly large ones, and a taste for high living; at a minimum he had no wish to be mindful of those small expenses—for rent, clothes, food, and drink—over which most people are bound to spend their lives worrying. By now, after producing six novels, he knew that he could not score with a best-seller, and so he turned his supple talent to the theater.

Did he also know that he simply was not a very good novelist? Erik Dorn (1921) is Hecht's best-known work from his Chicago years, and it is a mess, a compendium of its author's strengths and more voluminous weaknesses. Hecht's epigram-making power is among his strengths—he would always be adept at one-liners—and it is nicely displayed in this novel. “‘The press,’ Dorn once remarked, ‘is a blind old cat yowling on a tread-mill.’” And: “It's the only art we've developed in America—overdressing.” And (Dorn speaking again): “‘I advise you to complicate life with ideals. … A conscience is an immediate annoyance, whereas ideals are charming procrastinations.’” Although the character Erik Dorn is given the same physique and job as Hecht's friend Sherman Duffy, he is otherwise clearly intended autobiographically; and being the autobiographically-based character of a somewhat overheated writer in his late twenties, Dorn is also, as who will be surprised, the epitome of an Übermensch.

The novel has no shortage of overwriting (snow is “a thick white lattice [which] raised itself from the streets against the darkness”); hernia-causing heavy thinking (“The race can survive only as long as its weakest survive”); hopelessly ornate vocabulary (“the love affair of a Baptist angel and the hamadryad daughter of a Babayaga”); and an inflation of the chief character that results in unconscious comedy (“‘You are too big for love to hold,’” says Dorn's ever obsequious lover). No need to summarize the plot of Erik Dorn, for there really is none. Instead there is a rather unpersuasive, self-justifying account of the breakup of Dorn/Hecht's marriage and another of Dorn/Hecht's days as a correspondent in Germany after the war. “‘I admire revolution,’” says Dorn in this portion of the book. “‘Why? Because it diverts.’” Maybe for Dorn, but not, sad to report, for the reader.

What is of interest in Erik Dorn are the occasional remarks on what I take to be Hecht's own self-acknowledged shortcomings as a serious writer. Many of these are made by means of the contrast between Dorn and Warren Lockwood, a character based on Sherwood Anderson, of whom Dorn says: “‘The fellow's content to write. I'm not. He's found his way of saying what's in him, getting rid of his energies and love. I haven't.’” Lockwood says of Dorn: “‘He's the kind of man who knows too damn much and don't [sic] believe anything.’” And Dorn later says of himself: “‘My damned cleverness puts me beyond artists who find a destination for their energies in the struggle to achieve the thing with which I began.’”

But outside books, in so-called real life, Sherwood Anderson was not buying any of this. In a letter to Hecht, quoted in William McAdams's biography, he wrote:

… why do you have to bluff and bluff and impress me. Why are you so unsure of yourself. You can write man. You don't have to convince me of anything.

Return now to Maxwell Bodenheim's novel, Duke Herring, where of his Ben Hecht character Bodenheim writes:

His favorite boast was that he intended to accumulate a million dollars in the following year, and though this goal had eluded him so far, he did amass thousands of dollars annually through the sale of meretricious short stories, shallowly clever plays with short runs, and epileptic novels, whose malicious brilliance always held one eye cocked toward the adding machine in the publisher's office.

Bodenheim's portrait is far from free of malice, but it does underscore the issue around which people have always considered Hecht's career. This issue can be formulated simply enough: was Ben Hecht a sell-out? The term sell-out has a dishonorable history. It originated in the enclosed, always at least slightly paranoid, world of American Communism, where any divergence from the party line sent from Moscow was felt to constitute a desertion, or selling-out, of true principles. Transferred to the realm of art, the term meant betrayal of one's talent for the sake of either money or popular success or both. The assumption was that buyers were everywhere: Hollywood and Henry Luce, the critic Edmund Wilson famously remarked in the 1930's, were the two great enemies of talent in our time.

The notion inevitably lent a strong note of inner drama to artistic careers. Anyone who wrote for the movies, or Broadway, or the news magazines, or at one point the New Yorker (where Edmund Wilson himself eventually found a financially comfortable home), or later television, had to consider the possibility that he was selling out. It was of course also and always a self-congratulatory possibility, implying that one had something high and fine and serious in oneself to sell. Writers pumping out zippy prose for Time, or pilots for television sitcoms, could think that but for their staggering alimony payments or their children's private-school bills they might be devoting themselves to the deep art (great novel, elegant book of poems, powerful play) that lay buried within them. Such was the interior scenario that permitted one to cry—or, in some instances, drink—all the way to the bank.

But the line between what passed for selling out and what for artistic purity began in time to blur. The year 1964 may have been a watershed, when Mary McCarthy, with The Group, and Saul Bellow, with Herzog, both formerly small-public writers, had novels on the best-seller list. Soon authors one was accustomed to read exclusively in Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, and other intellectual journals began to appear with some regularity in Esquire, Playboy, even Vogue, where for a time the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. served as movie critic. Writers of the most extravagant intellectual pretensions—Harold Rosenberg, Susan Sontag, George Steiner—became frequent contributors to the New Yorker. Others went off to Hollywood without bad conscience, and why should they have done otherwise during a period—the middle 60's through the middle to late 70's—when movies were themselves awarded great (if finally false) intellectual prestige? As the distinction between highbrow and middlebrow art, along with that between elite and mass culture, itself began to blur, the entire notion of selling out began to seem questionable. Not that genuine talent, of literary and other kinds, did not continue to be deflected by the palmy prospects of big money and popular success. It did and does. Only nowadays no one seems much to notice.

In Ben Hecht's day people noticed—and perhaps few more so than Hecht himself. Through his work there runs an almost continuous criticism of the kind of writing he spent the better part of his own career doing, and this criticism contains more than an implicit suggestion of contempt. Soon after Hecht arrived in New York, for example, he began writing for the Broadway stage. At first he did so with moderate success; and then, in The Front Page (1928), with smashing success. Yet in a most peculiar novel entitled A Jew in Love (1931), Hecht could say the following about Broadway writers little different from himself:

These Jews (who dominate the night life of Broadway), decadent, humanless, with minds sharp and strident as banjos, offer through the mask of their perversities the last blatant sob of Jewish culture. They sing of mothers, babies, faraway homelands, of breaking hearts and lost joys, but to this eternal scenario of middle-class art they add a set of histrionics filched from the dwindling synagogues. Their songs quiver with self-pity, are full of the unscrupulous wailings of ancient Jew grief tricked out in Negro, Russian, and Oriental rhythms, and pounded home with the rabbinical slobber of an atonement prayer.

Further qualification does not make it better. Maybe rather worse:

Their wit, sterile with disillusion, cackling, derisive, full of epithet, proclaims them clowns and from behind their clownish front they sell Jewish tears at a fancy profit; weep into the coffee cups and wine glasses of the Gentiles and label the performance Broadway. Their doltish amours, their slapstick repartee and ragbag talents are chronicled by scores of journalists who follow them around like a procession of Pepyses.

Hecht spent still more of his life working on movies, about which he had even darker views. The movies, in his opinion, were quite simply the enemy of art; they were for the people, and the People (Hecht used a capital P), from the Renaissance on, always knew that Art (with a capital A) wasn't for them. “When you think of all the books, statues, paintings, oratorios, symphonies, cantos, etcetera that the People have never been able to enjoy, you can begin to understand their excitement over the Movies (caps again),” Hecht wrote in a story, “The Missing Idol.”

The Movies are their Cellinis and Angelos, their Shakespeares and Shelleys. They control all the plots and elect their own geniuses. And, like some international Lorenzo the Magnificent, they distribute rewards undreamed of by their ancient enemies—the Artists.

In yet another story, “The Heavenly Choir,” this one about a man who makes a fortune by recognizing and then realizing the potential of radio for selling products, Hecht considers the advantages of so potent a mass medium for conveying the beauties of art to the beastly masses. Could not radio bring about “the long-awaited liaison between Beauty and the Beast”? Not, it turns out, in Hecht's view—not radio, nor the movies, nor any other medium. When Beauty lay down with the Beast, he notes, “it was not the Beast that underwent any marked alteration, but, as always, Beauty. For Beauty lying down with the Beast too often grows a bit cockeyed and contemptible herself.” The attitude expressed here is rather more like T. S. Eliot than like the man who churned out more than seventy-odd credited and uncredited movie scripts.

Although Hecht was to write for Broadway sporadically over the years, it is his work for the movies that has been best remembered. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, for which he is best remembered. Given the zany nature of collaboration in Hollywood, it is not always easy to know who wrote what. Of the producer in his story “The Missing Idol,” Hecht observes: “Some eight different scripts were prepared by a dozen different authors, all of them of considerable renown (for it was Mr. Kolisher's principle to discard only the best).” This same Kolisher, an amalgam of the Jewish mogul-tyrants of the early Hollywood years, actually cuts out a scene from the movie he has produced on the life of Jesus that was inserted into the film by God Himself.

Hecht seems to have taken little pride in most of the work he did for Hollywood, apart from the extraordinary speed with which he could turn it out and the size of the fees he could demand for it. That he is best remembered for the work about which he cared least is an irony unlikely to have escaped him.

But then much having to do with Ben Hecht's career in Hollywood is suffused with irony, ambiguity, comedy, misunderstanding. Even Hecht's Hollywood beginnings had a touch of madcap comedy about them. “Will You Accept Three Hundred Per Week to Work for Paramount Pictures?” Herman Mankiewicz wired him. “All Expenses Paid. The Three Hundred Is Peanuts. Millions Are to Be Grabbed Out Here and Your Competition Is Idiots. Don't Let This Get Around.” Before joining the Hollywood gold rush, Mankiewicz had been a second-line drama critic for the New York Times and, as befitted a man who had put in his time at the round table at the Algonquin, had famously remarked that “Los Angeles is a great place to live if you're an orange.” (Mankiewicz's own claim to fame is the screenplay for Citizen Kane, though there is controversy over whether or not he actually wrote it.) It was Mankiewicz who, serving briefly as Hecht's screenwriting tutor, explained to him that in a novel “the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish,” whereas in the movies “the hero, as well the heroine, has to be a virgin.”

Not that Hecht, a quick study if ever there was one, needed a tutor for long. His first screenplay, Underworld, written for a movie directed by Josef von Sternberg, won one of the sixteen Oscars presented at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Hecht claimed that when he first saw what Sternberg had done to his script he felt as if attacked by mal de mer, but he nonetheless accepted his Oscar and the higher fees that winning it brought. In Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema, Richard Corliss writes that not only was Ben Hecht typical of Hollywood screenwriters; he was, in effect, the Hollywood screenwriter:

Nearly every facet of that talented and haunted breed—from the streetcorner wit and inexhaustible articulateness to the sense of compromise and feelings of artistic frustration—can be found in Hecht's dazzlingly contradictory career. Indeed, it can be said without too much exaggeration that Hecht personifies Hollywood itself: a jumble of talent, cynical and overpaid; most successful when he was least ambitious; often failing when he mistook sentimentality for seriousness, racy, superficial, vital, and American.

The legendary Ben Hecht stories have to do with making large sums for little labor, or taking on big jobs without anything like serious preparation—and just because the stories are legendary does not mean they are untrue. He worked on the screenplay for Gone With the Wind, [adaptation of novel by Margaret Mitchell] for example, without having read the novel; other people summarized it for him as he went along. To two stenographers he dictated a full screenplay for the producer Samuel Goldwyn in a single day, for which he (and, on this project, his partner Charles MacArthur) received $25,000 and 3.5 percent of the gross. He worked on the script of Scarface for Howard Hughes (then running a Hollywood studio) for $1,000 a day; since Hughes's solvency was then in doubt, Hecht added a provision that he be paid after each day's work, sharply at six o'clock, and he was. Throughout his career he did a vast amount of script doctoring, usually for heavy fees, since he was generally called in at a point of crisis. (“Whenever my father was in trouble,” Sam Goldwyn, Jr. told the biographer A. Scott Berg, “he went to Ben Hecht.”) David O. Selznick said: “Ben in my opinion was the greatest of all scenario writers.” This is an opinion with which Joseph Stalin, apparently, would have agreed. After seeing Hecht and Howard Hawks's movie about Pancho Villa (Viva Villa!), William McAdams reports, Stalin “was prepared to send a battleship to fetch Hecht back to the USSR but Hecht refused when he learned that the film Stalin wanted to make would only be shown in the USSR.” The stuff of which legends are made.

Hecht had few illusions about the standing of writers in Hollywood. According to an unnamed screenwriter quoted in Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own, “Jews are the writers of the business and writers are the Jews of the business.” Hecht noted that “at a Hollywood party, there would be forty or fifty celebrities, but I don't think you'd find any writers, possibly one, at the most two. They were never invited out in mixed company. They were treated much like butlers, socially.” The service writers provided for the powerhouse studio owner, according to Hecht, was to make him feel, through his power, somehow cultured: “The higher the class of talent he could tell what to do and how to do it, the more giddily cultured he could feel himself.” Yet Hecht also understood that these often coarse men (one of them, Harry Cohn, used to say that he had “a foolproof device for deciding whether a picture is good or bad—if my ass squirms, it's bad; if my ass doesn't squirm, it's good”) were not without their own strange but real talents. Samuel Goldwyn, though often inarticulate, could be oddly stimulating: he “filled the room with wonderful panic and beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot machine, shaking it for a jackpot.”

But the main point, which Hecht rightly seems never for a moment to have forgotten, was to get as much money out of these men as one could. And there was lots to get. In an amusing story entitled “Concerning a Woman of Sin,” Hecht sets out to explain why in Hollywood so many mediocre people are paid so much money. It is owing, he claims, to the agent, “for it was the agent who first uncovered the Basic Principle of Hollywood”:

This is that the Pharaohs who run the studios measure their own greatness by the amount of money they are able to spend. There is, in fact, no other activity open to them. The Pharaoh who can spend the most money on stars and geniuses becomes automatically the most dazzling figure in the cinema capital. Thus the competition to run the studios into bankruptcy is an extremely hot one. That all the studios are not quickly ruined by these royal extravagances is due to a single fact out of their control. … The popularity of the movies has become almost equal to that of sex.

In the same story, Hecht has a Hollywood Pharaoh, one Jerome B. Cobb—a character modeled, it was said, on Louis B. Mayer, who never forgave Hecht—buy and invest millions on a screenplay that he does not know has been written by a nine-year-old girl bred on True Confessions and True Love Stories. “‘God, I love this town,’” says the agent who sells the screenplay.

Yet there is evidence that, despite his contempt for the chances of producing even halfway serious work in Hollywood, Hecht more than once made the effort. On a few occasions, he was even able to direct his own scripts, using the artful cinematographer Lee Garmes; and in one instance, Angels Over Broadway (1940), he served as writer, director, and producer. I have never seen this movie, but even fanatical moviegoers do not rate it all that highly. Leonard Maltin gives it two and a half stars, saying that “it's just too offbeat (and pleased with itself about it)”; Richard Corliss advises, “Read the script, don't see the movie.”

Those who study movies with an intensity worthy of oncological CAT scans profess to see many a hallmark, even a comprehensive vision, in a Ben Hecht script. They speak of the gusto, style, satire, cynicism that he could get into his writing; one even uses the phrase “Hechtian man.” Corliss writes: “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.”

Yet when one reads down Hecht's filmography, noting that he had a hand in Gilda, Spellbound, Wuthering Heights, one also notes that his was not the only hand. Corliss rightly remarks that any true assessment awaits discovery of which movies Hecht substantially wrote and what were the contributions of the men who collaborated with him. “For, just as Hecht is often ignored in discussions of Hawks or Hitchcock,” Corliss says, “so are Charles MacArthur, Charles Lederer, and Gene Fowler forgotten on those rare occasions when Hecht's work is seriously appraised.”

“I can't help it,” the agent in “Concerning a Woman of Sin” frequently tells his clients. “I guess I'm not a judge of movies. I hate 'em too much.” Did Ben Hecht, too, hate them? Hard to say. Surely, he hated Hollywood, which he regarded as a combination gold and salt mine. “Anyone with a good memory for clichés and unafraid to write like a child can bat out a superb movie in a few days,” he remarked in his autobiography. He nowhere that I know speaks of a love for the movies; and one never gets from him the standard nonsense either about the special glories of the cinematic art or (as we have seen) about the movies as the great art of democracy.

Then why did Hecht, caring so little for the movies or for the money, work so hard at his writing? Ben Hecht had a boredom problem. As he grew older, he maintained, it was boredom that caused him to seek out “the ego disturbances which women can provide”—as pretty a euphemism for skirt-chasing as one is likely to find. Without what he called “the menace of ennui,” he said that he would never have written for the theater or the movies. “Work itself, swift, half mindless and exhausting, a happy drug,” was what he required. And as long as he was working, why not make it pay off?

One believes Hecht when he says, in his autobiography, “the money I earned meant almost nothing.” Certainly he found efficient ways of ridding himself of it: keeping a staff of servants that included a driver, a trainer, a cook, and, when in Hollywood, an additional kitchen-maid staff of three; toss in alimony, heavy taxes, two homes (one in Nyack, New York, the other in Oceanside, California), and other sideline amusements, and you can understand how in 1954 Hecht could write that for the past twenty-five years he had been “without a bank balance, owning neither stocks nor bonds, always broke, always battling my way out of debt, without money laid up for a rainy day and without even an insurance policy to provide for my family after I die. …” Such were the personal finances of the man known to be one of the great money-writers of his day.

But Hecht's career in the movies was simplicity itself next to his relationship with the Jews and with his own Jewishness. Not that he ever had great qualms about being a Jew. For the most part, it seems to have been a matter of indifference to him. His first wife was not Jewish, his second wife was. Formal religion appears to have played hardly any part in his upbringing. His was not the world of Irving Howe's fathers—socialist, labor union, left-wing idealistic—but instead was predominantly small business, or at any rate small-business-minded. In A Child of the Century, though he insists that “my family remained like a homeland in my heart,” he also insists that “I have never lived ‘as a Jew’ or even among Jews.”

The only one of Hecht's novels that still has the power, if not to enchant, then to disturb, A Jew in Love, would be instantly labeled anti-Semitic had it not been written by a Jew. The novel begins: “Jo Boshere (born Abe Nussbaum) was a man of thirty—a dark-skinned little Jew with a vulturous face, a reedy body, and a sense of posture.” The descriptions that follow do not become more charitable.

Jo Boshere (the character is said to have been modeled in part on the publisher Horace Liveright, but there must be even more of Ben Hecht in him) is an intellectual and a successful New York publisher. But above all he is an egotist with a romantic conception of himself and an unappeasable need to dominate others. A Jew in Love has to do with Boshere's unrelenting attempts at such domination, particularly over women. Otherwise, it is plotless. One reads on with mild interest and strong disgust about such characters as the Broadway journalist Gabe Solomon (a miniature portrait, MacAdams reports, of George Jessel), whose “talk of women would have abashed a gynecologist.” But more interesting than this sort of thing is Jo Boshere's violent rejection of Zionism. Boshere tells his sister that she is a Zionist “‘because you hate Jews, you're ashamed of being a Jew.’” And in the same conversation, he says:

I know what this Jew Consciousness is, because I once had it. It's the consciousness of not being a normal social human being. Just as the taint of homosexuality gives a man the miserable feeling of not being entirely a man. Once in a while a Jew comes to light whose ego is stronger than his label, who has enough brains, character, genius to lift his soul out of the God damn slimy stranglehold of Jew consciousness.

The attack on Zionism in A Jew in Love is notable because roughly ten years later—owing to Adolf Hitler—Hecht would be on his way not only to becoming a Zionist but, as he candidly put it, a “propagandist” for the Irgun, the Jewish organization in Palestine pledged to remove the British from the region—by violence, among other means—and to form a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan.

Hecht became involved with the Irgun through a column he wrote for the New York daily PM on the reluctance of important American Jews to speak out strongly against Hitler. Having been politicized by Hitler for the first time in his life, Hecht was shamed and outraged by this reluctance. He was driven to even greater rage when he learned that Joseph Kennedy, then ambassador to England, had warned the powerful figures in Hollywood to remain silent on the persecution of the Jews in Europe lest the war against Germany (in which the United States was anyway not yet engaged) come to seem “a Jewish war.” To make an elaborate story simple, in response to this column, two members of the Irgun called on Hecht one afternoon to seek his support for their program to save the Jews of Europe by sending them to Palestine.

Although so far as is known Hecht saved no European Jews through his work with the Irgun, and although he did not advance the Irgun cause in any finally lasting way, he nevertheless proved very strong in the line of agitprop. He wrote a series of inflammatory newspaper ads variously attacking the State Department, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and all the major American Jewish organizations (“Hang and burn, but be quiet, Jews / The world is busy with other news,” ran the refrain to one such effort). He also organized a star-laden pageant about the Jews of Europe entitled We Will Never Die that filled Madison Square Garden two nights running and then went on to play Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles.

Hecht's actions were not without personal consequences. He turned out to have a knack for making enemies almost as great as his knack for making money—and in not much smaller numbers. Because of his Irgun connection, movies on which he worked were blacklisted throughout the United Kingdom. In Hollywood, never known as the capital of courage, he was now offered only half his former fees for screenplays, and then only if he would agree to work without credit. None of this slowed him down or caused him to reconsider his commitment. The famous cynic had turned into a passionate idealist.

Passionate, but not particularly well-informed. Perfidy (1961), Hecht's book about the postwar trial of Rudolf Kastner, the man who on behalf of the Jewish Agency negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the lives of Hungarian Jews, shows both his strengths and weaknesses as a writer. No need to rehearse the intricate details of the Kastner trial here, but suffice it to say that Hecht, in 1961, used his book on the trial to reassert the Irgun line. This line held that during the war Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and other leaders of the Labor party in Mandatory Palestine, of which Kastner was a high-ranking member, betrayed the Jews of Europe in order to gain concessions from the British, who at the time wanted no great influx of Jews into Palestine lest it upset relations with the oil-rich Arabs. In defending Kastner after the war, Hecht argues, Israel's government—that is to say, the Labor party—was in reality defending itself.

It is a devastating charge—that the state of Israel was built on the willingness of its leaders to allow the Jews of Europe to die—and one that Hecht, for all his considerable skill at marshaling evidence and his powers of phrasemaking and caricature, finally cannot make stick. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, reviewing Perfidy in these pages,¹ remarked that Hecht, being “neither a historian nor a chronicler,” got a great deal askew, and she patiently sorted out his historical confusions, adding that she was disappointed to find that Hecht, “as a novelist and playwright,” did not have more compassion for the complex plight of the people he was writing about.

But Ben Hecht was less a novelist and playwright than he was a journalist and a screenwriter, professions that emphasize the sensational and melodramatic over the complexities of history and the troubling mysteries of the human heart. After a life of writing, Ben Hecht was disqualified from writing well about the one subject in the world—perhaps the only subject in the world—he had come really to care about. Talent long misused has a way of wreaking its own revenge.

Still, after one has chopped away at his work there remains something impressive about Ben Hecht. Such was his energy, his appetite for life, his odd courage, his self-awareness even of his own weaknesses, that he seems to require being judged by other than the usual standards. He was himself much more interesting than any character he ever created for the stage, screen, or fiction. Saying this is less a tribute to him as a writer than it is to him as an extraordinary man.

Ben Hecht died of a heart attack in his apartment in Manhattan on April 18, 1964, at the age of seventy-one. At the funeral service eulogies were read by Menachem Begin and Peter Bergson (both formerly of the Irgun), and the actors Luther Adler and George Jessel. It is comforting to recall that, back in the 1920's, when Jessel attempted to collaborate with Hecht on a play, Hecht told his friend Gene Fowler that he never met anyone “so eager to flaunt his stupidity, low-grade human values, and jackass vanities to the world.” There is no business like show business.

Note

1. Commentary, March 1962.