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Ben Hecht This Week

May 4, 2008

The anniversary of the independent state of Israel evokes the role of Ben Hecht in the conflict. An oganizer with Peter Bergson of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, his anti-British pronouncements resulted in a distinct career setback with the British boycott of his movies. A frigate transporting Jewish refugees from Europe to what would become Israel, the S. S. Ben Hecht, was named for him.

The S.S Ben Hecht, photograph courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.

Ben Hecht's mother, Sarah Swernowsky Hecht, immigrant from Kremenchung, Russia, owned and ran a women's clothing store in Racine, Wisconsin. She is seen here with her two sons, Ben, standing, and younger son Peter.

Photograph courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago

Antique postcard of Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan as they looked when Hecht arrived in 1910. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Margaret Anderson, Editor of Chicago's Little Review, launched Hecht with professional care. Image courtesy The Ben Hecht Story & News

Compostion by Chicago artist Ramon Shiva. Hecht supported him in his arts tabloid. Image courtesy Archive of American Art..

Ben Hecht's first Oscar was for Underworld, a story of gangland Chicago.

Ben Hecht on violin, right and Charles MacArthur on sax, left. They worked for rival newspapers in Chicago before writing The Front Page together

Ben Hecht on the movie set A Farewell to Arms, Hollywood. Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago

Ben Hecht on his Grant Park bench, where he people watched and city watched, getting ideas for his Chicago stories.

THE SNICKERSNEE PRESS PUBLISHES ONLY BEN HECHT (1894 - 1964) BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS.

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Our books in print are well researched anthologies of Ben Hecht's formerly uncompiled stories, which we annotate and illustrate to inform studies of cultural history: film, art, modernism, architecture and urbanism. We consider Hecht's career as an early screenwriter and literary journalist in Chicago, a playwright in New York, a publicist and human rights activist, and as Hollywood's highest paid and least reverent screenwriter.

Visit this site to discover the Ben Hecht, not just of his legend, but of his newly discovered writings and biography based on scholarly research. Welcome to our new location at BenHechtBooks.net/

Below, Ben Hecht, graduate, Racine High School, 1910. Photo courtesy Racine Public Library.

BEN HECHT BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS

BORN IN NEW YORK CITY in 1894, Ben Hecht was the son of Joseph Hecht and Sara Swernovsky Hecht, garment makers from southern Russia. After several years in Chicago the family moved to the industrial inland seaport of Racine, Wisconsin. Here his father was a working partner in a womens' clothing factory. His mother was the proprietor of the Paris Fashion store. Ben's Paris Fashion tasks were writing advertising copy, doing window displays and, he tells us, stoking the furnace beneath the fitting rooms. Shows at Racine's Bijou Theatre exposed young Ben to early films and "illustrated songs" between 1904-1910; but the circus touched him more closely inasmuch as the Hechts lived in a boarding house for circus people.

A Racine High School graduate, Hecht departed Racine in July of 1910 for a brief introduction to the college scene and fraternity life at the University of Wisconsin. He claims that he was asked to "apologize to the University" at a fraternity dinner table for his boast that he had already read the extensive freshman reading list. What, therefore, he thought, could UW possibly teach him?

ERGO, HE RECALLED in his memoir, A Child of the Century, he fled immediately to Chicago. Particulars remain murky. Clearly, however, he focused on literary attempts and connections early and throve in Chicago as the youngest, most creative and last to "defect" (to New York) of the Midwestern Literary Renaissance authors: Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, Max Bodenheim, and Sherwood Anderson, the latter a rival of Hecht and for a time, his room mate. Hecht's real-time muckraking poem about the Titanic disaster appeared on the front page of the Chicago Journal and other papers less than two years after his high school graduation in Racine. Hecht liked to sit on his favorite park bench in Grant Park, where he contemplated the urban scene and profusion of people, the basis for his stories.

IN THE MID 1910s Hecht wrote avant-garde plays in Chicago's pioneer little theater movement with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, namesake of the Goodman Theater. Little Review editor Margaret Anderson, favored Hecht, encouraging his serious literary aspiration as he toiled daily as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, then for the Chicago Daily News. In 1919 Hecht served as a post-war correspondent in Berlin, an experience that invigorated him artistically and exposed him to international politics, Berlin Dadaists Georg Grosz and Johannes Baader as well as the European silent film production scene. On return to Chicago, he wrote almost daily "1001 Afternoons in Chicago" columns, establishing himself as a prolific and inventive short story writer and essayist accessible to newspaper readers. Sometimes remembered as Runyonesque in his character studies, we prefer to say Hechtean like critics of his day. In his flourish of of literary journalism in the early 1920s, he also completed his first book, Erik Dorn, followed by Gargloyes, Fantazius Mallare, The Florentine Dagger, Kingdom of Evil and several plays, among them The Egoist. His arts and literary tabloid The Chicago Literary Times, of which Max Bodenheim was initially co-editor, lambasted Chicago's reactionary arts establishment while promoting the works of Hecht's artist friends George Grosz, Herman Rosse, Wallace Smith, Stanislav Szukalski and the cause of the avant-garde "No-jury" artists.
His "50 Books That Are Books" reading list includes some literature that influenced his later scenario writing

IN 1925 HE RETURNED TO A NEW YORK where the Algonquin Round Table was the locus of literary prestige and, for a time, he took a seat there. His work for New York Paramount Studios during this period was uncredited to evade alimony obligations. When at the first Academy Awards he won the first Oscar ever awarded to a writer for the Hollywood silent film Underworld, he was at home in New York. His initial refusal of the Oscar (he used it as a doorstop when it was later sent to him) set the precedent for more dramatic refusals by other recalcitrant winners over the years. After his success with the stage play The Front Page and his Academy Award for Underworld, Hollywood wooed him with lavish fees. In the 1930s he was writer, producer and director of films with Charles MacArthur at Paramount Astoria Studios in the New York borough of Queens. Despite his iconoclasm and his salty criticism of Hollywood, he won a second Oscar for The Scoundrel, which starred Noel Coward in a roman a clef about the New York publisher Horace Liveright.

HECHT'S FILM CONTRIBUTIONS spanned comedies (Nothing Sacred, Monkey Business) family fare (Jumbo, Roman Holiday), novel to film aptations: Wuthering Heights, Gunga Din, A Farewell to Arms; political satire (Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, Roxie Hart (yes, the first screenplay of the blockbuster Chicago) Hitchcock suspense in Spellbound, Notorious, the latter an Oscar nominee, and, under protest, remedial scripting for Gone with the Wind. Films he directed included Angels over Broadway and the noir Spectre of the Rose. He became a New York-Hollywood commuter, maintaining New York homes in Nyack and Central Park West. Hecht's collaboration with Kurt Weill on the We Will Never Die pageant of 1943 to expose the Holocaust remains a stirring and doomed theatrical effort to turn world events. His California mansion was at Oceanside, reflecting a love of the sea acquired in his Racine boyhood.and Chicago youth.