Ben Hecht Biography & Works 

ISBN 0966770935 paperback, $14.95 

Preface by Florice Whyte Kovan.  Click picture to buy the book. 

Ben Hecht's 1001 Afternoons stories, never before collected in toto, dazzle literary and journalism historians as a motherlode of perspective, historical information and satire. These fourteen about the silent film business, while at first glint detrimental to my original objective that Hecht be taken more seriously, beckon nevertheless to be mined and published first. Not only their broad appeal gives them priority, but also their biographical significance: they link the prolific Hollywood writer to the film business as an insider in the early 1920s, years earlier than other biographers made that connection.

Received wisdom dates Hecht's film work after his 1925 departure from Chicago for New York, where three years later, he scored a hit on Broadway with The Front Page in collaboration with Charles MacArthur. Conventional filmographies begin his Hollywood career with Underworld, the silent film for which he won the first Academy Award for writing in 1928; but my research finds him writing Hollywood produced scenarios in Chicago as early as 1915. Hecht is credited with well over 100 sound films including Twentieth Century, Wuthering Heights, Angels over Broadway, Design for Living, Spellbound and Notorious, the latter, with Viva Villa! an Oscar nominee. He won his second Oscar in 1935 for The Scoundrel, starring Noel Coward. Gone With the Wind and the Office of War Information film The Negro Soldier are two initially uncredited collaborations at works that became classics. From the 193Os until his death in 1964, he was known as Hollywood's best paid, most productive and least reverent writer.

The stories celebrate the silent film industry's publicity force, the trade proudly calling its mission "exploitation." The social context of this body of work is an emergent age of advertising and economic growth that generated new social "types:" the booster, the Babbitt, the press agent. Hecht learned turn of the century advertising and publicity devices during his boyhood in Racine, Wisconsin, where his parents struggled in the competitive women's apparel business. As a high school lad he wrote copy for the family store and dashed off advertising jingles to induce local purveyors of cigars and fuel oil to take out ads in school playbills. He went to Chicago with circus music and hyperbole ringing in his ears from years living in a rooming house owned by former partners of P. T. Barnum. Young Ben traveled briefly with their circus in Wisconsin.

A decade after his high school graduation Hecht preened on his perch as Chicago's colorful young genius of several years standing. Nationally and abroad he was known as a contentious figure in the theater, literature and criticism. His popular stories ran regularly in H. L. Menken's little magazine Smart Set; his avant garde pieces in Margaret Anderson's Little Review. His plays, including collaborations with Max Bodenheim and Kenneth Sawyer Goodman had been staged at Chicago's pioneering Little Theater and by the Greenwich Village Theater in New York.

In 1919-20 his service as an audacious correspondent for the Daily News in post-war Berlin returned him to Chicago an adventuresome cosmopolitan celebrity. At that point he did his most inspired writing in his freewheeling 1001 Afternoons in Chicago series, on the most read page of the Daily News. Simultaneously he wrote two more books. A novel, or anti-novel, Erik Dorn, was already under his belt, followed by the scandalous Fantaizius Mallare, which ended his employment at the Daily News just as his third controversial book, Gargoyles, dismayed people of Racine after whom he named characters.

Hecht was in his element spoofing the publicity ploys he knew well. A fanciful illustrated story about a Chicago earthquake was an early front page coup for his first paper, The Chicago Journal. While writing the 1001 Afternoons stories, he moonlighted as a partner in a publicity business with emeritus Chicago journalist Richard Little and Atlanta entrepreneur Grady Rutledge. Among the firm's diverse clients were Herbert Hoover's campaign for Chinese relief, a cosmetologists' union, and an organization whose goal was to expose members of the Ku Klux Klan.

This volume presents Hecht's most outlandish plots and trumped-up characters, travesties on the serviceable behind-the-scenes "news" story, which circumvented the Daily News' policy against free plugs for films or theaters. The model for the press agent character was his press agent friend Lloyd Lewis, remembered now in Chicago as editor of the Daily News and revered there for his loyalty in not joining the exodus of writers to New York. Hecht's parodies concern Lewis's earlier work for the Balaban and Katz theater chain, which also owned rights to the Fox studio's film distribution. The Hecht~Lewis bond, alluded to but never elucidated, now may be appreciated in Hecht's treatment of Lewis and the latter's willingness to lend his name to the nothing-sacred buffoonery by the young writer who would later write the 1937 classic Nothing Sacred.

Hecht portrays that brand of publicity that thrives on low cunning, frenzied blustering and inaccurate hype. Often the tales end by zooming in on "the merciless press agent" reduced to tears by the human-interest story he just fabricated, while Hecht, playing himself as the co-operative journalist, zooms out of the scene to his typewriter.

His characters include battle scene extra Alonzo Duval, "The Wonder Gladiator," weary from the great wars under Griffith and Fox; Lopez Delgado of Spain, bristling from humiliation as a Hollywood picador en route to his adoring Spain; Wallace Reid's fan mail secretary, Orson Pontius Dilge, running amok in the fan mail, and Nellie the manicurist wishing her barber suitor were as ferocious as Harrison Ford, (the Harrison Ford of the silent film era).

But there are more. Kid McCoy, middleweight champion during Hecht's childhood, reveals his movie career as "the face of a thousand clips." An unseen double's stunts for the action scenes of Mary Pickford and other actresses are reprised. And the indispensable Myrtle Platz, tear producer extraordinaire, squeezes tears out of actresses by caterwallering maudlin ditties.

Sometimes Hecht's stories spin out of the unconventional reviews of the "News" film critic, poet Carl Sandburg, who sat at the adjacent desk. Other stories were intended to flatter producers and other influentials: DW Griffith, Olga Petrova, Norma Talmadge, Clarence Day, Fern Andra and George Ade. But a sentimental partiality for the home crowd is apparent: his short lists of stars often included Illinois or Chicago natives like Blanche Sweet and Charles Ray or veterans of the Chicago Essanay studio, which cradled the early careers of Ben Turpin, Charlie Chaplin, Wallace Reid, FX Bushman and Gloria Swanson. How apt then to find, years later, a home town association in Hecht's most autobiographical film role, the unscrupulous publicist reporter in Nothing Sacred, played by Fredric March, his fellow Racinian and age mate.

Notwithstanding his legacy as a Chicago and Hollywood picaresque, Hecht's references to philosophy and his acuity with social ideas pick at our minds. Stories about the nature of fame consider Mack Sennett's inability to hide, while the unique and private Chaplin is reduced to a series of stylized and imitable gestures and props. Questions of the origins of life and the role of women are debated by feminist actress producer Madam Olga Petrova, Metro studio's first diva, and Herman Rosse, distinguished set designer and Hecht's life-long friend.

Problems of the assimilation and accommodation of minorities are broached in a story concerning Hollywood's Chinese cultural consultant Moon Kwan. Serious questions about the film industry and its effect on general thinking needle herein. The kind of work aspiring actors often must settle for is juxtaposed with the effect of that work on their self-image and conjugal life. The ante goes up among movie-struck people, who, in their personal relationships, hold other people to aesthetic and behavioral movie star standards.

Hecht veils and unveils, with a peremptory snicker and grin, the marketplace of the celluloid serpent, where character types reflect values and sometimes shape them, types beget stereotypes and everything, including literature, people and emotion, can be commodified.

The editor says: "These stories are from my research collection of the complete 425, all written before 1925, which I located among the riches of the Library of Congress. For the past several years I inventoried and read them, grouping them as to content: art, music, law, social history, gender and others. Sharing the discovery of these treasures of the silent film era could not be put off. I hope the stories, along with illustrations and miscellany about Hecht's life, his work and his times, will inform or entertain his fans, scholars and general readers. The celluloid serpent stories of Ben Hecht have been in their basket for two generations now. It's time to lift the lid, to let them out and to hear their charms". FW Kovan

Below, illustration for the Norman Selby, Kid McKoy story,in Selling the Celluloid Serpent, stories by Ben Hecht, book by Florice Whyte Kovan

See also ISBN 09667709-0-0  t

the artist book collector's edition of Ben Hecht stories, Selling the Celluloid Serpent

Rediscovering Ben Hecht: Selling the Celluloid Serpent -- Index 

Many bookstore patrons see what's in the book by looking at the index.  Here we give you the same opportunity.  The paperback is indexed, but if you'd like to buy the artist book of the same title, we furnish you with a free copy of the paperback for reference and to save wear on the artist book -- they have the same pagination.