Ben Hecht


Ben Hecht
Born February 28, 1894(1894-02-28)
New York City, New York
Died April 18, 1964 (aged 70)
New York City, New York
Spouse(s) Mary Armstrong (1916-1926)
Rose Caylor (1926-1964)

Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894, New York City – April 18, 1964, New York City), was a Broadway playwright and prolific Hollywood screenwriter, even though he professed disdain for the motion picture industry. He was nominated six times for the Academy Award, winning twice, in 1929 and in 1936.

Contents

Life and career in Hollywood

Hecht was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and as a young man moved to Chicago, where he became a reporter and, eventually New York City, where he met movie mogul David O. Selznick, with whom he became a lifelong friend and frequent collaborator.

Early in his career, he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. There he published the sensational column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. While working at the newspaper, he met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim who also became a lifelong friend with Hecht.

While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story. Army war hero Carl Wanderer and his wife had been assaulted by a "ragged stranger". His wife and the stranger were killed in the struggle. Hecht's investigation revealed that the stranger was actually a drifter named Al Watson whom Wanderer had hired to stage a holdup. Wanderer admitted he was a homosexual and had planned the murder of his pregnant wife. He was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on March 19, 1921.

While in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Los Angeles. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around."

Hecht eventually moved to Hollywood, where he scripted Josef von Sternberg's gangster story Underworld in 1927, and won an Oscar for his work at the first Academy Awards presentation. His plays include Ladies and Gentlemen, Twentieth Century, and The Front Page, all of which he wrote with frequent collaborator Charles MacArthur. The latter was filmed four times, most notably as Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday in 1940. Much of Hecht's later work was uncredited, as he worked as a "script doctor".

Hecht had an early talk show on television in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote the book for the 1953 Broadway musical Hazel Flagg.

Jewish and anti-Holocaust activism

"Blood for goods"

Background
Auschwitz · The Holocaust · Hungary:WWII · History of the Jews in Hungary

People and events
Aid and Rescue Committee · Kurt Becher · Joel Brand · Adolf Eichmann · Malchiel Gruenwald · Heinrich Himmler · Rudolf Kastner · Kastner train · Yonasan Steif · Joel Teitelbaum · Rudolf Vrba · Vrba-Wetzler report · Alfréd Wetzler

Sources
Yehuda Bauer · John S. Conway · Ben Hecht · Raul Hilberg · Miroslav Karny · Ruth Linn

Categories
Blood for goods · The Holocaust

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Hecht's activism began when he met Peter Bergson (né Hillel Kook) - an ETZEL emissary to America. Hecht wrote in his book Perfidy that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history - i.e. the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). After meeting Kook, Hecht dedicated himself to working with Kook's rescue group and after the war ended he continued to work with Kook on establishment of the State of Israel.

Kook's rescue group purchased ad space in major US newspapers and Hecht wrote most of the ads, which were designed to call for immediate rescue action. In Perfidy and other writings, Hecht wrote that he was saddened by the negative reaction of mainstream American Jewish leaders toward rescue. He perceived them as pompous and more involved with petty aspects of Jewish politics and post-war Zionist issues than investing their talents, time and connections into rescue of their doomed brethren across the Atlantic.

Together with Kurt Weill and other top-level Broadway and Hollywood contacts, Hecht produced the pageant We Shall Never Die, which was shown in Madison Square Garden and in numerous cities across America. In Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt and many government leaders saw it. The pageant was strongly opposed by major Jewish leaders such as Stephen Wise, and they tried to ensure that it was not shown.[1][2] Despite considerable obstruction the Bergson Group's activism bore fruit, although much less and much later than Kook, Hecht and their colleagues expected[3]. The Bergson Group had generated considerable support in Washington, and after long delay their activism resulted in President Roosevelt's establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB), which ultimately supported the Wallenberg mission to Budapest. According to history books by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, over 200,000 people were rescued as a result of the Bergson Group - probably mostly in Hungary.

After the war ended Hecht and Weill produced another major pageant, this time about establishment of the State of Israel, called A Flag is Born. It raised more than $400,000[4] for the revisionist-supporting American League For a Free Palestine, and was bitterly opposed by Haganah supporters.[5]

Hecht became a great supporter of Zeev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Zionism movement led by Menachem Begin. He opposed the social-democratic policies of Israel's first two prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, and of the Jewish Agency for what he regarded as their complicit silence and co-operation with the British during World War II in not doing more to rescue Jews and open the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. He spoke out against the lack of interest in saving the Jews trapped in Europe during the Holocaust. He purchased newspaper advertising in New York's newspapers to publicize the fate of Hitler's victims. In one such "advertisement" with the headline: "FOR SALE: 70,000 JEWS AT $50 APIECE GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS" explaining that three and a half million dollars would rescue the then-trapped Romanian Jews (quoted in his work Perfidy, pp. 191-192). However, Stephen Wise made a public statement in the name of the American Jewish Congress denying the "confirmation" of the offer from the Romanian government.

It was during this time that Hecht wrote his book A Guide For The Bedeviled, which explains the thoughts and forces that drove him to this radical change of life and work.

He subsequently wrote Perfidy, dramatizing the failure to rescue Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and the roles of the Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner and others in leadership positions in the Hungarian Jewish community. This issue was the subject of a famous libel trial, in which the Israeli government sued an amateur pamphleteer who accused Kastner, at the time a government minister, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Although the court initially held that these accusations were not libelous, on appeal the verdict was reversed by a split 3-2 decision in the Supreme Court. By then, however, Kastner had been assassinated.

Personal life

Hecht married his first wife Marie in 1915 (divorced February 1926) and had a daughter by her, Edwina Armstrong (born 14 November 1916). He married Rose Caylor and had a daughter by her named Jenny Hecht (30 July 1943 - 25 March 1971).

Quotes

How My Egoism Died from: A Child in the Century:

“ A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands. ”

Remember us from: The Reader's Digest, February 1943:

“ Outside the borders of Russia, there will not be enough Jews left in Europe to profit by representation were it given to them. They will have been reduced from a minority to a phantom. There will be no representatives of the 3,000,000 Jews who once lived in Poland, or of the 900.000 who once lived in Rumania, or of the 900,000 who once lived in Germany, or of the 750,000 who once lived in Czechoslovakia, or of the 400,000 who once lived in France, Holland and Belgium. Of these 6,000,000 Jews almost a third have already been massacred by the Germans, Rumanians and Hungarians, and the most conservative of the scorekeepers estimate that before the war ends at least another third will have been done to death. . ”

Other quotes:

  • In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
  • The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
  • People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.
  • When asked by his new wife's discomfited parents "Why didn't you tell us you were a Jew?", Hecht responded "I was afraid you would think I was bragging."
  • Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
  • There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age. (A Guide for the Bedevilled)
  • The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them. (Perfidy)

Academy Award nominations

Writing filmography

Books (partial list)

  • 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, McGee/Covici, (1922)
  • Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath, 174 pp., Pascal Covici (1922)
  • The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives w/ illustrations by Wallace Smith, 256 pp. Boni & Liveright (1923)
  • Kingdom of Evil, 211pp., Pascal Covici (1924)
  • Broken Necks { Containing More 1001 Afternoons }, 344pp., Pascal Covici (1926)
  • Count Bruga, 319 pp., Boni & Liveright (1926)
  • The Book of Miracles, 465 pp., Viking Press (1939)
  • 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, 370 pp., Viking Press (1941) ASIN B0007E7X9K
  • A Guide for the Bedevilled, 276 pages, Charles Scribner's Sons (1944), 216 pp. Milah Press Incorporated (September 1, 1999) ISBN 096468862X
  • The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, 524 pp., Crown (1945)
  • Perfidy (with critical supplements), 281 pp. (plus 29 pp.), Julian Messner (1962)
    • Perfidy 288 pp. Milah Press (1961), Inc. (April 1, 1997) ISBN 0964688638
  • Concerning a Woman of Sin, 222 pp., Mayflower (1964)
  • Gaily, Gaily, Signet (1963) (November 1, 1969) ISBN
  • A Child of the Century 672 pp. Plume (1954) (May 30, 1985) ISBN
  • The Front Page, Samuel French Inc Plays (January 1, 1998) ISBN
  • The Champion From Far Away (1931)
  • Actor's Blood (1936)
  • A Treasury Of Ben Hecht: Collected Stories And Other Writings (1959, anthology)
  • Erik Dorn
  • A Jew in Love
  • I Hate Actors!
  • 1001 Afternoons in New York
  • The Sensualists
  • Winkelberg
  • Miracle in the Rain
  • Letters From Bohemia
  • Gargoyles
  • The Egoist

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Wyman, David (1984). The Abandonment Of The Jews. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 0394740777. 
  2. ^ Medoff, Rafael (2002). A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust. New York: Mew Press. ISBN 156584761X. 
  3. ^ Larry Jarvik circa mid 1970-s video interview with Hillel Kook: Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die
  4. ^ A Flag Is Born. American Jewish Historical Society (2005). Retrieved on 2008-01-11.
  5. ^ “Traitors, Inc.”, Time, July 14, 1947, <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,779137,00.html> 

References

  • Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 146. 

External links

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