Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot-off-the-presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Ben Hecht. A Child of the Century. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020). 654pp. (Orig. publ. 1954)
16th Edition
About a dozen years ago, when I was weeding out my overflowing personal library by selling books on Amazon and eBay, I stupidly sold one I immediately regretted having let get away. Even worse was the aftermath. The book was the original hardcover version of A Child of the Century, the 1954 autobiography of Ben Hecht, who described himself as a “newspaper reporter, playwright, novelist, short story writer, propagandist, publisher” (p. 113). The woman on Long Island to whom I shipped it soon contacted me to say it hadn’t arrived. I had no proof of its mailing, so I had to take her word for it and refund the payment
Over the years my curiosity in the book grew; finally, I purchased a fresh paperback copy, only recently reprinted (2020), with a fine introduction added by film critic David Denby. It was a good decision. A Child of the Century is perhaps the most enlightening, entertaining, provocative, and informative book I’ve read this year. It’s as much a compendium of Hecht’s ideas on the people, problems, and events of his time as it is an account of his astonishingly prolific life, even more so, perhaps. Unfortunately, while it contains an index, it includes not a single illustration, those shown here being drawn from other sources.
Readers should note that they’ll be forced to piece together the traditional outlines of his biography only from the factoids about them sprinkled, almost offhand, through his mesmerizing, often philosophically inclined, vibrantly expressed ramblings. Subjects range from journalism, Judaism, God (in whom he came to believe only after losing faith in reason), post-World War I German politics and the Germans, conformity versus individualism, right- and leftwing politics (including communism, which he hated), freedom of speech, Hollywood’s greed and moral cowardice, theater, literature, love, marriage, and—with refreshing frankness (Kinsey had appeared)—sex (of all flavors).
The term “political correctness” was not yet born, but its purpose was. Thus, Hecht sharpens his quill against groups seeking to prevent films from saying or showing anything that might inspire a boycott. The Hollywood code of his time even forbade such innocuous phrases as “You are nuts,” “You’re a bum,” or “You’re lousy,” because they could be given a double meaning. Such restrictions have long since been lifted, of course, only to be replaced by others just as innocuous. I’m sure you can come up with half a dozen right now.
Hecht’s section on Hollywood promiscuity may not name names but is a humdinger of a read. None of which detracts from such existential concerns as the Holocaust (a word he never uses), man’s monstrosity to his fellow man, McCarthyism, power-seeking authoritarianism, and the founding of Israel, in which he was a remarkably important, if greatly disillusioned, player.
The book’s biggest drawback for those primarily interested in Hecht’s contributions to literature, movies, and theater is his casual attitude toward them. While he now and then drops the title of a book, play, or movie he wrote, he only rarely discusses it in any detail. For example, of the four plays he says he co-wrote with Charles MacArthur (he forgets a fifth, the 1946 flop Swan Song), the only one he discusses is the first, The Moonshooter, never produced because its two manuscript copies were lost. As for such Broadway milestones as The Front Page, Jumbo, and Twentieth Century, that right there is about as much as you get.
Hecht lived the life of a well-off vagabond, disdaining pomp and artificiality, spending the big money he earned irresponsibly, and caring little about being in debt, sure he’d always manage to get back on his feet by using his literary gifts. He cared little for critical praise, remembering only the slings and arrows.
Despite his several Broadway hits, he had no special affection for theater, delaying any discussion of the art until p. 416, declaring theater to be “one of the few subjects about which I feel diffident,” and confessing he has “no point of view toward it.” Moreover, he admits to being so sensitive to the sufferings of theatrical characters that he remains depressed by plays long after their curtains have fallen.
What he likes best about theater are its actors, whose purpose is to provide the admirable goal of diversion. He considers the actor’s ability to survive despite rejection to be heroic. His own fear of playwriting failure, he admits, has held him back. Being snubbed by both audiences and critics leaves you “bleak and lessened” (p. 419).
Although holding a low view of his own screenwriting, which he dismisses as melodrama, he offers a few words now and then about a couple of his 60 films, silent and talkies, like the early gangster movie Underworld, and, thank goodness, Gone with the Wind. As one of its several screenwriters, he made invaluable last-minute contributions even though he’d never read Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster.
Hecht’s existence began on New York’s Lower East Side, where he was born into a family of Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants in 1893. The family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where he was raised after his father, a tailor, went into the apparel business (only to fail), and his beloved mother sold coats and hats. Meanwhile, young Ben learned acrobatics from a fellow boarder and mastered the violin. He shifted to Chicago in 1911, where, despite being a fanatical book lover (with a tendency to forget what he’d read), he dropped out of school at 16 and became a respected reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal, hanging around with raffish journalists and others determined to upset society’s moral apple cart.
At the same time, he started gaining readers for his fiction, much of it controversial for its sexual explicitness, like his 1920 novel Erik Dorn. Hecht gives numerous examples of the news items he covered, some of them purely fictional. Whores, brothels, drunks, crimes, and executions were his element. He enjoys recounting, briefly, many of his most flavorsome stories, like the one about a dentist who raped his patient and, for one edition, bore the headline, “Dentist Fills Wrong Cavity.”
Hecht’s gift for verbal portraits allows him to create the worlds he moved through via salty depictions of each of his family members and of the people with whom he was most intimately involved. These take him from the flamboyant world of Chicago in the teens and 20s, so perfectly captured in the knockabout action of The Front Page (1928), to the German officers he consorted with in Weimar Republic Berlin, to the real estate tycoons in the 1925 land boom craze of Miami and Key Largo, to the nabobs and stars of Hollywood, to the figures involved in saving the Jews during and after World War II.
Readers interested in film and theater will savor his word etchings of celebrities like John Barrymore, John Gilbert, Charlie Chaplin, Constance Collier, Jed Harris, Harpo Marx, Charles Lederer, Fanny Brice, and Helen Hayes, while the literarily inclined will appreciate his depictions of Maxwell Bodenheim, Gene Fowler, Sherwood Anderson, H.L. Mencken, and many others. He knew Franklin D. Roosevelt, toward whose watery response to the plight of the Jews during World War he’s ruthless. Politicians were not his favorite people.
He would be married twice, the second time to an extraordinary Russian-born woman named Rose Caylor—a writer and actress—and have two daughters. The youngest, Jenny, born in 1943 when Hecht was 50, glows with his love on several pages; after becoming an actress with the politically radical Living Theatre, she died in 1971 of an accidental overdose. The reader is grateful her father didn’t live long enough to experience her loss. But he did know of a controversy she was involved in during her childhood, although he chooses to overlook it.
Hecht’s relationship with his Judaism is a running theme, both because he had little interest in organized religion and its rituals, but also because his Jewish roots—embedded in his family as they were—kept pulling him toward recognition of acknowledging his heritage. “Although I never lived ‘as a Jew’ or even among Jews, my family remained like a homeland in my heart” (p.109).
His chapters on the two years he spent in Germany from 1918 to 1920 as the only Jewish-American correspondent—he declares he never once experienced even a whiff of anti-Semitism—are unusually gripping. He was in daily contact with some of the major German leaders of the recent war, at a time when assassinations happened almost daily, and was an eye-witness to events suggesting a possible Socialist revolution in Germany around the time of the founding of the Weimar Republic. He concludes of the German people that their chief fault is servility in the face of power.
Of no less interest are Hecht’s sections on Hollywood, where he tears the movie business to shreds, without foreknowledge of how the movie industry would survive and improve in the years to come. “The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our country,” he declares, calling them “an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from being a cultured people.”
But the most compulsive narrative, which ties the story tightly to today’s Israeli-Arab concerns, is his getting intimately involved during World War II as a propagandist for a group of Palestinian Jews led by Peter Bergson (a.k.a. Hillel Kook). Originally devoted to making the U.S. aware of Hitler’s extermination of European Jewry, their Zionist goals clashed with those of other groups in the effort to establish the Jewish homeland born as Israel in 1948.
Hecht’s theatrical experience put him in charge of several propagandistic pageants supporting the Bergson group’s agenda; he mentions two but ignores his 1946 pageant-like play, A Flag Is Born, which I discuss in detail in my Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1940-1950. Starring Paul Muni and Marlon Brando, it raised enough money for the Zionist cause to purchase a ship named the S.S. Ben Hecht, intended to bring Jews to Palestine (an aborted mission); as with other Hechtian milestones, the author, for unknown reasons, completely ignores it.
Hecht’s depiction of the infighting among rival groups of Jews, with different policies, makes for stomach-wrenching reading, especially when he describes the slaughter of the breakaway Jewish militia called the Irgun (represented by Menachem Beigin [Begin])—considered “terrorists”—by the official militia, the Haganah (represented by David Ben-Gurion, who doesn’t come off well in Hecht’s account). This happened when their ship, the Altalena was fired upon in the waters off Tel Aviv. In his account, which other Zionists would dispute, the Irgun—from which Israel’s rightwing Likud Party would later spring—were the martyrs, and their destruction by other Jews ended his work on Israel’s behalf
It has taken me far too long to read A Child of the Century. If you’re at all interested in the people and events surveyed above, you should put Ben Hecht’s book on your wish list. I doubt very much you’ll regret it.
Up Next: Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater as Seen by Chicago Tribune Critics
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