Mark Horowitz Reviews Two Books on Ben Hecht
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/books/review/adina-hoffman
BEN HECHT
Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
By Adina Hoffman
THE NOTORIOUS BEN HECHT
Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist
By Julien Gorbach
For understandable reasons, biographies about Ben Hecht have focused
almost exclusively on his screenwriting career in Hollywood. And why
wouldn’t they? Consider a few of his credits: “Underworld,” directed
by Josef von Sternberg, for which Hecht won the first Academy Award.
(Not his first Academy Award, the first Academy Award ever given for
best story. The year was 1927.) “Scarface,” “The Front Page,”
“Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Wuthering Heights,” “His
Girl Friday,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious.” And that’s just films with
his name on them. Uncredited, he script-doctored countless others,
including “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “A Star Is Born” (1937)
and “Roman Holiday.”
Across four decades, Hecht worked on about 200 movies. He helped
establish the ground rules for entire genres, including the gangster
film, the newspaper picture, the screwball comedy and postwar film
noir. Jean-Luc Godard said “he invented 80 percent of what is used in
Hollywood movies today.”
However, what gets repeatedly overlooked, when historians and film
buffs consider Hecht’s life, are his politics. That’s understandable
too, given that he hated politics. Thanks to his early days as a
Chicago newspaperman, he came to believe that all politicians were
hopelessly corrupt. He was deeply cynical about the human condition,
and didn’t take do-gooders seriously. He dismissed the fashionable
leftism among Hollywood’s screenwriting elite as group therapy for
intellectuals.
But unexpectedly, in middle age, Hecht dropped everything to become a
propagandist and political organizer, in a nationwide campaign to
pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue the endangered Jews of
Europe. His dramatic transformation surprised his friends and
colleagues, and may reveal more about the man than any of his
Hollywood successes.
Image
Ben Hecht, as a director circa 1946, looks through a
camera.CreditRalph Crane/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
Two new books finally give this chapter of his life the emphasis it
deserves. “Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures,” by Adina
Hoffman, an accomplished literary biographer, and “The Notorious Ben
Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist,” by the first-time
author Julien Gorbach, a crime reporter turned journalism professor,
both play down Hecht’s screenwriting in order to dig more deeply into
his relatively unexplored Jewish side.
But as these biographies clearly show, Hecht’s Jewish American
identity runs like a soundtrack through his entire life. He once joked
that he became a Jew only in 1939, yet in fact he was pickled in
Yiddishkeit from the beginning. Born on the Lower East Side, raised in
the Midwest, he wrote novels, short stories and newspaper columns
about Jews throughout his life; Sholom Aleichem was an enduring
inspiration.
Hoffman’s book is part of the Yale Jewish Lives series of brief — in
this case too brief — biographies. She condenses his film and theater
career into a mere 50 pages or so, eager to get to the metamorphosis
Hecht underwent on the eve of World War II. And that’s where she
starts to draw closer to the man than any previous attempt.
What follows is a brisk, readable tour through Hecht’s wartime
alliance with the right wing of the Zionist movement — the
Revisionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky — and his support for the Irgun,
their clandestine paramilitary affiliate, led by Jabotinsky’s young
lieutenant Menachem Begin. She describes Hecht’s awkward lunch at the
“21” Club in New York with a young Irgunist, a Palestinian Jew named
Peter Bergson, who persuaded Hecht to help him create a Jewish army to
fight against Hitler. Later, galvanized by news of the mass
exterminations taking place in Europe, the team mounted a bold
campaign to pressure the United States government to make the rescue
of European Jewry a wartime priority. Their efforts were fought not
only by Roosevelt and the State Department, but also by establishment
Jewish groups, fearful that Judaizing the war would trigger more
anti-Semitism. Jewish-owned newspapers like The New York Times and The
Washington Post agreed, burying news of Hitler’s Final Solution..
Hecht wrote furious columns for the short-lived liberal newspaper PM,
excoriating the passivity of American Jews. (His friend Groucho Marx
congratulated him after one particularly angry screed. “That’s what we
need,” Groucho wrote, “a little more belligerency, professor, and not
quite so much cringing.”) Hecht also wrote a long exposé in The
American Mercury called “The Extermination of the Jews,” later
excerpted in Reader’s Digest. These were, Gorbach says, “the only
substantive coverage” of the Holocaust “to appear in mass-circulation
magazines.”
In order to make an end-run around the political and media
establishment and bring the story directly to the American people, the
Bergson group bought full-page ads in major newspapers, usually
written by Hecht himself. “Action — Not Pity Can Save Millions Now!”
was a typical headline.
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Hecht also coaxed his famous actor, producer and musician friends to
join him in mounting “We Will Never Die,” a large-scale pageant —
essentially a supersize Broadway musical, written by Hecht, with a
cast of hundreds. The production sold out Madison Square Garden, the
Hollywood Bowl and venues across the country. Tens of thousands saw
it. Hecht also wrote a pro-Irgun Broadway play, “A Flag Is Born,” with
an unknown Marlon Brando playing a Jewish refugee. The box office
receipts helped pay for a ship, rechristened the S.S. Ben Hecht, meant
to smuggle displaced Jews into Palestine.
Every step of the way, the brashness of Hecht and Bergson was met with
spectacular resistance from the more timid leaders of established
Jewish organizations: Rabbi Stephen Wise even compared Bergson to
Hitler. It didn’t matter. Public opinion was on their side and the
campaign attracted the support of senators, congressmen and Supreme
Court justices.
Hoffman ably synthesizes an unwieldy amount of material. But she is
hamstrung by her dislike of Bergson and Hecht’s affiliation with the
Revisionist movement, which evolved, after Israel’s founding, into the
right-wing Likud party of Begin and Netanyahu. She unfairly treats
Hecht as a bit of a crank in this regard, ignoring the fact that at
the crucial moment, Bergson and the Revisionists were the only ones
persistently raising the alarm and demanding a more aggressive
American response to the tragedy.
Gorbach may be the weaker stylist, at times insightful while at other
times too reliant on academic jargon and theory, but his is the deeper
dive, and he comes up with a surprising amount of fresh material on
Hecht’s activism.
By focusing on his politics, both biographies create a richer
portrait, yet still struggle to fully explain Hecht. Gorbach comes
closest, sensing that the cynicism that saturated his screenplays also
somehow fueled his wartime politics. It wasn’t idealism. “Morality was
a farce,” Hecht wrote. The criminal underworld he encountered as a
city reporter struck him as the truest representation of humanity. The
Holocaust didn’t surprise him. He had already predicted it in a prewar
novella.
Hecht didn’t become a Jew in 1939; he became a Zionist. The genocide
in Europe, Gorbach points out, along with the world’s failure to
prevent it, “made the logic of Zionism real to him.” The world
couldn’t be counted on. Jews had to defend themselves. “Today there
are only two Jewish parties left in the field,” Hecht said after the
war, during the Irgun’s campaign to drive the British out of
Palestine, “the Terrorists — and the Terrified.”
He was always spoiling for a fight. Gorbach calls him a romantic.
Hoffman calls him a defiant Jewish American. I’d call him a lifelong
rebel who finally found his cause. Menachem Begin said it best: “Ben
Hecht wielded his pen like a drawn sword.”
Mark Horowitz is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine.
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