My Amazon Review of Idina Hoffman's "Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures

On the Front Page of the Twentieth Century

Adina Hoffman has written an important biography the great screen writer Ben Hecht. She takes his life from the Lower Eastside of the 1890s, to Racine, Wisconsin, and then on to the newspaper world of Chicago, to Broadway and then on to Hollywood. In the 1930s Hecht became the highest paid screen writer in Hollywood turning out such classics as Scarface, Viva Villa, Gunga Din, Twentieth Century, Monkey Business and Wuthering Heights. He would also rewrite without credit Gone with the Wind, The Shop around the Corner, Mutiny on the Bounty and much later Casino Royal. Quite the career.

While in Chicago he would meet Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandberg and Theodore Dreiser all of whom would later become literary giants. It was his experience in Chicago newsrooms that inspired his Broadway hit, Front Page. Also as a reporter he covered postwar Berlin in 1919.

Hecht received perhaps the most famous telegram in all of Hollywood history. In late 1926 while in New York he received a telegram from his friend Herman Mankiewicz stating,

   “Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures.

      All expenses paid. ……..”

And as they say, the rest is history.

Perhaps most interesting to me is how Hecht rediscovers his Jewishness in 1939-40 with the onset of World War II and the growing horror facing European Jewry.  He meets up with Peter Bergson who was the Irgun’s (Jewish liberation group) man in the United States and starts raising dollars to rescue the Jews of Europe. In 1943 he puts on an extravaganza in Madison Square Garden highlighting the plight of European Jewry titled “We Will Never Die.” He is assisted in the work with such show business legends as Billie Rose, Moss Hart and Ernst Lubitsch. The show would go national. Along the way he battles the then Jewish establishment figures who were reluctant to highlight the seriousness of the disaster.

Later in 1946 he works with Bergson to put on a Broadway show entitled “A Flag is Born” to call attention to the struggle to create the Jewish state. Again he uses is influence to raise money for the cause. He was so important that future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would attend his funeral.

I would have really liked to know Ben Hecht. He was vibrant and full of energy and Adina Hoffman tells his story well.

The full Amazon Reviews appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R33KSBH77UVJ91/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv