“Christ, I'm tired,” Ben Hecht grumbled to his wife Rose in 1931. Stuck in Hollywood, Hecht was writing Scarface and complaining mightily. “Oh how tired I am!” he continued, gathering strength with every groan. “Aches, neck, back, eyes, heart—oh so tired.”
This is the sound of a man enjoying his misery; a master at the Jewish art of recreational kvetching. With Hecht, the line between pain and pleasure was vanishingly thin. In Hollywood, he wrote seemingly effortless dialogue until he collapsed (“I love a good honest pain, as you know”). Blurred lines abounded in Hecht's life. When writing The Front Page, his great collaboration with Charles MacArthur, he set out to skewer journalism but produced a love letter. “Our contempt . . . was a bogus attitude,” he later confessed.
Little was ever straightforward with Hecht, the playwright, journalist, and screenwriter-savant of Hollywood's first golden era. Did he single-handedly rescue Gone with the Wind? Could he, or anyone else, have written Scarface in 11 days? Legends aside, there was something inscrutable about the man. “Hecht is a rather difficult man to pin down,” Saul Bellow once wrote. The poet Doug Fetherling, who wrote a shrewd 1977 appreciation of Hecht, admitted that “no one is quite certain who Hecht was.”
Hecht's life should come with a warning label: Biographer, beware. A trickster, a prankster, a cool Wildean ironist, he was always a fast-moving target. When reporters quizzed him, they got the runaround: evasion, omission, deflection. “I have always had a distaste for telling the truth about myself,” he confided to H. L. Mencken. Indeed, mischief—getting away with things—supplied life's greatest pleasure for Hecht, along with writing rapidly and well. No wonder so many Hechtian legends survive, with some dust on them, 55 years after his death. In common memory, he is still the speed writer, the one-draft wonder, the Hollywood-bashing iconoclast, the swashbuckling social critic.
Inevitably, the legend takes a beating under Adina Hoffman's scrutiny. In her compact new biography, she attempts to recover Hecht from legend, refraction, obfuscation. It's a valiant attempt, but in the end, she falls victim to Hecht's expertly set traps. In a way, this book is like its subject: charming, never dull, and something less than trustworthy.
Read Full Article »