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Ben Hechts critically acclaimed autobiographical memoir, first published in 1954, offers incomparably pungent evocations of Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and New York during the Second World War and after. His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting.Saul Bellow, New York Times Named to Times list of All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books, which deems it the un-put-downable testament of the eras great multimedia entertainer.… (altro)
The magnificent Ben Hecht penned his memoir in 1954 during a period of convalescence. He never slowed down previously to take the time. The child of secular Jewish immigrants, he grew up in the New York ghetto before the family moved to Wisconsin. There he became a confirmed bibliophile. He went to college for one day before running off to Chicago and landing a job as a reporter during the height of Prohibition era gangster activity. He knew everybody from high to low. His romantic escapades were the stuff of movies. He became a propagandist for the Florida land boom, a variety of charities (some legit), a foreign correspondent, and went all out raising funds for the future state of Israel while antagonizing the Brits to no end. He wrote innovative scripts for legendary movies, novels, plays, poems, advertising, you name it. He turned a jaundiced eye on the waste associated with the capitalist horror of Bolshevism believing their fright gave that ideaology power it would never otherwise have had. His disdain for the sainted FDR earned him animosity but he was never cowed. The slaughter of the Holocaust aroused the latent Jew in him and he was relentless in their cause. His personal fortunes were always boom and bust, sometimes one step ahead of creditors and at others throwing down cash like Croesus. He ends his story before he began his stint as an early television talk show host. Written in an essay like narrative, his clear-eyed pithy wisdom is something to return to again and again. A life lived to the very fullest. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ( )
I first read a selection from this book in Fradkin's Seven States Of California. It concerned Hecht's time as a film writer in Hollywood. It was so falling down funny that I sought out the book, and I was not disappointed. Hecht starts out as a reporter in Chicago and moves to New York as a playwright. He does a hilarious stint as a promotional writer for a real estate developer in Florida, and then moves on to Hollywood to write movies. He is an ardent supporter of the nascent Israel state and one of their naval vessels is named for him. He is funny and erudite and his biography aptly captures the first half of the twentieth century in the arts. This is one of the more engaging autobiographies I have read. ( )
Ben Hecht’s daughter Teddy once introduced her dad as “the author of my being and other dubious works.” These works included the plays The Front Page and Twentieth Century, the films Scarface, Nothing Sacred, Spellbound and Notorious, plus a nonstop seven-day rewrite of the first half of Gone with the Wind for producer David O. Selznick. His movies and plays only hint at the scope of his rich, raffish career: he was cub reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent, poet, novelist, talk-show host on infant TV and so relentless a proponent for Zionism that his name was taken off films when they played in Britain. A Child of the Century packs all nine lives into 600 pages of glamorous prose snapshots of the famous (Mencken and the Marx brothers) and infamous (the Capote and Hitler mobs). It’s the un-putdownable testament of the era’s great multimedia entertainer.
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When a great man or an historic figure writes of himself, he can start right off with tales of his nursery days, his first adventures on his bicycle and all such memory-album trivia.
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Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, the Parisian writer, who lived like an alley cat, ate stale fish, went hiccuping and threadbare through fifty years of penury, who wrote with frostbitten fingers on cigarette papers, spoke from his hovel when dying: "Farewell. I have lived the richest and most magnificent of men." We who read can die with a similar boast.
"I'm giving a party," Mr. Eastman confided, "and I want a poem written about a bull who is nibbling some God-damn grass in a pasture and swallows a God-damn bumblebee by mistake. The bee goes down his throat into his stomach and after two days of hardship comes out of his ass in a big load of bull shit. Mad as hell, this Goddamn bumblebee crawls out, dusts himself off, jumps on the bull, and stings the be-Jesus out of him. I want that written in a poem. Think you can do it, Mr. Hecht?"
David was outraged to learn I had not read Gone With the Wind, but decided there was no time for me to read the long novel. The Selznick overhead on the idle Wind stages was around fifty thousand dollars a day. David announced that he knew the book by heart and that he would brief me on it. For the next hour I listened to David recite its story. I had seldom heard a more involved plot. My verdict was that nobody could make a remotely sensible movie out of it.
I suggested then that we make up a new story, to which David replied with violence that every literate human in the United States except me had read Miss Mitchell's book, and we would have to stick to it. I argued that surely in two years of preparation someone must have wangled a workable plot out of Miss Mitchell's Ouida-like flight into the Civil War.
"I know nothing of Krishnamurti," Barrymore answered with a great and unexpected sneer. "I never met him. On the morning I arrived in Calcutta, eager for spiritual communion with the young saint, I was picked up by a pimp and led to an amazing whore house. The most delightful I have ever seen to this day. I speak as a devoted student. I would like to describe this pelvic palace so that you will not think me totally an idiot for giving up my saint in its favor. It had a great central room with a floor of pink and white marble which was covered with fleets of pillows. You have never seen such pillows. They cooed at your buttocks. There were tall silver columns, and clouds of colored silks ballooned from the ceiling, giving it the look of a heaven of udders. Incense pots gave forth smells capable of reviving the most dormant of Occidental phalluses. And music came from somewhere—much as now in this room. Gentle music that went directly to the scrotum and cuddled there."
A month later I received a letter from Dreiser. He was in St. Louis and had met there a woman eager to invest a hundred thousand dollars in the new Western enterprise of movie making. The movies, wrote Dreiser, were going to take the place of literature in the U.S.A., and fortunes were going to be made out of them. H
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It is as writers that our genius disappears, or at best shrinks to a few stuttering and remembered anecdotes.
Ben Hechts critically acclaimed autobiographical memoir, first published in 1954, offers incomparably pungent evocations of Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and New York during the Second World War and after. His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting.Saul Bellow, New York Times Named to Times list of All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books, which deems it the un-put-downable testament of the eras great multimedia entertainer.
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