Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.
In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as “the Shakespeare of Hollywood” with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state.
The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences.
Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious! and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.
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Boston native Julien Gorbach is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He spent ten years as a daily newspaper reporter on the police beat, covering drive-by shootings and murder trials, and publishing an investigative series on killings that remained unsolved because of gang intimidation. Gorbach earned his doctorate at the Missouri School of Journalism, and his studies about Ben Hecht have been published in Journalism History and Literary Journalism Studies. He recently took a few minutes to share some insights about the focus and research process involved in his biography The Notorious Ben Hecht with history division membership co-chair Rachel Grant.
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Q: Can you describe the focus of your book?
A: My book is a complete biography of Ben Hecht, a Chicago crime reporter who became legendary as “the Shakespeare of Hollywood,” but was arguably more significant as the person who shattered the American media silence about the Nazi’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Hecht was an extraordinarily multifaceted figure who wrote the classic newspaper comedy The Front Page (most famously adapted for the 1940 film His Girl Friday), and more than 70 other films, including Scarface, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, and the final draft of Gone with the Wind. But, I treat Hecht’s Jewish activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. Hecht was a newspaperman leading up to the rise of Al Capone who then “invented” the gangster film when movies went to talk. During the Second World War, he mobilized public pressure on the Roosevelt Administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then, after the war, he became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with a Jewish gangster to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. My book looks at how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at a pivotal moment in history, at the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in the American media, and the consequences that followed. It takes readers on a journey from the Chicago newspaper world of the early twentieth century to New York City’s literary scene during the Jazz Age, through the great migration of writers to Hollywood during movieland’s “Golden Age,” to the battles for Jewish survival and statehood during the 1940s, and finally, to the final phase of Hecht’s writing career and his interactions with the underworld of Mickey Cohen’s Los Angeles during the 1950s.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: I wanted to explore questions about my own identity: What does it mean to say that I’m an American? Or a Jew? What loyalty, if any, do I feel that I owe to either of those things? These were questions I first confronted in college when I was reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man as the first Gulf War broke out. In the novel, 19-year-old Stephen Dedalus is approached by friends who exhort him to join them in the fight for Irish independence. Dedalus declares that his nationality, religion and family are the shackles that keep him chained to earth, and as a writer, he needs to let his soul soar free of them. When his friends call him a coward for refusing to join their cause, he tells them he is brave enough to face the consequences of his decision. I was reading this in early 1991, while my girlfriend was in Tel Aviv and the city was being targeted by scud missiles, which Israelis expected to be armed with chemical warheads. I wondered how I felt about my own obligations and loyalties, and didn’t have an answer. Years later, when I wanted to pursue a doctorate, a mass communication history professor at Hebrew University, Menahem Blondheim, suggested Ben Hecht as a dissertation topic. He told me a bit about Hecht’s discovery of Judaism later in life, and his shift from being a writer to an activist. “(I) turned into a Jew in 1939,” Hecht famously wrote. “The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, brought my Jewishness to the surface.” I wanted to learn about Hecht’s own path to Judaism, and see what his story could teach about these questions that had haunted me.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: I used the archive of Ben Hecht’s papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I also drew from the Palestine Statehood Committee Papers at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. But, of course, Hecht was a stunningly prolific writer in various media, and his circle of friends was comprised of journalists, novelists, playwrights, screenwriters and activists, who were also prolific, so there was a huge amount of texts to go through in order to develop a holistic picture of Hecht and his times.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: It relates to journalism and media history in four ways. First, I often explain that Hecht’s iconic newspaper comedy, The Front Page, romanticized journalism–or at least Chicago’s roguish, cynical variety of journalism–in the popular imagination, just as All the President’s Men and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would one day for a later generation. So my book covers “the Front Page era” of the Chicago newspaper world, in ways that call to mind the transgressions of fake news and “catch and kill” operations we see in our media today. Second, I trace Hecht’s career as the highest-paid, most sought-after writer in Hollywood from the ’30s into the ’50s, a position rivaled only by Dalton Trumbo during that era. Third, my book tells of the extraordinary publicity campaign that Hecht waged, initially to wake the American public up to the Holocaust and then to raise money for the armed struggle for a Jewish state. And, because this is a book about Israel’s origins, it also raises core questions about Israel’s future as a democratic nation. But, the fourth way is really what’s at the heart of the book, and explains its key relevance today. This is about one man’s effort to break the news of the biggest story of the twentieth century that the American press had missed: the Nazi plan to exterminate all Jews. As such, the book is about our collective capacity for denial, and how that is tied to human nature, or to what Hecht referred to throughout his writing life as “the soul of man.” The Great War had confronted Hecht and other journalists/public intellectuals, like Walter Lippmann and H.L. Mencken, with troubling questions about humanity and mass psychology, but while Lippmann questioned the public’s ability to grasp the complex questions of the modern world, and Mencken, more bluntly, ridiculed the stupidity and Puritanism of America’s “booboisie,” Hecht had an even darker view. He had seen the dark side of human nature as a crime reporter in Chicago, in covering not only the psychopaths on Death Row, but also the tightly knit network of Chicago’s criminals and politicians. Hecht concluded that our governments operate as criminal syndicates, a view he later found reinforced by Al Capone’s reign of Chicago, and finally, by the rise of Hitler. But with Nazism and its brutal persecution of the Jews, Hecht also found that humankind has primordial impulses towards tribalism and bigotry, fears and resentments of the Other that are easily exploited by our demagogues. Tied in with all of this is our capacity for denial—what Edward R. Murrow would later call “our built-in allergy to unpleasant and disturbing information.” All of this has deep implications for us today, during the presidency of Donald Trump. And it raises a key question: If the Nazi genocide was perhaps the biggest story of the twentieth century that our press and public were in denial about, what’s the biggest story we are in denial about today? The most obvious answer would seem to be climate change, but as a current resident of Hawaii and a former, longtime environmental reporter, I’d argue we are deep in denial about our broader environmental crisis: the destruction of our entire ecosystem and the mass extinction of species, or a “Sixth Extinction,” that scientists have been warning us about. The connection with the Holocaust may not seem obvious, at first, until one considers humankind’s evidently hardwired capacity for destruction and extermination. The story of Hecht’s life, though, also has lessons for us about the consequences of such deep cynicism about humanity, and the need to retain one’s idealism in order to maintain a moral compass.
Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: I’d suggest three things: First and foremost, if possible, check and make sure that your publisher not only has a fully staffed marketing department, but that they will use it in a way that treats your book as a priority. My book was one of two biographies of Ben Hecht that, by sheer synchronicity, were the first to appear about this extraordinary figure in thirty years. My “rival’s” book was published by Yale University Press, and thus far, anyway, the media attention for hers has far overshadowed my own. Secondly, review your book contract carefully to see not only your share of the sales revenue, but also your rights to decide the book’s title, cover, and other key choices. And, finally, be prepared for a tremendous amount of work when the book is in its final stages, work on things you may never have given much thought to before, like securing rights to images, responding to copyeditor queries, catching the attention of reviewers, and booking promotional events.
Check out the recent New York Times review of his work and consider purchasing it through Amazon.