The Notorious Ben Hecht

By Julien Gorbach, Purdue University Press, 2019, 327 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, Feb. 18, 2021

It is fitting that the play “The Front Page” was written by two authors – Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – because the biography “The Notorious Ben Hecht” also has two, both of them Julien Gorbach.

Hecht, a former newspaperman turned author, playwright, screenwriter and activist, died at age 70 in 1964. MacArthur, with whom Hecht often collaborated, also started in journalism, then branched out to writing for the theater and Hollywood. He died at 60 in 1956.

In writing “Notorious,” Gorbach, a former cops-and-courts reporter turned academic, used the playful reporter side of his keyboard to bang out colorful analyses that engaged readers, while on the stuffy academic side, he sweated over research that seems designed to satisfy grim-faced dissertation evaluators.

For instance, Gorbach spends a few pages interpreting the Chicago-newspaper farce “The Front Page,” blending his own opinions with the words of critics, scholars and the high hats the play offends, straining to find deep meaning in the tale of Hildy Johnson, the ace reporter; his glib, single-minded boss, Walter Burns; and the pivotal character, Earl Williams, the pipsqueak anarchist who escapes the gallows by escaping jail, then is pardoned before the boobish sheriff and corrupt mayor can bask in the curious glory of hanging him.

The interpretive pages are overly analytical and unnecessarily serious. “The Front Page” is funny, period; attempts to explain funny are laughable.

“The Notorious” is a worthy achievement, allowing me to understand the depth of Hecht’s intellect, conflicts and experiences. But while journalist Hecht branched out to the twin bawdies, Broadway and Hollywood, Gorbach made a more sober – pun inevitable – shift. After earning a Ph.D. in media history from the University of Missouri, he became an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The combination of reporter-Ph.D.-professor cannot be comfortable. A reporter, even one who did serious investigative pieces as did Gorbach, tries to connect with readers, to be the neighborly witness they are unable to be. As William Zinsser, one of my good-writing mentors, wrote in “Writing To Learn”: This is the personal connection that every reader wants to make with a writer; if we care about the writer we’ll follow him into subjects that we could have sworn we never wanted to know about.

Contrast that “every reader” approach with the Ph.D. candidate’s need to impress those starched-collared few who judge him: the snooty, status-obsessed academics who are looking for depth of research that leads to breakthroughs. Those people are going to want to see an overflow of sources, footnotes, data.

And what emerges is the associate professor, who again is judged on sources, footnotes, depth, publications for other academics to … to … enjoy? Nah. Enjoyment is a drawback, shows character flaws such as smiling and actually trying to sell a book. (See “depth of research … breakthroughs,” above.)

Here the breakthrough is Hecht’s unlikely conversion from popular author to political zealot, even an advocate of violence in creating a Jewish homeland.

To be thorough, Gorbach has decided he must go into great depth about Zionism. Most slightly more than casual readers of history – that describes me, give or take an Enlightenment – know that Zionism is the attempt to establish a Jewish state in the territory once known as Palestine.

Gorbach chooses to plunge deeply into the history of Zionism, its many leaders and many followers and many efforts, some contradictory, under the broad umbrella of the term. The effect is dizzying to those of us who are seeking to know and understand Ben Hecht.

For me, the history was too much. Keeping track of Herzl, Bergson, Jabotinsky, Weizmann, Begin, Tehomi, Achimeir, Stern, Raziel, Ben-Gurion, their alliances, their schisms, their dreams, their intrigues, made me think of a parallel between me and Gorbach: Let’s say I try to explain to a non-sports-fan baseball’s infield-fly rule.

What do I have to tell him? What can I leave out? Can I have a beer while I’m explaining? How about a six-pack?

When Gorbach tries to connect all the Zionist dots, he immobilizes the book, pleasings only the long-term tenured.

Further, Gorbach occasionally lapses into academic-speak. In my years of writing for newspapers, I never used “observed” as an attribution for a direct or indirect quotation. Gorbach likes it, as do the terminally academic. The following two sentences are in successive paragraphs on Page 127:

… one analyst for the “Saturday Evening Post” (went) as far as to observe, “Hatred of the Jews is the mortar which binds together into one house all the bricks of Hitler’s other hatreds.” … But as Deborah Lipstadt has observed, the press “still had difficulty grasping that one of the primary motives for Kristallnacht had been to destroy organized Jewish life and to make the Reich ‘Judenrein.’”

OK, so a dozen (probably more) uses of an aristocratic attribution verb isn’t exactly a felony. But the publisher is the Purdue University Press, and you’d think between Gorbach’s academic prowess and Purdue’s reputation for excellence that some copy-editing skill might intervene, if only accidentally.

Someone (or maybe some two) should be ticketed for a double spelling error, twice referring to the renowned German heavyweight boxing champion “Max Schmelling.” He is “Schmeling,” one “L,” for which the author and copy editor deserve punches in the noses.

And then we get the kind of amateurish errors that evoke the clumsy teenage shoplifter: “… they both center around …” instead of “center on,” and “one of the only” instead of “one of the few.”

The use of clichés is another misdemeanor, as most draw no blood; but do we really need yet another dreary “on steroids” yawner? “(Mickey) Cohen was Tony Camonte on steroids … .”

Two things of note: (1) “Tony Camonte” was the fictional “Scarface” of the 1932 gangster movie starring Paul Muni. (2) Once Gorbach shifts to profiling wacky (and “whack ’em”) Mickey Cohen, among history’s most colorful gangsters, the book becomes a wildly entertaining tale.

Cohen, often called the king of the rackets on the West Coast, was a close associate of Hecht’s, and if the book had been a biography of Cohen, with Hecht as a featured character, I would be raving about its combination of hilarity and corruption, titled “The Front Page For Crooks.”