Journalist From 1918 to 1919, Hecht served as war correspondent in
Berlin for the
Chicago Daily News. According to
Barbara and Scott Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles". According to biographer Eddy Applegate, "Hecht read voraciously the works of
Gautier,
Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, and
Verlaine, and developed a style that was extraordinary and imaginative. The use of
metaphor,
imagery, and vivid phrases made his writing distinct ... again and again Hecht showed an uncanny ability to picture the strange jumble of events in strokes as vivid and touching as the brushmarks of a novelist". ;
A Child of the Century In 1954, Hecht published his autobiography,
A Child of the Century, which, according to literary critic Robert Schmuhl, "received such extensive critical acclaim that his literary reputation improved markedly during the last decade of his life ... Hecht's vibrant and candid memoir of more than six hundred pages restored him to the stature of a serious and significant
American writer". Novelist
Saul Bellow reviewed the book for
The New York Times: "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 ... If he is occasionally slick, he is also independent, forthright, and original. Among the pussycats who write of social issues today, he roars like an old-fashioned lion." In 2011,
Richard Corliss, announced the
Time editorial board named Hecht's autobiography to the
Time 100 best non-fiction books list (books published since the founding of the magazine in 1923).
New Yorker film critic
David Denby begins a discussion of Hecht's screenwriting by recounting a long story from his autobiography. He then asks, "How many of these details are true? It's impossible to say, but truth, in this case, may not be the point. As Norman Mailer noted in 1973, Hecht 'was never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose. Denby calls this Hecht's "gift for confabulated anecdote". Near the end of the article, Denby returns to
A Child of the Century, "that vast compendium of period evocation, juiced anecdotes, and dubious philosophy". ;Ghostwriting Marilyn Monroe's biography Besides working on novels and short stories, he has been credited with
ghostwriting books, including
Marilyn Monroe's autobiography
My Story. "The reprint of Marilyn Monroe's memoir,
My Story, in 2000, by Cooper Square Press, correctly credits Hecht as an author, ending a period of almost fifty years in which Hecht's role was denied ... Hecht himself, however, kept denying it publicly". According to her biographer,
Sarah Churchwell, Monroe was "persuaded to capitalize on her newfound celebrity by beginning an autobiography. It was born out of a collaboration with journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, hired as a ghostwriter". Churchwell adds that the facts in her story were highly selective. "Hecht reported to his editor during the interviews that he was sometimes sure Marilyn was fabricating. He explained, 'When I say lying, I mean she isn't telling the truth. I don't think so much that she is trying to deceive me as that she is a fantasizer.
Eddie Muller stated that "Ben Hecht's fingerprints are all over some of Hollywood's greatest movies, including early prototypes of what would become film noir." His movie career can be defined by about twenty credited screenplays he wrote for Hawks, Hitchcock, Hathaway, Lubitsch, Wellman, Sternberg, and himself. He wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators,
Charles MacArthur and
Charles Lederer. While living in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend
Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently moved to Los Angeles. "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." As a writer in need of money, he traveled to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested. ;Working in Hollywood He arrived in Los Angeles and began his career at the beginning of the sound era by writing the story for
Josef von Sternberg's gangster movie
Underworld in 1927. For that first screenplay and story, he won an
Academy Award for
Best Original Screenplay in Hollywood's first Academy award ceremony. Soon afterward, he became the "most prolific and highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood". Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing", writes film historian Carol Easton. Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money". Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover ... It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk, as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures." Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to
Samuel Goldwyn biographer, Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner
Charles MacArthur, he "knocked out
The Unholy Garden in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.: It was produced exactly as written, and 'became one of the biggest, yet funniest, bombs ever made by a studio'." According to historian David Thomson, "to their own minds, Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht both died morose and frustrated. Neither of them had written the great books they believed possible." ;with Howard Hawks In an interview with director
Howard Hawks, with whom Hecht worked on many films, Scott Breivold elicited comments on the way they often worked: ;with David O. Selznick According to film historian Virginia Wexman,
Nothing Sacred is probably the "most famous of all the
Carole Lombard films next to
My Man Godfrey", wrote movie historian James Harvey. And it impressed people at the time with its evident ambition "and Selznick determined to make the classiest of all screwball comedies, turned to Lombard as a necessity, but also to Ben Hecht, nearly the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, especially for comedy. ... it was also the first screwball comedy to lay apparent claim to larger satiric meanings, to make scathing observations about American life and society." In an interview with
Irene Selznick, ex-wife of producer
David O. Selznick, she discussed the other leading screenwriters of that time: ;with Ernst Lubitsch According to James Harvey,
Ernst Lubitsch felt uneasy in the world of playwright
Noël Coward.
Styles of writing According to Siegel, "The talkie era put writers like Hecht at a premium because they could write dialogue in the quirky, idiosyncratic style of the common man. Hecht, in particular, was wonderful with slang, and he peppered his films with the argot of the streets. He also had a lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to ground even the most outrageous stories successfully with credible, fast-paced plots." "Movies", Hecht was to recall, "were seldom written. In 1927, they were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels, and all-night poker games. Movie sets roared with arguments and organ music." ;
The Front Page (1931) After contributing to the original stories for a number of films, he worked without credit on the first film version of his original 1928 play
The Front Page. It was produced by
Howard Hughes and directed by
Lewis Milestone in 1931. James Harvey writes, Of the original play, theater producer and writer
Jed Harris writes,
Eddie Muller observed that "Hecht and MacArthur's ribald rat-a-tat dialogue... instantly created a new American archetype—the fast-talking, hard-drinking newshound who'll do anything for a scoop." ;
Scarface (1932) After ushering in the beginning of the gangster films with
Underworld, his next film became one of the best films of that genre.
Scarface was directed by
Howard Hawks, with "Hecht the wordsmith and Hawks the engineer", :Letter by
David O. Selznick to Hecht, December 19, 1956: :Letter by Selznick to
John Huston, April 3, 1957: The following letter discusses
Portrait of Jennie (1948): Hecht was not credited, however, for his contribution, and Sidney Howard received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. In a letter from Selznick to film editor O'Shea [October 19, 1939], Selznick discussed how the writing credits should appear, taking into consideration that Sidney Howard had died a few months earlier after a farm-tractor accident at his home in Massachusetts: In a letter [September 25, 1939] from Selznick to Hecht, regarding writing introductory sequences and titles, which were used to set the scene and condense the narrative throughout the movie, Selznick wrote, ;
His Girl Friday (1940) "
His Girl Friday remains not just the fastest-talking romantic comedy ever made, but a very tricky inquiry into love's need for a chase (or a dream) and the sharpest pointer to uncertain gender roles." Hecht wrote that he has "never had more fun writing a movie", and felt the James Bond character was cinema's first "gentleman superman" in a long time, as opposed to Hammett and Chandler's "roughneck supermen". Hecht died few days before the final screenplay was announced to the press. Duns compares Hecht's unpublished screenplay with the final rewritten film: ==Personal life==