March was born in New York City in July 1899, where he attended
DeWitt Clinton High School. He served in the U.S. Army during
World War I, and graduated from
Amherst College in 1920 (where he was a protégé of
Robert Frost). He married Cyra Thomas in 1921, and they later divorced. He was also married to and divorced from Sue Wise after 1928. in 1925, and helped create the magazine's "Talk of the Town" front section. He left the magazine, and wrote the first of his two important long
Jazz Age narrative poems,
The Wild Party. Due to its risqué content, this violent story of a vaudeville dancer who throws a booze and sex-filled party could not find a publisher until 1928. Once published, however, the poem was a great success despite being
banned in Boston. March followed with
The Set-Up, a poem about a black boxer who had just been released from prison. In 1929, March moved to Hollywood to provide additional dialogue for the film ''
Journey's End'' and, more famously, to turn the silent version of
Howard Hughes' classic ''
Hell's Angels'' into a
talkie — a rewrite that brought the phrase "Excuse me while I put on something more comfortable" into the American lexicon. March stayed with Hughes'
Caddo Pictures studio for several years, temporarily running the office, overseeing the release of ''Hell's Angels'', and getting into legal trouble after an attempt to steal the script for rival
Warner Bros.' flying picture
The Dawn Patrol. March worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood until 1940, under contract to MGM and Paramount and later as a freelancer for
Republic Pictures and other studios; he wrote at least 19 produced scripts in his Hollywood career. His most prominent late script is probably the left-leaning
John Wayne curio
Three Faces West, a knockoff of
The Grapes of Wrath that ends with a faceoff between
Okies and
Nazis. With his third wife, Peggy Prior (a
Pathé screenwriter whom he married in 1932) and her two children, March returned to the East Coast in 1940. During
World War II, he worked at a shipbuilding plant in
Groton, Connecticut, and wrote features (mostly acid assessments of the movie business) for the
New York Times Magazine. In later years, he wrote documentaries for the
United States Department of State and
industrial films for
Ford Motor Company,
General Motors,
Monsanto Company,
American Airlines, and others. Several films starring industrial films icon
Thelma "Tad" Tadlock, including
Design for Dreaming (1956) and
A Touch of Magic (1961) were made from March's rhyming scripts. He retired from writing in 1964 and returned to California, where he died at a nursing home in Los Angeles on February 14, 1977. == Works and legacy ==