The oldest of three children of a single mother, Bella Cohen was born in
Bucharest, Romania and with her family emigrated to the
Lower East Side of
Manhattan when she was a child. After graduation from
Washington Irving High School, she worked as a
journalist for
socialist and
pacifist newspapers such as the
New York Call. Her work drew attention from Samuel, working as a
reporter for
The World, and the couple married in 1922. Shortly afterwards, they departed for
Moscow, where they worked as news correspondents for the next four years. After returning to the
United States, they settled in
New Hope, Pennsylvania. In the latter part of the decade, Samuel wrote several novels, including
Mon Paul,
The Skyscraper Murder, and
The Murder in the Gilded Cage (which he adapted into the film
The Secret Witness), on his own, while the pair collaborated on plays. The two wrote several plays that made it to
Broadway, including 1932's
Clear All Wires. Although that play only ran for 93 performances, they adapted it for
a 1933 film. It later became the basis of the hit 1938
Cole Porter musical
Leave It to Me!, for which the Spewacks wrote the book and which Sam directed. The Spewacks continued to write
screenplays throughout the 1930s, earning an
Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story for
My Favorite Wife in 1940. The 1933 film
The Solitaire Man was based on their 1927 play of the same name. They also penned a remake of
Grand Hotel, entitled
Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), which starred
Ginger Rogers. In the summer of 1943, Sam accompanied Lt.
Burgess Meredith to England to co-write the U.S. Army training film
A Welcome to Britain, which educated arriving troops on cultural differences between Americans and the British. The Spewacks were separated in 1948 when they were approached to write the book for
Kiss Me, Kate, which centered on a once-married couple of thespians who use the stage on which they're performing as a battling ground. Bella initially began working with composer-lyricist Cole Porter on her own, but eventually turned to Sam to collaborate with her, and the Spewacks completed the project together. It yielded each of them two
Tony Awards, one for
Best Musical, the other for
Best Author of a Musical.
Kiss Me, Kate proved to be their most successful work. Perhaps their best known straight play was
My Three Angels, which they adapted from the French play
La Cuisine des Anges by
Albert Husson. The French play was adapted as the 1955
Michael Curtiz film ''
We're No Angels, which was later remade in 1989 by Neil Jordan. The Spewacks sued Paramount over the 1955 film, which purported to be based on the Husson original rather than their adaptation. As "H.H.T." wrote in the New York Times review of the Curtiz film, "Oddly enough, the new Paramount comedy, We're No Angels'', gives sole credit to the Gallic original, then stalks the Spewacks almost scene by scene, without, alas, most of the fun." In 1965, Sam collaborated with
Frank Loesser on a musical adaptation of the 1961 Spewack play
Once There Was a Russian. Entitled
Pleasures and Palaces, it closed following its
Detroit run and never opened on Broadway. Bella was a successful
publicist for the
Camp Fire Girls and
Girl Scouts of the USA, and claimed to have introduced the idea of selling cookies for the latter as a means of raising revenue for the organization.
A Letter to Sam from Bella, a one-act play by Broadway director Aaron Frankel, is based on the Spewacks' personal papers from the Theater Arts Collection of
Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. ==Additional Broadway credits==