Get Me Rewrite!

Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and the Secret History of The Front Page

Even on their best days, journalists are prone to nostalgia. It’s a vocational hazard, a virus spread through stories, newsroom oxygen, and a slew of flattering Hollywood movies. Think of scoops, scandals, and romance. Savvy reporters sweating after stories. Gruff, demanding editors. Calm, courageous publishers.

That romantic image of journalism dates back to Prohibition. That’s when Broadway gave journalism a lasting gift: the cynical, wisecracking reporter. You might still remember him from screwball comedies. The loose tie and fedora. Whiskey secreted in his desk or back pocket. A cool, amoral charm. That classic archetype sprung from The Front Page, the bawdy, souped-up comedy that conquered Broadway in 1928.

By the blushing standards of ’20s theater, the play was shocking, a wild, profane joke-spree. “It was the play that uncorseted the American theater,” Tennessee Williams said. Indeed, its effect was seismic. It went 1920s viral, catching fire across the country. (Even Sydney, Australia, hosted a production.) It changed cinema, jump-starting the screwball comedy craze. It boosted journalism, drawing starry-eyed youngsters to the seedy, freewheeling world of booze and deadlines.

Nine decades later, its legacy is secure. Less famous, however, are the play’s origins, the story of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s partnership. How was The Front Page written? Whose genius was the active ingredient? Success tends to dissolve such questions, but not always; for years, there was gossip and speculation. How did Hecht and MacArthur create their masterpiece? Were they equal partners — the Lennon and McCartney of 1920s playwriting— or something a little different?

As a longtime Front Page fan, I was curious, so when the opportunity arose, I did some sleuthing. To make matters interesting, Hecht and MacArthur were brilliantly, cunningly evasive about their writing methods. When quizzed by reporters, they launched into shtick, bickering, trading insults, answering questions with quips. All those clever deflections did the trick. Thwarted, reporters gave up.

The writers first met around 1917 as young reporters in Chicago. They were émigrés of a sort, Hecht a Midwesterner, MacArthur from Nyack, New York. Their first collaboration miscarried when one of them — they never agreed on whom — got drunk and lost their manuscript. It stayed lost, but the friendship endured. Over roughly a decade, they drank together; schemed together; worked the same beat (albeit for rival papers); fled failing marriages; and decamped to New York City.

By 1925, they were bookends, both dapper, striving, and fairly new to Manhattan. MacArthur, lean and charming, was an aspiring playwright. Hecht, a fast, versatile writer of fiction, essays, and plays, had an erratic, quixotic talent. But together, through some creative alchemy, they were virtuosic, their combined genius exceeding the sum of their individual talents.

Their second, more famous collaboration began by accident. Hecht had written a fast-paced comedy, The Man-Eating Tiger, with his wife Rose. It hadn’t gone smoothly — the couple fought, the play flopped — but Hecht wanted to try again. When Rose refused — “I preferred our marriage to collaboration” — she promptly summoned MacArthur. Her message: you work with him. The rest is history.

But it’s history of a fuzzy, conjectural kind. The Front Page was written in Hecht’s New York apartment and, later, in Nyack. MacArthur’s second wife, Helen Hayes, liked to spotlight the mens’ teamwork. That drove Rose Hecht crazy. “A team, you say,” she wrote in her notes. Yet she maintained a diplomatic silence. “It was for the sake of the play, the legend of the two friends and my own good memories, that I made no comment.”

Privately, Rose thought Hecht deserved the credit, and others agreed. “With Ben and Charlie, Ben did all the writing,” the writer John Lee Mahin, an assistant to both writers, claimed. To many in their circle, that seemed plausible: Hecht wrote so quickly and effortlessly, it was almost spooky. Many theater people assumed that he, not MacArthur, was the presiding genius.

At first glance, the play’s vocabulary and themes belong mostly to Hecht. When the curtain rises, Hildy, the young reporter-hero, is at a crossroads. He’s planning to quit journalism, leave Chicago, and start a proper, respectable career in advertising. The play practically screams, “Don’t do it, Hildy!”, and for the next 140 minutes, we await Hildy’s decision. What are the stakes? Only his soul, the play suggests.

Hildy’s conundrum would have been familiar to Hecht’s readers. Between 1920 and 1924, Hecht wrote three novels about anxious, unsettled young writers. During that same period, Hecht got divorced, left Chicago, and got fired from his newspaper job. Art imitated life. Hecht’s first novel, Erik Dorn, was about “a young husband’s gradual revolt against domestic normalcy,” as H. L. Mencken put it. That same villain, domestic normalcy, reappears in Gargoyles (1922) and Humpty Dumpty (1924), where writers chase money and prestige into boring, dead-end jobs. The result? Domestic normalcy. Like a succubus, it threatens to steal the youth, vitality, and freedom from Hecht’s young scribblers.

So it goes in The Front Page. Hildy’s fiancé hates journalism — absurd, childish racket — and its grip on Hildy. Just leave, she begs him: “It’s your chance to have a home and be a human being.” That’s Hildy’s dilemma in a nutshell: Free man or obedient spouse? Busy, exciting life or serene, predictable one? The play is a comedy, but an unusual sort: seldom noticed is the deep undercurrent of anxiety running through it, anxiety about marriage, conformity, complacency, and selling out. Those were Hecht’s worries in the 1920s, and they form the hidden spine of The Front Page, along with nostalgia for newsrooms and journalists.

Even without spotting those connections, people assumed Hecht wrote The Front Page, and Hecht didn’t disagree. “He didn’t contribute very much,” Hecht sometimes said of MacArthur. When put on the spot, Hecht was blunt: he, not MacArthur, did the writing.

Sifting through archives, reading and rereading the play itself, I suspected as much. Indeed, Hecht’s early articles contain a handful of short, sharp sketches of local reporters. “Romantic memories crowd in,” Hecht wrote, “as I think of the County Building Press Room.” There, in embryonic form, are The Front Page’s heroes, its cynics, pranksters, and neurotics. To encounter them on microfilm is to feel a shiver: one sees The Front Page being born, not in 1928, but in 1922 and 1923, in the pages of the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Literary Times. Meanwhile, in those same newspapers, Hecht was perfecting the fast-paced, staccato dialogue that gives The Front Page its stunning velocity.

* * *

What, then, of MacArthur, whose name still clings to playbills, scripts — the entire recorded history of The Front Page? At first, MacArthur was evasive, outwitting me as if he were still alive. But soon enough, as I conducted interviews — including one with Hecht’s secretary, who observed the men working — MacArthur’s role came into focus. As it happens, he was not only valuable to the partnership, he was indispensable, if peculiarly so.

For one thing, he created Walter Burns, the fiendish, conniving editor who storms the pressroom in act two. (In real life, Burns was Walter Howey, MacArthur’s boss at the Chicago Herald–Examiner.) But MacArthur’s signal contribution, his genius, really, was as a keen, judicious editor. Hecht wrote fast, “but he didn’t have the instinct for perfection that Charlie had,” Helen Hayes recalled. If Hecht was quick but undisciplined, MacArthur was the opposite: methodical, shrewd, exacting. MacArthur’s job was to save Hecht from himself, to curb his worst instincts. He was a sieve that caught Hecht’s best ideas and let everything else pass through.

Hecht admitted as much in his 1957 memoir of MacArthur. Working together in Hecht’s apartment, “I’d throw a speech into the pot that seemed perfect to me. I’d chuckled dotingly as I offered it. Charlie would shake his head — and the speech would vanish. I believed in his headshake.” The head shook often. The plotting had to be tight; the characters had to stay in character. Mahin, who watched them work, recalled their modus operandi:

Ben and Charlie would discuss the scene, and Ben would go in and bat in out, bat it out. Charlie would be in the next room, playing the clarinet. Then Ben would read it, and Charlie would say, “No!” Ben would say, “All right, I’ll try again.”

MacArthur also supplied plot twists and peppered the script with bon mots. “When he did make a contribution, it was brilliant,” Hecht told a producer of his 1958–59 television show. One of Hecht’s secretaries, Nanette Barber, recalls watching the men collaborate. In warm months, MacArthur would amble over to Hecht’s house — they lived five minutes apart, in Nyack — and join Hecht upstairs. While Hecht scribbled at his desk, MacArthur, lying horizontally on Hecht’s bed, would sometimes interject. “He had taste and wit,” Barber said of MacArthur, whose ideas went directly into the script. “And I could see that he had genius.”

Partly, that genius was for tone. In Hecht’s novels, he played the iconoclast, skewering pieties, platitudes, and institutions. Marriage? A female plot. Middle-class life? A slow, quiet death. Money, status, and credentials? False gods, grim consolations for the weak and conformist. To write a commercial farce, Hecht’s harsher postures had to be softened, tempered, transmuted into humor. It’s likely that MacArthur, the calmer, gentler of the pair, policed the script, smoothing out its rough edges. Indeed, The Front Page is pure candy, a slick, seamless production that aims only to entertain, not shock the bourgeoisie.

No wonder that Hecht, when feeling stuck on a manuscript, turned to MacArthur. (When MacArthur needed help, Hecht returned the favor.) It wasn’t just plotting, though, that MacArthur assisted with. Over the years, MacArthur helped cure Hecht of his main literary vice: pat psychologizing. “To hell with psychology,” MacArthur would scold. “Let the story tell it.” For Hecht, that advice was critical: working alone, his debt to Freud and Nietzsche was obvious. His lack of empathy, coupled with an over-reliance on psychology (Hecht was “not too much of a psychologist,” Saul Bellow once wrote), was an Achilles’ heel.

And so, playing opposite roles — writer and editor, acrobat and spotter — the writers complemented each other perfectly. “Ben needed Charlie’s taste, and Charlie needed Ben’s energy and creative talent,” the writer Ian Hunter recalled. Helen Hayes agreed: “Ben could have used Charlie’s sense of taste. And Charlie needed Ben’s ability to get things done.” Hayes even acknowledged, in an unpublished interview, that Hecht wrote nearly all The Front Page’s dialogue. Hecht, for his part, once called himself an “apple tree” that needed MacArthur’s shaking “to see if any beauties fell out.”

The 1928 version of The Front Page — which was further polished by its producer, Jed Harris, and director, George S. Kaufman — marked the pinnacle of Hecht and MacArthur’s partnership; afterwards, their fates diverged sharply. In the 1930s, Hecht became one of Hollywood’s best screenwriters, with Scarface and Nothing Sacred among his credits, while MacArthur’s career was hampered by bad luck and alcoholism. Nonetheless, they partnered on numerous scripts, some good, some average, one, The Scoundrel (1935), an Oscar winner. All the while, they worked more or less the same way, until, with MacArthur all but incapacitated by alcohol, Hecht took over entirely.

Since their deaths in 1956 (MacArthur) and 1964 (Hecht), their reputations have declined. If anything has endured, it’s the mystique, the myth of the equal literary marriage. They refused to debunk it — and why would they? They weren’t explainers; they were entertainers. Keep ’em laughing. Keep ’em guessing.

The formula served them well. “I have found that the best way to get a play finished is to leave Hecht strictly alone while he is doing our writing,” MacArthur once said. A joke, or a confession? Like many of the pair’s public statements, it was artful evasion, the work of two brilliant and clever tricksters who, playing perfectly different roles, created one of America’s rowdiest, cleverest, most deliriously pleasurable plays.

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