Description
Book SynopsisBen Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.
In 1932, Hechtsolidified his legend as ""the Shakespeare of Hollywood"" with his thriller
Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe's Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state.
The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences.
Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written
Notorious! and
Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando's career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe's memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Prelude: The Lost Land of Boyhood
- Part I: THE NEWSPAPERMAN
- The Chicago School of Journalism
- Chapter 1: The Chicago School
- Chapter 2: Shades of Black: The Stages of Hecht's Cynicism
- Chapter 3: Propagandist in Training
- Chapter 4: The Journalist and the Gangster
- Part II: THE WRITER
- The Chicago Renaissance and Hollywood
- Chapter 5: The Chicago Renaissance: Little Children
- of the Arts
- Chapter 6: Crying in the Wilderness
- Chapter 7: The Un-Jewish Jew
- Chapter 8: Return
- Part III: THE ZIONIST
- From Humanist to Public Enemy
- Chapter 9: Jewish Knights: The Bergson Group
- Chapter 10: "Champion in Chains"
- Chapter 11: Campaign for a Jewish Army
- Chapter 12: "A Challenge to the Soul of Men"
- Chapter 13: "One of the Greatest Crimes in History"
- Chapter 14: Blood and Fire
- Chapter 15: Only Thus
- Part IV: THE MEMOIRIST
- Writing about L.A.'s Al Capone
- Chapter 16: "Some Kind of Strength"
- Chapter 17: Champion in Chains, Revisited
- Chapter 18: The Old New Journalist
- Chapter 19: Time Out for Psychology
- Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
