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As Norman Mailer noted in 1973, Hecht was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.” Hecht’s gift for confabulated anecdote suggests one reason that he became so successful as a Hollywood entertainer.
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How many of these details are true? It’s impossible to say, but truth, in this case, may not be the point.
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“The Stockyards’ owners imported Billy Sunday to divert their underpaid hunkies from going on strike by shouting them dizzy with God,” he tells us. In his book, Hecht recalls the local-journalism obsessions in the nineteen-tens and twenties-spectacular crimes and municipal frauds, a general atmosphere of license, exploitation, and swindle. At the age of seventeen, he became a full-time reporter, and attained what he called a “bug-in-a-rug citizenship” of Chicago. For some months, he wrote nothing for the Journal, but made himself useful by invading the homes of people suffering one tragedy or another and stealing a picture of the victim, usually a woman, which would then appear in the paper. (Don’t ask.) Hecht wrote the poem while Eastman was out to lunch, and got the job. He told the young man that he would hire him if he wrote a profane poem-a poem about a bull that swallows a bumblebee. The publisher was throwing a party that night and needed something he could show off. Having slept on a bench in the Chicago railroad station, he tried to go see a show at the Majestic Vaudeville Theatre, only to be accosted by a distant relative, Manny Moyses, a liquor salesman “with a large red nose.” Moyses pried him loose from the ticket line and brought him to meet a client who also had a red nose, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Journal, one John C. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.īen Hecht, the greatest of American screenwriters, produced, near the end of his career, a garrulous autobiography, “ A Child of the Century,” in which he tells us the following: In 1910, at the age of sixteen, he left the University of Wisconsin after attending for three days and took a train to Chicago.