Word: ben
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ben Hecht has assaulted the world as a gifted playwright (The Front Page}, maudlin novelist (A Jew in Love), bright essayist (A Guide for the Bedeviled} and cantankerous pamphleteer for Zionism...
...young Chicago newspaperman, Ben Hecht once found himself standing in a train shed awaiting the arrival of a VIP when he observed a workman lying underneath a locomotive. "His legs protruded from the thighs down. I noted that the locomotive had steam up and that its bell was ringing." Next minute "the workman's long legs were lying on the platform . . . The rest of him . . . remained between the tracks." Just then the VIP's train pulled in, so Reporter Hecht left "the bloody scene" and hurried off to his interview. "I had felt no shock at what...
such as rape, suicide, murder or flagrante delicto . . . While maturer minds bad gered the survivors ... I scurried through bedrooms, poked noiselessly into closets, trunks and bureau drawers, and, the coveted photograph under my coat, bolted for the street." How to Be Happy. Armored Ben's first prose efforts took the form of phony news stories ("Tales of lawsuits no court had ever seen, involving names no city directory had ever known...
Apostle in Disguise. "I dedicated myself," says Hecht, "to attacking prudes, piety-mongers and all apostles of virtue." The snag was that young Ben, raised by a good mother, was himself a disguised apostle of virtue. He would prance into a brothel "playing drunkard and whoremonger with all the vocabulary at my command"-only to find himself clutching the hand of a fallen sister and begging her to reform. He even took one young prostitute to live with him and "encouraged her to weep over her vile life." He "read books to her every night," while she "lay nude . . . listening...
...early irises" of his Nyack garden and became (evidently forgetting about Benjamin Disraeli) »'the first Jew to be denounced in the House of Commons for 500 years." But to Hecht none of this counts for much compared with the misfortune of living in the contemporary world. For Ben Hecht clearly blames Ben Hecht on his time-which may be less than fair to the 20th century...