Word: hechts
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From boyhood, when he lay in a Racine (Wis.) attic gobbling Shakespeare, Hecht regarded the world simply as a mint for the coining of "words" and "phrases." Most young bibliophiles "take sides" pas sionately when they read a book, regard less of whether they understand all the words, but young Hecht managed to do just the opposite. He recognized no "characters" in Shakespeare, only "words [that] seemed to hang in the air like feats of magic." He was only 16 when he landed the job of "picture chaser" on the Chicago Daily Journal. He was "sent forth each dawn...
Then he was promoted to genuine rapes, brothel murders, "a rash of bichloride of mercury suicides." He saw 17 murderers "twisting in their white sheets on the end of the whining rope" and could, today, he says, "cover a hundred pages with . . . fascinating cadavers." Writes Hecht nostalgically of those days: "That was happiness." The weakness of Hecht's armor was that it left him in sketchy underwear whenever he took it off. Like many an other supposedly invulnerable fellow, he was exposed, when in the buff, as more of a maudlin breast-beater than a Front Page chesty. Swept...
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...
...when Hecht looks back on it all, he laments the passing of those "merry," "wanton" days. True, he went on to make a heap of money on Broadway and in Hollywood, but this, he says, was cold comfort because he suffered terribly from "a nostalgia for poverty." He gets some comfort out of the somewhat mistaken belief that until he spoke up in 1939 "no voice of any importance anywhere" had protested against Hitler's butchery of Jews. He is also proud of having backed Palestine's Irgun terrorists so vigorously that he found "British spies among...
Also, Gassy Lamentation. Today, Author Hecht believes, "the artist is a vanishing figure . . . Individualism has dried up." All the girls, he complains, have become "masculinized," all the men soft as blubber. Police state government bleeds the citizen with taxes, relentlessly watches his every move. It is a far cry from the good old days of 1921, when Author Hecht, acting as "fund-raiser" for a Baptist group, "persuaded the Baptist synod ... to offer a prize of $5,000 for the best biography of the Savior," entered the contest under "the name of a needy Baptist pastor"-and walked off with...