They Made the Pictures Talk

By RICHARD CORLISS

BEN HECHT: THE MAN BEHIND THE LEGEND by William MacAdams

Scribner's; 366 pages; $24.95

MADCAP: THE LIFE OF PRESTON STURGES by Donald Spoto

Little, Brown; 301 pages; $19.95

Ben Hecht was lounging between careers -- he had written seven novels and two Broadway plays and was now dead broke -- when in 1926 he received a telegram from his pal Herman J. Mankiewicz, then a Hollywood scriptwriter. "Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures?" the wire read. "The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Then a mock-wily P.S.: "Don't let this get around."

It got around -- the news that Hollywood needed somebody to write the words for talking pictures. And it stayed around -- the contempt for self and cinema that Mankiewicz's cable winks at. How could one be paid so much to have one's literature ground into pulp by the coarse merchants who ran the movies? In the '30s and '40s a few screenwriters, pre-eminently Preston Sturges, seized the means of production and became their own directors. The rest mostly complained about their six-figure serfdom, partly because they were so good at it. "It is as difficult to make a toilet seat as a castle window," Hecht wrote in 1962, "even if the view is different."

Hecht was not just a cog in America's great art industry. He was a one-man cottage industry, occasionally directing his own scripts but more often writing and rewriting for hire. The filmography in William MacAdams' brisk biography of Hecht lists 143 movie projects, on 77 of which he got no screen credit. The list includes many of Hollywood's sassiest entertainments (Scarface, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday), but neither MacAdams nor any other scholar can isolate Hecht's contribution to each of them. Only this can be said with assurance: Ben Hecht did not work on Citizen Kane, Dumbo or Reefer Madness.

MacAdams doesn't come close to making his case for Hecht as "the most influential writer in the history of American movies." The racy dialect and hard-eyed urban fables associated with Hecht were in Hollywood's vocabulary virtually from the onslaught of sound in 1927. But MacAdams brings gusto to tales of Hecht's early days as a ruthless reporter and to his later, angry crusade as a pioneer Zionist. MacAdams also has a great source: Hecht's brio- filled 1954 autobiography, A Child of the Century.

Sturges should have written Hecht's biography; he loved brash charlatans and made comic art of their deceptions. Hecht should have written Sturges'; he would have wrung high irony from the story of a gallivanting rich boy who grew up to be the top writer-director in pictures. And one of the blithest. "All I do is wave a little wand a little," purred the orchestra conductor in Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours, "and out comes the music." For five glorious years, 1940-44, Sturges waved his wand and out came words and pictures. Nothing but Hollywood's most distinctive satires: The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. So rent the movies. Don't read the book.

Sturges' mother was a much-married dilettante who befriended Theda Bara, Aleister Crowley and Isadora Duncan. While working for his mother's cosmetics firm, Preston invented a kissproof lipstick. His life was as eccentric as his films. How does Donald Spoto make it read like forced labor? Some biographies, the good ones, offer a vivid picture of the artist's life. Others, like Spoto's, remind you of the biographer's trudge through library morgues and dead-end interviews. Sturges' film world was so open to American experience that even a bartender, asked for a special concoction, could exclaim, "Sir, you rouse the artist in me!" In Spoto, Sturges hardly rouses the pedant. Fact is, though, Hollywood frequently roused the artist in its cynical convoy of screenwriters.

P.S.: Don't let this get around.