Consider, if you will, the legend of the “Great American Reporter.” Think of Woodward and Bernstein daring the Nixon thugs to find the truth and topple a president. Think of glamorous red-headed Brenda Starr with her exotic comic strip adventures and her steamy love life. Think of the young Mark Twain, making a national reputation with his dry, tongue-in-check observations of San Francisco. Think of curmudgeonly crusader Lou Grant tackling the truth against the odds. Think of noble, bespectacled Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, who regularly turns into the all-powerful icon of American idealism, Superman. (Indeed, could Superman have been anything other than a reporter?)

We love those newspaper guys, those heroes.

Then—um—there’s The Front Page, a profane, un-PC, rough-hewn, rat-a-tat tommy gun of a play about the Chicago newspaper business back in its gory glory days. No bravery, no nobility, no exoticism, certainly no idealism! A bunch of raunchy, bored, cynical, ghoulish reporters sit around in a floating poker game waiting for the “big” story, the hanging of an anarchist murderer that will literally swing an election. Innocent? Guilty? No one gives a damn except to hope that his paper gets the exclusive. It’s a crummy, side-splittingly funny view of the press pool, a world that addicts its denizens like a drug and leads nowhere. And yet, the play is a love letter to newspapers and, in spite of everything, we still do love these guys.

It’s machine rule and mob rule 1920s Chicago, corrupt, brash, and full of lewd energy. The sheriff is totally the mayor’s man. The mayor is fiddling the upcoming election. They play the race card, and the immigrant card, and the ethnic card. Everybody pays-to-play (sound familiar?). Unexpectedly, the big story the reporters wait for turns out to be a jail break on the eve of execution. No wait! It’s actually two attempted bust outs, equally desperate—the condemned Earl Williams’ dash for survival and the Examiner’s best reporter, Hildy Johnson, breaking for freedom and a new life. Hildy is off to New York to marry a lovely, if conventional, girl, take a well-paid, if very conventional, job with her uncle’s advertising firm, and live a “decent,” “respectable” life. With the furious roars of his managing editor, Walter Burns, ringing in his ears and in his dandyish new clothes, wedding rings in his pocket, Hildy thinks he’s escaping the grubby, dead-end, lonely, amoral newspaper business that is personified by the “bums” in the shabby press room of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building. But when the Earl Williams jail break lands in his lap, the breaking “big story” does what all Burns’ rage and his old colleagues’ taunts can’t do. Hildy succumbs to being the news hound that’s in his blood.

The mayhem unleashed onstage seems so like farce, so wickedly contrived, but is actually solidly grounded in the reminiscences of the two former newspapermen who wrote the play, Ben Hecht (1894-1964) and Charles MacArthur (1895-1956). They met while working for various Chicago papers, both still in their teens, and began a lifetime collaboration a few years later in New York. To write their first co-authored play, The Front Page, they rented an empty Nyack, New York girls’ school in the summer of 1927 and locked themselves in, together with the memories that they threw back and forth at each other until the play was written. Food and booze were brought in by their wives, Rose Hecht and none other than Helen Hayes, MacArthur’s wife. The reporters and other characters, the incidents, the celebrated jail break, the seedy card game, the two-faced managing editor, the shifty sheriff and the slick mayor, the easily-outsmarted cops, even the infamous plot twist at the end (which I won’t spoil), are all straight out of the real experience of these two dialogue geniuses. All the names are Chicago names, most of them actual people. There was, for example, a great Chicago reporter called Hilding Johnson (who loved the fame the play gave him) but the squelched honeymoon and the relationship with the managing editor (based on Walter Howey of the Herald-Examiner) was Charlie MacArthur’s experience. Tommy O’Connor was the murderer who skipped his own execution by making the police look stupid and the sheriff was so recognizable that Chicago audiences rolled in the aisles at the satire. The Front Page was, in its day, “reality theatre.”

It also turned out to be “a Valentine thrown to the past” for its brash young authors. Hecht and MacArthur claimed that they set out to write “a piece of work which would reflect our intellectual disdain of and superiority to the Newspaper.” As they wrote, however, they discovered that their contempt “was a bogus attitude” and, in fact, they recalled “the Good Old Days” with uncontrollable sentimentality as “two reporters in exile.”

Hecht and MacArthur were the classic odd couple. Ben Hecht was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. Charles MacArthur came from the large, impoverished family of a Pennsylvania evangelist preacher. Hecht, a prodigy, was a concert violinist at 10, a circus acrobat at 12, and a Chicago reporter by 17. He was an early activist for civil rights for people of color and a crusader against the Ku Klux Klan. He went on to become the most prolific and important screen writer in Hollywood history. MacArthur, too, was an early starter who had a Chicago column and byline by age 19. In addition, he could boast a stint in Pershing's army chasing Pancho Villa around Mexico and service during World War II. He joined Hecht first in New York (where they wrote plays, individually and as collaborators), then in Hollywood. Devoted friends and colleagues, they often collaborated (The Twentieth Century, Gunga Din, Barbary Coast, Wuthering Heights for example). At one point they founded their own studio, which wasn’t profitable. Hecht wrote MacArthur’s biography.

Whether you know it or not, Ben Hecht’s scripts shaped much of our imaginations. He wrote almost 90 filmscripts, credited and uncredited, and worked with the great directors of the era. Scarface, Underworld, Nothing Sacred, A Farewell to Arms, Spellbound, Notorious, Some Like It Hot, and dozens of others all bear his name. The Nazi policies against European Jews woke him from his casual American Jewishness to highly partisan activism. His Zionism and vocal criticism of British policies in Palestine earned him blacklisting in England from the early 1940s. As a result, many of his greatest films don’t carry his name: think Stagecoach, The Man with the Golden Arm, Angels with Dirty Faces, Cleopatra, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hans Christian Andersen, Gone with the Wind, Gilda, A Star Is Born, Guys and Dolls, Mutiny on the Bounty, Queen Christina, Trapeze, Casino Royale, and on and on and on. His output is jaw-dropping.

However, back in the late ‘20s, while they penned their profane, funny love letter to the newspaper business, Hecht and MacArthur could not have dreamed that they were also writing the eulogy of the American press. One after another, the great papers are dying or struggling on life-support. Today, even as we laugh, we count the number of newspapers represented in this play for this one pressroom in this one city and marvel. We listen to the free-wheeling, fact-bending reporting style of these journalists and recognize that they enjoyed a crazy kind of freedom to say what they pleased, not what a corporation told them to say. For us, as for its authors years ago, The Front Page has become a “Valentine thrown to the past.”

© 2009 by Eileen Warburton

For further reading:
Ben Hecht. A Child of the Century, 1954. (Reprint: New York: Primus, Donald L. Fine, 1984) The superb autobiography of a superb storyteller!
George Hilton, editor. The Front Page: From Theater to Reality (Hanover, NH. Smith & Kraus, 2002). The script, several critical approaches, and lotsa pictures.


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.