Hollywood contemporaries Irving Berlin and Ben Hecht lived vastly different Jewish lives, with posterity predictably rewarding the politically correct Berlin and relegating Hecht to relative obscurity

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
Adina Hoffman

Yale University Press, 2019
264 pages

Irving Berlin: New York Genius
James Kaplan

Yale University Press, 2019
422 pages

Mention Irving Berlin, and Americans will almost surely start humming “White Christmas” or “God Bless America.” Mention Ben Hecht, and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Yet both were groundbreaking talents. Berlin (1888–1989) and Hecht (1893–1964) dominated the American entertainment industry from the 1920s to the 1950s – Hecht as a screenwriter and Berlin as a songwriter. Sharing an ear for dialect, they actually collaborated at least once. According to their recent biographies in the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series, however, these two products of Manhattan’s Lower East Side approached both their work and their Judaism very differently.

Highly self-disciplined and an astute businessman, Irving Berlin wrote nonstop (usually through the night) and maintained full control of his work. A perfectionist, he nearly buried “There’s No Business Like Show Business” lest audiences dislike it. And he composed “God Bless America” during World War I but thought it “just a little sticky” (p. 85), so he shelved it for twenty years, until World War II.

Though already a successful journalist and novelist, Ben Hecht made his real mark in cinema. Insiders acknowledge that he essentially invented the motion picture industry. In 1929, Hecht won the first Academy Award for Best Story for the silent film Underworld. He scripted or collaborated on as many as 140 movies, including such classics as Gone with the Wind and It’s a Wonderful Life. For a time, he was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Unlike Berlin, though, he spent recklessly and was often short of cash. He also considered his profession lowbrow, quipping that “it’s just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. But the view is different” (p. 97).