Playwright/Screenwriter Ben Hecht

Many ironic things happen in Hollywood.

Overnight idiots become geniuses and geniuses become idiots, waitresses turn into duchesses and what duchesses turn into won't bear mentioning. Overnight in Hollywood panhandling hams blossom into Coquelins and Lorenzos and vice versa. The boulevards are crowded with royal coaches turning into pumpkins before your eyes.

It's an Aladdin's Lamp of a town, and whichever way you rub it, genii jump out and make sport of the laws of gravity and sanity.

Everybody in Hollywood is used to irony, used to every mirage and monkeyshine of Fate. There is even the irony that people in Hollywood work harder than boilermakers and that this happy land of glamour is a tougher locale for survival than the Yukon. And there is yet the more inscrutable irony that out of this wedding of Jabberwock and the Muses called Hollywood a most astonishing lot of worthy enterprise emerges, full of beauty, wit and high purpose.

But the most ironical of events ever to happen in Hollywood is occurring today in its eastern suburb, the city of New York. It is the trial of Joe Schenck.

His Girl Friday, an adaptation of the 1928 Hecht/MacArthur Broadway smash The Front Page, was released just a year before this article appeared in the pages of Boxoffice®. Russell was cast in the traditionally male role of Hildy Johnson after director Hawks heard the lines read out by a woman prior to production.

Watch His Girl Friday in Timecode Theatre at the bottom of the page. Broadband, Dialup, or iPhone. Quicktime required.

A "Juicy Scapegoat"

Our government has decided that Joe is a criminal and should be sent to jail. Federal barristers are lambasting the hell out of Joe in open court, charging him with swindles and chicaneries against the income tax laws. And The Press of the land is happily focusing its wits and derision on this latest and juiciest of Hollywood scapegoats.

And therein, I assure you, is enough irony to give a hangman a bellyache. For of all the Nabobs and Satraps, Caliphs and Pooh-Bahs who make movies in Hollywood, Joe Schenck is the last man who belongs in a prisoner's dock. It is as ironical a piece of miscasting as was ever indulged in by his own 20th Century Company which, if you saw Tyrone Power in "Mark of Zorro," is a considerable statement.

I have never worked for Joe nor any of his companies and none of his silver has ever crossed my palm. Nor am I an intimate of his. I am merely one of the thousands who know Hollywood a little too well and who are looking on wideeyed at the irony of the pillorying of that town's most humane and gallant gentleman.

Joe's case will never be put into the evidence, however bright his lawyers. He will sit stolidly and take the rap for whatever misdemeanors are accredited to him and like the classy gambler he has always been he will take his licking without compromising friend or foe.

Befriender of Has Beens

There will be no evidence of another fact. This is the fact that many of the hundreds of thousands of dollars Joe is accused of having deducted fraudulently in his income tax returns were dollars squandered in secret charities. Joe shelled out a goodly part of his fortune weekly and yearly to hundreds of broken down hams and glamour girls, to hundreds of one~time jolly people wriggling finally at the bottom of the heap. Joe has been the Santa Claus of the Hollywood and Broadway rubbish heaps. He has supported more burned-out stars and buried more penniless alcoholic, harlots, mimes and scribblers than any gentleman of his time. Joe won't hand in the names of these who have known his largesse as extenuating evidence because that would be against his theory of deportment.

Six weeks after this article appeared Joseph Schenck, Chairman of 20th Century-Fox Film Corp., was sentenced to three years in prison and hit with a $20,000 fine for evading $250,000 in income tax. He was released in less than five months after being pardoned by President Harry Truman and returned to Fox as Head of Production.

And how the hell is Joe going to get it explained to a jury that his squandering money for entertainment expenses-parties costing from two to four grand a clip-was his honorable way of serving his company and his stockholders?

In these parties Joe created Joe Schenck and, once created, Joe Schenck became a figure of importance in a major, if cockeyed, industry. In these parties Joe learned wisdom, made friendships, dispensed cheer, consolidated talent deals, eavesdropped on ideas, rhumbaed with starlets and furthered the cause of movie-making as much as any single man connected with it. That the cause is a humptydumpty one and that it needs swimming pools and casinos and mixed quartets on the Pacific sands at dawn for furthering is none of Joe's doing. He furthered it for 30 years without making an enemy, turning down a touch, growing a deaf ear or a concrete bosom.

The Press, ever ready to pin its peacock feathers on any big name scapegoat, will see Joe's life as a dizzy and protracted Hollywood orgy. Wine flowed and women laughed and wriggled on divans, poker chips clicked and dress suits dived into swimming pools. But this was no orgy. It was Joe loving life and creating out of his doting not only a humane and gallant gentleman but an industry which brought cheer to millions and great fortune to thousands.

"Guilty of Nothing"

Joe says calmly he is guilty of nothing. But he is modest in his protest. For along with some of his other claims, Joe is also a philosopher.

"My father once told me," he says, "that if you are cold sober and haven't had a drink in weeks and five sane and intelligent people look at you and tell youyou are dead drunk, the best thing to do is not to argue but lie down and take a nap for an hour."

Joe is for the present having his little nap. And as Hemingway wrote of another gentleman in trouble, Joe snoozing a bit at his counsel's table "looks pretty good out there."