Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers Of

letting a crew film their life for the better Wonderful Life (1946)—which they didn’t part of a year, hadn’t experienced the inter- like—as well as the stage adaptation of The vening period in which, thanks to Jenny Diary of Anne Frank (1955), for which they Jones and Jerry Springer and Fear Factor, it won their Pulitzer and are probably best has become grotesquely obvious that many remembered today. Americans will do anything to be on televi- In this engaging and spirited biography— sion. And what seemed such sensational TV the title alludes to The Thin Man, of course: the in 1973—the dissolution of an apparently duo were so charming and amusing that ideal marriage, the efflorescence of a gay William Powell and Myrna Loy needed only to teenager—seems commonplace now. What imitate them—David Goodrich, a nephew, remain goofily interesting are some of the reveals that the scriptwriters were much more details: how, for example, some years after the than “good hacks,” and a very lucky thing for the broadcast, the Los Angeles public television rest of us, too, not to mention the stars they station offered, as a pledge-drive premium, a wrote for. They were eclectic craftsmen with the weekend with the splintered Loud family. swank of Bel Air and the work ethic of dray I look forward to talk-show appearances horses. “We shouldn’t take so much trouble,” in which I can explain what I really mean in Frances admitted, “but it is only to satisfy our- this review, and subsequently, one can only selves.” A friend likened their work to “fine cab- hope, a documentary on the making of one inet-making.” They were “professionals whose of those shows. name on a script [was] a guarantee of its excel- —Harry Shearer lence,” though assuring top quality involved many drafts, a willingness to “criticize freely,” and screaming matches that bystanders compared to THE REAL NICK AND NORA: “being near a bear pit.” Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, It was another world, the so-called Writers of Stage and Screen Classics. Golden Age of Movies that began with By David L. Goodrich. Southern talkies in the late 1920s and died when the stu- Illinois Univ. Press. 304 pp. $30 dios did in the 1960s. It depended on a Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the much-derided factory system that, as the urbane married couple who were as expert at author expertly details, nonetheless elicited writing for the stage as for the screen, once memorable work from Goodrich and assigned themselves the cable address GOOD Hackett and their friends—Ben Hecht, HACKS. This lighthearted bit of self-depreca- Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Dorothy tion was characteristic of the wit and modesty Parker, Philip Dunne, Samson Raphaelson, they brought to a high-polish collaboration that Lillian Hellman, Robert Benchley, and glittered from 1928 to 1962 and, along the many others—who came west to pick way, earned them four Oscar up some easy money and stayed nominations, one Pulitzer long enough to inject wit, Prize, and a Writers character, and style into Guild Laurel Award for what had been a bare- Lifetime Achieve- ly literate popular ment. Goodrich and art. Hackett wrote films Writers have al- that continue to ways been third-class please today, includ- citizens in Holly- ing The Thin Man wood, even when (1934) and its first two highly paid, and being sequels, Easter Parade marginalized may—para- (1948), Father of the Bride doxically—have saved Good- (1950) and its sequel, Seven rich and Hackett. It gave Brides for Seven Brothers Thin Man stars Myrna Loy and them perspective, so that (1954), and Frank Capra’s William Powell mirrored their when “we started throwing Christmas perennial It’s a creators, Goodrich and Hackett. up and crying into our type- Hirschfeld’s with arrangement special by reproduced Drawing Hirschfeld. Al 1998 © exclusive special representative, Galleries The Ltd., Margo New Feiden York. Summer 2002 119 Current Books writers” over misbegotten projects or Novels, she notes, are first and foremost moronic producers, they could pack up repositories of news: The great 19th-centu- their Smith-Coronas and go back to the ry novels “carried the news—of crime, high theater, as they did with The Diary of Anne society, politics, industry, finance, and low Frank. And when the entire system began life.” By the mid-20th century, it seemed crashing around their heads, they simply that such realities as war, Auschwitz, and the said, “Let’s get out of here.” And did. bomb had made fictional depictions of The system denigrated writers and “reality” incomprehensible or irrelevant, depended on them, and it will continue to and realism’s effectiveness as a literary tech- do so as long as movies tell stories. The nique began to weaken. But such develop- value of “hacks”—the good and even the ments came too late to hurt McCarthy’s bad—was defined by one of Hollywood’s own novels, which, if not exactly “realist,” are legendary talent users and abusers, Irving crammed with documentary miniatures. Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM, who The Company She Keeps records the precise called writers like Goodrich and Hackett progress of an adultery in a certain literary “the most important people in film”—and set, while The Group features an exact then added, mogul that he was, “and we account of the procedure by which an must do everything to keep them from unmarried woman got fitted for a pessary, or finding out.” diaphragm, in 1933. —Steven Bach All this immediacy flags when McCarthy casts her observations in the mold of general cultural criticism, perhaps because her A BOLT FROM THE BLUE: vocabulary takes on a palpable residue of the And Other Essays. 1930s sectarian political wars that shaped By Mary McCarthy. Edited by her. Though her perceptions remain firm A. O. Scott. New York Review Books. and scintillating when she talks of Tolstoy or 443 pp. $24.95 Salinger, her declarations about “Amer- Introducing this selection of Mary icans” can descend into meaningless polit- McCarthy’s occasional writings from the ical posturing. “What the foreigner finds 1930s to the 1980s, New York Times critic most objectionable in American life is its lack A. O. Scott writes that “one of the ambitions of basic comfort,” she wrote in 1947—at a of this book . is to make a somewhat time when Europe still lay in ruins. It does paradoxical case for [McCarthy’s] impor- not help to be told a paragraph later that “the tance as a novelist—one of a handful of immigrant or the poor native American indispensable American writers of realist fic- bought a bathtub, not because he wanted to tion in the immediate postwar era.” The col- take a bath, but because he wanted to be in lection succeeds in this ambition, though a position to do so.” by a path different from the one Scott like- McCarthy’s lasting allure comes partly ly had in mind. The occasional staleness of from her personas, literary and other- McCarthy’s quintessentially midcentury wise—on the one hand the authorial voice as an essayist—its political fierce- voice, sharp, sure, sensuous, and on the ness, its axiomatic contempt for the tastes other the beauty, the many marriages, and of the middle class—serves to point up the the lurid, abuse-filled childhood detailed contrast with her novels, which remain in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood fresh and even topical, particularly such (1946). The memoir and novels hold up masterpieces of social observation as The best, followed by the wry, perspicacious Company She Keeps (1942) and The theater and literary criticism. With so Group (1963). much of McCarthy’s work still in print, Those books, as it happens, also splendidly this collection necessarily has the feel of demonstrate the theories of the novel that odds and ends. Still, if it sends readers in McCarthy (1912–89) puts forth in the stur- search of the rest of the corpus, that may be diest of these essays, “The Fact in Fiction” success enough. (1960) and “Ideas and the Novel” (1980). —Amy E. Schwartz 120 Wilson Quarterly.

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