Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [42]
“Is this the room of the poor, tortured soul who was in the terrible El train wreck?” one asked.
The officer was properly impressed. He assured the “priests” that this was indeed the room they sought, and allowed them to enter. Once inside, they calmly proceeded with their picture-taking – until a flash bulb exploded. The guard, suspicious, opened the door, and soon was struggling with the photographers. He managed to seize their big press camera, but he was not aware of the tiny Leica that Byrne had brought along for just such an emergency. Cassocks flying, the “priests” made their escape and the Times scooped every paper in town.
For sanctioning this impersonation, Ruppel was reprimanded by the ranking Roman Catholic prelate in Chicago, the late George Cardinal Mundelein. But in the end, Ruppel was released with only a mild rebuke, largely because of his sincere regret for the escapade, but partly, perhaps, because he had been one of the children baptized by young Father Mundelein when he was a parish priest in Brooklyn.
A few reporters have confessed to even wilder escapades. Ben Hecht, for example, delights to recall the days when, with the aid of photographer Gene Cour, he titillated Chicago Journal readers with a succession of downright hoaxes: a series of accounts of piracy along the Chicago River, a major disaster involving a runaway streetcar, and even a description of an earthquake that supposedly shook the North Side.
“That earthquake story,” said Hecht later, “wasn’t such a good idea. I had to quote every relative I had to make it convincing. And creating a ‘fissure’ along the Lake Shore took two hours of hard digging!”
Hecht might have continued his “scoops” indefinitely. But to illustrate a story about an exiled “Romanian princess,” he selected an unfortunate model for his photographs – one of the vice district’s most spectacularly notorious prostitutes. Only Hecht’s promise to cease from such shenanigans saved him his job.
Subsequent work for the Daily News showed Hecht to be not only a good newspaperman, but a gifted creative writer. A personification of the era, he was at the hub of a group which included Harry Hansen, Charles Collins, Vincent Starrett, John Gunther, and others who frequented the old Covici-McGee Bookstore, and a restaurant called Schlogl’s. With the fitful assistance of poet Maxwell Bodenheim, Hecht also published a tabloid journal called The Chicago Literary Times.
This paper is a collector’s item today, if for no other reason than the pot shots that the two gifted eccentrics took at one another. Hecht’s book, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, wrote Bodenheim in one issue, was “the vivid etching of a disillusioned mind.” Bodenheim’s Blackguard, according to Hecht, was “as definite an experience as inhaling a quart of chlorine gas.” Both agreed, however, that New York City was “the national cemetery of arts and letters” – and, ultimately, both moved there.
It was during this period that Hecht and Bodenheim staged what may still be the world’s shortest and screwiest formal debate before a paying audience. They were to discuss the proposition, “Resolved; that people who attend literary lectures are fools.” The affair was well publicized, and the house was sold out. Both speakers, meanwhile, had insisted on being paid in advance. When Hecht rose to take the affirmative side, he merely gestured toward the audience, turned to Bodenheim, and said:
“I rest my case.”
“You win,” said Bodenheim, and the two debaters walked out arm in arm.
We will always remember Hecht, not only for his iconoclasm but for his amazing literary output: at least a dozen