The Theater: A Newspaperman

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Everybody always loved Charlie MacArthur—and he finally succumbed to the curse of too many friends. He began life as a minister's son in Scranton, Pa. Like many a minister's kid, he left his Godfearing upbringing far behind. Resolute in his break with things holy, he tackled the newspaper business. At that time, the unholiest newspaper careers in U.S. Christendom were to be found in Chicago. MacArthur went there. In 1914 he began as a reporter on the Chicago Herald-Examiner, switched to Colonel Robert McCormick's Tribune and later the New York American.

A Marvelous Circus. Charles MacArthur was a typical child of the Roaring '20s. He was wild, bitter, voluptuous, burdened with a marvelous conscience. He had a personal radiance that few could resist. When he at last beamed into Manhattan, it was inevitable that he should become a knight of the round table at the Hotel Algonquin, favorite mecca of the literati. A measure of his charm was once expressed by the late Algonquineer Alexander Woollcott: "Everyone who knows him lights up when he hears his name, and starts talking about him as if he were a marvelous circus that once passed his way."

Unbeknownst to MacArthur, his triumphant entrance into Manhattan was an anticlimax. His Chicago experiences, along with those of Ben Hecht, another journalist of the Rush Street school, had already fortified his mind for co-authorship of The Front Page, one of the greatest Broadway stage hits of the '20s, and a brutally truthful play about U.S. journalism. Unfortunately, the stereotypes it perpetuated linger in the form of the popular image of all newspaper reporters as boozy, totally cynical, wisecracking characters with battered fedoras perched on the backs of their heads.

The Front Page opened on Aug. 14, 1928—and the critics, themselves all journalists of some school or other, drooled over it. Three days later, lionized Playwright MacArthur married a famous actress named Helen Hayes, whose footlight acclaim dated back 22 years to her stage debut as a six-year-old child actress. With a bag of peanuts in his hand, MacArthur, on their first meeting, had uttered one of the few famous quotations of the 20th century concocted without benefit of pressagent. "I wish," he said, "that they were emeralds!" Charlie, in the most prepossessing of his virtues, was irresistibly glib; from the moment she met him, Helen Hayes loved him all his life.

A Touch of Childhood. When pressed to explain his philosophy of life, Charlie liked to sum it up puckishly with the words of a condemned man whose hanging he once covered in Chicago. The prisoner had halted at the gallows steps and asked: "Is this thing safe?" The line was worthy of The Front Page. In his dramatic chronicle of slobbish police reporters and a cannibalistic editor, MacArthur described his newsmen as "catatonic, seedy Paul Reveres, full of strange oaths and a touch of childhood." He wrote six more plays, was in Hollywood often to grind out scenarios, had his good name linked with many a charity (including the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis after Mary, his and Helen's only child,* gifted young actress with a promise of greatness, died at 19 of polio).