Oh, for the Hard-Bitten Cynicism of Days Gone By

In 1931 I saw Pat O’Brien as Hildy Johnson in the first movie version of “The Front Page,” and my fate was sealed. I wanted to be the kind of quick-thinking, fast-talking, hard-drinking newspaper reporter that O’Brien was in that classic, and that’s what I became.

I had a chance to relive that profoundly formative experience the other night when my wife and I attended a performance of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s gritty stage play at the Greater Los Angeles Press Club.

It was a benefit for the club’s 8-Ball Welfare Foundation, in memory of our late watchdog colleague, Bill Stout. (I was proud to know him.) It was performed at a battery of microphones and broadcast over KPCC-FM (and will be rebroadcast at 5 p.m. Sunday) by the California Artists Radio Theater, a company of seasoned pros who brought the old lines to raucous life with skill, humor, heart and energy.

There have been at least three movie versions of “The Front Page” since O’Brien’s faithful rendition of the Broadway hit.

In “His Girl Friday,” Rosalind Russell played Hildy Johnson and Cary Grant played the thoroughly unprincipled managing editor of the Herald-Examiner, Walter Burns. In a more recent version Kathleen Turner played Hildy (a television reporter) and Burt Reynolds her boss.

The play is compact, strident and caustic. It takes place in the press room of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building, circa 1930. Loud, slovenly, indolent reporters for the city’s seven newspapers play poker, eat, drink, gossip and blaspheme, waiting for the hanging of a cop killer at 7 o’clock the next morning.

With typical cynicism one complains, “Why can’t they jerk these guys at a reasonable hour, so we can get some sleep?”

The plot is as unchanging as Scripture.

Hildy, the Examiner’s reporter, drops in to say goodby. He is going to quit, go into advertising, and marry his fiancee, Peggy Grant. Walter Burns is determined to keep Johnson working for him, whatever chicanery it may require.

The condemned man, Earl Williams, escapes. The other reporters dash out. Williams enters, on the run. Hildy hides him in the roll-top desk of Bensinger, the hypochondriac reporter for the Tribune. Enter Mollie Malloy, a prostitute who has befriended Williams. She hears Williams in the desk. The reporters return. They suspect Mollie. They hound her. She jumps out the window. This scene dramatizes the insensitivity of the press.

Meanwhile, a messenger from the governor has arrived with a reprieve. The crooked mayor and the crooked sheriff offer the messenger a higher-paying job to forget the document. They see a political advantage in Williams’ execution. Burns arrives, tipped off by Hildy, who is back on the job. He calls for a crew of roughnecks to carry the desk to the Herald-Examiner. He has a thug bodily remove Hildy’s fiancee’s obstreperous mother.

Williams is discovered. The sheriff orders his men to shoot him, but in the nick of time, the governor’s messenger (he can’t be bought) returns with the reprieve. The mayor and the sheriff are suddenly righteous. Hildy reconciles with his distraught fiancee. They are taking the 12:40 train to New York.

Burns softens. He wishes the betrothed couple well. He hands Hildy his pocket watch as a wedding gift. Hildy protests, but takes it. Peggy admits Burns is a “peach,” after all.

When they have left, Burns calls his paper: “Duffy? Listen. I want you to send a wire to the Chief of Police of La Porte, Ind. . . . That’s right. . . . Tell him to meet the 12:40 out of Chicago . . . New York Central . . . and arrest Hildy Johnson and bring him back here. . . . Wire him a full description. . . . The son of a bitch stole my watch!”

I happened to visit the set one day when Billy Wilder was shooting his version, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. I asked him if he was going to keep that last line as the ending. “I couldn’t change it,” he said. “It’s sacred.”

In an epilogue to the published version of their play, Hecht and MacArthur said they meant it to show their “intellectual disdain of and superiority to the newspaper,” but it turned out to be “a valentine thrown to the past.”

In her review of “His Girl Friday,” Pauline Kael described the reporters as “this vanished race of brittle, cynical childish people (rushing) around on corrupt errands.”

That’s the way we were. But, oh my, we had a lot of fun.