Bella Spewack; Writer, Scout Cookie Inventor

Bella Spewack, who invented the Girl Scout cookie, co-wrote the Broadway musical “Kiss Me Kate” and found the purported Anastasia Romanov, has died. She was 91.

Mrs. Spewack died Friday night of natural causes in her Manhattan home, said a friend who did not want to be identified.

Born Bella Cohen in Bucharest, Romania, she was brought to New York as a child. Before hitting her stride as a writer, she tutored girls in Latin, taught English to foreigners and waited tables, noting later: “As a waitress I was no good.”

Mrs. Spewack began her writing career as a reporter with the socialist paper the New York Call and worked for the New York Evening Mail, the New York World and the New York Evening World. Later she wrote features for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times.

She met her husband, Samuel, at a socialist rally. The first year of their marriage, 1922, was spent in Moscow, where he was a correspondent for the New York World.

It was at that time that she found the woman who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov, the only surviving member of Russia’s ruling family.

“I found Anastasia in Berlin,” she once told an interviewer. “I was the first person to interview her. I wouldn’t give Sam the story.”

Mrs. Spewack was offered a job as women’s page editor but turned it down.

“I resented it,” she said years before women’s pages were converted to lifestyle sections. “Women can read the whole paper.”

Believing that newspaperwomen were poorly paid, she became a press agent. It was at that time that she hit upon the now-familiar seal-embossed cookie as a promotional and money-making idea for Girl Scouts. She suggested that if the scouts sold cookies at a flower show attended by actresses, the resulting publicity could launch national sales.

But Mrs. Spewack achieved her greatest fame paired with her husband, who died in 1971, as a Broadway and Hollywood writing team.

Together they wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning “Kiss Me Kate,” with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, based on Shakespeare’s play “The Taming of the Shrew.” Both writers and the composer originally hated the idea, Mrs. Spewack said after the 1948 musical’s first quarter-century of success, and were won over only during the production’s out-of-town try-out in Philadelphia.

Of their 20 Hollywood screenplays, she best liked “My Favorite Wife,” which starred Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. Others included “The Secret Witness” and “Week-End at the Waldorf.”

The Spewacks also wrote Broadway’s “Boy Meets Girl,” “Spring Song,” and with Porter “Leave It to Me,” in which Mary Martin sang the show-stopper “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”

The 1938 “Leave It to Me” was the result of an ocean crossing on which comedian Billy Gaxton asked the Spewacks to write a show for him.

“He said, ‘What about a musical?’ ” Mrs. Spewack recalled years later. “Sam reacted as if he couldn’t hear. I said, ‘We’ll pick it up later.’ ”

“Those were the happy days,” she said wistfully. “The market was up and everyone was young.”