Ben muttered under his breath. “I guess they’re all dead,” he said. “I used to work with them on the Journal American.”
We sat down and ordered a beer. “I think this must be the place,” he said, “but I might have it mixed up. We had good times together. We had a real ball with this character, Wanderer. Do you know the story?
“Well, Wanderer was an ex-army officer who discovered that his wife was pregnant. He didn’t want the child because he feared it would interfere with resuming his army career. He wanted to re-enlist. So he arranged for a fake holdup on Ingleside Avenue. That’s where I want to take you now.
“Anyway, he got a bum off Clark Street and gave the guy a few dollars to make this holdup, assuring him it was just a trick to be played on his wife for fun. Wanderer took his wife to the movies that night, to a theatre, if my memory is correct, called the Midway. And on their way home, they have to walk almost half a block along the side of a school yard. The streets are poorly lit, and this bum sticks a gun to Wanderer and yells, ‘This is a stick-up[stick-up]!’
“The bum never had a real gun. But Wanderer did. He pretended to struggle with the guy and then shot him ... turned the gun on his wife, too, and killed her instantly. Then he wiped off the gun and shoved it into the bum’s dead hand. It looked as though the robber had been resisted and somehow shot in the fight. Wanderer became a hero overnight, and the newspapers played him up for all it was worth.”
Ben and Carl Sandburg, who was then a reporter on the Journal, were eventually responsible for breaking the case. They went to interview the hero and came away with mutual misgivings which they confided to the police. It was a triumph worthy of The Front Page, but I think it was the irony of the world’s readiness for hero worship that made pricking the Wanderer balloon such a satisfying episode in the life of Ben Hecht.
In spite of all our efforts, the lectures and concerts in our downstairs room did not continue to draw indefinitely. Sometimes we couldn’t get fifty people to come out of an evening to hear good music for free (and one of the finest chamber groups in the city was providing us with a series just for the chance to play.) Saturday afternoons were idle—people seemed to have become too busy to spend time in simple conversation.
Book sales dropped, too. Price cutting hurt the psychiatric mail order business, although we held out for several years. Finally we discontinued the catalogue, in spite of its definitive value as a listing of significant books in this field.
Again, something new had to be done and done quickly. I decided to go after business and industrial accounts and to persuade them to give books instead of whiskey for Christmas presents. My successes included selling a bank 250 copies of the Columbia Encyclopedia, with the name of each recipient stamped in gold on the cover. I’m not sure this did much for the human spirit, but it helped pay the rent.
One afternoon Ben Kartman came in with a friend who had some ideas about Brent and television. They arranged an audition, I was accepted, and for almost a year I had a fifteen minute afternoon show, sandwiched between a program on nursing and one on cooking. Financially it was a disaster. I was paid scale, which at that time was $120 per week, and after I paid my union dues and my agent’s fees, most of the cost of the extra help I had to hire to cover the shop during my absences came right out of my own pocket. But I did learn this: be very careful what you sign, re-read the small print, and be sure to see your lawyer—lessons that would be helpful when television again beckoned in ways to be fully described in another chapter.