Features
The Dark Side of Albert: Einstein and Mileva Marić, his First Wife
By DAVID TOPPER Albert Einstein was the most photographed scientist of the 20th century. The scope of emotions depicted range from the serious to the silly: from looking like a secular saint with hands folded and deep in contemplation of supposedly solemn thoughts, to the image hanging in front of me on the bulletin board over my computer table, showing him sticking out his tongue at the cameraman. Living during the heyday of the development of the film camera, he and the press surely took advantage of it. The positive persona of the genius was formed out of these visual images. This visual disposition was supplemented with endless quotations on not only science and the universe, but also with homilies on life and how to live it, with much of that which you will find quoted, being things he never said. Overall, the general image of him and his personality has him coming out seemingly squeaky-clean.
Nonetheless, those of us who have looked into the man in more detail are aware of episodes of less than saintly behavior by Albert – the famous scientific idol. If, for example, you read any of the half-dozen or so lengthy biographies about him, you will find scattered therein stories of him speaking inappropriately or behaving, one might say, as a jerk. Having read all those books, and others – and even written three books on him myself – I knew this. So when I started reading a recent long biography of his first wife, Mileva Marić, I had no reason to think I’d be shocked, since I had already read a lot about her, including a book of letters to and from her best friend, which also contained a brief biography. But to my surprise, I was staggered in reading over 400 pages of his nasty behavior concentrated around this one woman – a woman whom he fell in love with as a university student, and who was the only mother of his children.
Here is the sad – and probably surprising to most readers – story of Mileva and Albert.
Mileva Marić was born on December 19, 1875, into a Christian Orthodox Serbian family. With a dislocated left hip, she walked with a limp throughout her life. (Her sister, Zorka, had the same congenital condition.) Forced to wear an orthopedic shoe, she was teased and mocked in school. Nonetheless, this very bright girl filled her lonely childhood with her studies (she was especially good at math) and piano lessons. Encouraged by a very loving father, she excelled in school, and was the first girl to attend high school physics courses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating in 1896, she applied to the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic, since in Switzerland women were admitted to all classes. She passed the entrance exam and majored in mathematics. It was a small freshman class of about two-dozen students, she being the only woman. That’s where she met, in the even smaller physics course, fellow student, Albert Einstein.
One of the earliest pictures we have of Mileva is dated 1897. In this portrait, I see a very serious, confident, determined woman with large penetrating eyes, a full crop of dark wavy hair and full lips. I would call her plain but attractive. I say this, because I was shocked at several instances when someone, upon first meeting Mileva, is quoted as describing her as “ugly.”
As a fellow student, Albert Einstein was attracted to her, and they quickly became a couple. He probably was the first male to take a romantic interest in her, overlooking her “handicap.” I suspect he was attracted to her gutsy attitude and her smartness. Plus, being Serbian, Mileva exuded an exotic “otherness” to the “German” in Albert. They spent most of their free time together, studying and falling in love. She did well in her courses, initially passing all of them, as Albert did too (of course). That is, until she was pregnant – a fact she tried to hide until she could not. And so she went home to her parents to inform them of this, and eventfully to have the baby.
Her parents were very supportive, which was unusual for the times. A girl was born early in 1902; they named her Lieserl (probably a Yiddish diminutive of Liese, a shortened Elizabeth). Albert stayed in Zurich and never saw his daughter; she was raised by Mileva’s parents, as Mileva returned to Zurich to continue her studies. No one knows what ultimately happened to Lieserl; she has seemingly vanished from all records. She may have died from Scarlet Fever as a child; or, she may have been adopted and grew up. One thing I do know: Mileva never forgot her. I believe that the loss of Lieserl is the major reason for Mileva’s depression and lingering melancholia throughout her life – as will be seen. As a result, she didn’t take care of her grooming and was a bit overweight – as seen in photos of her later in life. This, I suspect, may be a source of her “ugliness.”
Back to Zurich in the late 1890s and her studies: she passed all her courses over the first three years, and in her fourth year she started her thesis, hoping for a diploma and further work toward a PhD. But in 1900 she failed her final exams, while the other male students all passed. In July 1901 she repeated her final exams and flunked them again. I find it hard to believe that this sudden change in her performance was due to the tests being too tough for this woman, in light of all we know of her up to this time. Look at the last date above: she was pregnant with her child. I’m convinced that she just couldn’t concentrate on her studies. Albert passed, graduated, and started looking for a job – as well as working toward his PhD.
On January 6, 1903, they were married in a small civil ceremony. Mileva became a housewife; no more thinking of going any further in her studies. She then became the mother of two boys: Hans Albert (born in 1904) and Eduard (nicknamed Tete; in 1910).
All that promise came to nothing, not even a university degree. If she had not met Albert, who knows what she would have achieved? But that was not the path taken, and since she married what became the most famous scientist of the 20th century – if not the most famous person, as Time Magazine said at the end of the millennium – that’s why there is a plethora of documentation about her life, terribly sad as it was.
Now briefly fast forward a century or so, to around 1987, and the publication of the early love letters between Albert and Mileva, which had only been known by a few, and purposely suppressed. For example, Hans Albert, who had the letters much earlier, had wanted to publish them. But he was thwarted by Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan, who threatened litigation. Dukas was Albert’s lifelong secretary and Nathan was an economist and close friend, who eventually was the executor of Einstein’s will. And so, the letters never surfaced until Dukas and Nathan were both dead.
Even today, writing about these letters is an ideological minefield. Here’s why. The letters date from 1899 to 1903, when a new theory of physics was brewing in Albert’s mind. The result, in the so-called miracle year of 1905, was the publication of five papers that changed physics forever: two on what became his Theory of Relativity; one on a particle theory (much later called a photon) of light, as part of the emerging Quantum Theory; and two supporting the reality of atoms, which were still only hypothetical entities at this time. Knowing this, how much can we read into the love letters when Albert, in talking about his scientific ideas, uses “we” and “our work”? Well, it seems, a lot; for the initial response from primarily feminist quarters was that Mileva should at least be seen as a co-author of the famous papers, since it seemed that they conceived of the theory together. Given, as we will see, Albert’s shabby treatment of her later in life, then all the more sympathy was directed toward Mileva and her plight by history. Indeed, some went so far (you will still find websites saying this) that Albert stole the theory of relativity from Mileva. Nonetheless, after that initial flurry of debate, the consensus has moved away from this viewpoint, so that today the select scholars looking over the Einstein Papers Project in Pasadena, California assert unabashedly that Mileva made no input to Albert’s theory.
Nonetheless, I am one of the few “Einstein scholars” (if I may call myself such), who gives Mileva some credit in the 1905 marvel. She was good at mathematics, she had patience in her life and work, and she was a thorough researcher – all qualities severely lacking in Albert. Let me put it this way: over his life as a physicist, Einstein hired a series of companions (whom he called “calculators”) to do the tedious and complicated mathematics required for his theory, especially as it developed over the later years with the use of tensor calculus in his General Theory of Relativity. All were men; except, famously, his last calculator was the Israeli-American woman, Buria Kaufmann – about whom you will read in the literature as his “first female calculator.” (Incidentally, there is a website giving her credit for Einstein’s later theory, which is complete fiction.) I, however, would assert that Buria was the second woman; for Mileva was Albert’s first “calculator.” She was also his researcher and proofreader. Since she knew the physics, as we know from the letters, she also was his sounding-board – Albert bouncing ideas off of Mileva, as they say.
So, what about Albert speaking of “we” and “our work”? Let me put this into context by quoting from some of the letters in chronological order. In a letter Mileva wrote to Helene Savić (née Kaufler), her closest and longest friend throughout her life (they roomed together in a boarding house in Zurich when they were students), she speaks of a paper “written” by Albert that will be published soon that is “very significant.” She then says that “we” sent it to an important physicist – revealing how much she was involved with Albert’s work. Later in a letter from Albert to Mileva, let me quote from the opening lines to give you a trace of their intimacy: “Thank you very much for your little letter and all the true love that’s in it. I kiss and hug you for it from all my heart, exactly the way you would want it & are entitled to, love.” He then goes into a discussion of other people, followed by his going back to how much they love each other, and ending with this key sentence. “How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion.” I put in italics the famous (or is it infamous?) phrase: our work. But there’s nothing more on this, although a bit later in the letter he goes on to talk about another physics problem he is working on: specific heats. He discusses the physics problem in detail, with equations and his proposed solution, and he ends the topic with this: “Don’t forget to look up to what extent glass obeys the law of Dulong and Petit.” My guess is that it was this sort of task that was part of their work together. The letter ends where it began. “Tender greetings and kisses, my dear little dumpling, from your … Albert.”
I’ll leave the topic there, nonetheless aware of the possibility that Mileva did help Albert in even more significant ways, and that hence she’s been slighted by history.
Back to Zurich in 1903. Initially, their life together was harmonious, a reflection of the camaraderie in the love letters, as she kept house and raised her boys. But by around 1909, when Albert was being seen as an important physicist, there clearly was a severe strain on the marriage. For example, in a letter that year to Helene, she says that Albert “lives only for his work” and the family is “unimportant to him.” By 1914, when they moved to Berlin for Albert’s prestigious position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, their marriage entered a new phase. In fact, Albert had been having relations with a divorced cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who lived in Berlin. Moreover, Albert made it clear to Mileva that their previous relationship was over. He went so far as to give her a list of demands: that she do the laundry, prepare him three meals a day, and keep his office clean – all without any personal relations. No intimacy in the house, and no being together in public. It was degradingly cruel: Mileva’s role was reduced to being a maid and cook. She tried to accept it, but quickly found that she couldn’t endure the humiliation; and so she took her two boys back to Zurich, where she remained for the rest of her life.
They officially divorced in 1919, and Albert immediately married Elsa – all in the same year that he became the world-famous scientist, because of the solar eclipse experiment that proved that light from a star is bent around the sun, as predicted by his theory. He got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 and transferred the money to a bank in Zurich for the support of their boys, where Mileva had access to the interest in the account.
What happened after all that infatuation seen in the love letters and in their early life together? In retrospect, Mileva surely realized that she had ignored or overlooked what we might call the dark side of Albert. As a student he was overly sarcastic, often mocking and even degrading people whom he saw as inadequate or not too smart. He even teased her in ways that revealed an underlying hostility. When she pointed this out, he would laugh it off – and she’d forgive him. In a letter to Helena in 1900 she writes of Albert’s “wicked words with deeds! What an insolent boy he is, and yet I love him so much!” Telling words. Even after the acrimonious divorce, she still, as will be seen, was under Albert’s spell. I believe that she never got over that initial infatuation when they were students. It became a pattern: she was always trying to get on his good side.
Overall, Albert was very much a 19th century male chauvinist in his attitude and communications with women. Here are some of his words about women that reveal his overt misogyny: they are “passive, insecure, needy, and wanting to be dominated.” I knew that he liked to flirt with women throughout his life. But seeing him do so with other wives, with Mileva present, made it less frivolous and more malicious. In short, he was a cad and a rake, rolled into one.
The turnaround in their relationship seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was petty and vindictive, and especially very cruel towards her. There is no direct evidence of any real physical abuse. However, there was an incident in the spring of 1913 when a friend reported seeing Mileva with a badly swollen face, which was attributed to a “toothache” – and hence she and Albert missed some social events. Possibly the swollen face was a sign of something more malevolent, but we will never know the truth. Nonetheless, pondering this, I wish to quote something Albert wrote in a letter in 1925: “Not only children need a bit of thrashing, but also grownups and especially women.” And I’ll leave it there.
After the divorce, he accused her of poisoning his relationship with the boys – a common trope between divorcing couples. But it got more vicious as her financial situation became grave, and she asked for more money. She made some extra money tutoring students in math and giving piano lessons. But it wasn’t enough. Albert’s letters to her contain nasty personal attacks: saying she is “abnormal,” a “nonentity,” and that her pleading is “rubbish.” I can only imagine how Mileva felt being called this. At the time, she was in severe physical pain with chronic back problems, often forcing her into bed for long periods, even stays in hospital, when she was trying to raise two boys alone. Moreover, all this was exacerbated by problems in her Serbian family. Her sister Zorka was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was in and out of asylums; her only living brother disappeared into Russia after World War I; and her parents had serious financial problems.
Could it get any worse? It could. And it did. Tete became a handful. He was very bright and creative; he had musical talent on the piano, and he wrote promising poems and stories. But he was also prone to falling into depressive episodes, for apparently no reason – anger fits, throwing things, being out of control. I suppose Mileva saw this coming: Tete, like her sister, eventually was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Albert, of course, knew all this, but being in Berlin, he didn’t have to deal with it. He did make occasional visits and took summer trips with the boys (giving Mileva short breaks), all while he was still living in Europe. But when he moved to Princeton, N.J., in 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany and Einstein’s name being high on a hit list, their meetings were over; until 1938, when Hans Albert (now with a wife and two children) moved to the USA. The last meeting between Albert and Tete is recorded in a 1933 photograph that bears a close look. Both are seated in a room, with Tete looking over a large, open portfolio – perhaps reading it. Albert is facing in a different direction (about 90-degrees away), holding a violin and bow, and staring off into space. It may be that Tete is reading to him, but more likely they are inhabiting two different worlds.
In the years during World War II, living in Zurich, Switzerland (a country surrounded by a Nazi-occupied Europe), Mileva was terrified that the Nazis would swoop up this last free space. Moreover, she knew that they were rounding up Jews by the trainloads and moving them to Concentration Camps. She was somewhat safe as an Orthodox Christian, but Tete was “Jewish,” being a child of Einstein. She wrote pleading letters to Albert, asking him to take Tete to the USA. She even contacted the Red Cross, and they agreed that the best bet was to get Albert to sponsor him. “Bring us to safety,” she wrote. But being Mileva – ever still the dutiful wife, even though they had been divorced for two decades – she added (and I assert that she was not being sarcastic in saying this), “[I am] not intending to disturb your peace and freedom.” Petrified that “Tete is in danger because he is your son,” she concluded: “you can’t just leave him in the lurch.”
In fact, Einstein, Dukas, and Nathan were diligently rescuing Jews from Europe by using Einstein’s name to get emigration papers and such. Albert once spoke of this, saying that they were running a little refugee office over his cluttered “lawyer’s desk.” And they did save lives. Relevant here is a 1939 letter from Albert to Helena on this very topic. Helena’s father was Jewish, and she had numerous relatives whose lives were in peril, and so apparently, she was asking Albert for help. He wrote in response. “How gladly would I help! But I am desperately trying to at least get younger people out. Relocation of old people must under present horrible conditions be set aside.” In the end, we know of two aunts of Helena who died in gas chambers. Interestingly, in this same letter, Albert mentions that Hans is now in America, but that Tete is with Mileva in Zurich, saying that Tete is “incurably mentally ill.”
So, what about Tete? And Mileva’s pleading letters? As far as we know, these pleading requests were never answered. Albert, it seems, did leave his son “in the lurch.” My guess is that he just couldn’t fathom the chaos in his life of dealing with someone with such a severe mental illness. Listen to what he later wrote to Hans about Tete after learning of Mileva’s death. “If I had been fully informed [apparently referring here to what he saw as a genetic mental illness in Mileva’s family], he [Tete] would never have come into the world.” I can only imagine how Hans must have felt after reading these appalling words from his father about his beloved brother. Sometimes Albert’s behavior is plainly pathetic. Fortunately, the Nazis never invaded Switzerland.
Much of Mileva’s adult life was centred on Tete, as she watched him descend into the depths of mental illness. Overweight and chain-smoking, he was in and out of mental institutions. For Mileva, he was a full-time job. She, being the caring mother, was obsessed with making sure he would be safe after she died. And she succeeded; for seven years after his mother died, he lived in the renowned Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. He was 55 when he died.
I believe Mileva never got over two things: the loss of Lieserl and her infatuation with Albert. We don’t know what happened to Lieserl; but Mileva surely did, and it haunted her all of her life; as seen, she flunked her final chance for a university degree because of it. Lieserl was a source of her constant despondent behaviour and possibly her so-called “ugliness.” In a letter to Helena in 1925 she wrote of “my unfulfilled desire for a daughter”– another telling phrase, since she had a daughter, but was forced to abandon her.
Regarding Albert, no matter how abusive he was, Mileva still was open to forgiveness. She once asked herself this question: “When has a man ever listened to reason, when a woman is involved?” She should have listened to her own words.
Mileva Marić died on August 4, 1948, at the age of 72.
This story of Albert falling in and out of love with Mileva was not the first such episode in his life. It was previewed by and even overlapped with his first sweetheart: Marie Winteler.
In 1895 he spent a year enrolled in the cantonal school in the town of Aarau, near Zurich. He had taken the rigorous entrance exams for the Polytechnic (which Mileva later passed) and had flunked the non-science and non-math parts. But since he did so well on the science and math parts, it was recommended that he do a year of make-up in Aarau; plus, he was applying at age 16, a year early. He boarded with the family of Jost Winteler, a teacher at the school. Jost and Pauline had three daughters, the prettiest being Marie, two years older than Albert. Albert quickly fell for her, and she for him. She was an accomplished pianist, and so their love interests were supplemented with piano and violin duets. After that year, and after passing the entrance requirement at the Polytechnic, Albert moved to Zurich – where he met Mileva, and then broke off with Marie. In short, he jilted her, as he would later do with Mileva.
Marie, however, thought the relationship was to be forever, and wrote pleading letters when he stopped writing to her. After all, he was still mailing her his dirty laundry to wash and send back. (I am not making this up.) Being deeply hurt, she fell into a depression that (may have) plagued her throughout her life. She became a schoolteacher (whose records show that she missed a lot of classes due to sickness); in 1911 she married a man whose first name was Albert. They had two boys, but divorced in 1927. We also know that she tried to reach the first Albert in the 1940s about emigrating to the USA, but there is no record of his having received her letters. (Albert’s secretary was known to censor his mail.) She died in a mental institution in 1957, two years after Einstein died.
I mention this for two reasons. One, the obvious – this being a preview to the story of Albert’s shabby treatment of Mileva and the parallel terrible consequences. The other reason is the dirty laundry. This, also obviously, needs to be explained.
In 2019 I published an historical novel on Einstein’s life, called A Solitary Smile. In it, Marie is one of the characters, especially near the end and in a dream sequence that has Einstein recalling their time together, where he realizes how he hurt her. In recalling this part of my book, while writing this story of Mileva, and now Marie again – I suddenly realized that I didn’t include the dirty laundry bit. Why? I knew it then, as I do now. So why not mention it? Ruminating on this, I can only surmise that I was subconsciously protecting Albert from more scorn. Why dig up all the dirt (seemingly, literally in this case). How interesting this is. Me, being part of the problem. Protecting Albert’s image.
Well, I caught myself. And here I acknowledge my error – to supplement my saga on the dark side of Albert Einstein.
* * *
Readings: Mileva Marić Einstein: Life with Albert Einstein, by Radmila Milentijević (United World Press, 2010). In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić: Einstein’s First Wife, edited by Milan Popović (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). A Solitary Smile: A Novel on Einstein, by David R. Topper (Bee Line Press, 2019).
Features
There’s nothing Jewish about this classic American comedy — except just about everything
September 22, 2026
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 Chicago newsroom comedy The Front Page was so famous that when Harry J. Romanoff died in 1970, his New York Times obit referenced it. And in a 1986 review of a revival with John Lithgow as the conniving editor Walter Burns and Richard Thomas as the ruthless reporter Hildy Johnson, Frank Rich asked: “is there anyone who hasn’t seen The Front Page?”
Staged by George S. Kaufman and produced by Jed Harris, the original ran at the Times Square Theater for 276 performances. It has had many lives, including Howard Hawks’ fantastic 1940 screwball comedy, His Girl Friday. Hawks brilliantly turned the bromance into a he-she love story, casting Cary Grant as Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy. He also softened the script so that it passed The Hays Office — the film censorship bureau named for ex-Postmaster General Will H. Hays.
The play’s many admirers include Walter Kerr, another New York Times critic, who, writing about a 1969 revival, memorably described it as ” like a watch that laughed.” David Mamet praised Hecht and MacArthur’s satire in several places, once calling it “arguably the best American play.” Tennessee Williams wrote that it “uncorseted the American theater,” and Kenneth Tynan and Tom Stoppard loved it.
Hecht, who, according to researcher Jesse Tisch in an essay on Medium, did the majority of the writing, died in 1964 and our century seems more ambivalent about the play. Some critics loved the 2016 Broadway version, which Jesse Green, then of New York Magazine, said had been pieced together from several scripts. That production’s all-star cast, including Nathan Lane as Walter Burns and John Lithgow as Hildy did not prevent the late Terry Teachout from calling it “toothless.”
Part of the play’s slide may be related to the demise of legacy journalism. Chicago is down to two newspapers from the seven of the era of The Front Page. And part may be style. The long, crowded scenes lack the propulsive energy of a lot of streaming-influenced drama and the characters lack the tormented interiority many theater audiences have come to expect.
Now, the first major production in ten years — by the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, best known for Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which became a film starring Billy Crudup, and for a 2022 stage adaptation of Dial M For Murder — has opened Northlight Theatre’s inaugural season at their $33 million building in Evanston.
Set in a crummy press room in the Criminal Justice Building in Chicago, The Front Page was the first Broadway show about zany, wisecracking journos and the corrupt politicians they took down. About to quit the paper, get married and move to Buffalo, Hildy Johnson stumbles onto death row inmate Earl Williams’ jailbreak. Walter Burns wrangles Hildy into covering one last scoop.
The play uses many sources, some of which contradict each other. In Chicago, Hecht had both devoured and befriended the Jewish comics of the day. He loved clowns, including The Marx Brothers. The Cocoanuts, the 1924 Marx Brothers’ Broadway madcap vehicle that George S. Kaufman wrote and directed and Irving Berlin wrote music for anticipates certain elements of The Front Page. Set in a resort hotel instead of a newsroom, its crime and con-filled ambiance and fast-talking shyster characters seem like a prequel to Hecht’s drama.
But The Front Page also came out of the imagination of a first-generation American Jew who came of age in the 1910s. Born in 1893 in New York, Hecht moved west with his Russian immigrant parents, settling at age ten in Racine, Wisconsin. He arrived in Chicago when he was 16, became a journalist and hung out with figures in that city’s Literary Renaissance, most of whom were not Jewish.
Hecht had an enduring but tormented friendship with the writer Max Bodenheim, who was raised Jewish. It began with the men collaborating on plays and starting a modernist magazine, The Chicago Literary Times, and descended into each satirizing the other in novels. Even worse, Bodenheim seemed to become Hecht’s evil twin. Like Hecht, Bodenheim was a provocateur. Like Hecht, he moved to New York. But where Hecht flourished, Bodenheim crashed into poverty. Hecht helped him financially. But he couldn’t save him. In 1954, Bodenheim and his third wife were brutally murdered in their apartment.
If Bodenheim was a daredevil, Hecht was a fabricator. He embellished his nonfiction, including chunks of his 1921 and 1922 column for The Chicago Daily News, “1,001 Nights in Chicago.” Hecht’s Chicago peers mostly tolerated his provocations and fabulations. But as he grew famous, they became less tolerant. Writing in 1973, after Hecht’s death, Norman Mailer wrote that he was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.”
And yet to say that The Front Page is just an embellishment seems wrong. It is based in real life. Jazz Age Chicago had plenty of newspapermen, (some Jewish) who regularly impersonated people with accents, tall tales and disguises to get stories. The city was full of Jewish criminals too, like Ike Bloom, who ran Midnight Frolics Cafe, a nightclub Hecht frequented. But the central characters Hecht and MacArthur used as models for The Front Page were not Jewish. Walter Burns is based on Walter Howell, a famously Machiavellian editor. The death row murderer Earl Williams is based on Tommy O’Connor, a convicted murderer who was never captured after he escaped the county jail in 1921.
Though Hecht didn’t write The Front Page until he left Chicago for New York in 1924, he continued to identify with the city — or at least his version of the city. In Hollywood where he won his first Academy Award for the silent gangster film, Underworld, he wrote dozens of movies including Notorious, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Design for Living and Wuthering Heights and ghostwrote Gone With The Wind, Stage Coach and A Star is Born. “He invented 80% of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968.
Hecht liked to say that “he became a Jew at 39” in the late ’30s, when he took up anti-Hitler activism. He wrote polemics entreating Americans to pay attention to Hitler and pageants, such as one staged in Madison Square Garden, encouraging the country to attack Germany. As the scholar Liesl Olsen has written, he was “a heroic truth-teller who demanded that his country act decisively during modern history’s blackest hour.”
But recent biographers have complicated the idea of Hecht’s Jewishness as a midlife discovery. In the words of one, Adina Hoffman, he was “divided,” the man who grew up hearing Yiddish. And he was, like a lot of Jews of his generation, not observant, instead using journalism and the performing arts to express his Jewishness. In his Chicago days, literature and theater were his response to literary friends (and enemies) characterizing his Jewishness in one way or another. Carl Sandburg affectionately referred to him as the “Jewish Huck Finn.” Ezra Pound (less affectionately) called him “Rabbi Ben Hechtenberg.”
Hecht had to protect himself, either by acting tough, or by submerging himself in characters and fantasies. So he turned to theater. In Chicago, he wrote plays with Sherwood Anderson and then with the founder of The Goodman Theatre, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. In New York, he briefly hung out with the Algonquin Table set, many of whom dabbled in theater. But it was not a mutual admiration society. Dorothy Parker complained about his “smiling and swaggering savageries” and Alexander Woolcott wrote, “Hecht’s favorite character in literature is the disconcerting little boy who, when the King paraded in the imaginary robe, cried out: ‘But he hasn’t got anything on!’” Even the actor George Jessel, meeting Hecht during a rehearsal of The Front Page, described him as a yokel “wearing a loud red tie and a shirt that might have been used as a stage curtain for a troupe of very gay midgets.”
In The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur wrote a play that, with its profanity and cynicism towards politicians and journalists, initially attracted the attention of the police, who sent stenographers to note the supposedly pornographic dialogue. But nothing much came of the outrage except that the play became a hit. Nearly 100 years later, the classic vehicle seems, at first glance anyway, more charming than shocking.
The new production is directed by Northlight Artistic Director BJ Jones, who was an unofficial associate at Skokie’s now-defunct National Jewish Theater in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jones sees The Front Page’s legacy in 20th century Jewish writers, especially ones with a Chicago connection — David Mamet’s scurrilous language, Larry Gelbart’s rat a tat dialogue in M*A*S*H.
Reading The Front Page now you also might get the sense of a Jewish play manqué: its outsider characters, its energy, its cynicism. Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted it, says. “It’s Jewish in the same way as you could say about Irving Berlin, ‘there’s nothing Jewish about him except for everything he says.’ You feel it in the razzamatazz of the talk.”
Here are the first lines of the original 1928 script, in which the guys are playing poker:
The Card Players: crack it for a dime….by me…I stay…me too….I’m behind again…I was even a couple of minutes ago… papers…three…two…three to the dealer.
The scene is urban melting pot! Jazz! Vaudeville! As Hatcher puts it: “The play is chock full of Irishmen, Wasps, Presbyterians. But Jews are not there except in the style and verve of the language.” For his part, he names Officer Jacobi, who in the original is “voice from jail yard.” And he adds Abramovitz, an offstage journo.
Hatcher also wisely kept the gender-flipped casting from Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, in which star reporter, Hildy Johnson, was played by Rosalind Russell. He whittles down the play from three acts to two and the cast from 23 to 13. And he cleaned up some of the slurs. Like Hildy calling Jacobi “pickle nose” and the word “sissy.”
He did, however, keep “Polack Mike.” “We don’t want to blunt the knife so that it’s a butter knife,” he said.
Still, there is something constricted in The Front Page. The long scenes are sometimes funny, but also cruel, this world where nepotism and corruption rule, violence is king, and an editor and a politician manipulate everyone. If Hecht’s divided Jewishness led to his outsider take on Chicago journalism, his world can also seem hollow.
In the famous last scene, Walter lets Hildy go off to get married and even gives the happy couple his watch. The minute they leave, he calls his henchman to get the police to arrest them. And then he delivers the fabulous last line as if he himself even believes it: “The son of a bitch stole my watch!”
In 1928 the phrase “son of a bitch” shocked audiences. Now it seems quaint. But the vignette made me consider how the play takes people’s selfishness and cruelty for granted. Those in charge are so glib about the lives of others, including those they supposedly love. It barely seems like a comedy anymore; it’s too real.
*
Rachel Shteir, a 2025-6 Guggenheim Fellow, is working on a book about why theater matters. Read full bio →
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
In memory of Joan Druxman
By BERNIE BELLAN In May 2023 I wrote a story about Joan Druxman, whom I had just met in person when she was a guest speaker at the Remis Luncheon series that month.
Sadly, Joan passed away on September 5, after a brief illness. My original story received over 4,000 views, so I thought it worth repeating here, to honour the memory of a vivacious and fascinating woman. Here is that story again:
The February 21, 2001 issue of The Jewish Post & News had an article titled “It’s a Comedy Night!”
That article went on to describe an upcoming event in which State of Israel Bonds would be honouring Rabbi Alan Green. Among the comedians to be appearing at the event was to be “Joan Druxman-Jones.”
Now, 22 years later, State of Israel Bonds doesn’t have an office in Winnipeg, Rabbi Green doesn’t live here any more (although he will be returning this weekend as the Shaarey Zedek’s Rabbi in Residence during Shavuot) and, as for Joan Druxman-Jones, well, she is back in Winnipeg – after having left in 1990 – and after having had a tumultuous series of career changes throughout her life –and, after having dropped the Jones in her name and gone back to Joan Druxman.
Joan Druxman was the guest speaker at this year’s kickoff Remis Forum luncheon on Thursday, May 11, at the Gwen Secter Centre.
I had never met Joan prior to that Thursday, although advertisements for her well-known women’s clothing store, “Joan’s Boutique”, were a regular feature in our paper for years. Once she took the podium at the Gwen Secter Centre it was easy to see how Joan had been a successful model for years. She still maintains a shapely figure and, even at 83, Joan is quite an attractive woman. (Is it okay to say that, I wonder? Who knows what’s permissible nowadays to write about a woman – or a man, for that matter, when it comes to physical appearance?)
But, more than anything, what struck me in listening to Joan tell her life story was her ease in speaking, her quick wit, and her self-effacing sense of humour.
As Simone Cohen Scott noted in an email sent out to Remis Forum attendees (and, by the way, anyone can attend a Remis luncheon. Just let the Gwen Secter Centre know you’re coming by the Tuesday of that week’s luncheon. Call 204-339-1701.), I took “voluminous notes” while Joan spoke.
So, here’s my account of the story Joan told: Born in Winnipeg, Joan (whose maiden name was Zelcovich, she said), grew up in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and moved back with her family to Winnipeg when she was 15.
Joan explained why her father decided to move to Winnipeg. He had owned a successful hotel in Estevan, but many of the patrons of that hotel were rough-hewn oil workers from the area around Estevan. “My father wasn’t about to let those oil workers anywhere near his two teenage daughters,” Joan said. (She had a younger sister at the time they moved here.)
But, the summer before the Zelcoviches moved to Winnipeg, they spent part of that summer at Clear Lake.
There were a lot of Jewish girls at Clear Lake, Joan noted, but they snubbed here because of the way she dressed. “They thought I was a hick,” she said.
That fall though, when Joan began attending Kelvin High School, and she was introduced by the teacher to the other students, the other girls couldn’t wait to be her friend, Joan said. This time she was dressed to the nines, she noted – something that has been very important to her ever since, she also observed.
As she noted toward the end of her talk, “I firmly dress the way you want to be treated.”
But from where did get Joan derive her impeccable fashion sense?
“My mother subscribed to the New York Times Magazine. It was the Vogue of the day,” she said.
Sure enough, when she was only 16, Joan got her first job working at the Mirror Room in the Hudson Bay store while she was attending high school.
After attending Kelvin for a couple of years Joan decided to attend the University of Manitoba. (In those days, she explained, you could take Grade 11 at the university.)
As things turned out, however, and as Joan observed, university was not for her.
“I hated it like you can’t imagine,” she said. “When I got 17 in Biology I knew university was not for me.”
So, Joan decided to enroll in the Angus School of Commerce (which was owned by Janice Filmon’s father at the time) where she obtained her diploma in typing and shorthand. “I was a wiz on the Dictaphone,” she noted.
But, she had to find a job after graduating. “I saw an ad for a company called Gunn Garment, which was owned by Harry Silverberg and Dave Kaufman, and which was managed by Max Duboff.”
“I became Max’s secretary and house model,” Joan said. “That’s how I became a model.”
It was during her time at Gunn Garment that Joan was introduced to the man who was to become her husband, Winnipeg Blue Bomber George Druxman.
“Marilyn Trepel called me up and told me someone had seen me at a wedding. Would I like to meet him? He’s one of the Blue Bombers,” Marilyn said to Joan.
As a Bomber wife, Joan was asked to appear on a local television show along with other Bomber wives where they would each be asked to cook a favourite dish.
“I made blintzes,” Joan noted.
As luck would have it, “two guys from Manitoba Sugar saw me and asked me to do a regular cooking show on TV.”
It was while appearing on her own cooking show that an editor of the Winnipeg Tribune asked Joan whether she would like to become food editor of that paper, and shortly thereafter, the fashion editor as well.
The next step in Joan’s career came when she was asked whether she would like to become the fashion coordinator for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina, also the manager of the Fashion Room in the Bay.
But, as Joan recalled, “at the time the Bay fashions were all centrally coordinated. I hated them all. I decided to go out on my own.”
Thus began the longest segment of Joan’s varied career: as owner of Joan’s Boutique.
It was no simple matter, however, for a woman to strike out on her own in a business at that time, which was in 1976
Having been divorced from George Druxman (who died in 1999), Joan was mother of three boys at the time: Trevor, Greg, and Adam. Two of the boys were married by then.)
“I wanted to set up in an old house,” she recalled.
“I went to see a bank manager who said to me: ‘I’ll have you know fashion retailing is the riskiest business there is.”
Not one to be discouraged, however, a former classmate of Joan’s from Kelvin, Brian Aronovitch, told her there was a house at 34 Carlton owned by lawyer Ken Houston – who wanted to rent out part of the house.
At the same time Joan was introduced to another bank manager who was supportive of her dream of opening her own boutique.
“I opened Joan’s in 1977,” she observed. “Business just took off. It was bursting at the seams.”
Ever on the eye for another opportunity, it was while out for a walk in the neighbourhood of the Carlton store that Joan said she saw a rooming house for sale at 22 Edmonton.
“It was a tax sale,” Joan noted. And so, in 1979, Joan Druxman opened Joan’s Boutique at her new location on Edmonton, where she was to remain for the next 13 years.
“I gutted it and had clothing and accessories on the first and second floors,” she said, “with a hairdresser on the third floor.”
Ever restless, however, Joan decided to move to Vancouver in 1990.
“I saw things there that weren’t happening in Winnipeg,” she observed, including a very large Japanese population.
Joan opened her first store in Vancouver at the corner of 12th and Granville, but soon she came across a better opportunity at Berard and Granville. She approached a former friend from Winnipeg, Karen Simkin, who had also moved to Vancouver and who had opened a little gift shop.
“I invited Karen to move to that new location with me,” Joan said.
Karen’s husband, Garry Simkin, was fully supportive, and so the two women opened a store that was a combination clothing and gift ware store.
As mentioned though, Joan had taken note of how many Japanese tourists there were in Vancouver. Accordingly, as she explained, “I went to Simon Fraser University and learned how to read and write Japanese” so that she would better ingratiate herself with Japanese customers.
Things were going along well until their landlord told Joan and Karen that he was going to be raising the rent to $250,000 a year. (And remember, this was the 1990s. One can well imagine how exorbitant that amount would have been back then.)
So – another career switch for Joan was in the offing: “I decided I’d like to be an actress,” she observed. At the same time she started doing stand-up comedy (as noted at the beginning of this article.)
Ever eager for new challenges, however, Joan decided to apply for a green card and move to Los Angeles –where she began studying acting while working for Nordstrom’s.
“I also got my California real estate license,” she added.
But this was all before Obamacare, Joan noted. “Medical insurance was costing me $1500 a month.”
Joan decided to move back to Winnipeg where, once again, she opened “a little store.”
In 2020, however, with the onset of the Covid pandemic, Joan found she “couldn’t get stuff from Europe” and, as a result, she had to close her store.
“So, I walked into the cosmetics department of the Bay (Polo Park store) and said, ‘I want to see the Chanel manager.’ “
As luck would have it, that manager happened to need someone at the Chanel perfume counter and Joan was hired on the spot.
Which brings us full circle to where Joan started when she only 16 – working again at the Bay.
“Here I am at the Bay working five days a week – and loving it,” she said. “Without a bank manager, without a landlord, and without the tax man.”
But, as Joan observed, she still dresses to the nines – even though now she takes the bus to work. (It stops right in front of her apartment and drops her off right at work, so why not?)
As she noted though, you can imagine the looks she gets from other passengers who see an immaculately dressed woman getting on their bus every day.
One time, Joan said, her regular bus driver asked her: “Are you a celebrity?”
Joan told him she wasn’t, but one day that bus driver happened to be shopping at the Bay with his wife when he spotted Joan at the Chanel counter and said to his wife: “I know her. She rides my bus.”
That’s Joan Druxman for you – more twists and turns than a Gerry Posner story. Some day she ought to write a book. Hey, there’s an idea for her next career move!
Post script: We were informed that the day after Joan Druxman spoke at the Gwen Secter Centre she was involved in a terrible accident when she was coming out of work at the Bay.. It seems that Joan was caught in the midst of a situation where some young boys had been fleeing the store after having stolen some jeans. One of them ran into Joan, knocking her to the ground – which broke her hip. At last report she had undergone hip replacement surgery and had been released from the hospital.
Features
What I miss
By DAVID TOPPER When my late wife, Sylvia, and I moved into the house I’m still in, we brought with us not only our furniture and other things from inside the old house, but some outdoor plants and flowers – even a shrub. The shrub, of course, was small: a young mock orange. Sylvia had a thing about mock oranges, so we dug it up and took it with us to the new house. Then there were irises that we inherited from the previous owners of our first house. I can still recall Sylvia doting over those irises when we moved there in 1971. They were very different varieties from those she was familiar with. I liked them, too. I also remember a rose bush. Well, everyone likes roses. Appropriately, it was red. So, the irises, along with the mock orange and the rose bush were transplanted to the new yard. That was in the summer of 1976.
For reasons that I cannot explain, when it came to plants and such, there was a sort of division-of-plant-labor between us. I took care of all the indoor plants and Sylvia did the outdoor ones. This meant that she only worked during the relatively short span from late spring to early fall, since we live in Winnipeg, Canada. Whereas, I looked over the house plants all year long.
Actually, I can explain something. You may have noticed that when speaking of digging up things I use the plural. This was because Sylvia enjoyed physically working in the yard. This digging urge she acquired in the year after High School that she spent working on a Kibbutz in Israel. It was daily hard physical labor in the field: digging, planting, pruning, picking and so forth. Yet she always talked about it lovingly. That was 1960-61 and I saw the blissful look on her face when working in our yard, from 1971 onward.
In time we had a diverse array of plants and flowers. In no particular order, we had lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, irises, roses, tulips, lungwort, elephant ears, clematis, rhubarb and the mock orange (which – along with the irises and roses – had grown quite nicely, since the summer of 1976).
All this lasted until the foremost transition in our lives. Early in 2014 Sylvia was diagnosed as being in an early stage of dementia. Over the next six years, as she drifted deeper into her black hole, I gladly obliged taking over the household chores, some of which I had begun already – such as doing most of the cooking. As for the outdoor tasks from spring through summer, that deeply implanted love of gardening was one of the last things to go from her immediate world. Even when she was not too sure who I was, she was glad to work with me in the yard with a shovel in her hands – and a smile on her face.
Sylvia died in the winter of 2020. Come spring, it was just me and the yard.
I don’t remember if it was that first spring or one later, but one day I noticed that the mock orange looked less robust – so I pruned it. That seemed to work for the summer, but the following spring it lost its vigor. More pruning didn’t help. Thus, slowly, over time, it died off and I dug up what was left.
Around the time I was still fiddling with the mock orange, I noticed the rose bush that Sylvia gave lots of love and care was not looking its usual hearty self. I got the fertilizer that she used to try to revive it, and that seemed to work. But the following year, the bush lost its vitality – and nothing I did (extra watering; keeping it dry) worked to impede the track it was on. In time, the rose bush died, too.
“What’s next,” I shouted to our yard.
The following spring the tulips came up as usual, but didn’t look as healthy as they should. These had a special meaning, since we bought the bulbs on a trip to Holland and planted them ourselves. Obviously, I tried everything I could to bring them back – reading all that the Internet had to say about tulips. Needless to say, that was the last summer for the tulips.
“Oh no,” I cried the following spring, when I first saw the irises. They were up, but not looking very well. This was probably the most difficult loss. I don’t know why, but those irises were part of an exceptional bond between us. Sylvia and I and the irises: their singularity symbolized the uniqueness of our relationship.
The irises were the last to go.
As I write this, the rhubarb still comes up, but it’s not as hearty as it used to be. The rest of the plants are doing fine: lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, lungwort, elephant ears and clematis. Incidentally, I also have a unique fondness for the clematis, since I bought it and planted it myself many years ago.
I wish to make clear that I’m not putting forth any causal or symbolic or spiritual or mystical meaning to all this, in relation to Sylvia’s demise. Rather, I’m just telling the story of my personal experience with the plants and flowers in our yard. You may read into it whatever you wish.
Now when I walk about my yard, enjoying the remaining plants and flowers amidst the bushes and trees, I not only see and derive pleasure from all that I still have – but I also “see” what is missing: that mock orange, the rose bush, those tulips and the irises.
It also reminds me what I intimately and ultimately miss.
Tags: bonding |caring |coping |loss |sharing |symbolism
David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific,Academy of theHeart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag. and elsewhere.
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