The Saga of Jenny

Poor Jenny, bright as a penny, Her equal would be hard to find . . .

In front of Manhattan's Vanderbilt Theater one matinee day last week, a moppet sadly said to mother: "Gee, I wish I could see Mrs. Hecht's little girl in this." But Mrs. Hecht's little girl had just been forced out of the cast of the play Midsummer by Actors' Equity, and Broadway rang with the loudest theatrical Donnybrook in many a season. Actress Jenny Hecht seemed small (9 years, 45 Ibs.) to create such a furor. But then, as her father, Playwright (Front Page) Ben Hecht, had himself once remarked: (There never was an uninhibited little wench like Jenny."

Psychological Warfare. When Jenny first opened in Midsummer during its out-of-town run four months ago, everyone thought she was awfully cute, darling. The air grew chillier when Jenny took a poke at Barry Blake, another child actor in the play. Then the grownup actors--who can be just as sensitive in these matters as children--took offense when Jenny started stealing scenes from them, by mugging or winking at the audience. Backstage, Jenny thumbed her nose at Actress Vicki Cummings' maid, and, it was charged, even mother Hecht insulted Hollywood Actor Mark Stevens (playing Jenny's father) by yelling and burping into his face.

"Jenny," retorted Mrs. Hecht, denying everything, "is a lady." The other actors, she suggested, were jealous because the critics had raved about Jenny's fine performance (as indeed they had: ". . . absolutely captivating . . . more terrifying than the child monster in The Children's Hour . . ."), and were waging psychological warfare against her. In one scene, Stevens has to carry Jenny onstage through a fire door; Mrs. Hecht feared that "if we didn't tell her to duck, she would have her head bashed in." She pleaded with Stevens: "Why don't you try to charm Jenny?" But he ignored the suggestion.

Added Mrs. Hecht: Actress Cummings, in her turn, once "kicked a hole in Jenny's dress while she was in it." Worse, Jenny was deprived of her solo curtain call. She consoled herself with the thought that "for every person who hates me backstage, there are 30 people out there who love me." For the rest, she calmed her nerves by reading Chekhov.

Counterattack Fortnight ago, three solemn representatives of Actors' Equity marched into Jenny's dressing room.

First Representative: Miss Hecht, charges have been preferred against you.

Jenny (quavering): What have I done?

First Representative: I hear you've been a bad little girl. Among other things, you kicked one of the actors.

Jenny: I have never kicked any actor --onstage or offstage--in Hartford, Boston or New York, and I never tell lies.

Equity refused to make its charges public, but insisted that they were grave (actors claimed that Jenny was often late and refused to take directions). Outraged father Hecht, a veteran polemicist, rode to the counterattack. The Equity charges, he announced, were "trumpery," the work of "publicity-starved" actors. Father & mother Hecht considered suing Equity to clear their daughter's name. Meanwhile, they kept her secluded at their home in Nyack. "When one is in a blitz with a child," explained Mrs. Hecht over caviar and toast in New York's "21," "one pretends that nothing has happened."

Backstage at the Vanderbilt, the atmosphere was tense. In his dressing room, Actor Stevens nervously assured interviewers that he really loved dogs and children. Jenny, meanwhile, poured her heart out in an erratically spelled letter to a friend: "They didn't like me and we didn't like them . . . They put in the papers that I wasn't nice . . . I don't think anyone in the whole world . . . knows how it feals when they call half hour and you know it's not for you . . ."

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