Married Immigrants Mock Shakespeare for Movie Fame

Both their immigrant and journalist experiences influenced the themes of the first few of their plays to be produced on Broadway: The War Song (co-written with George Jessel), Poppa, Clear all Wires, and Spring Song. Though none of these plays ran for longer than three months, Clear All Wires, a play about unethical American reporters in Moscow, gained them their first job in Hollywood in 1933. They adapted the play into a film at the same time as they were reworking it as a musical for Broadway with Cole Porter writing the score. As a musical, Leave it to Me ran for nearly a year on Broadway, allowing the Spewacks to travel between the two cities and the two styles of writing for the rest of their careers.

As to their writing process, according to Jewish scholar Michael Taub wrote, “Since they worked as a team, it is, of course, impossible to evaluate one without the other. However, it is widely accepted that Sam created the plot and action, while Bella wrote most of the dialogue.” More compliments came in the forward to the Dramatists Play Service publication of Boy Meets Girl, a 1936 Spewack musical about the audacity of Hollywood that satirizes Grover Jones, a witty, extremely conservative screenwriter and his partner William Slavens.

In 1940 The Spewacks wrote My Favorite Wife, which involves a husband (Cary Grant) and his second wife (Gail Patrick) embarking on their honeymoon as the husband humorously encounters his first wife (Irene Dunne) who has been lost at sea for seven years. Original director Leo McCarey also earned story credit while the Spewacks earned solo writing credit, which meant the dialogue belonged to them. The three shared the Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story in 1941.

The Spewacks became so prominent that in 1946 the United Nations appointed Bella as a representative, covering the distribution of food in war-ravaged Eastern Europe. However, the culmination of their career came when producers approached Bella, during one of her separations from Sam, to write the book for a proposed musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Taming was Bella’s least favorite of all Shakespeare’s works, but she wrote the book and more importantly, convinced Cole Porter to do the score by insisting the basic story had less to do with Shakespeare and more to do with the melodramas of the Yiddish theatre. When Porter joined the team, Sam came onto the production.

Kiss Me, Kate became the longest-running musical in Porter’s career, running for 1,077 performances in New York. It won both a Tony Award and a Page One Award for the Spewacks in 1949, though they did not receive the contract to adapt this play into the film. That assignment went to Dorothy Kingsley in 1953.

Sam died in 1971. Bella in 1990. Revivals of their most successful Broadway shows have kept their names in the news. In 2000, Broadway director Aaron Frankel created the one-act play A Letter to Sam from Bella as a fund-raiser for the Columbia University Archives, which houses the Spewack collection of personal papers. According to Frankel, the letters show evidence of marital discord and frequent separations, sometimes caused by work, sometimes caused by personal discontent.

In regards to their relationship Bella once told a writer from Bucks County, where they also owned a vacation home, that “Sam really fell in love with my writing.” 

Research for this column comes from the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, edited by Rosanne Welch. 

If you’d like to learn more about the women highlighted in this column, and about the art of screenwriting while earning your MFA, our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is currently accepting applications.