THE REAL NICK AND NORA: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics.

By David L. Goodrich. Southern Illinois Univ. Press. 304 pp. $30

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the urbane married couple who were as expert at writing for the stage as for the screen, once assigned themselves the cable address GOOD HACKS. This lighthearted bit of self-deprecation was characteristic of the wit and modesty they brought to a high-polish collaboration that glittered from 1928 to 1962 and, along the way, earned them four Oscar nominations, one Pulitzer Prize, and a Writers Guild Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement. Goodrich and Hackett wrote films that continue to please today, including The Thin Man (1934) and its first two sequels, Easter Parade (1948), Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel, Seven Wonderful Life (1946)—which they didn’t like—as well as the stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), for which they won their Pulitzer and are probably best remembered today.

In this engaging and spirited biography— the title alludes to The Thin Man, of course: the duo were so charming and amusing that William Powell and Myrna Loy needed only to imitate them—David Goodrich, a nephew, reveals that the scriptwriters were much more than "good hacks," and a very lucky thing for the rest of us, too, not to mention the stars they wrote for. They were eclectic craftsmen with the swank of Bel Air and the work ethic of dray horses. "We shouldn’t take so much trouble," Frances admitted, "but it is only to satisfy ourselves." A friend likened their work to "fine cabinet-making." They were "professionals whose name on a script [was] a guarantee of its excellence," though assuring top quality involved many drafts, a willingness to "criticize freely," and screaming matches that bystanders compared to "being near a bear pit."

It was another world, the so-called Golden Age of Movies that began with talkies in the late 1920s and died when the studios did in the 1960s. It depended on a much-derided factory system that, as the author expertly details, nonetheless elicited memorable work from Goodrich and Hackett and their friends—Ben Hecht, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Dorothy Parker, Philip Dunne, Samson Raphaelson, Lillian Hellman, Robert Benchley, and many others—who came west to pick up some easy money and stayed long enough to inject wit, character, and style into what had been a barely literate popular art.

Writers have always been third-class citizens in Hollywood, even when highly paid, and being marginalized may—paradoxically—have saved Goodrich and Hackett. It gave Brides for Seven Brothers Thin Man stars Myrna Loy and them perspective, so that (1954), and Frank Capra’s William Powell mirrored their when "we started throwing Christmas perennial It’s a creators, Goodrich and Hackett. up and crying into our typewriters" over misbegotten projects or moronic producers, they could pack up their Smith-Coronas and go back to the theater, as they did with The Diary of Anne Frank. And when the entire system began crashing around their heads, they simply said, "Let’s get out of here." And did.

The system denigrated writers and depended on them, and it will continue to do so as long as movies tell stories. The value of "hacks"—the good and even the bad—was defined by one of Hollywood’s legendary talent users and abusers, Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM, who called writers like Goodrich and Hackett "the most important people in film"—and then added, mogul that he was, "and we must do everything to keep them from finding out."

—Steven Bach