Bella Spewack
Bella Cohen Spewack was a prominent American playwright and journalist, known for her extensive collaboration with her husband, Samuel Spewack. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she immigrated to the United States with her mother at a young age, eventually settling in New York City. Spewack began her career as a journalist, rising to the position of literary editor for the New York Evening Mail and later writing impactful articles that contributed to New York's rent laws and the public's understanding of prominent figures like Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov.
Throughout her career, she co-authored over a dozen plays for Broadway, achieving significant success with productions like "Kiss Me Kate," a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," which became a landmark hit. Spewack's work extended into film and television, where she adapted many of her theatrical works. Following her husband's death, she continued to manage his dramatic properties and engaged in freelance publicity work, including advising the Girl Scouts of America on fundraising strategies. Spewack's contributions to theater and journalism reflect her diverse talents and enduring legacy in American arts.
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Subject Terms
Bella Spewack
Author
- Born: March 25, 1899
- Birthplace: Bucharest, Romania
- Died: April 27, 1990
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Bella Cohen Spewack is usually discussed in concert with her husband and longtime collaborator, Samuel Spewack. The two brought over a dozen plays to Broadway between 1926 and Sam’s death in 1971. They also coauthored fourteen film scripts, including film adaptations of some of their plays, and television adaptations of Kiss Me Kate, and My Three Angels.
Bella Cohen Spewack was born in Bucharest, Romania, the daughter of Adoph and Fanny Cohen Loebel. In 1902, after Adolph abandoned them, Fanny and Bella immigrated to the United States. They lived in grinding poverty on New York’s Lower East Side. Fanny was remarried to Noonan Lang, but Bella disliked her stepfather.
Bella always wrote easily. After high school, she became a journalist and soon was literary editor of the New York Evening Mail. By 1921, she was a reporter for the New York Call. Through this connection she met Sam Spewack, a reporter for the Evening World. The two married in 1922 and for the next four years worked as foreign correspondents, spending considerable time abroad. In 1922, Spewack wrote her autobiographical Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side, not published until 1995, five years after her death.
Spewack was an effective reporter. In 1923, she wrote investigative articles on slum housing, which resulted in the enactment of New York’s rent laws. She gained worldwide recognition as the first reporter to publish the story of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov, the sole member Russia’s royal family to escape execution.
Spewack urged her husband to collaborate on writing plays. Although their first such effort, The Solitaire Man, failed in Boston, James McGuinness made it into a film in 1933. The first Spewack collaboration on Broadway, The War Song, relates the ordeals of a World War I soldier who suffers such a raft of trouble as to be unbelievable. Audiences responded well enough to justify a respectable run of eighty performances.
Clear All Wires!, which drew heavily on the Spewacks’ journalistic experiences, played for ninety-four performances. It then became a film for which they wrote the script. With contracts to write for Hollywood studios, the Spewacks moved to California, where they produced numerous film scripts.
In 1938, they collaborated with Cole Porter on Leave It to Me!, which ran for 291 Broadway performances. Their greatest success, however, came in 1948, when their collaboration with Porter, Kiss Me Kate, loosely adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1592). It ran for 1,017 Broadway performances and toured the world.
For the nineteen years after Sam’s death, Spewack was business manager of his dramatic properties. She also did occasional freelance work as a publicist. In this position, she advised the Girl Scouts of America to consider launching a cookie-selling campaign to raise money.