Konrad Bercovici: 
Gypsies and Gusto

Konrad Bercovici, a self-styled “gypsy,” was a popular American writer and journalist whose friends included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His successful lawsuit against Charlie Chaplin generated many a headline three quarters of a century ago.

Although his home was literally on the state line along West Lane in Lewisboro, N.Y., Bercovici always considered himself a Ridgefielder. In fact, his mailing address was Ridgefield because the Ridgefield Post Office delivered his mail.

A native of Romania, Konrad Bercovici was born in 1882 to an intellectual Jewish couple who taught their children Greek, French, and German as well as Romanian. At a young age he became fascinated with the Roma — what he always called gypsies. “He spent much of his youth among the tents of gypsies who poured into Romania from the borders of Hungary, listening to their songs and learning their language,” said the New York Times.

When he was 11, his father was killed in an anti-Jewish riot and the family soon moved  to Paris where they began socializing with the literary community. He studied the organ under Charles-Marie Widor — the man who taught Albert Schweitzer — and was soon proficient enough that he gave a recital at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. 

While still a teenager, he began to write professionally, often about the Roma. He sold short stories for $5 each, while also working at a variety of jobs, including painting the frame of the Eiffel Tower.

He met his wife, Naomi, a sculptor, in Paris. The couple moved to New York City in 1904. There, to earn a living while pursuing his interest in writing, Konrad shoveled snow from the city streets, played piano in silent picture theaters, sold artificial flowers, and worked in sweatshops.

His first book, Crimes of Charities, appeared in 1917 and criticized what he considered the indifference of organized charities to the people they were supposed to be helping. 

The same year, he joined the staff of the New York World, writing sports stories and features, and three years later moved to the New York Evening Post, covering stories in many parts of the world. At the same time he continued turning out short stories for literary magazines.

During the 1920s he also wrote a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, soon gaining an international reputation as a lively and interesting author. He became one of the Algonquin Table “regulars” that included  Irving Berlin, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Alexander Woollcott. Among his circle of friends were such artists, writers, actors, and musicians  as Melvyn Douglas, Diego Rivera,  F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, Wilhelm Van Loon, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Gershwin brothers. A  portrait of him sketched by the young Amadeo Modigliani is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Over his long life, he produced around 40 books, many of them about the Roma — his Story of the Gypsies has been considered a standard work on the subject. However, he also wrote fiction and non-fiction on historical figures, including That Royal Lover, about Romania’s King Caroll, and Savage Prodigal, a biography of the French poet Rimbaud.

The Bercovicis moved to West Lane around 1930, but also maintained a residence in New York City. Among his local friends was author Margaret “Peggy” Shane of North Salem Road, mother of Betty Grace Nash, longtime managing editor of The Ridgefield Press and wife of publisher  Karl Nash.

Karl Nash was well acquainted with Bercovici whom he described as “a frequent speaker at service club meetings over the years, tackling his subjects with a gusto that marked his writings.” In one talk that Nash covered in June 1945, Bercovici told the Ridgefield Lions that he favored imprisoning the entire nation of Germany for the war and its atrocities.  “There is no reasonable argument why a whole nation that has proven itself asocial should not be treated by the civilized nations of the world as an asocial individual is treated by society,” Bercovici told the club. “The crime committed by a thousand or a million or ten million is not less a crime because it has been committed by a mass.”

Some of Bercovici’s books became movies, including The Volga Boatman (1926), produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He himself worked as a screenwriter  for several years in Hollywood where he became friends with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. It was Chaplin’s hit The Great Dictator (1940) that was the subject of a 1947 lawsuit in which Bercovici  sued Chaplin, charging that he plagiarized material that Bercovici had written.

 

Bercovici was represented  by attorney Louis Nizer. In his book My Life in Court, Nizer explained that “The claim was that Chaplin had approached Bercovici to produce one of his gypsy stories as a motion picture and in the course of those friendly negotiations, Bercovici gave him an outline of ‘The Great Dictator’ story about a barber who looks like Hitler and is confused with him.” The case was settled, with Chaplin paying Bercovici $95,000 ($1.1 million in 2020). but with Chaplin also gaining rights to a couple Bercovici books that he could turn into movies.

In his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that he had been the sole writer of The Great Dictator’s script. He came to a settlement, though, because of his “unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next.” 

Bercovici died in 1961 at the age of 80, leaving four children including journalist Rion Bercovici, artist Mirel Bercovici, and author Revolte “Rada” Bercovici.

Ted Shane: 

Humorist from Hell

How can a humorist be a “lady” from hell? 

Ted Shane wrote books and magazine articles, and created the “Cockeyed Crosswords” that were popular from the 1930s to the 1960s and appeared in various magazines. But before he became a humorist and writer, he went to Canada to enlist in the Black Watch, the famous kilted Scots division called the “Ladies from Hell.” Only 16 when he joined, he fought in World War I with the division. 

Theodore Sidney Shane was born in New York City in 1900. His father was a tailor who had immigrated from Hungary in the 1880s and his mother was the daughter of German immigrants. After the war, Shane studied at Columbia, graduating in 1923, and began writing book and movie reviews and humor pieces for magazines that included the old Liberty, where his humorous crosswords also appeared. 

He came to Ridgefield in 1930 when he married Margaret Woodward Smith Boyd, also a writer, and lived here off and on until his death — he and Peggy Boyd also spent three years in Hollywood writing for MGM and 12 years in Europe. 

He wrote profiles, particularly of sports figures, for Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and other magazines, and worked as editor of 1,000 Jokes magazine. 

He published several books of crossword collections as well as “Heroes of the Pacific” (1944) and, though he did not drink, the light-hearted and popular “Bar Guide” (1950), illustrated by VIP (Virgil Partch). 

In 1940 Shane and writer-broadcaster Lowell Thomas wrote “Softball, So What?” about their

experiences on Thomas’s famous softball team, The Nine Old Men.  The Nine Old Men played in Ridgefield and in other places for benefit games in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The team included the likes of heavyweight champion boxer Gene Tunney, humorist Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle (F. Chase Taylor), cartoonist Paul Webb and Novelist Homer Croy.

Among the many celebrities who played in their games were critic Heywood Hale Broun, Believe It Or Not creator Bob Ripley, self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie, and baseball great Babe

Ruth — Shane wrote: “A .100 softball hitter, Ruth has made only one homer — off Broun, one of the softest softball pitchers in the game.” Among the people who came to watch the Old Men play was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a friend of Thomas.

In 1946, Shane tested the local political waters, running unsuccessfully for state senator from Ridgefield’s district. He was a Democrat in a very Republican district and lost mightily.

Ted Shane died in Ridgefield in 1967 at the age of 66.

In 1951 his daughter, Gretchen Shane, married Egbert W. Swackhamer (1927-1994) at Shane home in Ridgefield. Swackhamer later became a television director who did episodes for M*A*S*H, L.A. Law, Murder She Wrote, Bewitched, The Partridge Family, and The Flying Nun. He specialized in directing pilot shows for TV; of his 27 pilots, 18 became series, including Law & Order, Eight Is Enough, Quincy, M.E., S.W.A.T, and Nancy Drew.

Margaret Smith Boyd Shane:

Writer among Writers

Margaret Woodward Smith Boyd Shane grew up in a world of writers, wrote under several names, and became a best-selling author.

Margaret Woodward Smith was born in 1895 in Indiana. Her mother, Grace Woodward Smith, was a former high school principal who wrote articles for the Delineator, a popular magazine for women. Her father, Duncan Smith, was a newspaper editor and publisher, later a humor columnist. 

She attended the University of Chicago and worked for newspapers in Chicago and St. Paul, Minn., before marrying Thomas A. Boyd, also a writer. By 1920, she was writing novels.

The Boyds were both friends of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who recognized talent in each of them. As he had with Thomas Boyd’s successful novel, “Through the Wheat,” Fitzgerald brought Margaret’s novel, “The Love Legend,” to his famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, who published it in 1922. “The Love Legend,” published under the pen name Woodward Boyd, became a bestseller and was praised by The New York Times as “a lively, colorful tale.”
A year later she produced “Lazy Laughter” and then “The Unpaid Piper” (1927). 

The couple came to Ridgefield in 1925 and bought a house on North Salem Road, which she retained after their divorce in 1929. She married another writer, Ted Shane, and as Peggy Shane she produced more novels including “Tangled Wives” (1932) and “Change Partners” (1934). 

The Shanes made their home in Ridgefield except during a stint in Hollywood, writing for movies. 

In 1941, she and Arthur Sheckman wrote “Mr. Big,” a Broadway show directed by George F. Kaufman and starring Hume Cronyn and Fay Wray; it ran for only seven performances. (However it wasn’t a total loss; when a Hollywood studio later appropriated their title for the film of a different story, the playwrights successfully sued and collected damages.) 

Peggy Shane lived most of her last 10 years in England and France, but fell ill and came back to Ridgefield where she died in 1965 at the age of 69.
Her father was Duncan MacMillan Smith, also profiled in Who Was Who in Ridgefield. A Chicago journalist, he spent his last 25 years here and wrote the popular Ridgefield Press column, “A Birdseye View,” for many years. Her daughter, Elizabeth Boyd Nash, was an editor and co-owner of The Press for nearly 40 years. Her grandson, Thomas Boyd Nash, became the newspaper’s publisher.