Rose Caylor was newspaper reporter, author, screenwriter and
playwright. She was born in Vilna, Russia (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in
1898, the daughter of Morris and Elizabeth Libman. Her father came to
America in 1906 where he found work in Chicago as a department store
salesman. Rose, her mother and two sisters joined him there the
following year. Rose's older sister was the author and Jewish historian
Anita Libman Lebeson (abt. 1897-1987) and her younger sister, Minna
Libman Emch (abt 1904-1958), was a noted Chicago psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst.
Rose graduated second in her class at the University of Chicago and
went on to work as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. While at
the Daily News she met and fell in love with writer
Ben Hecht and moved to New York City
with him in 1924. The next year they married after his divorce from
writer Mary Armstrong was finalized. Over their almost forty year
marriage Rose collaborated on a number of projects with her husband and
helped as his assistant.
In 1930 she translated and adapted for Broadway
Anton Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya". Among
her novels are "The Woman on the Balcony" (1927) and "The Journey"
(1933).
Her only child
Jenny Hecht was an actress
who died of a drug overdose in 1971. Rose Caylor Hecht passed away in
1979. Her headstone at the Oak Him Cemetery in Nyack, New York bears
the inscription "and rooks in families homeward go, and so do I." from
the
Thomas Hardy poem "Weathers".
Fingers at the Window(1942)