Background
Frederick Hugh Herbert was born on May 29, 1897 in Vienna, Austria. He was the son of Lionel Frederick Herbert, a stockbroker, and Paula Knepler. Shortly after Hugh's birth the family moved to London.
Frederick Hugh Herbert was born on May 29, 1897 in Vienna, Austria. He was the son of Lionel Frederick Herbert, a stockbroker, and Paula Knepler. Shortly after Hugh's birth the family moved to London.
Herbert was educated at Gresham Public School in Holt, Norfolk, England, and in 1913 entered the London School of Mines to study engineering. The war interrupted his plans, however, and he joined the Officers Training Corps in 1914 and earned the rank of lieutenant.
During the war Herbert served with the Royal Garrison Artillery in London and Jamaica. Following the war Herbert became a copy boy in the advertising section of Selfridge's department store in London. In a short time he was producing poems and stories at a remarkable rate.
Herbert immigrated to the United States in 1920 to join his father, who had spent the war years in New York, and soon his short stories and essays were appearing in Smart Set and Saturday Evening Post. He also began writing movie dialogues and scenarios at Paramount's Long Island studios. Although his ambition was to write for the theater, Herbert was tempted by a lucrative Hollywood contract and moved to the West Coast, where he wrote original screenplays and adapted stories for numerous films, including Adam and Evil (1927), Beau Broadway (1928), Air Circus (1928), Lights of New York (1928), and Baby Cyclone (1928).
With the advent of sound he discovered that his gift for facile dialogue and "boy gets girl" plotting was in great demand. He adapted Murder on the Roof and wrote Vengeance for Columbia in 1930 while directing the sound sequences for Danger Lights and writing the screenplay for S. N. Behrman's The Second Man at RKO. Equally at home in melodrama and comedy, Herbert's film credits eventually surpassed fifty.
His first play for the Broadway stage, Quiet Please (1940), was a failure; but Kiss and Tell ran for an impressive 962 performances, and Herbert added radio writing to his list of credits. The courtship of Corliss Archer and Dexter Franklin became the basis for "Meet Corliss Archer, " which debuted on CBS in 1943. Herbert wrote for the series until 1955, and his skill at capturing the pangs of adolescence as well as the solid virtues of middle-class America made the program one of the most popular radio comedies of the period.
Herbert's skill as a playwright, however, was not limited to the teen set. In 1951 he shocked many theatergoers with his witty and controversial comedy The Moon Is Blue. The play, probably his best known, nearly duplicated the success of Kiss and Tell by running for 924 performances. In The Moon Is Blue, Herbert explored the relationship between a delightfully outspoken young woman and an engaged architect as they discussed sex in a frank and frequently funny manner. But when Herbert and Otto Preminger filmed The Moon Is Blue in 1953, shock became outrage. Angered by the use of such words as "virgin, " "mistress, " and "seduction, " the Legion of Decency condemned the film and the Hollywood Production Code Administration refused to grant it a seal of approval. United Artists responded by releasing The Moon Is Blue without a seal, and in the resulting box office scramble it grossed over $6 million. The impact on filmmaking was enormous. The film paved the way for a reappraisal of the production code and for the eventual acceptance of such controversial films as Lolita and Baby Doll.
With the success of The Moon Is Blue Herbert was guaranteed the capital and freedom to produce his own fims. He also wrote a novel, I'd Rather Be Kissed (1954), but like his earlier efforts--There You Are (1925), A Lover Would Be Nice (1935), and The Revolt of Henry (1939)--the book did not sell well; and Herbert's belief that novels were only a diversion from his real love, the theater, was underscored further. Herbert's last plays, A Girl Can Tell (1953) and an adaptation of Best House in Naples (1956), were not successful. But as was his custom, he shrugged them off and continued to work.
Herbert was striken with lung cancer in 1958. He died in Los Angeles, California, shortly after the release of This Happy Feeling, a film comedy based on one of his earlier stage hits, For Love or Money (1947).
Although born in Vienna and educated in London, Herbert created some of the most typically American characters in popular entertainment. One of Herbert's most enduring creations was the character of American teenager Corliss Archer, who was introduced in his 1943 play Kiss and Tell and played on screen by Shirley Temple in the 1945 film adaptation. The character went on to appear in a series of magazine articles, another Temple film, and a radio and television series called Meet Corliss Archer. Herbert won the Writers Guild of America Award for Sitting Pretty and was nominated for The Moon is Blue.
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Herbert was proud of the fact that he could write anywhere and could deliver under pressure. He was also a modest and generous man who could not refuse a favor or the call to "doctor" a shaky script. His literary pace was exhausting.
On September 19, 1927, Herbert married Arline Appleby. They had two daughters. Herbert credited his daughters with inspiring one of his most popular plays, Kiss and Tell (1943), in which the teenage Corliss Archer was introduced to American theater audiences. He later claimed that both girls wanted to play Corliss when the comedy became a radio series. He and Arline Herbert were divorced in 1937, and on May 14, 1938, he married Mary A. Lankey of Los Angeles.
