Arthur Sheekman (February 5, 1901 – January 12, 1978) was an American theater and movie critic, columnist, playwright, and editor—but best known for his writing for the screen.
In Sheekman's early years, the family lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where their father owned a bar.
Sheekman got his first job at twelve, working after school and on weekends at the St. Paul Public Library stacking books.
[6] Wanting to go to college, Sheekman enrolled at the University of Minnesota but found he could not manage both his job and his course work and had to withdraw.
[7] In 1926, Sheekman is rumored to have filled in for a colleague's place on a journalist's trip to the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia.
When the editor of the Chicago Journal stopped laughing, he offered Sheekman three times the salary he was getting at the Daily News.
On the Chicago Journal, Sheekman continued writing about the movies and Hollywood in his column, "Short Shot and Close-Up".
Then he was awarded the noteworthy space, "A Little About Everything," a column previously occupied by humorists Bert Leston Taylor, Finley Peter Dunne, and Franklin P. Adams.
The two men met in the fall of 1926 when The Marx Brothers came to Chicago on tour in their musical play, The Cocoanuts.
Then again after the Broadway run of their musical play, Animal Crackers (October 1928 – April 1929),[12] the brothers again came to Chicago on tour.
In the next five years, Sheekman and Perrin came up with two original stories (Kid Millions, Pigskin Parade), wrote four screenplays—two for Shirley Temple, one for Eddie Cantor, (Kid Millions, Rose of the Rancho, Dimples, Stowaway) and contributed additional dialog/material to movies for The Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor (Duck Soup, Roman Scandals).
They had the same wry fly irreverent sense of humor, grew up struggling to support their families, were non-religious Jews with a liberal bent (Marx was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and Sheekman was a founding member of the Screen Writers Guild), loved to read and appreciated beautiful women.
[19] Sheekman met his wife, actress Gloria Stuart, when visiting the set of the Eddie Cantor musical he was working on, Roman Scandals.
Under a headline, "'Madam' Even Better on Screen," Alton Cook wrote, "Scenarist Arthur Sheekman has achieved his good result with small and sly changes along the way, making the humor flow more steadily and giving some of it a sharper edge.
In addition to The Marx Brothers and Shirley Temple, he created characters for Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Susan Hayward, William Holden, Shirley MacLaine, Alan Ladd, Betty Hutton, Danny Kaye, Anne Baxter, Ray Milland, Ethel Merman, Dean Martin, Eddie Cantor, Debbie Reynolds, and Gloria Stuart.