Melchior Lengyel

Biography

Once upon a time in Debrecen, a boy named Lebovics Menyhért grew into the cosmopolitan storyteller who re-christened himself Melchior Lengyel. By his mid-twenties he was filing crisp dispatches from Swiss cafés for Budapest dailies, then trading quips with critics in Berlin and Vienna, turning out sly stage comedies that had even Ernst Lubitsch chuckling in the aisle. Two reconnaissance trips across the Atlantic—1921 and 1924—filled his notebooks with Broadway gossip and the burning prose of Eugene O’Neill, whose plays he later transplanted to German boards. When Europe tilted toward darkness in 1933, Lengyel packed his wit and fountain pen for London, reporting for *Pesti Napló*, until Lubitsch’s telegram in 1935 lured him to Hollywood’s sun-drenched backlots. There the man who had once dissected café society now conjured silk-and-steel romances: *Typhoon* hurled lovers across the South Seas; *Angel* let him both direct and pull the marionette strings; *Ninotchka* sent Garbo into gales of laughter and earned him one of the screenplay Oscars that would, on the night of 1940, lose only to the whirlwind of *Gone With the Wind*. The Soviet satire refused to die: it resurfaced as *Comrade X* with Gable and Lamarr, slipped into London fog as *The Iron Petticoat* with Hepburn and Hope, then twirled back onto Broadway as Cole Porter’s *Silk Stockings*, finally re-filmed with Charisse and Astaire tapping through the Cold War. Behind the curtain he ghosted the libretto for Bartók’s scandalous ballet *The Miraculous Mandarin* and handed Lubitsch the match that lit *To Be or Not to Be*. In 1960 he traded California palms for Roman cypresses, only to reverse the journey a decade later, closing the circle in Budapest, where, at ninety-four, the correspondent-turned-playwright-turned-screen-magician quietly folded his last page.