Lillian Hellman Read online

  LILLIAN HELLMAN

  Lillian Hellman

  An Imperious Life

  DOROTHY GALLAGHER

  Copyright © 2014 by Dorothy Gallagher.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Janson type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gallagher, Dorothy.

  Lillian Hellman : an imperious life / Dorothy Gallagher.

  pages cm. —(Jewish Lives)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-16497-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Hellman, Lillian, 1905–1984—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women dramatists, American—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3515.E343Z686 2013

  8129.52—dc23

  [B]

  2013027579

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Frontispiece: Author Lillian Hellman smoking a cigarette as she chats with author Dashiell Hammett while dining at Club 21. (Photo by George Karger/Pix Inc./

  Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. The Hubbards of Bowden

  2. The Marxes of Demopolis

  3. Two Jewish Girls

  4. Marriage

  5. The Writing Life: 1933–1984

  6. Along Came a Spider

  7. Eros

  8. Counterparts

  9. The Incurious Tourist

  10. Lillian Hellman’s Analyst

  11. “You Are What You Are to Me,”

  12. Having Her Say

  13. Jewish Lit

  14. An Honored Woman

  15. Mere Facts

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Prologue

  AT THE height of her celebrity—and it is difficult to say exactly when that would have been, since she was almost unflaggingly famous over a period of five decades—Lillian Hellman was as glamorous and visible a public presence as any movie star. But let’s say that one peak moment came in 1939, with the opening of The Little Foxes, which was her second hit play. Hellman was thirty-four years old. The play opened in February, which would have given her the opportunity to wear the furs she loved, a new mink in this case. She was seldom in public without her friends, and she would have been seen with Dashiell Hammett, her tall, handsome lover; and with her director and soon-to-be lover, Herman Shumlin; with her friend Dorothy Parker; and perhaps with the very glamorous Sara and Gerald Murphy, whom she had met in Paris. When Hellman appeared at restaurants, theater openings, and at the best parties, she was beautifully coiffed and made up. When reporters wanted to interview her in 1939, they came to her suite at the Plaza Hotel.

  From 1934, when her first play, The Children’s Hour, had been a Broadway hit, through the early 1960s, Hellman produced a play almost every other year. Between plays she wrote screenplays. If not every one of her plays was a hit, still, for thirty years, Hellman was the queen of Broadway playwrights. In fact, she was the only woman playwright of her generation. In those years, when people spoke of the American theater, they spoke of Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Hellman; a few years later they would add the names of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge.

  Much later, sometime in the late 1960s, or early seventies, I stepped onto a crowded elevator and caught my first and only glimpse of Lillian Hellman. She was unmistakable, though smaller than I would have thought. (A “mighty little woman,” Norman Mailer once said of her; an admiring phrase, even when placed in his complete sentence: “Oh, she was mean, manipulative and heroic—she was a mighty little woman.”1)

  By the time I saw her in the elevator, Hellman was in her mid-sixties; her plays had all been written, and the first of her three volumes of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, had recently been published. If I hadn’t yet read the book, I did soon after that elevator sighting, and I then passed on the book to my mother, who was, as I knew, a fan of Hellman’s. My mother admired Hellman’s plays, particularly her anti-Fascist play Watch on the Rhine; she admired Hellman even more for her outspoken political views, which, like her own, often echoed the views of the Communist Party; she admired Hellman almost as much for having lived openly with a man to whom she was not married. And, of course, my mother admired her, as so many did, for Hellman’s courageous testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  Hellman was Jewish, as my family was, a fact she did not make much of, nor did we, but which was nevertheless central to our sense of ourselves in the world. Apart from the fact that Hellman was rich and famous, and we did not know any rich and famous people, Hellman seemed exactly like the sort of person we would know—bohemian (although Park Avenue in her personal style), opinionated, and politically one of us. This is by way of saying that I do not come to Lillian Hellman tabula rasa.

  Lillian Hellman died in 1984. Four full-scale biographies have since been devoted to her life and work. The first was begun while she was still alive, the last appeared less than two years ago. There is also a fifth book that is a double biography of Hellman and Dashiell Hammett and their near-marriage of thirty years. There are a number of biographies of Hammett that naturally include material about Hellman, and a collection of Hammett’s letters, many of which are written to Hellman. Still another book about Hellman is an apparently affectionate reminiscence of a long friendship, but it is ultimately a devastating portrait of a desperate woman in her declining years.

  These are a lot of books even for a mighty little woman. The numbers indicate that even thirty years after her death Hellman excites interest. Not only as a writer, which would be reason enough, but as a conundrum—a woman whose determination to prevail in all aspects of her life was often at odds with the persona of moral rectitude she presented to the world. “The power of LH—a puzzlement,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Mary McCarthy, “even when one knows how concentrated she has been in its service.”2 Everyone who has written about Hellman runs smack into her capacity to outrage, and to enrage. Hellman was a woman of enormous energy—talented, ambitious, restless, audacious, highly sexual, funny, generous, avaricious, mendacious, demanding, greedy, contemptuous, dogmatic, irritable, mean, jealous, self-righteous, angry. To use an ambiguous phrase, Lillian Hellman was a piece of work.

  Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans in 1905. Her mother was Julia Newhouse, of Demopolis, Alabama; her father was Max Hellman, born in New Orleans. The couple married in 1904, and for the first six years of their daughter’s life, the Hellmans lived with Max Hellman’s sisters, Jenny and Hannah, who ran a boarding house on Prytania Street, at the edge of New Orleans’ famous Garden District.

  Julia brought a sizeable dowry to the marriage, which her husband used to open a shoe manufacturing company. The business failed. In 1910 or 1911, the Hellmans followed Julia’s family to New York, where Max Hellman got a job as a traveling salesman. Lillian attended public school in New York for most of the school year; for the remaining months sh
e went back to New Orleans to live with her aunts. She graduated from high school in New York in 1922, went to New York University for two years, then made her entrance into the literary world with a job at Boni and Liveright, then the foremost publishing house in New York.

  In 1925, Hellman married Arthur Kober, a theatrical press agent and writer. They soon moved to Hollywood where Kober wrote screenplays and Hellman got a job reading scripts for a movie company. Five years after her marriage, Hellman met Dashiell Hammett. She divorced Kober, and she and Ham-mett remained more or less together, in a complicated arrangement, for the rest of Hammett’s life. In 1934, with Hammett providing the source material, and editorial expertise, Hellman wrote her first play, The Children’s Hour. It was a hit. She was twenty-nine. A long career and an unimaginably eventful life lay ahead.

  Hellman was an only child, and as far as the record shows, a well-loved child. Her father seems to have been a feckless and humorous man, her mother abstracted and fey. Her paternal aunts, who were unmarried women of strong character, loomed large in her early life. Many only children grow up with a strong sense of entitlement, and Hellman certainly had that. By her own testimony she was headstrong and willful from a very early age. She was never pretty, and there is no doubt that all her life she suffered from her lack of beauty, although it never seemed to impede her very active sexual life. Money was a central ingredient in the lives of her mother’s family; they had a lot of it, originating in the fortune made by Hellman’s great-grandfather, Isaac Marx, who began his career as a peddler in antebellum Alabama. By comparison, the Hellmans were poor relations, and money was a preoccupation of Hellman’s work, and of her life, too.

  Hellman lived much of her life in public, which should make her a congenial subject for a biographer. But the opposite is true. She did not want her biography written, and while she was alive she destroyed letters and personal papers, and insisted that her friends refuse to speak to inquiring strangers. She wanted her memoirs to stand for her life. But, as it turned out, much of what Hellman claimed to remember could not be relied on for its actual truth. Like a mirror image of Hansel and Gretel, she often strewed her breadcrumbs so as not to lead home.

  Since there are biographies of Hellman that follow a chronological path, I have given most attention to the aspects of her life that particularly interested me. I was interested in the story of Isaac Marx, Hellman’s great-grandfather, who emigrated from Europe to rural, antebellum Alabama. I wondered how these immigrants were received when they first appeared in the agricultural South in the 1840s. What kind of lives did they make in a place where they were exotics, without language or farming skills? How did they manage to thrive economically, as so many of them did? What sort of relations did they have with slaves, and slave owners? How did they fare in the Civil War and Reconstruction? And what did Hellman, a third-generation descendant of the immigrant Isaac Marx, understand of her history, and how, as a writer, did she make use of that story?

  My mother and Hellman were of the same generation (my mother the elder by seven years) but born worlds apart—Hellman in New Orleans, my mother in a small village in the Ukraine. Yet, they had come to the same political conclusions about the Soviet Union. Hellman’s politics, which took up a large space in her life, were of great interest to me. And so, of course, was her work, which I have read with attention, the plays and the memoirs, in which she is both revealed and hidden.

  About those memoirs, for which I believe Hellman will ultimately be remembered: She began writing them in her mid-sixties. She was at the right time of life for such an enterprise—the tumult of youth passed, perspective and wisdom presumably gained, the infirmities of age still below the horizon. She had rich material to recollect. She knew everyone, had done everything, had been everywhere. She had forged a brilliant career on Broadway and in Hollywood. She had traveled widely and had stories of political and historical interest, particularly her experiences in prewar Germany, in Civil War Spain, in wartime Moscow. Her life had been, and remained, enviable: she had beautiful houses and beautiful clothes; her parties were glamorous, her friends were renowned, she had had more than her share of love affairs, and a public political life. There was also the matter of the persona that she had cultivated throughout her life: that of a tough-talking, truth-telling dame, a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may sort of woman. What might her readers learn about the relation of the person to the persona? What would Hellman finally make of herself and her time?

  Hellman worked steadily on her memoirs. Between 1969 and 1976, three volumes—An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time—were published, each to initial acclaim. In 1977, “Julia,” one of the stories from Pentimento, was made into an Academy Award–winning movie starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. The memoirs and the movie brought Hellman to the attention of a new generation, and her reputation, which had faded somewhat during the sixties, was restored to high shine.

  And then, just as the ailments of old age began to accumulate, Hellman’s reputation hit slippery ground. Her description of her courageous, lonely stand before HUAC, as she had written about it in Scoundrel Time, was challenged by her contemporaries as historically distorted and self-serving. The celebrated story of her dear friend Julia, for whom she had virtually risked capture by the Nazis, seemed to have no basis in fact. In 1980, the writer, and Hellman’s political adversary, Mary McCarthy, while being interviewed on television, said that Lillian Hellman lied with every word she wrote. In a fury, Hellman sued McCarthy, and in so doing opened her entire life to scrutiny, so that even the seemingly innocent stories of her childhood looked suspicious on second reading.

  With McCarthy’s words in mind, one re-reads, for example, a story Hellman tells of an incident that took place in New Orleans when she was a girl of about eleven years old: One evening Lillian’s beloved black nurse, Sophronia, takes her to the movies. Afterward, they board a streetcar to go home. With the deliberate intention of challenging segregation, young Lillian takes a seat just behind the driver and pulls Sophronia down next to her.

  “Back,” said the driver.

  I held so tight to her arm that [Sophronia] couldn’t move.

  He said, “Get back in the car. You know better than this.”

  I said, my voice high with fright, “We won’t. We won’t move. This lady is better than you are—”3

  As it was surely meant to do, the incident speaks very well for Hellman’s early and lifelong sense of justice. And we must admit that the story might have happened as Hellman tells it. There is no one alive—not Sophronia, not the bus driver nor any of the nameless passengers—to say that forty years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, little, white Lillian Hellman didn’t have the same idea. But to read the story knowing that Hellman’s reputation for honesty had come under question, that in her old age the persona and character she had worked so hard to construct was beginning to crack, is to see something very different than the author intended.

  In her memoirs, Hellman tells of another childhood incident. In this one she runs away from home and stays out all night, terrifying her parents. “From that day on,” Hellman writes, “I knew my power over my parents . . . [and] I found out something more useful and more dangerous: if you are willing to take the punishment, you are halfway through the battle.”4 Hellman offers this story as a key to her character. But surely she has left something out: the reader will search the pages of this story in vain for any indication that she was ever punished. In fact, her father, when he found her, treated her to a very large breakfast.

  1

  The Hubbards of Bowden

  BY THE time Lillian Florence Hellman was born in New Orleans in 1905, her once-burgeoning family in Demopolis, Alabama, had dwindled to a great-aunt or two, and a few cousins of the once-removed degree. Hellman seldom visited the town where her maternal great-grandfather, Isaac Marx, had settled in 1840, but Demopolis held the power of myth for her.

  Hellman wrote two plays based
on the Marx family. The first was The Little Foxes, produced in 1939. Seven years later she wrote a prequel, Another Part of the Forest. From time to time both plays are revived, and not long ago I went to see an off-Broadway production of Another Part of the Forest.

  The time is 1880. Marcus Hubbard, a vigorous man in his sixties, is the tyrannical patriarch of his family. He has an unhappy wife, Lavinia, two grasping, resentful sons, Ben and Oscar, whom he keeps on a very short leash; and there is Re-gina, a beautiful, intelligent, manipulative girl, Marcus’s best-loved child. The family lives in Bowden, a small town somewhere in Alabama. The Civil War is only fifteen years in the past, and it is the pervasive background to the action of the play.

  Marcus’s neighbors have been ruined by the war, their stately plantation houses are crumbling, the fields once worked by their slaves are filled with weeds. But the Hubbards are rich. They live in a grand house. Marcus, a remarkably cultivated man, is able to indulge his passions for books, for music, for ancient Greek history. It seems that Marcus has somehow profited from the Civil War. And, although Marcus has lived in Bowden for forty years, he and his family are pariahs; no one of any social importance will visit his house. And we learn that the Hubbards are in danger from the Klan:

  “You have good reason to know,” the aristocratic Colonel Isham says to Marcus, “there’s not a man in this county wouldn’t like to swing up anybody called Hubbard.” So Marcus has a secret; the action of the play will revolve around its revelation.

  Marcus’s children are also plotting against him. They want his money. Regina, who is having a secret love affair with John Bagtry, a penniless ex-Confederate soldier, wants money to run away with Bagtry. Oscar, the middle child, a feckless dimwit, works for Marcus in the family store where he is paid a paltry wage. Oscar is desperate for money so that he can marry Laurette, a prostitute, and live with her in New Orleans. Ben, the eldest of the Hubbard children at thirty-five, is, like Regina, very intelligent. He also works for Marcus, and is badly paid. He wants money to make himself independently wealthy by investing in the industries that are coming to the new South. And Ben wants more than Marcus’s money; he wants to humiliate and defeat his all-powerful father. Even Lavinia, Marcus’s wife, who had been loyal to her husband until now, wants money to get away from her husband. She wants to start a school for colored children in the “piney woods.”