Lillian Hellman Read online

  In the spring of 1960, Jo Hammett flew to Martha’s Vineyard with her family to see her father for what she knew would be a final visit. She found Hammett elegantly dressed but more debilitated than ever, thin, pale, and withdrawn. Jo stayed on the Vineyard for a week. Hellman complained to Jo about Hammett and the isolation his illness imposed on her; she hinted that perhaps Jo might take him home with her. But, Jo wrote, “When I was with him I saw nothing but kindness and patience from her. . . . I felt as close to her as I ever will. She had the burden of his care, didn’t want it, but took it anyway. Much of what they had had together was gone—the fun, the sex, the fighting—but the love remained. I could be wrong about a lot of things with Lillian, but not about that.”

  One day during that visit, Jo “bumped into Lillian in the village, and we went for coffee. . . . She went briefly into my father’s sorry financial situation and told me she would be his executrix. Her final remark on the subject was cheerful, ‘We won’t fight about money, will we.’ Not really a question but a confident prediction.”13

  Hammett had made his will in 1952. Jo, his favorite daughter, was to get half of his estate, Mary a quarter, and Hellman a quarter. Hellman was named as Hammett’s executor.

  Eight months after Jo last saw him Hammett died, owing the government, and other creditors, more than $220,000; of these debts, Hellman claimed $40,000 as “advances” she had made to Hammett during his lifetime. Hammett’s copyrights, which were owned by his estate and his family, were his only assets. For purposes of probate, Hellman valued these at $1,000. When the government agreed to settle Hammett’s debts by putting his copyrights up for public auction for whatever they would bring, Hellman and her lawyer friend, Arthur Cowan, were the sole bidders; they bought Hammett’s copyrights for $5,000. This arrangement left Hammett’s family with no legal claim on his work. At Cowan’s death in 1964, Hellman became sole owner of Hammett’s copyrights.

  As Hellman had predicted, Jo did not contest Hellman’s appropriation of her legacy, although this took some persuading on Hellman’s part, but not much. Several letters between her and Jo were exchanged. Hellman suggested that in buying Hammett’s copyrights she was saving Jo and Mary from inheriting their father’s debts. This was not true; the government had already agreed to settle Hammett’s tax liabilities for the amount of the copyright sale. Hellman’s lawyers sent Jo and Mary waivers of their interest in the Hammett estate, and they signed away their rights to what they believed was an estate without monetary value.

  But almost immediately after his death many of Hammett’s copyrights were renewed by Hellman, and Hammett’s work began to make money. In 1961 his novels were re-issued in paperback, and have remained in print ever since. An edition of his stories The Big Knockover, with Hellman’s introduction, was published in 1966. His novel The Dain Curse was sold for a television mini-series for $250,000. Hellman and her literary agents managed everything and kept everything. When Jo was asked by William Wright, one of Hellman’s biographers, if Hellman had ever given her any of the money earned by her father’s work, she said, “Maybe a fifty dollar check at Christmas.” Jo’s mother was still alive at the time, and Jo said that “the only negative thing I remember my mother saying about Lillian was that she thought Lillian should have given Mary and me some of my dad’s things after his death.” 14

  Jo displayed no bitterness or anger: “I figured that Lillian was my father’s wife for all practical purposes, and that she was entitled to a widow’s rights.”15 Not until Hellman’s death in 1984 did Jo receive her inheritance, but not in full even then. Jo had to hire a lawyer to wrest Hammett’s copyrights from a trust Hellman had established to control them after her death.16

  “Since [Hellman’s] death last summer,” Hammett’s biographer Diane Johnson wrote, “I have reflected that had she died before [my] book was written, it might well have included a story it presently does not, an intriguing story of a powerful woman’s struggle to possess and command at last the elusive ghost of a man about whom she was insecure in life. It is a story which seems to me to be about love, to be sure, but also about control, revenge, hate and money.”17

  Three years before he died, Hammett had written to Hellman: “There’s a popular song called ‘You’re My Destiny’ that has a second line I kind of like . . . ‘you are what you are to me,’ because it’s got that nice kind of ambiguity . . .”18

  12

  Having Her Say

  IN FEBRUARY 1952, Lillian Hellman was handed a subpoena to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities: HUAC, as the Committee was generally known. By then, the Hollywood Ten, many of them well-known to Hellman and Hammett, had served jail terms for refusing to answer the Committee’s questions about their affiliation with the Communist Party. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been tried, found guilty of espionage for the Soviet Union, and were in prison. Alger Hiss, who had denied giving State Department papers to the confessed Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers, was also in prison, convicted of perjury. Leaders of the Communist Party had been tried and jailed under the Smith Act for teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of the government. And Hammett, too, had served five months in prison, and had been released only two months earlier. Hellman was frightened when her subpoena arrived, but she was not surprised.

  Hellman did not write about this time in her life until 1976, when she published her third memoir,Scoundrel Time. The intervening quarter-century did not mellow her memories or her judgment of that era in American life. If anything, as she writes in her addendum to the book, “I am angrier now than I hope I will ever be again; more disturbed now than when it all took place.”1 And indeed, Hellman’s voice in the memoir—powerful, contemptuous, bitter, self-righteous—leaves no doubt of the sincerity of her feelings.

  Scoundrel Time is essentially a classic morality tale. A decent woman, Hellman, innocent of any wrong-doing, is caught up in that uniquely ugly American moment known generally as McCarthyism. She is summoned to appear before HUAC, where a band of cynical, careering politicians is bent on exploiting and magnifying American fears of Russians abroad, and subversives at home. HUAC’s method is to subpoena witnesses of known or suspected Communist affiliation and subject them to a kind of inquisition—a “degradation ceremony,” as Victor Navasky has called it—to extract confessions of membership in the Communist Party, to name other Communists known to the witness, and to confess the details of subversive activities in which these Communists may have engaged.

  When Hellman gets her subpoena, Hammett warns her not to do any foolish grandstanding. As he tells her, he knows that she is not psychologically equipped to tolerate prison life, and Hellman knows he is right. She does not want to go to jail. But under no circumstances will she give the Committee names. Nor does she want to invoke the protection of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination which, by its very wording, carries the implication that the witness has something to hide.

  So Hellman finds a good lawyer. She buys an expensive new dress for courage. On her lawyer’s advice, she writes a letter to the Committee that contains a phrase which will become more famous than anything else she has ever written: I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions . . .

  On May 21, 1952—the day of her appearance before HUAC—Hellman keeps faith with her moral code: she does not name names. But, somewhat to her shame, she does not have the nerve to tell the Committee to go to hell. Instead she takes her lawyer’s advice and invokes the Fifth Amendment when refusing to answer some questions she is asked about her membership in the Communist Party.

  But the result of her appearance is all that she had hoped. Not only is Hellman not sent to jail, but her eloquent letter, which includes an offer to answer questions about her own views and activities as long as she is not required to name others, is read into the record and distributed to the press. From that moment on, she is almost universally applauded as a heroine. In Scoundrel Time she does not shy from presenting herself as such.<
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  Scoundrel Time is not concerned only with Hellman’s triumph. If she is the hero, who are the scoundrels? They are not, as one might imagine, the members of HUAC, or even Senator McCarthy, himself. Nor does the appellation apply to Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets and Budd Schulberg, witnesses who did name names before HUAC. These people are beneath Hellman’s contempt. Her bitterness and anger are reserved for those who were in no danger from the Committee—the anti-Stalinist Left—the liberals, socialists, intellectuals who had broken with Stalin and with Communism in the 1930s.

  “I had,” Hellman writes, “up to the late 1940s believed that the educated, the intellectual, lived by what they claimed to believe: freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions, a more than implied promise, therefore, of aid to those who might be persecuted. But only a very few raised a finger when McCarthy and the boys appeared! . . . Many of them found in the sins of Stalin Communism—and there were plenty of sins and plenty that for a long time I mistakenly denied—the excuse to join those who should have been their hereditary enemies.” Hellman went further in characterizing her scoundrels. Money and success had corrupted these “children of timid immigrants” who had made it so good “that they are determined to keep it at any cost.”2 It was clear to everyone who read those words, and the words that followed, that Hellman did not have in mind the children of Italian immigrants or Irish immigrants or Spanish immigrants.

  In any case, it is in the nature of morality tales that the scoundrels do not get to tell their side of the story: “To hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did,” Hellman writes.3

  “If I stick to what I know, what happened to me, and a few others, I have a chance to write my own history of the time.”4

  And this she did, perhaps with more clarity than she intended. Whatever the Cold War was on an international level, “The real Cold War at the intellectual and cultural level,” as Tony Judt observed, “was not fought between the Left and the right but within the Left. The real political fault line fell between communists and fellow traveling sympathizers, on the one side, and social democrats, on the other side.”5

  There can be no doubt on which side of the fault line Hellman stood. Although she denied it in her memoirs, and repeated the denial on all public occasions, in a privileged communication to her lawyer Joseph Rauh, Hellman acknowledged that she had been a member of the Communist Party from 1938 through 1940.6 From her actual testimony before HUAC we can infer a somewhat longer period of membership. In answer to questions about whether she had been a member of the Communist Party in 1950, 1951, and, in the current year of 1952, she answered with a straightforward, “No, sir.” Asked about previous years, she refused to answer.

  But even if we accept as true Hellman’s report of two years of Party membership, we also know that from the mid-1930s through at least 1949, she never strayed far from Party precincts. Through the Cold War years of a Moscow-launched peace movement (“the most notable success scored by international communism in the field of propaganda was its virtual expropriation of the word ‘peace’”), Hellman’s voice was influential in many groups that were fronts for the Communist Party.7 The most significant of these was the Progressive Party’s 1948 campaign for Henry Wallace’s run for the presidency, in which Hellman headed “Women for Wallace.” The campaign, the Progressive Party, itself, was dominated by the Communist Party, as Hellman well knew, and as she says she told Wallace when he asked. A year later Hellman was a prominent sponsor of the Waldorf Conference for World Peace, a gathering that, as Murray Kempton wrote, was notable “as a discussion between Americans who spoke critically of their government and Russians who could hardly have offered theirs any such treatment and safely gone home.”8

  Since Hellman names few of her “Scoundrels,” we might ask who they were, and what they eventually said in their own defense. Among others, they included Sidney Hook, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Dwight MacDonald, William Phillips, Murray Kempton, Irving Howe, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Alfred Kazin. Some had once been close to, but had never joined, the Party; some were disillusioned former Party members. What was true of them all was that by the late 1930s, the purges, the Soviet manipulation of the Spanish Civil War, the Pact with Nazi Germany had left them bitterly disillusioned with the idea of a Soviet workers’ paradise. Most, though not all, remained on the Left, identifying themselves as liberals or socialists, or social democrats. Post-war events only confirmed their understanding of Soviet policies: the annexation by the Soviet Union of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Western Ukraine; the brutal imposition of Moscow-controlled governments in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Albania; the Soviet blockade of Berlin; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia; the show trials in Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia; the murderous anti-Semitic campaign that emerged in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and which lasted until, mercifully for all, Stalin died.

  In An Unfinished Woman and in Pentimento, Hellman had written almost exclusively about people who were dead, or, like “Julia,” heavily disguised. No one had yet publicly emerged from these memoirs to say her nay. But although she named almost no one in Scoundrel Time, she was dealing with still-living history which teemed with living witnesses who had a strong stake in the events she described.

  Dwight MacDonald, for one, who at various times in his life had described himself as an anarchist, a Trotskyist, a socialist, and who profoundly disagreed with Hellman’s politics, but had kept on friendly terms with her over the years. Soon after the publication of Scoundrel Time, he was asked what he thought of the book:

  “I thought it was an absolutely disgusting book . . . a silly book and also a very dishonest book. . . . She gives this self-dramatizing impression that she was isolated, that liberals didn’t help her, that nobody helped her . . . if you read the book you’ll see that all through everybody is on her side. Not politically, but for civil liberties . . . What she means is that nobody is on her side as a Stalinist.”9

  And this was true of Hellman’s main defender, her lawyer, Joseph Rauh. When Hellman found herself with subpoena in hand she consulted several liberal lawyers and chose Rauh, an exemplary anti-Stalinist liberal, a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action, an organization that excluded Communists from membership. Rauh later explained: “The Communists would say: ‘You don’t believe in civil liberties because you’re against us’; and then we’d say, ‘Well, we’re not against you and we’ll defend your civil liberties to the extreme, but we don’t think we have to have your crowd wreck our organization for us.’”10

  Rauh’s representation of Hellman was wholehearted. He explained the law to her. If Hellman did not want to name names, or to open herself to a charge of contempt, thus risking a jail sentence, she had to take the Fifth Amendment. By 1952, taking the Fifth was the strategy of choice for many of HUAC’s witnesses who wanted the outcome Hellman wanted—no names, no jail. What gave Hellman’s case its distinction was Rauh’s stroke of genius, which had nothing to do with the particulars of Hellman’s situation, but with Rauh’s use of public relations—her letter to HUAC.

  Her famous letter went through many drafts, written by Rauh and Hellman both. Hellman’s were the memorable, ringing phrases. The most famous: “I will not cut my conscience.” And:“I am not willing now or in the future to bring bad trouble . . . to hurt innocent people who I knew many years ago in order to save myself is to me inhuman indecent and dishonorable.”

  The letter continued in a distinctly un-Hellman-like tone of humility and unlikely references:

  I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me. To try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country. . . . In general I respected these ideals of Christian honor. . . . It is my belief that you will agree with these simple rules of human decency and will not expect me to violate the good American tradition from which th
ey spring. I would, therefore, like to come before you and speak of myself . . .

  I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you anything you wish to know about my views or actions if your committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the Committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the Fifth Amendment at the hearing.

  As Rauh well knew, HUAC would never allow a witness to set her own terms for questioning. But, by a stroke of luck, the Committee blundered; during Hellman’s testimony a Committee member agreed to make her letter part of the record, and at that moment it became a public document. Rauh was prepared on the spot to distribute copies to the press in the hearing room. The next day’s headlines reflected his effectiveness: “Lillian Hellman Balks House Unit.”11

  Years later Rauh told Hellman’s biographer Carl Rollyson how Hellman’s case had differed from that of another of his clients, Arthur Miller, who had eschewed the Fifth Amendment and stood on his rights under the First Amendment: “[Miller] just was not going to tell them what the hell the names of other people were. If he went to jail, so be it.”12 Rauh admired Hellman, but he thought that Miller’s was the more moral position, the more courageous position. It is also true that when Miller testified in 1956, the political hysteria had cooled several degrees.

  Rollyson then asked Rauh about the public perception of Hellman’s “moral victory” over the Committee. Rauh was amused. “The fact is,” he said, “she did have to plead the fifth amendment. There was no way out of it.” Given Hellman’s condition that she would not go to jail: “She could have gone to jail if she had talked about herself, not pleaded the fifth amendment, then refused to answer questions about others.” And about the accuracy of Scoundrel Time, Rauh said, “I would say it is Lillian’s dramatization of it. I don’t want to say anything that throws doubt on her veracity . . . But when she got done with [the story], it was better than a Babe Ruth home run.”13