Lillian Hellman Page 15
3. Wright, Lillian Hellman, 197.
4. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 164.
5. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 231.
6. Hellman, Three,149–50.
7. Isaiah Berlin, “Pasternak and Akhmatova,” in The Company They Kept: Writers and Their Unforgettable Friendships, ed. Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 70.
8. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 175.
9. Nina Nikolaevna Berberova,The Italics Are Mine (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), 140.
10. Hellman,Three , 150–51.
11. Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 226.
12. Hellman, Three, 205.
13. George F. Kennan, Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 210.
14. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 102.
15. Hellman, Three, 169.
16. Raisa Orlova, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983), 116.
17. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 174.
18. Hellman, Three, 284.
19. Hellman, Three, 284.
20. Hellman, Three, 183.
21. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 269.
Chapter 10. Lillian Hellman’s Analyst
1. Dr. Mark Leffert, “The Psychoanalysis of George Gershwin: An American Tragedy,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 2011. Kay Swift from Katharine Weber, The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011), passim.
2. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 226–27.
3. Peter S. Feibleman, Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1988), 218.
4. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997),143.
Chapter 11. “You Are What You Are to Me”
1. The chapter title is from a letter from Hammett to Hellman, January 14, 1958, quoted in Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 290. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 286.
2. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 286.
3. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 501.
4. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 245–47.
5. Diane Johnson, “Obsessed,” Vanity Fair, May 1985.
6. Mellen,Hellman and Hammett, 287.
7. Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett, A Daughter Remembers (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2001), 151.
8. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett, eds., Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), April 10, 1952.
9. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 61.
10. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 266.
11. Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman, quote from Hellman’s appointment books, 209.
12. Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 157.
13. Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett, 165–66.
14. Wright,Lillian Hellman, 297; Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett, 83.
15. Wright, Lillian Hellman, 297.
16. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,361–62.
17. Johnson, “Obsessed,” Vanity Fair, May 1985.
18. Hammett, Selected Letters, January 17, 1958.
Chapter 12. Having Her Say
1. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 726.
2. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 42–43.
3. Hellman, Three, 726.
4. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 43.
5. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2012), 226.
6. Rauh papers, Truman Library, cited by Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 319.
7. David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 314.
8. Murray Kempton, Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events (New York: Times Books, 1994), 110.
9. Michael Wrezin, Interviews with Dwight MacDonald ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 137–39.
10. Joseph Rauh, Oral History, 1989, Truman Library.
11. New York Times, May 22, 1952 (emphasis added).
12. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, 318.
13. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman,329, 330.
14. Quoted by Murray Kempton, The New York Review of Books, June 10, 1976.
15. Kempton, New York Review of Books, June 10, 1976.
16. Sidney Hook, Encounter, February 1977.
17. Irving Howe, “Lillian Hellman and the McCarthy Years,” Dissent, 1976; collected in Irving Howe: Selected Writings, 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 340–346.
18. Hellman, Three, 723.
19. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 212–13.
20. Hook, Encounter, February 1977.
21. Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 465.
22. www.pbs.org. American Masters.
23. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), 243–44.
24. Benn Schulberg, American Affairs, February 2, 2011, http://suite101.com.
25. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 249.
26. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 114.
Chapter 13. Jewish Lit
1. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 585.
2. Sylvie Drake, in Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 291.
3. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 43.
4. Christine Doudna, in Bryer,Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 197.
5. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, 72.
6. Dashiell Hammett, Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 611.
7. Francine Prose, Anne Frank, The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (New York: Harper, 2009), 177.
8. Prose, Anne Frank,193.
9. Meyer Levin, The Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
10. Prose, Anne Frank,205.
11. Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 127, quoting Lewis Funke, New York Times, May 27, 1956.
12. Melnick, Stolen Legacy, 144, citing New York Times, May 8, 1956, Sunday News, May 13, 1956.
13. Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” The New Yorker, October 6, 1997.
14. Hellman, Three, 439.
15. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2012), 41.
16. Hellman, Three, 511.
17. Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 413.
18. Lillian Hellman, The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 767 (emphasis added).
19. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 292.
Chapter 14. An Honored Woman
1. Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (New York: Knopf, 2010), 87; Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 679.
2. Peter Adam, in
Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 229.
3. New Republic, January 1, 1966.
4. Hellman, Three, 206.
5. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1977), Introduction by Lillian Hellman, 15.
6. R. D. Orlova, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983), 127–28.
7. Letter from Orlova quoted in Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 432.
8. Hellman, Three, 182–3.
9. Hellman, Three, 186, 187.
10. Hellman, Three, 242.
11. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 311.
12. Marion Meade,Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Villard, 1987), 413.
13. Wright, Lillian Hellman, interview with Teichmann, 311.
14. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 136.
15. Hellman, Three, 266.
16. Washington Post, November 18, 1970.
17. Wright, Lillian Hellman, interview with Samuels, 339.
18. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 66.
19. Wright, Lillian Hellman, 350.
20. Peter S. Feibleman, Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1988), 189.
21. Hellman, Three, 450–51.
22. Lillian Hellman, Maybe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), cover blurbs.
23. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman,531, citing Water Clemons’s review, Newsweek, June 2, 1980.
24. Hellman, Maybe, 43.
25. Feibleman, Lilly, 254.
26. Anatole Broyard, New York Times, May 13, 1980.
Chapter 15. Mere Facts
1. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 203, citing notes for a Harvard lecture.
2. New York Times, August 23, 1969, Op-Ed piece attacking Soviet defector, Anatoly Kuznetsov.
3. Peter S. Feibleman, Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1988), 283.
4. Elizabeth Hardwick, Foreword to Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs (New York: Harcourt, 1992), x.
5. Mary McCarthy, “The Fact in Fiction,” collected in On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1961), 263.
6. Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1967.
7. Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (New York: C. Potter, 1992), 603.
8. Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 670.
9. McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs,61.
10. Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 671.
11. McCarthy, On the Contrary,148.
12. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 61.
13. Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously, 609.
14. New York Times, Charles Poore, May 18, 1957.
15. Mary McCarthy Papers, Vassar College Archives and Special Collections, Box 258, Material for Answering Interrogatory 15.
16. Mary McCarthy Papers, Box 258, Material for Answering First Interrogatory.
17. Rose Styron with Blakeslee Gilpin, eds., Selected Letters of William Styron (New York: Random House, 2012) 542–44, 556.
18. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 390.
19. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), interview with Wexler, 355.
20. Rosalind Michahelles, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 681.
21. Martha Gellhorn, “Guerre de Plume,” Paris Review No. 79, 1981.
22. Mary McCarthy to Ben O’Sullivan, August 17, 1980, quoted in Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 681.
23. Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Gins - berg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York: Free Press, 1999), 122–23.
24. Feibleman, Lilly, 148.
25. Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 123.
26. The New Review, May 1974.
27. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 195.
28. Edwin McDowell, New York Times, April 29, 1983.
29. Wright, Lillian Hellman,408.
30. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 448–49, citing memo from Blair Clark.
31. Mary McCarthy deposition.
32. Prudence Crowther, ed., Don’t Tread on Me, The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman (New York: Viking, 1989), 288–89.
33. Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously, 617.
34. “On the Frontier,” The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2011.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WHOEVER UNDERTAKES to write about Lillian Hellman owes a large debt to Hellman’s previous biographers—to William Wright, Carl Rollyson, Deborah Martinson, Joan Mellen, and Alice Kessler-Harris—whose books I have read with great appreciation, and with pencil in hand. I am equally indebted to Diane Johnson and Richard Layman, for their work on Dashiell Hammett’s life. Of course none of these authors bear responsibility for my interpretations, misinterpretations or conclusions.
Many thanks to my editor, Ileene Smith, who provoked and encouraged this book, and to my steadfast agent, George Borchardt. Dan Okrent listened to a writer’s complaints and generously offered himself for much needed criticism at just the right moment. Victor Navasky disagreed with almost all my opinions about Lillian Hellman’s politics, but graciously allowed that I had made a persuasive prosecutor’s case. I am particularly grateful to Alan Goodman Koch, who unstintingly shared with me his years of research into Jewish life in nineteenth-century Demopolis, Alabama. As if that was not enough, he and his wife, Linda, gave a stranger food and lodging, and provided her with a guided tour to the town and the residents of Hellman’s family origins.
My husband, Ben Sonnenberg, my first reader for thirty years, died while I was working on this book. He remains as large as life to me. As always, I hope to make him proud.
INDEX
LH in index refers to Lillian Hellman. Works with no author indicated were written by Lillian Hellman.
Abolitionism, 24
Adler, Renata, 121
Akhmatova, Anna, 84, 85–86
Alabama: Another Part of the Forest set in, 9–15; black population of Marengo County in, 20; cotton production in, 20; Demopolis in, 9, 13–14, 16–17, 20–24, 26, 27; immigration of Isaac Marx to, 5–6, 9, 15, 18, 30; Jews in, 16–21; Marx family in, 5–6, 9, 13–14, 16–27; Mobile in, 16, 18, 20, 23, 25–26, 30; Piney Woods in, 13–14; plantations in, 16, 19; secession of, 24; slavery in, 19, 20, 24
Albee, Edward, 55
Alfred, William, 86
American Communist Party. See Communist Party
Americans for Democratic Action, 107
American Spectator, 48
Another Part of the Forest: as based on Marx family, 9–15, 21–22, 25, 32; dialogue of, 11; financial investment in, 69; Hammett’s editorial assistance with, 13; LH as director of, 11; opening date of, 11; questions on meaning of, 12; reviews of, 11; summary and theme of, 9–15, 118
Anouilh, Jean, 98
Anticommunism. See Communist Party; House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC);
McCarthyism
Anti-Fascism, 34–35, 54, 74–80. See also Hitler, Adolf
Anti-Semitism: of LH, 34, 40, 119; by Nazis and Nazi death camps, 33, 35, 110, 117; in North before Civil War, 24; in Soviet Union, 83, 107, 117. See also Jews
Arendt, Hannah, 133
Ash, Timothy Garton, 141
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein), 29, 32–33
Autumn Garden, The, 95
&n
bsp; Babel, Isaac, 85, 86, 112
Baldwin, Roger, 110
Beatty, Warren, 121
Bellow, Saul, 114, 118
Bentley, Eric, 11
Berberova, Nina, 84
Berger, Marilyn, 113
Berlin, Isaiah, 84
Bernstein, Leonard, 98–99
Bierut, Boleslaw, 87
Big Knockover, The (Hammett), 47, 101
Blechman, Burt, 118
Bloomgarden, Kermit, 115, 117–18
Boni and Liveright, 4, 38, 66
Breda, Rudolph. See Katz, Otto
Broyard, Anatole, 128
Buchman, Beatrice, 78
Buchman, Sidney, 78, 113
Campbell, Alan, 56, 60
Candide (Berstein and Hellman’s adaptation), 98–99, 132
Cannibals and Missionaries (McCarthy), 130
Cavett, Dick, 130
Chambers, Whittaker, 102
Chaplin, Charlie, 28
Children’s Hour, The: award for, 50; content of, 49, 50; and Hammett, 4, 49, 52; McCarthy’s view of, 132; opening date of, 2, 50; review of, 50; source of, 49, 52; success of, 29, 49, 50, 51, 52, 66, 131; writing of, 75
Civil War, 24–25, 31
Clark, Blair, 63–65, 72, 139
Code Name Mary (Gardiner), 137–39
Cold War, 102–13. See also Communist Party; McCarthyism; Soviet Union
Commentary, 142
Committee for Public Justice (CPJ), 125–26, 130
Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, 131
Communist Manifesto, 13
Communist Party: bail fund for convicted Communist Party leaders, 94–95; and civil liberties, 107–8, 110–11; Gardiner on, 77–78; and Hammett, 77, 88–89, 110, 123; and Hollywood Ten, 102; and LH, 2, 36, 63, 70, 76–77, 89, 105–6, 111–12, 141; and LH’s testimony before HUAC, 2, 7, 98, 102–13, 115, 132, 140; Melby on, 69–70; and Nazi-Soviet Pact, 59, 77–78, 106; Steve Nelson as member of, 60; and purge trials, 57–59, 79; Rauh on, 107–8; Smith Act against, 102, 111; and Wallace’s presidential candidacy, 69–70, 106. See also Soviet Union; Stalin, Joseph Company She Keeps, The (McCarthy), 133