Lillian Hellman Read online

  By the time Hellman wrote her plays about the Hubbard family, she was in her mid-thirties. Her opinions about history and politics were firmly settled. If the Hubbards were little more than symbols of the destructive power of money, we know that at the beginning of her life the Hellmans were poor relations of the Marxes. “Shabby poor,” Lillian wrote. Prideful child that she was, prideful woman that she became, the status of poor relation galled her. She resented her mother’s family, resented her awe of them; she was jealous of their wealth, and shamed by the disrespect they showed her much-loved father. Max Hellman may have been as handsome and charming and witty as his daughter said he was (although photographs show him to be a homely, pudgy man), but from the Marxes’ viewpoint, he was a failure as a businessman, which was the talent they valued. Max Hellman did not like the Marxes any more than his daughter did. And Hellman’s conflicting feelings, as she wrote in her memoirs, “made me into an angry child.”6 Anger followed her all the way into womanhood. The intense energy of her Hubbard plays is fueled by anger, tightly controlled by the artist she was.

  Hellman tells us that “after The Little Foxes was written and put away, this conflict was to grow less important, as indeed the picture of my mother’s family was to grow dim and almost fade away.”7 But this is not quite true. Her mother’s family remained vivid enough so that seven years after Foxes, she gathered the Hubbards for Another Part of the Forest. And they must have remained in her mind for some years after that when she frequently spoke of her intention to make a trilogy of the Hubbard plays. Money, the getting of it, the having of it, the spending and lending of it, her attraction to and disdain for the rich, lasted all through Hellman’s life. It made her behave in some peculiar ways.

  For Isaac Marx, born eighty years before his great-granddaughter, money was neither complicated nor symbolic. Had he been a reader of the Talmud, he would have come across the following passage:

  Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, because he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.8

  Isaac does not seem to have been a particularly religious man, but he would not have needed the Talmud to teach him about poverty. He had seen real poverty, he had known it; he had managed to escape it, and evidently meant never to know it again.

  Isaac Marx makes his first appearance as a resident of Demopolis in the Federal Census of 1850. The information in the census is scant. He is listed as a merchant, twenty-five years old, born in Germany; the only other listed member of his household at this time is his twenty-eight-year-old brother, Lehman, also a merchant. Both men are bachelors.

  By 1853, Isaac was married. His bride, Amelia Weidenreich, was a girl from the Rhine Pfalz region of Bavaria.9 Isaac was twenty-eight, Amelia eighteen. The wedding took place in Mobile, and since there is no sign of any member of Amelia’s family in Mobile or in Demopolis, and since Amelia came from a town in Bavaria close to Isaac’s own, it would seem likely that the match was arranged between their families, and Amelia sent over for the wedding. The couple may have been cousins; Hellman mentions a marriage between cousins in The Little Foxes. But whether or not they were related, they were strangers to each other; had they ever seen each other before, Amelia would have been no more than five years old.

  Very soon Amelia was pregnant. A year after her marriage, she gave birth to a girl, Sophie, Hellman’s grandmother. From the age of eighteen until she was forty-seven, Amelia gave birth on an average of every other year, producing a total of ten children. Two babies did not survive childhood; a son disappears from the records in early adulthood, presumably dead of disease or accident.

  The 1860 Census, the last taken before the Civil War, shows us that during the 1850s Isaac had become quite a substantial citizen. He was now head of a household of seven people including himself, his wife, and their four children. Moses Marx, a young man from Bavaria, perhaps Isaac’s youngest brother, also lived with them and clerked in Isaac’s store.

  In the same census Isaac, when asked the value of his real and personal property, gave the figure of $23,000. This made him far from the wealthiest man in town—the great wealth was held by the planters—but he was equally far from the poorest. His real property would have included the value of his store, and of the house which he had by then built for his family. Some fraction of his personal property—in the vicinity of four or five thousand dollars—inhered in the value of his five slaves, who were listed only by sex and age. The Marx family owned a forty-year-old black male; a black female of the same age; a twenty-eight-year-old black female; a thirteen-year-old mulatto female; and a black female child, seven years old.10

  In 1860, a quarter of all southern families owned slaves. “Whatever the ultimate affirmations of the Jewish religious tradition . . . individual Jews are strongly aware of the need to live in this world from day to day,” the critic Robert Warshow wrote in the late 1940s.11 Living day to day in the South, Jews accepted slavery as the law of the land: “The law of the land is the law [for the Jews],” the Talmud says. Indeed, the law of the land was also accepted by those who had most reason to object to it—free southern blacks who owned slaves, as many did.12

  The law of the land was different in the North, and most northern Jews opposed secession and slavery. Overt antisemitism was also more prevalent in the North than in the South. The fervent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator, saw no contradiction between abhorrence of slavery and hatred of Jews, referring to a northern Jewish judge as “the miscreant Jew,” a “Shylock,” a “descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross.”13 Had it not been for the presence of African slaves, antisemitism in the South would have been much closer to the surface. Jews, who had done so well in the South, feared nothing more than the stirring of that pot.

  When Alabama seceded from the Union in January 1861, there were fewer than 25,000 Jews living in the southern states. Between 2,000 and 3,000 of them served in the Confederate armies.14 Lillian Hellman’s family provided two soldiers to the Confederacy: her paternal grandfather, Bernard Hellman, who served as a quartermaster in Florida;15 Isaac Marx is first listed as a private in the Canebrake Legion of the Confederate Cavalry and then, in 1863, as a quartermaster.16

  In Another Part of the Forest, Marcus Hubbard runs the Union blockade to bring back salt. In the few records that exist of Isaac Marx’s activities as a quartermaster, there is no mention of salt, but there are some receipts for a horse he supplied to the Confederate Army for $800, some packing boxes for bacon, and forty-four bushels of something illegible, for which he was paid a total of $345. Of course there would have been many more transactions than the few that have survived and many transactions for which a record was never made. Some may have had to do with salt, or with the black market in cotton. General Ulysses Grant, convinced that Jews were responsible for the black market in cotton, issued the notorious General Order No. 11 in 1862, for the expulsion of all Jews from the areas of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky occupied by the Union. The order was quickly rescinded by Lincoln. But many men, including Jews, profited during the Civil War. And, in fact, Isaac Marx was a much richer man in the late 1860s than he was before the war began.

  For some reason, at about the time the war ended, Isaac moved his family to Mobile. His son Julius was born there in 1865; two more children followed.17 In 1868, he built a town-house in Mobile, an elegant house, typical of city architecture, with bay windows and shutters, a cast iron veranda, white marble fireplaces, a small formal garden, and imported French wall-paper. We know so much about this house because much later it was dismantled and re-erected for use on the campus of the University of South Alabama.18 The Mobile Census of 1870 shows him living in this house with Amelia and seven children. The value of Isaac’s real estate had risen to $100,000, and his personal worth to $50,000, although
this is probably a low estimate; no one tells the census taker the whole truth about his finances.

  In the years between 1860 and 1870, while the economy of the Old South crumbled, Isaac Marx made a fortune. Probably he bought land; the old plantations, now without slave labor to work them, were going cheap. No doubt he rented the land to freedmen to work, and took a share, a large share, of their crops. He was also a money lender.

  Isaac returned to Demopolis in about 1872. There is no suggestion that scandal was attached to his name. The newly formed Demopolis Board of Trade elected him as a member.19

  Isaac continued to be involved in his various businesses. When a temple was finally built in Demopolis in 1893, Isaac lit the perpetual light.

  In 1875 Amelia gave birth for the last time, to another boy, Henry. Ten years later Isaac built the bank for his eldest sons, Jacob and Edward; in 1898, he built the Marx Livery Stable, for the younger boys, Julius and Henry. His children had been educated and were prepared to take their place in the world. Specifically, we know that his son Julius graduated from college in Mobile with a master’s degree, and we can assume that the other Marx boys had been educated as well.20

  The children began to marry. In 1876, Sophie, the eldest of the Marx children, married Leonard Newhouse, who had come from Cincinnati to be a merchant in Demopolis. The Newhouses had four children, a boy and three girls. Julia, Lillian Hellman’s mother, was their second child, born in 1879.

  And the older generation began to die. Amelia in 1898, and Isaac in 1900, at the age of seventy-five. Only two of the Marx children, Julius and Henry, remained in Demopolis to live out their lives.

  In 1897, Leonard Newhouse died of syphilis. Sophie Marx Newhouse found herself a wealthy, and still-young widow. Like Regina Hubbard in The Little Foxes, Sophie longed for big city life; unlike Regina, she was not hampered by lack of money. She took her four unmarried children and left Demopolis, going first to Cincinnati, her late husband’s birthplace, and soon after to New Orleans. There, to her dismay, her daughter, Julia, met and married Max Hellman.

  Sophie was displeased with the match. Max did not seem to be, nor was he, a man of force and business acumen. But Julia was given her dowry, and Max opened a shoe manufacturing business. In 1905, the couple’s only child was born, a girl, named Lillian Florence. The new family lived first with Sophie Newhouse, and then with Max Hellman’s sisters, Jenny and Hannah, who ran a boarding house.

  By 1910 Sophie Marx Newhouse and her children were in New York. Sophie’s brother Jacob Marx left Demopolis to join her in the city. The Newhouses took apartments in the grand, newly built Ansonia Hotel on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets, which featured tower apartments and oval living rooms. In that day, as it still is today, the Ansonia was an architectural gem of the Upper West Side.

  Max Hellman’s shoe business in New Orleans failed. Sometime around 1910, the Hellman family, too, moved to New York. Everything about their residence in the city was at first tentative. They lived in a boarding house. Max worked as a traveling shoe salesman, and Julia and Lillian often traveled with him. For some years Lillian was sent to New Orleans for part of the school year. Eventually the family settled, taking an apartment in a solidly middle-class building on 95th Street near Riverside Drive; still their quarters were a great deal less luxurious than those the Marxes occupied at the Ansonia.21

  3

  Two Jewish Girls

  ONE EVENING in Hollywood, in 1935, a dinner party was given to honor Gertrude Stein. Among the invited guests were Charlie Chaplin and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom Stein had asked to meet. Dashiell Hammett brought Lillian Hellman along as his date.

  It is a little difficult to picture Lillian Hellman and Gertrude Stein in the same room at the same time. Something like trying to hold two opposing thoughts. These women do not belong together. Surely, they must be of different eras and different worlds. But, in fact, they were both American girls, Jewish girls, only a generation apart, and they both knew something of life in the South.

  Hellman was thirty in 1935, short and slender, with a large bosom, good legs that she played up, and always elegantly dressed and coiffed. Stein was sixty, also short, but unapologetically fat, which exempted her from fashion; few people knew anything about her legs.

  One can almost imagine that these physical differences between Hellman and Stein translated directly to the page: in Hellman’s tightly woven plots and precisely pointed sentences; in Stein’s loose, verbose, repetitious, plotless meanderings, in English, yes, but not as it is generally written or spoken. (Stein’s brother, Leo, who was bitter about his sister’s success, thought that she simply couldn’t write any better.1)

  More than appearance and writing styles differentiated the women. One preferred men, the other loved women. Each woman held extreme political views that the other would have abhorred. The social and cultural circumstances of one would have been deeply uncongenial to the other. At the moment they met, however, they were alike in being new American celebrities: Hellman, freshly acclaimed for her first play, The Children’s Hour; and Stein, already famous for being Gertrude Stein, was making a lecture tour of America with her first popular success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

  It is too much to say that Hellman and Stein became acquainted that evening. Stein paid no attention to Hellman. It was Dashiell Hammett who interested her and whose work she admired. (Hellman didn’t forget the snub, and many years later she told an interviewer a story about that evening to Stein’s disadvantage.2)

  This meeting between the two women was the first and the last, and with no significance for their lives. It is also insignificant, if not uninteresting, that Stein and Hellman, at different times, had a relationship with Ernest Hemingway in which sex hovered at the edges. “I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it,” Hemingway wrote of Stein long after their friendship was over.3 For her part, Hellman recounted a night spent with Hemingway in Paris. It was 1937; Hellman was in a deep drunken sleep in her hotel room when she was awakened by someone pounding on her door. Hemingway! What could a man want at that hour? But, no. he was carrying the proofs of his new novel To Have and Have Not and eager only for Hell-man’s opinion. Hellman read through the night, making discerning comments that seemed to annoy Hemingway. When dawn broke, Hemingway took his leave, but not before offering Hemingwayesque thanks: “I wish I could sleep with you,” he said, “but I can’t because there’s somebody else. I hope you understand.”4

  Between Stein and Hemingway we can be sure that nothing happened, apart from that frisson that made their friendship, as long as it lasted, more interesting. But between Hellman and Hemingway, who can say? When Hellman got back to New York, she let it be known that she had been one of Hemingway’s girls in Paris, and was “very bitter over him.”5 But digressions aside, what on earth is Gertrude Stein doing in Lillian Hellman’s story?

  If I found it surprising to find these birds of such different feather in the same room, how much more surprising it was to learn that they had so much in common that they might have been hatched from the same clutch. Like Hellman’s great-grandfather, Isaac Marx, the Steins had fled impoverished lives in Bavaria. In 1841, a year after Isaac Marx landed in Mobile, the Steins landed in Baltimore with four young sons. In Baltimore, they were met by Meyer, their eldest son, who, like Isaac Marx, had earned the money to send for them by peddling old clothes.

  In time, Meyer Stein opened a dry goods store in Baltimore. His younger brothers joined him in the enterprise, including his brother Daniel, who would be Gertrude’s father. During the 1850s, the store grew into a successful clothing manufacturing business. Since Maryland was a border state, when Civil War broke out the Steins were able to obtain contracts to manufacture military uniforms for the Union side.

  It’s possible that the maternal side of Gertrude Stein’s family, the Keysers, were slave owners at some point. The Keysers had been settled in Baltimore since the 1820s, and they were in favor of secession from the Union. Gertru
de’s maternal uncle, Solomon, fought for the Confederacy.

  The Stein family was divided on the question of secession. Daniel Stein sympathized with the Union. In 1862, Daniel and one of his younger brothers left Baltimore for Pittsburgh, where they set up a branch of the family business. The 1870 Census lists the worth of Daniel Stein’s real and personal property at the considerable sum of $60,000.6

  Many German-Jewish families have stories similar to the Marxes and the Steins: impoverishment and oppression in the Old Country; peddling in the New World; hard work, and a rise to riches. Few of these families, however, produced such writing daughters, girls who grew into exceptionally distinctive women, girls with enough self-assurance to live without the protection of marriage, and to follow their own inclinations.

  Stein’s self-confidence was striking: it was “outlandish confidence,” as Elizabeth Hardwick observed, “confidence and its not-too-gradual ascent into egoism.”7 Stein’s powerful sense of herself feels deeply organic, while Hellman’s often seems like bravado. Whatever the nature of their confidence, neither of these women ever faltered in her course.

  How did they get that way? In women, self-confidence is often based on beauty, but no one can accuse either of these girls of trading on her looks. Money in the family can be reassuring. Gertrude grew up a rich girl, in full knowledge that she would be provided for. Lillian had to earn her money, but her mother and grandmother had grown up rich, and while Lillian may have described herself as “shabby poor,” she knew how rich people behaved; she had early coveted the wealth of her Marx relations. And, even as she condemned their methods of making money, and their obsession with money, in Hellman’s plays about the Hubbards, she offers them no alternative: life without money is life without freedom.