Lillian Hellman Read online

  Gertrude and Lillian also occupied a similar niche in their respective families. Gertrude was the baby, and as the baby, as Stein readily acknowledged, or boasted, “naturally I had privileges, the privilege of petting . . . there you are privileged, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and this is the way I still am.”8 Lillian was an only child, therefore forever the baby; if she sometimes emphasized the negative aspects of that status, she knew very well that she always got her way: “As an only child, you never have enough of anything. Because you’re so spoiled all the time, and [getting a] lot has led to wishing for more.”9

  Hellman and Stein had these family circumstances in common, and now that we know a little more about the mechanisms of genetic inheritance, we can imagine that the qualities that brought two young impoverished men from Bavaria to America in the still-early nineteenth century were not lost; two and three generations down the line, their character traits may well have appeared in these fiercely willful and ambitious daughters, each of whom liked to think of herself as owing nothing to nobody.

  Like Hellman, Stein used autobiographical material in her work. She often said that she had no imagination and couldn’t make anything up. And like Hellman, she didn’t concern herself with the Jewish aspect of her characters. Thornton Wilder, who was a friend and admirer of Stein’s, wrote with some indignation to another mutual friend Alexander Woollcott: “Well, Gertrude Stein is a fine, big serene girl, is she? THEN why does she never mention [in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas] that she or Miss Toklas are Jewesses? And why in . . . “The Making of Americans” does she not mention that the family she is analyzing in such detail is a Jewish family. . . . It is possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.”10

  Stein never denied being Jewish. In fact she took a quixotic pride in it. She had a theory that all geniuses (herself included) had Jewish blood; and so, because she considered him a genius, she was sure that Abraham Lincoln was partly Jewish. She had other very peculiar ideas. For instance, in 1934, while on her lecture tour of America, she urged that Hitler be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She told a reporter that Hitler, by “driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements [from Germany] . . . is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.” Yet again, in 1938, she suggested that Hitler be considered for the Prize.11 Whatever we think of Gertrude Stein as an artist, we might agree with the critic Robert Warshow, who wrote that “in politics she was stupid and uninformed.”12

  In 1940, as Germany occupied France, friends warned Stein and Toklas to leave the country immediately. For once, Stein was properly frightened; she almost fled. But in the end she did not. She had always felt specially charmed, and she could not believe that anything bad could happen to her. And, in fact, nothing bad did. She found a protector in Bernard Faÿ, a Nazi collaborator, who admired her, and whom she, in turn, admired. When Faÿ visited her at her country house in Bilignin, in France’s Rhone Valley, the two friends spoke of many common interests, including Hitler, whom they thought a great man and compared to Napoleon.13 “Faÿ successfully pleaded Stein’s case with the Vichy authorities, and between 1941 and 1944, while the Vichy government, in collaboration with the Gestapo, deported 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps, Stein and Toklas, and their pedigreed poodle, Basket, through Faÿ’s intervention, were supplied with enough coal and food rations to keep them alive, if a bit thinner, while they waited out the war in the French countryside.14 “A Jew is a ghetto surrounded by Christians,” Gertrude Stein once said, and so it proved in wartime France.15

  Nor did Lillian Hellman ever deny being Jewish. She occasionally told interviewers that she liked being Jewish, even if, as she acknowledged, she had little sense of what that meant. In early 1940, she began to see a psychoanalyst, Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, who deserves and has his own chapter later. Hellman undertook analysis because she was concerned about her heavy drinking. According to an interview given by Zilboorg’s widow after Hellman’s death, the doctor noticed a couple of other problems; he hoped to cure his patient not only of alcoholism but of her chronic habit of lying, and of her antisemitism—“the deprecatory way with a curling lip she spoke of other Jews.”16

  It was no secret to her friends that Hellman often spoke contemptuously of Jews. “Get those Rappaports out of here,” she might say of a group of people not authorized to be in a theater where she was working. The power boats bobbing in the harbor in front of her Martha’s Vineyard property were “Jewish cocktail boats.”17 Walter Matthau, who starred in My Mother, My Father and Me, a play Hellman adapted, told her, as others did, that the play was antisemitic.18 “I myself make very anti-Semitic remarks but I get upset if anyone else does,” Hellman told an interviewer, the equivalent of saying, “Some of my best friends are Jewish,” as indeed they were.19 Although, again, like Gertrude Stein, no Jewish characters appeared in Hellman’s plays, even when Jews would seem to be central to the plot.

  A striking example is Hellman’s anti-Fascist play Watch on the Rhine. First staged in 1941, her hero, Kurt Muller (most probably based on her friend, the Comintern agent Otto Katz, who was, in fact, Jewish, and on whom more later), is an Aryan German, and an exemplary anti-Fascist. Muller, we are told, fought for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s; in 1940, when the action of Watch is set, Muller is a leader of the anti-Nazi underground. We find him in Washington with his family, resting from the ordeals of being a hunted man in Europe. But soon he learns that he must return to Germany to try and rescue several of his captured comrades. This is a very dangerous undertaking, and it is unlikely that he will survive. We learn that Muller was forced to leave Germany in 1933, the year Hitler took power. Was this because he was:

  A Jew? one character asks of another.

  No, I don’t think so.

  Why did he have to leave Germany?

  Oh, I don’t know, Teck. He’s an anti-Nazi.20

  No one in this play is Jewish. If any of the comrades Kurt is going back to Germany to rescue is Jewish, he doesn’t say so. It does seem a bit odd that Jews are barely mentioned in a play that specifically urges American liberals to rouse themselves to resist Hitler. There is a place in this play, as there was not in the Hubbard plays, for at least one heroic Jewish character, but there are none, even though such a character might carry some special moral weight given the message of Hellman’s play.

  In August 1939, when Hellman finished the first draft of Watch on the Rhine, she could not have known, no one did, the fate that would befall the Jews of Europe.21 But she was not ignorant, no one was, of the Nazi hatred and persecution of Jews.

  Both Gertrude Stein and Lillian Hellman were radicals. Stein was artistically as well as politically extreme. She was a radical conservative; during the decade of the Depression, Stein believed a hungry man was a lazy man. She was opposed to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; she supported Franco in his attack on the Spanish Republic; she was for Hitler, at least in those of his policies she was so sure would lead to peace.

  Hellman was traditional as an artist—she broke no new ground; she was on the far left side of the political divide. She admired Stalin and the Soviet Union; she believed in, and spoke publicly for, policies that were identical to those promulgated by the Communist Party. And so confident of their righteousness were both women, that events as they transpired barely ruffled their beliefs.

  4

  Marriage

  IT IS always interesting to ask about any couple: Why this particular man and woman? Why, to begin with, did Lillian Hellman marry Arthur Kober?

  When Hellman met Kober, she was nineteen, still living with her parents in the walk-up apartment on West 95th Street, near Riverside Drive, where the family lived for most of the fifteen years since their arrival in New York. After her sophomore year Hellman had dropped out of New York University where she had been an indifferent student. She was restless and uncertain as young, inexperienced people are, but she was a bold gir
l. And she harbored vaguely literary ambitions. The diary in which she made sporadic entries between 1922 and 1925 records some high-flown adolescent musings: “I shall say—I am a seeker of the truth. I arrive at conclusions and then discard them. . . . I am essentially artificial in my struggle for the truth.” About her active sex life: “Up to 2 hours we laid on the couch and should have had children but for many reasons didn’t . . .”1

  Soon Hellman had a piece of good luck. At a party, a flirtatious conversation with a man who turned out to be a publishing executive led to a job with Boni and Liveright, an eminent publishing house with a stunning list of authors that included Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Hellman’s job was fairly menial, but she found herself in the vicinity of the twentieth-century’s great writers and editors. As happens in life, one thing led to another, and a door into the world cracked open for her.

  The Liveright office was friendly and informal. Hellman made some friends among the other young women working there. Among them, as she tells it in her memoirs, was a girl named “Alice” who “was already started on the road to Marxism that would lead her, as a student doctor, to be killed in the Vienna riots of 1934.”2 In her second memoir, Hellman’s “Alice” became “Julia,” and she lived on several more years. Whether or not there was an Alice-Julia, Hellman did meet Arthur Kober through her job at Liveright, probably at one of the parties thrown by the publisher. He was five years older than Hellman; they began a love affair and Hellman became pregnant. She had an abortion, but a few months after that, in December 1925, “I . . . left my job at Liveright’s to marry Arthur Kober, who was a charming young man working as a theatre press agent and just beginning to write about his friends in the emerging Jewish-American lower middle class world.”3

  Hellman’s parents liked Arthur Kober; everyone liked him. He was not handsome, but he was sweet, kind, and funny, if also insecure and subject to bouts of depression. He was crazy about Hellman, and she was fond of him, even loved him, while aware that he was not quite her ideal. As she wrote in her diary the year before they married: “I can’t have the complete Don Juan because then I’d suspect something so I am growing quite content with a substitution.”

  Marriage to Kober offered many advantages. It got Hellman out of her parents’ house, and gave her emotional protection. Kober was a promising writer; his connections in the literary and theatrical world would prove useful in getting Hellman work—first as a theatrical publicist, then as a script reader in Hollywood. She began writing book reviews and little stories that she knew were not very good. In 1928, when Kober got a temporary job editing a magazine in Paris, Hellman went with him for her first trip abroad.

  Nor did marriage confine Hellman’s sexual life. “In those days,” she told an interviewer many years later, “we all thought we should be sexually liberated and acted as if we were, but we had deep uneasiness about sex too.”4 Not very long into her marriage, however uneasily, Hellman, in her own words, “began a history of remarkable men, often difficult, sometimes even dangerous.”5

  When Kober was offered a screenwriting contract in Hollywood, Hellman remained in New York for several months before joining him, and began a passionate love affair with a young man named David Cort, who went on to become a distinguished author and editor. The affair continued, on and off, for several years.6 Kober was an insecure man and a compliant husband. He remained deeply attached to Hellman for the rest of his life, but when he later looked back at their marriage he saw her as “thoughtless, restless and idle.”7 And it is true that Lillian Kober, as she was known during the years of her marriage, did pretty much as she pleased. If it pleased her to be separate from Kober for months at a time, and it did, if it pleased her to have affairs, and it did, Kober had his own affairs, and hoped that in time the marriage would settle.8

  In many ways the Kobers were mismatched: a headstrong, ambitious woman married to an appeasing, self-deprecating man is material for comedy, and certainly for conflict. “She could have had him for breakfast,” Hellman’s friend Talli Wyler said years later.9 There was a sexual imbalance between them—the more experienced, unconstrained Hellman and the inhibited Kober, who feared that his wife’s pleasure in what he called “going down episodes” was unnatural.10 And although both were Jews, there was a cultural divide between them: Hellman, who was confidently assimilated, and third-generation, and who could refer to first-generation Eastern Jewish immigrants as “kikes” and “yids,” and Kober, who had been born in Poland, one of five children of poor parents who ran a dry goods store in East Harlem, and spoke with an accent which he tried to disguise by affecting English pronunciation.11 And if Hellman, in her writing, would mention Jews rarely and only in passing, Kober, when he began to write for theNew Yorker, wrote stories that were almost exclusively about lower-middle-class Jewish characters, their speech rendered in Yiddish cadences, living precisely in the immigrant culture that Hellman disdained.

  It was inevitable that as Hellman found her feet she would look for another kind of man. When her friend Lee Gershwin suggested that she be nicer to her sweet husband, she replied that she didn’t want a sweet man.12 She “needed a teacher,” she wrote, “a cool teacher, who would not be impressed or disturbed by a strange and difficult girl.”13

  Hellman was difficult, yes, but not particularly strange. No one ever wondered about what Lillian Hellman wanted; she made that evident. When she met Dashiell Hammett she met a man who was truly strange: solitary, unreachable, cold, and inpenetrable in some essential way.

  The exact circumstances of the first meeting between Hellman and Hammett have been papered over by many versions. But they met in Hollywood, in a public place, at some sort of party, in the fall of 1930. Hammett was already famous. In legend, at least, Hellman saw Hammett across a crowded room—tall, handsome, slim, elegantly dressed, soiled from the effects of a three-day drunk. When she learned his name, she rushed to his side. According to Hellman, they spent the night in her car, talking about books.

  Neither side of Hammett’s family—neither Hammetts nor Dashiells—bore any resemblance to the Hellmans and Marxes. Hammett’s ancestors were seventeenth-century Catholic settlers from England and France. And through two centuries of American life, no branch of Hammett’s family seems to have found fortune in America; there is no evidence of accumulated property or wealth, or of higher education. The Hammetts and Dashiells stayed pretty much in the class in which they had begun—farmers, sailors, artisans, clerks, workers.14 Hammett was the changeling in the nest.

  Hammett was born in 1894, on his grandfather’s tobacco farm in Maryland.15 Family poverty pushed him into the work-force at the age of fourteen. But Hammett, a reader since child-hood, continued reading after he left school, picking up whatever books came his way, even as he worked odd jobs in the Baltimore area. In the same way, he picked up the pleasures that were available to a handsome young boy: smoking, drinking, sex with prostitutes. These became lifelong habits, of which he reaped the eventual consequences in alcoholism, frequent bouts of gonorrhea, and, finally, the emphysema and lung cancer that, along with tuberculosis, often made an invalid of him, and finally killed him at the age of sixty-six.

  In 1915, Hammett got a job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. His hair was still red in those days. He was tall, intelligent, and probably he already displayed the quality of self-containment that marked him all his life. He was soon trained in detective work and sent West to work as a Pinkerton detective. Hammett worked as a Pinkerton until the First World War broke out when he joined the army. He caught influenza in the pandemic of 1918, and most of his time in the army was spent in hospitals, being treated for the flu; a latent tuberculosis developed of which he would never be entirely cured.

  During a time when he was hospitalized in Tacoma, Hammett met Josephine Dolan, a pretty young nurse. In December 1920, they started dating. In late February of the next year, Hammett was transferred to a hospital in San Diego, and he began writ
ing love letters to the girl he called Jose. Hellman disliked the thought that he had ever loved Jose, but he did:

  This is the first time I ever felt that way about a woman; perhaps it’s the first time I have ever really loved a woman. That sounds funny but it may be the truth. . . . Lots of love to the dearest small person in the world. . . . I didn’t intend writing you a second letter before I got an answer to my first—but that’s the hell of being in love with a vamp. . . . But I love Josephine Anna Dolan and have since the 6th of January, more than anything in Christ’s world. . . . Yes’um, I deserve all the love you can spare me and I want a lot more than I deserve.16

  As he demonstrated during the rest of his life, Hammett was not a marrying man. But he was in love with Jose, and when she became pregnant they married on July 7, 1921. Their daughter, Mary Jane, was born on October 16, 1921. Five years later a second daughter, Josephine, was born.

  With little formal education Hammett read unsystematically, but widely. Literature, science, and philosophy. And, almost suddenly it seemed, he began to write. From 1922 through 1934, he published an astonishing body of work—eighty short stories and five novels. Four of his novels appeared between 1929 and 1931. And if Hammett did not actually invent the noir detective story—the hard-boiled, cynical, yet pure-of-heart detective-hero who operated in a bleak, corrupt society—he realized this world so powerfully that his stories and characters entered literature as though a place had been kept for them.