Lillian Hellman Read online

  As she had begun, so she continued. In principle at least, Hellman believed that sex meant neither more or less than you wanted it to mean: it might be an act of love, or a physical pleasure that could be taken with anyone, without consequence. Hammett had acted on this idea consistently, and Hellman gave almost as good as she got. But to do so, she had to fight a nature that had always been tormented by jealousy: “I made a sound I had never heard myself make before,” Hellman writes of the feeling of jealousy that overcame her in early adolescence. Sexually stirred by “Willy” (her uncle by marriage), she had watched him go off with his Cajun girlfriend: “I believe that what I felt that night was what I was to feel” as a grown woman, the “humiliation of vanity . . . rejection . . . I was at one minute less than nothing and, at another, powerful enough to revenge myself with the murder of Willy.”6

  Adding fuel to jealousy was Hellman’s bitter awareness that she was not a beauty; that in a room of beautiful women she would not, in the normal course of things, be the one preferred. But as far as she could manage it, neither would she allow herself to be chosen against. Whether by willed decision or natural assertiveness, from her youth to middle-age, few beautiful women could equal Hellman’s sexual success; few had her boldness, her presence, her nerve.

  To begin with, as Hellman once noted, youth, alone, is a powerful aphrodisiac: “All the men in the [Liveright] office made routine passes at the girls who worked there—one would have had to be hunchbacked to be an exception.”7 And after the success of The Children’s Hour, Hellman was in possession of a double dose of attraction: she was still young, and now she had fame as well. She would retain the power of fame all her life, and what she had going for her outlasted youth: immense vitality, intelligence, a sharp wit, a good figure. And even more: an urgent need for the attentions of men, a lack of inhibition in making her desires known, a strong sex drive, and the wish to please. Apparently, no lover was ever disappointed. “Unbelievably seductive,” said one lover. Another man, who did not initially find her attractive, let himself be seduced, and once in bed with her found the experience “just unbelievable . . . anything went . . . anything . . . it was terrific.”8 Yet another lover, James Roosevelt, the President’s son, called her “the greatest lay I ever had.”9 Not every man fell in love with her, but many did, attractive, successful men, the publisher Ralph Ingersoll, for one, who often promised to leave his wife for her, although he never did.

  In the early 1940s, more than a decade after their beginning, Hellman and Hammett’s sex life came to an end.10 As they were driving to a party, Hammett put his hand on Hell-man’s knee and suggested they skip the event, go home, make a pitcher of martinis, and take it to bed. For whatever reason—the lure of a glamorous party, an unattractively drunk Hammett—Hellman said no. And for whatever reason, Hammett decided to take Hellman’s refusal as final. They never made love again.11 Or it may be that it was Hellman who decided. She told the story both ways.12

  By this time, each had had many other sexual partners; inevitably their sexual bond had weakened and resentments had mounted. Hellman hated Hammett’s bouts of incapacitating and violent drunkenness; his coldness which kept her at a distance; his silence in the face of her rebukes; his parade of women, whether prostitutes or, sometimes, friends, as when Hammett, to Hellman’s lifelong fury, spent a week with their mutual friend, Laura Perelman, wife of S. J. Perelman, and sister of Nathanael West; with whom, as it had happened, Hellman had had her own brief affair.

  Hammett’s habit was silence and evasion, but he had his own resentments: of Hellman’s frequent rages, of her refusal to accept the fact that he was a man who would not tolerate interference with his life, of her social ambitions, which irritated him. And when Hammett began to understand that he would not write again, he would have had to be more than human not to feel some bitterness at this essential loss, particularly when measured against Hellman’s growing success, given that they both knew how much she owed it to him.

  In the spring of 1939, with the success of The Little Foxes, Hellman bought a 130-acre estate in Westchester County. She turned it into a working farm, Hardscrabble Farm she called it, which she and Hammett worked together. The farm was in Hellman’s name, but Hammett contributed to the expense of running it. He loved the place, and came and went as he pleased. As they lived separately in the city, they had separate bedrooms and lives at the farm. Hellman’s friends and lovers often trooped up to the farm on weekends, and she was open about her affairs—with her producer, Herman Shumlin, with St. Clair McKelway the New Yorker writer, with Time writer Charles Wertenbaker, with any number of other men. She preferred tall, handsome men, Lillian’s “goys,” Arthur Kober called them.13 Some affairs were serious—the one with Shumlin lasted some years—others were brief, not always by Hell-man’s choice.

  For all the frenetic sexual activity, deep, reciprocal love eluded Hellman. No one was writing the sort of poems to her that her poet friend Theodore Roethke wrote to his wife: “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.” Did she want that? More and more as time went on.

  In Moscow, at the end of 1944, Hellman met a diplomat named John Melby. Melby was no poet but he was an intelligent, capable man, and he was enraptured by Hellman. He fell deeply in love with her, he felt sexually awakened. She had “made a man” of him, he said; she “knew how to make a man feel like a man.”14 When Melby left his posting in Moscow in 1945, he and Hellman spent the summer together at Hardscrabble Farm and at East Hampton. Hellman introduced him to her friends, including Hammett, and including her psychoanalyst, Gregory Zilboorg, who evidently approved of Melby as a lover for Hellman. When Melby left for his new posting to China, Zilboorg wrote to him encouraging the relationship: he believed that Melby and Lillian “were happy together and would be.”15

  When Melby went to China, Hellman briefly considered going with him. She did not go. It was inconceivable that she would give up her life to be hostess for a diplomat. But she and Melby wrote each other frequently and at length. Melby invested in Another Part of the Forest, which opened in late 1946. He sent Hellman expensive hand-woven silk from Nanking. He reminded her of their happy times and spoke of his hopes that they would be together again.

  But they were an odd couple. Time and distance worked against them, and so did their political differences. Melby was a colleague of George Kennan, and shared Kennan’s understanding of the Soviet regime. He held no brief for Stalin’s policies, or, for that matter, for those of the American Communist Party. Henry Wallace, whose Progressive Party bid for the presidency in 1948, was actively supported by the American Communist Party, and by Hellman, raised Melby’s ire. In November 1947, he wrote to Hellman: “I . . . think it most unseemly of Wallace to make the kind of speech he does abroad [attacking the Marshall Plan]. If he disagrees let him do it at home.” In another letter, he wrote, “I do in fact think you are wrong about events and about a lot of people . . . it is plain now that the United States is faced with expanding Slavic power which is without scruples of any kind.” In answer to a letter from Hellman which does not survive, Melby wrote, “Of course I realize what all this [disagreement] implies of a personal nature, and that is the hardest part. On the other hand, I see nothing to be gained, and much to be lost by pretending one is what one is not.”16 In February 1948, with the Wallace campaign in high gear, Melby wrote: “I’m sorry to say I think Wallace is making a damned fool of himself. . . . Isn’t the record clear enough by now that [the Communists] will simply use him for their own ends . . . [and] that those ends are bad? . . . simply an extension of Soviet power, and they will never hesitate to use any means available to secure that extension . . . I don’t quite see what it has to do with Jeffersonian democracy.”17

  The love affair was essentially over by 1948, although affection remained and Hellman and Melby continued to see each other on occasion. In the early 1950s, when McCarthyism was at its height, Melby’s loyalty was questioned. The State Depart-ment’s Loyalty Security Board offered only
one charge against him: “That during the period 1945 to date, you have maintained an association with one Lillian Hellman, reliably reported to be a member of the Communist Party.” Melby was fired from the State Department in 1953. Unable to get a job in government, he taught for a while at a Canadian university. His name was finally cleared in 1980.18

  In the late forties, with Melby in China and their love affair fading, Hellman looked elsewhere. A casual affair with Randall Smith, an ex-longshoreman and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, filled some time. In 1948, a more serious prospect appeared. She began an affair with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia, Srdja Prica. Of Prica, Hellman wrote in her diary: “I am probably doing it all over again—but someday soon the need must be fulfilled—it is getting late.”19 She suspected the affair would not turn out well. Prica was a “sharp handsome and aggressive,” man, a famous womanizer.20 He was a very unlikely prospect to fulfill the need Hellman felt for a constant lover, for a husband, possibly even for a child, although she was by then in her early forties. For a little while, before Prica dropped her, she hoped against hope that “His Excellency,” as she later referred to him, would be that man.

  Hellman lived a daring sexual life; as with all daring enterprises it had dangers: for one thing she exposed herself to that most common and painful danger, rejection. Sexual rejection cut particularly deeply with Hellman who felt her lack of beauty, and diminishing youth. But she did not change her seductive technique. “Lillian came on with every man she met,” Arthur Miller said. Miller wasn’t interested, and he felt that she never forgave him for that. Nor was the director Elia Kazan interested. Hellman invited him to a dinner à deux. In his memoirs Kazan writes of the evening: “I felt like a young girl cornered by a rich old man who expected the reward she could afford to pay for the fine meal he was providing.” Kazan might not have been unwilling but: “I saw that her general attitude toward the world was derisive. She made fun of everyone she talked about, and I wearied of her.”21 He thanked her for the gumbo and left. But if he was not attracted, neither was he unadmiring: “I thought her intrepid; that lady had balls! She went after what she wanted the way a man does.”22

  A reader of Hellman’s memoirs would learn very little about her love life. A few sentences about her marriage to Arthur Kober, much more about Hammett, here and there some brief allusions to other men: “R,” for one, a passing reference to John Melby. Oddly, however, Hellman devotes a full chapter in her memoirs to a man who helped her financially, but rejected her sexually—Arthur Cowan, a rich Philadelphia lawyer whom she first met in the early 1950s. “I came to know his face as well as my own,” she writes, implying a great intimacy.23 Apparently Cowan liked being seen with Hellman, liked being part of her circle of celebrities. He offered to manage her money and promised to leave her money in his will. But he told her that she was too old for him; his preference was for young, beautiful women. “I wouldn’t marry you, Arthur, I never even thought about it,” Hellman recalls in her memoir. But she gives Cowan the last word in this exchange: “Like hell you wouldn’t. . . . You’d marry me in a minute. Maybe not for anything but my money, but I’m not marrying you, see?”24

  Hammett continued to be a presence in Hellman’s life until, after a long illness, he died in 1961. When she came to write her memoirs she gave him a central place in her life story, and she presented theirs as a relationship of deep love and affection which, despite difficulties, had lasted a lifetime. But long before his death he had vacated his place in her sexual life, and in the hopes she had for a permanent partner.

  Hellman had not yet given up hopes of Blair Clark when Peter Feibleman came into her life. Hellman first knew Feibleman as a ten-year-old boy in New Orleans, the son of friends. When she met him again he was a handsome published writer in his late twenties. Hellman took an interest. “I have had a fine, a rare, a desired and almost forgotten kind of voyage—the discovery of my feelings for an interesting man,” she wrote him after a meeting in Los Angeles.25 Eventually they became lovers, at least for a time. Feibleman was twenty-five years her junior.

  No relationship with Hellman was simple. Feibleman soon understood that her needs could consume him. He insisted on his own life, with people of his own age. He insisted that they live separately most of the time. He wrote her: “Here it is once more: I don’t want to live together, Lilly, not on a permanent basis. I need other people too much, and I need to make a life. . . . We have a shot at a new kind of friendship now, let’s not muck around with it, Lilly.”26

  Hellman tried to appear reasonable, but she had little control of her emotions. She hired a detective to find out who Feibleman was seeing; she falsely complained to him of receiving threatening telephone calls from one of his girlfriends. She listened in on his telephone conversations, and when she was caught, she exploded in moral outrage . . . “imagine your accusing me of such a thing . . .” I “realized,” Feibleman wrote, “that Lilly’s almost legendary sense of justice, the justice upon which so much of her life was based, was the justice of a child . . . It didn’t matter when the man had truly broken the rules of the relationship, any more than it mattered what those rules were, as long as she felt something had been done against her. It was sandbox thinking . . . The biggest difference between Lillian as a grown-up and Lillian as a child was that she was taller.”27

  It didn’t please Hellman that sex between them ended as she grew older and sicker. But Feibleman cared for her and remained in her life until the end. Hellman had lucked out, and so had Feibleman. When Hellman died she left him her house on the Vineyard, and enough money to live on for the rest of his life.28

  8

  Counterparts

  LILLIAN HELLMAN must have loved her Julia. No other such entirely admirable character exists in her work, except, perhaps, for “Kurt Muller,” the hero of Watch on the Rhine. Like Julia, Kurt is a heroic anti-Fascist.

  In her memoir Pentimento, Julia is presented to the reader as Hellman’s cherished friend, her oldest and dearest friend. Hellman has loved Julia since girlhood. She loves Julia for her intelligence, her bravery, and her beauty, for her nobility of spirit, not for her riches, although it so happens that Julia is very rich.

  After an idyllic girlhood together, life has parted the friends. When both girls are nineteen, Julia leaves New York, first to study at Oxford, and then to go to Vienna where she hopes to undergo a training analysis with Freud himself. Hellman marries and goes to Hollywood, where she meets Dashiell Hammett and becomes a playwright.

  As Hellman tells the story, she next sees Julia in 1934. Hellman has traveled to Paris to work in solitude on The Children’s Hour. In Paris, she gets a telephone call telling her that Julia is in a hospital in Vienna. Hellman rushes to Vienna. Julia is not in good shape. Her beautiful is face covered in bandages, and there is something very wrong with her leg. We are told that Julia is a Socialist; in synchrony with her beliefs she has been living in a one-room apartment in a Vienna slum, indifferent to her great inherited wealth, except as it can be used to help the Austrian workers in this year after the Nazis have taken power. On occasion, Hellman tells us, she has also used her money to show her love for her dear friend, Lillian, by buying her expensive antiques.

  Julia is in the hospital because she has been wounded by the Fascist troops of Engelbert Dollfuss. At Julia’s insistence, Hellman leaves her in Vienna and does not see her again until 1937, when she is once again in Paris and is asked to smuggle money to Julia in Berlin so that Julia may continue her anti-Fascist work. We now learn what was wrong with Julia’s leg: it was amputated in the Vienna hospital.

  Leaving aside the matter of Hellman being in Europe at all in 1934—her known schedule does not allow for the two months she says she spent there, working by herself on The Children’s Hour in Paris, visiting Julia in Vienna for several weeks—it may occur to you that Hellman must have been of two minds about Julia, so savagely did she physically batter her, taking off Julia’s leg, eventually killing her, and fi
nally destroying the remains of Julia’s beauty altogether by giving her corpse a hideously sewn together face, as she tells the story in Pentimento. Of course, things might just have happened that way.

  Kurt Muller, the hero of Watch on the Rhine, also risks his life for the anti-Fascist cause, and he has bullet scars on his face and broken bones in his hands to show for it. But when we leave him in Hellman’s play, he is still alive, still handsome, still united with his beloved wife and children. And although he is going back into the Nazi maw, Hellman has at least given him the possibility of surviving the war.

  All of her life, Hellman stood by the reality of Julia, but the argument about whether Julia existed as Hellman’s friend was resolved long ago, and not in Hellman’s favor. We can take it as given that Hellman invented her. If not exactly invented her, then, rather like a cuckoo in reverse (or a writer of fiction) she raided another bird’s nest to incubate and raise an unrelated hatchling as her own.

  Muriel Gardiner, whose life Hellman had appropriated to create her “Julia,” wrote Hellman a gracious letter a few years after “Julia” was published:

  Ever since your beautiful book Pentimento appeared, friends and acquaintances have been asking me whether I am Julia. Unlike your Julia, I am—obviously—still alive, and I have not been wounded and my daughter lives with her family in Aspen, Colorado. But many other things in Julia’s life agree with mine. . . . I have never met you, though I heard of you often through our good friend, Wolf Schwabacher . . . and I have seen and admired many of your plays and enjoyed your books.