Lillian Hellman Read online

  While the Russian army waited for Stalin’s orders to march into Warsaw, 20,000 rebels of the Polish Home Army were killed by the Germans, along with 200,000 civilians. Stalin had demonized the Polish resisters as “power hungry adventurers and criminals.”14 It was his intention that no dissenters should be left alive to oppose Soviet hegemony when the Red Army marched into Poland. And, in fact, by early January, when the Red Army entered Warsaw, it was a razed and emptied city.

  Hellman was forbidden to ask questions at the front; nor, it seems, would she have asked had she been permitted. As she said with some impatience to a Russian major who told her she was not to inquire about her location, or about battle actions: “How often can I tell you I don’t give a damn, and wouldn’t know a platoon from an army corps or maybe even a gun from a plane.”15

  Hellman and Orlova remained at the front for almost two weeks. In Lublin, on December 31, they celebrated New Year’s Eve, with Władysław Gomułka and Boleslaw Bierut, the Polish Communists designated by Moscow to establish the post-war government in Poland. In her own memoir, Orlova gives us a vivid description of New Year’s Eve 1944–45 at the front lines: “An empty barrackslike building, long undecorated tables. A bowl of cabbage, a bowl of potatoes, another bowl of cabbage. And full size bottles of vodka between them. . . . no bread at all.”16

  Hellman was back in Moscow on January 9, and she and John Melby resumed their affair. A week later, Hellman writes, she received a telephone call from one of Stalin’s aides telling her that Stalin had agreed to an interview with her. She said that she was sorry, but was afraid she couldn’t make it, and she left Moscow the following day. Years later, asked by an interviewer why she had passed on that unique opportunity, Hellman replied that she had “never understood why one just wants to meet the great or the famous because they’re great and famous . . . it seemed to me we would have nothing to say to each other.”17

  Hellman was insistent on the fact that she was not a historian or a journalist, and it is true that by training and temperament, she was neither. Nevertheless, she was an intelligent, ambitious woman, a professional writer, who, in 1944, happened to find herself on the front lines of history. It is scarcely conceivable that she would have turned down the chance to speak directly with Stalin, if, indeed, she had had such a chance.

  No memoirist tells you everything, that would be impossible, of course. But it is unusual to feel, as one does with Hellman, a writer’s reluctance to tell, a determination to evade. Especially when she is the one who raises the subject in the first place. Hellman is a writer. You would expect her to be interested in Russian writers. But in 1944 she drops some names of great Russian writers and turns quickly away from them, from their work, from the fate they suffered. When it would be appropriate to mention a significant historical event, she omits it, when it is unavoidable, she refuses to engage; she dissembles when approaching politically sensitive material, hedges, misleads. How is it possible, for instance, to take at face value Hellman’s statement “that the truth is that I do not know if [Hammett] was a member of the Communist Party and I never asked him.”18 She may not have asked him because the question was unnecessary; as she tells us only a few lines later: “He was often witty and biting sharp about the American Communist party, but he was, in the end, loyal to them.”19

  As for Hellman, herself, she says that she and Hammett “had not shared the same convictions,” but never does she mention in what ways their convictions differed.20

  Sometime around 1960, Alfred Kazin accepted an invitation to take part in a cultural event in Moscow. He arrived along with a group of American writers, none of whom were well-known enough to impress their Russian hosts. The Russian officials wanted to know: “Where is your Hemingway . . . [where is] . . . your great progressive dramatist and friend of people’s democracies Lillian Hellman?”21 The Russians had no problem saying of Hellman what she would not say of herself.

  10

  Lillian Hellman’s Analyst

  IN THE 1930s psychoanalysis was in high vogue in New York’s artistic circles. Many of Hellman’s friends were being analyzed by the fashionable Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. George Gershwin was treated by Zilboorg, as was Gershwin’s mistress, Kay Swift; Ralph Ingersoll, Hellman’s one-time lover, was a patient of Zilboorg’s, and so were Herman Shumlin and Arthur Kober. Hellman, herself, began her analysis with Zilboorg in 1940, and continued to see him both as analyst and friend until the late 1950s.

  Zilboorg was a short, stocky man, Jewish, born in Kiev in 1890. A photograph of him taken in the 1940s shows him to have a high, balding forehead, a thick moustache that does not quite reach the outer corners of his mouth and hangs in a deep fringe over his upper lip. He wears a bow tie, and rimless glasses that magnify dark, intense eyes.

  Eventually, there would be questions about Zilboorg’s biographical and professional claims: Was he actually part of the pre-revolutionary Kerensky government of Russia? Did he attempt to fight off the Bolsheviks? A more serious problem was whether or not he was licensed to practice medicine in New York State, since no record of a medical license issued to him could be found. But these questions did not arise until later. In 1931, Zilboorg opened a private practice as a psychiatric analyst, working from his home in the East Seventies in New York City.

  There seems to be no question that Zilboorg was a man of great charisma and brilliance. He spoke three languages, including his native Russian. He had taught himself English within a few months of arriving in America, and he translated books from Russian into English. He wrote respected books himself, and was a co-founder of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

  There are many stories about Zilboorg’s treatment methods. He often discussed his patients and the disclosures they made to him with his other patients, many of whom were known to one another. He traveled with his patients on vacations, went to parties at their homes. He had definite ideas about how his patients should run their lives. For instance, both George Gershwin and his mistress, Kay Swift, were in treatment with him. When Swift wanted to divorce her husband, Zilboorg forbid her to do so. He also insisted that Swift, a very attractive woman, needed to have sex with him during their sessions; this activity, he said, was part of her treatment, for which she was naturally required to pay as usual. Zilboorg charged a great deal of money for his services. He charged Hellman seventy-five dollars an hour, the equivalent of about $700 in today’s money.

  George Gershwin came to Zilboorg with a number of physical problems; Zilboorg dismissed them as the symptoms of a neurotic, and when Gershwin suddenly died of a brain tumor in 1937, some of Zilboorg’s colleagues believed that Zilboorg was to blame for a faulty diagnosis.

  In 1942, a couple of Zilboorg’s patients who felt that he had manipulated them, and taken advantage of them financially, complained about him to the Board of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. A Motion of Censure against Zilboorg was presented to the members. It failed to pass, and Zilboorg continued in his profession well into the 1950s.1

  Hellman first consulted Zilboorg because she was confused by her success and worried about her excessive drinking. Zilboorg may have helped her to cut down, but she continued to drink all her life. Zilboorg disapproved of her relationship with Hammett; he preferred John Melby, whom he met several times, when Melby spent the summer of 1945 with Hellman in New York.

  Like most analysands, Hellman, finally, did not know what to make of her analysis. The analytic process is so tortuous and mysterious, so much like magic, that in the end it requires a leap of faith. In 1967, almost ten years after Zilboorg had died, a Russian friend asked Hellman about her analysis:

  “It was a long, painful business,” Hellman said. “Then it’s over and you can’t fit the pieces together or even remember much of what you said or what was said to you. But I no longer have headaches.”

  Her friend then asks about Zilboorg, himself: “From one foreign quarter I hear that he was much respected . . . But from another I hear strange tales of his last years.�
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  “Yes,” Hellman says. “Zilboorg ended odd. . . . But I respected him and was grateful to him. . . . After he died it took me a long time to believe the ugliness I was hearing. I guess people who mesmerize other people die absolutely on the day they die—the magic is gone.”

  “Like Stalin,” Hellman’s Russian friend suggests.

  “Yes,” Hellman agreed. But she would like to excuse Zilboorg: “It was not all venality with Zilboorg,” she says to her friend, “although it looked like that to many people.” She thought that perhaps the financial scandals had something to do with Zilboorg’s ideas about economic justice: “He was,” she says, “an old fashioned Socialist who hated inherited wealth as undeserved, and many of his patients were people like that.”2 In other words, since Zilboorg’s patients had inherited their money, it was legitimate that Zilboorg had bilked them of it, not for mercenary reasons, but for the sake of a political principle.

  Hellman knew another psychiatrist, a friend, Dr. Milton Wexler, of whom she said that she counted on him to always tell her the truth.3 After Hellman died, Wexler told an interviewer that the only thing Zilboorg had cured Hellman of was “a good deal of her money.”4

  11

  “You Are What You Are to Me”

  SO MUCH was at stake in the dark days of the Cold War—imprisonment, livelihood—that it was not unknown for friends to keep their distance from friends in trouble. When the writer, Jerome Weidman, heard that Dashiell Hammett was in jail for lack of $10,000 in bail money, Weidman called Arthur Kober and offered to put up the money himself.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Kober said. “You’re a married man. You have two children.”1 Kober, who had his own family and career to think of, did not offer to put up bail money for Hammett. Nor, it seems, did Lillian Hellman, although she preferred people to think otherwise.

  In July 1951, four of eleven convicted Communist Party leaders jumped bail. Dashiell Hammett, a trustee of their bail fund, was called before the court and asked to reveal the whereabouts of the missing Communists, and also the names of contributors to the bail fund. He refused, and was found guilty of contempt of court. His bail was initially set at $10,000 (although, in the end, he was denied bail altogether and sentenced to six months in prison). In her 1951 diary, Hellman wrote of her distress on the day Hammett was sentenced: “The moral mess . . . should I, could I, wise, unwise, [to provide bail] Gregory [Zilboorg] advised not . . . The loss of head and too many consultations.”2

  Hammett and Hellman had gotten along remarkably well during the previous years. Hammett had been on the wagon since 1948. Even before that he had worked with her, had “given” her, in Hellman’s words, The Little Foxes in 1946. In 1950 he worked with her again on The Autumn Garden, Hell-man’s homage to Chekhov, a play in which ten old friends gather at a summer guest house and speak bitterly of their lives and the roads not taken. The play opened in March 1951 to mixed reviews, and ran a respectable 101 performances.

  Hammett was still trying to do his own work, but was as stalled as ever. That year he and Hellman spent their time together at Hardscrabble Farm, and at a rental house on Martha’s Vineyard. Money was plentiful for both of them. Their relationship had survived Hammett’s years of alcoholism, several years of wartime separation, numerous love affairs, and they had settled into what Hellman called “a passionate affection . . . the best time of our life together.”3 It had been a pleasant lull in the political storm, which hit Hammett first.

  A two-page section of Diane Johnson’s biography of Dashiell Hammett concerns itself with Hellman’s behavior when she learned Hammett had been arrested. According to the account in Johnson’s book, Hellman got the idea that Hammett’s bail was set at $100,000, not $10,000. Trying to raise this large amount, she ran first to the Chase Bank intending to mortgage her townhouse, but learned that the paperwork would take too long. She then gathered up all her jewelry and went to a pawn shop, but was offered only $17,000. She phoned her friend William Wyler in Hollywood, who wired her money, but it was still not enough. Finally, she flew up to Martha’s Vineyard where a friend mortgaged his own house for Hammett’s bail. Finally she had enough money. Weeping in gratitude, Hellman flew back to New York only to learn that her efforts have been in vain and Hammett has been denied bail and must go to prison at once. But just as she is about to leave for the courtroom to be at Hammett’s side as he is taken off in handcuffs, she is handed a note from one of his three lawyers:

  Do not come into this courtroom. If you do, I will say I do not know you. Get out of 82nd Street and Pleasantville. Take one of the trips to Europe that you love so much. You do not have to prove to me that you love me at this late date.4

  Despite Hellman’s best efforts to thwart Hammett’s potential biographers after his death in 1961, biographies did appear. Finally Hellman authorized a biographer of her own, Diane Johnson, to write Hammett’s life. Hellman agreed to make herself and materials available to Johnson, but with some provisions in the contract that, essentially, made Johnson dependent on Hellman’s approval for the publication of the book.

  Johnson’s book was published in 1983. A year later Hellman, herself, died, and Johnson was free to write about some of the problems that arose in working with Hellman: “For instance,” Johnson wrote, “at one point [Hellman] said she was stunned by a terrible omission in the manuscript: an account of her activities trying to raise bail for Hammett. . . . Since I had not dealt anywhere in the book with [these] activities . . . and since in any event he had not been granted bail, I had not included a discussion of her hypothetical or potential part in raising bail. But she insisted that this episode—proof as she saw it, of her love—be included, and the account was written by her and the book’s editor.”5

  Had any of it happened? The half-crazed running around New York to banks and pawnshops? The flight to the Vineyard to raise the sum Hellman inflated from $10,000, which she easily could have raised, to $100,000? The note from Hammett’s lawyers, which none of his three lawyers could recall delivering to Hellman?6 The only verifiable incident in Hellman’s story is that she did, indeed, quickly take off for Europe.

  Lillian “had left almost immediately after the trial for Europe,” Hammett’s daughter Jo wrote. “I could tell [Papa] was surprised and hurt. But not angry. At least I didn’t hear it in his voice . . . but what was really shabby was the note she later fabricated from my father’s lawyer as justification. . . . The whole thing sounded so much like Lillian and so unlike Papa that it would have been funny if you were in a laughing mood.”7

  Dashiell Hammett came out of prison in December 1951, his health broken for good. Prison life had made him a much sicker man. He had hoped to recuperate at Hardscrabble Farm, but Hellman, facing a large tax bill, had put the farm on the market while Hammett was in prison. Legally, the farm was hers, but Hammett had considered Hardscrabble to be his as much as Hellman’s: he had put a great deal of work and money into it, and had loved the place. “I haven’t thought about it much,” he wrote to Jo when Hellman was packing up the farm, “except to know it’s going to leave quite a hole in life.”8

  Hammett wrote the above letter to Jo from his apartment on West 10th Street. Six months later, faced with a large tax bill of his own, one of well over $100,000, and the consequent attachment by the IRS of what income he had been making from his copyrights, Hammett could no longer afford the Village apartment. He moved to a small cottage owned by friends, in Katonah, New York, and lived there alone and fairly solitary for five years, still trying to write his novel, getting sicker by the day. By 1958 it was clear to him, and to his friends, that he could no longer physically manage on his own. He had emphysema, and may have already had the lung cancer that would kill him. He made plans to move into a Veterans Administration hospital. Hellman took him in then; in May, 1958, Hammett moved into Hellman’s luxurious townhouse at 63 East 82nd Street.

  For the next years Hellman arranged for Hammett’s care, supported him financially, and saw him th
rough to his death in January 1961. It was not an ideal arrangement for either of them. Not for Hammett who had always guarded his independence; not for Hellman, who often resented the burden of his illness, and who continued to want from him the emotional generosity he had always withheld. She was aware that when visitors came to see him, “there was warmth and need and maybe even the last weeks a sexual need, but not with me,” she wrote in her diary. And, “sometimes now, I think he wanted to be good friends, but more often I know that he didn’t.”9

  Hellman’s moment of confrontation with the House Committee on Un-American Activities would come in May 1952. Many years later she wrote about it in powerfully dramatic terms in Scoundrel Time, the third in her volumes of memoirs. At the time, however, she came out of it very well: she did not name names, she was not cited for contempt, she did not go to jail. She was blacklisted in Hollywood and her income was diminished, but apart from that Hellman’s life continued much as before. She traveled to Europe, she gave dinner parties, she had affairs. She continued to work, not in Hollywood, but on Broadway. In 1956, she adapted Jean Anouilh’s play about Joan of Arc, which appeared on Broadway as The Lark, and was a great success. She collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on a musical version of Candide, which was not so much of a success. In 1960, she presented what turned out to be her last original play, Toys in the Attic. Here, again, she turned to family material, this time to her immediate family—to her father and mother, and her Hellman aunts—for a play about the destructive power of family, love, and money. Toys was a smash hit; it ran on Broadway for about a year and a half and won Hellman the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play.

  Hellman was forced to sell Hardscrabble Farm for back taxes, but the blacklist did not break her financially, as it did so many of her friends. In 1955 she was able to buy a house with three acres and a private beach on Martha’s Vineyard.10 She also held mortgages on various properties in New York that brought her income; she had stocks and bonds, jewelry and furs, and a well-staffed New York townhouse.11 How strange, and yet how like her, to claim that in order to make ends meet she “took a half-day job in a large department store, under another name.” No doubt she just wanted to underline the evils of the blacklist.12