Chapter 11

Life After Death

Life owes it to you to die your own way.

—Lillian Hellman, Harvard lecture, 1961

You don’t necessarily have to like her, but you should understand her. It’s more about empathy than sympathy.

—William Luce

It may be that her life, with its strong loyalties, combative courage and abiding hatred of injustice, will eventually be considered her greatest theatre.

—Robert Brustein

Lillian Hellman died in her home on Martha’s Vineyard on June 30, 1984, a few days after her seventy-ninth birthday. The night before, Bill Styron carried her into a small dinner party at John and Barbara Hersey’s. She ate and drank almost nothing, but she was in good spirits and planned a fishing expedition for the next morning. Anecdote has it that she propositioned a guest at dinner, inviting him back to her place for a nightcap. He declined the playful request. She returned home after dinner to the care of her nurse and housekeeper and died quietly in the night. The coroner listed the death as coronary arrest, but most likely the underlying cause was the emphysema from which she had suffered for years.

Her death was no surprise. Over a period of several years, Hellman had become increasingly frail. Bronchial problems caused by her ubiquitous cigarettes impeded her blood circulation and contributed to heart failure; a series of small strokes reduced her ability to walk and eventually to eat by herself; glaucoma and cataracts reduced her eyesight to near zero. Hellman’s eyesight became so poor by the winter of 1980 that she could no longer read a printed page. At that point her helpers began to write in large spiral-bound notebooks, using bold markers to make block letters. The notebooks contain schedules and plans, as well as reminders to Lillian. The one she kept from February to March 1980, while she was in California, includes a poignant comment on her troubles that winter. A single page, written in block letters, contained the words: “MARY MACARTHY QUOTE ON THE DICK CAVETT SHOW: EVERY WORD SHE WRITES IS A LIE INCLUDING ‘AND’ AND ‘THE.’”¹

That was the winter that Hellman spent in San Francisco, where she celebrated the publication of Three, a single-volume edition of her memoirs. Billy Abrahams, her editor, arranged a tribute to the book at the Marin County Veterans’ Center and agreed that he and Peter Feibleman would host the event. As it turned out, Hellman was too weak to make the trip without help, and Abrahams and Feibleman together assisted her onto the stage. Abrahams introduced her to an enthusiastic crowd, telling them that she was ill but that “she said if she had to, she’d come by ambulance. And in fact, she did.”² Her appearance, said Abrahams, demonstrated her “indomitability.” Peter Feibleman pitched in to read a section of Pentimento for her. Hellman read two pages from a new afterword she wrote for Scoundrel Time. “I am angrier now than I hope I will ever be again,” the piece concluded, and then went on to say that she wanted to take the moral stand she tried to avoid taking when she wrote Scoundrel Time. “I never want to live again to watch people turn into liars and cowards and others into frightened, silent collaborators. And to hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did.”³ The audience gave her a rousing ovation, and Lillian left in a limousine followed by two ambulances, one of them filled with friends, just in case.

The next day, the writer Kay Boyle wrote to her friend Jessica Mitford, also Lillian’s friend. She was, she wrote, shattered by the “macabre performance” of the previous evening: “The ambulance might have been a hearse from which they lifted the poor, desperately ill, emaciated creature that Lillian has become.” She blamed William Abrahams and the publishing house for “its total horror of exploitation.” And she spluttered that “that terrible liquid cough that shook her was like a sound from the grave.”⁴ Little did she suspect that Lillian had in fact insisted on appearing.

Lillian gave everyone trouble in those years, her irascibility and impatience rising with increasing infirmity. Friends withdrew from her withering tongue: embittered by her stubborn refusal to abandon the suit against Mary McCarthy, they stopped seeing her. But many remained loyal, forgiving her temper tantrums and reveling in her continuing ability to make fun of everything and everyone.⁵ Unable to withstand northern winters, she moved each year to California, where she took rooms for herself and her nurses at the Beverly Wilshire hotel or rented houses from absent friends. The nurses who cared for her wrote of their plight to Rita Wade, Hellman’s secretary, who coordinated their efforts from New York. After one particularly difficult period at the Beverly Wilshire, one wrote to describe the “absolutely incredible” and “miserable” time that Hellman had given her and her coworker. The registered nurse who replaced them the following year wondered if she could survive Hellman’s “mental abuse.” She had, she reported, won one battle: she convinced Lillian that no nurse could sleep, night after night, on a couch in the sitting room. She persuaded Hellman to hire an aide to relieve her at night. “I am going out of my mind,” she protested. “What am I doing as Lillian Hellman’s personal slave? Pray for me!!”⁶ All the nurses complained of Lillian’s tightfistedness about money, the requirement that they send each receipt, no matter how small, to Rita on the day it was acquired, and Hellman’s insistence that they notify Rita immediately if they cashed checks. The nurses, with Rita’s acquiescence, passively resisted these instructions, notifying Rita when and as it seemed appropriate.

Over a period of about eighteen months, Hellman ate less and less and lost weight rapidly until she was down to about eighty pounds. Still she accepted invitations, allowed her friends to carry her from cars to restaurants, and invited guests for dinner. Often she was, as her friend Robert Brustein described, “carried into the house, placed in a chair, and fed her food,” little more than “a bedridden Job imprisoned inside a broken bag of bones.”⁷ In California, Hannah Weinstein came to visit while she could. In New York and on the Vineyard, Annabel Nichols read to her several times a week, providing one of Hellman’s few sources of pleasure. Her nurse described her at the end to Peter Feibleman as a woman who “is half paralyzed, legally blind; she’s having rage attacks that are a result of strokes; She cries at night; she can’t help that. She can’t eat. She can’t sleep. She can’t walk.”⁸ And still she could hold a room with her offbeat humor, or interrupt a dinner conversation with a withering disagreement that always began with a rasping “forgive me” before she launched a tirade. Most of her friends thought she survived these last years not on food but on anger.

Everyone remembered the anger. To be sure, Lillian had been bad-tempered and irascible all her life. But, as Brustein noted, before her illness “her anger was more focused; after, it became a free-floating, cloud-swollen tempest that rained on friend and foe alike.”⁹ Peter Feibleman agreed; he believed that her personality changed after the small strokes she suffered in the mid-seventies. Most of her good friends took the anger in stride, understanding that it was not directed at them personally but rather, as John Hersey described it, constituted “a rage of the mind against human injustice.”¹⁰ Anger, Hersey thought, was “her essence.” Bill Styron agreed. He, among others, bridled at her quarrelsome nature, regularly refusing to speak to her after a spat about one insignificant thing or another. He recalled one such incident over how to cook a Smithfield ham that kept them apart for an entire summer.¹¹ In the end Styron, like Hersey, believed the “measure of her anger was really not personal, but cosmic, directed at all the hateful things she saw as menacing to the world.”¹²

1983: Still she could hold a room. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)

To the end, Hellman retained her capacity for fun—the continuing, wicked humor—that her friends cherished. At their last dinner together, William Styron recalled, “We carved up a few mutually detested writers and one or two mediocre politicians and an elderly deceased novelist whom she specifically detested … I remember that gorgeous cackle of laughter which always erupted at moments when we were together … which followed some beautiful harpooning of a fraud or a ninth-rater.”¹³ Like Styron, those who spent the most time with her balanced anger against this capacity for humor. Alex Szogyi, a Hunter College professor, caught her two-sidedness. She was “naturally contentious and cantankerous,” he wrote, “in a manner that was humorous or disturbing, depending on one’s proximity.”¹⁴ Her old friend Jules Feiffer commented on “the girlishness, the brattishness and incredible sense of fun.” Asked what she missed most about Lillian, Maureen Stapleton replied, “She made me laugh more than anybody I’ve ever known.” She was “deeply funny. Deeply funny.”¹⁵

Vanity and pride persisted even as Hellman’s body deteriorated. Each morning she got up, dressed carefully, and applied heavy makeup and mascara.¹⁶ Too ill to go very far or to do very much, she nevertheless surrounded herself with all the acroutrements of elegance to which she was accustomed. On one two-month trip to California, she instructed Rita Wade to send her four handbags (gray, red, the Blair Clark bag, Hannah’s brown bag) and three evening bags (rose, black, and gold) along with an assortment of shoes and coats.¹⁷ Her nurse, convinced that Hellman did not need heavy coats in California, suggested that Rita simply ignore that part of the instruction. Just days before she died, Hellman showed up at a party at Patricia Neal’s house, looking divine in a “magnificent Russian amethyst necklace.”¹⁸ Regularly she lied about her age. Bill Styron recalled that she deducted six or seven years just days before she died. She had been doing this all her life, Styron thought, “not as vanity, but as a kind of demonstration that she was hanging on to life.”¹⁹

Peter Feibleman—her friend, for awhile her lover, and the man whom she later called her son—learned of Lillian’s death in his Los Angeles home. Though he knew she was close to the end, he had been waiting impatiently in California for the galleys of their coauthored cookbook to arrive. He wanted to bring them to her. In some ways, the cookbook, Eating Together, effectively capped her life. Unable to see, she dictated most of it and listened as recipes and portions of it were read back to her. Many of the recipes emerged from memories of New Orleans; others came from her travels over Europe and her New England experiences. A sprinkling (added as an afterthought) came from Hannah Weinstein’s Jewish kitchen. They were all peppered with commentary, not about food but about the occasions on which she had eaten the dishes and with whom. Because the two authors could not agree on which dishes to feature, they divided the book into two parts labeled “Her Way” and “His Way.” It was the only kind of collaboration she could tolerate. Peter arrived on the Vineyard two days late, without the manuscript, and just in time to participate in the funeral arrangements.

1981: To the end, Hellman retained her capacity for fun. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)

The funeral was an impressive affair. Two hundred people, many of them celebrities, some of them her Vineyard neighbors, gathered under a crop of pines at Abel’s Hill cemetery in the village of Chilmark to say good-bye. The theme of the day was not her anger or humor or vanity or love, though these were often mentioned, so much as her ability and desire to communicate. Jules Feiffer recalled her capacity to speak across generations, “to effortlessly engage the old, the young, the middle-aged, the left, the middle, the right, and just about anyone except on occasion the women friends of the men she admired.” Patricia Neal remembered her eagerness to find out about her daughter Lucy’s plans and noted that “she was very eager to help the next generation.” Jerome Wiesner, the former president of MIT who had helped to found the Committee for Public Justice, remarked on “her special caring for students and her excitement in helping them to learn and grow and … the enormous enthusiasm and love with which they responded.” And Peter Feibleman cried as he recalled her last conversation with him. When he asked how she felt, she replied that she was suffering from “the worst case of writers’ block I ever had.”²⁰

Lillian Hellman’s body may have been in her grave, but quickly it became apparent that she would find no rest there. A residue of ill will, still very much alive, continued to corrode an already damaged reputation. Within days after her death, the quarrels about her name and her reputation resumed. Letters poured into William Abrahams (who, in addition to being her editor at Little, Brown and her friend was also one of three literary executors), whose agreement to undertake an authorized biography of Hellman had just been announced. Many of the letters praised and complimented her “courageous stand against the infamous [Joseph] McCarthy.”²¹ Others suggested that controversy would continue. “You will be at the mercy of this frightful old harridan as an arbiter of verification for allegations, often contradictory, which she commonly made and which history repeatedly refutes,” wrote one New Yorker.²² “Writing an authorized biography of Lillian Hellman is like trying to square a circle. I feel sorry for you,” wrote another correspondent.²³

The notion that she was a liar not only persisted but took on a life of its own. Just days before she died, questions of Hellman’s veracity resurfaced in a Commentary article written by Samuel McCracken, which purported to establish definitively that “Julia” was mere fiction.²⁴ Christopher Hitchens affirmed and sealed Hellman’s fate as a liar in a few paragraphs that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement two days after the funeral. There he declared that McCracken demonstrated “every verifiable incident” of the Julia episode “false or unconvincing.”²⁵ Though he heard about Hellman’s death before the piece went to press, he wrote, he “saw no reason not to leave” the piece as it stood. No one, he thought, would disagree that she was a liar.

Hellman did not think of her stories as lies. She was, after all, a dramatist who used the material at hand to invent tales. She made up stories about herself, her mother’s family, her father’s past. All her life she used the experiences of friends, wars, and journalistic forays to make up stories. Like Ibsen, she believed that drama was meant to make a point, not just to entertain. She never claimed a good memory; she always said her books were portraits, inventions, so she wrote memoirs that were not memoirs, fulfilling the mandate that memoir is the art of lying. If her work exaggerated or misplaced incidents, or engaged in self-dramatization, she believed that she had lived a life of integrity, honesty, and trust. The difference between her opinion of herself and the opinions of others earned her the tag of hypocrite.

Then there was the moralism. That Lillian was a moralist, nobody would want to deny. That she proclaimed her moral principles loudly—in her plays and her memoirs and at every public opportunity—must have irked friends and enemies alike. She fully earned the labels of self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement that her critics leveled at her. But these labels might have disappeared after her death had she chosen not to replay her courageous stance before HUAC and to taunt others about their behavior then. She was, after all, a woman whose memoirs had been praised as “moral beacons for the generation coming of age, telling of an effort to remain truthful to one’s convictions in the face of the forces of dishonesty and repression.”²⁶ The claim to a higher morality could only have been humiliating to the targets of Hellman’s attack.

The label of Stalinism, too, became indelibly affixed, plausible because it melded with that of the liar. Hitchens fended off potential criticism of his easy acceptance of McCracken’s piece, which, he admitted, “goes on to cite examples of her lack of scruple in the political world.” Such criticism, he wrote with skillful innuendo, would come from members of “Miss Hellman’s faction” who “will say that it is motivated by the dislike of her opinions which inspires the rest of the magazine.” The New York Times received letters that insisted that even as Hellman was being praised as a great playwright, she be remembered for her skill “in moralizing even at the expense of truth, honor, and common sense.” This was a woman, the writer reminded readers, who “accepted the murderous crimes of J. Stalin, never questioned.”²⁷ Soon, identifying Hellman as a “Stalinist” became simply a matter of course, lightly tossed off as one among many adjectives used to locate her presence.²⁸

After death, every crack and crevice in Hellman’s literary record seemed to reveal a Stalinist cast. If she had refused in 1953 to support a presentation of Anne Frank’s story that was specifically Jewish, it must be that she was not only anti-Semitic but that she was then trying to cover up the deaths of Jewish nationalists in the Soviet Union.²⁹ If her plays were melodramatic, wrote one distinguished biographer, so were her politics.³⁰ In her will, she created three trusts: one to protect her piece of the beach on the Vineyard for the use of local children; a second, named for her, to help deserving writers anywhere in the world. Hellman intended the third fund, named for Dashiell Hammett, to be used for the “promotion and advancement of political, social and economic equality, civil rights and civil liberties.” She requested that fiduciaries distribute the revenue from this fund in accordance with “the political, social and economic beliefs, which of course were radical, of the late Dashiell Hammett who was a believer in the doctrines of Karl Marx.”³¹ The clause demonstrated to all and sundry that Hellman herself continued to be a believer.³²

Attributions of Stalinism quickly became part of Hellman’s public reputation, their ugly implications tarnishing many who had never met her. When conservative pundit William Buckley sought to impugn the reputation of presidential candidate Bill Clinton by going after Hillary Rodham Clinton, he traced her association with leftist groups. Mrs. Clinton, had, he wrote, chaired the New World Foundation (“one of the most left-leaning foundations in America”), on whose board had sat one Adrian DeWind, who in the 1970s had been a member of the Committee for Public Justice, an organization “formed to attack the FBI” and whose founder was none other than “Lillian Hellman, a member of the Communist Party well after she reached the age of puberty.”³³

Soon Lillian Hellman’s name evoked a visceral, negative response. She had pretended to moralism, argued her detractors, and spent a lifetime railing against silence in the face of evil. Yet she had remained silent before HUAC rather than speaking up. To call her a hypocrite was simply to identify what was the case. Hellman, critics argued, never repented her self-righteousness, her lies, and her self-aggrandizements. To label her a communist was to offer a simple description. Had she not, after all, “year after year, held the Soviets blameless for all their crimes?”³⁴ Nor did she get credit for courage. “She was awarded laurels for valor,” wrote William Wright, one of her biographers, “in spite of others quietly going to jail for the same, but less well-worded bravery.”³⁵ So well accepted did these assertions become that within a decade after her death, the mention of her name produced vituperative, visceral responses. None but a fool could believe she was other than an apologist for Stalin. Friends and admirers retreated in the face of the onslaught. Some quietly denied that Lillian had any continuing association with Stalin. Others, giving a little, defended her brilliant way with words and acknowledged that she was loath to fully acknowledge the Stalinist horror and quick to criticize those who did. Evidence to the contrary, the general consensus was captured in a 1997 biography of the Hellman-Hammett relationship, which was described by one reviewer as a chronicle “of their love affair with Stalinism.”³⁶

Within a decade after her death, and continuing into the twenty-first century, Lillian Hellman’s name came to serve a symbolic purpose. Invoking it negatively became shorthand for designating one’s own place in the political universe, a way of capturing what had gone wrong with the twentieth century, of explaining one’s own behavior in the face of evil. To seize on Hellman and attack her created solidarity with those who had always opposed communism and who had not succumbed to the politically naïve temptations of a New Left, who, with the dawning of neoconservatism, stood solid in the face of the nation’s enemies. To assail her revealed the assailant as a patriot, polishing his image and turning accusations of cowardice and betrayal into the virtuous partisan. This was precisely the line taken by some of Hellman’s detractors. After her death, but not before, film producer Elia Kazan, who had named names and subsequently suffered from Hellman’s accusations in Scoundrel Time, vented his fury on “this bitch with balls” who spent the last fifteen years of her life “canonizing herself.” As if exonerating himself from responsibility, he continued, “I believe now she wanted me to become the villain I became.”³⁷

In this context, Hellman’s sexuality became fair game: just another example of her perverse and unattractive nature, another source of resentment. It wasn’t just that she slept with men. She was plain, and she slept with whomever she pleased, and then remained friends with them afterward. She was plain and she claimed a great love who reciprocated her affection; she was plain, and even at the end of her life she attracted men to her side. “Most women as plain as Hellman would have slunk off into a comfortable marriage or sublimated their amorous side altogether,” wrote William Wright.³⁸ But Lillian had done the opposite, turning herself into a seductive and sexually attractive woman. This clearly galled some men. Kazan accused her of using sex to gain her political ends. “She was able to ease what she seemed to have considered her misfortune of birth … by gathering men around her, living testimonials to her allure.” Kazan continued, revealing his offended manhood with every word: “Once, it is said, she kept a house in which she provided hospitality for a cadre of vigorous intellectuals … the chosen”—he went on to name those involved in this household, and claimed “to admire the lady for providing herself with this mini-harem.” This was the kind of setup many males have secretly yearned for, he insisted, extending tribute to Hellman for doing what other men and woman were not brave enough to do.³⁹

Distasteful stories about Lillian’s sexuality surfaced from every corner. Elia Kazan avowed that she had come on to him but that he had resisted—he would have preferred someone else.⁴⁰ Stanley Hart insisted that he had to sleep with her to get her signature on a contract with Little, Brown, and that he left her when the sexual interest palled.⁴¹ Occasional newspaper columns insinuated that there was something odd about Hellman’s penchant for young men, or hinted of Hellman’s secret love for women: “Hellman detractors, of which there are many,” one insisted, “have often hinted that she had lesbian tendencies and point out her play ‘The Children’s Hour’ and the film ‘Julia’ as examples of her fondness for unusually close female relationships.”⁴² At the same time, other detractors described with complete certainty her inability to get along with women.

There is no doubt that she was a difficult woman, impassioned, tempestuous, transgressive with regard to gender roles. “She went after what she wanted the way a man does,” Elia Kazan commented.⁴³ She was demanding, peremptory, and often rude. And she could be vindictive and sometimes vengeful. Such qualities, often forgiven in death, might have been judged differently had Hellman not been female, or a displaced southerner, or come from a Jewish background, or appealed to highbrow rather than middlebrow audiences. But Hellman was all of these things, and in acting against the grain she distanced herself from communities of support, turning into the rebellious individual she always imagined herself to be.

Her loud and contentious nature identified her, stereotypically, as a Jew, as did her concern for money onstage and off. But Hellman’s Jewishness was by no means her most dominant identity, nor did it constitute a religion or a politics. Rather it was a source of comfort and reassurance. So she alienated those who identified with Jewish spiritual content as well as those who supported the state of Israel. If she thought of herself as a southerner, she reserved her southern charm and hospitality for those she cared about. In private she exhibited joy at creating hospitable environments and sharing her talent as a cook. In public, Hellman deployed her southern heritage like a trump card to claim the last word against racists and bullies.

The speed with which Hellman’s image came to personify evil in some minds did not entirely mask her skills as a playwright and memoirist. If she was the most evil of people to some, she was still a treasure to others. Her continuing popularity and her ability to attract an audience rankled many. William Luce’s play Lillian, mounted just months after her death, drew reactions that spoke to both of these. Conceived while she was still alive, the play linked together passages from Hellman’s three memoirs. Before she died, she listened as the finished version was read to her, and she approved. Several actresses turned down the role before Luce showed the script to Zoe Caldwell, who immediately accepted the challenge. Caldwell’s husband, the distinguished Robert Whitehead, agreed to direct the one-woman play. Whitehead had earlier directed some of Arthur Miller’s plays with no political fallout.

There was no question that the play effectively captured Lillian, nor that Caldwell’s acting brilliantly rendered what one fan described as “the soul of your Lillian.” Caldwell prepared for the role carefully, consulting with her friends and visiting Hellman’s old New Orleans home. She, who did not smoke, puffed continuously onstage and off; she manicured her nails in just the careful way Lillian would have done. Two hours before curtain every night, she made herself up by fitting a large molded nose to her face; each night she wondered why Lillian, always impeccably dressed and vain of her appearance, had not had her nose fixed. She concluded that Lillian wore the nose as “a badge of courage.”⁴⁴ Before every performance, Caldwell splashed on a little of the tea-rose perfume Lillian generally wore. Her performance captured Lillian so well that the actress disappeared into her. “I saw a woman whom I shall never forget become a woman whom I have long admired and have never forgotten,” wrote one fan. “Mesmerizing … brilliant … extraordinary,” wrote another.⁴⁵ The one-woman play toured the Midwest and parts of the South before opening in New York in January 1986, then going on tour again in both Europe and America.

Despite the fact that Caldwell so effectively captured Lillian Hellman, leading audiences to share the pathos of her childhood and her life in the theater and with Hammett—or perhaps because of it—the play risked once again popularizing a woman now buried. Critics, unhappy with seeing Hellman resurrected, took the occasion, in the words of one of them, “to say more about Lillian Hellman than to discuss the biodrama they were offered.”⁴⁶ Again and again they followed glowing descriptions of Caldwell’s performance and Whitehead’s direction with attacks on Luce and on Lillian herself. The performance might be a tour de force, one critic averred, but he did not understand why it avoided “the issue of whether she was a Communist at any time in her life.”⁴⁷Luce, said another, “misrepresented Hellman by glossing over the more controversial aspects of her life and by whitewashing her notorious career as a playwright, a mendacious memoirist, a relentless Stalinist, and a vindictive, self-serving celebrity.”⁴⁸ Luce responded by telling everyone that Hellman had final approval of the script: “She wouldn’t let me use any words of my own. I call it a job of carpentry.”⁴⁹ But he stood by his work.

Discontent with Hellman surfaced once again as reviewers commented on her “profound contempt for virtually everyone with whom she came into contact” or noted “her bitterness and petty vindictiveness,” her “steely presence,” or the “meanness and transparency” of her nature. “The larger issue,” one thought, “is how such a vile person could have exercised so much influence on a culture she so haughtily despised.”⁵⁰ In the New York Times, Frank Rich savaged the play. Caldwell, he began, “surely captured the seething physical presence of Hellman.” But Caldwell was “chained to a sanitized Hellman portrait,” Rich continued, a portrait that omitted her “controversial attack on fellow liberals with whom she parted ways” as well as “her scathing portraits of friendly witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee.”⁵¹ When the play opened in London the following fall, critics followed suit. The play failed to pay attention to Hellman’s politics, trumpeted the Observer, headlining a full-page review, THE LIFE AND LIES OF LILLIAN HELLMAN. Caldwell’s performance was brilliant: “The only snag is that Hellman’s autobiographical works are full of lies.” Nor could the author resist throwing in a negative comment about Hellman’s politics: “She certainly never said a word against Stalin until long after Khruschev’s denunciation; and she very rarely criticized Russia.”⁵²

Like a cat with nine lives, Lillian Hellman survived this criticism. Her work continued to reach the stage, repeatedly revived into the turn of the new century. Regional theaters turned to The Autumn Garden and The Children’s Hour in the 1990s. The decade after the new century began, New York theaters mounted major productions of Another Part of the Forest, Toys in the Attic, and The Little Foxes. In London in 2011, a new production of The Children’s Hour drew packed audiences. Late-night television regularly showed the films into which Hellman had poured her heart: Dead End Kids, Dark Angel, The Little Foxes, and The Children’s Hour all became staples. And Hellman herself continued to inspire public attention. Nearly twenty years after Hellman’s death, Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends (a reflection on the relationship of Mary McCarthy to Hellman) hit the boards. The play, which opened in New York in December 2002, was described by one reviewer as “an uncomfortable cross between vaudeville and conventional musical comedy.”⁵³ Another called its story that of “a feud between two politically engaged, exceptionally feisty women within a literary world of men.”⁵⁴ In what may well be the supreme irony, in 2010 the Committee for Recognizing Women in Theater established its “Lilly Award” in honor of Lillian Hellman, the playwright who never wanted to be placed in the company of “women playwrights.” Gloria Steinem offered the invocation at the first award ceremony.

If we can attribute to Hellman’s persona some of the virulence of the charges against her and her continuing hold on the American imagination, much of the explanation for her continuing presence surely lies in the twentieth-century moment. During her lifetime, Hellman’s political positions remained remarkably consistent, taking on different colors as the political climate changed. Critic Richard Bernstein has noted that “the posthumous reexamination has to do with the playing out of old battles between American liberals and conservatives, or to put this another way, between anti-Communists and those who felt that American anti-Communism was more dangerous than Communism itself.”⁵⁵ Hellman belonged in the latter camp, along with a goodly number of the intellectuals of her generation. But in the late twentieth century, victory went to those who defined communism as the enemy of national security. Each new revelation of espionage, every document that revealed a close relationship between the Comintern and the CPUSA, strengthened the hand of anticommunists. Though most American radicals, like Hellman, never involved themselves in party activities, the idea that government investigatory committees had been right to demand retraction, apology, and information took hold. Even after the communist threat had passed, her critics remained furious that Hellman had never been called to task for failing to acknowledge its seriousness. Hellman was forever viewed through the lens of a persistent communist threat.

Patterns of association that seemed ordinary or benign to observers of the forties and even of the fifties turned, by the late seventies, into evidence of guilt. In Hellman’s case, the unbroken pattern stemmed from her fateful 1930s decisions with respect to the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow trials of 1937, and her refusal to denounce the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. In the eyes of detractors, these demonstrated her commitment not only to communism but to Stalin. She committed further sin, in the eyes of detractors, when she remained silent about that commitment in her appearance before HUAC. That made her a liar and justified unsubstantiated assertions of “fealty to a foreign power.” All the while, so the story went, she never wavered in her sympathy for Stalin. That made her an irredeemably evil person. Worse, instead of silently suffering the slings and arrows of persecution, she rewrote the story, turning her escape from a jail sentence into a moral claim to courage and heroism. This tendency to self-aggrandizement, most readily confirmed by what was seen as the theft of the Julia story from an innocent woman, was in this context simple confirmation of Hellman’s evil nature. To those who saw the world through the schisms of the twentieth century, Hellman’s effort to redeem her good name from Mary McCarthy constituted “the mark of high Stalinism.”⁵⁶

And yet it is precisely this extremely negative view of Hellman that illuminates her role in twentieth-century America. The Stalinist label undermined not only the personal integrity of the accused: it was meant to discredit her conception of virtue and decency as well. Her life and work proclaimed the benefits of certain kind of moral society, one that would care for its poor and excluded members, protect democracy against bullies in uniform or not, and provide the freedom to live by one’s own lights. Casual accusations of Stalinism incorporated these goals within the penumbra of deception that included lying and self-aggrandizing behavior. Hellman’s deep and continuing antagonism to anticommunist appeals suggests that she understood that they would engender cynicism of the entire progressive agenda. She feared—not wrongly, it turns out—that anti-communism could and would be used to unite disparate groups in opposition to the larger moral principles of a progressive politics. This, she insisted—when, for example, she pointed to the role of anticommunism in fostering the Vietnam War—would unleash American power on an unsettled world. It would foster a new morality rooted in a money ethic that would dominate all spheres of life. In the twenty-first century the retreat of social democracy, progressivism, and liberalism and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism bring us to a new appreciation of Hellman’s strident and continuing outbursts.

Judgments about Hellman’s behavior still come out of the battles over who was right and who was wrong in that midcentury conflict. “We understand something about Lillian Hellman,” wrote Hunter College professor Alex Szogyi, “when we look at her life—but we understand as well what some of the salient cultural imaginings of the twentieth century were—and we see in the paradoxes of Lillian Hellman’s life—some of the tensions of a difficult century.” Those tensions reflected the competing moral claims of different world views as Hellman tried to sort out what was virtuous and how to behave. The woman who wanted to become a great playwright became a celebrity instead; the woman who aspired to the company of the century’s great intellectuals fought fierce battles with them; insecure, fearful, and politically naïve, she espoused particular political positions that fostered discord rather than consensus. Out of a desire to protect dissent, she dedicated much of her life to the cause of civil liberties; in return, she earned the Stalinist label. To become the beautiful, audacious, and courageous Julia of her imagination, she invented a world in which she did not live. That invention brought her castle tumbling down.

When we look back now, we notice the compromises that Hellman made in order to maintain moral consistency in a challenging world. We see in them the complicated circumstances in which many well-intentioned people found themselves caught. Hellman retreated from none of these issues. She wrote, she took positions, she acted on her beliefs as her conscience moved her. She was alternately damned and respected for her pronouncements, the variation less a function of her will and her choices than of the changing times in which she lived. The same sexual behavior that others emulated in the 1920s appeared predatory by the 1960s; the brave search for economic independence in the 1930s seemed, to radical feminists of the 1970s, to be insufficiently feminist. And the commitment to a better world that so many people shared in the Depression years seemed by the 1960s and ’70s to be sheer folly.

The divided world in which Lillian lived her adult life would disintegrate after 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and, some would say, the twentieth century ended. But the conflicts in which she became a lightning rod continue to attract attention and mold the political arena. There are still no easy answers to the questions that Hellman confronted around the meaning of traditional family life, the price of commitments to racial and ethnic egalitarianism, the corrupting power of money, and the precariousness of the search for political utopias. Nor are there solutions to women’s desire for economic independence or the hoary question of the relationship of art to politics. These lacunae make her life worth examining not for her sake, but for ours.