Chapter 1
I was raised in an old fashioned American tradition, and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country …
—Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time
Beautiful Julia Newhouse, daughter of a wealthy southern family, married Max Hellman—who had nothing to recommend him but charm—in 1904. A year later, Julia gave birth to a child they called Lillian Florence Hellman. Baby Lillian grew up to be a precocious and rebellious child. She spent her early years in New Orleans before the family moved north to New York City. But she returned to New Orleans and the South for months at a time throughout her youth. Geography, class, and gender all added up to life on the fringes.
Lillian belonged to no traditional world, but she lived on the outskirts of several. She was born and nurtured in southern soil although she grew up mostly in New York City; she lived in the shadow of her mother’s wealthy family, reacting to it with both envy and contempt; she was Jewish by birth, embraced African-American lore and love as a child, and attended Catholic and Baptist churches as the spirit moved her. In the 1930s she wanted to change the world and to live in harmony with the great love of her life, Dashiell Hammett. She became a famous playwright and memoirist, a winner of many awards and honors, yet she never escaped the taint of communism nor suspicions that she lied about her past. She died cherished by a few good friends, despised and misunderstood by many.
Baby Lillian grew up to be a precocious and rebellious child. (Times-Picayune photo)
That’s the short story. There are many longer versions, each of them different, and each carrying a range of meanings. In some of them, she is not a southerner at all but a child of the New York City streets; in others she is a rebellious teenager whose spoiled and overindulged youth crystallizes into a narcissistic womanhood. Yet again she might be a bookish daughter with precocious reading habits and an overactive imagination. All of the stories begin in New Orleans.
Lillian’s maternal great-grandparents, Marx and Newhouse, came to the United States from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, part of a stream of migrants who left their homeland when arbitrary rules restricted the mobility of Jews and hampered their capacity to earn a living at home. Like many such immigrants, they started life peddling goods in small communities in the Midwest and the South. The Marx family settled in Demopolis, Alabama, where they opened a small store that grew into a large establishment and eventually fostered a banking business. Sophie Marx, Lillian’s grandmother, was born there. The Newhouse family set itself down in Cincinnati, Ohio, using the city as a base for trading all over the South. Their son, Leonard, met Sophie Marx on one of his trips and married her soon after. Sophie gave birth to four children: Gilbert, the only son, was born in 1877, then Julia in 1880, followed by two sisters, Florence and Miriam. Grandfather Leonard died shortly after the youngest daughter, Miriam, was born in 1891. Julia, destined to become Lillian’s mother, was eleven at the time of her father’s death.
Left a widow with four young children, Sophie Marx Newhouse committed herself to expanding the fortunes of the Marx-Newhouse clan. This would not have been unusual for a southern white woman in the post–Civil War generation, for the war produced a plethora of genteel middle-class widows bereft of husbands and income. Many such women found ways to become self-reliant that would have been unimaginable in an older South. They sought professional training and semiprofessional jobs as nurses and teachers, opened small businesses and managed family properties. Sophie Marx benefited from their example. To expand her resources, she relied heavily on family trading networks and especially on her brother Jake, the ruthless great-uncle whom Lillian later claimed to fear and on whom she modeled the critique of the South that infused several of her plays. By 1900, Sophie could respond with one unequivocal word to a census question about her occupation. She described herself as a “capitalist.”1
Sophie appears to have moved with her children from Cincinnati, where she lived at the turn of the century, to New Orleans. The extended family prospered. Lillian’s great-uncles and -aunts, many of them from the increasingly powerful Marx clan, settled into trading and banking. Julia, her older brother, Gilbert, and her two sisters grew up in comfort. To finish her education, Julia spent two years at Sophie Newcomb College—the women’s college of Tulane University. Though it could not be compared with intellectually challenging northern schools like Wellesley and Mount Holyoke, Newcomb was by no means a finishing school at the time. Julia’s presence there suggests that her mother might have been worried about her future. Julia was already in her early twenties, with no prospect of marriage looming. But Julia had her own plans. She left school when she met Max Hellman.
Max’s family, though also of German-Jewish stock, had not done as well as Julia’s. His father, Bartaute (or Bernhard), probably arrived in the United States in 1866, about a year after the Civil War ended. Family lore, sometimes repeated by Lillian, described the family as coming from older stock and the grandfather as a veteran of the Civil War. Lillian doubted that this was the case. Ship records confirm her suspicions. They show thirty-two-year-old Bernhard Hellman arriving in Baltimore from Bremen on the Humboldt in October 1866. He may already have been married to twenty-eight-year-old Babbette Kaschland, who arrived from Germany a year later. The couple moved to New Orleans, where he worked as a bookkeeper. They had two daughters (Jenny and Johanna, commonly called Hannah) before bringing baby brother Max into the world in 1874. Despite his immigrant origins, Grandfather Bernhard lived a middle-class lifestyle. He purchased a home in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans, not one of the city’s most expensive areas but certainly respectable. The household kept a live-in servant. In a period when fewer than 10 percent of girls graduated from high school, both daughters did so, as did Max. The girls also had some sort of secretarial or office training.
Max Hellman, like his father, started life as a bookkeeper. Handsome, funny, and outgoing, he won the hand of shy Julia Newhouse over the objections of her family, who then and later thought him unworthy of their beautiful and rich daughter. But their daughter was already twenty-three years old. They reconciled themselves to the marriage, providing Julia with a handsome dowry. The couple married on Tuesday evening, September 27, 1904, at the home of the bride’s mother. Max’s mother attended, as did his and Julia’s sisters. Brother Gilbert did not come but sent the couple a generous one-hundred-dollar check.2 The young couple first moved into her mother’s home at 10 Rosa Park, just north of Charles Street. Rosa Park was, at the time, one of New Orleans’s most elegant neighborhoods. They brought baby Lillian Florence, born on June 20, 1905, home there.
Not unusually for the time, Julia hired a wet nurse for the baby. We might think of this as an explanation for Lillian’s never-ending fears of rejection, the source of her anger at the human race and especially toward women.3 Then again, we might not.
When Lillian was less than a year old, the family decamped to Prytania Street, just a few blocks from where Max grew up. Their new neighborhood included several boardinghouses with rooms occupied by teachers, clerks, salesmen, and a few professionals. This must have been a step down for Julia. Still, her dowry enabled Max to start his own business manufacturing and distributing shoes, and the family, including the nurse, Sophronia McMahon, lived comfortably. When the business failed a few years later, the wealthy clan pretty much left the young family to its own devices. Thereafter, Max made a decent living as an itinerant shoe salesman.
The family decamped from the comforts of Rosa Park to Prytania Street. (Uri and Michal Alon)
The New Orleans where Lillian was born in 1905, a year into the marriage, was then a thriving port city, hub of an active financial and trading center. The twelfth-largest city in the United States, it boasted a diverse population of more than three hundred thousand souls. One quarter were African-American, many the descendants of former slaves and others the children and grandchildren of a large free black and Creole population that predated the Civil War. Italians, Germans, Irish, and French together constituted the bulk of the immigrant population. Like all southern cities and most northern towns as well, New Orleans was residentially segregated. Contiguous communities of racially mixed people sometimes overlapped to produce a rich cultural and social mix that gave the city a freewheeling character. In a decade noted for southern white terror toward African-Americans, New Orleans developed a reputation for cosmopolitanism and liberalism. In a South that rigidly prohibited social intercourse between blacks and whites, New Orleans, alone among southern states, did not prohibit intermarriage across the races.
The city’s diversity produced a rich culture that included the parading of brass bands, a strong tradition of minstrel players, and, by the time Lillian arrived, the birth of jazz. Originated by black musicians, played and enjoyed by blacks and whites, jazz became the aural symbol of cultural syncretism. But there were other arenas of inclusion as well. The city’s Storyville neighborhood boasted the famous New Orleans cribs where black and white women sold their sexual services to all comers for small fees. Finance and trade produced a prosperous middle and upper-middle class, whose members patronized dance, music, and theater. Here the new South grew apace, offering seemingly limitless opportunity to make money out of the area’s natural resources.
As fate would have it, Lillian would be an only child. Cared for until she was five by Sophronia, she remembered her nurse with enormous affection as the great influence on her life. “If we’d been able to afford Sophronia until you were sixteen or eighteen,” she recalled her father repeating mournfully, “everything would have been different. We’d have all been happy and you’d have been a different child.”4 By Lillian’s account, it was Sophronia whose advice and direction turned Lillian into the southerner she remained and who inspired the egalitarian values from which she never strayed. Sophronia taught her to respect the beliefs of others, no matter how alien or uncomfortable to her. She instilled in Lillian a simple moral code: to mind her own business, to defer to her parents and their positions, to be loyal to friends and family. From Sophronia, Lillian absorbed a respect for tradition and an antagonism to racism that would remain with her forever. And from Sophronia, too, Lillian learned that she might appease her conscience by expressing empathy and solidarity but that real change required an active commitment.
If Hellman declared herself to be a southerner at heart, she was a particular kind of southerner, a Jewish southerner whose religion was held in abeyance. Neither her parents nor their families were religiously observant. Lillian had no formal religious training in her youth; had she been sent to synagogue, it would likely have been to a Reform congregation, typical in the New Orleans community of her childhood. Jewish lack of religiosity echoed among the Catholics and Protestants of the area, whose religious practice tended to be open and eclectic as well.5 Among the Jews who surrounded her, Lillian would have learned lessons quite different from those imbibed by the Eastern European immigrants who peopled northern cities. Reform Jews explicitly rejected Jewish law as interpreted by the rabbis of old, and they turned away as well from the notion that Jews constituted a nation of their own. They subscribed instead to a code of justice and morality common to the Judeo-Christian tradition, holding their national identity to be located in the place where they lived. Reform Judaism constituted, in short, a way for Jews to become Americans.
As a child, Lillian learned to say prayers after the Christian fashion—asking God to protect her parents, her nurse, her aunts. When her father discovered this odd behavior, he teased her about becoming the first Jewish nun on Prytania Street—a memory that Hellman cherished. Her mother conveyed her own form of spirituality manifested by attending services at whatever church or occasional synagogue moved her. In the New Orleans of Lillian’s childhood these visits would not have been unusual: at least one historian of the Jewish community remarks on its sociability, on a continuing “exchange of church visiting, where members of both the Jewish as well as the Christian community take one another to hear the new ministers, or partake of church suppers.”6 With Julia and with Sophronia, the small Lillian enjoyed an array of such visits.
In that respect, New Orleans was an oasis of a kind. It contained a rather small population of seven thousand Jews (less than two thousand families) who together constituted a little more than 1 percent of the population of the city at the time.7 Jews had lived in New Orleans for two hundred years: about half of the Jewish families dated back at least three generations. The city contained no solidly Jewish neighborhoods, no self-created ghettos, no orthodox Jewish community. Julian Feibelman, writing in 1941, called it a place where “families have mingled socially for generations, and the tradition is continued today.”8 Jews, he continued, found themselves “in almost every nook and cranny of social, political and cultural life.”9 This was an area reasonably free of anti-Semitism. As one of her contemporaries put it, “I was Jewish and that was that, but nobody seemed to care very much and nobody so far as I could see was very exercised about it.”10 Hellman echoed these feelings, noting of Jews in New Orleans that “they had a pleasant community of their own and in turn the community allowed them to have it.”11 Such casual integration of Jews did not go unnoticed among the growing numbers of their co-religionists. Historian Leonard Reissman remarks on its problematic consequences. “More so than in most other American-Jewish communities, New Orleans appears to give substance to the fears of benign assimilation that have always dominated Jewish history.”12
Elsewhere in the South, apparent assimilation hid more negative feelings that sometimes manifested themselves in violent outbursts. Lillian grew up in a South where Jews clustered in small groups in small towns and cities, where, to quote one scholar, they “played poker with the sheriff, fished with the county judge, hunted with the planters, and became leaders of the local Chamber of Commerce.”13 In the memory of Eli Evans, whose father was once mayor of Durham, North Carolina, Jews were “blood and bones part of the South itself: Jewish Southerners.”14 And yet Lillian was ten and still spending long summers in the South when a Marietta, Georgia, mob stormed the jail where Leo Frank, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish factory superintendent, was being held under suspicion of murdering a young white woman. Could she have been unaware of the anti-Semitism that fueled the lynching that followed? She was probably in her twenties when the novelist Ronald Bern experienced the daily playground beatings and active anti-Semitism that characterized his school years in the South.15
The differential experience suggests that Lillian may well have suffered from what the historian W. J. Cash has called the paradox of “the eternal alien,” never quite belonging. “In the general withdrawal upon the old heritage,” notes Cash, Jews inevitably stood out. “It was perfectly natural that … he should come in for renewed denunciations; should … stand in the eyes of the people as a sort of evil harbinger and incarnation of all the menaces they feared and hated—external and internal, real and imaginary.”16 Among New Orleans Jews, that alienation was experienced in one important arena: Jews had never been invited to the Mardi Gras carnival balls, and this despite the fact that a Jew had originated the carnival in 1872 and been its first Rex.17 As a child, Lillian did not feel deprived of this experience, and when she might have felt excluded she had already left the South. And yet years later she ridiculed the notion of exclusion with a suspicious vehemence. “May God bless them and keep them,” she wrote of Jews who wanted to participate in the ceremonies, “and some day allow them to ride on those hideous Mardi Gras floats and become Kings and Queens, ermine bedecked, at the grand balls and as silly as their dancing partners.”18
Hellman’s deep commitment to racial egalitarianism seems to have emerged from both her eclectic exposure to religion and her southern roots. Unlike their poor white counterparts, Jews who lived in the South experienced few “turf” conflicts over jobs. Unlike New York’s first- and second-generation immigrants, who frequently identified themselves as refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia, the comparatively deep roots and relative economic prosperity of many southern Jews placed them in more secure positions. Still, the position of southern Jews was not without ambiguity. Their small numbers and dispersed presence, historian Paula Hyman notes, pushed Jews in the South and other small communities into a private commitment to their faith that substituted for the public exhibitions of Jewish culture more prevalent in larger Jewish communities. They were white people in a world where race mattered more than religion. As white people eager to achieve economic success and security for their families, they adapted to prevailing racial hierarchies and discriminations. But that did not mean that religion and ethnic tradition did not matter at all. As outsiders within, they tended to identify with the persecuted rather than with the persecutors. Even as they adopted southern white standards of segregation and place, southern Jews generally took liberal positions on the “Negro problem.” Somewhat cynically, Hellman attributed this stance to self-interest—to respect for African-Americans as customers and as employees.19 In this sense their Jewish identity differed from that of their northern counterparts even as their southern origins separated them from the rest of America.
Lillian’s parents echoed the anti-racist lessons learned from Sophronia and were, if anything, more inclined to take matters into their own hands. She often told a story that she later reproduced in her memoirs of how her father got involved in a brawl in defense of a young black girl who was traveling by train alone in the deep South. Lillian (about ten at the time) and her parents were sitting one night on a deserted southern train platform when they noticed the young woman running from two white men, who caught up with her and grabbed her, knocking the girl’s suitcase out of her hands and scattering her possessions. Max stepped up immediately—an unexpected act in the days before World War I—insisting they put the girl down. The men responded by taking a swing at him. He fended them off and hurriedly escorted the girl to the just-arriving train, telling Lillian to jump aboard. Only when the train began to pull out did father and daughter realize they had left Lillian’s mother behind “on the ground carefully picking up and repacking the girl’s valise.” She headed for the train as it jerked to a stop, walking through the two men and smiling as she said, in a deep southern accent, “Excuse me, boys, excuse me. Mah husband wants us to get aboard the train.”20 Lillian later thought the accent might have saved her mother’s life.
Hellman later ascribed the incident to her parents’ commitment to individual liberty. It was, she thought, about “two people who believed in the right to go unmolested.” Max Hellman, she later claimed, had a “genuine feeling for Negroes, and real pity.” To her parents’ example, she attributed her deeply rooted commitment to civil liberties and individual freedom. But the image of two perhaps drunken white men harassing an innocent black girl also illuminated the changes going on around her. For the benign images of paternalism that constituted her child’s view of the South, she substituted the brutality of a new South focused on personal gratification and the accumulation of wealth rather than on mutual responsibility. She never reconciled her childhood memories of a safe and comfortable New Orleans with the abused and exploited population of the new South.
Lillian moved with her parents to New York in 1910, at the age of five. For the next eight or nine years, the family seems to have spent several months of every year in New Orleans. We know about these years mainly from Lillian, who clung to an image of herself as a child of the South despite the fact that most of her schooling occurred in New York. Hellman tells us that as a child she went to school both in New York and in New Orleans and experienced discomfort in both places. In the North, she could not keep up with her smart urban classmates; in the South, she found herself bored to tears and frequently playing hooky. She probably moved about until she was eleven. After that, southern summers spent in New Orleans and in her mother’s family compound in Mississippi mingled with school years in New York City. In all that time, Hellman maintained a distant though still loving relationship with her old nurse Sophronia, who continued to exercise moral authority in a world in which her parents proved more capricious and less predictable.
In New Orleans, the family generally lived in a boardinghouse run by her father’s two older sisters, Jenny and Hannah. Set on the shabby, genteel end of Prytania Street for a while and then relocated to a somewhat seedier neighborhood, the boardinghouse provided Lillian with endless entertainment and immersion in the eccentricities of New Orleans family life.
There she learned to prepare crayfish, to make turtle soup, and to command such domestic arts as knitting, sewing, and embroidery. She admired her aunts’ strong sense of themselves as independent women, acknowledged their love for her and her father, and noted the way they cherished and protected her mother. Warm, funny, and kind, Jenny and Hannah introduced Lillian to a tradition of generous hospitality that she would practice all of her life. Perhaps inadvertently, they also fostered Lillian’s strong need to construct around herself a “family” of people who cared for her and looked after her needs. Coming from a South where she was pampered by aunts and where a tradition of service prevailed, she readily equated deference with love. This characteristic lasted all of her life, perhaps accounting for much of the bad temper and irritability that her associates observed when she failed to get the help she needed and wanted, or when her friends let her down.
The South too is the location of the fig tree where Lillian satisfied her “stubborn, relentless driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.”21 She hid herself in its branches to read and to educate herself, later recalling the delicious sense of freedom to read as widely as she liked. There, she shed her school clothes and her temper as she allowed the environment to comfort her and hold her safe, “nobody there to tell you what to read, or give advice, or interpret; no interest in whether the book is good or bad … You are just there reading anything you can put your hands on, all hot and sticky with excitement, and maybe fudge …”22 The fig tree appears in several locations in Hellman’s later work, and undoubtedly in her mind, providing a haven and a hiding place for a restless young girl. Generally, Hellman locates it in the front yard of her aunts’ boardinghouse on Prytania Street, though occasionally it appears at “Pass Christian,” the Mississippi resort frequented by the Marx-Newhouse clan, where she and her family spent a week or two every summer of her early teenage years.
An Unfinished Woman proudly recalls childhood moments when Hellman demonstrated courage and spirit, often flouting advice in favor of making her own decisions. Some of these seem, in retrospect, to have been trivial incidents, more reflective of her efforts to define her character than important as anecdote. She tells us that she often chose to skip school in order to spend time in the fig tree. She describes efforts to defy her mother’s wealthy family by trading an expensive ring given her by Uncle Jake for books. Instead of punishment, she was rewarded by being told that she had spirit after all.
Lillian retreated to the branches of the fig tree to lick her wounds over her first great disillusionment. She had witnessed her father meeting another woman outside a restaurant, then getting into a taxi with her. Lillian tells us that in a blind rage she threw herself from the fig tree, breaking her nose. When she ran, for comfort, to Sophronia and told her the story, that wise woman instructed her to remain silent about her father’s affairs, giving her the message that would resonate down the years: “Don’t go through life making trouble for people.”23 The broken nose accompanied her for the rest of her life, unmended, despite Hellman’s vanity about her clothes and her looks, and marking her exit from the safety of the South, the security of her parental home, and an implausible vision of herself as a curly-headed beauty. Zoe Caldwell, who played Lillian onstage shortly after her death, thought of the broken nose as a mark of courage, a reminder of the need for discretion.24
In the aftermath of the fall, Hellman ran repeatedly to Sophronia and the black community for help and solace. In one episode, she tells us that at fourteen she ran away from home after an argument with her parents and stayed away for two nights, making her way, finally, to what she calls the Negro part of town. She knew this area because it housed her family’s dressmaker and she had often been brought there by Sophronia. She remembered it as peopled by cheerful souls and remarkable houses with welcoming doors. There, after invoking Sophronia’s name, she was taken in by a suspicious black family that nevertheless protected her and arranged for her to be collected by her father. Did Lillian really run away from home at fourteen and manage to stay away for two nights, discovering that she had her first menses just as her father came to fetch her? That’s doubtful. Yet whether this story recalls an event that happened or one that she constructed to capture her feelings of despair at the time, it reflects a sense of what racial relations meant to her, revealing something about Lillian’s sense of the New Orleans black community as a place of comfort rather than one of terror.
Much that Hellman tells us about her experience of southern childhood is clearly romanticized, the exaggerated and wishful memories of a child who recalls moments of pain and joy in the light of lessons learned and rewards received. Her identity as a southerner remained, all her life, firmly rooted in a mythical South where paternalism, gentility, culture, and self-respect trumped the quest for money in the battle for survival. The grown-up Lillian’s reflections on these southern roots reveal a surprising nostalgia for the gentle past of her imagination, producing a bitter rage against those who threatened to destroy sweet memories. Her mother’s family, especially her great-uncle Jake, is among those against whom her venom is directed.
Hellman held the uncontrolled search for wealth represented by Jake responsible for exacerbating the poverty and racial tension that would become characteristic of a new South. In the unnamed small southern town in which her most famous play, The Little Foxes, is set in 1900, Hellman locates a predatory family intent upon becoming rich by learning “new ways” and learning “how to make them pay.” The family echoes that of her mother. As brother Ben says, the plantation built on fine crops and Negro labor “now belongs to us … twenty years ago, we took over their land, their cotton and their daughter.”25 But the unhappy daughter whose marriage into the family provided it with the land and credibility to destroy the life she loved wants only to retreat into drink where she can shut out the present to revel in the beautiful past of memory. Her mother, she recalls, sold off everything out of need, never letting go of her anger at a “people who killed animals they couldn’t use and who made their money charging awful interest to ignorant niggers and cheating them on what they bought.”26 The price of greed, Hellman tells us, is the loss of culture, civility, and humane values, especially toward poor people.
Lillian eventually learned to emulate the warmth and grace of the old South, but she would not, in any event, have been positioned to take advantage of the new. There she was merely an ugly duckling, lacking traditional good looks and without the kind of family wealth that might have compensated for them. She could not expect to marry into the world of romance and charm, nor could she have brought resources to a marriage or a business partnership. To be sure, she dreamed of being a beauty, but after her first boyfriend told her she looked like “a prow head on a whaling ship,” she gave up on that dream.27 Eventually, she created the head of blonde curls that she wished for, and she earned enough to live the lifestyle of her grandmother. But she never stopped envying good-looking women, nor did she transcend the feeling that she was a poor relative in an extended family where wealth not only mattered but was what chiefly counted.
New York City proved to be something of a haven for such a young girl. The family settled into a comfortable apartment at 330 West 95th Street. Lillian used the phrase “shabby-genteel” to describe the apartment; census records reveal it to have been solidly middle-class. The neighbors included a dermatologist, an interior designer, a musical director, and an art dealer, occupations that measured well against that of Lillian’s father, who earned his living as a traveling salesman with a line of clothing. The family employed a daily housekeeper and, often, a cook. Both parents had a lively interest in all things literary and especially in the theater. They attended regularly, and afterward revisited the plays and actors’ performances in the presence of their daughter. Though Lillian attended public schools, she took dancing and music lessons, and, as a teenager, had more freedom to explore the city than most of her peers.
Lillian adored her father, a genial host, a great entertainer, a man of quick wit and charming style. She admired his vitality and resolution, and she forgave him, perhaps even came to admire, his persistent attractions to other women. For Max was a philanderer who did not hide his affairs from his wife and family. True to southern tradition, Lillian’s mother ignored her husband’s long absences and his unfaithful ways. The small Lillian adapted to this behavior reluctantly, following the precepts of her beloved nurse Sophronia not to go through life making trouble for people.28Hellman remembers her mother as “small, delicately made, and charming” but also as flighty, timid, and impractical.29 As the child turned into a young woman, she grew to despise her mother’s acquiescence, only later coming to see it as a courageous and brave response to her father’s misbehavior.
The models presented by her relatives offered a different perspective on life. Lillian’s Newhouse grandmother had moved to New York around 1907, settling into a life of ostentatious wealth in a Park Avenue apartment where she lived with two unmarried daughters and a large staff of servants. Lillian remembered the “lovely oval rooms filled with the upper middle-class trappings that never managed to be truly stylish.”30 She recalled the glamorous parties that she watched as a peeping child from the servants’ hall. Lillian and her mother visited often, but she experienced these visits in sharp contrast to her own life, which seemed shabby by comparison. From the discomfort she felt in the presence of her forceful grandmother and from the extended family’s never-ending discussions of money and finances, she perceived her own family as economically marginal. The dissonance produced in her an unquenchable anger and at the same time “a wild extravagance mixed with respect for money and those who have it.”31
Did consciousness of class enter her picture of the world as a result of the family dynamics? By her own account, Lillian claims to have learned in her teenage years to despise those who sought only wealth and power. She tells us that she did not want either money, or the lack of it, to control her own life. And yet her sense of injury is palpable: she felt cheated of the wealth that was her mother’s due and that she always believed was rightfully hers. The perceived injustice of it all fed a sense of entitlement that led her then and after to claim (even aggressively demand) what she believed to be hers, inside and outside the family. Unwittingly she inherited the pattern her grandmother modeled. She expected and wanted the creature comforts of wealth. One day she might inherit some of them. Until then, she would carve out her own path, earn economic success by her own efforts, or gravitate toward the rich, benefiting from their largesse. Insecure about her place in the world, the teenaged Lillian became impatient, bad-tempered, sharp-tongued, and rebellious. Forever after, even when she became well off, she imagined herself as poor, feared losing her money, and insisted on the comforts that wealth could bring.
Marks of identity mattered in perverse ways in the New York City to which Lillian moved as a child, for once again she was outside. Hers was not the culture of recently arrived Yiddish-speaking immigrants. She experienced neither the poverty of the Lower East Side nor the community spirit of the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. She did not belong to the immigrant community of legend where parents sacrificed to provide education for children who expected to climb the ladder of social mobility. But neither did she belong among the wealthy German Jews whom the East Siders contemptuously labeled “Jeckes”—for jacketed, prosperous Jews.
At thirteen, she entered Wadleigh High School for Girls. Founded in 1903, Wadleigh was the first college-preparatory public high school for girls in a city where there were already several elite public boys’ schools meant to train the children of immigrants for college. By the time Lillian enrolled in 1918, Wadleigh boasted nearly three thousand smart female students from all over the city. Lillian was an indifferent scholar in a rather large class of bright schoolmates, and she remembered these years as unhappy. Still, when she graduated in 1922 at the age of seventeen, she had already begun her career as a writer: she wrote a weekly gossip column for the school newspaper entitled “It Seems to Me, Jr.,” and served as an editor of the senior yearbook. In her last year of school she kept a diary that at first she thought of as private, but which she then allowed her boyfriend to read. She recognized, as she did so, that the meaning of what she wrote would change when her words became public.32 This early effort to grapple with whether “truth” would flow from her pen would remain with her for the rest of her life.
A seventeen-year-old bright female high school graduate from a middle-class family in 1922 might reasonably expect to choose college as an option. Fewer than 10 percent of the young women in her age cohort would make this choice, but Lillian had little doubt about it. She wanted to go to Smith College—a destination favored by bright northern young women. Her mother proposed her own alma mater, Sophie New-comb, which didn’t suit Lillian’s taste for clever and well-read schoolmates. They compromised on Goucher College in Baltimore. Goucher was southern enough for her mother and committed to serious education for women. Lillian applied and was accepted. In the end she enrolled in none of these, telling everyone that her mother was ill and would need her at home. The likelihood is that financial constraints, rather than loyalty to her mother, determined the choice. At any rate, when the fall came, she registered at Washington Square College of New York University.
The college was then a small affair, less than a decade old, and housing a few hundred undergraduate students. Though it was located in the heart of Greenwich Village, its students mingled neither with the literati who frequented the neighborhood nor with the local Italian families. There she encountered some great minds whose efforts to discipline her reading she resisted. College seemed to her to serve no useful purpose. Restless and bored, she quit after two years. An extended trip with her mother through the Midwest and the South followed. In the fall of 1924, just nineteen, she took a job in the publishing industry as a manuscript reader.
This time she chose well. Boni and Liveright, the firm for which she went to work, was a vibrant and exciting young publishing house that avidly represented itself as the perfect outlet for a city of speakeasies, automobiles, and creative intellectual ferment. Its head, Horace Live-right, founder of the Modern Library—which had introduced Americans to inexpensive editions of great European authors—remained committed to publishing new fiction in uncensored form. Liveright attracted to his lists such authors as Hemingway, Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot. And he published the first novels of William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Bertrand Russell, and S. J. Perelman. If Lillian did not work directly with these authors or on their manuscripts, she found herself in a world exactly suited to her ambitions and her tastes and surrounded by creative and talented writers and cultural pundits, young and old. There she encountered Eastern European Jews who aspired to take their places in the thriving cultural communities of the twenties. This was a world where talent and intellect mattered more than money or religion or family background.
The job introduced Lillian to a world that she would thereafter make her home. At Boni and Liveright, she revealed the sharp critical skills honed by many years of reading in the fig tree, making good use of her quick wit and acerbic tongue. Her employers appreciated the speed with which she read and judged manuscripts and deplored the sloppiness and lack of discipline with which she approached her work. By Lillian’s account at least, they valued most her standing as a representative of a younger, freer generation of women—the flapper generation—whose personal style they desperately tried to understand. Among the perquisites of the job were endless parties and gatherings to honor one book and one writer or another. Shy though she was at the time, Lillian did well at these, drinking in a time of prohibition, dressing in the short skirts and clinging fabrics that signified greater personal freedom for women, dancing and flirting in ways that violated contemporary rules about exhibiting sexual availability. No longer isolated, she found a community of people like her, eager to express themselves as consumers, happily declaring their creative ambition, and unafraid to live by their own standards. Disillusionment might follow, but in the middle of the prosperous and free-spirited 1920s, surrounded by the cultural ferment of New York, Lillian found a niche.
Just a year into the job at Boni and Liveright, Lillian met Arthur Kober, whom she married a few months later. Five years older than Lillian and the son of Austro-Hungarian immigrants, Kober grew up in the working-class Bronx where he spent his youth fending off the blows of Italian and Irish immigrant children and developing the sardonic humor of the New York Jew. His family background, so different in class and culture from Lillian’s, must have been one source of his appeal to her. Marrying into New York’s Jewish immigrant community would provide her the insider place that she lacked. And Kober had the advantage as well of being part of the creative cultural community in which she continued to see herself.
By 1925, working as a theatrical press agent and the author of several New Yorker short stories, Kober already knew he wanted to be a playwright. He worked in a heavy Yiddish idiom, using Jewish life in the Bronx as his vehicle for an affectionate humor. And he palled around with a young group of creative entertainers who were yet to make their names. Among them were Lee and Ira Gershwin, Laura and S. J Perelman, Herman Shumlin, Nathanael West, and Louis Kronenberger. These would become Lillian’s lifelong friends. Along with them and her husband, she moved into the heart of the entertainment community, adopting the raucous and argumentative style that would come to characterize New York Jews. As she melded into the smart, creative, and culturally ambitious circles that now surrounded her, Lillian found an exciting new world of literary and theatrical arts.
She also found an identity. If she grew up on the edges, on the borders of north and south, of Jew and non-Jew, of rich and not so rich, of love and anger, she found a place that transcended all these borders. Entering adulthood in the twenties, she could celebrate her generation, indulge her sexual passions, associate with a community of creative artists, and strive for her own economic independence in ways unthinkable to her mother’s generation. Her sense of what it meant to be an American reflected values gathered from her childhood and interpreted in the light of the experiences of her young womanhood. Nurtured in Sophronia’s lessons of honesty, integrity, justice, and decency, she would shape these concepts to her own experience, reacting with anger and frustration when they failed to resonate with others. To her, these concepts remained the heart and soul of American culture and of the life she would construct for herself.
Just a year into the job, Lillian met Arthur Kober. (Photofest)