Chapter 2
It’s a question of what dignity is about.
—Lillian Hellman, American Scholar Forum, “Women on Women”
You are above all entirely and impressively a lady; yet also a great gentleman, honorable to a fault, truthful and courageous, immensely and movingly straight.
—Literary agent Robby Lantz to Lillian Hellman
In her late forties, Lillian Hellman constructed an anecdote about her first party dress. “I was sixteen, too thin, too awkward and I had a long, sad face,” she wrote. “I was not the girl for the pale orange tulle with appliquéd rosebuds and ribbons that my mother thought so right for me. I knew that day what my mother had wanted in a daughter and I felt sad.” As if to affirm her desire to become a different kind of woman, Lillian concluded the anecdote with the dramatic flair that would become her signature. “A week later, at the party,” she wrote, “somebody dropped a match and the tulle dress burned slowly and surely and it seemed to me proper that my mother’s dream of a daughter went with it.”1
But if Lillian could not live her mother’s dream, neither could she entirely abandon it. She could not be the “beautiful, gentle, efficient woman” who participates in southern legend. Nor could she “accept without question the doctrine of male superiority and authority.”2 Born to be a charming, solicitous, and nurturing southern belle, as her husband Arthur Kober once put it, she reached beyond southern tradition and turned into a misfit, becoming in the eyes of all around her a difficult woman. As a child, she escaped from her family’s expectations to read in the fig tree of her memories, to run away to the arms of her nurse Sophronia when things got difficult. She was, in that sense, always defiant, in rebellion against emulating her mother’s place as an obedient and submissive creature bred for a lifestyle that her father could not afford. We learn something about how hard it must have been for a woman of the twenties and thirties to be serious about her work and at the same time to hang on to whatever womanliness meant to her when we watch Hellman maneuver through the obstacles. She became outspoken and direct, some would even say rude. To protect herself, she developed a quick wit and a biting sense of humor. These qualities placed her at the cutting edge of changing twentieth-century gender norms, a leading symbol of the new independent woman. Yet even as she challenged traditionally appropriate roles for women, she cultivated deeply feminine qualities of warmth and generosity.
“I was sixteen, too thin, too awkward and I had a long, sad face.” (Lillian Hellman Estate)
In Pentimento, Hellman provides us with a clue to the tension between her desire and her destiny. There, she draws a portrait of her distant cousin Bethe, who remained ever after a symbol of the teenager’s wish to be able to act on one’s feelings without shame. Hellman described her first (clearly invented) view of Bethe hanging clothes from a line. “She was naked and I stopped to admire the proportions of the figure: the large hips, the great breasts, the tumbled auburn hair that came from the beautiful side of my father’s family.”3 As in so much of Hellman’s writing, we can’t tell what part of Bethe reflects the life of a living cousin and what part Lillian’s own sense of how she imagined her own life. The Bethe remembered by Lillian emigrated from Germany as a young woman, briefly lived with aunts Jenny and Hannah, and then fulfilled the terms of a prearranged but bad marriage. She left it after a few years to live, unmarried, with an Italian mobster. That act led her kin to cut off their relations with her. The teenage Lillian describes herself as deliberately tracking down her cousin and trying to bring Bethe back to the bosom of the family. But in Lillian’s story, Bethe would have none of it. She had willingly paid the price demanded of a woman who followed her heart and knowingly offended her relatives. She remained, in Lillian’s fantasy life, the courageous young woman who had chosen her own path.
Lillian matured into a generation blessed or cursed with such choices, an “in-between” generation. Twelve-year-old Lillian watched women win the right to vote in New York State in 1917. She was fifteen when the ratification of the nineteenth amendment enabled women nationwide to cast ballots. But the young Lillian was not inspired by the social reform movements that transformed the political environment of her youth. She was too late for the activist feminism of the early 1900s that had won the vote for women, achieved a measure of property rights, and acquired legal access to divorce and custody of their children. Nor did she identify with the generation of college-educated women that continued, after suffrage, to carve out paths toward social justice as well as political participation. The well-off and the married belonged to one or more of the burgeoning women’s clubs that by 1920 boasted some five million members united under the banner of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. These groups committed themselves to a variety of social causes that stretched beyond political campaigns for women’s equality to a quest for freedom in other spheres. They wanted to assure justice for the poor, to reform corrupt municipal politics, and especially to guarantee the health of mothers and their children. But for Lillian’s generation, as historian Susan Ware has pointed out, women’s rights were not so much at issue.4
Instead, Lillian joined a cohort of young women who sought to achieve personal freedom by taking advantage of the rights won for them by “the shock troops,” as she later called them, of the earlier generation. Before the First World War, working-class and poor women, black and white, married and single, generally earned their own livings or contributed to family support by doing domestic work, going off to factories, or taking in boarders, doing laundry, or sewing at home. But in the early 1920s, increasing numbers of young single women who, like Lillian, came from respectable families aspired to enter the world of work. Moving into new office jobs or training as semiprofessionals in teaching, nursing, and the new field of social work, they carved out permanent places for themselves outside the home. They were the women who grasped modernity and rode it full throttle into the twentieth century. “By their widely publicized accomplishments and non-traditional lifestyles,” Ware notes, “such popular heroines suggested that women could be autonomous human beings, could live life on their own terms and could overcome conventional barriers.”5
In popular parlance, they were the flappers: a cohort of young women who lived for pleasure, disdaining ideals of self-sacrifice and service held by the Victorian generations of women. Flappers disdained the authority of parents and social custom, danced the night away in jazz clubs, consumed alcohol in speakeasies in the face of legal prohibition, smoked, acted brashly, and followed their sexual inclinations. Among many young women of this generation, including Lillian, the powerful drive to transcend the limits of their mothers’ generation pushed them beyond the search for pleasure to make something of themselves, to be their own persons, to earn their way in the world.
Sex played an important role for this group of women, signaling not merely a flouting of convention but the desire to live on their own terms, to be free. In Europe, before the war, men and women avidly read Otto Weininger, whose Sex and Character proposed that only male character (active, productive, logical, and moral) could produce genius and posited that the passive and amoral female would destroy male creativity.6 Weininger’s dire warnings about female sexuality took second place in the United States to those of Havelock Ellis, the originator of the science of sexology. His work stimulated public discussions of previously forbidden subjects like homosexuality, then called “sexual inversion” or deviance. At the same time, Margaret Mead began to publicize her studies of Pacific islands where men and women seemed to reverse roles, the men caring for children even as the women exercised clout within the community. Popular culture, including films, stimulated sexual appetites; the growing use of automobiles created new possibilities for unchaperoned interaction between the sexes.
1935: A powerful drive pushed her to be her own person. (Ransom Center)
But it was Sigmund Freud whose ideas inspired the generation of the twenties in the United States to seek sexual liberation. Freud’s notions about sexuality in infancy freed women to accept sexual expression as a normal part of human behavior and to acknowledge sexual desire. Lillian paid no attention to the flip side of Freudian theory, which equated female maturity with the quest for motherhood, ultimately reinforcing ideals of female submission. Like other women of her generation, she eagerly rejected old notions of chastity and sexual purity, convinced that the practice of free love provided healthier alternatives for women. Hellman’s diaries from the early 1920s describe something of how a young woman then might have fantasized about sex and male relationships as well as how torn she might have felt. Self-consciously, with a sense of audience in mind, the seventeen-year-old Hellman records her feelings about boys and young men who court her and whom she views largely without interest. Slowly she begins to accept the possibility that a physical relationship might be satisfying—even without mental challenge. Sex, she finally concludes—still at the tender age of seventeen—“is like eating a meal. I try to make it like eating a banquet. But I am rather glad. This entails no heartaches or hurts—it leaves you satisfied if not breathing.”7
The idea that girls and women, like men, derived pleasure from sex as part of normal daily life appears in some of Hellman’s early short stories. In what is perhaps quintessential wish fulfillment, “Perberty in Los Angeles”—written in 1933 and featuring a fourteen-year-old protagonist—describes a mother, aunt, and uncle who try to encourage the teenager to welcome sex into her life. “Have you felt no yearnings to embrace the boys in the field … and to lie in the dells and crannies,” asks her fictional aunt Minnie. The teenager, more interested in ancient Greek grammar than in sexual experience, responds by trying to change the subject, leading her mother to beg and plead with her to think about sex because “it is normal … and of course we will forgive you and assist you.”8 “I Call her Mama,” published just a few months earlier, also features a fourteen-year-old female protagonist whose mother had prematurely pressed sexual freedom on her. Resisting sex instruction, the teenager tells her mother not to make such a fuss about sex. “It’s not good to make my attitude toward sex any more beautiful,” she tells her, and then concludes a long tirade against her mother’s reification of sexual freedom with the simple assertion that “I want an old fashioned home.”9
New understandings of relationships that involved sexual satisfaction and multiple partners for women as well as men produced a range of controversial but widely tolerated lifestyle options. This was especially true for bright urban young women like Lillian who were of undistinguished education and no great wealth. Their choices included careers without marriage, “Boston” (same-sex) marriages, companionate marriages without benefit of license until the couple decided whether they were compatible, and “marriage under two roofs” for those who, though legally joined, desired to live apart and could afford to do so. For the educated middle-class, unmarried, white woman, a loss of virginity or a discreet sexual relationship outside marriage no longer consigned her to shame. Rather, it marked access to freedom.
Hellman took advantage of these options as she became aware of them. The summer she turned nineteen, she engaged in a full-scale sexual affair, parts of which she recorded in her diaries. When her first love ends and Jerry (the name she gives to her lover) disappears, leaving her in pain, she concludes that it is a “terrible and unwise thing … to become so engrossed with one being” in a way that shuts off all else.10 The young Lillian, her diaries suggest, does not dismiss love lightly—but she does wonder how often it will come to her, how often she will attract it. As if anticipating the future by trying to control it, she places her first real love affair into the category of something perhaps deeply felt and genuine, but not worth continuing anguish. Later, she recalls it with distaste as a loveless encounter that lasted only a few months: “I suppose that the cool currency of the time carried me past the pain of finding nastiness in what I had hoped would be a moving adventure,” she wrote.11
At Boni and Liveright, Lillian met and partied with a range of people who were no strangers to sex. Invitations came to the parties with great frequency, partly, she thought, because she was “young and unjudging” and partly for “reasons not so good.”12 Though she describes herself as shy in this period, to the company she appeared as an icon of flaming youth. Occasionally, Hellman recalled, Horace Liveright asked her and some of her young colleagues to explain the flapper phenomenon to clueless older male guests who seemed dumbfounded by the claims of young women to sexual freedom. Not particularly adept at her job, Lillian believed that Horace Liveright continued to employ her out of admiration for her youthful verve and audacity. To her colleagues, she represented a phenomenon they did not understand.
Lillian invited utter incomprehension when she returned to work one afternoon after having taken the morning off to have an abortion. She had already agreed to marry Arthur Kober but became pregnant by him a few months before the marriage was scheduled to take place on December 31, 1925. Not wanting her friends to assume that the pregnancy had fostered ideas of marriage, she decided on abortion. She returned to the office later in the day, dry-eyed, a bit wobbly, but ready to go to work. She remained there through the rest of the working day, resisting every effort to take care of her and refusing to entertain a word of sympathy. She did not, she said, want to become the “house pet.” Her strength drew admiration from some but alienated others who could not understand her apparently casual attitude toward a difficult act.13
For all her rebellious spirit and her desire to act on her own instincts, Hellman quit her job and married Arthur Kober on New Year’s Eve, 1925. She was just twenty. Arthur, then an aspiring writer who worked as a playwright, satisfied her desire to nurture—to create a loving relationship—that remained one part of her complicated persona. Together the newlyweds went to Paris, where she floated on the fringes of the American expatriate community, wrote a few short stories, traveled a bit in Europe—usually without Kober—and described herself as generally restless. She returned to New York alone and supported herself by writing book reviews for the New York Herald Tribune and reading manuscripts for some of her publishing friends. During the months they spent apart from each other, with Arthur’s knowledge, she occasionally saw, and slept with, other men. Such behavior was not entirely unusual among the educated and arty young people with whom she traveled. Muriel Gardiner (whom Hellman did not then know but who would later play a significant role in her life) describes her experience in Greenwich Village in those years in language Lillian would have recognized: “There was an attitude of general camaraderie among us all, men and women. Many of the married couples seemed rather independent of each other, wives and husbands often dating someone of the opposite sex in accord with the mores of the ‘roaring twenties.’ ”14
After Kober returned to the States, Lillian took a job as a publicity agent in Rochester, New York. She left after four months to accompany Kober to Hollywood, where he had received a munificent job offer as a screenwriter. In Hollywood, Kober, desperate to find Lillian something to do, arranged for her to work as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sometime in this period, Lillian stopped using birth control, became pregnant, and had an early miscarriage. She had returned to New York from the West Coast and was staying in the St. Moritz hotel when she discovered the loss. “I cried like hell for almost two solid hours,” she wrote to Arthur. In a rare moment of visible vulnerability, she added, “Please don’t feel bad—we can try again … Write me that you don’t mind very much and cheer me up. It alters no promises I made you and I hope you understand that—if you don’t and are still entertaining the idea of a divorce, now is your time to get it on the record. But please console me a little—I’m ashamed really—I always thought I was a super-creator of babies … Please write more often and please love me. I miss you an awful lot.”15 By then the marriage was all but over. Returning to Hollywood, Lillian Hellman Kober met Dashiell Samuel Hammett, with whom she was to begin a legendary thirty-year relationship.
By the standards of the literati in the late twenties and early thirties, Hellman’s marriage to Kober was unorthodox but not terribly unusual. Yet it did not entirely free her from the constraints of parental values. Even after she separated from Kober and returned to New York without a partner, she took care that her rebellious lifestyle did not offend her mother’s sensibilities. On the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, she wrote to Kober to complain that “my movements—particularly in the matter of visiting unmarried gentleman [sic]—have all to be accounted for to Mama, so that I am never quite free to move around the way I might want to.”16 If she feared parental disapproval, it did not stop her from behaving as she wished. “I have to account to mama for the details of my life,” she wrote to Kober. “I guess someday she’s going to find out I am not a virgin, and that’s bound to be the end of our beautiful friendship.”17 Her generation, as she repeatedly proclaimed, “did not often deal with the idea of love …” When her aunts Jenny and Hannah challenged her for being part of a generation that “goes about naked all the time,” she made it clear that her value system and theirs differed. “We sleep with everybody,” she admitted, “and drink and dope all night and don’t have your fine feelings.” But, she added, recalling her aunts’ ostracism of Bethe, her standards “did not involve spitting on people because they live with lowdown Wops and get into trouble.”18 Living in Hollywood surely legitimized these feelings. In Hollywood, where physical beauty reigned, Hellman had honed her sensual sense of self. She had also found an environment that encouraged sexual adventurousness.
Dashiell Hammett not only gave Lillian the space to develop her sexual persona but, in his sometimes brutal way, insisted on it. Married when he met her to a wife with whom he did not live but to whom he continued to remain loyal, the father of two small daughters, he had constructed a life that included sex with whatever woman was within arm’s reach. In addition to being an attractive man in his late thirties, tall and thin, he was then a minor celebrity, the author of a series of bestselling detective stories that had been sold to the movies. Money was no problem: Hammett squandered it on expensive hotels and gifts; he drank excessively, gambled at the race track and at cards, and engaged in endless, meaningless, sometimes costly sexual encounters.
Hellman was not quite twenty-six when she met Hammett, and she struggled to reshape her life. She fled the West Coast, running from two men, both in love with her and eager for her full attention. One was a sweet and loving husband, a talented but unexciting friend. The other was a famous writer of detective novels, a flamboyant alcoholic, profligate around women and money and married to someone else. While she tried to sort out what she would do, she settled herself into the St. Moritz—a residential hotel—and wrote profuse letters to both of them. She also produced short stories for the New Yorker, which routinely rejected them. Hammett visited her in New York for a couple of weeks in the late spring and then returned to Hollywood. Conflicted and lonely, she sought solace in the company of old friends and sometime lovers, Jed Harris and Louis Kronenberger among them. Occasionally she would hole up with Kronenberger for a night or a weekend. She partied with Ira and Lee Gershwin, Chester Erskine, and Herman and Rose Shumlin when they were on the East Coast. By the fall, she had made her decision; she agreed to divorce Kober and then went, nervously, to New Orleans to tell her aunts about her divorce and her relationship with Hammett. There is no record of how she told her parents, who were still living on West 95th Street.
He was a minor celebrity. Hammett in the late 1930s. (Photofest)
1935: Back and forth to the coast she went. (Photofest)
Back and forth to the coast she went, each time leaving after an angry tiff. Occasionally Hammett came east, taking separate quarters in one residential hotel or another. Finally, late in 1932, Hammett moved to New York, living at first in the Hotel Pierre (one of New York’s most expensive hotels) and then with Lillian in a three-room suite at the Sutton Club Hotel.
The Sutton, managed by their friend the writer Nathanael “Pep” West, housed a community of writers that included James T. Farrell and Edmund Wilson. There, they lived a life of cheerful dissipation, working, drinking, and partying. Together Hellman and Hammett developed a series of friendships that were filled with mischief and fun. Lillian probably had a short liaison with Pep West, and she grew fond of his sister Laura Perelman and her husband Sid (S. J.) Perelman. According to Edmund Wilson, Lillian “used to help West steam open the letters of the guests by means of a kettle which he kept in his rooms.”19 Hammett had a week-long fling with Laura. Subsidized by his publisher, Knopf, he finished what was to be his last novel, The Thin Man, which he dedicated to Lillian. She continued to write short stories that continued to be rejected. In the winter of 1933–34, she and Hammett moved together into a small apartment in the Florida Keys, and together they completed her first produced play: The Children’s Hour.
Their behavior flew in the face of the Depression-produced economic misery all around. Amid unemployment and widespread suffering, a growing national concern with social responsibility and traditional family life had replaced the individualism of the twenties. Opposition rose to wage work for women, particularly for women with male partners to support them. Hellman’s image of independent womanhood seemed callow in the face of such attitudes. But the depression that devastated the economic fortunes of many and threw a quarter of the work force out of jobs had a more salutary effect on Lillian. As she became a well-known playwright and developed her talents as a skilled movie scriptwriter, she benefited from a Hollywood industry that flourished by creating fantasies for a nation in despair. The laurels—and the income—Hellman earned in this decade enabled a celebrity lifestyle and encouraged her to continue to flout conventional family relationships.
When Lillian’s mother died in 1935, Lillian felt free to follow Hammett’s style more fully. The masculine pose she adopted then included an outspoken and brash persona, complete with a foul vocabulary, which she used indiscriminately. Like Hammett (and such other 1930s figures as Hemingway and Faulkner), she drank, smoked, and partied nonstop. She was, wrote one observer, a “tough broad … the kind of girl who can take the tops off bottles with her teeth.”20 Not infrequently she indulged her passion for gambling and managed to make money playing both poker and chemin de fer. Nor did she make a secret of her sexual liaisons: she approached men she desired aggressively and slept with them at will. Quickly she earned a reputation as a “she-Hammett.” But she wanted to be manly in another way, too, by exhibiting qualities of courage and forcefulness, by refusing to back down from a fight. These qualities contributed to her reputation as a stubborn woman, a difficult woman, a fighter.
To be sure, the tough outer shell hid a core of self-doubt that remained close to the surface. As a child, she believed she was not pretty. Later in her life, when she was asked to draw a self-portrait, she drew a stick-figure that she labeled “What I wanted to look like and don’t.” The drawing presented a figure that Lillian identified as having “blond curls, natural” and “deep blue eyes, natural.”21 She was always, she said, “jealous of great beauties.”22 The absence of conventional good looks, the prominent nose and irregular features, would shape Hellman’s persona in many ways. She was a woman who needed men yet could not wear the pale orange tulle she thought would attract them. So she adapted. From early on she dyed her mousy brown hair a strawberry blonde that sometimes took on a reddish tinge. She showed off appealing qualities like her slim ankles and expressive eyes. She exhibited pride in her slender and sensuous body, which she dressed with an exquisite sense of style. She cultivated a flirtatious charm reminiscent of her mother’s South.
Interviewers routinely found themselves confounded by the contrast between the “tough broad” of record and the woman who appeared before them. “It was teatime,” wrote one, “and Miss Hellman was sipping a pale sherry. She wore a gray dress fastened up the front with a zipper but open at the throat, with a black silk scarf crisscrossed in front like a soldier’s and secured with a crystal clasp. She had a slender gold wrist watch and black pumps.”23 Such responses were routine. Hellman’s warmth and affability in person belied the public image and the masculine writing. “She is genuinely feminine to a degree that borders engagingly on the wacky,” wrote Margaret Chase Harriman in a New Yorker profile.24 This appraisal remained consistent throughout Hellman’s lifetime. “In her own drawing room,” one interviewer commented, “Miss Hellman, less a woman playwright than a woman and a playwright was gentle, thoughtful, courteous, her manner affable … The ferocity she so relentlessly anatomizes in the theater … nowhere in evidence.”25 A decade later, a British reporter affirmed the judgment, declaring that “although she has the kind of forthrightness and directness usually called masculine” she was in fact extremely feminine.”26
1938: She cultivated a flirtatious charm. (Photofest)
Still, Hellman was consumed with doubt about her own lovability, full of fear of both success and failure, and prone to feeling lonely and isolated even when she was surrounded by people. She ran away when she anticipated a negative response to one of her plays or when she saw successful love on the horizon. Furiously jealous of Hammett’s dalliances and angry with him for his continuing attractions to women of all sorts, she responded, characteristically, by soliciting affection and sex from other men, as well as with displays of bad temper and bouts of anger that she readily acknowledged but could not control. When Hammett hit bottom, she invariably came to his rescue, grudgingly forgiving him his faults and remaining attached to him nonetheless. Fearful of loneliness, she arranged to have company and then complained that she was with “all people I deeply like but people I wanted to run from.”27 After a while, she began to recognize her behavior as what she later called “an old pattern.”28 Fearing abandonment, she courted rejection; fearing loneliness, she surrounded herself with people she then wished away.
But Hammett was often a generous partner, and there were good weeks and months. During their frequent separations, Hammett wrote Lillian loving letters, begged her to join him, and sometimes rearranged his life so he could be with her. But he did not stop sleeping with other women. The stories about Lillian’s reaction to this behavior are legendary. Hellman once traveled cross-country to be with him, only to find him drunk and in bed with a prostitute. In a rage, she smashed up his furniture and returned immediately to New York. There were times when his friends Albert and Frances Hackett would call from the West Coast, pleading with her to come and rescue him from a hotel in which he was trapped because he could not pay the bill.
Hellman, in turn, engaged in a series of sexual relationships, each of them more meaningful than Hammett’s one-night stands but none as powerful as her pull toward him. In the half dozen years after she met Hammett, she remained involved with Kober, from whom she never separated emotionally. Nor, apparently did Arthur seek such a separation. Long after their divorce, she continued to express concern for his well-being. “Please, please do not go into the swimming pool,” she begged him when she feared infection from crippling polio disease. She concluded her plea with an admonition to “pay attention to mama and take care of yourself.”29 Once, she advised him to change his living quarters. “I do think you would be more comfortable with a beach house, a servant and someone to look after the dogs,” she wrote. In the same letter, she urged him to suspend decisions about what he wanted to do after his current contract ended. She signed this letter, “You got Mother Lillian behind you if that means anything.”30 In 1934, Kober sent Lillian a new typewriter and she responded with delight: “It’s a grand present and you don’t know how much I needed it … you’re a lovely, generous man. You always send me such fine presents and I’m so grateful. Maybe next year I can give you something very good too. It’s about time. Maybe I can earn some money with this new one … It was a wonderful gift to me and I love you very much.”31
Through the 1930s, during the first decade with Hammett, Hellman maintained her on-and-off-again relationships with several friends and former lovers. She saw much of fellow playwright Louis Kronenberger. She had an ongoing affair with up-and-coming producer-director Jed Harris. She maintained a decade-long intermittent sexual relationship with Herman Shumlin, who produced three of her plays. She probably got involved with Otto Katz, a communist double agent, when she went to Spain in 1937. Her relationships with these men, and with others, began as (or included) sexual liaisons and grew into committed work-related friendships. In 1936, she fell passionately in love with Ralph Ingersoll, who was then editor in chief of Fortune magazine. She met Ingersoll when they were both stranded by bad weather in a New Mexico airport lounge. The two fell quickly into an intense romance that ultimately foundered on Ingersoll’s unfulfilled promises to leave his wife. Still, the liaison seeded a three-way friendship with Hammett and inspired the creation of PM magazine. There were more, many more, sexual encounters, but these are the most important ones.
Hammett disliked these involvements, but never, according to Lillian, expressed jealousy or did anything to resist them. He called them “juggling oranges” and distinguished them from his own behavior, which he characterized as simply having fun. Eventually the Hammett-Hellman relationship became asexual. As Lillian told the story, this was a result of Hammett’s addiction to drink. One summer evening, probably in 1941, she rejected his drunken advances, and he vowed never to sleep with her again. According to Lillian, he never again did so.32 There are, of course, other possible explanations for Dash’s withdrawal from a sexual relationship with Lillian. She had just then begun a relationship with New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway. Perhaps Dash was following through on his threat to leave her if she continued to juggle oranges, or perhaps she had revealed a weakness—her comment demonstrated that she was not as tough as he wanted her to be. Lillian never quite got over the humiliation of the rejection. She spoke about it when she was in her seventies to Hammett’s biographer, Diane Johnson, who concluded that she remained attached to him even after his death because she never stopped struggling to “possess and command at last the elusive ghost of a man about whom she was insecure in life.”33
But Hellman had, by all accounts, a far more complicated relationship with men. In the eyes of most observers, she seemed genuinely to love being around them and to cherish an enormous affection, especially for Dash. A strong-willed and highly sexual woman, not unlike such figures as Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn, she needed men in her life.34 The actress Zoe Caldwell, who played Lillian onstage and studied her closely, thought Hellman must have adored men, that she loved to be around them and enjoyed making love with them.35 Caldwell attributes Hellman’s special appreciation of men to an absence of mothering that came from Julia’s too-early rejection of her child. But vanity contributed to Hellman’s persistent insecurity as well: she needed constant reassurance about her desirability and her attractiveness. Attached to a man around whom she was often insecure, she exhibited in public all the outward qualities of strength demanded of the free woman of the interwar decades. In private, she allowed her feminine self to slip out. The cost of women’s freedom, as literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, is “emotional impoverishment and restriction.”36
We catch a glimpse of how closely Lillian guarded her feelings around Hammett when she tells us that occasionally she and Hammett talked of marriage, most seriously when Hellman became pregnant for the third time in 1937. On his own, Hammett urged his wife, Josie, to file for a Mexican divorce, which was granted on August 31, 1937. By the time he wrote Lillian the news a week later, Lillian had already had an abortion. This was the third time she had lost a child, and yet she did not comment. The moment passed and marriage did not come up again.37 “I don’t know why we didn’t marry,” Hellman told an interviewer some years later. “We thought of it but then after a while it became silly even to discuss it.”38 Somewhat later, in 1942, Lillian visited Arthur and Maggie Kober’s newborn baby. She was caught staring at it for a long while with tears in her eyes. She readily agreed to be godmother.
Despite the gloom cast by the continuing Depression and an impending war, the period from the late thirties through the forties must have been among the most gratifying of Lillian’s life. In May 1939, with money earned from The Little Foxes, she indulged in the then decidedly male prerogative of purchasing a home of her own. The house, which she called Hardscrabble Farm, and its 130 acres of woods and meadows were located in Pleasantville, New York, an hour or so north of the city. The property contained a large restored colonial house with four and a half baths, five fireplaces, and a four-car garage.
It boasted as well a six-room caretaker’s cottage, two guest houses, barns, and an eight-acre, spring-fed lake. Together, she and Hammett, along with farmer Fred Hermann, who occupied the caretaker’s cottage, set themselves to reclaiming some of the neglected land, raising poultry and poodles as well as pigs and cattle, immersing themselves in other farm chores. At Hardscrabble, Hellman participated in slaughtering animals, helped to make sausage and head cheese, and learned how to hunt, trap turtles, and to fish. She delighted in her dogs and especially in the new puppies that came regularly.
In some ways the years at Hardscrabble allowed her to open up her many-sided persona. She was in her mid-thirties, with two successful plays and several movie scripts behind her. She had achieved fame as well as fortune, and she had a satisfying male companion at hand. At the farm, she began the pattern of nurturing and entertaining that provided continuing fulfillment. She surrounded herself with guests of all sorts, including her father, who often showed up for weekends, and Hammett’s children, who came for summer holidays. On weekends she invited the cast of whatever play of hers was then running on Broadway. The house was so often filled with people that Hellman sometimes remembered it as a sort of boardinghouse where “people came and stayed.”39 Still she found time to sequester herself in the study, where she wrote four great plays (Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind, Another Part of the Forest, and Autumn Garden) that solidified her reputation as a playwright of the first rank. To the study door, she taped a notice:
This room is used for Work
Do not enter without knocking
After you knock wait for an answer
If you get no answer, go away and
Don’t come back
This means everybody
This means you
This means Night and Day
By Order of the Hellman-Military-Commission-for-
Playwrights. Court Martialling will Take Place in the Barn,
and your Trial Will Not be a Fair One.40
The thirteen years Lillian spent at Hardscrabble, most commentators would agree, were surely the happiest years with Hammett, and probably the happiest of Lillian’s being. By the 1940s, Hellman’s relationships with men and women had taken the shape that would persist for the rest of her life. The heavy drinking over, more secure in her craft and capable of earning her own way, she cultivated the love and loyalty of good friends and colleagues without dependence on a single partner. In addition to her ex-husband and his new wife, Maggie, her close friendships included Lee and Ira Gershwin, lifelong friends, who persuaded producer Herman Shumlin to read and produce The Children’s Hour; Talli Wyler and her husband, William, who directed her screenplays for These Three and Dead End; and Dorothy Parker. Lillian first met Parker in 1930, in Hollywood. The two became good friends when they shared scriptwriting and union-organizing experiences in Hollywood. They later traveled to Spain together and spent time supporting anti-fascist causes. Their friendship survived Hammett’s fierce dislike of Dottie and Lillian’s contempt for Dottie’s husband, Alan Campbell. It foundered only at the end of Parker’s life when Parker could no longer control her addiction to alcohol. In her lifetime, Lillian achieved a goodly measure of deep and reciprocated love. And with those she loved, she created long-term relationships that sometimes included sex and often did not. She may never have had a sexual relationship with a woman (there is no evidence that she did), but with women, as with men, she created long-term loving relationships and lifelong loyalties.
In 1940, Hellman entered analysis with Gregory Zilboorg. She was thirty-six and had just seen her third blockbuster success mounted on the Broadway stage. She could not, she thought, handle the success. “Somewhere by instinct I had sense enough to know that I was going to have a crack-up,” she told interviewer Christine Doudna.41 Success and the drinking, she would later say, were her main reasons for starting treatment. But she knew these were not the only catalysts. Hammett, still drinking heavily, began, around this point, to withdraw from a sexual relationship with her. A year or so after she began analysis, the birth of Arthur and Maggie’s daughter shook her deeply. Perhaps she had finally decided to come to terms with her fear of abandonment, her deeply rooted sense that she could not be loved? Or perhaps Hardscrabble released some newly reborn sense of her nurturing self.
Whatever the immediate impulses that led her to the couch, Hellman committed herself to the process, worked hard at it, and discovered much about herself. She wrote about the “hidden nastiness and resentment” that she found in her unconscious and about the temper and the anger that she could not control.42 And, repeatedly, she referred to the treatment as intimately related to the painful depressions she suffered. “It is very sad to watch a neurosis work,” she commented to her then lover, John Melby, “especially when it belongs to you.”43 The analysis would last eighteen years and develop into a deep friendship with the analyst and his wife, Peggy. The Zilboorgs visited her at Hardscrabble; she traveled with them to Paris and Italy; she sent her friends to Gregory Zilboorg for therapy and analysis. And in his hands, Lillian seemed able to give scope to her nurturing qualities.
She had always maintained a warm relationship with her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, but the relationship deepened and strengthened after Kober’s remarriage and, not incidentally, after she began psychoanalysis. Arthur married Maggie Frohnknecht in 1941; Lillian served as witness at their wedding. She helped the family find an apartment in New York, managed their move from one apartment to another, supervised the storage of their things when they went abroad, and advised them about servants and real estate transactions. From Hardscrabble Farm, she wrote them loving and sometimes playful letters that began “Darling Arthur, darling Maggie,” and ended with salutations of love and affection. Sometimes she signed these letters “Lillikins”; often she invited them all to “come home.” These letters expressed a genuine longing, hard to fathom. Maggie became ill in 1946, and Lillian visited and comforted her in the hospital. A year later, she was writing to her: “Above all I wish I could see you again. I can’t tell you how much I miss you or how often I think about you. You have left a large, vacant place in my life, and I hope to God you will come back some day soon and fill it again.”44 Sometimes she started her letters with “Dearest Maggie and husband dear to us both,” or concluded them with affectionate salutations such as “my love to you, our husband, and child” and instructions to Maggie to take care of “our husband.”45Occasionally, she and Dash took care of Catherine at Hardscrabble. Catherine remembers these times as joyous moments when Dash paid special attention to her.46
This relationship, like so many others in Lillian’s life, was anchored by a frequent exchange of gifts that continued for all of their days and that served as concrete manifestations of reciprocal affection. Arthur and Maggie sent Lillian Christmas and birthday presents regularly. Lillian reciprocated, and when she could not think of what to send, she simply asked. “What do you want for your birthday and how much should it cost?” she wired Kober in August 1941.47 When he sent her the bill for the six hand-sewn shirts he requested, she promptly sent him “57 smackers for 6 beautiful shirts, which is my birthday present to you.”48 To the Kobers’ equivalent question in May of 1943, Lillian telegraphed back, “Girl of my fine type would love towels. It’s a wonderful present and I am very grateful. Much Love to both of you and will write next week.”49 The decision to buy presents themselves and send off the bills seems to have become routine. In response to one query from Arthur about a Christmas present, Lillian replied that she would like a negligee and asked him if he “would like me to buy it and charge it to you in order to save you trouble.”50 Later, Lillian asked whether Maggie had yet bought her birthday present in the same letter in which she told Kober that she had bought herself “a beautiful chair for the lawn … it cost $36.45 and I am very grateful to both of you and pleased with it. Thank you darling, and thank Maggie for me.”51
She enjoyed the love and loyalty of good friends. Here with Arthur Kober, Mrs. Shumlin, Esther Keene, and Herman Shumlin at the Shumlin home on Fire Island. (Ransom Center)
For Arthur she reserved a special place marked by her affectionate salutations to him: “Arthur baby darling,” she might write to him. Occasionally she warned him, “If Maggie ever divorces you …”52 And it was not unusual for Lillian to remind Arthur of their own marriage, as when she telegraphed to wish him “A happy New Year, Darling and with truly loving memories of 22 years ago.”53 After Maggie died in 1951, Lillian briefly harbored hopes of resurrecting their earlier love affair, signing one letter to him, “your first bride.” These hopes came to naught but left her with no residue of ill feeling. She continued to see Arthur and to share confidences with him until he died in 1975. Her last act of friendship was a tribute at his funeral where she claimed for him “an affection without any of the misery that so often comes with broken arrangements.” It was, she thought, “a friendship that had no pause and never ended.”54
Hammett, who joined the army in 1942 and was stationed in the Aleutian Islands, received a full measure of her warm affection. At the beginning of their separation, Hellman (whose letters are missing) complained of his being cold, to which he responded with a humorous comment about taking his temperature and seeming “warm enough to the thermometer.”55 But from Alaska, Hammett suggests that Hellman proved a very satisfactory correspondent. “You, if I may say so, Madam,” he told her, “write very nice and warming letters.”56
From Hammett’s letters to Hellman, we learn about the loving relationship they shared, even after he had foresworn sexual intimacy, and perhaps in anticipation of a reunion when he returned. Addressed to “Dear Lilishka” or “Dearest Lily” or Lilibet, the letters sometimes expressed concern for her health; at others they commented on her work or his, as when he proudly noted the release of the movie version of Watch on the Rhine (whose script he had written), appreciated her work on North Star, or boosted her spirits when she despaired over a difficult new play (The Searching Wind). The letters are often sentimental, as when he noted the thirteenth anniversary of their first meeting and added, “They have been fine grand years and you are a fine grand woman and for all I know I must have been a fine grand man to have deserved them and you. And with such a start, think of not only the next thirteen, but the ones after that!”57 They are also filled with the kinds of intimate details that recall a life together. When the army stopped censoring the letters of enlisted men in Alaska, for example, Hammett rejoiced that he would now be able to write to her “without feeling that I’m telling whichever officer in my unit happens to be unit censor about you in bed.” He wouldn’t want those officers to know, he wrote to her playfully, “that in cold weather you sleep with your buttocks sticking out from under the covers.”58 As the war drew to a close and Hellman took her lengthy trip to Moscow, Hammett longed for her return, telling her he would postpone a thirty-day furlough until he knew when she would be back, and closing his letters with “Now I’m off to bed, sweetheart, but not without sending you much love and many, many kisses.”59
In every way, Lillian acted like the wife she might have been. While he was away, she held a power of attorney for him and she and her secretary, Nancy Bragdon, monitored his spending and managed his financial affairs. Lillian sent cookies to Fort Monmouth for him and his barracks mates and responded to his requests with alacrity. Once he was settled in Alaska, he asked for books—“books are something I’ve been missing a good deal lately”—and from Abercrombies: a “hood to thwart the elements; you know something to pull over my face when the weather’s bad, with eyeholes or something to look through. I don’t know—Abercrombies will know … Tell them,” he wrote, “It’s for winter—WINTER—tell ’em, in Alaska—ALASKA.”60 Unasked, she sent food of all kinds: rumcakes, maple sugar, chocolates, and grapefruit peel, but also caviar, goose liver pâté, and smoked turkey from an East Side gourmet shop called Martin’s. To Alaska also went socks from Brooks Brothers and Saks Fifth Avenue, pipes and pipe tobacco from Dunhill, and, in the fall of 1943 (just preceding their second Christmas apart), a gold chain and a ring to which he avowed his instant attachment.61
After Hammett had been in Alaska for about a year, Lillian flew off on her Moscow adventure. There, she fell deeply in love with a State Department officer named John Melby. Hammett, who did not worry when he received no letters from Moscow, began to wonder why she did not write once she had arrived in England on her way back to the States. “Charitably,” as he put it, he blamed her silence on the mail service, but he also remarked in a hurt note to Maggie Kober, “I guess I’ll never understand women.”62More seriously he wrote to Lillian, in March of 1945, that he would “expect some kind of explanation why you didn’t write me all the time you were in England.”63 Lillian did not explain—and when Hammett returned to the United States in the summer of 1945, he found Melby at Hardscrabble. Hammett obligingly moved his belongings out. But Melby left for China within months, and Hammett resumed his on-again, off-again place in Lillian Hellman’s life—sometimes living at Hardscrabble, at others in an apartment he took on West 10th Street in New York City, and, after 1952, in a cottage in Katonah, New York, owned by friends who gave it to him at nominal rent. Lillian, as she wrote to Melby, remained “very devoted to Dash, deeply devoted, and I wish I could see him happy and settled and sure of some kind of future. He is a wonderful human being, and it is heartbreaking to see it go to waste.”64 Dash, for his part, continued to read Lillian’s work, and the two drew closer together in the difficult McCarthy years. Lillian tried to raise bail money for him when he was arrested for refusing to divulge the names of contributors to a civil liberties bail fund, supported him when he went to prison, and paid his bills when Hammett’s income fell victim to charges of income tax delinquency. In 1958, ill and broke, he moved somewhat reluctantly into Hellman’s town-house on East 82nd Street. He was living there when he died on January 10, 1961.
With John Melby, as with so many of her lovers, Lillian retained an important relationship that survived their sexual attraction for each other. She met and fell in love with Melby in the winter of 1944–45, when she visited the wartime Soviet Union. Melby was then a cultural affairs officer at the Moscow embassy of the United States, and for a while both of them lived at the American compound in Moscow, known as Spaso House. It was here that she met Ambassador Averell Harriman and his wife, Marie, who would remain her friends long afterward. When Melby returned to the United States on leave in the summer and fall of 1945, the two talked of marrying as soon as Melby could secure a divorce from his estranged wife. But the relationship foundered when Melby was posted to China, where, despite his continuing professions of love and commitment, he stayed for more than four years. Hellman treated the separation as temporary at first, writing long love letters to him and begging him to return. Slowly the requests turned to demands, and as Melby’s replies demonstrated an increasing reluctance to return, a very sad Lillian slowly put the relationship aside. When Melby returned from China in 1950, he was involved with another woman. Still, he and Hellman, ever fond of each other, met intermittently.
She met John Melby in the winter of 1944. (University of Pennsylvania Archives)
Eventually, Melby found himself called before a government investigating committee questioning his loyalty. The charges against him included his relationship with Lillian (a “known Communist”). Hellman enlisted Joe Rauh, the lawyer who helped to defend her before HUAC, to represent him, and did what she could to stay quiet and not complicate his life; she shared his anger and distress when he ultimately lost his job and his career in the State Department. Briefly they resumed their affair, but in the end, Melby married another woman and reappeared in Hellman’s life only intermittently.65
While Melby was in China, Hellman dealt with the illness and death of her father, and here, too, a sense of family feeling is palpable. Her father began to develop symptoms of dementia in 1948. Hellman tried first to provide nursing care for him at home and then, reluctantly and on the advice of his doctors, placed him in an expensive private nursing home. From there he wrote long anguished letters to his family and friends, begging to be released and venting his frustration on Lillian. His sisters, Hannah and Jenny, pleaded with Lillian to return him to his home, convinced that she was restraining him against his will and accusing her of being hard-hearted. Lillian responded angrily at first. She was hurt at their mistrust and invited them to come and visit their brother to see for themselves. For more than a year letters flew back and forth, each of them demonstrating Lillian’s misery at having to incarcerate her father and her outrage at having to explain herself to her two beloved aunts. Not until they came to visit did they desist. The episode suggests something of Lillian’s sense of herself as a daughter. Though she never felt close to anyone in her mother’s family, she cherished her relationship with her father and his sisters until they died, and their memories long afterward.66
Family relationships did not come easily to Hellman, and in the fifties she seemed to become needier and more emotionally dependent as well as more fearful about her standing and status. Surely this is linked to the devastating betrayals of the McCarthy period and the dissolution of many friendships under the stress of government investigation. But the fifties must have challenged Hellman in other ways as well. This was the decade in which ideas about traditional marriage and heterosexual fidelity were linked to patriotism, when maintaining a home and family sustained American prosperity and the American way of life. In the parlance of the time, a happily married suburban housewife represented security and stability, the promise of capitalism in an age of potential nuclear conflict.67 Hellman’s position as an unmarried and independent woman now seemed anomalous rather than admirable, vaguely subversive of American values rather than celebrated. A woman of her age and generation should, it was thought, have settled down with a husband as so many of Hellman’s female friends had done. Hellman, in contrast, continued to relish both her independence and her sexuality, attributes some thought of as symptoms of communism. Yet Lillian seemed entirely comfortable in her double role. With Dash she acted, as actress and friend Patricia Neal recalls, “like a little girl,” solicitous and flirtatious.68
After 1952, while Hammett occupied the cottage in Katonah, he briefly maintained his apartment on 10th Street. Hellman apparently visited him in Katonah “often, not so very often, but often,” as Helen Rosen, the cottage’s owner, put it; and he spent infrequent weekends in New York with her.69 In the context of the decade, the absence of a shared residence struck many as odd. After Dash became ill in the mid-fifties, he no longer had the resources to live alone. Reluctantly he moved into her New York City townhouse. But for all that she provided for him until he died in January 1961, she never felt confident in his affection, never secure in his love for her. “With other people there was warmth and need and maybe even the last weeks a sexual need,” she wrote in her diary two months after he died, “but not with me.”70 Dash didn’t want to be in her house, didn’t want to be dependent, but had little choice. Without him, she conducted an active social life, traveling at whim and dining out frequently. When she entertained at home he often disappeared; when she went out it was generally to see her friends alone. Her loneliness was certainly exacerbated by the death of Gregory Zilboorg just a year and a half before Dash died.
It took Hellman a while after Hammett died to come to terms with what their relationship had been. With uncharacteristic honesty, she confided to her diary, “sometimes, now, I think he wanted to be good friends, but more often I know that he didn’t.”71 When she wasn’t angry with Hammett, she blamed herself. “I did my best,” she divulged to the diary, “and I know now and am sad about it, that it wasn’t a very good best.” Hellman buried her sorrow and her loneliness in her memories of Dash, turning him, in death, into the romantic and idealized soul that the living Hammett was not.72 The memory of Hammett, and the stories she made up about him, became a crutch as she entered into her late fifties and sixties—a reminder of joy and physical vitality, of sensuality and happiness. She kept photographs of him everywhere, managed his estate and his image, recalled anecdotes about him, and quoted remarks he might have made.
Self-reliant now, and without Dash as an emotional backup, she resituated herself both with relation to the men she loved and in her social relationships. She met and fell for Arthur Cowan, a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, in the late 1950s and remained close to him until he died in 1964. Cowan’s wealth, not his politics, created the glue that drew them together; her cynicism and anger about old political allies still got in the way of re-creating some of her old relationships. And though she denies wanting to marry him, her denials have a bit of the quality of protesting too much. She was willing to settle, she tells us in Pentimento, for the continuing, dependable, and generous male companionship he offered along with financial and legal counsel when she needed it. And yet when Cowan became involved with another woman, she suspected he would renege on his promise to take care of her forever. After his sudden death, Lillian insisted that he must have left something for her and set her lawyers to hunting for the will. It could not be found, and Hellman, feeling cheated and abandoned, was convinced that the family had destroyed it.
Her dependence on another friend, Blair Clark, was more emotional than financial. Clark was an executive at CBS and had been the college friend of Robert Lowell, who with his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, was then Lillian’s frequent companion. He became close to Lillian shortly after Dash died.73 There is something of pathos in this relationship. Blair Clark befriended Lillian in 1962 with notes and phone calls and expensive dinners. Lillian believed and hoped that their friendship would develop into an ongoing intimacy and perhaps something closer. Clark claimed to have been unaware of Hellman’s sexual attraction toward him and to have feared her neediness. Perhaps we must believe him, for Hellman’s diaries of the period are filled with longing for him that include waiting for his calls, noting his silences, commenting on whether she called him. They record when they went out to dinner together, when he visited, how long he stayed, and whether the visit was good or not. Through the lines appears a kind of lovesick longing that suggests the wish for, if not the reality of, a more permanent relationship. To stir Clark’s feelings and assuage her own desires, Hellman created an elaborate and fantastic fable about a fictional Yugoslav diplomat with whom she claimed to be engaged in a long-running affair. She had, she said, had a son with this man, and then she spun a complicated tale about the boy’s youth and education, his career, his marriage, and his children.
The tale, clearly made of whole cloth, prefigures some of the later stories Hellman would tell to capture the self that she wanted to be. This style—critic Richard Locke calls it “inventing all the time”—endeared her to many people. It was, says Locke, “part of who she was”; Locke’s partner, Wendy Nicholson, adds that it was “part of her gift.” Friendship, in Locke’s view, “involved play, a fantasy self-presentation, a different kind of exaggeration, a good story.”74 Certainly this seemed to be the case with Blair Clark. He remained fond of Lillian and affectionate toward her into the 1970s and after he remarried. Until she died, he took her out for dinner several times a year, acted as confidant when she needed a shoulder, and played a major role in the influential Committee for Public Justice that she founded in 1970. But, he claimed after she died, “we were never lovers, which may come as a surprise to some and which was surely a disappointment, and more, to her.”75
The relationship suggests Lillian’s continuing capacity to create emotional intimacy even as her physical attractiveness waned. As she moved into her sixties, she became increasingly close to young men who were attracted by the force of her personality and tempted into her orbit by the wacky sense of humor, the charming directness, and the confrontational stance. “Playfulness,” as Blair Clark put it, “was very much part of her nature.”76 And she loved to pick an argument, to fight. Her continuing zest and energy compensated for the now leathery skin and the wrinkled, smoke-scarred face. In person, remembers Wendy Nicholson, “she had this incredible electrical charge about her … She really had a tremendous sort of personal force.”77 Many men, particularly younger men, found her both attractive and seductive. Her sometime lover and close friend Peter Feibleman, twenty-five years younger than she, called her the sexiest woman he had ever known.78
And yet her loneliness and her desire for male companionship sometimes led her down hurtful paths. Stanley Hart claims to have been tempted into Hellman’s sexual service in the mid-sixties. Hart, then an editor at Little, Brown who had encountered Lillian several times when they were both on Martha’s Vineyard, proposed to his boss Arthur Thornhill that she be invited to write a memoir. Hart claims that he learned from Lillian’s agent (then Robby Lantz) that the deal would carry a proviso. “If I slept with Lillian Hellman,” concluded the then-thirty-six-year-old Hart after discussions with Hellman’s agent, “I could get her signature on a contract.”79 Hart was not averse to the exchange. She was, after all, a star. Sleeping with her, he frankly admits, “offered the promise of a friendship that I thought would elevate me into an echelon in which writers, and artists and actors and the very rich tended to socialize.”80 Lillian, in his memory, was “game, sexy and flirtatious.” She was also robust and energetic. Hart recounts how he made a date with Lillian and ended up in bed with her, beginning a reluctant romance that lasted for the better part of two years until he had her signature on the contract and she began to treat him with the disdain she reserved for those who served her. Then, in his eyes, she turned into an irritable, “self-centered, aging and ungainly” woman into whose “cruel, contentious” face he could no longer look.81 Hart published the story thirty years later and fifteen years after Lillian’s death. If it is true, it suggests some sense of Hellman’s vulnerability to the existential loneliness from which she suffered and provides a clue to her unrequited need for physical affection.
Lillian generally satisfied her needs for companionship in an exciting social life in which she became involved after Dash’s death in early 1961. At Harvard, where she taught in the spring of 1961, she met Richard Poirier, then a young lecturer who would become a close friend and one of her literary executors. She also got to know Harvard instructor and playwright William Alfred. There too she met Martin Peretz, who would become editor of the New Republic, and Fred Gardner, the young student who introduced her to the world of the student left. To these young men and to many others who recalled her defiance toward the House Committee on Un-American Activities, she was still a heroine. “She was thought of as gutsy, brilliant, witty, noble, socially desirable, and sexually liberated,” Stanley Hart tells us.82 Her new contacts melded with her New York life to provide a place on the edges of the intellectual world of the sixties. She did not belong in the quasi-political group that became known as the New York intellectuals or in the literary circle that surrounded the New York Review of Books, but many of its members became her friends. They included Philip Rahv of Partisan Review, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Barbara and Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. To this mix, and to her dinners, she added many others, among them conservative columnist Joseph Alsop, Norman Podhoretz (who became editor of Commentary in 1960), and McGeorge Bundy.
Celebrity provided access to broader and broader circles and simultaneously affirmed her status, a position she assiduously cultivated. Putting politics into the backseat, she constructed relationships with the rich and the powerful. She dined at the Princeton Club with Edmund Wilson and partied with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jackie Kennedy, Richard Goodwin, and Norman Mailer. She was recognized and offered a table at the most elegant restaurants; she attended and held court at the season’s fashionable parties. An avid hostess, Hellman became, in Edmund Wilson’s choice phrase, the Queen of the Cocktail Belt.83 “No writer I had ever met before … or would ever meet again,” recalled Norman Podhoretz of his younger days, “lived in as opulent a style as she did.” When he went to one of her lavish dinner parties, he met “famous theatrical personalities—producers, directors, actors, and actresses—with the women all richly begowned and bejeweled and the men radiating the special air of self-assurance that seems always to accompany the making of a lot of money.”84 The numbers of these friendships, and the amount of time Hellman invested in them, suggests the plausibility of John Hersey’s claim that he knew “no living human being whom so many people consider to be their one best friend.”85
Others recalled Hellman’s dinners for their warmth and energy: “She wanted everybody to be having a good time,” remembers Peter Feibleman, so she moved people around to make sure that they were not bored.86 Her dinners consisted of a mix of carefully selected people. “She knew who to ask, who to seat them next to. It was like choreographing.”87 At the dinners she was, in one attendee’s words, “very attentive, very generous. The food was always wonderful.”88 Adds Morris Dickstein, “Whether she was throwing a small dinner party or a large party, she treated it like a kind of art. The amount of energy that went into the seating, the meal, the cooking, the mix of people was the kind of effort that a really good writer would expend on a sentence. She worked to get it exactly right.”89 Lillian did not, at these events, control her tongue. She could disrupt her own parties and those of others by fighting with her guests, verbally slugging at them for their likes and dislikes. And yet she had a quick sense of humor and a raucous laugh that concluded a debate and put everyone at ease. Lillian’s parties were so wonderful and such fun that her friends coveted invitations to them. The writer Shirley Hazzard wrote to her friend William Abrahams of one dinner party she knew Hellman was planning: “If we are excluded we will just come round and moan beneath the windows.”90
After the harrowing and unsettling fifties, in which she had been marginal in many worlds, the renewed celebrity demonstrated Hellman’s importance. She enjoyed the attention thoroughly. “Whenever Lillian would walk into one of those New York parties where there were bankers and pretty girls and famous people there,” remembers Peter Feibleman, “Lillian would walk in and the other ladies would all kind of disappear into the woodwork.” Nor was Hellman above broadcasting her victories. She told all and sundry that “Lord” Sidney Bernstein invited her to dinner in London. And, when Britain’s Lord Snowdon asked if he could take her photograph, she gloried in teasing her agent about it, insisting that he now display the respect properly due her.91 Hellman might have started the decade of the sixties as a star chaser, but by its end she had become a star worthy of chasing.
The social nature of many of Hellman’s contacts—often efforts to take advantage of celebrity—should not obscure the deep and long-lasting friendships she developed. These drew on her nurturing qualities. On the Vineyard, where she continued to spend her summers and soon built herself a smaller house to replace the large one she had occupied with Hammett, she became close to Jerome Wiesner (later to become president of MIT), his wife, Peggy, and to the poet Robert Lowell (known to his friends as Cal), though not to his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She fished with John Hersey almost daily and sometimes with William Styron too. She gossiped with screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, picnicked with John and Sue Marquand, quarreled with Robert Brustein, played Scrabble with Rose Styron, and planned dinners and parties with Barbara Hersey. She met Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, in the early fifties. That friendship survived an unsuccessful collaboration on the operetta Candide (produced in 1955) to become a robust, complicated, and loving association. Lillian addressed him as “Lennie Pie”; he called her Dear Lillllly or Dear Lilliana. In the seventies, Mike and Annabel Nichols often joined a Vineyard crowd that not only summered together but occasionally spent several winter weeks on an island in the Bahamas. Annabel Nichols would become a loving and attentive companion as Hellman grew older and more irascible.
These were Lillian’s friends. Irritating, demanding, and bad-tempered as she often was with them, stubborn and willful as she might be, they took her flaws in stride and reveled in the warmth she exuded and the practical jokes and high jinks in which she excelled. To her Vineyard friends, she was simply part of the community: they supported her and listened to endless complaints even as she enlivened their days with her wit and inventiveness. Stories abounded about her swimming nude off her boat or at the Vineyard beach. Brooke Allen, whose family summered in that community, recalls her penchant for practical jokes. Lillian once forged a letter to Bill Styron, signing it with the name of an attractive woman he had long wished to meet. Styron read the letter, imagined that it expressed genuine admiration, and immediately set out to find the supposed correspondent. The joke backfired when Styron briefly took up with the young woman. Hellman’s New York friends cherished the wicked sense of humor that led her to let fly at friends and foes alike and then slyly apologize for what she called “the snake in my mouth.”92
It wasn’t easy to be Lillian’s friend as she grew older. Her forceful and direct style, her penchant for saying what was on her mind without censorship, her quick temper and occasional tantrums, offended many. When these qualities were not relieved by humor and warmth, they could be destructive. This happened more and more after 1974, when, while in Europe, she apparently suffered the first of a series of strokes. Peter Feibleman tells us that the strokes increased her level of irrational anger astronomically and often led her into erratic emotional behavior. If she quarreled with her Park Avenue neighbor over what kind of table should go under a vase in their shared hallway, the two never spoke again. If she lost a watch on the beach in Gay Head, she complained that the beach was insufficiently patrolled. Her capacity to make both men and women, but especially women, appear invisible was legendary. Anne Navasky tells a story about how, having sat next to her all night at a dinner, she offered Lillian a ride home. Lillian accepted, and Anne went out to get the car. Escorted out of the house by Richard de Combray and Victor Navasky, Lillian noted the woman at the wheel and turned to Navasky to compliment him for having hired a female chauffeur.93
Even to those she loved, before and especially after the strokes, she could be, and often was, overbearing, arrogant, and just plain rude. She demanded much in terms of responsiveness and loyalty, and she was thin-skinned and sensitive to slights. But she was also remarkably giving, willing to focus on her companions and to be “interested in your life and what you were.”94 Not surprisingly, her friendships were volatile, marked by arguments that led to days and weeks of anger before reconciliation. She could pick an argument over a recipe, as she did with Bill Styron, and the two stubborn individuals would part company for weeks. If she disliked a question at someone else’s dinner table or perceived an insult, she might pick up her handbag and leave. Or she could silence a conversation by shouting across a table to tell someone that he was wrong about something she had barely overheard.95 Her friends tolerated or accepted these behaviors, in return for the genuine affection that Lillian so often displayed.
Her sexual energy directed toward men, Hellman often simply ignored the women in their presence. She often referred to wives as “Madam” as if she could not bother to remember their names. Insecure about her own looks and vain of her own appearance, she abhorred vanity in other women. She referred to those she disliked as “Mrs. Gigglewitz” out of aversion for their conceit, their mindlessness, or their careless display of wealth. John Hersey wrote, after her death, “she had a habit of liking husbands and very expressively not liking wives.”96 True, she made no special effort to appeal to the wives of men she cared about, sometimes maintaining strong relationships with men despite, not because of, their wives. Elizabeth Hardwick falls into that category. Lillian was extremely close to Hardwick’s husband, Robert Lowell, in the late fifties and early sixties but maintained a coolly civil social relationship with Lizzie, as she was called. But Lizzie, who reciprocated the cool feelings, turned her back on Lillian once the marriage was over and publicly disparaged her and her work.97 Still, her close woman friends included the wives of William Wyler, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur, Jerome Wiesner, and Arthur Kober, as well as those of V. S. Pritchett, John Hersey, and Mike Nichols. And many of the friends she made in the sixties and seventies, including Anne Peretz, Lore Dickstein, and Wendy Nicholson, testify to the attention she paid them, the notes of appreciation she wrote, and the small gifts she sent. These were friendships Hellman perceived as with equals—with women who had position or accomplishment of their own.
Perhaps Lillian’s closest woman friend was Hannah Weinstein, who would become Lillian’s touchstone. A loyal friend and companion through the political troubles of the 1950s and a confidante until she died in 1982, Weinstein returned from a self-imposed exile in Europe to found a successful Hollywood production company. In later years she lived around the corner from Lillian’s Park Avenue home. The two were almost daily companions, often dining together at local restaurants. By some accounts, Hannah played second fiddle to the much tougher Lillian, but Hannah also seemed to have exercised some control over Lillian, insisting, for example, that she say thank you when appropriate.98 Shirley Hazzard, Frances Hackett, and later Ruth Field and Maureen Stapleton were among the women who shared their thoughts with Lillian over the years and with whom she shared her deepest feelings.
Lillian’s large heart and enormous capacity for warmth and generosity drew people to her even as her irascibility repelled them. She responded promptly to friends in need, though not always in the ways they wanted. She lent money—generally accompanied by advice and instruction. Hellman worked closely with the poet Richard Wilbur when he was called in to provide lyrics for some of the songs in her 1955 musical operetta Candide. She and Wilbur’s wife, Charlee, had become good friends, a friendship perhaps best exemplified by the Wilburs’ decision to ask Lillian to be godmother to their son and Lillian’s decision, after Hammett died in January 1961, to send all of Hammett’s clothes to Richard (who, like Hammett, was tall and thin). Lillian regularly exchanged Christmas presents with the Wilburs and sometimes lent them her Martha’s Vineyard home. Charlee addressed her letters to “Dearest Pie” and signed them with affectionate remarks like “so much love, dear, from us all.” Early in February 1961, the Wilburs ran into financial trouble and Charlee, without Richard’s knowledge, wrote to Lillian to ask her for a loan. Their son had been ill, she wrote; she had given their only bit of available cash to a cousin without her husband’s knowledge; she did not want to trouble Richard because it would cause him anxiety. Lillian responded immediately. She would loan the money—but only if Charlee told her husband everything. Charlee agreed, at first stipulating that the loan be made in her name alone. Once again Lillian balked. Finally, with Richard’s full knowledge and consent, Lillian made the Wilburs the loan. Like every loan she made, she kept careful records of the amount and the repayment record.99
Hellman adopted a similar, sometimes unwelcome, but always well-intentioned interventionist strategy at other times. When she learned that Robert Lowell was searching for a producer for his five-hour drama The Old Glory, she insisted that only she had the skill and contacts necessary to find someone good. In the end she failed, but she did help to raise money for the production.100 When her goddaughter Dina Weinstein asked her for help in setting up a catering business in France, Hellman replied with a counterproposal to support her for five months while Dina wrote a French cookbook. Characteristically, Lillian imposed a condition. She asked Dina to “turn over your research upon your return, to me and together, or perhaps I alone, will use the research for a cookbook.” Dina turned down the offer but Lillian sent her money anyway, offering her advice about menus, holiday meals, and which customers to entice.101 These examples suggest a desire to control that others experienced as problematic. In the mid-seventies, Catherine Kober, the daughter of Arthur and one of Lillian’s four godchildren, inherited $10,000 that Lillian’s mother had meant to leave to Arthur decades before. The money passed through Lillian to Catherine, by now an adult, and Catherine contributed it to her favorite charity. Lillian, incensed that Catherine had not solicited her advice, promptly and painfully broke off relations with Catherine.102
On the other side, Hellman’s life was punctuated with routinely munificent gestures. Old friends often drew on her for support, and she gave generously but only to causes in which she deeply believed. Routinely she invested small sums in plays written, produced, or directed by her friends. She provided her producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, with several loans, the first of them in 1946. He did not finish repaying them until 1956. After Bloomgarden’s leg was amputated in 1972, she asked her agent to restructure some of the conditions of the contract for The Lark, on which they had worked together, in order to give him a larger share of the royalties.103 Later, she guaranteed a $5,000 loan to the ailing Bloomgarden from Bankers’ Trust, paying it off when he could not. She willingly lent her 82nd Street house to whomever needed it. At one point, when she was abroad for several months, she instructed her secretary to ask the housekeeper to close down all the rooms except for her bedroom and study, which guests might want to use.104 She lent her Park Avenue apartment to Edmund Wilson when her old friend, and very briefly her lover, became ill with what was apparently a tropical parasite. He and his wife, Elena, spent ten days there before he was admitted to Doctor’s Hospital for a throat condition. Wilson’s biographer, Lewis Dabney, counts Lillian “among the loyal friends of his later years” and remarks on what he calls the unjustified bitterness with which Mary McCarthy (Wilson’s third wife) “would later attack Hellman for not telling the truth about her Stalinist past.”105
Recommendation letters and introductions flew from Hellman’s desk with great regularity. One after another, she referred New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt, theater director Robert Lewis, and photographer Richard de Combray to William Abrahams, her editor at Little, Brown.106 She offered Renata Adler an introduction to Arthur Thornhill, Little, Brown’s publisher, and asked Thornhill to look at the manuscript of psychologist George Gero, who was her therapist at the time. She recommended “a brilliant young woman called Alice Wexler” to her literary agent, Don Congdon, and nominated photographer Berenice Abbott as well as Australian novelist Christina Stead to membership in the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.107 Maureen Howard’s memoir, Facts of Life, earned a blurb that described it as one of a handful of good books that “could only have been written by women.”108 These responses suggest a person devoted to friendship and committed to the actions that would keep it alive. For Morris and Lore Dickstein, who had purchased a summer home in Sag Harbor, Hellman contacted old friends. “It was like she had alerted people to be ready for us,” reported Lore Dickstein.109
Perhaps to affirm friendship and to participate in an exchange that would make her feel loved, Lillian always placed great stock in the giving and receiving of gifts. The value of the gifts exchanged served as a measure of reciprocal affection. All her life she desired, even expected, gifts from the women and men who were her friends and lovers, chastising them when they failed to come through and teasing them with her own promises of generosity. Hammett won her heart with a mink coat and expensive jewelry; her friends brought back luxurious laces from Europe. John Melby sent her silk cloth and unusual items from China. Ruth and Marshall Field filled her house with flowers on the occasion of her HUAC hearing. Gifts tested as well as buttressed friendship, producing in some friends enormous anxiety as to what and how much to give. Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, for example, were said, annually, to have racked their brains to come up with a suitable Christmas gift for her.110
Lillian in turn went to Europe with lists of gifts she would bring back and distribute on her return. On one occasion she sought ties, scarves, a cigar cutter for Dash; lace collars for her friend Ruth and Ruth’s daughter, Judy; leather gloves and crosses for some of the women in her life; a blouse for her secretary, Edith. Sometimes she made lists of things that she had bought, such as “7 extra ties, slip, blouse, Silver Hat pins, scarves (2), Lace front”—and then a second list that revealed to whom she would give them. On other occasions, she was more specific—reminding herself to buy a Swiss watch for John, pearl earrings for Helen, her cook, a perfume bottle for Mary Warburg, handkerchiefs from London for her aunt Florence Newhouse. Then again, she might jot down the sizes and colors of items of clothing she would bring back, as when she noted that John Hersey wore a size large or extra large and that he did not like red, gold, or green, while Barbara wanted a white slipover.111 Gifts could take varied forms: Lillian expected and got invitations to dine at expensive restaurants, the use of her friends’ homes in the Caribbean and warm climates, and, once, an invitation to travel by private yacht to Egypt. Sometimes they involved services: Felicia Bernstein would return to the United States from Rome through Paris, husband Leonard wrote, “so that she can pick up the dresses for you.”112 And sometimes they were prized possessions. Charlee Wilbur gave her a necklace that belonged to her grandmother and that was so precious to her that she hoped Lillian would leave it to the Wilburs’ daughter in her will in order that it might remain in the family.113
To be sure, the demands of friends and acquaintances could become irritating, increasingly so as she grew more famous in the sixties. She ducked an invitation to support Tennessee Williams’s candidacy for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, scribbling a note to her secretary on the bottom of the letter, “Call and say I am somewhere—on a boat—Maine, maybe—and you won’t be hearing from me for a few weeks.”114 To Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who asked her to support the candidacy of someone she hardly knew to the Academy, she wrote that she had already supported enough people and would do no more. And yet there were always more, and she always did.
Lillian Hellman never lost the edge of toughness she acquired in the 1920s and with which she conquered the 1930s. She never lost the feisty willingness to speak her mind, or the tough veneer that coded her as manly or masculine. Nor did she ever stop being the sexual creature of the 1920s. She remained always, as her friend Morris Dickstein described her, “at once a perfect lady and at the same time … obscene.”115 Jane Fonda, who played Lillian in the film Julia, experienced difficulty capturing her: “Lillian is a homely woman,” she told an interviewer, “and yet she moves as if she were Marilyn Monroe. She sits with her legs apart, with her satin underwear partly showing—she’s a very sexual, sensual woman.”116 Reading the interview, Lillian took umbrage not at Fonda’s characterization of her sexuality but at the description of her as homely. Hellman’s friend Richard Stern perhaps captured her best in these years. She was, he thought, “comfortable and expensive,” as well as “cozy, warm, flirtatious, yet a powerhouse.”117
We learn from Hellman how complicated it must have been for a woman in the deepest part of the twentieth century to stay true to her desires even as she juggled the pressures of the world around her. She never let go her mother’s dream, cultivating the warmth and generosity that earned her loyal and loving friends. But she also wanted to be her own person, so she stubbornly insisted on having things her own way and could not curb the fierce temper and the foul tongue that created chasms. The gap between the two personas was mediated by talent, celebrity, and the earthy humor that kept friends and enemies alike in awe. Her agent, Robby Lantz, responding to an introduction she wrote in the mid-sixties to an anthology of Hammett’s work, elegantly summarized the contradictions: “You are all heart, yet also all brain; all vulnerability, yet incredibly strong; all emotion, yet completely unsentimental; possessor of a rare sense of the tragic, yet full of pure, clear humor.”118 Even put together, these qualities could not disguise Hellman’s existential solitude. She never overcame it, perhaps because it emerged from a century in which many women tried to be not one thing or another but to be all things at once. To Billy Abrahams, the editor of her memoirs, she described the resulting tension: “I asked almost nobody this summer, but the house has been too full. This week is good—nobody—and I sulk and make myself delicious things to eat, and tell myself nobody loves me and why should they?”119