Chapter 3

A Serious Playwright

I say again that the presentation of something besides mere entertainment and spectacle is the great function of the legitimate theater of the world today.

—Lillian Hellman, 1936

Everything that I had heard or seen or imagined had formed a giant, tangled time—a jungle in which I could find no space to walk without tripping over old roots, hearing old voices speak about histories made long before my day.

—Lillian Hellman, 1973

Before she became the Lillian Hellman famous for writing her memoirs, Lillian Hellman was a playwright. Between 1934 and 1964, she wrote eight plays of her own and adapted four others to the theater. She did not want to be just a good playwright, nor to be identified as a woman playwright. She wanted to be a great playwright. And she almost made it. For many years she was counted among the most important twentieth-century American dramatists, her manner reminiscent of Ibsen and Chekhov, her work placed in a category with that of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Harvard professor of drama William Alfred introduced her to a university gathering in 1961 as “the conscience of the American theater,” someone who reminded her audience “of the hunger for justice which makes every play and adaptation of hers … a moving incitement to seek out the home truths of life, and live in obedience to them.”¹

As a writer, Hellman attempted to speak to the issues of a traumatic century: she thought of herself as a serious playwright, as part of an intellectual community that could influence the shape of ideas at a time when ideas mattered. She aimed, in her plays, to illuminate moral questions that informed the everyday lives of her audiences, questions such as how the pursuit of wealth distorted human relationships in and outside the family. She advocated a vigorous defense of liberty and freedom in the face of internal political disagreements and international bullying; she explored the pernicious consequences of a culture of fear on the capacity of any individual to speak truth and retain integrity. She promoted these ideas on the largest stages she could find, first in the Broadway theater and then on the Hollywood movie screen. Aligning the message with the medium would prove no easy task: appealing to a broad audience, it was thought, required pandering to the public taste for lust and violence. Serious ideas did not belong on Broadway. And yet it was Hellman’s genius to be able to write serious plays that enthralled audiences and kept them coming back for more. For this she was sometimes accused of appealing to middlebrow tastes; she would later find herself mocked and disparaged by those who represented highbrow intellectual culture.

She wanted to be a great playwright. (Photofest)

The sharp-tongued and quick-witted voice that spoke plainly to a broad public offended those who heard in it a judgmental tone and a forceful advocacy of increasingly controversial ideas. By the 1940s, some thought of her as a political writer. Her reputation dimmed; she fell out of fashion. Critics referred to her as a “minor master,” an architect of the “well-made play.” They described her as an overemotional playwright who resorted to melodrama to resolve her plots and accused her of writing propaganda. Though she remained a celebrity, she self-consciously abandoned the theater and turned to writing short essays before she tackled the bestselling memoirs that would bring her fortune and notoriety. The tension between Hellman’s dramatic writing style and her insistence on speaking to the critical issues of the day marks her engagement with moral and ethical issues. But it also teaches us something about the dilemmas faced by writers of her generation—the first to confront a media-driven environment—who sacrificed nuance and subtlety in order to obtain breadth and influence. From Hellman, we learn how difficult it could be for a writer, especially one who was a woman, to explore serious subjects and to attract audiences steeped in the popular culture of movies and the radio.

Hellman knew she wanted to be a writer early on. She recognized her calling when, as a girl, she curled up to read in the limbs of the perhaps metaphorical fig tree that she recalled with such pleasure. This experience, she told a Harvard audience shortly after Dash died in January 1961, stayed with her. “Somewhere I recognized the world was open … Somewhere in those years, I knew that I wanted to be a writer and I knew it so hard that I was amazed that other children didn’t want to be writers.”² The issues she wanted to write about came from those years, too. Her 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. They also exercised a powerful shaping force on her moral sensibilities. From their “fierce belief in personal liberty,” Hellman claimed to derive her love of freedom and liberty and her passionate commitment to justice.³ This “world of the half-remembered, the half-observed, the half-understood,” she thought, was what had moved her to begin to write.⁴

Writing did not come easily to her. Hellman started out as a manuscript reader whose task was to select submissions worthy of being published. She did this first at Boni and Liveright, where she worked for almost two years, and then she screened scripts worthy of production for Broadway producers and for Hollywood companies. She proudly took credit for identifying Vicki Baum’s The Grand Hotel, a 1930 blockbuster play and later an Academy Award–winning film that she encountered while reading for Herman Shumlin.⁵ At the same time, she wrote spicy reviews for the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday Book Review, for which she earned $7.50 apiece. Damning and praising with equal verve, these reveal something of the direct and assertive character that would soon emerge. She might call something “plain trash” one week, and then the next discuss a book’s “exotic strength, fine directness and complete sincerity.” Or she might characterize something she didn’t like as “plain sensational bunk of the more powerful sort.”⁶ Of William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, a book published by her old employer Boni and Liveright, she wrote that she particularly admired “the humor, the delight of Mr. Faulkner’s writing” and commented on the “brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writing of a few men.” Ignoring the New Orleans origins of most of Faulkner’s protagonists, she focused only briefly on the lively and sympathetic characters he had created. It was his craft that captured her, his capacity to produce “the fine kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen.”⁷ Hellman’s choices capture her own lifelong concerns with the art of writing—with trying to get dialogue just right.

In this period, too, Hellman produced a few rather undistinguished short stories, several of which she published in a small magazine called the Comet that her then-husband, Arthur Kober, briefly edited. Despite her desire to succeed, she quickly discovered, according to her friend Peter Feibleman, that her talent lay in writing “ladies’ magazine” stories, for which she had only contempt.⁸ She tried her hand, then, at writing a play with Louis Kronenberger. Dear Queen, a never-to-be-produced comedy, was, in Hellman’s words, “about a royal family who wanted to be middle class people.”⁹ While she and her friends participated in the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt and then celebrated the achievements of the first one hundred days, Hellman agonized about how she would become a writer. In that spring and summer of 1933, while the country survived a banking crisis, adopted the National Industrial Recovery Act, and flew the blue eagle, there is little evidence that she was either engaged politically or that she and her friends ever talked about the political issues of the day.

She was at loose ends, already living with Dashiell Hammett, when he gave her the idea for the plot of the play that became The Children’s Hour. Lillian took that plot, the story of an early-nineteenth-century Scottish court case about two female schoolteachers accused by a disgruntled young pupil of “unnatural affection” for each other and turned it into the play that would spark her career. In Lillian’s hands, the villain of the story becomes the child’s grandmother, who, without ascertaining its veracity, broadcasts the accusation to the pupils’ parents and leads them to withdraw their children from the school. The teachers, Karen and Martha, fight the accusation in court and lose their case. Their school and their relationship destroyed, Karen concludes that she has indeed been guilty of loving Martha. In despair Karen commits suicide. Shortly after, the grandmother returns to say that the child has admitted to lying. Too late: the dream of a school is over; Karen is dead; Martha no longer trusts the fiancé who doubted her. The tragedy is complete.

Adapting the play, Hellman kept the theme of the court case intact, focusing on the impact of what she called the big lie. But she omitted one crucial part of the original case. The child in question was the daughter of an Indian mother and an English civil servant, a child whose mean-spirited accusation made sense in the context of the daily racism that she faced. Hellman wanted to emphasize the dramatic effect of an unmediated “big lie,” so she chose to focus not on the racism that led the child to act out but on the content of the accusation. She might easily have taken another path. Racial tension embroiled the country in the decade of the thirties and would certainly have been on Lillian’s mind in 1934. That year, Congress once again debated a divisive anti-lynching bill against which southerners repeatedly filibustered; nine black teenagers, the Scottsboro boys, arrested in Alabama in 1931 for allegedly raping two white women, still sat in jail awaiting trial. The Communist Party had come to their defense, turning the issue of justice for African-Americans into a national cause. Labor strikes, unemployment councils, and the inefficient and uneven distribution of hurriedly enacted relief benefits stirred discontent and conflict among competing groups. Under the circumstances, a popular audience in the thirties might choose to empathize with the turmoil of a mixed-race child, drawing attention away from the destruction wrought by the lie. Hellman, the playwright, chose to simplify her story: she wanted to demonstrate how destructive a big lie could be.

For that, she needed a lie awful enough to undermine a school, several lives, and the trust of a community. A lie that focused on the issue of sexuality made sense. After a decade of unprecedented sexual indulgence, the Depression mentality encouraged more traditional family life and fostered widespread efforts to reestablish a sexual order rooted in the male-breadwinner family. Hellman might have turned her plot on a child’s accusation of heterosexual misconduct (as she would do in the film that followed the play). But her own flagrant sexuality, her divorce from a good man, her unorthodox relationship with Hammett, made that risky. The sexual desire of two women for each other, on the other hand, fed into the widespread and Depression-fostered mistrust of sexual unorthodoxy without calling attention to her own sexual behavior. Imagining a potential lesbian relationship created the perfect opportunity for a child to reveal a secret that flouted conventional morality. In Hellman’s hands, it effectively demonstrated the power of rumor to send the innocent into a whirling chasm of destruction.

Crafting the play was painstakingly hard work. For a while, she and Dash rented a cottage on tiny Tavern Island off the coast of Connecticut, where Hammett finished what was to be his last novel, The Thin Man, and she endlessly rewrote her play. Many versions later, all of them “condemned, praised, edited, cut, and fathered, in general, by Dashiell Hammett,” she took the play to Shumlin.¹⁰ Still it required the intervention of good friends to get him to pay attention. When he did, he immediately agreed to produce and direct it. He would go on to produce and direct three more of her plays.

The Children’s Hour opened in 1934 to laudatory reviews. It was, commented one critic, “a genuine contribution to the American theatre. It is that wise, that interesting, that significant. It is that all-fired good.”¹¹ Critics particularly identified Hellman’s talents as a playwright in her capacity to tell a riveting story “with its own distinct brand of thrills and sympathies, coils and recoils.”¹² This was, they agreed, “a fine brave play,” one so cleanly and tightly written that “up until the last quarter … there is not one second when you can let your attention wander, even if you wanted to.”¹³ They noted Hellman’s flair for plot, her capacity for rapidly delineating the persona of each character in precise language and with lifelike dialogue. She had a special talent, they noted, for capturing children without condescension and with full attention to the complexity of their problems. And her story, despite its unpredictable end and its grim theme, simultaneously entertained and uplifted audiences. Here was a theme, critic George Jean Nathan commented, that merited devoted attention to “the ruin and tragedy that befall two young women teachers in a girls’ school following a whispered accusation—on the part of a maleficent little pupil—that they are lesbians.”¹⁴

Only the last part of the final act drew objections. There Hellman’s attention turned from the malicious child—who, along with her grandmother, had dominated the first two acts—to the unhappy love triangle. She focused on Martha and Karen, the two women whose lives devolved into mistrust of each other, ultimately producing the tragic suicide of one and the abandonment of the second by a fiancé who is convinced that they will never escape the rumors that overshadow their lives.¹⁵ New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson admonished her for the melodramatic effect. “Please Miss Hellman,” he wrote in one of several efforts to evaluate the play, “conclude the play before the pistol shot and before the long arm of coincidence starts wobbling in its socket.”¹⁶ But others would come to a different conclusion. Even with its melodramatic ending, wrote a New York Herald Tribune commentator, “The Children’s Hour will still be the rightest thing in the recent American theatre.”¹⁷

Hellman may have had a hit on her hands, but she also had a controversy. Mindful of the fact that Arthur Hornblow’s The Captive, a play about lesbian lovers, had been attacked and closed down in 1926, critics repeatedly raised (if only to dismiss) the charge of sensationalism. Had Hellman, they asked, introduced the subject of “unnatural affection” only for its box-office effect? Most agreed that what one critic called her “honesty of purpose” should overcome audience skepticism. “Certainly there can be no offense to the adult mind,” he wrote. “On the contrary, the effect should be highly salutary in the horror aroused at the enormity of irresponsible slander in such matters.”¹⁸ But the refusal of many to name lesbianism, their insistence on substituting euphemisms like “unnatural behavior” or “abnormal attachment,” drew persistent attention. Some described lesbianism as “a forbidden theme … which is not discussed openly in respectable society.”¹⁹ Others criticized the title (which Hellman had fought to keep) on the grounds that it falsely advertised the play as suitable for the young.

Hellman bitterly resented the charge that she had chosen the title for The Children’s Hour for its scandalous appeal or that the notoriety of the play stemmed from its attention to a subject that “has been forbidden in the theater as unfit for public illustration.”²⁰When a negative review in Town and Country magazine opined that she had chosen the title for the sake of its “smug sensationalism,” she angrily demanded a retraction from the magazine’s editor. She deserved it, she wrote, not because the reviewer was “malicious and vulgar”—that was his right—but because he had cast aspersions on her honesty and insinuated that she merely sought publicity for herself. “It is not his privilege to interpret my motives or my character,” she concluded.²¹ The reviewer lost his job.

The scenario in which Lillian protested that she was a victim of misguided reviewers and critics would become increasingly familiar. Like so much else that Hellman would write, The Children’s Hour appealed to audiences for reasons quite different from those she imagined. Hellman had intended The Children’s Hour as a morality play about good and evil; she had wanted to question the impact of rumor, the failure of justice in the face of crowd action. Hellman had never imagined Mary Tilford, the child liar, as the “miniature genius of wickedness,” who appeared to audiences and critics as diabolical, fiendish, sadistic, and vicious. Rather, she would later tell an interviewer, she imagined the thirteen-year-old child as “neurotic, sly, but not the utterly malignant creature which play-goers see in her.”²² To her the real villain was the destructive and judgmental grandmother, who had willingly absorbed and spread the lie. The Children’s Hour was “really not a play about lesbianism,” she repeated more than once, “but about a lie. The bigger the lie the better, as always.”²³

Yet the harder Hellman fought, the more obscure became her intended theme, and the more visible the question of lesbianism. Believing that her integrity and her reputation for honesty were at stake, resenting what she believed to be an unwarranted debate over her motives, she tried endlessly to get people to pay attention to the consequences of the “big lie” as opposed to the subject matter of the accusation. She deplored the publicity generated when the producers encountered resistance from potential female leads who did not want to be associated with lesbianism. She encouraged her producer to fight a ban imposed by Boston because, said the mayor, The Children’s Hour was “identified with a theme that would automatically bring it to the attention of the Board of Censors.”²⁴And she publicly denounced the decision by London’s Lord Chamberlain that the play could be offered only under a limited private subscription basis. It was not to be fully produced there for twenty years.²⁵

Lillian and her producer, Herman Shumlin, fought each act of censorship, fearing that the accusations would obscure the themes she wanted to emphasize. Yet a year after The Children’s Hour opened, when Sam Goldwyn offered to turn it into a film, she changed her tune. As if to demonstrate how little the lesbian theme mattered as compared to the big lie, she altered the film script, turning the “inappropriate acts” witnessed by Mary Tilford into scenes from a heterosexual love triangle. Her new script featured a sly and more appropriately neurotic child claiming to have observed the fiancé leaving the bedroom of the other woman. It retained only the tiniest reference to a possible attraction between the two women, eliminated Martha’s suicide, and sent the reconciled heterosexual couple off to Australia to live happily ever after. To distance the film still further from its Broadway provenance, Hellman reluctantly agreed to give up the title for which she had originally fought. The adapted film emerged as These Three.

For all the publicity, perhaps because of it, The Children’s Hour ran on Broadway for two years to enthusiastic audiences. Hellman did not appreciate her good fortune. Right after the play’s November 20, 1934, opening, she fled to Hollywood, unclear about how to handle her newfound success. She describes herself as puzzled “about why people wanted to interview me,” confused about “what to do with the money that poured in every week.” She felt herself, she later wrote, “too young for my years: high spirited enough to question the value of such fame and low spirited enough to refuse the natural pleasures it should have brought.”²⁶ New-found celebrity turned into despair as she realized that a successful first play would impose on her the heavy burden of public expectations of future success.

Her second play, Days to Come, turned out to be a critical and box-office disaster whose failure Hellman never fully understood. She started work on Days to Come in 1935. Nominally, the play focuses on labor strife in a small Midwestern town. Andrew Rodman, a paternalistic and well-intentioned Midwestern factory owner, has, along with his family, developed a reputation as a caring and generous employer. Hit hard by the Depression and by his wife, Julie’s, excessive spending, Rodman is forced to cut wages and to lay off some workers in order to save the factory. The workers turn to an outside union organizer to protect their jobs. Rodman, in turn, brings in strike breakers who turn out to be gangsters. Class issues divide community members against each other with predictably tragic results. Layered into the play is a second tale about Rodman’s unhappy wife, Julie, whose affair with Rodman’s best friend and lawyer places her in a position to witness the crimes of the gangsters and to save the life of the organizer. A third thread follows the machinations of Rodman’s sister, who, anxious about her fortune, fosters much of the conflict between the two sides. The resulting violence not only turns his former workers and the community against Rodman but splits his family asunder. Good and evil are pitted directly against each other: the humane and virtuous workers responsible for the prosperity of the factory owner’s family are trampled by the forces of industry and the thuggish hand of greed.

Hellman thought she had written a more complicated play, one about a financially and emotionally troubled family unable to resolve problems not of their own making. As she put it, “they lived in a place and time where old convictions, a way of life, clashed sharply with unexpected new problems.”²⁷ The Depression, source of these problems, serves as a background that allows Hellman to sympathize with the weak-willed and good-hearted Rodman and with workers who rely on a rising trade unionism to protect their jobs. The only true measure of evil lies in the strike breakers, whose appearance signals the victory of the sister and the lawyer, both more interested in profits than in the well-being of the workers. But the play’s message was too obscure for its audience. Hellman’s sharp arrows directed against the selfish search for individual wealth missed their target. Instead of wounding the greedy sister and manipulative lawyer, they pierced an unfaithful wife and a labor-organizer lover whose passion for love and justice compete with each other. The play, which opened on December 15, 1936, closed after only seven performances.

The failure of Days to Come tells us something about the tormented choices of the 1930s. On its face, as the critic Joseph Wood Krutch noted, Days to Come promoted “a definite Marxian moral—namely, that men are sundered from one another by a difference in class interests between which no personal good-will can adjudicate.”²⁸ But Hellman described the play as something else altogether. “It’s the family I’m interested in principally,” she told an interviewer just a few days before the play opened, “the strike and social manifestations are just backgrounds. It’s a story of innocent people on both sides who are drawn into conflict and events far beyond their comprehension.”²⁹ The outcome of Days to Come rested, after all, on the twists and turns of a plot in which a dependent wife drives her husband into debt; a greedy sister persuades her brother to disappoint desperate workers rather than risk her own profits; a lawyer’s affair with a factory owner’s wife leads him to place self-interest above duty to his client. More than forty years later, when the play was revived for the first time, critic Terry Curtis Fox commented on its complex amalgamation of moral and political subjects. To him, Days to Come seemed to open up Hellman’s “great continuing theme … that there is no line between private morality and public policy, that political choices are moral choices.”³⁰ In the thirties, Hellman chose to see in the play a different dimension: she focused on the willingness of individuals to put their own interests before those of community. To her, its moral lay in its condemnation of the ease with which one person could betray another to protect himself.

Years later, when her celebrity was assured, she would remember the pain that failure caused her, calling “the failure of a second work … more damaging than failure ever will be again” because it made the success of the first seem like an accident.³¹ “Failure in the theater,” she wrote to Arthur Kober after the play closed, “is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.”³² It was to be two years “before I could write another play, The Little Foxes,” she later commented, “and when I did get to it I was so scared that I wrote it nine times.”³³ Yet for all her agony, Hellman never gave up on Days to Come. To her it seemed “a good report of rich liberals in the 1930’s, of a labor leader who saw through them, of a modern lost lady, and has in it a correct prediction of how conservative the American labor movement was to become.”³⁴ Four decades after its debut the play was, for the first time, revived for a twelve-day limited run in a small theater. Hellman took the opportunity to explain it once again to an interviewer: for her, the divisions incited by class may have been present, but they were not central. Rather, the idea that some people remain simple and undemanding while others pursue self-gratification, that the honorable may become victims of injustice while justice eludes the principled, that one’s own integrity is, in the end, all there is constituted the fundamental values and themes that would underline her life’s work in the theater and beyond. “Justice and injustice, integrity and dishonor, principle and self-gratification,” to paraphrase one critic, were the themes around which both her life and her work evolved.³⁵

Emerging as a playwright in the depths of the deepest economic depression the United States had ever known, Hellman might have taken a different route. She had, after all, first thought of herself as a writer of fiction, and particularly of short stories. But with little recognition for her stories, the theater seemed a logical choice. Hellman found there “a place for the expression and exchange of ideas,” a location where she could “present an idea for the consideration of intelligent audiences.”³⁶

And yet Hellman was not drawn to the lively ferment of the off-Broadway theater of the late twenties and early thirties. Her desire to develop and articulate ideas rather than to investigate form led her rather to follow the social realism of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. She was not attracted to theater companies like the Provincetown Players, which turned to direct social criticism in the late 1920s. Nor did she follow in the footsteps of the new experimental theater that emerged in the early years of the Depression and whose quintessential expression is in the Group Theatre. Founded in New York in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford (both of whom Lillian admired), and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre created a community of actors, playwrights, and directors who pioneered ensemble acting and freely responded to play scripts by turning the production of a play into a collaborative project. Some of Lillian’s soon-to-be-well-known contemporaries, including friends John Howard Lawson and Marc Blitzstein as well as Elmer Rice and Clifford Odets, found inspiration in the Group Theatre’s effort to join political statements with acting methods that drew on real-life issues and characters. Just a year after The Children’s Hour opened, New York’s Group Theatre offered to the public two plays by Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing, which did not merely critique the American experience but called for political action. They suggested a newly assertive theatrical experience in which plays and playwrights called upon audiences to raise their voices, often in alignment with the dogma of a rising Communist Party.

Hellman took no part in this theater of protest, nor did she express much interest in the New Playwrights Theater or the WPA Theater project in which many famous playwrights and theater figures like Blitzstein and the young Carson McCullers made their names. Her work, Arthur Miller would later recall, was not angry enough. And yet the critics of the day had little doubt about her anger. “She is a specialist in hate and frustration, a student of helpless rage, an articulator of inarticulate loathings,” wrote one commentator after seeing Days to Come.³⁷ The anger, in Miller’s judgment, didn’t seem to take political form. It didn’t seem to him “to belong to these impassioned, challenging plays.”³⁸ There was, remembered Miller, “a certain eloquence in her dialogue that set her apart from the theatre of protest which was so brash and exciting then.”³⁹ Hellman, in Miller’s view, was “preeminently Broadway.”

The artist of Hellman’s mind’s eye needed to involve herself not with immediate political questions but with the larger concerns of her generation. Her job was to make the world a better place to live by engaging with moral issues rather than problems of the day. With some exceptions, Hellman chose subjects engaged with everyday life: the tension between human feeling and the pursuit of wealth, the corruption of money, the perversity of extended family relationships, the unforeseen costs of human apathy. She wanted to underscore the behavior of bullies, to condemn racism, and to portray people who could resist both. She sought to illuminate pretense and vanity, and above all to focus attention on questions of justice.⁴⁰ She did this by drawing lively portraits of individuals confronting the conundrums posed by these issues in their daily lives. Like Ibsen, she placed her characters in what the critic Jacob Adler has described as “clear and firm dramatic structures.”⁴¹ And like Ibsen, she produced problem plays—plays that assumed, perhaps too optimistically, that “to reveal a problem is a step toward correcting it.” Adler called her “the single most important American Ibsenian outside of Arthur Miller.”⁴²

To Hellman, a good society included one without poverty or racism, one built on principles of social justice. But she did not advocate for these by calling her audiences to arms or urging political action; nor did she turn to abstract questions about the human condition as her successors in the theater were apt to do. It was not, she told one interviewer, that “all literature must have social or economic implications.” And yet, she continued, “unless you are a pathological escapist there must be some sort of propaganda in everything you write.” For her, propaganda meant explicit advocacy of some cause. “The truth must be the main objective of any one who seeks a form of literary expression … If a person doesn’t want to involve himself with the truth he has no business trying to write at all.”⁴³

Hellman attributed her moral positions not to any particular event, such as the New Deal, but to her moment in time. She belonged to a particular generation, she told an audience of Harvard students in 1961, a “little bracket … too old to be depression children, too young to have known the fun and brilliance of the 1920s.” As a writer, she was part of this “between-times group.” Unlike her literary predecessors who had emerged in “the hurricane winds of the early 1920s … who were ten or fifteen years older than my generation … more brilliant and frequently more talented than mine,” she saw herself as having missed out. “We were born later than Faulkner, or Fitzgerald or Hart Crane or Hemingway or O’Neill,” she ruminated, “and by the time we might have been ready the depression had appeared and the world, and literature took a sharp turn.”⁴⁴ Her group was “bright and lively, but not as good.” They represented “a bracket of ten years between the wonderful fresh wind that blew so good between the First World War and the days when what we called a depression … turned later into a world storm, the ugliest war of history.”⁴⁵ Hers was a generation tasked with sorting out the meaning of social justice, racism, and fascism, of good and evil in a dangerous and insecure world.

This sense of herself as a creature of her time permeated her work and obligated her to speak to the moment. Neither she nor any writer could accurately account for the influences on her work, she would say, but like the best playwrights of her moment, she found herself caught in the “combination of economic fear and spiritual uplift” of the Depression years, admiring of “the new and daring and remarkable things that were happening in the country.”⁴⁶ A good play, she thought, must be based on real life; writers could write only about the “world that was made for them … they reflect their origins.” She would not identify her own location in space and time as “influence.” Most writers, she would say when asked, invented influences for interviewers: clarity about a work’s origins in “influences, people, events, comes much later, and sounds good, but very often hasn’t much to do with the facts.”⁴⁷

The best writers, of whom she hoped she was one, would “bring new light” to the world from which they had come. In that respect, she thought of the theater as “the clearest mirror of its time.”⁴⁸ For her, the issue of why a writer wrote was less important than the product. The writer, she thought, had to have something to say: her job was to “use it right. Right? Right for what? Right to have something to say and to say it well.”⁴⁹ But there was no point in speaking if nobody listened. To achieve her goal of addressing broad questions that extended beyond the political-economic crisis of the 1930s, Hellman would have to find larger audiences than the relatively narrow world of experimental theater allowed. Her ambition was to write “serious plays for the commercial theater.” To this end, she sought “first class” productions in good theaters whenever possible. She wanted the attention of major reviewers in the leading media. And she wanted the monetary rewards of successful Broadway production.

The theater proved to be a curious choice for Hellman, exacting compromises from her that she did not enjoy and to which she sometimes could not acquiesce. To attract the audiences she wanted, she chose to resort to plot devices and melodrama that often drew criticism; these earned her the reputation of a middlebrow rather than a highbrow writer. To acquire first-class productions for her plays—equity actors and a professional stage to show off her work—she would need to cultivate the acquaintance of producers and actors whom she claimed to despise. She denied that she craved the glamour of the theater, insisting that to her it was mostly hard work, but she found that she relished center stage and enjoyed consorting with leading actors, actresses, producers, directors, and eventually the movie moguls who would employ her in Hollywood. She dropped their names in conversation until, eventually, her name became one of those that others dropped.

Hellman worked hard at her writing, disciplining herself to put in long hours and to work to deadlines. In her plays, as in her short essays and later in her memoirs, she relied on careful research and thoughtful preparation, keeping notebooks for each of her projects and recording in them ideas as well as incidents. Sometimes research involved, as it did for Days to Come, visits to unfamiliar sites; other times her subjects demanded investigations of particular personas, like that of the labor militant. She wanted to get every detail right. For Watch on the Rhine, she claimed to have made digests of more than twenty-five books, to have read widely in the memoirs and the history of the period, and to have kept notebooks that ran to a thousand pages or more.⁵⁰ All her life she explored, or had assistants explore, such things as the appropriateness of particular locations, the dates of key events, the attributes of period garments. Her concern for accuracy persisted throughout her life—a particular irony in light of accusations of lying that hounded her at the end of her life.

To write well she claimed the need for calm, “for long days, months of fiddling.”⁵¹ Not infrequently, she complained, as she did to Arthur Kober at one point, about the interruptions that got in the way. “It is becoming increasingly obvious,” she wrote Kober from New York, “that I cannot work here: the telephone, the cause, the thousand nuisances who want me to speak or breathe or donate, the friends and half-friends who see no reason why you can’t stop working and come to dinner and run right back and work after dinner.”⁵² Playwriting was, like any other form of writing, not glamorous, she told a Wellesley College audience.⁵³ Hellman thought writing for the theater a magical thing—a gift that you either had or didn’t and that could not be taught. Yet she credited Hammett with teaching her how to write. “Patiently and persistently he hammered away. He began by attacking most of what I had written, teaching me along the way that writers must go to school at writing, and learn and read and think and study.”⁵⁴ But she was a good student and learned quickly to use dialogue to evoke character. Under Hammett’s tutelage, she became expert at drawing sharply delineated characters and providing them with succinct and often raffish voices. In a few lines, she could capture the essence of a personality as well as its major flaws.⁵⁵

About 1942: She credited Hammett with teaching her how to write. (© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Hellman counted on Hammett for critical readings of one draft after another: “Over and over again he would tell me how bad was the first draft, the second, the fifth, the sixth; over and over again I would bring the next drafts, giving them to him with what I thought was the truthful notice that if this wasn’t any good I would never write again and might kill myself.”⁵⁶ The Little Foxes went through nine drafts, each of them worked on by Hammett, perhaps, thought Hellman, because after Days to Come he was as scared for her future as she was. Watch on the Rhine was “the only play that came out in one piece,” she recalled.⁵⁷ Hammett never shirked. In one instance—the last speech of Autumn Garden—when she could not get it right, he rewrote the speech for her. Repeatedly and gratefully, she acknowledged his role as a critic. “He was generous with anybody who asked for help,” she told an interviewer after his death. “He felt that you didn’t lie about writing and anybody who couldn’t take hard words was about to be shrugged off, anyway. He was a dedicated man about writing. Tough and generous.”⁵⁸

Her biggest difficulty, she would often say, was plotting. “I’m scared of plotting,” she confided to Arthur Kober. “The few things I’ve ever done well were plots laid out for me beforehand.”⁵⁹ Unsurprisingly, Hellman leaned heavily on Dashiell Hammett for many of her plot ideas. The idea for The Children’s Hour came from him, as did the framework of her last original play, Toys in the Attic. But her plot structures tended to be contrived: in the manner of the “well-made” play, they relied on surprising revelations and twists. To bring her plays to their conclusions, Hellman introduced such devices as a letter found in a Bible, an overheard telephone conversation, or a revelation that there was no keyhole in the door through which sexual contact was said to have been observed. These fed the popular audience’s desire for drama but did little to enhance the literary quality of the work.

Wanting her plays to be read as well as acted, Hellman made sure that the literary and dramatic forms “come together.”⁶⁰ When she did not have time to ensure that she had got things right in a script prepared for rehearsal, she edited it for the published version, recasting a sentence, changing the place of a verb, or revising punctuation to meet the standards of readers. She was finicky about every word, seeking, as the drafts of her plays show, the right adjective and the pithy phrase, attempting in a sentence to capture a character’s personality or a complicated motive. And she was sensitive about efforts to change anything: “It is not getting an idea for a play that drives playwrights mad so much as the business of having the idea still recognizable, even to its author, at the completion of the script,” she explained to an interviewer.⁶¹

As her plays entered production, Hellman became more possessive of her work and reluctant to cede even an iota of control. The writer, she insisted, was the heart of the process of producing plays. She had seen the Russian theater, she said more than once, and appreciated its sometimes wonderful “production, directing and acting,” but Russia was no longer producing good new writers and so, she judged, it could have only “dead end theatre. Fine to see, but it ain’t going nowhere.”⁶² As a writer, she took full responsibility for failure: “I do not believe actors break plays or make them either,” she asserted.⁶³ For these reasons she wanted to maintain control over her work and found collaboration of any kind difficult. She wielded a heavy hand with regard to casting her plays, attended rehearsals regularly, and accompanied plays when they first went out on the road. She believed in the importance of every word she had written, refusing to allow actors or director any input at all. She would, and did, fight in defense of her positions, insisting that this was a way to work out differences and often revealing her legendary temper if opponents continued to disagree. “I didn’t know about my nature,” she wrote in the early forties, “which turned out to be angry at the suggestion of any change, even the most innocent and foolish.”⁶⁴ But she chided those who took her anger seriously, dismissing her explosions as “a comic waste” and attributing them to nerves “in a time when people believed too much in the civil rights of something called temperament.”⁶⁵

Hellman claims to have discovered these qualities when The Children’s Hour went into production. In one of her first stands, she fought successfully for the child, Mary Tilford, to retain a lisp that everyone including her producer-director, Herman Shumlin, thought overdone. As she explained, “I learned early that in the theater, good or bad, you’d better stand on what you did.”⁶⁶ She learned her lesson well. “I took a stand on the first play and now I have a reputation for stubbornness,” she told an interviewer.⁶⁷ The quality earned her a reputation as “difficult”—a label she acknowledged with some humor. Being difficult, she told a group of Swarthmore college students, “means refusing to alter a line, protecting your own work, arguing for salary,” and then she described the qualities of the difficult woman as “pig-like stubbornness” and “rigidity.”⁶⁸ Harold Clurman, who directed Hellman’s 1951 production of The Autumn Garden, agreed with Hellman’s assessment of her persona. “There’s a certain rigidity about her, a certain self-protective element,” he told an interviewer.⁶⁹

To be fair, Hellman’s refusal to budge seemed to be as much a principled decision for her as one based on ego. Much later in life, she exercised the same kind of control over the work of Dorothy Parker (of whose estate she was executor) when she refused permission to adapt her work to film. Nor would she allow Hammett’s unpublished stories to see the light of day, claiming that he had not thought them ready. Of her own work she was equally protective. Even when she saw the need for changes, she could not easily make them, and never at a moment’s notice. It threw her off when she tried to do otherwise—as she did, for example, when she worked with Leonard Bernstein and several lyricists including, finally, Richard Wilbur on the 1956 production of the musical Candide. She had adapted the book and designed the characters, but as the musical went into rehearsal she found herself overwhelmed by demands to alter one element after another to fit the needs of a musical production. The musical that finally appeared was far too long and something of what she called a “mish mash.” She defended herself later from accusations about its messiness: “I was working with people who knew more about the musical theatre than I did, I took suggestions and made changes that I didn’t believe in, tried making them with speed I cannot manage.”⁷⁰

But in the end she put down the weaknesses of Candide to her own failure at the art of collaboration. “I am not a good collaborator because I am unable to do the kind of pressure work that goes with other people’s understandable demands. I am unable to take other people’s opinions about writing. I work best on my own for good or bad.”⁷¹ She generalized this into a commentary about herself. Noting about Candide that she “had become, with time, too anxious to stay out of fights,” she remarked that “everything I had learned about the theater, all my instinct went out the window.” Finally she concluded that collaboration “was truly not my nature, that I must never go through it again.”⁷² Hellman’s ready acknowledgment of her weakness at collaboration did not prevent her from defending her original book and attributing the musical’s failures to repeated efforts to tinker with her original conception. Finally, when Bernstein wanted to adapt the original music to a new treatment of the subject, she agreed, provided that her name be removed from its revivals.

At the root of Hellman’s neurotic behavior lay anxiety about the end product. The production process overwhelmed her—perhaps because, much as she tried, she could not control it. Though she insisted on a heavy hand in selecting or approving casts, in attending rehearsals, in faithful adherence to her words, she found, as the critic Walter Kerr noted, “the simple act of entering the production process so fundamentally distasteful, such an invasion of creative privacy, that she can rarely bring herself to write about it; one senses that she does not wish to remember it.”⁷³ She once recalled that she “complained and fussed a good deal” during rehearsals for The Little Foxes and then added that she only knew that “because I have continued to do so through the years.” Others testify to her irascibility. Harold Clurman remembered her whispering audibly during rehearsals. “It’s disturbing to me and disturbing the actors,” he told her. “She didn’t understand that the actor is also a sensitive being just as she is.”⁷⁴ Austin Pendleton, who acted in a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, remembers her sitting in the back row of the orchestra section during rehearsals loudly dictating notes about the actors’ performances to her assistant. Once she walked around the theater to check sight lines and called out to director Mike Nichols all the mistakes she thought he was making. This incident, according to Pendleton, drove Nichols to ask her to stay away from rehearsals until the first public preview.⁷⁵

As her plays came closer to opening night, she became increasingly nervous—pacing through rehearsals, drinking, and unable to sit still. “I have never felt anything but fear and resentment that what was private is now to become public, what was mine is no longer mine alone,” she told a Harvard audience. “More than anything else the commitment takes place on that day, and final commitments, a final having to stand up, stand beside, take responsibility for, open yourself to, is for me an act of such proportion that I have never on all the many first days that came, ceased to be my kind of sick.”⁷⁶ Pendleton, who directed the 1981 production of The Little Foxes that starred Elizabeth Taylor as Regina, provides a vivid picture of her behavior on such occasions. There wasn’t “one scene that could make it to opening night without her saying she hated it,” he affirms. Toward the end of the New York previews, Hellman, still unhappy with how things were going, stormed out of the theater at the second intermission and, in full view of the preview audience, pounded her cane on the ground to emphasize how much she hated the performance. Pendleton says of himself: “I just lost it, and I started yelling—the lobby’s jammed, people are ordering drinks in line—and I started yelling, ‘This is the worst fucking night of my life.’ To which Hellman yelled back, ‘Every night I see this fucking production is the worst fucking night of my life.’” This incident so upset Pendleton that he left the theater, unable to watch Act 3. He walked around the block several times, threatening to quit the show, until the curtain came down, and then he retreated with some close friends to an obscure bar where he thought nobody could find him. Just a few minutes into their first drinks, Hellman, who had tracked him down, called. “You still angry?” Pendleton recalls her asking in a way that he found enchanting. “We laughed for a few minutes about our blow-up,” he remembers, “and I had a wonderful hour or so of drinking with my friends.” The relationship mended; the revival turned out to be a critical success.⁷⁷

Hellman’s neurotic misbehavior was in such full play on opening nights that Hammett, whenever he could, avoided them. Time and again she recalled the scene of William Randolph Hearst and a large party walking out during the middle of the first act of Days to Come, making loud negative comments as they did so. “I vomited in the back aisle … I had to go home and change my clothes. I was drunk,” she tells us in one version of the story.⁷⁸ In another she describes herself getting sick in a back alley. She offered her lecture audiences vivid descriptions of herself able to watch a first night only from the wings, or of herself vomiting, getting drunk, or simply leaving the theater. And she admitted that she “jump[ed] up and down through most performances.”⁷⁹ Almost always, after the opening of a play, successful or not, she fled the scene—for the West Coast (after The Children’s Hour and Days to Come), to Cuba (after The Little Foxes). Nor did success alleviate the pain. She “snarled at it,” she wrote. “It took me years to find out that I was frightened of what it did to people and instinctively I did not trust myself to handle it.”⁸⁰

Her neurotic behavior in full play. With the 1981 cast of The Little Foxes , Anthony Zerbe, Maureen Stapleton, and Elizabeth Taylor. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

Embedded in Hellman’s persona—her lack of faith in the theater, her fear of failure, her commitment to the craft of writing, her continuing need for adulation and money—are some of the reasons that she took jobs as a Hollywood screenwriter. There were other reasons, of course. In the 1930s, talking films were still quite new and Hollywood was very much in need of the words that would turn actors into mouthpieces. Many of her close friends—Dorothy Parker, the Perelmans, Arthur Kober, and Hammett himself—worked there off and on, transforming plays, novels, and plot lines into movie scripts. Most significant artists, including more distant friends of Hellman’s like John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald, did it for the money. Moving peripatetically from coast to coast, they reaped the lavish rewards and then freely spent their earnings. Many of Hellman’s friends thought of this work as “whoring,” selling their souls at the cost of artistic fulfillment. Hollywood, thought playwright Arthur Miller, was “the heart of decadence.” If Lillian were indeed “a genuine lightbearer,” he and others speculated, she would not be “spending so much of her life writing for Samuel Goldwyn and the other merchants.”⁸¹

Hellman claimed to be “one of the few people who liked writing for pictures” when most of her generation made fun of them.⁸² Screenwriting allowed (indeed required) Hellman to relinquish control of the production process and to trust the cameras to do their work.⁸³ It enabled her to do what she did best: namely to craft believable scenes out of her own, or someone else’s, plot and characters. She took the craft seriously, separating the writing from the shooting of the film in a way that she could never separate the writing of her plays from their production. In Hollywood to revise the script of The Children’s Hour for the film These Three, she wrote to Arthur Kober, “it should be finished some time this week, and then I figure two weeks work, and home.” Director Wyler, she added, wanted her to stay for at least part of the shooting. She would not, she wrote Kober, because “Goldwyn wouldn’t pay me for that, and I wouldn’t do it.”⁸⁴ Writing for Hollywood had its drawbacks, of course: it offered none of the intellectual challenge of live theater where, she told an interviewer, “you can present an idea for the consideration of intelligent audiences, which of course is completely outside the gaudiest opium dreams of possibility in Hollywood.”⁸⁵ But it not only paid very well and regularly, it also allowed her to draw characters quickly and precisely through dialogue—a skill at which she excelled.

Hellman more or less redeemed the failure of Days to Come when she returned to Hollywood to work on the script for Dead End—a Broadway production contracted to Sam Goldwyn as a film. There she made the moral point that had fallen so flat in her failed play. She focused on social injustice and inequality in the context of the Depression, pursuing what one critic called her “single minded devotion to her own idea of what is important today.” Dead End’s author, Sidney Kingsley, had acted with the Group Theatre and written one piece for them before he wrote the Broadway play that Hellman turned into a movie. In it, a working-class heroine, on strike from her job, seeks to salvage the lives of the slum kids in her neighborhood who are courted by the same gangster who is courting her. The kids, whose lives of mischief and petty crime are threatened by luxury housing that is slowly displacing them, are tempted by the apparently glamorous life of crime that the gangster represents. He is countered by an idealistic young architect who rejects the wealth of real estate interests to design housing for the poor and who thus wins the heart of the heroine.

Hellman’s voice permeates the film. The action is melodramatic, but class conflict holds center stage. The gangster, who is wholly bad, comes to a tragic end; the heroine, wholly good, is saved from a moll’s life. But the dead-end kids are good and bad: they could go either way. The film ends with the dream of a hopeful future still only a glimmer in the eye of the idealistic young architect. As in most of her work, Hellman cannot restrain herself from a final summing up. She wants social justice for the poor; she admires not the abstractly idealistic but those who willingly risk their own lives and fortunes to act on their beliefs.

Hellman came closest to hitting her twin goals of attaining artistic success and scoring commercially with The Little Foxes (1939), one of the important plays of the American twentieth century. Set in the South in 1900, it explores some of her conflicted feelings about her wealthy grandmother and uncles, whose rise paralleled what one critic called “the ruthless rise of industrialism” in America. But it also contains hints of nostalgia for the mythical past of a South governed by family values rather than competition for position.

The plot revolves around the efforts of Regina Giddens and her brothers, Ben Hubbard and Oscar Hubbard, to capitalize on a proposed new cotton mill that will make them all rich by paying low wages to the displaced black workers who will become its labor force. The proposal requires each of the three Hubbard siblings to invest one third of the necessary capital. When Regina fails to persuade her sickly husband, Horace, to cooperate in the scheme, her brothers steal his bonds from a bank vault and plan to cut her out of the deal. Horace discovers the theft and decides not to prosecute. Regina, furious, withholds his medicine and watches him die as he struggles to retrieve it. Now in a position to blackmail her brothers, Regina bargains for a larger share of the pie and succeeds. Avarice, manipulation, and murder triumph; the romanticized South is destroyed.

In the context of the Great Depression and its ongoing misery, in the face of the apparent failure of capitalism to restore prosperity, The Little Foxes seemed to many to be a more political play than her earlier efforts. Like her fellow intellectuals of the period, Hellman seemed to have lost faith in the free enterprise system. In contrast to those who hoped that recovery would restore economic progress, Hellman foregrounded the moral crisis posed by the process of industrialization, especially as it would affect the value system of an old South that, whatever its sins, had preserved a graceful old culture. In this context, The Little Foxes appeared not only cynical of capitalism but perhaps a bit too unwilling to face the racial indignities of the old South. “Plainly,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, a professor of theater at Columbia University, a regular reviewer for the Nation magazine, and among the most severe of her critics, “the play is directed against contemporary society.”⁸⁶

Hellman would have none of this. She denied the political implications of the play, claiming that The Little Foxes was designed as “a drama of morality first and last and that anyone who reads too much cynicism into [the Hubbards] is being misled.”⁸⁷ She told one interviewer, “I just wrote what I thought I’d write. It turned out to be an attack. I suppose somebody had to tell me about it afterwards, because I really didn’t know it.”⁸⁸ For her the key questions of the play revolved around such questions as whether humane values would survive the materialism of capitalist demands; or whether the daughter, Alexandra, representing the next generation, would have courage enough to reject the values of her mother and search for a brighter world. Hellman located these questions in the moral sphere—as issues not of politics but of good and evil.⁸⁹ The Little Foxes participated in the broader themes she cared about, including issues of justice and injustice, right and wrong, power and its victims. The play’s keystone line, placed in the mouth of the household’s loyal black servant, Addie, supports both contentions. Addie notes of the Hubbards, “There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.” And then Addie follows with the quiet observation that could almost be a call to action: “Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.”⁹⁰

If critics assessed The Little Foxes as a more political statement than Hellman had meant to make—as propaganda against industrialism—they explained the play’s audience appeal and power as a product of its flaws. The Little Foxes marked Hellman as the author of “well-made” plays. Critics had applied this label to her first plays, as when the New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson commended The Children’s Hour for its “hard, clean economy of word and action” and praised the play as “vigorously planned and written.”⁹¹ But the designation of the “well-made” play took on a more negative connotation when reviewers assessed The Little Foxes. While they continued to approve her tightly knit plot structures, they questioned whether her plays relied too heavily on surprising revelations and plot twists designed to maximize their theatrical appeal. “It is not only a play that is well made. It is a play that is too well made,” wrote one reviewer of The Little Foxes. “It suffers from being far too well contrived for its own enduring health. Much of its writing is much too expert in the worst manner of Ibsen.”⁹² Looking backward from 1939, others wondered whether this had not always been characteristic of her work. Had she not always tailored her plots to fit the needs of the play’s message? How was it that The Children’s Hour turned on the testimony of the only child left in the school over the holidays?

In the eyes of the critics, Hellman was too clever by half. In their view, The Little Foxes not only successfully melded the tightly structured and plot-driven play with melodrama; it did so too successfully. Brooks Atkinson led the chorus, declaring that while Hellman had provided “a knowing job of construction, deliberate and self-contained,” “she writes with melodramatic abandon, plotting torture, death and thievery like the author of an old-time thriller.”⁹³ Joseph Wood Krutch chimed in, claiming that only Hellman’s extraordinary gift for characterization rescued her play from the “righteous uncontrollable anger” that overwhelmed “Hellman’s carefully contrived plots.”⁹⁴ Richard Watts, though he described the play admiringly as honest, pointed, and “more brilliant than even her triumphant previous work,” thought it a “grim, bitter, merciless study … a psychological horror story.”⁹⁵ Hellman never again outlived the verdict of melodrama: “Essentially a melodrama,” wrote one influential critic of her next play, Watch on the Rhine (1941). “The sense of artificial contrivance, also, is more conspicuous.”⁹⁶

In her 1942 introduction to Four Plays, Hellman defended herself against the attacks. To her mind, critics simply did not understand that the theater imposed its own limits, providing a “tight, unbending, unfluid, meager form in which to write.”⁹⁷ Surrounded by three walls, with the audience making up the fourth, Hellman argued that the playwright had little choice but to pretend or, in other words, to “trick up the scene.” She thought the well-made play was one “whose effects are contrived, whose threads are knit tighter than the threads in life and so do not convince.” But she believed her plays did convince, contradicting the notion that her plots were too tightly knit. “I’ve never understood this charge because it seems to me that then one would say, ‘well-madeness, if that’s what it is, too much technique, is bad because it’s bad work, because the writing is bad.’ “⁹⁸ But nobody ever accused her of bad writing, and so the puzzle remained.

Nor did Hellman concede that her plays were melodramatic in any negative sense. Accusations of melodrama, raised with respect to her early plays, reemerged as well in the context of The Little Foxes, whose characters seemed so rigidly demarcated as either good or evil. She believed the meaning of the word had been corrupted by the modern world, and she defended her own plays as melodrama of the good sort. “By definition,” she wrote, melodrama is “a violent dramatic piece, with a happy ending,” where good triumphs over evil. She objected to its current usage to refer to plays that deployed “violence for no purpose, to point no moral, to say nothing,” and appealed to critics to consider that “when violence is actually the needed stuff of the work and comes toward a large enough end, it has been and always will be in the good writer’s field.”⁹⁹

The question, then, was whether the ends were large enough to carry the violence—and here Hellman claimed innocence. She did not see her characters as quite as greedy or as mendacious as her critics insisted. Nor did she see them as good or bad: “Such words have nothing to do with the people you write about.”¹⁰⁰ In her eyes, The Little Foxes was a family saga—a tale of the greed and hatred that infuse a family eager to make its profit from a changing world. Hellman sometimes described it as a satire and other times as a morality play. She had meant, she wrote in Pentimento, “to half-mock my own youthful high-class innocence in Alexandra, the young girl in the play; I had meant people to smile, and to sympathize with, the sad, weak Birdie, certainly I had not meant them to cry; I had meant the audience to recognize some part of themselves in the money-dominated Hubbards; I had not meant people to think of them as villains to whom they had no connection.”¹⁰¹

Whether it went through the nine drafts she claimed to have written or not, The Little Foxes was the play that Hellman described as the most difficult to write and the one with which Hammett was most involved. The play—once again produced and directed by Herman Shumlin and with Tallulah Bankhead in the leading role—was a huge financial success. It would also become her most enduring claim to artistic fame. It ran for 410 performances and was immediately bought for the movies by Sam Goldwyn, who asked Lillian to write the movie script. The film, starring Bette Davis, still appears regularly on late-night television. The play has had several first-class revivals, with great stars vying to play the role of Regina. And it has become a staple of American repertory theater.¹⁰²

After The Little Foxes, no one could doubt that Hellman was a serious playwright. But the dual sin of well-madeness and melodrama continued to vex her. John Gassner, sympathetic to her accomplishments and one of those who continued to count her among the great American playwrights, wrote in 1949: “We have had our reservations; we have felt she plotted too much or calculated her effects for theatrical purposes, if not indeed for propaganda.”¹⁰³ And twenty years after its opening, Jacob Adler had not resolved his critical ambivalence toward The Little Foxes. He thought its carefully tailored plot was subverted by “the total depravity of the Hubbards … their murdering, blackmailing, scheming and stealing sensationalize the play, ultimately making it unbelievable.”¹⁰⁴Critics continued to ask whether Hellman was not too good at what she did: too effective, too careful, too measured. They accused her of writing in a vein that was too vituperative, too direct, and too real. They asked if she was not too angry for a southern playwright, for a moral playwright, for the times in which she wrote, and especially for a woman playwright. They wondered about her political agenda. Such comments would haunt Hellman for the rest of her playwriting career, leading her ultimately to dismiss criticism and to claim that she never read it.

Hellman’s considerable successes with audiences did little to diffuse critical judgments of her plays by criteria that seem, in retrospect, to be narrowly tailored to unexamined assumptions of how a woman should write. These assumptions were just one step removed from judgments about Hellman as an individual. Herald Tribune reviewer Richard Watts and other critics dismissively acknowledged Hellman’s meticulous preparation and careful use of language as if these reflected qualities of womanhood rather than the skills of a playwright.¹⁰⁵ Her effort to draw moral lessons seemed to them typical of women writers. In that context, her penchant for melodrama seemed to cross gender lines. When New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson took her to task for writing sheer melodrama, Hellman challenged the designation. She thought his criticism an expression of discomfort with a woman who paid attention to the serious problems of evil that existed in the world. This she thought was a comment on his nature, not on hers.¹⁰⁶

The commentaries would not be worth dwelling on had they not been a harbinger of what was to come. Whether used positively or negatively, the melodrama label would stick. Fifteen years later, Walter Kerr, a critic who admired Hellman’s work, would note that the quality that lifted her above that of her playwriting contemporaries was “an almost masculine control of the more melodramatic emotions, a muscular arm that comes down on a situation as though it were a handy anvil. Her sound, if I may say so, is usually the sound of steel.”¹⁰⁷ Conflating Hellman’s persona with the content of her plays turned both into fair game. Moralist she may have been, and as moralist she deserved to be taken to task. As a female moralist she was not only fair game but also meddling in politics that were not her sphere. She would be judged not in light of the validity of her positions, but in the shadow of the difficult and opinionated woman that critics perceived.

Firmly and consistently, Hellman resisted the label of a “woman playwright.” The idea, Margaret Chase Harriman discovered when she interviewed her for a New Yorker profile, simply made her angry.¹⁰⁸ Women playwrights, she pointed out in her defense (and with reference to peers who included Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, and Clare Boothe Luce), tended to write sentimental plays. The label conjured up writers of comedies and romances rather than the tough-serious issues with which Hellman dealt. She dismissed such comparisons as “products of the facile imaginations of reviewers and reporters who will go to any length to achieve an easy and meaningless generality.”¹⁰⁹ Protest as she might, Hellman could not escape the designation. “Even the best of our women playwrights,” critic George Nathan wrote of her, “falls immeasurably short of the mark of our best masculine.”¹¹⁰ Hellman would not concede: “I am a playwright. I also happen to be a woman,” she told Harriman, “but I am not a woman playwright.”¹¹¹