Chapter 7
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
I do not believe in giving away the work by which one lives.
—Lillian Hellman, 1946
Work hard enough and you are bound to get rich.
—Lillian Hellman, note to self
Lillian Hellman was born not exactly poor, but poor enough to see herself as an outcast in her mother’s wealthy family. She died with enough money to endow a trust fund for the benefit of persecuted writers and to contribute to the support of her good friend Peter Feibleman for the rest of his life. In between she mostly made her own way, earning her living as a writer for the theater and for the cinema and as an occasional journalist. She worked hard, invested well, and lived comfortably: an apartment in a fashionable section of New York City, a house in the country or on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she could enjoy the sea she loved. She was well cared for by an array of servants who generally included caretakers for her homes, a cook, a housekeeper, and a secretary, as well as additional help when she needed it and as she aged. She traveled widely and well—sometimes on assignments of one sort or another, but often for the pleasure of the trip. She was famous—some might say infamous—for half of her life, a celebrity in every sense.
This picture might not be unusual were its subject male. But Lillian Hellman was a female who had neither inherited nor married into wealth. She was certainly not the first or only woman of her generation to rise by her own efforts. Actress and movie producer Mary Pickford, writer Fannie Hurst, and cosmetics entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker all come immediately to mind. But Hellman’s money and lifestyle generated more comment than most. Had she been a male, she would have been perceived as the archetype of the American dream. But she was a female who prospered because she adopted what was, in the mid-twentieth century, a decidedly transgressive gender role. As she aimed to live by her own standards of desire, so she sought to construct an economically self-sufficient life for herself. She paid attention to how much she earned, managed her resources carefully, counted and kept track of her assets. These qualities fit public expectations of an upwardly mobile male. But the casual onlooker, observing these qualities in a female, accounted them tightfisted, miserly, penny-pinching. To that onlooker, Hellman’s lifelong financial vigilance seemed decidedly unwomanly. It generated pejorative adjectives like grasping and greedy. Hellman’s daily involvement with the details of her financial affairs seems at first glance to justify the negative adjectives and even to border on hypocrisy. Her accumulated creature comforts, including expensive jewelry, fur coats, and beachfront houses, seemed to contradict her commitments to social justice in a fairer, more equitable society. But another glance suggests something of a paradox. Hellman’s moral outlook (and the focus of some of her plays) centered on the corruption of money. But to live as an independent woman required her to pay close attention to the very thing she found corrupting.
Peter Feibleman attributes Hellman’s relationship to money to the New Orleans experience: “She was scared of poverty,” he thought, because she didn’t have either looks or money as a child. She had “a contempt of the rich and an admiration of them, a contempt for money and a desire to have it.”1 But there was something else. The contradiction tells us something about how Hellman arranged her life. To live as an independent writer required financial resources. Yet, as her plays repeatedly suggested, Hellman believed that money inspired human corruption. The challenge of earning large quantities of money and remaining true to herself became Hellman’s test. We are able to reconstruct how she met the challenge by reassembling some of the legal and other documents she left behind. These might help up to understand just what a remarkable achievement it was for an unmarried woman, and a writer at that, to accumulate a small fortune without relying on family money or male support. Reading between the lines of these documents, we see not only the measure of the achievement but something of the price she paid as her personality altered to accommodate her complicated aspirations.
Hellman came to maturity in a generation when more and more women went out to work, to be sure, but when the idea of an ambitious and economically independent woman still stirred as much animosity as curiosity. To earn her living as a writer and to achieve recognition on the Broadway stage as the author of serious plays—and in Hollywood as a significant scriptwriter—required a range of qualities generally considered in the early and mid-twentieth century to be the province of men. These included a robust vocational commitment, the capacity to identify as a worker who made a living by the pen, and the self-confidence that she had something to say to the larger world. But those alone would not be enough. To sustain and ensure success, Hellman would need not only a strong voice but a forceful and demanding persona. She would need, as Feibleman put it, to make her own opportunity as a playwright to compete in a world with men.2 As she learned to exercise these attributes, she adopted a style of public behavior that seemed a travesty of womanhood. Her reputation as an angry woman—aggressive, controlling, and rude—preceded her. Admired as a writer, she became the subject of humor and parody.
At the same time, this difficult woman accumulated the financial resources that permitted her to exercise a quintessentially female role. Those who encountered Hellman in the thirties often expressed surprise at how feminine she appeared. Her designer clothes, her gracious manners, her slim and carefully crossed ankles, the tea rose perfume all suggested a softer, more generous, and kinder persona than her public image allowed. The money Hellman earned provided the temptingly cozy environments where she entertained friends and relations in graceful style, spaces that one friend described as “elegantly furnished, but … comfortable.”3 Money also enabled her to affirm her principles through the generous help she could give to causes she cared about. And when the time came, her money provided for her ill father, for her dying friend Dashiell Hammett, and for her own physical needs as she herself grew older and sicker.
Like the hero of any Horatio Alger story, Hellman accumulated her wealth through luck, pluck, and hard work. In the late twenties and early thirties, when her own income was sporadic and she was still a young adult, she relied on her husband, Arthur Kober, and then on Dashiell Hammett. The first significant sums she earned came from the successful run of The Children’s Hour in 1934 and from the lucrative employment in Hollywood that followed it. Lillian was familiar with the Hollywood scene, having worked as a reader before the success of The Children’s Hour. She returned afterward to work on the movie script that became These Three, then accepted an offer from Samuel Goldwyn to write the script for The Dark Angel. Goldwyn, pleased at her success and convinced of her ability, offered to put her under a long-term contract. Hellman portrays this negotiation in Pentimento as an act of courtship: she enticed Goldwyn to chase after her by disappearing to Paris. When he finally tracked her down, he offered her “a contract with a fine clause about doing nothing but stories I liked and doing them where and when I liked. I had become valuable to Mr. Goldwyn because I had left him for reasons he didn’t understand. For many years that made me an unattainable woman, as desirable as such women are, in another context, for men who like them that way.”4 The contract she finally negotiated with Goldwyn allowed her to write two films of her own choosing per year, over a three-year period. She would be expected to live in Hollywood during the ten-week writing period set aside for each film, and she would be paid the then astonishingly high sum of $2,500 for each working week. Writing and living in Hollywood had its drawbacks, of course, but it not only paid very well and regularly, it was good training.
Hellman tells us that she squandered the money she earned on drink and parties. She called these the “wild fat” years. Perhaps. But it was in this period that she moved from the second-class hotels and furnished rooms in which she had been living to take up more comfortable quarters in various sublet apartments and residence hotels. She lived off and on with Hammett, generally in apartment hotels, sometimes escaping to more isolated places to write and occasionally creating a home at more elegant residences such as the St. Moritz and the Plaza. By the late thirties she had begun to live well. When she traveled west by train, she occupied drawing rooms rather than sleeping compartments, or she chose to fly on the newly scheduled airlines. On the West Coast, she stayed with Hammett in rooms he took at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There, he notoriously partied and drank until he was out of money, then hid away until someone bailed him out or his next check came.
For all her success in Hollywood, Hellman remained contemptuous of it as a place to live and could not stay there for any length of time. Hammett often engaged in his most flagrant alcoholic binges there and gave vent to his most outrageous sexual and social behavior. By habit, he invited young women to his rooms, where they remained for days until his money gave way and his alcoholic haze lifted. Undoubtedly Hammett’s free-spending ways contributed to Hellman’s perception that Hollywood “stands as the most preposterous civilization of all time.” But she objected as well to its flaunting of money. She could not bear “the elaborate and pretentious dinner parties” given by the film people. “You find yourself twelve at table with twelve footmen and two majordomos,” she explained to one interviewer, “and then food that you’d throw right back at the counterman in a dairy lunch is set before you with fancy gestures and on gold plate.”5 Yet the commute had its benefits: she earned enough money in Hollywood to support a bicoastal life style, and she enjoyed the glamour that rubbed off on her through association with the famous and the powerful. Despite her protests about spending too freely, she lived extravagantly, and mostly in hotels. “Anybody’s a fool who doesn’t live in a hotel,” she wrote to Arthur Kober around this time, “and me—I’m going right back to the Plaza where everything comes up in a silver service elaborate enough for royalty.”6 She was living there when she signed the contract for The Little Foxes in December 1938.
The Little Foxes turned into a big hit that enabled her to put a down payment on the 130-acre farm in Pleasantville, New York, that she called Hardscrabble. With a little financial help from Max Hellman and some from Hammett, she closed on the farm on June 1, 1939, and after a period of renovation, moved in the following May.7 The farm, bought in her name alone, turned out to be everything she had hoped. In the light, airy rooms of the old house, she wrote five of her plays, following a rigorous work schedule that involved several hours at her desk in the morning, staying away from visitors until after lunch, and often returning to work in the late afternoons and evenings.
From Pleasantville, where Hellman and Hammett lived for thirteen years, it took just an hour and a half to drive to New York City. Hellman kept a car (a Cadillac after the war) to get back and forth and never gave up on urban life. She sublet apartments—often very elegant ones like the one she occupied on the third floor of the Henry Clews house at 27 West 51st Street. Small though it was (two rooms and a kitchen and bath), the Clews house was a distinguished, mansion that added luster to Hellman’s name. She moved from the Clews house in November 1941 to a somewhat larger space at 5 East 82nd Street, just off 5th Avenue. Three years later, she purchased a graceful Georgian townhouse at 63 East 82nd Street for $15,000 down and a $33,000 mortgage. She was not yet forty years old and the owner of two spacious homes, each of them bought with income she earned as a writer. The new house was just two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the heart of the fashionable Upper East Side that she loved. The house featured a duplex that she rented out, a triplex for her own use, a basement apartment for a resident superintendent, and two sixth-floor maid’s rooms.
The farm turned out to be everything she had hoped. With Hammett about 1949. (Eileen Darby)
She purchased a graceful Georgian townhouse. (Photo by Alice Kessler-Harris)
Sixty-three East 82nd Street was not just a house purchase but a carefully explored and managed investment: Hellman first considered a partnership with the house’s current owners, then asked her accountant to carefully calculate the costs and benefits of various other ownership strategies, including the lost income from other investments, the price of her own rent, and the operating expenses of the house. She subsequently invested $16,000 to renovate the plumbing and two kitchens and to install a passenger elevator. Much of the renovation was completed and supervised in Hellman’s absence: she was in Moscow during the winter of 1944–45. By the time she returned in March, her apartment was ready for occupancy, and the upper two and a half floors (containing ten rooms, three baths, and a private terrace) had been rented “at a very satisfactory figure,” as her lawyer, Stanley Isaacs, informed her.8 Her lawyers successfully appealed the assessment of the house in order to lower the property taxes while raising the ceiling on the rent she could charge her tenants. Bernard Reis, her accountant, wrapped up the deal by preparing a statement showing how she had come out on the investment. The process beautifully illustrates one of the perquisites of wealth: the ability to purchase the labor of others.
As The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine affirmed her box-office value, Hellman became increasingly prudent in her management of her literary properties and inflexible about the financial remuneration she expected from her work. She agreed to revivals and performances only without changes or cuts of any kind, and almost never to amateur companies. If a proposed performance threatened to detract attention from a new play or draw an audience from a touring company, she often refused. She signed contracts that gave her the right to approve the director and the cast of any revival; if adaptations were necessary for a broadcast version, she wanted the right of approval. She rarely granted permission for anything but a full production of her plays, routinely refusing to permit excerpts from any of her writings to be performed onstage.
Hellman’s decisions about whether to grant the rights to perform particular plays rested partially on the amount of her royalty or the payment she could expect, and here she adopted a hardheaded and unsentimental stance. On one memorable occasion, Julian Feibelman, rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans and a good friend of her father’s, made a mistake. He scheduled a reading of Watch on the Rhine without asking for permission. When the problem was called to his attention, he canceled the reading and wrote to her to apologize. Then he pleaded. Could she see her way clear, he asked, to giving them permission to do just one reading? An audience of fifty, which included her two aunts, had already been assembled. The fifty-cent admission fee would go directly to buy textbooks for poor children in the religious school. Hellman remained adamant. “It is too obvious to need much going into to say that the only way a playwright has of earning a living is to have a paying public come into a theatre, and any time people do come in without paying, he is, of course, being dishonestly cheated.” Anyone who decided to read a play without paying royalties was in violation, but that somebody should decide to read a play that was still running in New York was, in her eyes, “the most impertinent I have ever heard of.”9
If she could be sticky about permissions for idiosyncratic performances, making no exception for friends and relatives, she became positively strident when larger sums were involved. Jack Warner of Warner Bros. learned this to his sorrow when he decided to push back the release of the film version of Watch on the Rhine. His company had, despite wartime exigencies, completed the film in a timely fashion. But he didn’t want its release to interfere with another Warner Bros. product, a wartime propaganda film called Mission to Moscow that was designed to assuage fears of a newly allied Soviet Union. Hellman threw a metaphorical tantrum. She insisted that Watch on the Rhine was equally important “and what it has to say should be said now.” She had agreed to shut down the successful road tour of Watch on the Rhine, she wrote to Warner, “and cost ourselves a good deal of money by doing so … because we felt the need of the play’s message.”10 Warner’s efforts to reassure Lillian that a later opening would be just as lucrative did not allay her feelings of having been slighted. She was, she wrote back, concerned about the money to be sure, but she had willingly sacrificed it “because we believed we had something to say and our financial sacrifices were small in the light of it.”11 There the matter rested until, two months later, Hellman learned that Warner Bros. had scheduled the film to open in the Strand Theatre, an undistinguished and relatively small movie house. Now she was outraged and her temper unconstrained. “By the postponement of the picture, by the way it has been treated, and by the theatre at which it will open, there are few people now who are not convinced that the Warner Brothers believe it to be a minor effort. You will understand that I can only consider this treatment of my play as a violation of the principle on which the contract was originally signed.” Bluntly commenting that “this letter, like the last letters, will make no difference to anybody,” she announced that she “had looked forward to a future of good years with you people.” Now that was over. She never signed another contract with Warner Bros.
Hellman generally defended her efforts to protect her properties as matters of principle coming out of her concern for the rights of all authors. But the record reveals so many arguments over large and small sums of money that we are led to wonder whether her defense obscured simple penny-pinching. Certainly the trivial nature of some of her dealings with Watch on the Rhine suggest an unfortunate penchant for haggling. She declined, in 1942, to purchase a ten-dollar audio recording of her acceptance speech when she won the Drama Critics Circle Award for the play because it was “too expensive.”12 She wanted Random House to pay her $250 rather than the $150 they offered to reprint Watch on the Rhine, and then settled when Bennett Cerf reluctantly agreed.13 In 1946, she refused to forgo her royalties on the production of a Japanese version of Watch on the Rhine that had lost money because, as she told her agent, “I do not believe in giving away the work by which one lives … and I have no interest in the rehabilitation of displaced Japanese.” In her typically blunt style, she admonished the unlucky man: “I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I tell you that you are mistaken in recommending to any writer the waiving of royalties for a commercial production in any country, but particularly an enemy country.”14
And yet Hellman could and did surrender her claims when alternative principles appealed to her or garnering payment became too difficult. During the Second World War, and in support of the troops, she readily gave permission for Random House to publish a special “Armed Service Edition” of four of her plays despite the promise of only a tiny share of the royalties.15 When she discovered that Watch on the Rhine had been performed, without permission, by the American military in Germany and Austria, she did not ask for royalties. Rather she insisted that they be “turned over to the proper officials of the United Jewish Appeal in those countries.”16 And, in one of her great gestures to principle, she left her name on North Star even when the final film so displeased her that it caused a permanent breach in her relationship with Sam Goldwyn.
To be fair, she could afford these gestures because the war years—years when the politics of the nation allied with Hellman’s inclinations—proved politically comfortable and financially lucrative for her. She sold The Little Foxes to Goldwyn for $75,000 in 1940; she received $150,000 from Warner Bros. for Watch on the Rhine in 1941. She and Herman Shumlin set up their own production company to produce the film version of The Searching Wind in 1944; Lillian owned 60 percent of the stock in this company, Shumlin 40 percent, and Lillian got 10 percent of the gross weekly receipts for the run of the play as well.17 Proudly, she announced to Dash, on army duty in Alaska, that they had called the company Dashiell Pictures, Inc. It was to be a short-lived affair. Dashiell, Inc, produced an unsuccessful film version of The Searching Wind and then folded in a spate of recriminations between Lillian and Shumlin. But Lillian was now box office magic. She partnered with Kermit Bloomgarden to produce her next play, Another Part of the Forest, and sold it to Universal Pictures for $250,000 (of which Bloomgarden got 20 percent) plus a hefty share of box office receipts.
These sums enabled Hellman to buy two more Manhattan rental properties, to begin her lifetime habit of investing small sums regularly in the production of the plays of others, and to accumulate a substantial portfolio of stocks on her own account. She chose her investments carefully, putting her money in relatively small amounts in individual blue-chip stocks and seeking financial advice from friends as well as professionals. Her largest investment in the forties was in American Telephone and Telegraph (now AT&T), in which she owned four hundred shares.18
Hammett, too, was doing well. Though he was not writing fiction, his army service in Alaska restricted his penchant for lavish spending. The royalties from his earlier stories and plays accumulated in accounts over which Hellman held power of attorney. Nancy Bragdon, Hellman’s secretary, released small sums for one purpose or another. Hellman chose and sent presents to the people he designated when he asked. For larger amounts, he participated in a game of asking for Hellman’s approval. Before he increased the support he provided to his divorced wife and their two children, he wrote to Hellman, suggesting that he wanted to do so. A couple of weeks later, he wrote, “emboldened by your silence I clear my throat again and ask you will you do whatever’s necessary to … send them—meaning those Hammetts—their millions at the rate of $200 a week instead of at the lower rate hitherto obtaining. Thank you, Ma’am.”19 Hellman punctiliously responded. She did not hesitate to chastise Hammett when she judged that he was spending money frivolously, and she scrupulously deducted from his account the costs of the gifts he asked her to buy for herself. Hammett, for his part, participated in the game by declaring his freedom to defy her wishes—as, for example, when he proposed to invest in war bonds.
That was during the war. At its end, when America’s brief friendship with the Soviet Union faded into bitter enmity, Hellman’s fortunes faltered. In the war years, her plays, appearances, and appeals drew ready and sympathetic audiences. But in light of a rising fear of Soviet territorial and ideological expansion, these activities no longer seemed admirable. Her services, especially as a scriptwriter, fell out of favor. Presented by Hollywood producers with the opportunity to sign a loyalty oath in 1949, she refused, joining the list of those who would no longer be allowed to work in Hollywood. Her subsequent failure, and Hammett’s, to cooperate with government investigating committees affirmed her position as at least a fellow traveler and probably a communist. Shut out of the film industry that had provided much of her income, Hellman began to worry about money.
Income tax investigations added to her troubles. The Federal Bureau of Taxation (to become known as the Internal Revenue Service in 1953) had investigated Hammett in 1950 and found that he owed taxes on his royalties back to 1943. When he got out of jail in 1951, the bureau sent him a bill for back taxes in the range of $100,000. He refused to pay, so the bureau attached all his future income. He was earning something under $5,000 a year at the time, most of it from radio adaptations of his novels and stories.
Hammett now relied fully on Hellman for support. But she too was in trouble. In March 1951, the tax bureau conducted a full-scale investigation of her income. Edith Kean, then her secretary, reported to Hellman after the visit of the inspector. He had asked not only why she needed two studies (one in Pleasantville and one in the city) but wanted a detailed breakdown of the cost of all the furniture in both; he queried her visits to the Soviet Union, France, Czechoslovakia, and England in 1947 and to Yugoslavia in 1948; he challenged her contention that her car, a Cadillac, was used only for business purposes; and he discounted the effort to claim the receipts from Watch on the Rhine as capital gains, declaring them taxable as income. But the most devastating questions were around Hellman’s claim to losses incurred by the farm. Kean reported his comment verbatim. “Since it has steadily lost for 11 years—and no business could continue such heavy losses for so long—it should be considered as ‘gentleman farming’ and not a business for profit making.”20 A hefty bill for back taxes now came due.
A classified advertisement, placed in the New York Times in August 1951, tells the rest of the story. It also suggests how Hellman (and perhaps other victims of McCarthyism) could conflate the events of those years in ways that could be interpreted as untrue. Hellman always claimed that she put the farm up for sale after her HUAC appearance in May 1952, and in consequence of it. The advertisement tells us that the farm appeared on the market nine months before the HUAC hearing, though almost certainly in consequence of tax inquiries that were more than likely inspired by the political witch hunts for suspected communists and sympathizers. The advertisement read: “130 ACRE ESTATE, Comfortable. Homey. Restored colonial in a fairyland setting of winding lawns and wooded glens … As a home this estate is ideal. As an investment for subdivision, it’s terrific. $75,000 firm.”21 In the event, Hardscrabble took almost a year to sell and went for $67,500. Hellman forever associated the loss of the farm with her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In fact, its sale probably resulted from the more general political climate of the decade. But Hellman might be forgiven this conflation. She moved out of the farm shortly after her May 1952 HUAC appearance.
These postwar years into the early 1950s were surely the most difficult of financial times for Hellman. She made less money and worried about it incessantly. She pawned her jewelry to pay for bail that Hammett would not accept. She tried to make a film in London and refused to understand when her agent told her the deal was off. The unsigned contract in hand, she took off for London in the fall of 1951 and put up at Claridge’s in the expectation that her expenses would be covered. Her agent, Kay Brown of MCA Management, futilely protested that Lillian had misunderstood: “As you will recall, I telephoned you and said that Charney said the deal was off.”22 Lillian, still at Claridge’s, threatened to sue, backing off only when she received a settlement sufficient to cover her expenses. The sense of untouchability spread to the theater, which had no blacklist. To Joseph Losey, who withdrew a tentative offer to revive The Children’s Hour in London, she vented her spleen. “I have just found out this morning that our negotiations with you have fallen through, and I feel that I must say that it’s a little shocking to me that we went to so much trouble and so much talk for nothing. It’s a new experience for me in the theatre, and I don’t like it.”23
Hellman’s memories of these years tell us as much about her fears as about her financial circumstances. By her own standards she was broke, but, as her friends Morris and Lore Dickstein would put it later, Lillian’s idea of being broke differed from that of ordinary people’s.24 She seems never to have fallen quite as low as her memoirs suggest. Yet she worried incessantly about whether she could continue to support her comfortable lifestyle. To keep body and soul together, she tells us, she turned to Macy’s department store for employment. That story is undoubtedly false—though surely she feared that she might have had to resort to selling lingerie to make a living. Though she sold her beloved farm, she continued to live in her East 82nd Street townhouse, to maintain a staff of helpers there, and to invest in theatrical productions in which she believed. She never stopped contributing small sums to an author’s investment pool, a practice that she began in 1950 and continued for the next decade and a half. Even when she was in the midst of her 1952 HUAC encounter, she invested $2,500 in Arthur Kober’s Wish You Were Here. At the time, she had no ready cash at hand, so she asked Arthur Kober to forward the sum for her. She repaid the entire amount at the end of the year.25 In the fall of 1952, she gave Bloomgarden $1,500 to help finance the Second Play Company production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Small but steady returns from these investments flowed into her coffers for many years. In 1955, she had enough funds to purchase an old house on Martha’s Vineyard. If she was not broke, there is no question that financial worry consumed her, contributing to her irritability.
In the spring of 1953, bedeviled by the government’s continuing harassment of both Hammett and Melby and fearful that she would be called once again to testify before HUAC, Hellman sought a European passport. She told Ruth Shipley, the passport officer with whom she frequently dealt, that she was badly in need of the employment that was waiting for her there. Shipley, perhaps sympathetic to Hellman’s womanly pleas, acceded. Hellman left in May for what was intended to be a two-month stay during which she meant to complete a film adaptation for Alexander Korda and hoped to sign a contract that would enable her to consult with him about the work. She finished her adaptation in two weeks of relatively relaxed time in Rome, where she “felt the lifting of burdens,” and then headed for London to negotiate with Korda about the film. While she was away, she wrote almost daily letters to her then secretary, Lois Fritsch, and she expected daily responses, though she did not always get them. The letters offer an unusually detailed set of insights into Hellman’s fever-pitch level of anxiety about her personal affairs as well as about money.26 And the two often intermingled to reveal the finicky and particular persona for which she was noted.
Send the wool dresses to the cleaners, she instructed Fritsch, but not to the most expensive cleaners “because they are not new. Try asking around for another medium price cleaner.”27 “Those wool dresses may look clean,” she reminded Fritsch, “but they are not and shouldn’t be put away until they have been cleaned.” Her “favorite purple wool coat” could go to the expensive cleaner, and “the tan fur coat hat and muff to Bergdorf.” Through Fritsch, Hellman conveyed orders to her housekeeper, Helen, instructing her about every detail of home care while she was gone. She should not wash “the frill around my dressing table … It should be cleaned.” But she could do the washable blouses herself, rather than send them out, and, by the way, she should not forget to clean all the shoes and pocketbooks as well. Inquiries about money permeated the letters, along with household concerns. “Have we had any money deposited?” she asked in the same breath as she wondered whether Helen had cleaned the servants’ rooms and done the necessary repairs of buttons on the clothing left in the closets. “And please send promptly the box office receipts in gross dollars and our royalties.”28
Concern about money sometimes took the form of inquiries about royalties paid or to be paid and sometimes of queries about deals under discussion or about to be consummated. These sometimes involved productions like The Children’s Hour, then on Broadway, and sometimes advice about whether she could afford to take another mortgage. Sometimes she asked if there was any income tax news, and sometimes she complained that the income tax people were holding up payments to her accounts for reasons she did not understand. She expressed relief when the money finally did come through, and then concern about whether the political situation would interfere with her capacity to earn money. “I hope nothing happens now. My movie contract could be spoiled and money is needed now for a few new reasons.”
And she worried about expenses. While she waited in Rome for Korda to invite her to London and provide a place for her to stay, she commented on how expensive Rome was and speculated about moving to a cheaper hotel, determined to live on her expense money and to learn “to take buses, which is an experience.” She checked over lists of bills to be paid as Lois sent them to her, indicating which were correct and which she wanted to protest. She berated Lois for allowing her car to remain in an expensive garage instead of driving it up to the home of friends where Dash was then living. “I have seldom felt money so foolishly thrown out as the garage bill,” she wrote to her. And, finally, she asked Lois to explain to Helen that she was forced to cut back her hours because “I cannot afford to keep her all summer.” Maybe, Hellman suggested to Lois, Helen “would like to come in once a week to clean, overlook apartment.” Hellman would certainly want her back in September.29
Back home, Hellman turned to earning more of her living from the theater. Adaptations of successful existing plays seemed a promising route, and to them she now turned. Her friend (and the producer of Montserrat and The Autumn Garden) Kermit Bloomgarden owned the rights to produce an English-language version of The Lark, a play by Jean Anouilh based on the life of Joan of Arc. Would she, Bloomgarden asked, write an English-language adaptation for the American stage? Hellman balked. She badly needed the money, yet there were obstacles. An English adaptation already existed—made by Christopher Fry and performed without great success in London. Bloomgarden disliked the Fry version, as did Lillian when she saw it in London. Three earlier plays of Anouilh’s had been presented in New York since 1950, all to mixed reviews and none of them a financial success. If she were to make a success of this one, she would need control over its content. In need of money at the time, Hellman tells us in Pentimento that she encouraged Bloomgarden to see if he could work out an arrangement for a new translation that she would then adapt to the American stage.30
Bloomgarden got to work. Anouilh’s agent, Jan Van Loewen, balked at the idea of having such a famous person do the translation, fearing that his client would lose control of the piece. He proposed that the two writers work together.31 Hellman backed off a bit. She wrote to Bloomgarden that she feared the idea of working together: “I would rather like to spare myself the problems of arguing with a man about his own play, and I have a suspicion that we would spend more time in being tactful than we would in managing any work.”32 When Bloomgarden persisted, she continued to raise problems, including the rights of the first English translator and who would have final authority over the content. She also demanded a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds and a share of the movie rights should the play be sold to the film industry. Van Loewen balked at these terms—citing, among other things, the question of whether Hellman was “politically acceptable in Hollywood.” Lillian reared up in anger, insisting that “this kind of ugliness has not previously happened to me in the theatre.”33 She wrote directly to Anouilh and solicited from him an explanation and something of an apology.
Bloomgarden did not give up. Communicating now directly with Anouilh, he begged for a resolution to the problem, to which Anouilh finally conceded. “I am not opposed to the choice of Miss Hellman for the adaptation,” he wrote to Bloomgarden, attributing the discord to his agent’s political fears, the origins of which lay “in the working of American film producers.” Still, he insisted, in the absence of any knowledge of Lillian Hellman’s “style,” and without having seen the adaptation, he would not guarantee her share of the movie rights. Finally he offered to return to Bloomgarden the $3,000 paid to option the play for America.34 Bloomgarden declined the offer to withdraw, and the two compromised by agreeing to give Hellman a share of the movie rights if the play ran for twenty-five days or more on Broadway. Now there were more objections. Anouilh did not want to allow Hellman to publish her adaptation with Random House, claiming that she had agreed to too small an advance ($500 to be split with Anouilh) without informing Anouilh. Belatedly, he disclosed that he had already contracted to publish the Fry version in the United States.35 Hellman now erupted in anger at Anouilh’s bad faith, though she continued to work on the adaptation.
The production that emerged should have satisfied everyone. It earned accolades from reviewers for turning what some thought the weakest of Anouilh’s works into a “beautiful production of a thoroughly vigorous play.”36 But the tension around Hellman’s English-language version of The Lark outlived the aesthetic value of the play that appeared on Broadway. In 1966, a decade after the successful opening of Hellman’s translation, Van Loewen gave permission to perform the Fry version; Hellman insisted that only her version could be performed in the United States and declined an offer of compensation. Nothing would persuade her to concede her rights to control the American production. The coup de grâce came nearly twenty years later. Hellman published her account of the episode in Pentimento, excoriating Van Loewen and Anouilh for their failure to acknowledge the artistic and financial success she had achieved in adapting The Lark to the American stage. Her play, she insisted, had been a critical success in the United States following five failed attempts by Anouilh to crack the American audience. It had made Anouilh a significant sum of money, for which she had received neither thanks nor appreciation. In response, Van Loewen penned a letter that illuminates the gender tensions that had permeated his earlier relations with Hellman. Angry that she was unwilling to acknowledge the defects of her version of The Lark, he wrote, “now you force me to a real spanking,” and then went on to disavow any need to appreciate an adaptor whose translation was, in his view, inadequate, and who had “mutilated and amputated” a play that “but for its indestructible quality, the brilliance of the production, and of Julie Harris’s performance … might well have been a failure.” Acknowledging that vanity was endemic in writers, he concluded, with a flourish, he had “never encountered such hurt vanity as in your case.”37
While negotiations proceeded around The Lark, Hellman was working on Candide, where, once again, she ran into problems of control and remuneration. After Candide closed its three-month run, Hellman insisted for artistic reasons that it not be mounted again. She didn’t want to work on it anymore and she didn’t want anyone else to do so either. But some of the music was magical, and in the world of musicians, Leonard Bernstein’s achievement remained alive. Occasionally a two-piano concert version went out—four people sitting on stools, telling the story and singing the score. A decade later, Gordon Davidson, inspired by Maurice Peress, a friend and former assistant conductor of Bernstein’s, asked if they might approach Bernstein about doing a version of Candide to launch a new theater in Los Angeles.38 They wanted, Davidson says, to find simple ways to tell stories with good music. Candide fit the bill perfectly. Peress brought Davidson to meet Bernstein, and the three agreed to mount a twelve-performance run of the show. With extended narration that was simpler than Hellman’s original, this would be not quite a full-scale production yet not exactly a concert version. Bernstein agreed to let them search through his “Pandora’s box” of music omitted from the original production. “Don’t tell Uncle Lillian,” he warned his collaborators, fearing that Hellman would quash the effort.
The modified production that opened for a short run in 1966 was wildly successful. A new song was added strengthening Candide’s character; the production caught some of the irony of Voltaire’s novel and allowed the music to breathe, turning it, as Davidson says, “into a joyous beggar’s opera.” Hellman caught wind of it a few months after the event. She wrote asking Gordon Davidson for the script, which, with some trepidation, he sent. He received her answer weeks later. It was not as bad as he had feared. Acknowledging Davidson’s talent as director and the success of the production, it went on to declare unequivocally her horror at what had been done to her work. “No-one,” she wrote to Davidson, “I repeat, no-one ever changes a word that Lillian Hellman writes.”39
The incident reveals the stubborn belief that Hellman maintained in herself and in her work. It also suggests her conception of writing as remunerative work on which she depended. Afterward, she tried to work out a way to prevent such changes from ever happening again, or at least from occurring without her knowledge. If Candide were to be revived, she told her agent, then not only should “Lennie, Wilbur and myself” have approval of all changes, but “if I disagree with the adaptation of the book, and Lennie should happen to agree … that my disagreement will have to stand—or vice versa of course.”40 Bernstein, equally stubborn, refused to give up on his music. He produced another modified version of Candide that was performed in Los Angeles in 1971 and then in San Francisco and at the Kennedy Center. This time, Lillian’s fury knew no bounds. She had lost control and finally had little choice but to concede that Bernstein’s music had a life of its own. He commissioned a new book, by Hugh Wheeler, and she agreed to take her name off any production based on that book. The struggle for control cost her the services of Robby Lantz, her devoted agent for more than a decade, who disagreed with her position in the matter. Surprisingly, it did not cost her the friendship of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia.41
By the late 1950s, Hellman had recouped her financial position. At various times she bought or held mortgages on rental properties in Manhattan (at 77 East 80th Street and 920 Park Avenue as well as 208 West 96th Street) and in Sunnyside, Queens. In addition to her homes in Manhattan and on Martha’s Vineyard, she owned stocks and bonds worth around $200,000. She also possessed a considerable amount of expensive jewelry that she kept carefully insured: diamond pins and bracelets, antique necklaces and gold watches, several fur coats and jackets. She valued these at around $20,000.42 Her home furnishings included expensive antiques and some valuable art objects, paintings, and prints. Together these added up to a reasonable fortune in 1960.
And yet Hellman remained worried about money and alert to opportunities to maximize both wealth and income. This mixture did not produce the best of behavior. She solicited advice from friends like Arthur Cowan, responding gratefully when he extended good advice and irritably when something went wrong. She expressed a sense of entitlement and a willingness to fight for her due, whether it was over a lost will that she was sure should have included her or the right to control Hammett’s property because she believed only she could make it profitable. When she feared losing something valuable, she expressed her vulnerability peremptorily, demanding explanations, answers, and detailed accountings about everything.
Some of the most illuminating insights into Hellman’s feelings of vulnerability with respect to her possessions come from her dealings with insurance companies. In the late 1950s, as her prosperity mounted, Hellman filed claims for small and large amounts: in 1958, a bathroom leak that damaged a new fur jacket in the closet below; a stolen purse, taken from an L.A. hotel room while she slept. The purse contained a diamond-studded gold powder case, a gold cigarette case, credit cards, and $640 in cash. Detectives found the purse but not the cash. She bought an expensive mink coat in January 1960 that she wanted insured; she lost a diamond pin that spring. Selma Wolfman reported that the pin turned up safely that August. She claimed a loss of several hundred dollars for household items missing, and apparently stolen, from her Vineyard house in the fall of 1961. The lost items included four Wedgwood plates, a rare old platter, six bottles of perfume, two umbrellas, a nutria fur hat, and a blanket. The total amounted to a little more than $500. In April 1962, a branch fell on the house, damaging the heating system; in August an expensive watch, left in full view on the beach when she went swimming, disappeared. Surely the police could be more careful about who they allowed on the beach, she wrote to the town authorities. In September she filed a claim for damages to goods left in storage when she moved from the Mill house to a smaller house on the Vineyard.43
The claims added up until they became something of a problem. Her insurance agent struggled year after year to find personal property insurance for her, only to be refused by company after company. Exasperated, she fired the agent only to discover that her new agent ran into the same difficulties.44 In 1963, her homeowner’s insurance on the 82nd Street house was not renewed: “You have presented four separate claims of losses in a three year period,” wrote the unfortunate insurance agent who tried to find her a new policy. “Not that any of these claims has been large—but the fact that there have been four in the three years supposedly gives them pause, and makes them apprehensive that in a renewal period of another three years, there may be a big claim.”45 A new policy was finally found. Three years later that, too, was canceled.
Did Hellman set out to cheat insurance companies? In all likelihood, no. Her claims support that child’s sense of justice that characterized all her relationships. She had paid for insurance; the losses, however caused and however minor, were real. She wanted the recompense she had paid for. After her 1962–63 debacle with insurance companies, one might think she should have been more careful. But in February 1964 she once again filed a claim. This time it was for an envelope of money ($682) that she had carried with her to a theater performance where she had been jostled, her purse opened, and the envelope taken.46 The following September she signed a sworn statement claiming that her dressmaker had lost a package containing two expensive suits sent for alternation. She settled the claim for $800. April 1966: she reported items missing from her Vineyard home to her insurance agent—a phonograph, ten to twelve records, a transistor radio, and a Hudson Bay blanket. In July 1968, she left an expensive watch ($800) in her shoe while she went “swimming on my own beach” at the Vineyard. She claimed to have been in the water only three or four minutes. The watch was gone; she had fruitlessly raked the beach in an effort to find it.47 This was the second such watch she had lost.
From these endlessly repeated, if minor, incidents, we learn something about Hellman’s relationship to money that is more than confirmed by larger incidents. One of these had to do with how she handled the Hammett estate. When Dashiell Hammett died in January 1961, he was without resources. Lillian had supported him and paid his medical bills in the last years of his life. She estimated the cost of her support at around $40,000. In his will, Hammett named Hellman his literary executor. He divided his estate: half to daughter Josephine, one quarter to daughter Mary, and one quarter to Lillian. Then the Internal Revenue Service confiscated the entire estate in payment of back taxes. Hammett, the government claimed, owed them $163,000; New York State demanded another $10,445. Hellman offered the government $5,000 to clear the debt, which was politely refused in favor of a public sale of the assets. At auction Lillian’s close friend Arthur Cowan bought the entire estate for $5,000, then gifted it to her. Lillian thus came into full ownership of Hammett’s literary properties.48
At the time, the estate wasn’t worth very much, producing by Lillian’s estimate less than $500 a year in revenue. Copyrights had not been renewed, the work had not been managed well, Hammett’s fiction had gone out of style. Lillian took on the task of revivifying the properties with a vengeance, paying attention to the work as if it were her own, fiercely guarding access to the property. Under her guiding hand, helped no doubt by the revival of the hard-boiled-detective-and-tough-dame style that Hammett had originated, the estate flourished. Hellman controlled Hammett’s legacy tightly, asking not only for generous fees but also for the right of approval—and doing so with an air of entitlement for which some of her critics never forgave her. She turned down a 1969 movie offer of $500 for Hammett’s story “Corkscrew,” which she found “almost insulting,” writing to her agent, “I’ve thought up a quite good answer, I think. Why don’t you call him and say that I’ll give him an option on the story for $500 if he’ll give me an option on his restaurant for $500.” Lillian had in mind a figure of $5,000 to option the story and $25,000 if they decided to produce it.49 She maintained control till the end of her days, agreeing to cooperate with those who wanted to film, dramatize, or adapt Hammett’s work only if she were given rights of approval. Additionally, as her agent wrote to one ultimately disappointed British television producer, “I am reasonably sure she would want financial recompense for such help.”50
The Hammett daughters, Mary and Josephine, were at first taken aback by Hellman’s possession of their father’s assets but quickly came to understand that without Hellman the estate would have been worth little. Once the estate began to make money in the seventies, Hellman occasionally doled out a share of the proceeds to each of the daughters, with the lion’s share going to Josephine, as Hammett had willed. Because, Lillian told them, she paid high taxes on the income earned by the estate, she kept a good portion for herself. When she died, she willed half of the income from the now-profitable estate to Josephine, Hammett’s surviving daughter. The other half, including some of the profits she had derived from Hammett’s work over the years, went to a trust fund in Hammett’s name. The property itself remained under the control of literary executors she appointed. Money and control both entered into these arrangements. Unsurprisingly, Josephine Hammett did not resist them, although she expressed both gratitude for Hellman’s successful management of her father’s affairs and anger at the rigid control involved.
Hellman’s adventures with Hammett’s literary properties fueled suspicions of her as a greedy woman. And although much in her behavior confirms the description, she must, after Hammett’s death in 1961, have felt herself truly alone. Her penchant to go after money reached a low level during her unsuccessful effort to acquire a share of Arthur Cowan’s estate. She was sure that Cowan, a rich Philadelphia lawyer and sometime lover who had been her financial adviser for several years, had left her the bulk of his estate. He had, she claimed, talked all through the years about his will and “made constant jokes about what a rich woman I would be if he died.”51 When he died unexpectedly in 1964, she found letters from Cowan that corroborated her claims: one offering to start a portfolio of stock in both their names and to leave his half to her; another promising to do nothing to “diminish your share (the lioness’ that is) of my estate—which by the way is something one should enjoy while alive.”52 And she insisted that her secretary could confirm her expectations. To no avail. The will could not be found. Hellman suspected the family had destroyed it.53
Still destined to make her own living, discouraged by the theater and disillusioned by the movies that no longer blacklisted her, Hellman found herself by the early sixties in need of substantial income to retain her comfortable lifestyle. She turned to making money in other ways. Surprisingly, she discovered that she liked to teach. Just before Hammett died, she accepted an appointment at Harvard for the spring of 1961. She went to Cambridge alone. She found the appointment satisfying—good for her ego as well as for her pocketbook. Living in a university residence normally occupied by her friend Archibald MacLeish, accompanied by her cook and housekeeper Helen Richardson, she socialized with students as well as with her distinguished colleagues. This was the first of a series of residencies at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities: Yale in 1966, MIT and Harvard again in 1968, Berkeley and MIT in 1971, Hunter College in 1972. At Berkeley she earned $9,000 a quarter to teach one class and deliver one public lecture. That sum equaled the annual salary of a beginning assistant professor at the time. At Hunter, she earned $35,000 for a semester as a distinguished professor—a salary that raised some eyebrows.
This was heady stuff and Hellman thrived on it, using every opportunity to enhance her income. She was not above accepting small commissions—$700, for example, from an advertising agency to prepare five comments of one hundred words each on women’s dress styles.54 She would not go to speak at Iowa State University for a fee she considered too low. “Miss Hellman thinks it should be $1,200 or $1,500 whatever you think. She gets many of these offers to speak and usually turns them down,” her secretary wrote to Robby Lantz. “But she may do this one if they pay more.”55 Nor would she participate at a symposium organized by Esquire magazine for the paltry sum of $500. “How would you like to tell them that $1,500 is the price?” she wrote to Robby Lantz, who promptly did.56 Sometimes her requests to Lantz were crude: “What do you think about this?” she wrote to Lantz of one request. “Should I do it, or should you ask the guy how much money I get for doing it.”57
1961: She discovered that she liked to teach. With Harvard students Robert Thurman, Peter Benchley, Charles Hart, Matthew Zion, and Frederick Gardner. (Photofest)
Journalism provided something of an outlet, and in 1963 Hellman worked out an arrangement with Ladies’ Home Journal to publish three pieces “on anything I wanted to do anywhere, with expenses paid, etc.” Hellman anticipated a $5,000 fee for each piece, “a good arrangement for me because I, Saturday night, turned down a great deal of money” for a movie script. Editor Caskie Stinnett sent her to Israel to cover the pope’s visit there, and to Washington to cover Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Poverty.58 Robby Lantz, Hellman’s agent, carefully negotiated the terms under which the pieces would be written. As Lantz wrote to Stinnett on signing the contract, Hellman was “particularly happy at your confirmation of the fact that no cuts or changes in Miss Hellman’s material will be made without her prior express approval.”59
By the mid-sixties, with the McCarthy period well behind her and the political activism of the civil rights movement and the New Left under way, Hellman’s star once again rose. Requests for rights to perform her plays in both the United States and foreign countries poured in: The Children’s Hour in Austria in 1966, Dresden in 1967; an Italian edition of her plays and a festival of five of her plays in Italy in 1967; The Little Foxes in Prague in ’67; a radio production of The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest in Norway on December 31, 1968. The BBC inquired whether it could do Another Part of the Forest as well on March 28, 1960. In the United States, Hellman’s popularity mounted and with it her celebrity status. A Caedmon recording of The Little Foxessucceeded a 1966 revival of Watch on the Rhine at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. Her agents received inquiries about reviving productions of Another Part of the Forest and The Little Foxes. Television and radio stations wondered if they might do parts of The Autumn Garden. Finally, Mike Nichols brought in a full-scale New York production of The Little Foxes, which opened in New York’s Lincoln Center in 1967.
But the return of good times did not diminish Hellman’s sense that her popularity and her income could shift with the political winds. No matter the increase in her prosperity, she continued to exercise an ever tighter control over her financial affairs. She monitored every transaction large and small, relying on the principles that had long guided the distribution and performance of her work and scrupulously respecting the rights of others. She routinely deferred to the Dramatists Guild and the Authors’ League of America over such questions as who owned performance rights to which plays in what venues, or who controlled continuing rights over plays originally signed over to producers and film companies. But she kept daily decisions over fees and production rights in her own hands. She acknowledged and made decisions about a veritable mountain of requests to reproduce her work and Hammett’s from public and private groups all over the world: Norway, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, Australia, and elsewhere. Though formally fielded by her agents, each demanded a response from her. She was called on to consider whether an amateur production one year might undermine a first-class production planned for a year later, or whether a book publication should preempt a request for a lecture or a play reading. She considered, and mostly rejected, adaptations of Hammett’s work, and then of Dorothy Parker’s and finally of her own. On a daily basis she decided whether to lend her name, her presence, her voice, and her pen to events small and large.
Each request demanded an individual answer from her agent, who faithfully consulted her about the price she was willing to accept for how many words, or minutes, or paragraphs, and whom she generally advised to say no unless the payment was generous.60Despite its prestige, she wrote to Don Congdon (who succeeded Robby Lantz as her agent), she would not allow the BBC to broadcast a forty-five-minute version of The Children’s Hour for a “disgusting sum of money.”61 She would have to be paid $1,000 for an initial TV production of Toys in the Attic, she told a Yugoslav agency, and $500 for every rerun.62 A German film producer who offered to pay her $1,500, the normal rate, for a filmed interview, was told that she would do the interview for $2,500. To make sure she got that sum, her agent set a negotiating price of $3,000.63 Money was the bottom line, for, as she protested, she had often been cheated of her due. She’d willingly agreed to an interview with Bill Moyers in 1968, and she had also agreed to reproduce the tapes on cassettes. But when the reproducer sold the cassettes for a profit, she balked. “It is a racket, and someone is making money on it,” her secretary wrote to her lawyer, Ephraim London. “Miss Hellman’s point is that since the studio gets a royalty on it, shouldn’t Miss Hellman get a royalty?”64 This vigilant oversight continued all of her life.
Sometimes good causes, nonprofit organizations, and “educational” programs got a break, but not always. She would not allow her plays to be performed in South Africa, no matter who sponsored them. She could not permit a sentence or two in a women’s calendar, or a paragraph in a staged celebration of women without payment. She would allow a high school student to read an excerpt of her work in a high-school auditorium only if the passage did not exceed twenty-five words. One such incident in the winter of 1976–77 is paradigmatic. When the producers could pay no fee, Hellman refused permission to allow her work to be used in a public television program intended to “highlight the important literary contribution made by women.”65 The producers reduced their request to a bare paragraph from Pentimento and, on the advice of counsel, informed Hellman’s agent that “though they were uncomfortable doing something that will displease her,” they had decided to go ahead. An incensed Hellman pushed Donald Congdon to respond. “Miss Hellman’s work is in great demand and has a value in the market place,” he replied, “the equity of which would surely be reduced if such free use as you propose were permitted.”66 The producer’s agents and lawyers consulted, concluding that they were on solid ground in resisting payments. But Congdon, spurred on by Hellman, pursued the case: “The creative artist should not be told, as Miss Hellman was, that her work was going to be used whether she gave permission or not. Both of us found that offensive,” he wrote.67 Two months later, Hellman settled for an apology and a token fifty-dollar fee.
Hellman’s hardheaded calculations did not succumb to the temptations of participating even in performances designed to celebrate her. Producer Viveca Lindfors offered her $2.50 per performance to use four lines from An Unfinished Woman in a show planned to highlight the role of women in letters. Lillian countered by claiming that her words were worth at least $25 per performance. After some negotiating, Lindfors offered her $5, and Lillian came down to $10. When they could not bridge that gap, Lillian abruptly pulled out. Nor did she succumb to requests for magazine interviews unless they were in connection with the publication of one of her books: she believed commercial magazines that would make a profit by publishing her spoken words should pay artists an appropriate fee. And she believed very strongly that to garner the respect it was due, she should not sell her work short.
Those who produced her plays or used her words without permission infuriated her. Not atypically, Congdon, who became her agent in the summer of 1971, wrote to object when an unsuspecting playwright inserted a few lines from An Unfinished Woman into a play: “This is to request an explanation from your client without delay, and to put him on notice that he has no right to use any material of Miss Hellman’s without a license to do so.”68 The same lines appear repeatedly in Congdon’s letters to Hellman suggesting that she remained vigilant on the principle of ownership. About a Yugoslav agency that ignored or overlooked a request for payment and performed The Little Foxes without permission, Congdon advised Hellman to take the tiny sum they put up after the fact and offered to “put their agency on notice that in no circumstances can they permit future performances of your work unless the theatre can pay an acceptable advance and guarantee to supply royalty statements.” Hellman replied, “Yes, do this very firmly.”69
Hellman’s objections covered Hammett’s work as well as her own: when a producer pleaded that he had already gone some distance toward the making of a musical based on Sam Spade, Congdon described Hellman as “affronted by the thought that professionals would go so far in developing a property they did not control.”70
Looked at from the perspective of her ample financial resources in the late sixties and seventies, Hellman’s behavior appears to be greedy. But in light of her status as an economically independent woman, the fear evoked by her blacklisting in the fifties, and the new possibilities that her celebrity status suddenly made available to her, Hellman’s behavior deserves a more charitable assessment. Certainly, in the seventies, America shed whatever temptations had drawn it to the idea of cultural revolution, communal living, and a diminished concern for material goods. The New Left’s vision of hippies wandering the world with all their possessions in a knapsack vanished. It was replaced by a new spirit of materialism and a new respect for corporate power. By the late seventies, a new market ideology reigned. Neoliberal ideals that glorified individual achievement and competition floated in the air and would soon replace the spirit of social responsibility that Hellman appreciated about the sixties. Hellman, approaching her seventies and still involved in every detail of her financial affairs, learned to use the market to her benefit. She understood herself as a valuable property whose protection lay primarily in her own hands and who could and should make as much as possible from a market in which she held a valuable position. Her work was, after all, her largest resource. To manage her complicated financial affairs and her literary properties, she relied on the meticulous attention of secretaries, agents, accountants, and lawyers, all of whom worked with each other, as well as with her, to ensure that her rights and interests were appropriately acknowledged and paid for. Unquestionably, she acted the prima donna. She believed in her own value and the value of her work; she expected deference. She wanted immediate attention to her affairs and thoughtful consideration of her desires. She expected accountants and agents alike not only to understand and respect her principles but to honor all her unspoken as well as spoken wishes. For this we might take her to task, but by the seventies these behaviors had become part of a tough persona and a self-protective veneer necessary to living well by her own efforts.
To guide her, Hellman hired talented literary agents who painstakingly helped her to maximize her income and advised her as to what she might and might not accept by way of remuneration. These relationships inevitably became touchy, with agents consulting with her over even the smallest decisions and eating crow when they overstepped their boundaries. Robby Lantz, who represented her in the sixties and again in the eighties, repeatedly wrote her notes about large and small requests, noting that “I think I know your answer, but don’t want to answer for you.”71 The files of letters to and from Don Congdon, her literary agent in the seventies, contain similar language. After he had represented her for little more than a year, he wrote to explain why he had settled for a relatively small payment for one of Hammett’s stories, apologizing at length for the arrangement. “Ordinarily, I would check any unusual request for permission to quote from Hammett’s work with you,” he wrote. “Because this material was to be used in a ‘scholarly monograph,’ and because it seemed clear that the quotes would be used in a proper fashion, I assumed that it would meet with your approval. If this assumption was incorrect, let me know and I will check all permissions with you in the future.”72 The apology seems to have worked, because Congdon eventually represented Lillian for nearly twelve years. But his deference did not diminish. Years later he continued to ask her approval for trivial decisions. “This,” he would write to her in reference to one request or another, is “something you probably won’t approve, and if that is so, just say the word.”73
Their relationship could not have been easy. She quibbled about everything, asserting the most irascible side of her personality, as when she refused the author of a book on the early days of the Screen Writers Guild permission to include a photograph of herself.74 She asked Congdon to challenge Little, Brown, publisher of her bestselling memoirs, because a statement covering December royalties did not pay off until March. Though she had signed a contract specifying the schedule, she nevertheless remonstrated: “Why in the name of God should they keep money belonging to writers two months past its proper date?” Only Congdon’s assurance that this was standard in the industry prevented her from protesting “this nasty practice.”75 She made as much fuss over a $30 charge for typing a contract as over a $400 fee for altering galleys. The typing charge drew a particularly vituperative outburst: “I cannot tell you how silly I think it is to send me such a bill,” she wrote to Congdon. “I find that I am totally shocked at this kind of minginess, which I can’t believe is your idea. Is everybody out to annoy everybody else at any cost to themselves?”76
Not infrequently, Hellman overrode the authority of her agents, producing irritation and conflicting messages. After she fell out with Robby Lantz, he volunteered to give up half of his commission on the three-book contract with Little, Brown (of which An Unfinished Woman had been published and Pentimento was then under contract).77 She insisted that she had negotiated this contract directly with Little, Brown’s president, Arthur Thornhill, but agreed that he should have half of it. “I do not wish to renew the mess between you and me that need never have happened, and for which I will always feel bewildered and pained. Therefore, I agree to your proposal of one half of your commission, and to hell with all the sad mangling that goes on in this world.”78 She asked her lawyers to negotiate the rights to a piece of Hammett’s for which she had previously asked Don Congdon to be responsible. Congdon, confused, complained to the lawyer, but Lillian simply dismissed the agent’s concern. “Don’t worry about Congdon …” she told her lawyer. “You and I were quite justified and no explanation need go beyond that.”79 Sometimes she simply circumvented the agent’s authority by going directly to the individual with whom she was negotiating. Challenged, she resorted to stubborn language. “It does seem to me my right to insist upon certain measures that have to do with me,” she wrote to Don Congdon on one occasion.80Congdon eventually severed their relationship, telling her, “We have come to a parting of the ways—I no longer want to represent your account.”81 Robby Lantz, who then returned to her service, reacted more generously. When, shortly before her death, she tried to find her way around him, Lantz gently took her to task. “I think it would be best if only one of us negotiates at a time … You pay your agent to do the agenting … I love you but you shouldn’t burden yourself with these matters.” Lillian didn’t let up, and a month later he wrote again: “I beg you on bended knee to prevent people from duplicating and counter-moving on anything one has to do. It only creates major suspicion … and frankly serves no useful purpose.”82
For all of her acerbic style and quarrelsome nature, this impossible woman managed to retain the services of talented literary agents, lawyers, and financial accountants, establishing with them long and loyal working relationships. Her gender served her well in this respect, for she could not only be charming and lovable, she could and did present herself as a helpless, confused woman when she wanted to garner the protection of the generally male guardians of her affairs. “I honestly believe that I do not ask very much,” she wrote to Robby Lantz when he once failed her, “and when I am in trouble and need help I should get it as fast as possible.”83 When she wrote seeking explanations for some large or small confusion, she described herself, tongue in cheek, as “bewildered,” “misunderstood,” and pained. Occasionally she pursued answers by claiming to be an ignorant woman who needed itemized explanations of complicated statements and clarification of questionable decisions.84 Generally, she ended these letters with declarations of love and loyalty. With astonishing frequency, she claimed to lose statements she did not understand, checks she did not wish to cash, and reports that she wanted to dismiss. When things went well, she offered expressions of warm affection, invitations to dinner, and the loan of her Vineyard house. “Helen will take good care of you,” she wrote to Lantz, who borrowed the house for five days, “and please tell Shirley to let her know what you prefer in the way of food.”85
The measure of her concern with money—and its relationship to her ability to live the good life she had carved out for herself—emerges in her relationships with accountants and lawyers as well as with literary agents. Hellman created an interlocking structure in which one checked the other and each responded to advice from as many people as she could consult. In an effort to keep track of her money, she asked Robby Lantz to forward contracts to her accountant, Ted Present, because she was “asking Present to make up a list of when and how much monies are due me, feast or famine lady that I am.”86 As her financial resources stabilized and she became more comfortable, her affairs became more complex and she, in turn, more dependent on the accountants and lawyers who served her. She checked with them and they checked with each other about the tax implication of royalties, property sales, and trust redemptions. By the seventies, her accountant, Jack Klein, was paying her bills. When she had a problem with a department store or a telephone company, she, her secretary, and the accountant all consulted over how it should be handled.
If she couldn’t understand what her financial advisers and lawyers were doing, or felt impatient with an explanation or a strategy, she exploded in frustration. On one such occasion, she disagreed with her former producer Herman Shumlin over how to disburse the funds that came in from the film Spanish Earth. For years, Shumlin had channeled Lillian’s share of the money (about $200 a year) to Spanish Refugee Aid—a tax-exempt organization. In the summer of 1969, Hellman learned that the film’s producer, Joris Ivens, was ill and destitute. She wanted her share of the income sent directly to him. Shumlin resisted—sending the money to Ivens would create tax problems. He asked Hellman to send the money herself. Hellman stubbornly refused, claiming that she would then have to pay tax on the money she received.87 The dispute went on for weeks until Shumlin caved.
Sharp-tongued she was, but apparently effective. One lawyer, who had served her well, inquired of her accountant how much he could charge her. He had, he said, accrued some $10,000 in billable hours but could not imagine billing her for much more than the $4,000 he had charged her the previous year.88 His caution was clearly warranted. A year later, Hellman wrote to him to complain, “I really see nothing that warrants what seems to me as large a bill as this,” and asked him to return her papers to her.89 The firm backed off—sending Lillian a conciliatory letter in which they agreed “to treat the check you sent … as a credit against further services.”90
Twice—once with Lantz, and once with Congdon—she broke off a decade-long relationship, each time because she became convinced that the agent did not have her best interests at heart. With Lantz, the break came around the 1971 revival of Candide, which her partner and coauthor, composer Leonard Bernstein, badly wanted to do and which she desperately did not. Lantz, who then represented both Hellman and Bernstein, was caught in the middle. Hellman, convinced that he had encouraged her to agree to the revival out of loyalty to Bernstein, became incensed when she discovered that he was taking a commission on a work she hadn’t approved. Not wanting to quarrel with Bernstein (whose wife, Felicia, was a close friend), she severed her relationship with Lantz and, after declaring that she hated the 1971 production, agreed to pull out of the Candide partnership permanently, pending a new treatment that utilized none of her ideas. This proved, in the end, to be impossible, so she continued to receive royalties from subsequent productions from which her name disappeared. But she had been fond of Lantz, and, in a final bow to friendship, she agreed to let him keep half of the commission on the royalties of her old projects, channeling the rest to her new agent, Don Congdon.
Prosperity, not desperation, encouraged her to put her townhouse on the market in February 1969. She wasn’t getting along with her tenants, she was tired of running the property, and the New York real estate market offered an opportunity to trade for a smaller yet fully serviced apartment.91She turned down an initial offer of $285,000 and sold 63 East 82nd Street in September 1969 to Theodore Zimmerman for $310,000.92 This turned out to be a shrewd move. A couple of years later, the New York housing market declined as the city went into an economic tailspin. With the profits she reaped, Hellman was able to add to her nest egg. She agreed to hold a short-term second mortgage on the property ($220,100) at 7 percent interest, and she retained an option to live in the upstairs apartment for up to two years at a reasonable rent of $1,000 a month.
The negotiations and the move reveal Lillian’s endless capacity to attend to the details of financial transactions and once again suggest her attention to the deliberations. She consulted accountants and lawyers about the best route to go with regard to taxes, the timing of new purchases, the place to put the funds released from the house, the advisability of financing a second mortgage for the buyer. She dictated notes to her secretary and wrote in her own hand on scraps of paper to remind herself about what had been agreed and what still remained to be negotiated. Her reminders overflowed the boundaries of file folders and touched the smallest details. “We have agreed that I keep storage space in the cellar, and that I keep space for the wood. If I wish to keep my washing machine downstairs in the cellar, I may do so,” she wrote in a note to herself. She wanted to be sure that there would be room for her maid as long as she stayed there; she wanted the contract to indicate that her rent included gas and electricity; and she asked (and got) the new owner to paint the sixth-floor maid’s bathroom as well as the live-in superintendent’s apartment.93 She carefully listed the items she would take (the sconces in her study but not the ones in the living room; the mantel in the living room, rather than the one in the hallway) and those she was willing to leave. She could part with the eighteenth-century wall panels, the ceiling fixtures in some rooms, the upstairs washer and dryer, which, however, she might use until she left. Inevitably, after the house sale was concluded, she came to dispute such issues as exactly which room the maid would occupy, where the caretaker would live, what changes should be made at Hellman’s expense and which at that of the new owners. Following the negotiations and while workmen occupied the house and moved furniture, Hellman stayed in the Vineyard or traveled to California, the physical arrangements and the move itself taken care of by her secretary and helpers hired for the purpose.
Lillian’s tenancy in the upstairs apartment at 63 East 82nd Street did not last very long. She found, as she wrote to a former occupant of the house, “something vaguely disturbing about living in a house you once owned and with people who have no experience in running such a house.”94She compromised by spending as much time as she could out of town. When she moved out in October 1970, she was still perseverating over small details. She missed an English Sheraton chair that had been in a hallway, she said. It was newly upholstered. She wanted it back.95
The saga of the house on East 82nd Street did not end there. Hellman, having taken a second mortgage on the house, became entangled in the new owner’s financial problems. For several years he paid her irregularly and occasionally skipped a payment or requested a postponement on a payment due. Hellman took all this badly, complaining that it was “embarrassing and a nuisance, and asking him not to do it again.”96 To her lawyers, she expressed concern that the house might be abandoned; she feared, she wrote them in May 1973, that “I will not have a good year next year, and I certainly cannot afford to be burdened with a house whose present condition I know nothing about and whose leases I know nothing about.”97 In fact, 1973, the year that Pentimento was published, turned out to be a good financial year for Lillian. But her worries persisted until January 1976, when the house was resold and the remaining loan ($83,305) repaid to her.
She quickly settled on a new apartment in one of the city’s elegant buildings, at 630 Park Avenue.98 She had sold her house for $310,000 and bought the new place for $112,650, so she could afford to renovate it to her liking. And she did, turning a traditional three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment into an elegant living space for one, with a large master bedroom and a comfortable library. The apartment also came with a second-floor room for a live-in helper. To prepare the new quarters, she left careful instructions for the carpenter who undertook to renovate the new apartment—along with the price for each job. He was to remove the sliding doors in the maid’s room closets, install an electrical outlet, hang pegboard on the north wall of the kitchen, and so on. Each job had a price attached, the most expensive being the installation of a marble fireplace in the living room at a cost of between $250 and $300. After it was all done, she quibbled about small costs: why the additional $10 for a window repair, she asked. Because he had added a screen, replied contractor John Michael. Months later she was still quibbling. She could not, she said, distinguish between the front and back doorbells, and she did not understand why it had taken so long (and cost so much) to put up a shower curtain rod. If he would correct these things, she would pay his bill.99
To prepare for moving, Hellman hired Mildred Loftus, who also took charge of the unpacking. Together the two decided what was to be brought from the old house, what needed cleaning, what should be sold, which bookcases would need to be cut and how, which chairs to recover at what cost. But it was Loftus who got the jobs done. Hellman continued to provide detailed instructions on issues such as which books would go where, which dishes in what cabinet. Hellman thought Mildred a life-saver, calling her “the best friend I have” and complimenting her on her arrangement of the dishes, on finding lost attachments for the shelves of the china closet, and on replacing the dining room curtains.100 She also praised Rita Wade, who took charge of the bills and the billing, typing confirmations of all the instructions and keeping meticulous track of what was done and the cost of everything. An endless array of contractors, “rug men,” and workmen handled the work itself. But Hellman was tired. From the Vineyard, she wrote her gratitude to Mildred Loftus, adding that “the weight of what I’ve done has been a stone around my neck and all I can do is hope that the stone will soon disappear.”101 By September, when Lillian returned from the Vineyard, the apartment was ready for her.
For all of her irascible character and her quick and angry temper, Hellman seemed not only to get along with her domestic helpers but to develop warm and affectionate relationships with many of those who worked for and with her. Chief among these were her secretaries, who generally came in for two or three days a week and who took over much of the management of her domestic as well as business affairs. Among the names that stand out: Nancy Bragdon, Edith Kean, Lois Fritsch, Selma Wolfman, and Rita Wade each stayed with her for many years, together spanning a period of almost four decades. They extended their services to supervising moves from and to houses and apartments, caring for the household and for her personal needs while she was away, and keeping track of complicated insurance, financial, and tax records. Bragdon watched over Hammett’s accounts while he was in the army; Lois Fritsch fielded the IRS when Lillian ran into tax problems during the McCarthy period; Wade took care of hiring and firing a platoon of nurses as Lillian became increasingly ill at the end of her life.
She had more complicated relationships with her cooks—and, after her favorite Helen Richardson’s departure, with the succession of housemaids who lived in one or another of her houses. On the one hand, Hellman seems to have treated them formally, laying out her expectations and drawing up oral and sometimes written contracts with them, expecting them to live up to their commitments and paying salaries, that were, by the standards of her day, more than fair. She scrupulously paid benefits for her household employees, including workmen’s compensation and health insurance. More than once she went to bat with insurance companies on behalf of employees injured in household accidents. When her longtime cook Richardson injured her knee, Hellman asked her secretary, Selma Wolfman, to help collect the appropriate compensation; later Hellman made sure that Helen got medical attention for a shoulder injury. She did the same for other, more transient employees.102
But there was another side, one that went against the grain of the feminist environment of the seventies. Her instructions to newly hired employees indicated the kind of service she expected and the tasks to be performed. They were detailed, direct, and somewhat anachronistic. A 1973 “Things to Do” list instructed her new help to dust all rooms and to wipe all windowsills each day; to clean her bathroom daily and to mop the floor several times a week; to vacuum once a week “and please put the soft brush on the vacuum cleaner and vacuum all the furniture and under the cushions at the same time.” Lillian wanted her bath towels washed “each time they are used,” her bed linens changed twice a week, and her mattress turned every two weeks. She wanted the furniture oiled and the floors lightly waxed once a month, the ice bucket filled at noon and again at four every day, and she gave explicit instructions for laying the table and serving when guests were expected for lunch or dinner.103 She told a twenty-five-hour-a-week helper hired in the spring of 1979 just how to get started: “You will move in Friday, April 13, around 9.30 am,” she wrote to her. “You will not be expected to work each day until 12:30 or 12:45. Every Thursday when you come in at 12:45 pm you will make my bed and dust and straighten the house. Every Thursday evening if I am at home, you will either fix dinner or help me fix dinner.”104 And so on.
These detailed instructions suggest, as do the letters from women who worked for her, more of the two-sidedness of Lillian’s nature. She could be extraordinarily generous and by her own lights fair. In return, she demanded not just meticulous and attentive service but caring and affection as well. Her sense of entitlement expanded as she grew older and more irascible, bringing with it displays of bad temper that often offended those who worked for her. She treated her helpers like servants rather than companions, demanding that they perform menial as well as more sophisticated tasks and insisting on promptness, cleanliness, and attention to duty. Rosemary Mahoney, one of the young women she hired, found the relationship an enormous disappointment.105 The lists of duties allowed no room for initiative or the exercise of personal choice. They were precisely tailored to particular employees—to the full-time maid who would live in the second-floor maid’s room at 630 Park Avenue as well as to the part-time summer help who came to her on Martha’s Vineyard or escorted her to doctors in the years of increasing blindness. An offense could precipitate a stream of violent invective and a burst of temper that could be heard by neighbors and embarrassed her friends and visitors.106
To those who departed, Hellman provided instructions as detailed as those who arrived. “Give your own room a thorough dusting and vacuuming,” she instructed one young woman, and “a good cleaning of the bathroom that you have been using. Please take your curtain down and give it a washing and ironing, remembering to iron it damp in order to get the sides the correct length and then rehang it.” The vacuum was to remain on the bed, she reminded her helper, and the bed and pillows to be covered.107
If the departure was on good terms, Hellman could reach out generously. She offered a young Chinese woman employment as well as lessons in English and driving instruction. Ming Hu’s English, however, proved inadequate to Hellman’s needs, so she found her another job and earned the young woman’s undying gratitude. Ming Hu wrote regularly to Hellman, dropped by the apartment with soup, offered her appreciation and massages, and presented her, in subsequent years, with a handmade nightgown and a sweater.108 Other ex-employees wrote her affectionate and loving notes.
Her sense of entitlement expanded as she grew older. (Photo courtesy Lynn Gilbert)
Given Hellman’s difficult persona and her demanding nature, it isn’t surprising that some of her employees could not abide her and left abruptly. Those who did so experienced her legendary wrath. She wrote a decidedly unpleasant note to a young women who left her service for unknown reasons just after Christmas in 1980. The letter suggests something of Hellman’s increasing narcissism, as well as a paranoia perhaps aggravated by her dependence on others. But it also speaks eloquently to a conception of service that embodied loyalty and love as well as a large sense of entitlement.
I am, of course, shocked that you would leave my house without any notification, particularly when you know that I am not well.
It is my hope that nothing illegal has happened here, but certainly you know that you have cost me a very large fee at the Agency, whereas if you had left one week earlier I would not have been responsible for the fee.
It is also my hope that you do not owe us any money for the telephone bill. If you do, I will have to go through proper channels to collect it.
I don’t think anybody in my life has ever done anything quite as unpleasant to me as you have managed; nor do I see the reason for it. But let us hope that nothing will come out of it that is too difficult for you.109
As she became older, sicker, and more needy, Hellman’s irascibility and her specificity increased. So too did the speed with which a succession of college and graduate students came and went. She needed these students to read to her, to take her to doctors’ appointments, and to help out around the house. So she solicited from her friends and acquaintances the names of students who “would not only like to give up the summer,” but who were “taking a year off from college.” She offered them “a half day job from about 12 noon on” and suggested that she could help them find other employment on the Vineyard if they needed it. Much as she needed the help of these students, she could not bring herself to be kind to them: her abrupt and sometimes angry manners offended more than a few. For several years in the late seventies and early eighties she did not scruple to ask student helpers to make their homes in a tent on her Martha’s Vineyard lawn, suggesting that if there were no guests around they might use the house and promising them a maid’s room when and if they moved to New York. Some students accepted the arrangement for the privilege of working with the great celebrity.
Nellie Mohn, a Wells College student, chose to do so in the summer of 1980. After some negotiation, Hellman hired her as a “general housekeeper and assistant secretary” in the spring of 1980, sending her a check for $125 to bind her services, which would begin on the Vineyard at the end of May. At the same time, she asked Mohn to sign a letter indicating that she understood and accepted the terms of her contract, which included providing her own tent to accommodate her for the summer. “Feel free to live in the house until your tent is well established,” she wrote to her. Then she suggested that Mohn start work in the kitchen, “giving the ice box a thorough cleaning, the floors and counters a thorough scrubbing, and do the same in the room that contains the freezer and the washing machine.” After that, Lillian would give her further instructions.110 Mohn turned out to be a great success. When she left that fall, Hellman gave her a letter to take with her. In it, she described Mohn as a “young woman of extraordinary intelligence of serious education … of conscience, of dignity,” concluding that this was “not only a letter of recommendation for Miss Mohn, it is a letter of admiration.”111
But the case of another employee (let us call her Linda) reveals another side of Lillian’s character and hints at her growing paranoia as she grew more feeble. Hellman hired Linda while she was visiting Arizona one winter. She did “not much like” her, as she wrote to a friend from whom she solicited suggestions for a replacement. But Linda stuck it out for several months before quitting. When she did so, Hellman asked her to sign a dictated statement that reads as follows:
Dear Miss Hellman,
This is to assure you that I have had a pleasant six months in
your employment, and that we have lived by the rules of our
agreement, which included my weekly salary, my airplane ticket
from Tucson to New York, and half of the cost of my airfare to
Charlotte, North Carolina.
My warmest regards, and thanks.
Two days later Hellman dictated—but did not ask Linda to sign—a confused statement that began with Linda wishing Lillian success on the completion and publication of her new book and ended with Lillian offering Linda some wild game.112
The exchange suggests that Lillian was not in full control of her faculties at the time, but it offers a glimpse into her concern that she not be perceived as having wronged her helper. Linda bore no grudge. “I do worry for her, Rita. Please let me know how all goes,” she wrote to Rita Wade a few weeks later. Then, thanking her for helping to sort the situation out, she concluded by taking responsibility for her departure: “I promise to keep working on getting a little tougher and not being so sensitive.”113 Linda was not free yet, however. Five months after she quit, she received a letter from Lillian demanding that the young woman tell her why she had not noticed that some of her jewelry had been damaged and three diamonds lost. She did not directly accuse her of theft. Rather, she wrote, “I would like to have your immediate reply of why you did not notice either one of these damages when we packed on our return … Please write me of any possible memory you have or any possible knowledge you might have spared me. I wait eagerly to hear from you.”114 Linda replied promptly, claiming no knowledge of the missing stones and declaring her continuing affection for Miss Hellman.
The story of Lillian’s mother’s will sheds more light on the question of Hellman’s feelings about money. Lillian’s grandmother Sophie Newhouse died in 1930, leaving her mother, Julia, a small trust fund. Grandmother Sophie Newhouse had left all the rest of her money directly to her other children. But, probably because Sophie mistrusted Julia’s husband, Max, Sophie left Julia’s share in trust, making her own brother, Lillian’s great-uncle Gilbert, its executor. Julia in turn willed the trust to her only daughter, making small provisions to Arthur Kober and to Max’s two sisters should they survive Lillian. The trust fund rankled all of Lillian’s life, becoming a symbol of her mother’s family’s excessive engagement with money and perhaps the main source of her alienation from her mother’s family. She later wrote, “I don’t see my aunt Florence very often, mostly because my father quite rightly thought my grandmother’s will was directed against him.”115
When Julia died in 1935, the fund went to Lillian. From it, she initially received $900 quarterly. But Gilbert entrusted the fund to an accounting firm headed by Arthur Ernst that managed it ineffectively, eventually reducing the principal by a third. Still the trust continued to provide Lillian with an income of about $3,000 a year—a significant sum in 1940. To prevent a further erosion of its value, in 1942 Lillian asked her father to look into the situation and then hired attorney Stanley Isaacs to represent her. She encouraged him to question even small charges, because, as her secretary wrote, “Miss Hellman says to tell you not to worry about what you tell Ernst because she doesn’t like him much.”116 With Isaac’s guidance, Lillian tried to influence the investments made by the trust, channeling them from stocks to tax-free bonds of various kinds. When Gilbert died in 1946, he was replaced by his niece, Florence (Julia’s sister and Lillian’s aunt). Florence was well intentioned but utterly incompetent in financial matters and left Ernst and his successors to handle the trust at will. Over the years it continued to do badly, shrinking in value and by the 1950s providing Lillian with less than $1,500 in annual income. The relatively small sums and the declining assets added fuel to Lillian’s ire: Why had her monies, alone of all the original Sophie Newhouse estate, been left in trust?
Several times Lillian demanded accountings and expressed concern at the loss of income. But in the end, she feared that the expense of scrutiny would destroy the trust entirely. Instead she sought advice on how to invest the trust’s funds from her lawyer friend Arthur Cowan. Encouraged by Cowan, in 1957 she began to try to obtain access to the trust itself.117 To no avail. Florence had been advised that turning the trust over to Lillian would encourage a suit against Florence’s estate after her death. “Lillian, I am sorry,” she wrote to her in the spring of 1960, “but I can’t do anything about it; I can’t break the law. I feel very badly and if I could I would hand it over to you but I don’t want to get into any trouble.”118 Lillian responded churlishly: “It is very difficult for me to understand what Mr. Ernst means when he says you could be in any trouble, but most important to me, I feel sad and bewildered.”119
The issue created tension for many years. Lillian simply did not understand how her aunt could continue to exert influence over money that she conceded belonged to Lillian. But in Lillian’s view, her aunt shared the perspective of her mother’s family, which, as she wrote to her lawyer, “talked very little about anything but money and several times Florence and I have had sharp minutes about that.” This created endless ill feeling: “I see her only because my mother would have wanted it, and that amounts to about four visits a year.”120 Her friends gathered as much. One remembered “her talking all the time to some elderly aunts who were living well into their nineties because she was determined that they would leave her money.”121 Hellman’s visits to Florence diminished as Florence grew older and more senile. Toward the end, she wrote a pathetic note to her niece: “Dear Lillian, What is wrong? I haven’t heard from you, even on my birthday. Was it anything to do with the money for your trust?”122
Florence’s growing senility encouraged Lillian to continue her efforts to dissolve the trust. In 1972 she hired a politically savvy lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, who, with Florence’s knowledge, petitioned the surrogate court to remove her from her position and to name him as trustee. The maneuver succeeded: Florence resigned her position on August 4, 1972, and O’Dwyer became her successor the following June. Lillian now insisted that the fund be reinvested to disregard growth and produce as much income to herself as possible. This, she told O’Dwyer, was necessary because “since I have no ability to will the trust to anybody else, my chief interest is in the highest possible yearly earnings to myself.”123 O’Dwyer continued to serve as executor until a run for political office forced him to give up the job and Lillian to seek a new strategy to control it.
All along, Lillian believed that Florence disliked and distrusted her. Florence had, Lillian wrote to Paul O’Dwyer, “of course known about my father’s anger and about my agreement with it.” But this was a matter of justice. “I have no idea,” she continued to O’Dwyer, “whether our petitioning for a change of executor would cause her to remove me from her will—if indeed I have ever been put there—but I think we should do it.”124 Lillian was wrong about Florence’s feelings. When Florence died in 1975 she left Lillian the bulk of her estate, a sum amounting to $270,000 as well as some expensive jewelry and household objects. It took a while to clear the estate, and Lillian waxed impatient, pushing her lawyers to extract advances on the money due her and complaining that some of the jewelry left to her had gone missing. At this point in her life she did not need the money. Lillian came into her aunt’s bequest at a moment in time when she was reaping many thousands of dollars in royalties from the first two volumes of her bestselling memoirs. By 1973, her accountant, Jack Klein, valued her net worth at a little more than $812,000, including $320,000 worth of securities, and her aunt’s legacy made not a whit of difference in her lifestyle.
But there remained her grandmother’s trust. At age seventy Lillian still had not escaped the penumbra of her mother’s acquisitive family. In 1976, Florence now dead, Hellman approached a fourth lawyer, Donald Oresman of the distinguished law firm of Simpson Thacher and Bartlett to try once again. This time she succeeded. On August 15, 1977, Lillian received the news that the trust fund had been legally broken. She gave Arthur Kober’s daughter, Cathy, $10,000 to fulfill her mother’s bequest to Kober, paid all the fees, and inherited $132,500. She was seventy-two years old; she had lived her entire adult life under the shadow of the Newhouse family financial umbrella and had finally worked her way clear of it.
She turned now from worrying about what others would leave her to how she would distribute her own substantial assets. True to form, she worried over every detail, changing the will almost yearly in large and small ways, trying as hard as she could to control what would happen to the money she had so carefully accumulated in her lifetime. The list of beneficiaries changed as her old friends died off, but with a few exceptions she sought to leave those who remained with meaningful personal items rather than gifts of cash. To her secretaries, the choice of a piece of jewelry as well as a small amount of cash; to Annabel Nichols, a diamond bracelet; to Barbara and John Hersey, a Queen Anne table, and to Barbara a piece of jewelry too. And so it went. She named her friends and the particular item or items she wanted them to have: an antique chest or dressing table to one, a pair of candlesticks or wall sconces to another, Russian icons to a third, and then choices of anything left over to others. As each year passed, she crossed out those who had died or offended her, or added a new friend. The specificity of the final versions suggests that Lillian wanted her heirs to know that she had thought about each of them individually, that she held for each of them a particular affection that she could express only with something that was irremediably hers.
As the wills changed over the years, she left more and more of her property to Peter Feibleman, who had loved and cared for her since the mid-sixties. And yet there were strings attached that also changed over the years. She wanted to leave the cooperative apartment to him, but only if he lived in it. If he chose to sell it, then he could keep the largest part of the money it brought in—but, she wrote to her lawyers, “I would like to make the provision that he has no right to bequeath the apartment to his heirs and that if he owns it on his death the total sale reverts to my estate.”125The Martha’s Vineyard house would go to Feibleman, but additional property on the Gay Head beach would be left to the town for the use of local children. Cantankerous to the end, she sought to assign separate fiduciaries for her literary properties, as executors for her estate, and for the two trusts she established—as well as for the trust she set up for the royalties that would go to Hammett’s daughters and for the Vineyard property. Her lawyers protested, finally, the “fragmented authority” that would result. Under that version of the will, they calculated, nine individuals would be involved in each decision as to any literary property. She wanted to tie her executors and literary fiduciaries to their jobs by paying them a flat fee, plus an executor’s or trustee’s commission on the services they rendered.
In the early eighties, when her estate was probably worth more than $2 million and would soon, by one estimate, amount to $3.5 million, she was still dithering.126 She signed the last version of her will on May 24, 1984, just a month before she died. The will that she rewrote many times teaches us something about what history had done to her, for she wanted both to recognize those who had been kind to her and to ensure that her wealth would continue to support the work to which she had devoted her life. The final distribution of her estate suggests her need both to believe that she was loved and to use her resources to express what love she still could. For in the end money was not simply a way of sustaining herself, but a way of convincing the world that she mattered. And who could blame her, a woman alone, a woman without money or beauty, for extracting from her talent and her fame the emotional sustenance that no partner provided?