A Difficult Woman (13 page)

Recommendation letters and introductions flew from Hellman's desk with great regularity. One after another, she referred
New Yorker
critic Penelope Gilliatt, theater director Robert Lewis, and photographer Richard de Combray to William Abrahams, her editor at Little, Brown.
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She offered Renata Adler an introduction to Arthur Thornhill, Little, Brown's publisher, and asked Thornhill to look at the manuscript of psychologist George Gero, who was her therapist at the time. She recommended “a brilliant young woman called Alice Wexler” to her literary agent, Don Congdon, and nominated photographer Berenice Abbott as well as Australian novelist Christina Stead to membership in the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.
¹⁰⁷
Maureen Howard's memoir,
Facts of Life
, earned a blurb that described it as one of a handful of good books that “could only have been written by women.”
¹⁰⁸
These responses suggest a person devoted to friendship and committed to the actions that would keep it alive. For Morris and Lore Dickstein, who had purchased a summer home in Sag Harbor, Hellman contacted old friends. “It was like she had alerted people to be ready for us,” reported Lore Dickstein.
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Perhaps to affirm friendship and to participate in an exchange that would make her feel loved, Lillian always placed great stock in the giving and receiving of gifts. The value of the gifts exchanged served as a measure of reciprocal affection. All her life she desired, even expected, gifts from the women and men who were her friends and lovers, chastising them when they failed to come through and teasing them with her own promises of generosity. Hammett won her heart with a mink coat and expensive jewelry; her friends brought back luxurious laces from Europe. John Melby sent her silk cloth and unusual items from China. Ruth and Marshall Field filled her house with flowers on the occasion of her HUAC hearing. Gifts tested as well as buttressed friendship, producing in some friends enormous anxiety as to what and how much to give. Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, for example, were said, annually, to have racked their brains to come up with a suitable Christmas gift for her.
¹¹⁰

Lillian in turn went to Europe with lists of gifts she would bring back
and distribute on her return. On one occasion she sought ties, scarves, a cigar cutter for Dash; lace collars for her friend Ruth and Ruth's daughter, Judy; leather gloves and crosses for some of the women in her life; a blouse for her secretary, Edith. Sometimes she made lists of things that she had bought, such as “7 extra ties, slip, blouse, Silver Hat pins, scarves (2), Lace front”—and then a second list that revealed to whom she would give them. On other occasions, she was more specific—reminding herself to buy a Swiss watch for John, pearl earrings for Helen, her cook, a perfume bottle for Mary Warburg, handkerchiefs from London for her aunt Florence Newhouse. Then again, she might jot down the sizes and colors of items of clothing she would bring back, as when she noted that John Hersey wore a size large or extra large and that he did not like red, gold, or green, while Barbara wanted a white slipover.
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Gifts could take varied forms: Lillian expected and got invitations to dine at expensive restaurants, the use of her friends' homes in the Caribbean and warm climates, and, once, an invitation to travel by private yacht to Egypt. Sometimes they involved services: Felicia Bernstein would return to the United States from Rome through Paris, husband Leonard wrote, “so that she can pick up the dresses for you.”
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And sometimes they were prized possessions. Charlee Wilbur gave her a necklace that belonged to her grandmother and that was so precious to her that she hoped Lillian would leave it to the Wilburs' daughter in her will in order that it might remain in the family.
¹¹³

To be sure, the demands of friends and acquaintances could become irritating, increasingly so as she grew more famous in the sixties. She ducked an invitation to support Tennessee Williams's candidacy for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, scribbling a note to her secretary on the bottom of the letter, “Call and say I am somewhere—on a boat—Maine, maybe—and you won't be hearing from me for a few weeks.”
¹¹⁴
To Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who asked her to support the candidacy of someone she hardly knew to the Academy, she wrote that she had already supported enough people and would do no more. And yet there were always more, and she always did.

Lillian Hellman never lost the edge of toughness she acquired in the 1920s and with which she conquered the 1930s. She never lost the feisty willingness to speak her mind, or the tough veneer that coded her as manly or masculine. Nor did she ever stop being the sexual creature of the 1920s. She remained always, as her friend Morris Dickstein described
her, “at once a perfect lady and at the same time … obscene.”
¹¹⁵
Jane Fonda, who played Lillian in the film
Julia,
experienced difficulty capturing her: “Lillian is a homely woman,” she told an interviewer, “and yet she moves as if she were Marilyn Monroe. She sits with her legs apart, with her satin underwear partly showing—she's a very sexual, sensual woman.”
¹¹⁶
Reading the interview, Lillian took umbrage not at Fonda's characterization of her sexuality but at the description of her as homely. Hellman's friend Richard Stern perhaps captured her best in these years. She was, he thought, “comfortable and expensive,” as well as “cozy, warm, flirtatious, yet a powerhouse.”
¹¹⁷

We learn from Hellman how complicated it must have been for a woman in the deepest part of the twentieth century to stay true to her desires even as she juggled the pressures of the world around her. She never let go her mother's dream, cultivating the warmth and generosity that earned her loyal and loving friends. But she also wanted to be her own person, so she stubbornly insisted on having things her own way and could not curb the fierce temper and the foul tongue that created chasms. The gap between the two personas was mediated by talent, celebrity, and the earthy humor that kept friends and enemies alike in awe. Her agent, Robby Lantz, responding to an introduction she wrote in the mid-sixties to an anthology of Hammett's work, elegantly summarized the contradictions: “You are all heart, yet also all brain; all vulnerability, yet incredibly strong; all emotion, yet completely unsentimental; possessor of a rare sense of the tragic, yet full of pure, clear humor.”
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Even put together, these qualities could not disguise Hellman's existential solitude. She never overcame it, perhaps because it emerged from a century in which many women tried to be not one thing or another but to be all things at once. To Billy Abrahams, the editor of her memoirs, she described the resulting tension: “I asked almost nobody this summer, but the house has been too full. This week is good—nobody—and I sulk and make myself delicious things to eat, and tell myself nobody loves me and why should they?”
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I say again that the presentation of something besides mere entertainment and spectacle is the great function of the legitimate theater of the world today.

—Lillian Hellman, 1936

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

—Lillian Hellman, 1973

Before she became the Lillian Hellman famous for writing her memoirs, Lillian Hellman was a playwright. Between 1934 and 1964, she wrote eight plays of her own and adapted four others to the theater. She did not want to be just a good playwright, nor to be identified as a woman playwright. She wanted to be a great playwright. And she almost made it. For many years she was counted among the most important twentieth-century American dramatists, her manner reminiscent of Ibsen and Chekhov, her work placed in a category with that of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Harvard professor of drama William Alfred introduced her to a university gathering in 1961 as “the conscience of the American theater,” someone who reminded her audience “of the hunger for justice
which makes every play and adaptation of hers … a moving incitement to seek out the home truths of life, and live in obedience to them.”
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As a writer, Hellman attempted to speak to the issues of a traumatic century: she thought of herself as a serious playwright, as part of an intellectual community that could influence the shape of ideas at a time when ideas mattered. She aimed, in her plays, to illuminate moral questions that informed the everyday lives of her audiences, questions such as how the pursuit of wealth distorted human relationships in and outside the family. She advocated a vigorous defense of liberty and freedom in the face of internal political disagreements and international bullying; she explored the pernicious consequences of a culture of fear on the capacity of any individual to speak truth and retain integrity. She promoted these ideas on the largest stages she could find, first in the Broadway theater and then on the Hollywood movie screen. Aligning the message with the medium would prove no easy task: appealing to a broad audience, it was thought, required pandering to the public taste for lust and violence. Serious ideas did not belong on Broadway. And yet it was Hellman's genius to be able to write serious plays that enthralled audiences and kept them coming back for more. For this she was sometimes accused of appealing to middlebrow tastes; she would later find herself mocked and disparaged by those who represented highbrow intellectual culture.

She wanted to be a great playwright. (Photofest)

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

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

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