A Difficult Woman (14 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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