A Difficult Woman (34 page)

But if Hellman recognized that something new was happening in the theater, she did not know how to address it. Instead, in the changing political climate of the 1960s, she found new audiences and new popularity among young people committed to challenging authority, supporting civil rights for African-Americans, and opposing an escalating war in Vietnam. In 1967, Mike Nichols undertook a major new production of
The Little Foxes
that burnished Hellman's reputation and revivified her image. But the production regenerated questions of art and politics. This time the attack came from some of Hellman's former friends in New York literary circles and signaled a reignited warfare between left-wing anticommunists and the remnants of the old left.

Elizabeth Hardwick, once close to Hellman and herself a southerner, led the charge, condemning Hellman for failing to do justice to the complicated questions of who might benefit from industrializing the South. This, wrote Hardwick, “is an idea of great interest, and in Lillian Hellman's failure to do justice to its complications so much about our theater and our left-wing popular writers of the Thirties is revealed.” Hardwick then went on to damn Hellman's plays in general. They included lines reminiscent of popular movies written by leftists of the thirties and designed to articulate the author's political beliefs rather than illuminate difficult issues. They resorted to a “craftsmanship of climaxes and curtain lines and discoveries” designed to ensure commercial success rather than intellectual profit. In a ringing conclusion, Hardwick condemned Hellman for squeezing her characters to death between “the iron of an American version of Socialist Realism and the gold of a reigning commercialism.”
¹¹²
A flurry of accusations and denials about the personal nature of the
argument ensued. But Hardwick's dagger struck deep, damaging Hellman's reputation as a writer with something serious to say. In the world of the literati, a wounded Hellman appeared as merely middlebrow—a woman with a “torn spirit” who vacillated between “the bright stuffs of expensive productions and the hair-shirt of didacticism.”
¹¹³

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.