A Difficult Woman (37 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.