A Difficult Woman (5 page)

The differential experience suggests that Lillian may well have suffered from what the historian W. J. Cash has called the paradox of “the eternal alien,” never quite belonging. “In the general withdrawal upon the old heritage,” notes Cash, Jews inevitably stood out. “It was perfectly natural that … he should come in for renewed denunciations; should … stand in the eyes of the people as a sort of evil harbinger and incarnation of all the menaces they feared and hated—external and internal, real and imaginary.”
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Among New Orleans Jews, that alienation was experienced
in one important arena: Jews had never been invited to the Mardi Gras carnival balls, and this despite the fact that a Jew had originated the carnival in 1872 and been its first Rex.
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As a child, Lillian did not feel deprived of this experience, and when she might have felt excluded she had already left the South. And yet years later she ridiculed the notion of exclusion with a suspicious vehemence. “May God bless them and keep them,” she wrote of Jews who wanted to participate in the ceremonies, “and some day allow them to ride on those hideous Mardi Gras floats and become Kings and Queens, ermine bedecked, at the grand balls and as silly as their dancing partners.”
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Hellman's deep commitment to racial egalitarianism seems to have emerged from both her eclectic exposure to religion and her southern roots. Unlike their poor white counterparts, Jews who lived in the South experienced few “turf” conflicts over jobs. Unlike New York's first- and second-generation immigrants, who frequently identified themselves as refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia, the comparatively deep roots and relative economic prosperity of many southern Jews placed them in more secure positions. Still, the position of southern Jews was not without ambiguity. Their small numbers and dispersed presence, historian Paula Hyman notes, pushed Jews in the South and other small communities into a private commitment to their faith that substituted for the public exhibitions of Jewish culture more prevalent in larger Jewish communities. They were white people in a world where race mattered more than religion. As white people eager to achieve economic success and security for their families, they adapted to prevailing racial hierarchies and discriminations. But that did not mean that religion and ethnic tradition did not matter at all. As outsiders within, they tended to identify with the persecuted rather than with the persecutors. Even as they adopted southern white standards of segregation and place, southern Jews generally took liberal positions on the “Negro problem.” Somewhat cynically, Hellman attributed this stance to self-interest—to respect for African-Americans as customers and as employees.
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In this sense their Jewish identity differed from that of their northern counterparts even as their southern origins separated them from the rest of America.

Lillian's parents echoed the anti-racist lessons learned from Sophronia and were, if anything, more inclined to take matters into their own hands. She often told a story that she later reproduced in her memoirs of how her father got involved in a brawl in defense of a young black girl
who was traveling by train alone in the deep South. Lillian (about ten at the time) and her parents were sitting one night on a deserted southern train platform when they noticed the young woman running from two white men, who caught up with her and grabbed her, knocking the girl's suitcase out of her hands and scattering her possessions. Max stepped up immediately—an unexpected act in the days before World War I—insisting they put the girl down. The men responded by taking a swing at him. He fended them off and hurriedly escorted the girl to the just-arriving train, telling Lillian to jump aboard. Only when the train began to pull out did father and daughter realize they had left Lillian's mother behind “on the ground carefully picking up and repacking the girl's valise.” She headed for the train as it jerked to a stop, walking through the two men and smiling as she said, in a deep southern accent, “Excuse me, boys, excuse me. Mah husband wants us to get aboard the train.”
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Lillian later thought the accent might have saved her mother's life.

Hellman later ascribed the incident to her parents' commitment to individual liberty. It was, she thought, about “two people who believed in the right to go unmolested.” Max Hellman, she later claimed, had a “genuine feeling for Negroes, and real pity.” To her parents' example, she attributed her deeply rooted commitment to civil liberties and individual freedom. But the image of two perhaps drunken white men harassing an innocent black girl also illuminated the changes going on around her. For the benign images of paternalism that constituted her child's view of the South, she substituted the brutality of a new South focused on personal gratification and the accumulation of wealth rather than on mutual responsibility. She never reconciled her childhood memories of a safe and comfortable New Orleans with the abused and exploited population of the new South.

Lillian moved with her parents to New York in 1910, at the age of five. For the next eight or nine years, the family seems to have spent several months of every year in New Orleans. We know about these years mainly from Lillian, who clung to an image of herself as a child of the South despite the fact that most of her schooling occurred in New York. Hellman tells us that as a child she went to school both in New York and in New Orleans and experienced discomfort in both places. In the North, she could not keep up with her smart urban classmates; in the South, she found herself bored to tears and frequently playing hooky. She probably moved about until she was eleven. After that, southern summers spent in
New Orleans and in her mother's family compound in Mississippi mingled with school years in New York City. In all that time, Hellman maintained a distant though still loving relationship with her old nurse Sophronia, who continued to exercise moral authority in a world in which her parents proved more capricious and less predictable.

In New Orleans, the family generally lived in a boardinghouse run by her father's two older sisters, Jenny and Hannah. Set on the shabby, genteel end of Prytania Street for a while and then relocated to a somewhat seedier neighborhood, the boardinghouse provided Lillian with endless entertainment and immersion in the eccentricities of New Orleans family life.

There she learned to prepare crayfish, to make turtle soup, and to command such domestic arts as knitting, sewing, and embroidery. She admired her aunts' strong sense of themselves as independent women, acknowledged their love for her and her father, and noted the way they cherished and protected her mother. Warm, funny, and kind, Jenny and Hannah introduced Lillian to a tradition of generous hospitality that she would practice all of her life. Perhaps inadvertently, they also fostered Lillian's strong need to construct around herself a “family” of people who cared for her and looked after her needs. Coming from a South where she was pampered by aunts and where a tradition of service prevailed, she readily equated deference with love. This characteristic lasted all of her life, perhaps accounting for much of the bad temper and irritability that her associates observed when she failed to get the help she needed and wanted, or when her friends let her down.

The South too is the location of the fig tree where Lillian satisfied her “stubborn, relentless driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.”
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She hid herself in its branches to read and to educate herself, later recalling the delicious sense of freedom to read as widely as she liked. There, she shed her school clothes and her temper as she allowed the environment to comfort her and hold her safe, “nobody there to tell you what to read, or give advice, or interpret; no interest in whether the book is good or bad … You are just there reading anything you can put your hands on, all hot and sticky with excitement, and maybe fudge …”
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The fig tree appears in several locations in Hellman's later work, and undoubtedly in her mind, providing a haven and a hiding place for a restless young girl. Generally, Hellman locates it in the front yard of her aunts' boardinghouse on Prytania Street, though occasionally it appears at “Pass Christian,” the Mississippi
resort frequented by the Marx-Newhouse clan, where she and her family spent a week or two every summer of her early teenage years.

An Unfinished Woman
proudly recalls childhood moments when Hellman demonstrated courage and spirit, often flouting advice in favor of making her own decisions. Some of these seem, in retrospect, to have been trivial incidents, more reflective of her efforts to define her character than important as anecdote. She tells us that she often chose to skip school in order to spend time in the fig tree. She describes efforts to defy her mother's wealthy family by trading an expensive ring given her by Uncle Jake for books. Instead of punishment, she was rewarded by being told that she had spirit after all.

Lillian retreated to the branches of the fig tree to lick her wounds over her first great disillusionment. She had witnessed her father meeting another woman outside a restaurant, then getting into a taxi with her. Lillian tells us that in a blind rage she threw herself from the fig tree, breaking her nose. When she ran, for comfort, to Sophronia and told her the story, that wise woman instructed her to remain silent about her father's affairs, giving her the message that would resonate down the years: “Don't go through life making trouble for people.”
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The broken nose accompanied her for the rest of her life, unmended, despite Hellman's vanity about her clothes and her looks, and marking her exit from the safety of the South, the security of her parental home, and an implausible vision of herself as a curly-headed beauty. Zoe Caldwell, who played Lillian onstage shortly after her death, thought of the broken nose as a mark of courage, a reminder of the need for discretion.
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In the aftermath of the fall, Hellman ran repeatedly to Sophronia and the black community for help and solace. In one episode, she tells us that at fourteen she ran away from home after an argument with her parents and stayed away for two nights, making her way, finally, to what she calls the Negro part of town. She knew this area because it housed her family's dressmaker and she had often been brought there by Sophronia. She remembered it as peopled by cheerful souls and remarkable houses with welcoming doors. There, after invoking Sophronia's name, she was taken in by a suspicious black family that nevertheless protected her and arranged for her to be collected by her father. Did Lillian really run away from home at fourteen and manage to stay away for two nights, discovering that she had her first menses just as her father came to fetch her? That's doubtful. Yet whether this story recalls an event that happened or one that she constructed to capture her feelings of despair at the time, it
reflects a sense of what racial relations meant to her, revealing something about Lillian's sense of the New Orleans black community as a place of comfort rather than one of terror.

Much that Hellman tells us about her experience of southern childhood is clearly romanticized, the exaggerated and wishful memories of a child who recalls moments of pain and joy in the light of lessons learned and rewards received. Her identity as a southerner remained, all her life, firmly rooted in a mythical South where paternalism, gentility, culture, and self-respect trumped the quest for money in the battle for survival. The grown-up Lillian's reflections on these southern roots reveal a surprising nostalgia for the gentle past of her imagination, producing a bitter rage against those who threatened to destroy sweet memories. Her mother's family, especially her great-uncle Jake, is among those against whom her venom is directed.

Hellman held the uncontrolled search for wealth represented by Jake responsible for exacerbating the poverty and racial tension that would become characteristic of a new South. In the unnamed small southern town in which her most famous play,
The Little Foxes
, is set in 1900, Hellman locates a predatory family intent upon becoming rich by learning “new ways” and learning “how to make them pay.” The family echoes that of her mother. As brother Ben says, the plantation built on fine crops and Negro labor “now belongs to us … twenty years ago, we took over their land, their cotton and their daughter.”
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But the unhappy daughter whose marriage into the family provided it with the land and credibility to destroy the life she loved wants only to retreat into drink where she can shut out the present to revel in the beautiful past of memory. Her mother, she recalls, sold off everything out of need, never letting go of her anger at a “people who killed animals they couldn't use and who made their money charging awful interest to ignorant niggers and cheating them on what they bought.”
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The price of greed, Hellman tells us, is the loss of culture, civility, and humane values, especially toward poor people.

Lillian eventually learned to emulate the warmth and grace of the old South, but she would not, in any event, have been positioned to take advantage of the new. There she was merely an ugly duckling, lacking traditional good looks and without the kind of family wealth that might have compensated for them. She could not expect to marry into the world of romance and charm, nor could she have brought resources to a marriage or a business partnership. To be sure, she dreamed of being a beauty, but after her first boyfriend told her she looked like “a prow head on a whaling
ship,” she gave up on that dream.
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Eventually, she created the head of blonde curls that she wished for, and she earned enough to live the lifestyle of her grandmother. But she never stopped envying good-looking women, nor did she transcend the feeling that she was a poor relative in an extended family where wealth not only mattered but was what chiefly counted.