Imaginary Friends (4 page)

DASHIELL HAMMETT
:
[Quoting lines from
The Thin Man.
]
“You know, Vic, the important thing is rhythm. You always have rhythm in your shaking. A Manhattan you shake to a foxtrot. A Rob Roy you shake to two-step time. A dry martini you always shake to waltz time.”
[To
LILLIAN
.
]
Say, how many drinks have you had?

LILLIAN
: This will make five martinis.

DASHIELL HAMMETT
: All right, will you bring me four more martinis, Leo? Line them up right here.
[
DASHIELL HAMMETT
starts to drink the martinis, one by one.]

LILLIAN
: After he wrote
The Thin Man
, he told me I was Nora, and I was very pleased, and then he told me I was also the
silly girl in it, and the villainess, too. And he wrote me poetry, and he was so handsome, and he called me “My darling Lilishka.” Didn’t you, Dash? Dash?

DASHIELL HAMMETT
,
apparently drunk, falls off the bar stool onto the floor
.

I met Hammett—Dashiell Hammett—in Musso and Frank’s Restaurant in Los Angeles in 1930. He’d written
The Maltese Falcon
and
The Dain Curse
. He was the hottest thing in town. When I met Hammett, I was a reader at MGM and didn’t have a political bone in my body or a nickel to my name. When he got done with me, I was Lillian Hellman.

On-screen we see the scene from
Julia
in which Jane Fonda, playing
LILLIAN
,
is living with Jason Robards, playing
DASHIELL HAMMETT
.
She’s trying to write. She types a few words on a piece of paper and then crumples it up. She tries again and crumples another piece of paper. Then she throws the typewriter out the window
.

That never happened.

MARY
: Thank you. Almost none of it happened. Hammett—you and Hammett—you rarely slept together, he was drunk most of the time, and he had the longest writer’s block in living memory.

LILLIAN
: He loved me and only me.

MARY
: I’m sure he did. But this romantic thin man who rode into your life and turned you into a femme fatale was a figment of your imagination. He was just a story.

LILLIAN
: If you want to believe that, it makes no difference to me. Because you don’t know the first thing about stories. If you did, you wouldn’t do silly things like telling us there are no nightingales in North America. Fine, Hammett was just a story. And one day he gave me a book of British court cases and said, “Here’s something.” In it was an article about a girls’ school in Scotland where two headmistresses were accused by a student of having a lesbian relationship. The scandal forced the school to close, and the headmistresses sued the student for libel. I was very lucky, because he’d given me something that had structure, it had a subject—

MARY
: Its subject was lying—

LILLIAN
: I called the play
The Children’s Hour
, and it was, for its time, shocking. It’s always nice to begin with something shocking. It’s a way of saying—
[A little Mae West.]
“I’m here. Notice me, boys. Come over to my corner of the playground and I’ll show you my underpants.” I was a sensation, and I was twenty-nine.

The
BARTENDERS
shake up a new round of drinks, and a man in a top hat enters and sits down next to
MARY
.
He is highwaisted and slightly overweight. This is
EDMUND WILSON
.

MARY
:

WE SPOKE, WE DRANK, WE KNEW
—

BARTENDERS
:

EDMUND WILSON APPEARS
—

MARY
:

THE SCENT OF DISASTER
THE CLINK OF A GLASS AND YOU

BARTENDERS
:

HE WAS OLD HE WAS NEW

MARY
:

A VOICE LIKE MY OWN SAID “I DO”
I WOKE, I SANK, I FLEW

For many years—for most of my life, really—I tried to figure out why I married Edmund Wilson. He was, of course, brilliant. Say something brilliant, Edmund.

EDMUND WILSON
: Something brilliant.

MARY
: And he was famous for being a great deal of fun. Say something fun, Edmund.

EDMUND WILSON
: Something fun.

MARY
: And he was eminent. And clever. And he was interested in all sorts of odd things. Puppets. He could take a bow tie and turn it into a tiny mouse—

He turns a bow tie into a tiny mouse
.

EDMUND WILSON
: Squeak squeak.

MARY
: —and he had met Harry Houdini, and he could do magic tricks.

EDMUND WILSON
stands and removes his top hat and pulls a rabbit out of it. He exits with the rabbit
.

He was called Bunny, but not because of the rabbit.
[Indicating
LILLIAN
.
] She
loved him.

LILLIAN
: I did. I didn’t really know him until years later, but I absolutely adored him. Everyone did.

BARTENDERS
:

EVERYONE LOVED HIM
AND NOBODY SHOVED HIM DOWN ANYONE’S THROAT

MARY
:

THIS IS TRUE

BARTENDERS
:

AND MAY WE NOTE THAT WE KNEW
AND ADORED HIM

LILLIAN
: Everyone did. Everyone but you.

MARY
: Did you ever—?

LILLIAN
: Sleep with Edmund Wilson? Absolutely not. Although I did sleep with Philip Rahv. Once.

BARTENDERS
:

SHE SLEPT WITH PHILIP RAHV

MARY
: Not even once.
[Beat.]
I was sleeping with Philip Rahv when I met Edmund Wilson. I was in love with Philip Rahv.

LILLIAN
: No one remembers Philip Rahv. They all think you’re talking about Philip Roth.
[To the audience.]
It’s Philip
Rahv
—
[She mouths the words, “And I did sleep with him.”]

MARY
: Philip Rahv was tall and handsome and about to become the editor of
Partisan Review
—and I was just starting to
write criticism. We lived together in a one-room apartment, and we argued endlessly about everything. Whether Jews were superior to gentiles—which he believed, of course. It was as if he were on a game show—

PHILIP RAHV
enters, pushing a small table
.

Jewish geniuses for five hundred dollars.

PHILIP RAHV
:
[A slight Russian accent.]
Einstein, Marx, Spinoza—

MARY
: Exactly. He was very intense. We waged class struggle every day.

LILLIAN
: “My First Jew” by Mary McCarthy.

BARTENDERS
:

A SMOKE, A DRINK, A JEW
A WAR OF THE CLASSES
A MURKY MORASS FOR TWO

PHILIP RAHV
:

I LOVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE MASSES WITH YOU

BARTENDERS
:

THOSE CIRCULAR FIGHTS WE’D PURSUE

MARY
walks over to the table, which is set for dinner, and starts to cut a loaf of bread
.

PHILIP RAHV
: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka—

MARY
: I’m not playing this game with you anymore—

PHILIP RAHV
: Because you always lose.

MARY
: I do not always lose. How can I lose with Shakespeare on my team?

PHILIP RAHV
: But Sigmund Freud is not on your team—

MARY
: I’m not playing, Philip—

PHILIP RAHV
: Or Jascha Heifetz, or Vladimir Horowitz—

MARY
takes a particularly vicious cut at the loaf of bread
.

LILLIAN
:

A SMOKE

MARY
:

A DRINK

PHILIP RAHV
:

A JEW

A beat
.

What are you doing?

MARY
: I’m cutting the crusts off.

PHILIP RAHV
: Do you know why you’re cutting the crusts off?

MARY
: Because the sandwich tastes better with the crusts off—

PHILIP RAHV
shakes his head—that’s not the right answer
.

Because I grew up in a family where they cut the crusts off—

Wrong answer again
.

I give up.

PHILIP RAHV
: The reason people cut the crusts off bread is so they can throw the crusts away. Which shows the world that they have money, so much money they don’t even need the whole piece of bread. It’s a way for the middle-class goyim to pretend to be upper-class goyim—

MARY
:
[Interrupting.]
It makes the sandwiches look nicer.

PHILIP RAHV
: It’s very bourgeois.

MARY
: Liking pretty things doesn’t make you bourgeois.

PHILIP RAHV
: Caring about them does.

He stands and picks up a pretty little vase with a few flowers in it
.

MARY
: What are you doing?

PHILIP RAHV
: Watch this—

He starts across the room toward
MARY
and lets the vase fly out of his hand—
MARY
screams
.

MARY
: Philip!—

He catches the vase
.

PHILIP RAHV
: It’s just a possession. Possessions mean nothing.

MARY
: It was my grandmother’s. It’s practically all I have from my grandmother.

PHILIP RAHV
: It’s a thing. It’s just a thing. Who needs it?

MARY
: What would you suggest I put flowers in?

PHILIP RAHV
: Where is it written we have to have flowers?

MARY
: Oh, I suppose there’s a Marxist position on flowers—

PHILIP RAHV
: And as for linen napkins—

He holds up a linen napkin
.

MARY
: They were my grandmother’s—

He picks up a silver fork
.

PHILIP RAHV
: And silver—

He puts the fork back as
MARY
says:

MARY
: The silver was—

PHILIP AND MARY
:
[Together.]
My grandmother’s.

PHILIP RAHV
: You know what my grandmother left me? A scrap of paper. And you know what was on that scrap of paper? A message. And you know what that message said? “When the Cossacks come, don’t open the door.”

A beat
.

MARY
: I suppose Jews don’t care about things they own—

PHILIP RAHV
: Oh, voila. Now it comes out—

MARY
:
[With a much better French accent.]
It’s “voila.”

PHILIP RAHV
:
[Fracturing the pronunciation.]
Voila yourself.
[A beat.]

MARY
:
[Repeating his line.]
Voila now
what
comes out?

PHILIP RAHV
: Voila, scratch a goy and you find an anti-Semite.

MARY
: I am not an anti-Semite. That is so ludicrous. It’s all right for you to accuse me of being overly attached to meaningless objects, but when I suggest that
your
people are not exactly—

PHILIP RAHV
:
My
people. Oy, oy, oy, that’s good. My people are not exactly what? Say it, go on—

MARY
: Your people—some of your people—some of your people living on Park Avenue, for instance—are not exactly living on bread and water—

PHILIP RAHV
: But if they were, they would eat the crusts.
[He stands.]
Good-bye. I’m going into the bathroom to stare at my foreskin.

MARY
: You don’t have a foreskin.

PHILIP RAHV
: Exactly.

PHILIP RAHV
goes into the bathroom and slams the door. A beat
.

MARY
: We were incredibly happy.
[She goes to the bureau and takes out a fox stole and wraps it around her neck. Re: the stole.]
My grandmother’s.
[Beat.]
One day Philip had a lunch for the great critic Edmund Wilson and took me to it. I wore my best black dress and a silver fox stole. He—Edmund—was short and stout and pink and pop-eyed, and he huffed and he puffed all the way through lunch. A few weeks later he took me to dinner. Here’s what I had for dinner: three daiquiris, two double Manhattans, a bottle of red wine, and several tumblers of B&B. Two weeks later a similar dinner, and then to his house in Connecticut. I was shown to a guest bedroom. I decided to come down to the study where I knew he would be. It was late. There was a couch. He misunderstood why I had come, and took me in his arms, and I gave up the battle.

BARTENDERS
:

A COUCH, A KISS, AND YOU
THE RAPTUROUS FORCE
OF A FUTURE DIVORCE
FOR TWO
BEFORE IT BEGAN
IT WAS THROUGH

LILLIAN
: You slept with him because you were drunk.

MARY
: That wasn’t the reason—

LILLIAN
: Why are you making this into the turning point of the twentieth century?

MARY
: But I didn’t come down to the study to sleep with him. And I tried to explain that to him later. Not that he cared—the only thing he cared about was that it had happened. I’d slept with him, that was the fact, case closed. But I hadn’t gone there to sleep with him. I’d gone there to talk to him, I swear, I’d gone there only to talk to him.