The Lost Detective (18 page)

During his months in Manhattan, Hammett collected reviews and fans for his work, from Alexander Woollcott to Dorothy Parker. But perhaps most influential for Hammett was a memo David O. Selznick wrote to his boss at Paramount Pictures, B. P. Schulberg, in July 1930. His letter came three weeks after movie rights to
The Maltese Falcon
had been bought by rival Warner Brothers for $8,500, of which Hammett kept 80 percent.
⁴
Paramount had released its adaptation of
Red Harvest
, called
Roadhouse Nights
, in February. Selznick now urged his boss to further “secure” Hammett, whose “vogue is on the rise” and who “might very well prove to be the creator of something new and startlingly original for us.” Selznick recommended signing the former Pinkerton man to write a “police story” for the actor George Bancroft. Hammett, he approvingly noted, “is unspoiled as to money.”
⁵

Hammett had not been pleased with what Paramount did with
Red Harvest
, his portrait of a Western nightmare town convulsing in violence entirely softened and rewritten and featuring performances by Jimmy Durante. “They changed everything but the title,” Hammett recalled, “and finally they changed that to ‘Roadhouse Nights.”’

Despite this treatment, Hammett may have assumed he would have greater influence by working on his future screenplays himself, in person, or (at three hundred dollars per week with a five-thousand-dollar option for any original story accepted) perhaps the money was simply too tempting. He answered the call to Hollywood, as so many writers were then doing to gather up absurd amounts of promised cash and to hide from the deepening hard times. He could briefly visit his family before starting work for Paramount. While living at the
Hollywood Knickerbocker, he corrected proofs for
The Glass Key
, about which there was some growing film interest as well.

Outwardly, his life seemed to veer out of his control during this first time working in Hollywood, yet Hammett proved surprisingly successful when he could show up in shape to work. He wrote his first assignment (a seven-page treatment titled “After School”) in a weekend, a story that was expanded as “The Kiss-Off” and ultimately produced the next year as a gangster film called
City Streets
, starring Sylvia Sidney and a young Gary Cooper, for which Hammett received a screen credit. He did various script doctoring projects, meeting William Powell, a charming, hard-drinking actor who would later reunite with Hammett for the
Thin Man
films, and the German actress Marlene Dietrich, who proved in that year’s
Blonde Venus
that she could mesmerize even while clad mostly in a gorilla suit. Outside of work, there were dinners with young actresses at the Brown Derby or Chasen’s (with its rack of lamb for two), fights at the Olympic Gardens, music at the Clover Club.

With his chauffeur “Jones” and some friends, Hammett traveled to San Francisco to repay Albert Samuels the loan his former boss had made to finance the move to New York the year before; after a week-long party at the Fairmont Hotel, Hammett found he needed to borrow eight hundred dollars more from Samuels, to settle up and make the return trip to Los Angeles.

He was coming off another long drinking jag when he went to a party at Daryl Zanuck’s house in Hollywood one night in late November 1930. Zanuck had bought rights to
The Maltese Falcon
for Warner Brothers in July (spurring the invitation from Selznick and Paramount that had brought Hammett to Hollywood). In addition, Zanuck and Warner’s were pioneering
the gangster film, having just made
Little Caesar
(with Edward G. Robinson) and with
The Public Enemy
(starring James Cagney) due out in the spring. These were films closer to the
Black Mask
style of crime writing.

The party became noteworthy for Hammett for someone else he got to know that night: a young married script reader for MGM named Lillian Kober.
^*
Her family name had been Hellman, she was Jewish, opinionated and literary, had lived in New Orleans and New York and tended toward feisty pronouncements, was odd-looking but confident, and nicely dressed with reddish brown hair. They left the party together and carried their drunken discussion out into Hammett’s chauffeured car.

He was thirty-six and, she recalled, professionally the hottest thing on both coasts. She was twenty-four, tepidly married to a New York humorist and scenario writer named Arthur Kober, and unpublished except for a few stories in a Parisian journal edited by her husband. Hammett’s “five-day drunk had left the wonderful face looking rumpled,” Hellman would remember in
An Unfinished Woman
, “and the very tall, thin figure was tired and sagged. We talked of T. S. Eliot, although I no longer remember what we said, and then went and sat in his car and talked at each other and over each other until it was daylight.”
⁶
Soon he was writing verse for her. By the next year, she would be divorced and living off and on with Hammett.

Hammett parted ways with Paramount by the end of 1930. Daryl Zanuck, at Warner’s, which was already making the first of three film versions of
The Maltese Falcon
, commissioned Hammett in January 1931 to write a new Sam Spade story for William Powell. The actor had also just come over to Warner and previously played the gentlemanly detective Philo Vance, the highly popular book series character by S. S. Van Dine whom Hammett had disparaged in print as a “bore” who was always wrong. Hammett’s deal with Warner’s was worth fifteen thousand dollars, to be paid in three installments, upon approval.
⁷

For the rest of the country, the year 1931 was a time of nearly 20 percent unemployment, bank panics, and hundreds of failures as a recession hardened into depression. New York’s Bank of the United States had gone under the year before, the largest failure in the country’s history, and newspapers published advice on how smaller banks could stave off runs by fearful depositors: managers in Chicago had rushed in a jazz band to distract panicked customers, while in Raleigh they gave out coffee and sandwiches to quiet them; one savings and loan put out an open valise full of thousand-dollar bills as a calming display of fiscal health. Hollywood, as usual, felt far from all of that.
⁸

Hammett’s daughters visited him during his time in Hollywood, sometimes encountering worldly young ladies before going out to shop nearby at Brock’s jewelers or eat lunch at the Brown Derby with their glamorous screenwriter father. “We caught glimpses of a different world when we visited him,” wrote Jo Hammett. “The light had a golden feel; things smelled different.”
⁹
At such times, Hammett’s life must have
seemed almost as he’d pictured it when he first convinced Jose to move to Los Angeles anticipating his success in the movies. Sometimes a box of chocolates would come home with the girls for Jose, or a carved box picked out with the help of one of his young ladies, and he continued to write her fond letters. The couple remained married, and he kept to his promise by sending her checks, faithfully if not always predictably.

After two rounds (and ten thousand dollars), Hammett’s screen treatment “On the Make” was ultimately rejected by Warner’s that April.
^**
In his letter, Zanuck explained that what had been commissioned as a Sam Spade story had “none of the qualifications of
Maltese Falcon.
” The Warner Brothers adaptation of the novel, released later in 1931 with Ricardo Cortez as Spade, suffered by comparison as well.

For Hammett, his boozy months in Los Angeles were punctuated by frantic cables to his patient publisher Alfred Knopf, asking for money (
IN DESPERATE NEED OF ALL MONEY I CAN FIND
). He caught his third case of gonorrhea during this time and, when Lillian Hellman had to leave town to visit New York in March, feathered his letters to her with accounts of his runs to the toilet. A month later he wrote that he was still “out of commission” but couldn’t keep from “pimping” for friends such as the New York humorist Sid (S. J.) Perelman, in Hollywood with his wife, Laura, trying to write screenplays. (Laura Perelman’s dog Asta would later give its name to the
famous schnauzer
^†
sidekick of Nick and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man
.)

“Something’s got to be done to keep the gals moderately content while I’m out of order,” Hammett told Hellman. Such drunken letters were no doubt meant to manipulate a swift return by his new lover, but they mostly sketched a gamey picture of life in Hollywood. When he surmised that Hellman had been with another man, he proudly called her a “she-Hammett.” “Alcohol has had me pretty much out of touch,” Hammett explained in another letter from April 1931, when he also wrote Alfred Knopf, “I think
The Thin Man
will be my last detective novel.” Most of it did not yet exist.

Normally reticent, he could become animated and then famously mean as he drank. There were occasional incidents—a knife throwing at a party where he’d seemed to be enjoying himself earlier—and worse, according to one young actress he had seen for a time, Elise De Viane, who sued him for battery and attempted rape after an evening in his hotel room. Hammett would not appear in court to contest the charge and lost a civil settlement of $2,500 in 1932. Whatever occurred, Hammett had scared himself enough to stop drinking for a while, unable to sell a screen treatment on one coast or deliver a novel on the other. According to friends, he had another collapse. In August 1931, Alfred Knopf deposited the money in the Irving Trust that Hammett said he desperately needed in order to come back to New York, then he closed his telegram to his author,
LOOKING FORWARD EAGERLY SEEING YOU AND RECEIVING THIN MAN
.
¹⁰

He had gone to Hollywood at the height of his creative powers and learned just what he was capable of with the money Hollywood had thrown at him, money he had giddily, contemptuously, tossed away. By the time he returned to New York in September 1931, it could no longer be said that he was “unspoiled as to money.”

* * *

During the winter of 1932, Sid Perelman saw Hammett back in New York, at the Sutton Club Hotel on East Fifty-Sixth Street. To land there, Hammett had burned through his remaining movie money at more luxurious establishments, living lushly at the Hotel Elysée and the Biltmore and the Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue, where he was finally stranded in his suite, unable to settle his bill of a thousand dollars. Word reached his friends, who invited him to join the group of literary guests (James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, Herbert Asbury) living cheaply at the nearby Sutton, a good place to work if you were close to broke and didn’t care, for the time being, about ugly furniture or bad coffee.

Hammett contrived a scheme for sneaking out on his bill at the Pierre: “His knowledge of the mentality of house detectives provided the key,” Sid Perelman recalled in a memoir. “Hammett decided to use fat as a subterfuge. He pulled on four shirts, three suits, innumerable socks, two lightweight ulsters, and an overcoat, cramming his pockets with assorted toiletries. Then he puffed out his cheeks, strode past the desk without a glimmer of suspicion, and headed for the Sutton.” There, when the faux fat man arrived, Perelman and others were all gratefully ensconced with their own projects. Hammett brought his own.

The Sutton Club was a serviceable new establishment managed by Sid Perelman’s brother-in-law, Nathanael “Pep” West, who
offered his empty rooms to a clientele of deserving writers. Ability to pay was not the main criterion for West in sneaking in his literary guests in his unofficial writer’s colony. West himself had so far written one unpublishable novella, and was working on his first short masterpiece,
Miss Lonelyhearts
, about a newspaper advice columnist with a Christ complex, which Hammett would read in manuscript while a guest at the hotel. West put three grubby rooms together for Hammett and classily dubbed it the Diplomatic Suite. Hammett would stay eight crucial months.
¹¹

Before the move, he had written “A Man Called Spade” for
American Magazine
—he did three high-paying Spade stories in 1932—and a cinematic novella called
Woman in the Dark
was serialized in
Liberty
. Now he was primed to push on with the final novel he would ever publish, completed in a flourish of surprising discipline, given how wildly he had been living. Lillian Hellman recalled him pounding away in his shabby suite:

I had known Dash when he was writing short stories, but I had never been around for a long piece of work: The drinking stopped, the parties were over. The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ten days or two weeks to go out for even a walk for fear something would be lost.
¹²

He may not have feared only that something would be lost, but, given how things had unraveled on the West Coast, that something already had been. But, in an impressive last stand, he finished the book, against which he had already borrowed
several times from Knopf. It was not his best work, but it would become his most popular, especially in combination with the series of films it inspired.

He had spent eight comparatively spartan months at the Sutton. After pulling the final page from his typewriter and turning in the manuscript in the spring of 1933, he was back briefly in the black, and the time for “locking-in” and discipline was over. Liquor was again legal.

The book he had written, in addition to its central mystery plot about the search for a missing inventor, Clyde Wynant, over several days in December, was also clearly an account of what it was like to be suddenly wealthy and an ex-detective from San Francisco, spending as quickly as the money came in and bantering with your sophisticated lady friend at a series of parties and Manhattan hotels.

Sometimes in his bathrobe, having scotch for breakfast, Nick Charles is a burnt-out case moved to do things mainly out of love for his wife. “We didn’t come to New York to stay sober,” he reminds her when events threaten his Christmas plans. Up from the lobby of his Hotel Normandie come a host of characters from his detecting past. The adventure seeks him out, buzzed and resistant as he is. Even when wounded by a bullet, he is in his hotel bed, throwing a pillow in defense. Nick Charles is three things rare in a good detective: drunk, famous, and accompanied usually by his charming wife.