A Difficult Woman Read online

  A Difficult Woman

  The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

  ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS

  For Emma and Molly and Jake

  and

  For Daniel and Eddie and Callie

  With hope and joy and love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1. Old-Fashioned American Traditions

  Chapter 2. A Tough Broad

  Chapter 3. A Serious Playwright

  Chapter 4. Politics Without Fear

  Chapter 5. An American Jew

  Chapter 6. The Writer as Moralist

  Chapter 7. A Self-Made Woman

  Chapter 8. A Known Communist

  Chapter 9. The Most Dangerous Hours

  Chapter 10. Liar, Liar

  Chapter 11. Life After Death

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliographical Guide

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  Introduction

  If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written; for a great deal is known of men of which proof cannot be brought.

  —John Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

  In 1976, aged seventy-one, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman posed in a mink coat for a resonant advertisement. Cigarette in hand, gazing insouciantly at the camera, Hellman claimed the legendary status she craved. Her flirtatious stance, self-confident amid the wrinkled features, her posture at once brazen and enticing, Hellman gazed directly at the viewer. The advertisement did not reveal the name of its model. It did not have to. Everyone who read Vogue and the New Yorker and the other magazines in which the advertisement appeared would know that this was Lillian Hellman. She was at the peak of celebrity. In addition to a fistful of plays whose names were well known, she was a heroine to young women who adored her two bestselling memoirs. A star-studded celebration of her seventieth birthday had recently been covered in all the society pages. Just months before the advertisement appeared, Hellman published her third volume of nonfiction, Scoundrel Time. So controversial was that volume, and so divisive, that when the mink coat advertisements hit the stands, Hellman had already begun her long decline from the pinnacle of fame to the depths of notoriety.

  1976: Everyone would know that this was Lillian Hellman. (Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives)

  What was it, I wondered as I started on this book, that made Hellman’s life matter so much to so many? To be sure, it traversed most of what historian Eric Hobsbawm has labeled the short twentieth century, the period that saw the rise and demise of the communist Soviet Union. Her life reveals the multiple tensions within which every politically engaged American juggled options and choices during that challenging period. Hellman was born in 1905, came to maturity with the flapper generation of the 1920s, learned her politics in the Depression-era thirties, became a celebrity playwright and movie scriptwriter during World War II, when America needed heroes, and earned her stripes in the struggle against McCarthyism in the early fifties. She survived blacklisting to become an idol of the New Left and the second wave of the women’s movement, only to succumb to red-baiting and character assassination at the end of her days. She was, and is still, dragged from the grave to serve as an example of the perils of mendacity. But her words are still quoted, her plays are regularly revived, and her example still inspires.

  It was hard to believe that this complicated and forthright woman had come to such a bad end in the popular imagination. Like many of my contemporaries, I read—devoured would be more accurate—Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical work as it appeared in the late sixties and early seventies: An Unfinished Woman in 1969, Pentimento in 1973, and then Scoundrel Time in 1976. These memoirs, which deeply moved me at the time, drifted into obscurity in the wake of continuing accusations that they reflected more fiction than fact. More than a quarter century after her death her name still evokes bitter feelings. How had it happened, I wondered, that Lillian Hellman, once so honored and famous, admired for her blunt and plainspoken style, had become the archetype of hypocrisy, the quintessential liar, the embodiment of ugliness? How was it that she was so widely remembered as a rigid Stalinist, an angry woman, a greedy, self-aggrandizing individual in a world where so many others had committed many of the same sins? Why had these characterizations, this negative reputation and the controversy that swirled around her, so long survived her death in 1984? This book tries to answer these questions not by reassessing her character but by thinking through her relationship to the twentieth century. The questions that trouble me are not so much about her psychic dimensions—the traditional subject of the literary biographer—or even about the soil from which she grew, the question most often raised by the historical biographer. Rather, I wonder about what is to be learned from the surviving images of Lillian Hellman, from the sharp disjuncture between the glamorous and celebrated playwright and the “ugly” woman of popular memory.

  The answers to these questions seem to me to lie in the historical drama within which Hellman acted her part: in the multifaceted and politically splintered America in which she spent her days. In Hellman’s lifetime, America fought several wars for democracy and freedom abroad, yet engaged in extended episodes of political repression at home. Her life engaged a century during which women strode toward economic and political equality, yet remained constrained by popular images of beauty and models of traditional family relationships. This was a century when celebrity conferred fame, money, and standing, of which Hellman had her full share, yet it placed its recipients in the glare of constant publicity, turning them into public property. At the century’s start, the nation challenged immigrants to assimilate by eliminating differences of language and culture; by its end, it encouraged pride in multiculturalism and unique qualities of ethnicity and identity. During the twentieth century, efforts to achieve the good life for every citizen yielded remarkable success, but they also produced an arrogant stance in the world. The twentieth century pitted two competing ideological systems against each other, fostering intense conflicts about the meaning of loyalty and the definition of virtue.

  Lillian Hellman, as a historical figure who faced difficult choices, lived in a century sharply divided by ideology and morality. Repeatedly she made decisions about where to locate her political allegiance; how to construct her life as a woman in a world that limited women’s aspirations; what it meant to live as a Jew, a southerner, a writer at a time when these identities all carried gender, economic, and political connotations that she only half understood and sometimes explicitly rejected. These issues could not be neatly separated. Her identity, her friendships, her sexuality, her writing, and her politics sustained and infected each other, producing an amalgam that was at once idiosyncratic and complicated and very American.

  My task has been to see how the life of a single woman can help us to understand some of the salient contradictions of a challenging century by highlighting the thorny situations that Hellman faced. Fortunately, my job has been made easier by the spate of more traditional biographies that have already appeared. These (especially two very good ones by Carl Rollyson and Deborah Martinson) offer thoroughly researched accounts of Hellman’s daily life.1 I gratefully refer readers who wish to follow Hellman “cradle to grave” to them. Here I choose another path, one to which the historian is perhaps particularly attuned. I seek not only to explore how the world in which Hellman lived shaped the choices she made, but to ask how the life she lived illuminates the world she confronted. There is yet a third layer. Because Hellman’s life seems to me to so dee
ply encapsulate many of the twentieth century’s challenges, I ask as well how a changing political environment influences popular perceptions of her life. Hellman’s actions alone, I argue, cannot account for the transformation in her reputation. Rather, over time, critics, reviewers, political friends and enemies collectively formulated a life that reshaped Lillian Hellman, turning her into something of a Rorschach test. Critics and friends alike viewed her through their own eyes and their own ideological biases. They helped to construct the Lillian Hellman whose work and reputation persists. That Lillian Hellman is an amalgam of the person and of our image of the person; of the good and the bad that she did and was thought to have done. This then is a book (a biography if you will) about a woman, about the idea of a woman, and about the world that formed and shaped her.

  Hellman, living and dead, is a most uncooperative source. She was committed to controlling her own legacy and savvy enough to try to do so. In 1961, Hellman contracted to sell her early manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which also owns the papers of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and many other major writers.2 She was pleased that they wanted the manuscripts, and she settled for a generous initial purchase price along with an arrangement that would allow the library to accession some of the manuscripts immediately and to release others annually. As was then general practice, the library evaluated the additional accessions as it opened them to public use, recording them as gifts for which Hellman would receive tax deductions. Thereafter, she carefully adhered to her obligation to send future drafts of plays and published material to the library. But she rigorously excluded personal papers from the collection. In the seventies, she included provisions to donate her remaining manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center in the several versions of her will. All of them instructed that personal papers be withheld as they “could be of no possible interest to anyone.”

  Because she wanted to remain the subject of her own imagination, Hellman tried, sometimes deliberately, to shape her image to her liking. In the diaries and appointment books that she kept sporadically all of her life, she often disguised the identities of lovers and friends. Recognizing herself as the butt of anger and misunderstanding, she frequently made up stories about herself, her childhood, and her family that illustrated who she wanted to be. With her friend Hannah Weinstein, she invented a fictional Mr. Schwartz who might or might not appear to marry her.3 She narrated her stories in letters to friends, dinner-table conversations, and in four books of memoir and reminiscence that presented herself as she wished to be remembered. She destroyed, insofar as she could, anything that might allow another judgment or correction of the record. She asked her friends to return her letters to them. With a few exceptions (her first husband, Arthur Kober, didn’t return her letters, nor did John Melby), they complied. Hellman then destroyed many of these and other letters.

  At first, Hellman insisted that she wanted no biography written about her. “I am not sure that anybody’s life shows us much about their work,” she wrote, as she refused to cooperate with those who wanted to write about Dorothy Parker or Dashiell Hammett or herself. An early effort by Stephen Marcus to undertake a biography of Hammett, her longtime lover, ended in discord and the threat of lawsuits. When she finally acquiesced to Diane Johnson’s biography of Hammett, she monitored the sources and tried to control their interpretation, telling Johnson that she did not believe in “fictionalized biography” and hoped she would not write one.4 When it became clear that biographers would write about her with or without her permission, she wrote to her friends asking them not to talk to them. The result, of course, was that, as William Wright confessed, he interviewed her enemies and produced a biography bent toward their derisive interpretations. At the end of her life, she appointed her friend and editor William Abrahams as her official biographer. She requested that the archive close all her papers to other researchers for an unspecified period of time. The archive complied. Abrahams gamely started the project, only to be interrupted by death.

  Under these circumstances it would be folly to try to capture the “real” Lillian, whoever that is. Her story has emerged in bifurcated form. There is, first of all, the story as she remembered and wanted it. This perhaps was not deliberate manipulation so much as an artifact of the effort at self-representation. The writer Carol Kolmerten once noted that only when Kolmerten reread letters to her mother written during her first marriage did she notice that she had “constructed a fictional narrative of my life that I perceived my female relatives wanted to hear.”5 Hellman would have been sympathetic. She described An Unfinished Woman as a memory book. She never said that Pentimento was a memoir; indeed she begged the editor of Esquire (which republished a piece of the book) to “not use the words ‘memoir’ or ‘autobiography’ in connection with the pieces.”6 She did not want these pieces, she wrote, to be thought of as a sequel to An Unfinished Woman. These were her stories. She was the heroine of her own play.

  Because we cannot take at face value anything she says about herself, we are led to ask about the meaning of her self-representation. Hellman wrote extensively about issues of honesty, decency, and integrity. All her life she worried about the meaning of memory, sharply distinguishing the truth of memory from other forms of truth. She tells us in a dozen different ways that she does not believe there is any absolute standard of truth, that her memory is poor and that she writes “as she remembers” rather than what is true, that she despises those who live by pretense and sham. As if to confirm her self-evaluation, she clearly tells large and small lies, expands and contracts the truth, mixes up the events, misremembers years, times, and dates, and omits salient details about her life. None of this should surprise us. In the larger frame of history, questions of truth and lies permeate the past. And the historian, as the great Russianist E. H. Carr once said, is no hanging judge. He or she asks what the writer reveals about the dialogue between the individual and history rather than whether it is factual. The genre of memoir, where low standards of veracity prevail, is a particularly useful vehicle for understanding what a subject wants us to know. Freud tells us we all remember things that never happened and misremember things that did. That is an invitation to the historian to fit together the jigsaw puzzle in order to place what is forgotten or misremembered into a pattern of explanation.

  Hellman’s memoirs, published between 1969 and 1980, situated her in the midst of the twentieth century’s great conflicts. Filled with invention, written with verve and style, her books described a risky and exciting life and turned her into a bestselling author. But they also led readers to probe her image of herself as a reliable reporter, to produce their own stories about Lillian Hellman. Hellman’s deliberate fudging of detail provoked these examinations. She shortened the number of weeks she spent in Finland on her way home from the Soviet Union in 1937 to make it appear that she had time for another (probably fictional) excursion that she wanted to relate. She sometimes stretched the number of months she spent in Moscow during the war from two to four and even six in order to make a point about her familiarity with the scene. And she routinely adopted writing tics like “most certainly” and “absolutely” that signaled what was least certain, least reliable.

  At first these misrepresentations served Hellman well, dramatizing her perceptions, place, and politics even as they rode roughshod over literal truth. Exaggeration and elision are the prerogatives of the memoirist, who, unlike the autobiographer, does not promise to write with unvarnished fidelity. And Hellman is very good at telling stories that extract her readers’ sympathies. Did bombs really fall in Valencia while she was there? Was she shoved under a bench by a policeman? Did Hemingway give her the manuscript of To Have and Have Not to read and critique in Paris or anywhere else? The stories effectively display Hellman’s memories of panic, her self-doubt, her need for courage, and, finally, they speak to one woman’s capacity to overcome terror and prevail. They are not the first or only occasions when she tells us how fear i
mmobilized her but that she did the right thing in the end. Some stories seem to stretch credibility and to back-fire. In Pentimento, Hellman tells us that she delivered $50,000 to a friend in the Austrian resistance, Julia. This story was made into a film starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. At first “Julia” served Lillian’s purposes well. It positioned Hellman as a courageous anti-fascist, a person of principle. But when a woman whose story resembled that of Julia came forward, Hellman was accused not merely of enhancement, exaggeration, and self-aggrandizement, but of theft: of appropriating someone else’s life. That cast a light on Hellman’s character that ultimately reflected on everything she touched.

  Lillian Hellman was, if nothing else, a controversial figure. During her life and after, she was the object of adulation and anger, love and hate. When I started work on this book my friends and colleagues told me that this was a subject that had no rewards. They attached adjectives such as evil, cruel, and vindictive to Hellman’s name. She was, I was told, a Stalinist, a liar, a self-hating Jew, at best a second-rate playwright, already forgotten. She was said to be a polarizing and dishonest person. There would be nothing but misery in tackling the life of this hateful person. Besides, there were already several accounts of her life, most of them negative.7 Why write another? I took all of these comments seriously, thinking at first to avoid this python’s nest and to go on to another, less controversial, project. But I am one of that generation of 1970s historians who have taken it upon themselves to examine gender as an ideological force, and Hellman appealed too strongly.

  By the time I started to work on this project in 2001 Hellman had become deeply embedded in negative mythology. Those who had already come to damaging conclusions about her had done so less out of knowledge about the woman than from commitment to particular ideologies. Their own sense of themselves as liberals, Zionists, or feminists infused what they “knew.” Several biographies about her reinforced the negative images, each slipping into, and confirming, the already-existing descriptions of a wicked and evil woman. If the biographer dared to provide a more empathetic view of Hellman and her politics, she was taken to task by reviewers whose imaginations could not transcend an accepted public picture. Minds were made up. And yet this too tells us something about a century in which what was remembered was often conditioned by which side you were on.