Broadway Babylon (20 page)

H
ELLMAN’S INDIGNATION SEEMED TO GROW
with the years. She took to saying she was a playwright and memoirist, not a historian. “I always wonder if I’m telling the truth,” she admitted. “Very tricky business, the business of oneself, plus memory, plus what you think you can do plus what has moved you, sometimes without your knowing it.”

Though she was rightly celebrated for defying HUAC, she wasn’t the only one to do so, though she derived the most from it, nurturing her own legend, or myth, and making herself seem a lone dissenter. She wrote that her heroic resistance to the inquisitors was interrupted by a voice in the press gallery, clearly and loudly stating, “Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it.” That voice was not heard by anyone else present, including her attorney Joseph Rauh. Hellman insisted that she’d been determined to tell HUAC the truth about herself, come what may. Yet in the first draft of her letter to the committee she declared that she’d been a Communist Party member from 1938 to 1940, the years of the Hitler-Stalin pact, though in
Scoundrel Time
and to the committee she claimed she hadn’t been—a lie revealed only after the draft’s discovery in 1988.

Eric Bentley’s Off-Broadway play
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
(the committee demanded if witnesses were or had ever been “a member of the Communist Party?”) featured Hellman’s HUAC appearance as a dramatic highlight, with actresses Colleen Dewhurst, Tammy Grimes, Peggy Cass, and Liza Minnelli re-enacting the scene of a brave, contemptuous “Lilly” declining to cut her conscience.

Although Hellman abhorred Hitler, she idolized Joseph Stalin, defending the murderer of millions—including a disproportionate number of Jews—to the end of her days. She wasn’t merely a Marxist, but an apologist for Soviet dictatorship—as Tallulah Bankhead dumbfoundedly discovered (more anon). In his book
The Scoundrel in the Looking Glass
, philosopher Sidney Hook summarized Stalin’s evils, including the invasion of Finland, the invasion of Poland and murder of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, the subjugation of the Baltic states, the Moscow purges, the suppression of Hungary’s would-be
1956 revolution, the murder of Trotsky, etcetera, and concluded that most of Hellman’s readers would never guess that she was “once one of the most vigorous public defenders of [Stalin’s crimes] which even Khruschev did not hesitate to call crimes.”

Indeed, many literati already impressed by Hellman the playwright were prone to canonize the lone post-Hammett literary lioness who’d fought so many dragons and survived, head unbent. Jules Feiffer felt, “I don’t believe it was ever a matter of choice with her to play it safe or not.… She honestly knew of no other way to behave.” John Hersey believed her the personification of rage against injustice of all sorts, and William Styron was “in awe of this woman … a mother, a sister and a friend and in a strange way a lover of us all.”

Hellmann was no friend to Dashiell Hammett’s offspring, from whom she, in charge of his literary legacy, withheld royalties. “When the literary powers decided to enshrine the non-marital union of Miss Hellman, who was already married, and Mr. Hammett,” declared playwright George Kelly, “they chose to leave out his booze and apathy and her mercenary ambition and all the hypocrisies and politics.” It wasn’t printed at the time that the pair were far from inseparable or sexually faithful.

H
ELLMAN’S
1973
MEMOIR
.
Pentimento
led to her widest audience yet via the highly praised 1977 film
Julia
, starring Jane Fonda as Lillian and Vanessa Redgrave as her purported pal Julia (wags nicknamed the movie “Reds in Bed”). The picture’s emotional centerpiece is the attempt by brave, freedom-loving Hellman, who risks her life—for once acknowledging being Jewish—to smuggle $50,000 into Hitler’s Germany for the activist Julia and her underground colleagues to use to smuggle Jews and others out of the fascist fatherland. Questions about Hellman’s account of events were mushrooming. When put on the spot, she allowed, “Everybody’s memory is tricky, and mine’s a little trickier than most, I guess.”

In 1983, the year before Hellman’s death, a retired physician named Muriel Gardiner published
Code Name Mary
, an autobiography. It was the same story as the Julia chapter in Lillian’s
Pentimento
. However, Gardiner’s version was verifiable through Austrian records and witnesses. In 1978 Gardiner had written to Hellman, intensely curious about
Julia
and its resemblance to her own life. She wondered why she had never heard of another young female American doing work for the Austrian resistance while she, Gardiner, was there, starting as a medical student in Vienna in the mid-1930s. Hellman never responded to Gardiner, and later denied even receiving her letter.

Though Hellman and Gardiner—the real “Julia”—had never met, both were clients of the famous Austrian lawyer and raconteur Karl Schwabacher. Carol Brightman, a biographer of Hellman foe Mary McCarthy (no relation to
the Republican senator), theorized that Schwabacher “may well have entertained his clients” with tales of Gardiner’s derring-do, later appropriated by the memory-free—and sometimes conscience-free—Lillian Hellman. Gardiner was on the verge of suing Hellman when the latter died.

By that time Lillian had famously sued writer and critic Mary McCarthy. “That goddamned
name
,” she’d cried, “it comes back to haunt me!” (For a fuller description of Hellman’s contentious relationships with McCarthy and Bankhead, see this author’s
Celebrity Feuds!
) It had happened that Hellman, no longer easily able to read, tuned in to Dick Cavett’s television talk show in January 1980. At 74, suffering from glaucoma, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema, she was limited to bed and a wheelchair. Her usual rage was compounded by the ravages of old age and decades of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. “Goddamn my eyes,” Lillian swore to a friend, “and my pacemaker and goddamn my arteries.”

Cavett’s guest was Mary McCarthy (sister to actor Kevin, one of Montgomery Clift’s closest friends). Mary had met the six-years-older and much-more-successful Hellman only twice and had seldom reviewed her plays, which she considered dull, contrived, and unworthy of attention (partly out of jealousy?). Perhaps that was as well for Hellman, since McCarthy—a failed playwright—was known for her jaundiced views: for example, Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
“reeks of literary ambition as the apartment reeks of cheap perfume,” and
The Iceman Cometh’
s Eugene O’Neill is “probably the only man in the world who is still laughing at the Iceman joke or pondering its implications.” McCarthy, who finally hit it big as a novelist with
The Group
, was known for her at times foolish flipness, which more than once landed her in trouble, for instance in 1944 when she’d said she felt sorry for Hitler ‘cause the poor guy just wanted to be loved.

Pressed by Dick Cavett to put down a name writer, McCarthy repeated on air a bit of libel from
Paris Metro
that Hellman was probably aware of but hadn’t sued over. (Few people read the scholarly periodical.) McCarthy averred that Lillian was “dishonest.” “How so?” asked Cavett. Replied McCarthy, “I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including
and
and
the
.”

Hellman could hardly believe her ears, and immediately after phoned several people. One was Cavett, who offered her the chance to appear and rebut McCarthy’s slander. Hellman declined. Two weeks later she sued, a choice that many literati deplored because they felt McCarthy, as a critic, was entitled to air her opinion, regardless. An astonished McCarthy claimed not to remember what she’d said on the Cavett show, though by then it had been reprinted several times, also reiterated on TV, at cocktail parties, etc. People chose up sides, and issues of free speech were invoked. While many observers felt McCarthy
had gone too far, they also believed Hellman’s lawsuit, if decided in her favor, would limit the rights of critics and journalists.

Lillian let it be known she would drop her suit if McCarthy would publicly apologize. This the younger woman resolutely refused to do. “
Liar
I said, and
liar
I meant,” she gloated two years later. During the lengthy legal process, some tidbits spilled out as Hellman’s autobiographical writings were culled for inaccuracies or inconsistencies, and anti-Hellmanites made their voices heard. An elderly Hungarian claimed that Lillian had stolen
The Little Foxes
from her late playwright husband, whose agent had submitted a play to Hellman’s friend and producer Herman Shumlin. And then there was
Code Name Mary
.…

Finally, in 1984, in an eighteen-page opinion, Judge Harold Baer Jr. denied McCarthy’s motion to dismiss the suit on First Amendment grounds. He declared that her statement about Hellman “seems to fall on the actionable side of the line—outside what has come to be known as the marketplace of ideas.” Most resoundingly, Judge Baer asseverated that Hellman was somehow not a public figure—as Lillian had disingenuously contended—and was thus entitled to greater protections than, say, actors or politicians, whose work is for the most part performed in public.

McCarthy was astounded, and much of the cultural community saw it as a blow to free expression and a move toward increased censorship. An appeal was launched by McCarthy and PBS-TV. But before the appeal could be tried, Lillian Hellman died at 78. McCarthy was immensely relieved, then quickly cocky: “There’s no satisfaction in having an enemy die—you have to beat them.” Asked years afterward if she would have done the same thing again, Mary said, “If someone had told me, ‘Don’t say anything about Lillian Hellman because she’ll sue you,’ it wouldn’t have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. I didn’t want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that.”

T
HE FIRST PERSON TO STATE IN PRINT
that Lillian Hellman had deliberately lied was Tallulah Bankhead, star of Hellman’s play
The Little Foxes
(1939). The accusation, in her 1952 memoirs, was written off as a flamboyant actress’s theatrics, possibly motivated by greed for publicity. Not until the 1980s would the late stage star be vindicated. The original episode, which devolved into a lifelong feud, began about a year into the run of
The Little Foxes
.

In 1939, Russia, under Stalin, invaded its tiny neighbor Finland. Later in the year, after Tallulah and the play’s cast informed the press they would be doing a benefit performance to aid Finland, they were stunned to learn that Hellman and producer Herman Shumlin had declined to give permission. Hellman declared that it wasn’t America’s fight and she didn’t want to encourage warlike sentiments. Bankhead apprised reporters, “I’ve adopted Spanish
Loyalist orphans and sent money to China, causes for which both Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman were strenuous proponents.… Why should [they] suddenly become so insular?”

Insiders knew that Lillian was hiding her real motive: a fanatical devotion to Soviet Russia. She countered her star by proclaiming, “I don’t believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I’ve been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little Republic to me.” It was a slap in the face of freedom-loving Finland, which was as anti-Hitler as its Scandinavian neighbors. The comment marked Hellman’s moral low point, and at the time only her collaborator Shumlin knew that Lillian almost certainly had never been to Finland, though she would continue to paint it in fascistic colors.

Hellman and Bankhead became mortal enemies. Tallulah didn’t like being crossed when she knew she was in the right. Lillian didn’t like being questioned and was used to getting her way minus the glare of publicity that a Broadway superstar brought to bear. Hellman made several enemies via the incident. Up until then, the extent of her adherence to Marxism had not been widely known. The feud, conducted in the press, made her hardline views famous—and reviled.

Just as the incident was dying down, Hellman made things worse. Feeling a need for further vindication, she lied that the real reason she’d turned down Tallulah’s benefit was that when the Spanish government had fallen to Franco and his Fascists, Hellman and Shumlin had requested the actress to do a benefit for the Loyalists who were fleeing to neighboring France. Tallulah and company, the playwright said, had refused! The star was outraged by the lie—but in almost any ruckus pitting an outspoken, theatrical actress against a male producer and a serious, plain, and grim female playwright, the actress was usually discounted out of hand.

In her autobiography, Tallulah wrote, “The charge that I had refused to play a benefit for Loyalist Spain was a brazen invention. Neither Shumlin nor Miss Hellmann ever asked me to do any such thing. Nor did anyone else.” Bankhead would have used stronger language but feared legal reprisal—Hellman spoke loudly and carried a big lawyer. After
The Little Foxes
, the two women never talked again. They continued to speak ill of each other, but Hellman created a more scathing portrait of Bankhead than vice versa, both via inclination and the fact that she wrote about Tallulah posthumously.

After Hellman’s death, cultural commentator Hilton Kramer labeled her a “shameless liar” and sweepingly stated that “the ‘memoirs’ that brought her wealth, fame, and honors of every sort are now shown to have been a fraud.”

“The tough thing about discussing or dissecting Lillian,” said Leonard Spigelgass, “is discerning the motives of those deconstructing her. She doesn’t
merit complete dismantling. Are her detractors objective in listing every faux pas and contradiction? Or are they reactionaries eager to exploit her flaws to promote their own intolerant agenda?”

Tallulah’s costar and intimate friend Patsy Kelly noted, “Back before the whole McCarthy mess, you wouldn’t have imagined Lillian Hellman would become so very admired, outside of on Broadway. It took that backtracking Congress we got after Roosevelt to make Hellman look like a victim.… If she’d been a smarter cookie, she’d have stayed on Tallu’s good side and Tallu would maybe’ve made hits out of her [subsequent] plays. But Hellman couldn’t stand feminine competition, or any gal who took a chunk of her limelight and her reputation.