by Sam Toperoff
Every rag with a Hollywood gossip column had a story on his escapades and featured some variation on “When the cat’s away …” Hedda Hopper, who despised Lillian for calling her “Greta” continually at one of Jack Warner’s croquet parties, gave the item daily play and provided more details than anyone else. “What famed studio Boswell has been making the round of all the night spots with a different exotic China doll or three on his arm now that his once-true-love is back East scripting her new drama? She’d better put a private eye on the case fast. Unlike our antisocial Greta who ‘Vants to be alone,’ this is one guy who apparently can’t ever get enough pleasant company. Piece of advice: 3,000 miles is a very long way to stretch fidelity, if it was ever there to begin with.”
Lilly didn’t need the gossip mill to tell her something had gone terribly wrong. None of her calls to Hammett had been answered, not to their place, not to his place, not to the studio. She left messages for him everywhere, none of which got returned.
There was a day or two when she thought it best just to throw herself into her work, leave the matter unresolved until she got back. What she didn’t know would hurt her less than any detailed truths. And she could rewrite whatever imaginary scenarios were required to suit her needs. Her friend Laura Karp changed her thinking over the phone with these sentences: “Lilly. He’s not like I’ve ever seen him before. He’s gone way over the line. These girls are trash. Street whores. He’s in a stupor every night. He’s debasing himself. It’s disgusting.” She almost made it seem as though Hammett were the victim. It took a sleepless night and lots of pills for Lilly to confirm that she was the sole object of his wickedness.
Hellman was still needed for the polishing of The Children’s Hour, so she left New Haven thinking she could get to L.A., see Hammett, set things right, or at least as right as she could, and still return to New York in time to clean up the play and enjoy her triumph. She doubted the “set things right” part.
Flight 82 was over Albuquerque in the hour before sunrise. The stewardess brought her black coffee and a sympathetic smile, which surprisingly Lillian accepted. At bottom the wounding had less to do with love than with loyalty. No, it was simpler than that. It was about being untrue. Lilly liked the way that sounded as dialogue. She may have been disloyal to Kober. She was never untrue to him. She had not lied to him about anything. She had not been deceitful. Hammett was false, disloyal, untrustworthy, all those things, but mostly untrue to her, the selfish bastard. That everyone who mattered in their professional world knew, that she was either to be pitied or mocked—she preferred mocked—took the situation to humiliating depths. She begged the stewardess for a bit of Scotch for her coffee. The stewardess winked.
The Thin Man had been released by M-G-M just before Lillian left Hollywood for New York. Hammett had not wanted to attend the premiere, claiming an absolutely unnecessary visit to Jose and the kids in Montana that very week. The timing didn’t feel right to Lilly. When he made her promise not to see it without him, it began to smell bad too.
It wouldn’t be fair to say she helped him with his script as much as he did with hers, but she did provide Nick Charles with some of his best lines. Hollywood writers used to play this game, Lillian called it Hayzing, the object of which was to see how many off-color puns and double entendres a writer could slip past the studio censors and the Hays Office crowd. The studio censors were tougher simply because it was cheaper for the studio to catch the fixes before Hays bounced them back. The studio censors were also just plain smarter. The reigning king of Hayzing was Ben Hecht, with Charlie MacArthur a close second. Lillian in her brief Hollywood career was closing fast on the leaders.
She and Hammett sat at their regular table at Barney’s Beanery with the rough Thin Man script and tried to slip in as much iniquity as possible. So, for example, there’s Nickie at the bar, high as usual, with two chorus girls. Lilly wrote in the margin:
FIRST GIRL: Oh, Mr. Charles, you’re so much fun, but I have to go to bed early tonight. I’m taking my lifeguard test in the morning.
NICK: No need, I’ll show you my breaststroke and you’ll be just fine.
NORA (TO GIRL): Just try that, my dear, and not even mouth-to-mouth resuscitation will save you.
Hammett’s contribution to the same scene struck her as less witty, more mean-spirited.
FIRST GIRL: Oh, Mr. Charles, you’re so much fun, but I have to go to bed early tonight. I’m taking my first golf lesson early in the morning.
NICK: I’ve got my nine iron right here. I’ll be glad to show you how to use it. Nora, darling, you wouldn’t mind coming along as our caddie, would you?
Lillian never told him that the nine-iron banter bothered her, that it crossed a line between erotic and obscene, but worse, that it struck her as cruel to Nora. That thought clarified something for her: cruelty was in fact precisely what made the erotic obscene. She understood then her discomfort when Hammett got too rough with her in bed. It wasn’t just the force of his smacks; or perhaps it was, even though he stopped when she made it clear that he had hurt her. More, it was what he said, the taunting. He would squeeze her nipples, playfully at first. Then he’d say, So you like that, do you? As he got a bit rougher, so did his voice: And that? How about that! And then meaner: Not so much fun now, is it? Is it? She knew that same line had been crossed—that this was the onset of cruelty. Hammett had that in him. Could a man work all those years in that criminal world, that demimonde, and not become cruel? Or maybe the reverse was true. Maybe he was drawn to that world precisely because its cruelty matched his own. Another thought: the only way Hammett’s behavior made any sense was to see him as two men, two personalities.
The problem with reason was that it undermined passion. As her flight approached Los Angeles now, her severest anger had subsided. Understanding had produced that undesirable effect.
Hammett, she reminded herself, had only gone to the eighth grade before his lout of a father pulled him out of school so he could put the boy to work at a man’s job at half-a-man’s pay. Nevertheless, this was someone who taught himself Latin and Greek, who never met a crossword he couldn’t defeat. Who’d read all the classics, could discuss the arts brilliantly when he chose to, had a grasp of European and Asian history, a knowledge of wine and fine cuisine, who could talk baseball or boxing with the best sportswriters in America. Not to mention archaeology and analytical psychol … Lillian closed her eyes.
IT IS REALLY VERY HARD to tell people what my father did—for a living, I mean. Unless, of course, they paid people to be drunks back in those days, which I seriously doubt. I’m not trying to be obscure or mysterious here; I honestly do not know. Sometimes he came home wearing overalls, sometimes his Sunday suit, sometimes a lumberjacket and boots. Mostly he didn’t come home at all. “On the road” was my mother’s explanation. Sometimes she added, “He’s doing it for us.” I never quite believed her or knew quite what that meant.
When he was home, he hardly ever spoke. And he never talked to any of us. Us was Reba, my older sister, and my little brother Dick, and of course my mother. When he did speak it was to tell us what we could not do. “No dolls at table, young lady, if you want to eat here tonight.” “Young man, I don’t want to hear you sass your mother ever again, or it’s out on your ear.” Dickie, who looked like my father and carried his name as well, took the brunt of his could nots. There was such a sour smell about the man. I’m sure my mom was happier when he was “on the road, doing it for us.” We all were.
In the family I was called Sam. I didn’t choose to become Dashiell—my middle name—until I left home and decided who I really wanted to be in the world. My mom used to call me Dash sometimes. My father made fun of the name. “When was the last time that slowpoke ever dashed?”
I realize now that maybe he was too defeated a man to sit down and talk, especially to his older son, who he must have known was watching him very carefully all the time. I’ve always been grateful I never had sons. You might think drink would
have loosened his tongue a bit. It did at the gin mill. At home Richard Thomas Hammett was one sullen SOB.
The closest we ever came to a talk was one night when I was probably about nine or ten. I had a bad dream and must have woken myself up. I made some noises I was hoping my mother or sister would hear but no one came. I saw a light on in the kitchen. My father was alone at the table. It would be convenient to say I remember a bottle and glass, but I honestly do not. He may have been crying. He waved me in. I sat on the floor by the kitchen door. He talked. He said he always tried to do the right thing, always, by his family, by his neighbors, by the Lord, even to strangers. Yes, he wanted to go to church more often—we were Catholics—but there were so many days he couldn’t, he didn’t feel wanted there, felt like a Judas. That’s what he said, a Judas.
He was talking more to himself. I was just there. But then he did look at me and I sensed he was sending out a warning. It all began with his grandfather, he said, or maybe even earlier than that, this curse on the Hammett men. His own father had passed the warning along to him. Did that mean, I wondered, that his father had heard this same nocturnal talk when he was a boy?
“There is the wolf within us, Sam, and there always has been.” He said it and left a pause he seemed reluctant to fill. “We are men. You will be a man. But that is not our only nature. There is the wolf too, lonely, hungry, untamed. It makes us the kind of men we are. Our eyes, they’re different from other men’s.”
That part was true. I could see it was true. Pale eyes, pale, pale eyes. He had them, Grandpa had them, I had them. Kids called me Ghost because of my pale eyes. But the eyes weren’t the real issue. They were only the sign of our wolfish natures—restless, solitary, ravenous. Jesus, what a thing to tell a boy.
“When you least expect it,” he said, “that’s when the wolf comes. In your belly. In your throat. All over your skin.” He shivered. He was sobbing again. Try to imagine how hard it was for a boy to understand what this father was saying, how he was acting. Imagine also how the man that boy would eventually become would be shaped—well, maybe not shaped but touched at least—by his father’s madness.
“Wolf? You mean there’s a wolf’s blood in me, Paw?”
“We attack defenseless things, we Hammetts. Things that mean us no harm.” I could see now in the dim light he was crying more deeply now. “We can’t let things be peaceful. We have teeth and claws and have to use them. Pity us, Samuel.”
He rose, stood me up, took each of my shoulders in his strong hands, and said, “It isn’t so terrible after all, boy, as long as you never let anyone see you do this.” Papa threw his head back and released a long whispered howl. He was laughing.
He was gone not many days later. I didn’t see my father except on and off briefly for a great many years. Eventually I developed a vague sense of what he meant about Hammett men. I would never have come up with wolves myself—every drunk has at least one great metaphor in him—but that’s a better understanding than what I did come up with. His poetry was better than mine. I only have a sense of something dark, something dangerous, something other, and there is a compelling desire to free it, precisely because it is shrouded or caged or whatever … so why not call it my father’s wolfish nature? I’d been the wolf with Jose. I’ve tried not to be the wolf to my children, but I hurt them simply by staying away. And now Lilly. God help me.
Did I know what I had done? I knew, whatever anyone else may believe, that I had no choice in the matter. I knew I would have to ask her for some consideration but that I would do even that in a wolfish way. Worst of all, I knew I would do something like it again. Wolves don’t apologize.
Wolves never apologize.
HELLMAN WAS SOUND ASLEEP when her plane touched down at Mines Field in Los Angeles, so soundly asleep that she was the last passenger into the terminal. Their regular man, a tiny Filipino named Kai Mindao, met her at the gate. He worked for them when they were both in town and kept their place when they were not. She asked him if he knew where Mr. Dash was. He believed Hammett was at the studio. She told him to take her to the Santa Monica apartment as long as he was sure Mr. Hammett was not there. Kai said he’d make sure, but he had driven Mr. Dash to the studio yesterday and he had not seen him return.
“And how was he? Yesterday I mean?”
“Himself, Mrs.”
“Which himself?” She tasted her gall again.
“Himself. As always.”
Lillian needed time. To sleep. To make some phone calls. To think.
Kai had indeed located him. Hammett was in a bar in Culver City, right across the street from the M-G-M commissary. Of all possible venues for a showdown, not so bad. Certainly better than breaking into a hotel room. She still didn’t know what she would say. She had a better sense of what she would do. Hit him. Try to hurt him if she possibly could; there was a chance if he was drunk enough.
As they approached the bar on La Cienega, Lilly realized she knew the place. She had spent some time there with Hammett when they first met during her days with Kober at Paramount. The familiarity of the bar both calmed her and made her more angry. For some reason the matter of leaving or staying with him never came to mind; all she wanted to do was batter him.
The day was warm, the bar very dark. For her it was like entering a movie at midday. She stood by the door and let her eyes adjust. The clock above the cash register said 1:20. She noticed as she approached from behind that he’d had his hair cut very recently. He was newly shaved too. There was talc on his collar. Sure signs that his toot was recently over. It must have been an incredible drunk.
Once when she was a teenager back in New Orleans, Max took her to the fights on a barge in the harbor. She wore a newsboy cap, a leather jacket, knickers, and she passed too easily for a boy. The fight she saw and still remembered, a coal-black man against a Creole, ended so suddenly she never saw the punch that put the black man down and out. Not many others saw the punch either; men in the crowd booed and shouted “Fix!” Later her father explained to her as he counted his winnings that the knockout blow was no phantom but a short, perfectly placed solar plexus punch.
“Solar plexus, Daddy?”
Boxing historians, of which Max was one, knew the provenance of this particular blow. The huge American heavyweight champion “Gentleman Jim” Corbett lost his title to the slight Brit Bob Fitzsimmons back at the turn of the century when he was hit in the small, particularly vulnerable area—the solar plexus—just below the chest cavity and above the stomach. When perfectly placed, the blow didn’t have to be powerful to arrest an opponent’s ability to breathe and render him absolutely helpless. Exactly the outcome that would satisfy her this afternoon with Hammett.
That was her ideal retribution. The image of Hammett on his knees, gasping for air, unable to speak, pleased her greatly. The two were, after all, already well beyond words. First a fist, then an openhanded smack, a clawed hand, a kick, and why not a scream—no, a shout—while pummeling him, that at least would tame the rage pulsing through her now.
Lilly had no idea he saw her coming up behind him in the mirror—there are some things a detective never forgets to do. She noticed when she got closer he had only a coffee cup before him on the bar. The drying out had indeed begun, probably it had started just this morning with the haircut and the shave.
She stood directly behind him and now saw him looking at her in the mirror. They said nothing. Did nothing.
“You know, if I had a piece of piano wire, I’d garrote you.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” She’d forgotten how calm his voice could be in very emotional moments. “You’d only try to garrote me. I wouldn’t let you garrote me.”
“So tell me why.”
“Because I want to breathe a while longer on this earth.”
“No. Why won’t you keep your dick in your fucking pants?”
Hammett took a breath and looked with sadness at the bartender. “My business.”
“Stand up and turn around.”<
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Hammett smiled. “Sounds like you’ve got a gun.”
“No. I want to hit you.”
“Fair enough.”
Hammett slid his stool back a bit and rose. The bartender moved away. Hammett turned around slowly and faced Lillian. He was tall and straight and clean. He was not smiling but nodding, seeming to acknowledge her right to some form of retribution, just not garroting.
His jacket was open. She had bought him this tie with a small floral design. His solar plexus, as best she could determine, lay behind the widest point on the gray silk. Hammett’s scarred, tubercular lungs lay behind that too. The punch, she knew, had to be sudden, had to be sharp, thrown with all the force she could muster and with all her anger channeled into it.
Lillian exploded at Hammett’s chest.
He caught her fist in midair, mere inches from his tie. His pale eyes narrowed: “Not here, Lilly.”
He was hurting her wrist. “Humiliation for humiliation.”
He pulled her close. “I said, not here.”
“I’m going to spit in your eye.”
“No, you are not.”
Once in Galatoire’s in New Orleans a man came over to the table where she was having crayfish gumbo with her father. As the man approached, Max Hellman touched her hand and quietly said, Don’t say a word. Whatever happens, let me take care of this. The man was large, but so was her father. The man stuck his head low over their food. He called Hellman Maxie and said something about You people … and Better watch your kosher ass … Max Hellman waited, smiled upward and spit squarely in the man’s eye. Since Max had not quite swallowed his gumbo, the sight was disgusting in the extreme. Max then rose quickly and landed the first hard blow before they took the other man away. Galatoire’s did not want to lose Max Hellman’s patronage.
Lillian Hellman spit squarely in Dashiell Hammett’s eye. The amount of phlegm she produced surprised her. Hammett snorted and laughed.
