Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  “So how?”

  “Real evil has a certain defining quality. It’s perverse and we often see it better in small things. The smile on a villain’s face, even in a bad movie. The look in his eyes. The unnecessary gesture he makes with his knife. The threat of a punch that doesn’t get thrown. Intimidation is evil’s calling card. The German officer who takes command of your village has to have this quality—civilized but evil. Von Stroheim, even when he smiles—especially when he smiles—is the most frightening man in the world. He takes his white gloves off slowly one finger at a time and you can tell he’s a fiend.”

  Hammett told Lillian of reports he had read about medical experiments in concentration camps that had scared the hell out of him. Disgusted him. Their real evil came out in their crazy scientific theories of racial purity. Hammett couldn’t see how she could work any of it into North Star, but for him it was at the heart of the Nazi darkness.

  Lillian had lots of new questions. That’s how the process always worked: ideas strewn on the floor like pickup sticks. Some left. Some discarded. Some picked up, examined, questioned, put aside or onto the save-for-later pile. Some became “must use,” others “must use but how.”

  Zenia had cleaned up long before and gone to sleep. Hellman and Hammett spoke late into the night, now in more general terms about the war and eventually about what they were reading, what he was writing, about the texture and details of their lives, and about old times. Was his racetrack story really true? And did Warner ever pay up? Yes and yes. And did she really make money with last year’s sweet corn crop? And did she really run a farm stand down at the road? Yes and yes.

  They spoke more slowly and quietly the later it got. The cigarette smoke in the room began to settle. The whiskey had not quite run out. Just before bed Hammett said, “Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve got a little surprise of my own.”

  “CAP’N, HOW THE HELL ARE YOU?”

  Hammett pointed to the stripes on his arm. “Just a corporal, Jimmy, just a corporal.”

  “You’re a captain to me, Dash.”

  When the doorman first opened the door of the cab and saw Lillian he was genuinely pleased—“Miss H.! We’ve missed you.” Hammett in uniform produced a second excitement. Jimmy could not resist the instinct to embrace Hammett, uniform or no uniform. He kept saying, “Pleasure, real pleasure.” In fact, he made such a fuss that many in the crowd waiting to enter “21”—almost all the men were officers in uniform—turned to look at the corporal and his lady.

  Lillian said to the crowd, “Forgive them, folks, they fought together at Gettysburg.”

  Jimmy took their arms and escorted them past the waiting crowd, talking all the while: “How’d you pull it off, Mr. H.? Where they got you stationed? Jeez, it’s good to see you both again.” He guided them through the door and past the hat check, right up to the maître d’s stand. Lillian loved the murmurs of discontent from women hanging on the arms of big brass over the privileged treatment of an old corporal and his woman.

  Jimmy turned the couple over to Tomaso, who gave Hammett a crisp salute and Lillian a polite kiss and then led them to the corner table they had always considered theirs. As they passed through the room, eyes followed. Someone called out, “Bravo.” Three or four others applauded briefly. Neither of them acknowledged. There would be time when they were seated to look around for old friends.

  Their waiter was Martin. Like old times. It was hard for him to keep his smile in its professional range, but he did reach out impetuously and shake their hands. He said it was a pleasure to have them back, an honor to serve them.

  “Menus?”

  “Not really, Martin.”

  “Does Madame have an idea?”

  “Something Russian, I think, Martin.”

  “The Beluga to start?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Lamb, kabob-style perhaps.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Lillian took out a cigarette and offered one to Hammett. He refused. Martin lit hers. “And for Mr. Hammett?”

  “The regular, please.” My god, he thought, I’m really going to miss this place.

  “And to drink, sir?”

  “Champagne, Martin. We’re celebrating. Mumm’s. You pick the year.”

  The restaurant was full of braided and medaled officer uniforms of all the services, of gilded and spangled women, few of whom were very young, and some older members of the smart New York set for whom the war was still something of an abstraction, but less so than before.

  The theater crowd was there as well, almost no actors—most couldn’t afford this place—but she recognized George Abbott and the Shubert brothers with their wives. Lillian saw Jimmy Walker, the old mayor, drinking alone at a corner table. Tallulah was there with her young man of the evening, so Lillian prepared for a terrible scene. Tallulah held Lillian personally responsible for giving Bette Davis her role in the Little Foxes movie. David Sarnoff was there. So was Paley. And, oh shit, there was Winchell, who was certain to come by.

  Hammett’s surveillance of the room stopped abruptly when he saw Alfred Knopf and his wife, Blanche. He had taken a Knopf advance and written nothing. Fortunately that’s when Martin arrived with their champagne, which Hammett always insisted on opening himself. The pressure of the cork in his hand was not only pleasurable but gave him a sense of the bottle’s quality.

  “Look, there’s Blanche and Alfred. Why not go over and say goodbye? Maybe he’ll want an army memoir.”

  “I’m a soldier, not a writer.”

  “My hero. Go on over.”

  Hammett poured the champagne slowly and expertly. “Maybe later. Here’s to crime.”

  “To crime.” Lillian paused before touching glasses. “I think I’m going to miss you terribly.”

  “Now you tell me.” Clink.

  When Hammett looked up again, Alfred and Blanche were at the table. Alfred leaned down to kiss Lillian. He said, “How did you manage it, old man?”

  “That’s the British old man, I take it. Not old man as in ‘OLD’ man.”

  “I think I meant both. And it’s awfully good to see you two … together.”

  Lillian: “It’s good to be you two … together.”

  Dash said, “Unfortunately not for long. I’ll be shipping out next week.”

  Blanche Knopf observed that this news was startling to Lillian. She asked, “To where?”

  “Top Secret, I’m afraid. Slip of the lip may sink a ship …”

  “You take care, both of you.”

  “We will.” Said in unison as they watched the Knopfs walk away.

  “So why the hell didn’t you tell me? Made me look like a fool with them.”

  “Just found out. Didn’t want to ruin our evening.”

  “That’s a nice way not to ruin an evening.” She glared at him. “So where? Or is it Top Secret even to me?”

  “West Coast is all I know. Honestly.”

  “Wonderful. I’m going to be in L.A. a good deal with North Star. Maybe our paths will cross.”

  As their meal ended and more well-wishers came by, Lilly’s pique softened. Lilly and Dash felt appreciated, a feeling they usually shared only with one another, and certainly not all the time. That others also valued them came as surprising good news.

  Hammett popped the cork on a second bottle of Mumm’s before dessert was done. He poured. “To crime,” he said.

  “To the man who knows nothing whatsoever about love.”

  He stopped before the clink: “Oh, how I hate you.”

  “Oh, how I hate you more.”

  Clink.

  . 16 .

  At War

  SAM GOLDWYN CAME THROUGH on the North Star project as Lillian could never have imagined. She always had a strong ally in Jimmy Roosevelt, but he had given up being a costumed lieutenant colonel in Hollywood and become a captain in the Marines. He was on active and dangerous duty fighting a real war in the Pacific. But he had kept an office in Washington that expeditiously forwarded Lillia
n’s messages. Through that office he kept a distant eye on North Star.

  The talents assembled for the project were remarkable for any studio film, unprecedented for a propaganda piece about the Soviet Union. Besides Milestone and the excellent cinematographer James Wong Howe, the film featured some of Hollywood’s finest actors, most of whom believed in its wartime importance as much as Lillian. The Russian villagers were Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Farley Granger, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, Jane Withers, Ann Harding, and every homey-looking character actor on the M-G-M lot. The Nazi villain was indeed von Stroheim, whom Hammett called the absolute best of the absolute worst. Aaron Copland signed on for the Russian-sounding music score; and none other than Ira Gershwin wrote the patriotic lyrics … in English of course.

  Lillian did not count herself among the luminaries who had hired on. All the others did, however.

  The moral and dramatic conflict at the heart of her script is the tension between two doctors—one a Russian civilian, Dr. Pavel Kurin, the other a German officer—over the issue of blood transfusions for wounded German troops. The soldiers are dying of wounds they received from the Russian defenders of the village in which the story is set. The German commandant orders transfusions for his men with blood taken from healthy Russians, including the village children. For Lillian this was the dramatic heart of the conflict, and more importantly the most elemental metaphor she could create.

  Goldwyn and Milestone thought this bloody plot device too gruesome for an American audience. Lillian was adamant that the transfusions stay in. She told Goldwyn, “Squeamish about blood, are you? What do they think the war is all about? It’s a fucking bloodbath, for Christ’s sake.” And then she issued an ultimatum: remove the transfusions and she would remove herself. And she would make sure the president heard about it.

  The blood transfusions stayed in.

  At the plot’s climax, a dangerous transfusion is performed by Dr. von Harden, played by von Stroheim with frightening civility. The German officer lives but the Russian boy dies. The Russian Dr. Kurin, the avuncular Walter Huston, confronts von Harden. In the doctor-to-doctor confrontation, Lillian delivers her political message:

  PAVEL KURIN: You knew he would die.

  VON HARDEN: They took too much blood. I’m sorry for that.

  KURIN: I’ve heard about you … civilized men who are sorry … men who do the work of Fascists while they pretend to themselves that they are better than the beasts for whom they work … men who do murder while they laugh at those who order them to do it. It is men like you who have sold their people to men like them!

  [Kurin takes out a gun and shoots von Harden at point blank range.]

  KURIN: You see, Doctor von Harden, you were wrong about me. I AM a man who kills.

  Given the cultural climate created by the war, it was almost impossible for most movie critics to evaluate The North Star harshly or as other than what it was, an effective propaganda film. The Hearst movie critics, however, wanted no part of Rooshkie propaganda. Don McConnell in the Journal American ended his review with a warning, one Lillian dismissed without a second thought:

  Lillian Hellman’s latest film project, The North Star, has been of great benefit to our newly discovered Soviet buddies. It depicts them as peace-loving, noble, and innocent victims tormented by a ruthless aggressor. But wait just a minute here, weren’t those roles reversed just a couple of years ago when it was the Soviet Armies that rolled ruthlessly over innocent civilians in Finland and eastern Poland? And did said Miss Hellman come to the defense of those peaceful peasants then? Not for a moment.

  If Miss Hellman were a more scrupulous student of recent history, she would know that yesterday’s Enemy turned today’s Ally is likely to become tomorrow’s Enemy once again. Comrade Hellman would be wise to sing “The Internationale” a bit more softly, if at all, when that tomorrow comes.

  CORPORAL HAMMETT’S BUNK was at the far end of a Quonset hut, near the latrines, and he composed his letter on military V-mail paper in the dark with the help of his field flashlight:

  Dear Lillushka—(Is it still safe to call you by your Soviet diminutive?)

  I’m well, after a very rugged journey, but I am, alas, forbidden to reveal its destination. I won’t do that because correspondence to and from this destination will be censored severely. However, if you read “The Widow’s Peak,” you will remember how interesting the correspondence was. Did you read it?

  In that early Hammett story, conspirators send each other coded letters. Every time a question is asked it meant the very next sentence contained a clue to some important piece of information. Lillian remembered and could now discover where in the world Hammett was.

  The sentence after the question read:

  Dear, I miss your cooking most of all, especially the delicious stuffed derma you always made for the Holidays.

  There it was. Lillian had never made stuffed derma in her life and knew immediately that was the clue. To go from derma to kishka, its Yiddish equivalent, might take a while for some people, but not for Lillian. From kishka to the Aleutian island of Kiska was not a difficult step. Finally, Lillian knew where in this secret military world Hammett was.

  She went to the great atlas in the room where Hammett had usually stayed and found a map with commentary. Her finger touched Kiska and she imagined the Hammett she had seen off at Grand Central months before. There was much she wanted to tell him tonight about herself. There was much she wanted to know about him. Helplessness always made her angry. The atlas commentary called the chain of islands part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, an allusion to its volcanic creation, not the ironical fact that the temperature was a maximum of fifty degrees in midsummer and sub-zero most other times. She would begin to knit him a pair of wool socks in the morning. Maybe have Zenia start a pair as well.

  It’s a difficult, hopeful time for both of us. We’ll see this through. I like the kids I’m with. They call me Pops—it smacks of an old Blues Man—which of course is what I am: Pops Hammett crooning “Daddy’s Got a Spankin’ Heart”! These kids are mostly about half my age. They see me as a complete enigma, part uncle, part scoutmaster, part priest, part teacher, part fossil. Forty-eight to them makes me one of our country’s Founding Fathers. Since the army hasn’t changed a whit since my last time around, my advice is often sought. I’m going to be important here. It’s a role I sort of like. Maybe when you see me again, you’ll call me Pops too.

  He was writing in a very tight script because the V-mail form was so small. Since he was running out of space, he began to write even smaller. Lillian would need a magnifying glass to decipher it.

  A confession. When this show is finally over in a few years I will allow myself to be lauded as a self-sacrificing, patriotic American. (I’ll do my best to see that it is not done posthumously, only because I won’t be able to hear what they say about me.) Patriotism in the Grand Old Flag sense has nothing to do with it. I joined up because it was by far the best option open to me. My writing was crap. The family stories started to dry up. Movie scripts were not going to happen again. A radio script a night, what sort of challenge was that! (I’m telling you what you already know and doing it in the tiniest words possible.) The army could save me from myself: it would insure me, clothe me, house me, feed me, force me to drink 3.2 beer. It would put me back into a world of men, where I’ve always managed well, and allow me to kill Rats indirectly and hopefully directly as well. And the only cost to me is my enforced absence from you. We have been apart before, separated mostly for foolish personal reasons. This separation is completely different, achingly and sorrowfully so, but it must be endured.

  Oh, by the way, I’ve become the company barber. I’m good at it too. Man with the clippers. You’ll be pleased to know I demand payment for my services.

  Well, gal, tell me how things are going in the Ukraine. Oh, I just remembered, I’m going to need, really need, lots of reading material. Send me subscriptions to all the good mags real soon.r />
  I miss your face. I miss your brains. I miss you. I have always missed you.

  Pops

  The last few words barely got on the page.

  Alaska Command required a newspaper to help indoctrinate, inform, and entertain the thousands of troops gathering for a likely attack on imperial Japan. Sergeant Hammett—the promotion matched his new assignment—became the editor in chief of The Adakian, an eight-sheet publication of fifty thousand copies.

  Hammett put together a staff of young men, city kids for the most part with some experience on college newspapers, and quickly went about the task of organizing assignments and setting deadlines, opening production and distribution channels, and above all establishing the standards, the tone, and the point of view of the paper. He edited everything that went to print and wrote about half the paper himself. He even began doing some of the political cartoons, drawing an American eagle that managed to look like FDR, a Stalin-like Kodiak bear, a Hitler rat, and an evil Japanese face on the setting sun. He worked very long hours and was profoundly tired and quietly happy.

  Each week after the paper had been put to bed, he drank piss beer with his staff. They begged him to tell Hollywood stories, which he occasionally did only because they wanted them so badly. He told them true and unvarnished; the young soldiers were left open-mouthed and speechless by the debaucheries he described. Hammett never told any stories about himself. Although they were curious, none of his staff ever asked.

  The editor of The Adakian was often relieved of his military assignments. Some but not all. Hammett was required to qualify on the rifle range every three months. This meant a two-mile march to the rifle range with his Headquarters Company in full gear, then lying prone and hitting the target from as far away as five hundred yards. Most times, either Pops Hammett or a kid from Alabama had the highest score.