Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  This evening wasn’t really a celebration, although Lillian, after doing her patriotic duty acting as goodwill ambassador to the Soviet Union, finally did have another play running uptown—Another Part of the Forest, that family sequel to The Little Foxes—and it was doing good business. Since Hammett had been back in New York for well over a year already, this wasn’t in any way a welcome home party, but once again his writing caught the breeze of a new development in the storytelling industry. The shortage of paper during the war led to the creation of paperback books. His novels and short stories were being released again in the new form for a new generation of readers. There wasn’t much money in it for him, but he didn’t need much money these days. He was being appreciated once again and that warranted this small celebration.

  He had been despondent during much of his time back from the war. He spent most of it alone at the cottage in Katonah, where he said he was writing a bit. He was drinking a lot. He also spent more time at Hardscrabble talking with Lilly about new projects—hers. She contemplated another movie for Goldwyn—she liked to call him Goldwine now, in honor of FDR—and a play set in a New Orleans boardinghouse. She thought this idea for a drama too small; Hammett reminded her the world was nothing but a big boardinghouse that badly needed the two Hellman aunts to keep things going.

  Almost everything Lillian wrote in those postwar days had a dispirited, melancholy quality she just couldn’t shake. When she had been Kassandra warning about danger, there was energy. When she was herself part of the war or encouraging others to be brave and unselfish, she was passionate. But somehow after the great victory celebration, exhaustion set in. It lingered still, unshakable.

  Hammett was not himself either, at least not his old self. His last three army years, time spent almost exclusively in the world of young men, writing editorials and drawing amateurish cartoons on deadline, even the physical training, had suited him so perfectly that he was lost when thrust back into civilian life. There was an absent quality, a distractedness about him he could no more break out of than Lillian could lose her world-weariness.

  But Café Society, especially when Hazel Scott or Pearl Bailey or Billie Holiday, the club regulars, performed, brought out the best in each and both of them for an evening. Toward the end of an evening, after she played a late set, Hazel Scott usually joined them to talk politics and have a drink. Hazel was a civil rights activist before there were civil rights activists. When she went to Hollywood to make some movies, she made it quite clear from the get-go she would never play a maid or even wear an apron.

  So she was mostly featured doing a specialty number at the piano in a nightclub while the stars entered and were being shown to their seats. The camera stayed on Hazel for a while and then followed the likes of Don Ameche and Janet Blair or Robert Alda and Joan Leslie to their table. Sometimes Hazel finished up her song, took her applause, and approached the stars to deliver a line or two before moving off camera.

  Scott could never be the headliner in Hollywood that she was here in Manhattan. Hollywood wanted to showcase a light-skinned Negro woman with a virtuoso talent in very small doses to make white America sit up and take notice while giving the liberal producers a sense of personal satisfaction. That is how the world saw Hazel Scott until she started organizing other Negro studio performers. She was immediately labeled uppity and was soon after unwelcome in Hollywood. She had just returned to New York.

  She finished “Mean to Me,” and the lights came up to appreciative applause.

  Hammett stood when Hazel approached. He intended to kiss her cheek. “You folks got a minute?” It was said mostly to Lillian. She pulled out a chair before Lilly could respond. It was early in the evening; she had just finished the second of four sets.

  Hammett said, “Jesus, you’re in some form tonight, young lady.” It was true. She had played a Fats Waller medley at top speed with perfect classical piano technique.

  “I always play great when I’m furious.”

  “Hollywood does that to a girl,” Lillian said to her glass. She was drinking good Scotch. Hammett ordered one for Hazel.

  “That’s history, dearie. When RKO told me I’d never work there as long as I lived, I didn’t believe them. I do now. I can’t get a sniff from anyone.”

  Lillian: “So, that’s the furious?”

  “No, now the furious is that damn Committee they set up about who’s a real American. I got subpoenaed again.”

  Of course they had read about it and thought a Congressional committee investigating who and what was un-American was pretty silly, political posturing, a facial blemish on democracy that would pass soon enough. Hazel Scott had been one of the first performers called to testify. Paul Robeson was another. “You’ve got to see these guys. They’re the same Crackers my mama had to deal with when she toured the South with her band. Scum of the earth, let me tell you, I mean scum of the earth.” Except for its chairman, the Committee was overwhelmingly and deeply Southern.

  “Wanted to know if I was a Comm-a-nist—they say the word the way they say Nig-ra. If any of the people I worked with or any of my friends was Comm-a-nist. Don’t laugh. These are scary men and they got themselves some real power now in this country. This thing has already cost me a small fortune.”

  It was 1948 and already HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, a successful stockbroker and Jersey City Republican, had begun calling movie actors, writers, and directors to testify and affirm their loyalty to America under oath. Hollywood was where the publicity was and the Committee stoked up plenty of it. Only Thomas chose to say Communist and Negro correctly.

  “I thought you were all done with Hollywood before this who’s American stuff.”

  “Apparently Hollywood wasn’t all done with me. It’s payback time. And like I said, it’s already cost me real bucks.” Scott shook her head, angry and bewildered. “You need to get a good lawyer and you need him for a while. That’s not cheap. Then, three weeks after I testified, I get this bill from whatever you call those guys claiming I owe taxes since ’39. My accountant tells me I can fight them but in the long run it’s better to pay up and make them go away. The Committee’s only the front door. Taxes is the back door. So they got you coming and going. We don’t really stand much of a chance against them.”

  “We?” Said in harmony.

  “Of course we. You don’t think they’re going to stop with a little colored girl who plays piano and sings in a dump like this, do you? They just start with us.”

  Lillian said, “But at least you’ve got New York. You can work here till your teeth fall out.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There ain’t no forever work anywhere with these guys. Soon lots of people who are working ain’t going to be working no more. I looked into their faces and it scared the hell out of me. I didn’t show it, but they got to me.”

  Hammett said, “What are you going to do?”

  “I got to testify again next month. Paul too. Their letter says they want to ask me extensively about my associates. ‘My associates,’ what the hell does that mean? Fortunately, I hear Paris is lovely this time of year.”

  Hammett said, “Careful about that. Talk to your lawyer first.”

  “Can’t put him in jeopardy. He’s a friend.”

  “He’s your lawyer. He’s protected.”

  “Glad you think so.”

  Lillian wanted to know how it felt to testify.

  “Dirty. They’re the scum and I felt dirty. They kept throwing the word subversive around, so I asked if they were going to investigate the Ku Klux Klan as ‘subversive.’ This Cracker jumps in and tells me, ‘Young lady, the Klan is a venable—venable—American institution.’ I said my family could vouch for how venable it was. He said right now the threat to this country was the Comm-a-nists, not the Klan, and did I know any of them. These guys want names and believe me, they’re going to get names one way or another.”

  There was nothing, Hammett tho
ught, they could do to him; rather, nothing they could do to him that would touch him. His concern was for Lillian. He was right about that. And wrong about their doing nothing to hurt him.

  Hazel went back to the piano and announced as the lights dimmed, “Here’s a ballad, ladies and gentlemen, that’s been on my mind a great deal lately. Bing Crosby got himself some credit writing lyrics on this one. I hope he forgives my taking some liberties with the words.”

  She gave herself some tempo with her left hand and after exploring a number of possibilities with her right, she drifted into the refrain of “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” Hazel sang:

  They need our love so madly

  Or they’ll behave quite badly …

  No, we don’t stand a ghost of a chance with them.

  The man from Carolina

  Thinks there’s nothing finer

  Than the Klan coming around for you …

  So please look around for Commies,

  Even if they’re your mommies

  Cause we don’t stand a ghost of chance with them.

  After a second chorus, she only played the melody. Beautifully.

  The term cold war had already been minted and was in wide circulation on the nightly news. The homegrown Rats were free to come out and roam. It was the Weasels, as she dubbed them, those in service to the Rats, Lillian despised most. Weasels testified before the Committee, offered up names, made its work run smoother as it rolled over more and more lives, gathering tremendous momentum and no moss. The Weasels offered up Hammett’s name far more often than Lillian’s. She hated them doubly for that.

  The Committee was legally authorized—the legality was particularly ironic given what was learned about Nazi legalities at the Nuremberg Trials—“under mandate of Public Law 601” to pursue Communists or Communist sympathizers for the public good. The punishment it meted out was supported by the Smith Act of 1940, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government and punishable by up to twenty years in federal prison.

  Hazel Scott had been deemed uncooperative; she named no one. She was now performing in Paris. Others testified freely and the Committee publicly applauded their cooperation. These were the more widely acknowledged Weasels. Hammett kept the distinction between victim and Weasel very clear; he always had sympathy for human weakness. To Lillian anyone who gave a name for any reason whatsoever was pure Weasel.

  All of this is old hat now, relegated to a brief, unfortunate period of American history by most historians, but certainly not by the Committee’s victims. The damage done was far more widespread than history records; it devastated many thousands of un-American American lives. Hammett addressed the situation in a speech he gave at Cooper Union on “The Cop and the Criminal,” ostensibly a talk about his approach to the detective story, but in fact a public defiance of what the Committee was doing to America. Hammett was no longer an effective public speaker.

  Lillian made herself inconspicuous at the fringe of the audience. A cold sober Hammett began:

  Let’s get this straight from the start. The cop is paid by the state. The state gives him his badge, his gun, his billy club, and permission to use them, his uniform, and, if he’s lucky, a police car to drive around in. His job is to protect the law-abiding public from criminals. So far, so good. There are times, however, when the crooks and the cops and the state are indistinguishable from one another, when they are all mixed together and aligned against the interests and guaranteed rights of those same law-abiding citizens.

  We are in one of those times now. Those of you who may have had the ill fortune to have stumbled upon my Red Harvest or even The Glass Key probably know that I have dealt with just this sort of corrupt situation before in fiction. In both cases—I must tell you Red Harvest was based on a real miners’ strike in Montana in which the company, the cops, and the government ganged up on the miners—in both cases my lone detective character is successful in combating the corrupt cops and turning the tide. Remember, though, that’s just what happens in novels. In Montana, the bums mopped up the miners.

  Lillian noticed Hammett’s hand begin to tremble. He needed a drink. No way for her to get him one. He sipped some water.

  In America today the cops and the crooks and, of course, the judges and the pols are all in cahoots again. It happens periodically, usually around union busting time, which for them is all the time. They like to send very dramatic, unmistakable messages. What else is this preposterous Committee deciding who is American and who is not, but a shot across the bow? Sometimes the legal criminality even reaches the level of political murder.

  For a moment Lillian thought he might talk about Jerry Waxman. She held her breath.

  What else was Vanzetti and Sacco if not precisely that? These new thugs dressed up as Congressional cops are surely nothing new. They crawl out of the woodwork whenever they have the chance. But every time they appear, we must each become detectives and reveal that they are really the crooks and not the cops.

  Lillian scanned the crowd and picked out four men at least she was sure were government agents. Two were taking notes. She also recognized a legit guy from the Times, a gal from the Trib.

  If I was trying to turn this current mess into a detective story, I’d see it as an old-fashioned protection racket. I’d set it in Mom and Pop’s grocery store. Gunsels come in and want fifty bucks a week to keep trouble away. Pop tells them he’s never had any trouble. They smash his front window. That’ll be fifty bucks. Pop goes to the police. They’ll watch his store when the thugs return, but they can’t promise anything more. Next week the gunsels return for their fifty; a cop watches from across the street while the thugs break the other front window. The cop across the street smiles.

  So what’s to be done? And who is there to do it? Certainly not the likes of Nick Charles. He’s too tipsy for the task. He and Nora hobnob in the wrong social circles. A society murder is one thing. The protection racket is a very dirty, roll-up-your-sleeves business. Sam Spade? I don’t think so. There are no beautiful dames involved and no big money to be made in a Mom and Pop grocery. No, the guy I need—the guy we need—is the Op. He’s far tougher than either one of the others and breaking up this protection racket’s going to take a bear of a man, a courageous brute. That’s the Op. He’s also a working stiff, and for me that counts for an awful lot when it comes to a matter of integrity.

  As Hammett continued, his quiver became more pronounced. Lillian wanted to hold him, steady his hand. Hammett was never at his best in front of an audience, but he accepted this engagement as a necessary first skirmish in what he knew was now to be a long, difficult battle with the U.S. government. During the question period after his talk he really began to come apart, but he knew to keep his answers brief and somewhat cryptic. He needed a drink badly now, something the cops in the crowd could not miss. Hellman loved her Hammett very much at that moment.

  In the cab uptown she took his hand and offered him a flask. He accepted it gratefully with a growl and a slow smile. Traffic was heavy. They didn’t talk. He continued to shake, so she held his arm hard with both hands and tried to absorb his tremor.

  They were almost at Columbus Circle when he said, “I could have done it better. But I had to take the first shot. I want them to know I’m ready.”

  “We’re ready.”

  “My guess is they’ll do me first. You’re the bigger fish to fry.”

  “I beg your pardon.” She made a pronounced huffy face and then smiled. “I hope that’s not how they see it. But I’m ready for them too.”

  “You haven’t been reading your Solomon.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “The time to get and the time to lose deal. Sweetheart, this looks like our time to lose. Let’s know that and see what we can hold on to.”

  “And let’s see how many of those pricks we can take down with us.”

  “Jesus, you are something.”

  “Jesus had nothing to do with it.” She passed the
flask back to Hammett.

  THE BRIGHTEST LIGHTS were placed behind the Committee, backlighting the Congressmen, making them more silhouettes from the witnesses’ position than recognizable individuals. Somehow it seemed appropriate to Hammett that the inquisitors should be indistinguishable from one another. The lighting had been arranged for the movie and new television cameras shooting down from a platform behind the Committee. Smaller lights and cameras were set up before the panel to capture their questioning. The witness was the story.

  When John S. Wood, the Committee’s new chairman, a Democrat from Georgia—the Committee’s dirty work was truly bipartisan—rapped for order, the large hearing room in Manhattan’s Federal Building remained abuzz with conversation. He rapped again and the chamber, thronged to standing room with the curious, the politically engaged, the friends and enemies of the Committee, prospective witnesses, members of the press, radio, and television, still did not fall to silence. The chairman rapped twice more for order. In fact, as Mr. Wood gave the required Congressional justification for the Committee’s investigative hearings on un-American activity, namely the subversion of the country’s political and social system by Comm-a-nists, fellow travelers, and bedfellows, he could still barely be heard. Hammett and his lawyer were already seated at the witness table ready to be legally uncooperative. Finally the room quieted. The chairman turned up his microphone and said, “Please state your full name, address, and occupation.”

  Victor Rabinowitz, Hammett’s attorney, interrupted. “Mr. Chairman.” He covered his eyes in a salute. “The lights behind you, Mr. Chairman, are quite blinding and cause great discomfort when we have to look—”