Lillian Hellman

by Dorothy Gallagher

  Hammett’s biographer, Diane Johnson, sees Hammett’s self-portrait in all his detective-heroes: in the fat Continental Op, in Sam Spade, in Elfinstone, the hero of a never-completed novel. Elfinstone, as Hammett wrote him, is “a ruthless man, without manners, impatient of [the] stupidity of people with whom he comes in contact, with little love for his fellows.”17 In particular, Johnson sees Hammett’s portrait in Ned Beaumont, the hero of The Glass Key: “principled, forlorn, afflicted with an uneasy worldliness and the ability to understand the meaner motives and ambitions of his friends.”18 Johnson adds, “Like Sam Spade, like Nick Charles, Ned will sleep with the woman from a higher social class—pleasure, but also a kind of revenge.” In the “Elfinstone” manuscript, Hammett creates a woman who prefigures Hellman—exotic and Jewish: Johnson says that “Hammett liked the idea of Jewish women, and women who were hotblooded and foreign.”19

  In 1929, a year before he met Hellman, Hammett separated from Jose and his children. He would support them—occasionally shower them with money and gifts, more often neglect them for long periods—and never live with them again. That year Hammett went to New York, in part to be where the literary world was centered, but also to join his lover, Nell Martin, to whom he was not quite as exotic a man as he would be to Hellman.20

  As Hammett had been born into rural poverty, so had Nell Martin, who went into the fields as a berry-picker at the age of ten. She was an adventurous girl, had traveled around the country, taking what work came her way, living the sort of itinerant American life that Woody Guthrie ballads were made of. Martin had driven a taxi, tried law school, worked in laundries, been an actress and a vaudeville singer. And just as unexpectedly as Hammett, she turned out to be a writer.

  Martin was not a great writer, or even a particularly good one. Hellman liked to mock her work, but by 1930, when Hellman had written virtually nothing, Nell Martin had published many short stories and some novels and plays. Hammett dedicated his 1930 novel, The Glass Key, to her; Martin’s 1933 novel, Lovers Should Marry, is dedicated to him. Theirs was a not insignificant relationship, and it continued for some time after Hammett and Hellman met.

  Dashiell Hammett was not only handsome, rich, and successful when Hellman met him, he was admired for the qualities he gave his heroes—integrity and authenticity. He was seen to be his own man, and he was, but authenticity is a quality that can belong to both the devil and the saint.

  Everybody drank a lot in those days. Hammett drank ruinously. If Hellman liked to see him as a “stylish” drunk, others would differ. He could be a falling-in-the-gutter drunk, a three-day-binge drunk, a vomiting drunk, a drunk who couldn’t remember what he had done when drunk. Often he was a violent drunk. Hellman was sometimes seen with bruises on her face. Once, at a party Hammett punched her in the jaw so hard that she fell to the floor.21 An actress named Elise De Viane successfully sued Hammett for assault and battery.22 Hammett could be a cruel drunk; he was certainly cruel when he called across the dinner table to an actress, no longer very young, who had just spilled tomato sauce on her lap: “Doesn’t it remind you of when we were both still menstruating?”23 “Oh, Pru,” he said of one of his lovers, “She just thinks you can’t fuck her without paying attention to her. So I . . . did a crossword over her shoulder while I screwed her.”24

  Hammett never gave up prostitutes, or other women, for that matter. He sometimes wanted Hellman to take part in sexual threesomes; and Hellman, in love with him, drinking and smoking heavily to keep up with him, trying to keep up with him in every way, did what she could to please him.25 It was the 1930s, the Depression had hit the country, but for Hellman and Hammett Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age seemed to linger.

  There was the odor of tobacco always—both of them smoked incessantly; it was in their clothes, their blankets, the curtains, and the ash-littered carpets. Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with its inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust.26

  There is no need to ask what kept Hellman with Hammett: Sexual excitement, Hammett’s good looks, his fame as a writer, his natural air of authority, the thrilling, transgressive edge he offered of life without boundaries, the politics she soon came to share with him. And when he went on the wagon he showed her the life of a writer deeply concentrated on work; then he was the “cool teacher” she wanted, generous to Hellman with his intellectual life, with his ideas about writing; generous also with his money, which in those days poured in like Monopoly money, and which was hers as much as his.

  Yet four months after meeting Hammett, Hellman de-camped for New York, leaving Hammett, and also Arthur Kober, who was still very much part of her life. Hammett was caught by surprise, which may have been the point. Kober was distraught but not yet despairing. Jose came to see Kober one day, wanting to know how serious the Hammett-Hellman relationship was. She still hoped Hammett would come back to her and the children. Kober told Jose not to worry. It was just a passing fling.

  If Kober believed this, it was because Hellman gave him reason. From New York she wrote to her husband, begging him to “please love me.” She told him that “I miss you an awful lot. . . . I love you very much. . . . Certainly I’m coming back &if you want me sooner I’ll leave right away. . . . I hope we are going to stay married the rest of our lives.”27 And, “I dreamed about you last night. . . . I think about you too much. I’m a thinker type.”28 She spoke about having children with him.

  Hellman was keeping her options open. She was writing to Hammett, too. He did not keep her letters, but she kept his. Hammett wrote teasingly, offering himself in one sentence, withdrawing in the next; speaking of love, and mocking it: “The emptiness I thought was hunger for chow mein turned out to be for you, so maybe a cup of beef tea. . . . So you’re not coming home, eh? I suppose it doesn’t make any difference if I have to go on practically masturbating . . .”29

  Really, Kober never had a chance. He and Hellman divorced early in 1932, after eight years of marriage. Hellman’s tortuous years with Hammett began. Her life as a writer began.

  5

  The Writing Life: 1933–1984

  “MY AMBITION now is to collect enough money to be able to finish ‘The Thin Man,’ which God willing, will be my last detective novel . . .” So Hammett wrote to Hellman in 1931.1

  The Thin Man was published in 1934. Hammett was forty, prime time for a writer, but The Thin Man would be his last novel in any genre, and his literary silence persisted for the twenty-odd years of life left to him. He had not lost the ambition to write; on the contrary. Through the years he would refer, optimistically or despairingly, to a book he was working on, whether the same book or several, is not clear.2 All that was found at his death was a fragment of a novel which he called “Tulip.” Hellman would publish this, together with some of his early stories, and her introduction to them, in a collection called The Big Knockover.

  Hammett’s alcoholism, his bouts of ill health—recurrences of gonorrhea, eruptions of tuberculosis, periods of depression—all these surely weakened and demoralized him, and ate into his time and energy. But his silence descended so quickly after The Thin Man; no sooner did he announce his ambition to abandon the detective genre, than he seems to have hit the wall that every writer fears is looming—when he has written himself out, exhausted his material, run out his string. Hammett was a constant and discerning reader; he understood good writing. His contemporaries, his friends, included William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Hammett was popular and admired, but it was the others, not he, who set the literary standards for the time.

  At the end of 1948, Hammett went on the wagon for good, but it made no difference to his ability to write, and painfully, and over many years, he must have discovered that his talent would not stretch to reach his literary ambition. He couldn’t go back to detective stories, he felt he had worn that vein of his writing out; and he couldn’t find his way ahead. This was Hammett’s tragedy, the tragedy of a writing life.

&n
bsp; Nothing similar would blight Hellman’s life. She had failures, yes, and she suffered over them. But she had a sense of what she could do, and when she failed, she got over it, and wrote again.

  In a desultory way, Hellman had been writing since the 1920s. Arthur Kober had published some of Hellman’s stories in The Paris Comet. In 1933 and in early 1934 Hellman published two stories in the American Spectator, slight, humorous New Yorker ish stories (though they had been rejected by the New Yorker) more in Kober’s broad style than the tightly constructed melodramatic style for which Hellman became known. In the early thirties Hellman also collaborated with her former lover, Louis Kronenberger, on a never-to-be produced farce, which they called The Dear Queen.

  Life is full of “what-ifs,” and would Hellman have become a playwright if she had not cast her lot with Hammett’s? Certainly she would not have written The Children’s Hour. In 1933, as Hammett was finishing up The Thin Man, he came across a recounting by William Roughead of a legal case—“Closed Doors; or, The Great Drumsheugh Case”: In early nineteenth-century Scotland, two young school teachers were accused by an unhappy pupil of harboring an “unnatural” affection for each other. The teachers went to court to deny the accusation; they won their case, but their school and their lives were ruined. Hammett toyed with the idea of making a play of this material himself, but he offered it to Hellman, and it became The Children’s Hour.

  Hellman stuck with the essentials of the story, changing emphases here and there. Her main task was to learn the craft of playwrighting, how to transform a story into dialogue that played on the stage. Hammett worked with her on draft after draft. The couple moved around a lot during 1933 and 1934. Sometimes they were together, sometimes apart. They stayed at various hotels in New York, they spent time in the Florida Keys, on a Connecticut island, on Long Island. Wherever Hellman happened to be that year, she worked steadily on The Children’s Hour. With Hammett’s guidance she produced at least six drafts of the script. It was not finished until he gave it his imprimatur. She was grateful to him, and she resented him; she depended on him for encouragement, for ruthless editing, for rewriting until he died. After that, perhaps coincidently, she never again wrote an original play.

  Like every writer, Hellman was often in despair about her work. She was a complainer by nature, and perhaps she complained more than most. In 1944, when Hellman had three hits—The Children’s Hour, The Little Foxes,and Watch on the Rhine—behind her, as well as one failure, Days to Come, she was working on her fifth play, The Searching Wind. Hammett was unavailable to her. He was in the army, stationed in the Aleutians. She wrote him a letter complaining of how badly her work was going. He answered: “If you had any memory . . . you’d know that your present dithers over the play are only the normal bellyaching of La Hellman at work. You still think you dashed those other plays off without a fear, a groan or a sigh; but you didn’t sister: I haven’t had a dry shoulder since your career began.”3 In another letter from the Aleutians, Hammett affectionately, teasingly, evoked the atmosphere of their work together: “Oh yes,” he wrote, “about you: I hope the play is coming along better than if I was on hand to get into quarrels with you about it, and that therefor[e] you are devoting to sheer writing those periods you used to take out for sulking because I was hampering your art or objecting to a glittering generality, which, it’s possible, is the same thing.”4

  Hellman had a finished script of The Children’s Hour in 1934. She gave it to Herman Shumlin, the director and producer who had made his name on Broadway with the production of Grand Hotel. It was not a blind submission. Hellman knew Shumlin; she worked for him, sporadically, as a script reader. Shumlin agreed to produce the play, and it opened in November of 1934, a major first play, and a major hit. The reviews were spectacular: “the season’s dramatic high-water mark,” from the New Yorker critic. The material—lesbianism—was scandalous (the play was banned in Boston). The Children’s Hour ran on Broadway for more than two years, and when the Pulitzer Prize Committee gave the prize to an adaptation of an Edith Wharton story, The Old Maid, the New York drama critics created the Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, and gave one to Hellman. She was twenty-nine and famous. In the middle of the Depression, Sam Goldwyn offered her $2,500 a week to write screenplays; she was rich. She had more lovers than she could easily juggle: Herman Shumlin would soon be her lover, also the editor and publisher, Ralph Ingersoll, Hammett, of course, the producer and director Jed Harris, Arthur Kober from time to time, and others as the fancy took her.

  Failure came to Hellman with her second play. In 1935, still riding high on the success of The Children’s’ Hour, Hellman began work on Days to Come. This time she supplied her own plot, which announced her political interests. Days to Come centers on relations between labor and capital in the form of a strike in a one-industry Ohio town. A union organizer arrives in town: a very attractive man, a man of integrity, perhaps not unlike Hammett. The villains are strike-breakers, hired by the mill owner who, in ordinary times, is a decent enough man, kind and paternalistic to his employees. But in this time of crisis he shows his true colors as a capitalist by hiring thugs to break the strike.

  But the issues of the strike are confused. The characters are little more than stick figures with attitudes, and the social problems that Hellman wants us to care about don’t seem to interest her very much. Her attention is on the secondary plot: on the unhappy, adulterous wife of the mill owner who falls in love with the union organizer. Love is doomed. In the end everyone speaks truth to everyone else and everyone’s life is changed, if not necessarily for the better.

  The critics noticed that Hellman did not have a grip on her play. When Days to Come opened in mid-December 1936, William Randolph Hearst walked out during the second act, and much of the audience with him. The reviews were devastating. The New York Post reviewer called it “dull” and “muddled,” the New York Times found it not only “bitter” and “elusive” with an “analysis of female neuroticism” thrown in. The play closed after six performances.

  Hellman feared for her career. “The truth is I’m scared of plotting, that the few things I’ve ever done well were plots laid out for me beforehand,” she wrote to Arthur Kober.5 She was referring to the screenplays she had adapted from material originating with other writers; and, of course, she was speaking of Dashiell Hammett, her greatest literary resource, who had given her the plot for The Children’s Hour. Hammett had not been of much use to her on Days to Come. For long periods in 1936 he was enduring treatments for gonorrhea, and drinking very heavily. When he saw the play on opening night, he didn’t like it, and he told her so.

  Failure threw Hellman off balance, but only temporarily. In the late winter of 1937, she and Hammett went to Hollywood; Hellman to adapt Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway hit, Dead End for the screen, Hammett to work on a third Thin Man script. They lived together in apparent harmony, in a six-bedroom suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Both worked to organize the Screen Writers Guild, to assure that Hollywood writers got proper credit for their work. In late spring or early summer Hellman became pregnant. In her memoirs she says that for a little while she imagined the possibility of marriage and a normal family life with Hammett, and that he, too, seemed pleased about the prospect. He went so far as to get a Mexican divorce from Jose, which may or may not have had legal force. But just as talk of marriage was in the air, Hammett went on a drunken binge and brought a woman home to their bed. Hellman had an abortion. (Her seventh, according to her friend Lee Gershwin.)6 In late August, after Dead End had been released to excellent reviews, Hellman sailed for France on the Normandie. She returned from her travels in November and began work on her third play, The Little Foxes, which turned out to be her second huge success. The Children’s Hour had not been a fluke.

  As Hellman later realized when she, herself, was teaching, writing for the theater was something that couldn’t be taught: “Playwriting,” she told an interviewer, “is something you have to come by instinctively,
be born to.”7 She also understood that writing was not a matter of mood but required regular working hours. She worked three hours in the morning, two or three hours in the afternoon, another two or three hours late in the evening.8

  As for the process, Hellman echoed the bemusement of many writers: “How the pages got there, in their form, in their order is more of a mystery than reason would hope for,” she wrote.9 She called The Little Foxes “the most difficult play I ever wrote,” and of all her plays, she said, she had depended on Hammett most heavily for this one.10 “I was clumsy in the first drafts, putting in and taking out characters, ornamenting, decorating, growing more and more weary as the versions of scenes and then acts and then whole plays had to be thrown away. I was on the eighth version of the play before Hammett gave a nod of approval and said he thought everything would be O.K. if only I’d cut out the ‘blackamoor chit chat.’” It wasn’t easy for her to endure “the toughness of his criticism, the coldness of his praise,” but it was useful to her “and I knew it.”11

  The writing of Watch on the Rhine was a comparative pleasure: “the only play I have ever written that came out in one piece, as if I had seen a landscape and never altered the trees or the seasons of their colors. All other work for me had been fragmented, hunting in an open field . . . following the course but unable to see clearly . . . But here, for the first and last time, the work I did . . . make[s] a pleasant oneness. . .”12

  Perhaps Hellman’s sense of wholeness in the play was due to the unity of her theme. The Little Foxes of 1939 had also had a theme: the indictment of greed and, implicitly, the injustices of capitalism. But in that play the relationships between the Hubbards were so discordant, that although rivalry for riches was the subject, attention was deflected from the theme to the family members. In Watch on the Rhine, plot and characters work smoothly to serve the story. There are many dramatic twists and turns in the plot of Rhine, including her hero’s act of murder, but everything that happens is directly to the point—Fascism, Nazism, is an evil that must be fought; and not only by the Europeans who have experienced the Nazi rise to power, but by complacent American liberals as well. Watch on the Rhine is an exhortation to America to face the facts of the European war, and to act. It was produced in April 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor, after which that matter was resolved.