Lillian Hellman

by Dorothy Gallagher

  When Scoundrel Time was published in 1976, Hellman was very pleased with the good reviews and the success of the book—four months on the New York Times best-seller list, Time Magazine’s description of her as “an invaluable American.”14 She assumed that she had had her say. But as the months went by, other critics made their way into print. Hellman’s version of history was not to pass unchallenged.

  Murray Kempton was concerned with the hypocrisy of the Communist devotion to civil liberties. He wondered, ironically, what Dashiell Hammett “might have said to Miss Hellman on the night he came home from the meeting of the board of the Civil Rights Congress which voted to refuse its support to James Kutcher, a paraplegic veteran who had been discharged as a government clerical worker because he belonged to the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party. But then,” Kempton noted, “Hammett was a Communist and it was an article of Party faith that Leon Trotsky, having worked for the Emperor of Japan since 1904, had then improved his social standing by taking employment with the Nazis in 1934.”15

  Sidney Hook’s analysis of the heroine of Scoundrel Time was almost as long as the book itself, and fiercer in its disapprobation of Hellman than Hellman is of her scoundrels. Hook asks his readers to imagine the following:

  A woman of some literary talent and reputation who, although not a cardholding member of the Nazi German-American Bund . . . signs denunciations of the victims of Hitler’s purges and frame-up trials as “spies and wreckers” . . . and characterizes the Nazi holocaust as a purely internal affair of a progressive country.16

  Irving Howe wrote: “Surely Miss Hellman must remember . . . that there were old fashioned liberals like Henry Steele Commager and Roger Baldwin and old fashioned Socialists like Norman Thomas who combined a principled opposition to Communism with an utter rejection of McCarthyism. Thomas fought for the liberties of the very Stalinists who had supported the prosecution of Trotskyists in Minneapolis under the notorious Smith Act. . . . Those who supported Stalinism and its political enterprises . . . helped befoul the cultural atmosphere . . . helped to perpetuate one of the great lies of our century, helped to destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for a resurgence of serious radicalism in America.”17

  Hellman’s opportunity to respond to her critics came when Scoundrel Time was republished with her other memoirs in 1979. But she had no taste for substantive debate and her arguments weread hominem; she dismissed her critics as old fogeys, “people for whom the view from one window, grown dusty with time, has blurred the world and who do not intend ever to move to another window.”18

  She seemed unprepared to respond to Dan Rather, who, in a generally admiring CBS television interview in 1977, asked her: “Well, what about the charge that, while you could see what was wrong with McCarthy and that whole era in this country, you failed to see what was wrong with Stalinism?”

  “I came to see what was wrong with Stalin—Stalinism—,” Hellman replied. “I don’t—I think it’s fair enough to say that, at that period, I did not entirely see what was wrong with Communism. I happen never to have been a Communist for one thing, which is left out of this story. I don’t quite understand that argument. I mean I don’t really know what has—one—one thing has to do with another. I am—I was not a Russian, I was an American. . . . I was injured by McCarthy for one thing. I was not—I was personally not injured by Stalin.”19

  She thus walked right into the door Sidney Hook had left open: “Lillian Hellman . . . was not a German. Nor was she personally injured by Hitler. But she protested vigorously his terror regime . . . But then if the fact that she was not Russian and suffered no injury at Stalin’s hands exonerates her from failure to criticize Stalin’s crimes, why did she then defend them . . . and defame those who . . . sought to establish the truth about them?”20

  “No one who did what I did, whatever his reasons, came out of it undamaged,” wrote Elia Kazan, who had named names before HUAC. “Here I am thirty-five years later, still worrying over it.”21 The Cold War fault line runs, perhaps, deeper in Hollywood than anywhere else, where the entertainment industry had been a focus of the HUAC hearings. When Lillian Hellman appeared at the 1977 Academy Awards, the entire audience rose to cheer her. When Elia Kazan was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, several hundred members of his own generation stood outside the auditorium in protest: “Elia Kazan: Nominated for the Benedict Arnold Award,” read one placard. Kazan’s blacklisted contemporary Abraham Polonsky remarked, “I hope somebody shoots him.”22 Inside the auditorium some in the audience, of a younger generation, refused to rise from their seats when Kazan walked on stage to be honored.

  Budd Schulberg had quit the Party in 1940. Some years later he ran into Lillian Hellman at a cocktail party. As he recalled it, their conversation was hostile: He asked Hellman, “What about Isaac Babel?”

  “She said ‘Prove it!’ I told Lillian, ‘Better writers than you or me have been killed. She said, ‘Prove it!’ . . . I think it would be very hard to get Lillian to criticize the death of a Soviet writer. They could be stretched on the rack at Lubianka prison and Lillian would go back on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.”23

  In 1951, Schulberg named names before HUAC. He was still thinking about that act shortly before his death in 2009 when he spoke about it to his son Benn: “It was not so black and white. People don’t understand how complicated it was. I hated what McCarthy represented, and the Blacklist, but if I was a Soviet writer I would have been killed too. We were attracted to socialist ideals, but in reality people were being murdered over there.”24

  Hellman was proud of herself, as she had a right to be. If she had not told the Committee to go to hell, as she would have preferred to do, and had reluctantly invoked the Fifth Amendment, still, by her own standards, and those of the people she respected, she had behaved impeccably: “I’m pleased with what I did in front of the House Un-American Committee,” she told Marilyn Berger, who interviewed her for a television program in 1979. But she couldn’t leave it at that. “Because,” she added, referring to her offer to give the Committee information about herself, “it had good results and it led other people to take the same position, which was the first time anybody’d ever taken it.”25

  This last part of Hellman’s sentence was not quite true. She had not been the first to offer the Committee information about herself while refusing to name names. At least one witness, the screenwriter Sidney Buchman, had done so months earlier. Hellman was, however, the first person, the only person who testified before HUAC, who was congratulated by a disembodied voice calling down to her from the press gallery: “Thank God, cried the ethereal voice, “somebody finally had the guts to do it.”26 To do what? The voice never specified. And no one else in the crowded Committee room that day could recall hearing it.

  13

  Jewish Lit

  “OUT OF the immigrant milieu there came pouring a torrent of memoir, fiction and autobiography,” Irving Howe wrote of the explosion of Jewish writers into the mainstream of American literature. “Let us call this body of writing a regional literature—after all, the immigrant neighborhoods formed a kind of region.”1

  Hellman was the same age as Henry Roth, only ten years older than Saul Bellow, eleven years older than Bernard Malamud, but she knew almost nothing about the experiences on which they, and younger Jewish writers, drew. She had no immigrant parents or grandparents; she had not lived in the neighborhoods in which the children of immigrants were raised, had not known the struggle of these children to integrate into American life without breaking faith. “I wasn’t brought up as a Jew,” Hellman told an interviewer in 1981. “I know almost nothing about being one—I’m sorry to say—though not sorry enough to go to the trouble of learning. . . . I don’t want it to alter my point of view about things.”2

  Hellman felt removed enough from the world of the immigrant’s child so that in Scoundrel Time she could write of her betrayal by the children of “timid immigrants” as if she was describing
a strange people.3 When asked about that particular phrase, she denied that she had meant Jews. “No,” she protested. “No. I’m a Jew, and I don’t know how they could have thought a Jew could be snobbish about other Jews.”4 But she had gone too far in Scoundrel Time for plausible denial. Referring to the heads of Hollywood movie studios, and their cooperation with HUAC and the blacklist, she had concocted a contemptuous, if awkward, metaphor of Jewish timorousness: “Many of them had been born in foreign lands and inherited foreign fears. It would not have been possible in Russia or Poland, but it was possible here to offer the Cossacks a bowl of chicken soup. And the Cossacks in Washington were now riding so fast and hard that the soup had to have double strength and be handed up by running millionaire waiters.”5

  In October 1955, Dashiell Hammett wrote to his daughter Jo about the success of a new play adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett: “[They] got smash-hit notices for the opening of their Diary of Ann[e] Frank and everybody is very happy about it—those that aren’t jealous.”6

  Hellman was not jealous. She had been a part, if a minor part, of the success of the play. The Hacketts were old Hollywood writer-friends of Hammett’s and Hellman’s. They had adapted two of Hammett’s Thin Man books for the screen, as well as Father of the Bride and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. On the face of it, they were not an obvious choice to adapt Anne Frank’s Diary. But Hellman had suggested them to Kermit Bloomgarden, another of her old friends, who was the producer of the play.

  The story of how Anne Frank’s Diary reached the stage is so tangled, Francine Prose writes, “so rife with betrayal and bad behavior, so mired in misunderstanding and complication,” that after four books devoted to the subject, and more articles, it is still unclear exactly what role Hellman played in it.7 What does seem clear is that at some point on the Diary’s road to Broadway, Hellman turned down the opportunity to adapt the work herself; she told the director, Garson Kanin, that should she write the script, the play would be so depressing it wouldn’t run more than one night. It needed, she said, a “lighter touch.”8 According to Meyer Levin, who had been involved with the project from the start, and was the first to produce a script from the original diary, Hellman had been instrumental in blocking the production of his script, calling it “too Jewish.”9

  The Hacketts had some difficulties producing an acceptable script. On many weekends they flew to Martha’s Vineyard to consult with Hellman, who made suggestions that Goodrich called “brilliant.”10 When the play became tied up in a lawsuit brought by Meyer Levin, Hellman denied that she had had a hand in the adaptation. The New York Times ran a story that indicated otherwise: “It turns out on the highest authority that Lillian Hellman had a considerable part in helping to fashion [The Diary’s] ultimate triumph. Miss Hellman, before she grabs the telephone or her typewriter to demand a retraction, had better pause. The credit was paid to her the other day by the play’s adaptors themselves. . . . ‘We don’t know what we would have done without Lillian . . . ’”11

  The Diary of Anne Frank was a huge success in 1956 and received the Pulitzer Prize. With or without Hellman’s help, the Hacketts had achieved a “lighter touch” by toning down the Jewish content of the Diary. The New York Times Sunday magazine noticed that “race and religion are incidental details of the drama.”12 Without the Hacketts’ script, without Hellman’s understanding of the nature of commercial theater, the play might never have been produced at all.

  In some circles, however, the Hacketts’ script was controversial and remained so. Forty years after the production of the play, Cynthia Ozick wrote: “Where the diary touched on Anne’s consciousness of Jewish fate or faith, [the adaptors] quietly erased the reference or changed its emphasis. Whatever was specific they made generic.” Ozick offers an example: Where Anne Frank had written: “if after all this suffering there are still Jews left, the Jewish people will be held up as an example . . . maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason we have to suffer. . . . Through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but through the ages they’ve gone on living, and the centuries of suffering have only made them stronger.” The Hacketts not only condensed the speech but changed its meaning. Anne’s character says: “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. There’ve always been people that have had to . . . sometimes one race . . . sometimes another.”13

  If this was not a change Hellman had suggested, it was an idea she had often expressed. When Hellman wrote “Julia,” in the 1970s, the character of Lilly asks Julia whether the money she has brought to Berlin will save Jews. Julia replies: “About half. And political people. Socialists, Communists, plain old Catholic dissenters. Jews aren’t the only people who have suffered here.”14

  “Ironically,” Tony Judt wrote, “the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union achieved in the course of their extermination the equality that they had long since been promised . . . they became citizens, just like everyone else . . . killed as Jews, they were memorialized and officially remembered merely as the citizens of whatever country they happened to be in at the time of their death.”15

  The changes the Hacketts, Hellman, Kermit Bloomgarden, and Garson Kanin made to the diary were designed to “universalize” Jewish suffering, to make it not only palatable to the audience, but to ennoble the audience with a sense of participation in the grandeur of the human spirit. So that, in the Hacketts’ version, a line plucked out of its context in the diary is placed at the very end of the play: As the footsteps of the Gestapo approach the attic in which Anne and her family are hiding, Anne, in the terror of that moment, incredibly cries out: “I still believe in spite of everything that people are truly good at heart.”

  Hellman’s final Broadway play was an adaptation of a first novel by Burt Blechman called How Much? Renamed My Mother, My Father and Me, it opened on Broadway on March 21, 1963. Like The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, it was about a family and money. Unlike the Hubbards, however, this family is unmistakable in its ethnicity: they are called the Halperns. What money the Halperns have, and it doesn’t seem to be much, places them among the barely-hanging-onnouveau riche. In this play Hellman is dealing with characters toward whom, in life, she felt only contempt.

  Saul Bellow had liked the novel well enough to give it a blurb; some others among Hellman’s friends were not at all sure why she had chosen it. It may be that she wanted to try her hand at the new “regional” literature. Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March had won the National Book Award in 1954; Bernard Malamud’s stories The Magic Barrel won the same prize in 1959; Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus won it in 1960; Bruce Jay Friedman’s very Jewish Stern was hailed as an “iridescent tour de force” when it was published in 1962. Hellman was a competitor by nature. Now she was about to try something new—an absurdist farce about Jews.

  The story of My Mother, My Father and Me, such as it is, concerns a family of striving, first-generation New York Jews: a weak father on the verge of bankruptcy; his ditzy wife who is a compulsive shopper and social climber; an immigrant grandmother; a son attempting to find himself by trying one fad after another. As Hellman wrote them, the Halperns are not characters so much as caricatures, set loose in a plotless play, with money as their motive power. The joke is on them, on their cluelessness and vulgarity. The play closed after seventeen performances.

  “I thought, I think now, that it is a funny play,” Hellman wrote, “but we did not produce it well and it was not well directed.”16

  There were other problems: Hellman’s writing led Walter Matthau, who starred in the play, to tell her that he thought the play was anti-Semitic; others told her so as well. Hellman, herself, thought she was doing something brave: “It’s time we had black and Jewish villains,” she said. “Just because I’m a Jew doesn’t mean I can’t pick on Jews.”17 Or on niggers. The black housekeeper, Hannah, says to the Jewish grandmother: “Your daughter comes home, I say give me my wages and find yourself a Jew
-type nigger.”18

  The play might have had more success with another writer, one with some sympathy for her characters. Hellman’s dislike for the Halperns was palpable. But My Mother, My Father and Me had at least one fan who wrote Hellman in admiration: “This is a slashing fresh wind—a storm!—blown into the fetid air of our times . . . Marvelous—you are marvelous in your wrath.”19

  14

  An Honored Woman

  ALL THROUGH her middle years, honors came to Lillian Hellman: a Theater Arts Medal from Brandeis University; honorary doctorates from Wheaton College, from Smith, from Yale, from Columbia; election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; two New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. An Unfinished Woman won Hellman the prestigious National Book Award in 1969; Julia, the movie made from her story in Pentimento, won three Oscars in 1977.

  By 1963, Hellman had come to an end of her work in the theater. When asked why she no longer wrote plays, she would answer variously that she had never felt entirely at home in the theater, or that she couldn’t bear all the talk about the money it cost to produce a play. But, probably, she wasn’t sure herself. Perhaps it was simply that she had begun working in the theater with Hammett, he was gone, and her run was over.

  Even before she stopped working in the theater, Hellman began to receive invitations to teach. She was invited to Harvard, to Yale, to Berkeley, to Hunter. She chaired seminars in writing and literature; she enjoyed it all and charmed her colleagues. A new life opened up to her, new friends presented themselves. She courted, and was courted by young people making their names—Susan Sontag, Renata Adler, Warren Beatty, Nora Ephron. Most of the young women fell away in time, as often happens in friendships between different generations, particularly when the older woman is needy and demanding, “burdensome,” to Nora Ephron, “amusing company . . . [but also] a much feared bully” to Renata Adler.1 Hellman’s social life expanded even into Establishment circles: Jackie Kennedy came to dinner and brought McGeorge Bundy along; it seemed not to matter that the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Vietnam war were Bundy’s causes and Hellman’s atrocities.