A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Lillian belonged to no traditional world, but she lived on the outskirts of several. She was born and nurtured in southern soil although she grew up mostly in New York City; she lived in the shadow of her mother’s wealthy family, reacting to it with both envy and contempt; she was Jewish by birth, embraced African-American lore and love as a child, and attended Catholic and Baptist churches as the spirit moved her. In the 1930s she wanted to change the world and to live in harmony with the great love of her life, Dashiell Hammett. She became a famous playwright and memoirist, a winner of many awards and honors, yet she never escaped the taint of communism nor suspicions that she lied about her past. She died cherished by a few good friends, despised and misunderstood by many.

  Baby Lillian grew up to be a precocious and rebellious child. (Times-Picayune photo)

  That’s the short story. There are many longer versions, each of them different, and each carrying a range of meanings. In some of them, she is not a southerner at all but a child of the New York City streets; in others she is a rebellious teenager whose spoiled and overindulged youth crystallizes into a narcissistic womanhood. Yet again she might be a bookish daughter with precocious reading habits and an overactive imagination. All of the stories begin in New Orleans.

  Lillian’s maternal great-grandparents, Marx and Newhouse, came to the United States from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, part of a stream of migrants who left their homeland when arbitrary rules restricted the mobility of Jews and hampered their capacity to earn a living at home. Like many such immigrants, they started life peddling goods in small communities in the Midwest and the South. The Marx family settled in Demopolis, Alabama, where they opened a small store that grew into a large establishment and eventually fostered a banking business. Sophie Marx, Lillian’s grandmother, was born there. The Newhouse family set itself down in Cincinnati, Ohio, using the city as a base for trading all over the South. Their son, Leonard, met Sophie Marx on one of his trips and married her soon after. Sophie gave birth to four children: Gilbert, the only son, was born in 1877, then Julia in 1880, followed by two sisters, Florence and Miriam. Grandfather Leonard died shortly after the youngest daughter, Miriam, was born in 1891. Julia, destined to become Lillian’s mother, was eleven at the time of her father’s death.

  Left a widow with four young children, Sophie Marx Newhouse committed herself to expanding the fortunes of the Marx-Newhouse clan. This would not have been unusual for a southern white woman in the post–Civil War generation, for the war produced a plethora of genteel middle-class widows bereft of husbands and income. Many such women found ways to become self-reliant that would have been unimaginable in an older South. They sought professional training and semiprofessional jobs as nurses and teachers, opened small businesses and managed family properties. Sophie Marx benefited from their example. To expand her resources, she relied heavily on family trading networks and especially on her brother Jake, the ruthless great-uncle whom Lillian later claimed to fear and on whom she modeled the critique of the South that infused several of her plays. By 1900, Sophie could respond with one unequivocal word to a census question about her occupation. She described herself as a “capitalist.”1

  Sophie appears to have moved with her children from Cincinnati, where she lived at the turn of the century, to New Orleans. The extended family prospered. Lillian’s great-uncles and -aunts, many of them from the increasingly powerful Marx clan, settled into trading and banking. Julia, her older brother, Gilbert, and her two sisters grew up in comfort. To finish her education, Julia spent two years at Sophie Newcomb College—the women’s college of Tulane University. Though it could not be compared with intellectually challenging northern schools like Wellesley and Mount Holyoke, Newcomb was by no means a finishing school at the time. Julia’s presence there suggests that her mother might have been worried about her future. Julia was already in her early twenties, with no prospect of marriage looming. But Julia had her own plans. She left school when she met Max Hellman.

  Max’s family, though also of German-Jewish stock, had not done as well as Julia’s. His father, Bartaute (or Bernhard), probably arrived in the United States in 1866, about a year after the Civil War ended. Family lore, sometimes repeated by Lillian, described the family as coming from older stock and the grandfather as a veteran of the Civil War. Lillian doubted that this was the case. Ship records confirm her suspicions. They show thirty-two-year-old Bernhard Hellman arriving in Baltimore from Bremen on the Humboldt in October 1866. He may already have been married to twenty-eight-year-old Babbette Kaschland, who arrived from Germany a year later. The couple moved to New Orleans, where he worked as a bookkeeper. They had two daughters (Jenny and Johanna, commonly called Hannah) before bringing baby brother Max into the world in 1874. Despite his immigrant origins, Grandfather Bernhard lived a middle-class lifestyle. He purchased a home in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans, not one of the city’s most expensive areas but certainly respectable. The household kept a live-in servant. In a period when fewer than 10 percent of girls graduated from high school, both daughters did so, as did Max. The girls also had some sort of secretarial or office training.

  Max Hellman, like his father, started life as a bookkeeper. Handsome, funny, and outgoing, he won the hand of shy Julia Newhouse over the objections of her family, who then and later thought him unworthy of their beautiful and rich daughter. But their daughter was already twenty-three years old. They reconciled themselves to the marriage, providing Julia with a handsome dowry. The couple married on Tuesday evening, September 27, 1904, at the home of the bride’s mother. Max’s mother attended, as did his and Julia’s sisters. Brother Gilbert did not come but sent the couple a generous one-hundred-dollar check.2 The young couple first moved into her mother’s home at 10 Rosa Park, just north of Charles Street. Rosa Park was, at the time, one of New Orleans’s most elegant neighborhoods. They brought baby Lillian Florence, born on June 20, 1905, home there.

  Not unusually for the time, Julia hired a wet nurse for the baby. We might think of this as an explanation for Lillian’s never-ending fears of rejection, the source of her anger at the human race and especially toward women.3 Then again, we might not.

  When Lillian was less than a year old, the family decamped to Prytania Street, just a few blocks from where Max grew up. Their new neighborhood included several boardinghouses with rooms occupied by teachers, clerks, salesmen, and a few professionals. This must have been a step down for Julia. Still, her dowry enabled Max to start his own business manufacturing and distributing shoes, and the family, including the nurse, Sophronia McMahon, lived comfortably. When the business failed a few years later, the wealthy clan pretty much left the young family to its own devices. Thereafter, Max made a decent living as an itinerant shoe salesman.

  The family decamped from the comforts of Rosa Park to Prytania Street. (Uri and Michal Alon)

  The New Orleans where Lillian was born in 1905, a year into the marriage, was then a thriving port city, hub of an active financial and trading center. The twelfth-largest city in the United States, it boasted a diverse population of more than three hundred thousand souls. One quarter were African-American, many the descendants of former slaves and others the children and grandchildren of a large free black and Creole population that predated the Civil War. Italians, Germans, Irish, and French together constituted the bulk of the immigrant population. Like all southern cities and most northern towns as well, New Orleans was residentially segregated. Contiguous communities of racially mixed people sometimes overlapped to produce a rich cultural and social mix that gave the city a freewheeling character. In a decade noted for southern white terror toward African-Americans, New Orleans developed a reputation for cosmopolitanism and liberalism. In a South that rigidly prohibited social intercourse between blacks and whites, New Orleans, alone among southern states, did not prohibit intermarriage across the races.

  The city’s diversity produced a rich culture that included the parading of brass bands, a stro
ng tradition of minstrel players, and, by the time Lillian arrived, the birth of jazz. Originated by black musicians, played and enjoyed by blacks and whites, jazz became the aural symbol of cultural syncretism. But there were other arenas of inclusion as well. The city’s Storyville neighborhood boasted the famous New Orleans cribs where black and white women sold their sexual services to all comers for small fees. Finance and trade produced a prosperous middle and upper-middle class, whose members patronized dance, music, and theater. Here the new South grew apace, offering seemingly limitless opportunity to make money out of the area’s natural resources.

  As fate would have it, Lillian would be an only child. Cared for until she was five by Sophronia, she remembered her nurse with enormous affection as the great influence on her life. “If we’d been able to afford Sophronia until you were sixteen or eighteen,” she recalled her father repeating mournfully, “everything would have been different. We’d have all been happy and you’d have been a different child.”4 By Lillian’s account, it was Sophronia whose advice and direction turned Lillian into the southerner she remained and who inspired the egalitarian values from which she never strayed. Sophronia taught her to respect the beliefs of others, no matter how alien or uncomfortable to her. She instilled in Lillian a simple moral code: to mind her own business, to defer to her parents and their positions, to be loyal to friends and family. From Sophronia, Lillian absorbed a respect for tradition and an antagonism to racism that would remain with her forever. And from Sophronia, too, Lillian learned that she might appease her conscience by expressing empathy and solidarity but that real change required an active commitment.

  If Hellman declared herself to be a southerner at heart, she was a particular kind of southerner, a Jewish southerner whose religion was held in abeyance. Neither her parents nor their families were religiously observant. Lillian had no formal religious training in her youth; had she been sent to synagogue, it would likely have been to a Reform congregation, typical in the New Orleans community of her childhood. Jewish lack of religiosity echoed among the Catholics and Protestants of the area, whose religious practice tended to be open and eclectic as well.5 Among the Jews who surrounded her, Lillian would have learned lessons quite different from those imbibed by the Eastern European immigrants who peopled northern cities. Reform Jews explicitly rejected Jewish law as interpreted by the rabbis of old, and they turned away as well from the notion that Jews constituted a nation of their own. They subscribed instead to a code of justice and morality common to the Judeo-Christian tradition, holding their national identity to be located in the place where they lived. Reform Judaism constituted, in short, a way for Jews to become Americans.

  As a child, Lillian learned to say prayers after the Christian fashion—asking God to protect her parents, her nurse, her aunts. When her father discovered this odd behavior, he teased her about becoming the first Jewish nun on Prytania Street—a memory that Hellman cherished. Her mother conveyed her own form of spirituality manifested by attending services at whatever church or occasional synagogue moved her. In the New Orleans of Lillian’s childhood these visits would not have been unusual: at least one historian of the Jewish community remarks on its sociability, on a continuing “exchange of church visiting, where members of both the Jewish as well as the Christian community take one another to hear the new ministers, or partake of church suppers.”6 With Julia and with Sophronia, the small Lillian enjoyed an array of such visits.

  In that respect, New Orleans was an oasis of a kind. It contained a rather small population of seven thousand Jews (less than two thousand families) who together constituted a little more than 1 percent of the population of the city at the time.7 Jews had lived in New Orleans for two hundred years: about half of the Jewish families dated back at least three generations. The city contained no solidly Jewish neighborhoods, no self-created ghettos, no orthodox Jewish community. Julian Feibelman, writing in 1941, called it a place where “families have mingled socially for generations, and the tradition is continued today.”8 Jews, he continued, found themselves “in almost every nook and cranny of social, political and cultural life.”9 This was an area reasonably free of anti-Semitism. As one of her contemporaries put it, “I was Jewish and that was that, but nobody seemed to care very much and nobody so far as I could see was very exercised about it.”10 Hellman echoed these feelings, noting of Jews in New Orleans that “they had a pleasant community of their own and in turn the community allowed them to have it.”11 Such casual integration of Jews did not go unnoticed among the growing numbers of their co-religionists. Historian Leonard Reissman remarks on its problematic consequences. “More so than in most other American-Jewish communities, New Orleans appears to give substance to the fears of benign assimilation that have always dominated Jewish history.”12

  Elsewhere in the South, apparent assimilation hid more negative feelings that sometimes manifested themselves in violent outbursts. Lillian grew up in a South where Jews clustered in small groups in small towns and cities, where, to quote one scholar, they “played poker with the sheriff, fished with the county judge, hunted with the planters, and became leaders of the local Chamber of Commerce.”13 In the memory of Eli Evans, whose father was once mayor of Durham, North Carolina, Jews were “blood and bones part of the South itself: Jewish Southerners.”14 And yet Lillian was ten and still spending long summers in the South when a Marietta, Georgia, mob stormed the jail where Leo Frank, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish factory superintendent, was being held under suspicion of murdering a young white woman. Could she have been unaware of the anti-Semitism that fueled the lynching that followed? She was probably in her twenties when the novelist Ronald Bern experienced the daily playground beatings and active anti-Semitism that characterized his school years in the South.15

  The differential experience suggests that Lillian may well have suffered from what the historian W. J. Cash has called the paradox of “the eternal alien,” never quite belonging. “In the general withdrawal upon the old heritage,” notes Cash, Jews inevitably stood out. “It was perfectly natural that … he should come in for renewed denunciations; should … stand in the eyes of the people as a sort of evil harbinger and incarnation of all the menaces they feared and hated—external and internal, real and imaginary.”16 Among New Orleans Jews, that alienation was experienced in one important arena: Jews had never been invited to the Mardi Gras carnival balls, and this despite the fact that a Jew had originated the carnival in 1872 and been its first Rex.17 As a child, Lillian did not feel deprived of this experience, and when she might have felt excluded she had already left the South. And yet years later she ridiculed the notion of exclusion with a suspicious vehemence. “May God bless them and keep them,” she wrote of Jews who wanted to participate in the ceremonies, “and some day allow them to ride on those hideous Mardi Gras floats and become Kings and Queens, ermine bedecked, at the grand balls and as silly as their dancing partners.”18

  Hellman’s deep commitment to racial egalitarianism seems to have emerged from both her eclectic exposure to religion and her southern roots. Unlike their poor white counterparts, Jews who lived in the South experienced few “turf” conflicts over jobs. Unlike New York’s first- and second-generation immigrants, who frequently identified themselves as refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia, the comparatively deep roots and relative economic prosperity of many southern Jews placed them in more secure positions. Still, the position of southern Jews was not without ambiguity. Their small numbers and dispersed presence, historian Paula Hyman notes, pushed Jews in the South and other small communities into a private commitment to their faith that substituted for the public exhibitions of Jewish culture more prevalent in larger Jewish communities. They were white people in a world where race mattered more than religion. As white people eager to achieve economic success and security for their families, they adapted to prevailing racial hierarchies and discriminations. But that did not mean that religion and ethnic tradition did not mat
ter at all. As outsiders within, they tended to identify with the persecuted rather than with the persecutors. Even as they adopted southern white standards of segregation and place, southern Jews generally took liberal positions on the “Negro problem.” Somewhat cynically, Hellman attributed this stance to self-interest—to respect for African-Americans as customers and as employees.19 In this sense their Jewish identity differed from that of their northern counterparts even as their southern origins separated them from the rest of America.

  Lillian’s parents echoed the anti-racist lessons learned from Sophronia and were, if anything, more inclined to take matters into their own hands. She often told a story that she later reproduced in her memoirs of how her father got involved in a brawl in defense of a young black girl who was traveling by train alone in the deep South. Lillian (about ten at the time) and her parents were sitting one night on a deserted southern train platform when they noticed the young woman running from two white men, who caught up with her and grabbed her, knocking the girl’s suitcase out of her hands and scattering her possessions. Max stepped up immediately—an unexpected act in the days before World War I—insisting they put the girl down. The men responded by taking a swing at him. He fended them off and hurriedly escorted the girl to the just-arriving train, telling Lillian to jump aboard. Only when the train began to pull out did father and daughter realize they had left Lillian’s mother behind “on the ground carefully picking up and repacking the girl’s valise.” She headed for the train as it jerked to a stop, walking through the two men and smiling as she said, in a deep southern accent, “Excuse me, boys, excuse me. Mah husband wants us to get aboard the train.”20 Lillian later thought the accent might have saved her mother’s life.