A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  It boasted as well a six-room caretaker’s cottage, two guest houses, barns, and an eight-acre, spring-fed lake. Together, she and Hammett, along with farmer Fred Hermann, who occupied the caretaker’s cottage, set themselves to reclaiming some of the neglected land, raising poultry and poodles as well as pigs and cattle, immersing themselves in other farm chores. At Hardscrabble, Hellman participated in slaughtering animals, helped to make sausage and head cheese, and learned how to hunt, trap turtles, and to fish. She delighted in her dogs and especially in the new puppies that came regularly.

  In some ways the years at Hardscrabble allowed her to open up her many-sided persona. She was in her mid-thirties, with two successful plays and several movie scripts behind her. She had achieved fame as well as fortune, and she had a satisfying male companion at hand. At the farm, she began the pattern of nurturing and entertaining that provided continuing fulfillment. She surrounded herself with guests of all sorts, including her father, who often showed up for weekends, and Hammett’s children, who came for summer holidays. On weekends she invited the cast of whatever play of hers was then running on Broadway. The house was so often filled with people that Hellman sometimes remembered it as a sort of boardinghouse where “people came and stayed.”39 Still she found time to sequester herself in the study, where she wrote four great plays (Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind, Another Part of the Forest, and Autumn Garden) that solidified her reputation as a playwright of the first rank. To the study door, she taped a notice:

  This room is used for Work

  Do not enter without knocking

  After you knock wait for an answer

  If you get no answer, go away and

  Don’t come back

  This means everybody

  This means you

  This means Night and Day

  By Order of the Hellman-Military-Commission-for-

  Playwrights. Court Martialling will Take Place in the Barn,

  and your Trial Will Not be a Fair One.40

  The thirteen years Lillian spent at Hardscrabble, most commentators would agree, were surely the happiest years with Hammett, and probably the happiest of Lillian’s being. By the 1940s, Hellman’s relationships with men and women had taken the shape that would persist for the rest of her life. The heavy drinking over, more secure in her craft and capable of earning her own way, she cultivated the love and loyalty of good friends and colleagues without dependence on a single partner. In addition to her ex-husband and his new wife, Maggie, her close friendships included Lee and Ira Gershwin, lifelong friends, who persuaded producer Herman Shumlin to read and produce The Children’s Hour; Talli Wyler and her husband, William, who directed her screenplays for These Three and Dead End; and Dorothy Parker. Lillian first met Parker in 1930, in Hollywood. The two became good friends when they shared scriptwriting and union-organizing experiences in Hollywood. They later traveled to Spain together and spent time supporting anti-fascist causes. Their friendship survived Hammett’s fierce dislike of Dottie and Lillian’s contempt for Dottie’s husband, Alan Campbell. It foundered only at the end of Parker’s life when Parker could no longer control her addiction to alcohol. In her lifetime, Lillian achieved a goodly measure of deep and reciprocated love. And with those she loved, she created long-term relationships that sometimes included sex and often did not. She may never have had a sexual relationship with a woman (there is no evidence that she did), but with women, as with men, she created long-term loving relationships and lifelong loyalties.

  In 1940, Hellman entered analysis with Gregory Zilboorg. She was thirty-six and had just seen her third blockbuster success mounted on the Broadway stage. She could not, she thought, handle the success. “Somewhere by instinct I had sense enough to know that I was going to have a crack-up,” she told interviewer Christine Doudna.41 Success and the drinking, she would later say, were her main reasons for starting treatment. But she knew these were not the only catalysts. Hammett, still drinking heavily, began, around this point, to withdraw from a sexual relationship with her. A year or so after she began analysis, the birth of Arthur and Maggie’s daughter shook her deeply. Perhaps she had finally decided to come to terms with her fear of abandonment, her deeply rooted sense that she could not be loved? Or perhaps Hardscrabble released some newly reborn sense of her nurturing self.

  Whatever the immediate impulses that led her to the couch, Hellman committed herself to the process, worked hard at it, and discovered much about herself. She wrote about the “hidden nastiness and resentment” that she found in her unconscious and about the temper and the anger that she could not control.42 And, repeatedly, she referred to the treatment as intimately related to the painful depressions she suffered. “It is very sad to watch a neurosis work,” she commented to her then lover, John Melby, “especially when it belongs to you.”43 The analysis would last eighteen years and develop into a deep friendship with the analyst and his wife, Peggy. The Zilboorgs visited her at Hardscrabble; she traveled with them to Paris and Italy; she sent her friends to Gregory Zilboorg for therapy and analysis. And in his hands, Lillian seemed able to give scope to her nurturing qualities.

  She had always maintained a warm relationship with her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, but the relationship deepened and strengthened after Kober’s remarriage and, not incidentally, after she began psychoanalysis. Arthur married Maggie Frohnknecht in 1941; Lillian served as witness at their wedding. She helped the family find an apartment in New York, managed their move from one apartment to another, supervised the storage of their things when they went abroad, and advised them about servants and real estate transactions. From Hardscrabble Farm, she wrote them loving and sometimes playful letters that began “Darling Arthur, darling Maggie,” and ended with salutations of love and affection. Sometimes she signed these letters “Lillikins”; often she invited them all to “come home.” These letters expressed a genuine longing, hard to fathom. Maggie became ill in 1946, and Lillian visited and comforted her in the hospital. A year later, she was writing to her: “Above all I wish I could see you again. I can’t tell you how much I miss you or how often I think about you. You have left a large, vacant place in my life, and I hope to God you will come back some day soon and fill it again.”44 Sometimes she started her letters with “Dearest Maggie and husband dear to us both,” or concluded them with affectionate salutations such as “my love to you, our husband, and child” and instructions to Maggie to take care of “our husband.”45 Occasionally, she and Dash took care of Catherine at Hardscrabble. Catherine remembers these times as joyous moments when Dash paid special attention to her.46

  This relationship, like so many others in Lillian’s life, was anchored by a frequent exchange of gifts that continued for all of their days and that served as concrete manifestations of reciprocal affection. Arthur and Maggie sent Lillian Christmas and birthday presents regularly. Lillian reciprocated, and when she could not think of what to send, she simply asked. “What do you want for your birthday and how much should it cost?” she wired Kober in August 1941.47 When he sent her the bill for the six hand-sewn shirts he requested, she promptly sent him “57 smackers for 6 beautiful shirts, which is my birthday present to you.”48 To the Kobers’ equivalent question in May of 1943, Lillian telegraphed back, “Girl of my fine type would love towels. It’s a wonderful present and I am very grateful. Much Love to both of you and will write next week.”49 The decision to buy presents themselves and send off the bills seems to have become routine. In response to one query from Arthur about a Christmas present, Lillian replied that she would like a negligee and asked him if he “would like me to buy it and charge it to you in order to save you trouble.”50 Later, Lillian asked whether Maggie had yet bought her birthday present in the same letter in which she told Kober that she had bought herself “a beautiful chair for the lawn … it cost $36.45 and I am very grateful to both of you and pleased with it. Thank you darling, and thank Maggie for me.”51

  She enjoyed the love and loyalty of good f
riends. Here with Arthur Kober, Mrs. Shumlin, Esther Keene, and Herman Shumlin at the Shumlin home on Fire Island. (Ransom Center)

  For Arthur she reserved a special place marked by her affectionate salutations to him: “Arthur baby darling,” she might write to him. Occasionally she warned him, “If Maggie ever divorces you …”52 And it was not unusual for Lillian to remind Arthur of their own marriage, as when she telegraphed to wish him “A happy New Year, Darling and with truly loving memories of 22 years ago.”53 After Maggie died in 1951, Lillian briefly harbored hopes of resurrecting their earlier love affair, signing one letter to him, “your first bride.” These hopes came to naught but left her with no residue of ill feeling. She continued to see Arthur and to share confidences with him until he died in 1975. Her last act of friendship was a tribute at his funeral where she claimed for him “an affection without any of the misery that so often comes with broken arrangements.” It was, she thought, “a friendship that had no pause and never ended.”54

  Hammett, who joined the army in 1942 and was stationed in the Aleutian Islands, received a full measure of her warm affection. At the beginning of their separation, Hellman (whose letters are missing) complained of his being cold, to which he responded with a humorous comment about taking his temperature and seeming “warm enough to the thermometer.”55 But from Alaska, Hammett suggests that Hellman proved a very satisfactory correspondent. “You, if I may say so, Madam,” he told her, “write very nice and warming letters.”56

  From Hammett’s letters to Hellman, we learn about the loving relationship they shared, even after he had foresworn sexual intimacy, and perhaps in anticipation of a reunion when he returned. Addressed to “Dear Lilishka” or “Dearest Lily” or Lilibet, the letters sometimes expressed concern for her health; at others they commented on her work or his, as when he proudly noted the release of the movie version of Watch on the Rhine (whose script he had written), appreciated her work on North Star, or boosted her spirits when she despaired over a difficult new play (The Searching Wind). The letters are often sentimental, as when he noted the thirteenth anniversary of their first meeting and added, “They have been fine grand years and you are a fine grand woman and for all I know I must have been a fine grand man to have deserved them and you. And with such a start, think of not only the next thirteen, but the ones after that!”57 They are also filled with the kinds of intimate details that recall a life together. When the army stopped censoring the letters of enlisted men in Alaska, for example, Hammett rejoiced that he would now be able to write to her “without feeling that I’m telling whichever officer in my unit happens to be unit censor about you in bed.” He wouldn’t want those officers to know, he wrote to her playfully, “that in cold weather you sleep with your buttocks sticking out from under the covers.”58 As the war drew to a close and Hellman took her lengthy trip to Moscow, Hammett longed for her return, telling her he would postpone a thirty-day furlough until he knew when she would be back, and closing his letters with “Now I’m off to bed, sweetheart, but not without sending you much love and many, many kisses.”59

  In every way, Lillian acted like the wife she might have been. While he was away, she held a power of attorney for him and she and her secretary, Nancy Bragdon, monitored his spending and managed his financial affairs. Lillian sent cookies to Fort Monmouth for him and his barracks mates and responded to his requests with alacrity. Once he was settled in Alaska, he asked for books—“books are something I’ve been missing a good deal lately”—and from Abercrombies: a “hood to thwart the elements; you know something to pull over my face when the weather’s bad, with eyeholes or something to look through. I don’t know—Abercrombies will know … Tell them,” he wrote, “It’s for winter—WINTER—tell ’em, in Alaska—ALASKA.”60 Unasked, she sent food of all kinds: rumcakes, maple sugar, chocolates, and grapefruit peel, but also caviar, goose liver pâté, and smoked turkey from an East Side gourmet shop called Martin’s. To Alaska also went socks from Brooks Brothers and Saks Fifth Avenue, pipes and pipe tobacco from Dunhill, and, in the fall of 1943 (just preceding their second Christmas apart), a gold chain and a ring to which he avowed his instant attachment.61

  After Hammett had been in Alaska for about a year, Lillian flew off on her Moscow adventure. There, she fell deeply in love with a State Department officer named John Melby. Hammett, who did not worry when he received no letters from Moscow, began to wonder why she did not write once she had arrived in England on her way back to the States. “Charitably,” as he put it, he blamed her silence on the mail service, but he also remarked in a hurt note to Maggie Kober, “I guess I’ll never understand women.”62 More seriously he wrote to Lillian, in March of 1945, that he would “expect some kind of explanation why you didn’t write me all the time you were in England.”63 Lillian did not explain—and when Hammett returned to the United States in the summer of 1945, he found Melby at Hardscrabble. Hammett obligingly moved his belongings out. But Melby left for China within months, and Hammett resumed his on-again, off-again place in Lillian Hellman’s life—sometimes living at Hardscrabble, at others in an apartment he took on West 10th Street in New York City, and, after 1952, in a cottage in Katonah, New York, owned by friends who gave it to him at nominal rent. Lillian, as she wrote to Melby, remained “very devoted to Dash, deeply devoted, and I wish I could see him happy and settled and sure of some kind of future. He is a wonderful human being, and it is heartbreaking to see it go to waste.”64 Dash, for his part, continued to read Lillian’s work, and the two drew closer together in the difficult McCarthy years. Lillian tried to raise bail money for him when he was arrested for refusing to divulge the names of contributors to a civil liberties bail fund, supported him when he went to prison, and paid his bills when Hammett’s income fell victim to charges of income tax delinquency. In 1958, ill and broke, he moved somewhat reluctantly into Hellman’s town-house on East 82nd Street. He was living there when he died on January 10, 1961.

  With John Melby, as with so many of her lovers, Lillian retained an important relationship that survived their sexual attraction for each other. She met and fell in love with Melby in the winter of 1944–45, when she visited the wartime Soviet Union. Melby was then a cultural affairs officer at the Moscow embassy of the United States, and for a while both of them lived at the American compound in Moscow, known as Spaso House. It was here that she met Ambassador Averell Harriman and his wife, Marie, who would remain her friends long afterward. When Melby returned to the United States on leave in the summer and fall of 1945, the two talked of marrying as soon as Melby could secure a divorce from his estranged wife. But the relationship foundered when Melby was posted to China, where, despite his continuing professions of love and commitment, he stayed for more than four years. Hellman treated the separation as temporary at first, writing long love letters to him and begging him to return. Slowly the requests turned to demands, and as Melby’s replies demonstrated an increasing reluctance to return, a very sad Lillian slowly put the relationship aside. When Melby returned from China in 1950, he was involved with another woman. Still, he and Hellman, ever fond of each other, met intermittently.

  She met John Melby in the winter of 1944. (University of Pennsylvania Archives)

  Eventually, Melby found himself called before a government investigating committee questioning his loyalty. The charges against him included his relationship with Lillian (a “known Communist”). Hellman enlisted Joe Rauh, the lawyer who helped to defend her before HUAC, to represent him, and did what she could to stay quiet and not complicate his life; she shared his anger and distress when he ultimately lost his job and his career in the State Department. Briefly they resumed their affair, but in the end, Melby married another woman and reappeared in Hellman’s life only intermittently.65

  While Melby was in China, Hellman dealt with the illness and death of her father, and here, too, a sense of family feeling is palpable. Her father began to develop symptoms of dementia in 1948. Hellman tried first to provide nursing
care for him at home and then, reluctantly and on the advice of his doctors, placed him in an expensive private nursing home. From there he wrote long anguished letters to his family and friends, begging to be released and venting his frustration on Lillian. His sisters, Hannah and Jenny, pleaded with Lillian to return him to his home, convinced that she was restraining him against his will and accusing her of being hard-hearted. Lillian responded angrily at first. She was hurt at their mistrust and invited them to come and visit their brother to see for themselves. For more than a year letters flew back and forth, each of them demonstrating Lillian’s misery at having to incarcerate her father and her outrage at having to explain herself to her two beloved aunts. Not until they came to visit did they desist. The episode suggests something of Lillian’s sense of herself as a daughter. Though she never felt close to anyone in her mother’s family, she cherished her relationship with her father and his sisters until they died, and their memories long afterward.66

  Family relationships did not come easily to Hellman, and in the fifties she seemed to become needier and more emotionally dependent as well as more fearful about her standing and status. Surely this is linked to the devastating betrayals of the McCarthy period and the dissolution of many friendships under the stress of government investigation. But the fifties must have challenged Hellman in other ways as well. This was the decade in which ideas about traditional marriage and heterosexual fidelity were linked to patriotism, when maintaining a home and family sustained American prosperity and the American way of life. In the parlance of the time, a happily married suburban housewife represented security and stability, the promise of capitalism in an age of potential nuclear conflict.67 Hellman’s position as an unmarried and independent woman now seemed anomalous rather than admirable, vaguely subversive of American values rather than celebrated. A woman of her age and generation should, it was thought, have settled down with a husband as so many of Hellman’s female friends had done. Hellman, in contrast, continued to relish both her independence and her sexuality, attributes some thought of as symptoms of communism. Yet Lillian seemed entirely comfortable in her double role. With Dash she acted, as actress and friend Patricia Neal recalls, “like a little girl,” solicitous and flirtatious.68