A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Emerging as a playwright in the depths of the deepest economic depression the United States had ever known, Hellman might have taken a different route. She had, after all, first thought of herself as a writer of fiction, and particularly of short stories. But with little recognition for her stories, the theater seemed a logical choice. Hellman found there “a place for the expression and exchange of ideas,” a location where she could “present an idea for the consideration of intelligent audiences.”36

  And yet Hellman was not drawn to the lively ferment of the off-Broadway theater of the late twenties and early thirties. Her desire to develop and articulate ideas rather than to investigate form led her rather to follow the social realism of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. She was not attracted to theater companies like the Provincetown Players, which turned to direct social criticism in the late 1920s. Nor did she follow in the footsteps of the new experimental theater that emerged in the early years of the Depression and whose quintessential expression is in the Group Theatre. Founded in New York in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford (both of whom Lillian admired), and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre created a community of actors, playwrights, and directors who pioneered ensemble acting and freely responded to play scripts by turning the production of a play into a collaborative project. Some of Lillian’s soon-to-be-well-known contemporaries, including friends John Howard Lawson and Marc Blitzstein as well as Elmer Rice and Clifford Odets, found inspiration in the Group Theatre’s effort to join political statements with acting methods that drew on real-life issues and characters. Just a year after The Children’s Hour opened, New York’s Group Theatre offered to the public two plays by Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing, which did not merely critique the American experience but called for political action. They suggested a newly assertive theatrical experience in which plays and playwrights called upon audiences to raise their voices, often in alignment with the dogma of a rising Communist Party.

  Hellman took no part in this theater of protest, nor did she express much interest in the New Playwrights Theater or the WPA Theater project in which many famous playwrights and theater figures like Blitzstein and the young Carson McCullers made their names. Her work, Arthur Miller would later recall, was not angry enough. And yet the critics of the day had little doubt about her anger. “She is a specialist in hate and frustration, a student of helpless rage, an articulator of inarticulate loathings,” wrote one commentator after seeing Days to Come.37 The anger, in Miller’s judgment, didn’t seem to take political form. It didn’t seem to him “to belong to these impassioned, challenging plays.”38 There was, remembered Miller, “a certain eloquence in her dialogue that set her apart from the theatre of protest which was so brash and exciting then.”39 Hellman, in Miller’s view, was “preeminently Broadway.”

  The artist of Hellman’s mind’s eye needed to involve herself not with immediate political questions but with the larger concerns of her generation. Her job was to make the world a better place to live by engaging with moral issues rather than problems of the day. With some exceptions, Hellman chose subjects engaged with everyday life: the tension between human feeling and the pursuit of wealth, the corruption of money, the perversity of extended family relationships, the unforeseen costs of human apathy. She wanted to underscore the behavior of bullies, to condemn racism, and to portray people who could resist both. She sought to illuminate pretense and vanity, and above all to focus attention on questions of justice.40 She did this by drawing lively portraits of individuals confronting the conundrums posed by these issues in their daily lives. Like Ibsen, she placed her characters in what the critic Jacob Adler has described as “clear and firm dramatic structures.”41 And like Ibsen, she produced problem plays—plays that assumed, perhaps too optimistically, that “to reveal a problem is a step toward correcting it.” Adler called her “the single most important American Ibsenian outside of Arthur Miller.”42

  To Hellman, a good society included one without poverty or racism, one built on principles of social justice. But she did not advocate for these by calling her audiences to arms or urging political action; nor did she turn to abstract questions about the human condition as her successors in the theater were apt to do. It was not, she told one interviewer, that “all literature must have social or economic implications.” And yet, she continued, “unless you are a pathological escapist there must be some sort of propaganda in everything you write.” For her, propaganda meant explicit advocacy of some cause. “The truth must be the main objective of any one who seeks a form of literary expression … If a person doesn’t want to involve himself with the truth he has no business trying to write at all.”43

  Hellman attributed her moral positions not to any particular event, such as the New Deal, but to her moment in time. She belonged to a particular generation, she told an audience of Harvard students in 1961, a “little bracket … too old to be depression children, too young to have known the fun and brilliance of the 1920s.” As a writer, she was part of this “between-times group.” Unlike her literary predecessors who had emerged in “the hurricane winds of the early 1920s … who were ten or fifteen years older than my generation … more brilliant and frequently more talented than mine,” she saw herself as having missed out. “We were born later than Faulkner, or Fitzgerald or Hart Crane or Hemingway or O’Neill,” she ruminated, “and by the time we might have been ready the depression had appeared and the world, and literature took a sharp turn.”44 Her group was “bright and lively, but not as good.” They represented “a bracket of ten years between the wonderful fresh wind that blew so good between the First World War and the days when what we called a depression … turned later into a world storm, the ugliest war of history.”45 Hers was a generation tasked with sorting out the meaning of social justice, racism, and fascism, of good and evil in a dangerous and insecure world.

  This sense of herself as a creature of her time permeated her work and obligated her to speak to the moment. Neither she nor any writer could accurately account for the influences on her work, she would say, but like the best playwrights of her moment, she found herself caught in the “combination of economic fear and spiritual uplift” of the Depression years, admiring of “the new and daring and remarkable things that were happening in the country.”46 A good play, she thought, must be based on real life; writers could write only about the “world that was made for them … they reflect their origins.” She would not identify her own location in space and time as “influence.” Most writers, she would say when asked, invented influences for interviewers: clarity about a work’s origins in “influences, people, events, comes much later, and sounds good, but very often hasn’t much to do with the facts.”47

  The best writers, of whom she hoped she was one, would “bring new light” to the world from which they had come. In that respect, she thought of the theater as “the clearest mirror of its time.”48 For her, the issue of why a writer wrote was less important than the product. The writer, she thought, had to have something to say: her job was to “use it right. Right? Right for what? Right to have something to say and to say it well.”49 But there was no point in speaking if nobody listened. To achieve her goal of addressing broad questions that extended beyond the political-economic crisis of the 1930s, Hellman would have to find larger audiences than the relatively narrow world of experimental theater allowed. Her ambition was to write “serious plays for the commercial theater.” To this end, she sought “first class” productions in good theaters whenever possible. She wanted the attention of major reviewers in the leading media. And she wanted the monetary rewards of successful Broadway production.

  The theater proved to be a curious choice for Hellman, exacting compromises from her that she did not enjoy and to which she sometimes could not acquiesce. To attract the audiences she wanted, she chose to resort to plot devices and melodrama that often drew criticism; these earned her the reputation of a middlebrow rather than a highbrow writer. To acquire fi
rst-class productions for her plays—equity actors and a professional stage to show off her work—she would need to cultivate the acquaintance of producers and actors whom she claimed to despise. She denied that she craved the glamour of the theater, insisting that to her it was mostly hard work, but she found that she relished center stage and enjoyed consorting with leading actors, actresses, producers, directors, and eventually the movie moguls who would employ her in Hollywood. She dropped their names in conversation until, eventually, her name became one of those that others dropped.

  Hellman worked hard at her writing, disciplining herself to put in long hours and to work to deadlines. In her plays, as in her short essays and later in her memoirs, she relied on careful research and thoughtful preparation, keeping notebooks for each of her projects and recording in them ideas as well as incidents. Sometimes research involved, as it did for Days to Come, visits to unfamiliar sites; other times her subjects demanded investigations of particular personas, like that of the labor militant. She wanted to get every detail right. For Watch on the Rhine, she claimed to have made digests of more than twenty-five books, to have read widely in the memoirs and the history of the period, and to have kept notebooks that ran to a thousand pages or more.50 All her life she explored, or had assistants explore, such things as the appropriateness of particular locations, the dates of key events, the attributes of period garments. Her concern for accuracy persisted throughout her life—a particular irony in light of accusations of lying that hounded her at the end of her life.

  To write well she claimed the need for calm, “for long days, months of fiddling.”51 Not infrequently, she complained, as she did to Arthur Kober at one point, about the interruptions that got in the way. “It is becoming increasingly obvious,” she wrote Kober from New York, “that I cannot work here: the telephone, the cause, the thousand nuisances who want me to speak or breathe or donate, the friends and half-friends who see no reason why you can’t stop working and come to dinner and run right back and work after dinner.”52 Playwriting was, like any other form of writing, not glamorous, she told a Wellesley College audience.53 Hellman thought writing for the theater a magical thing—a gift that you either had or didn’t and that could not be taught. Yet she credited Hammett with teaching her how to write. “Patiently and persistently he hammered away. He began by attacking most of what I had written, teaching me along the way that writers must go to school at writing, and learn and read and think and study.”54 But she was a good student and learned quickly to use dialogue to evoke character. Under Hammett’s tutelage, she became expert at drawing sharply delineated characters and providing them with succinct and often raffish voices. In a few lines, she could capture the essence of a personality as well as its major flaws.55

  About 1942: She credited Hammett with teaching her how to write. (© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  Hellman counted on Hammett for critical readings of one draft after another: “Over and over again he would tell me how bad was the first draft, the second, the fifth, the sixth; over and over again I would bring the next drafts, giving them to him with what I thought was the truthful notice that if this wasn’t any good I would never write again and might kill myself.”56 The Little Foxes went through nine drafts, each of them worked on by Hammett, perhaps, thought Hellman, because after Days to Come he was as scared for her future as she was. Watch on the Rhine was “the only play that came out in one piece,” she recalled.57 Hammett never shirked. In one instance—the last speech of Autumn Garden—when she could not get it right, he rewrote the speech for her. Repeatedly and gratefully, she acknowledged his role as a critic. “He was generous with anybody who asked for help,” she told an interviewer after his death. “He felt that you didn’t lie about writing and anybody who couldn’t take hard words was about to be shrugged off, anyway. He was a dedicated man about writing. Tough and generous.”58

  Her biggest difficulty, she would often say, was plotting. “I’m scared of plotting,” she confided to Arthur Kober. “The few things I’ve ever done well were plots laid out for me beforehand.”59 Unsurprisingly, Hellman leaned heavily on Dashiell Hammett for many of her plot ideas. The idea for The Children’s Hour came from him, as did the framework of her last original play, Toys in the Attic. But her plot structures tended to be contrived: in the manner of the “well-made” play, they relied on surprising revelations and twists. To bring her plays to their conclusions, Hellman introduced such devices as a letter found in a Bible, an overheard telephone conversation, or a revelation that there was no keyhole in the door through which sexual contact was said to have been observed. These fed the popular audience’s desire for drama but did little to enhance the literary quality of the work.

  Wanting her plays to be read as well as acted, Hellman made sure that the literary and dramatic forms “come together.”60 When she did not have time to ensure that she had got things right in a script prepared for rehearsal, she edited it for the published version, recasting a sentence, changing the place of a verb, or revising punctuation to meet the standards of readers. She was finicky about every word, seeking, as the drafts of her plays show, the right adjective and the pithy phrase, attempting in a sentence to capture a character’s personality or a complicated motive. And she was sensitive about efforts to change anything: “It is not getting an idea for a play that drives playwrights mad so much as the business of having the idea still recognizable, even to its author, at the completion of the script,” she explained to an interviewer.61

  As her plays entered production, Hellman became more possessive of her work and reluctant to cede even an iota of control. The writer, she insisted, was the heart of the process of producing plays. She had seen the Russian theater, she said more than once, and appreciated its sometimes wonderful “production, directing and acting,” but Russia was no longer producing good new writers and so, she judged, it could have only “dead end theatre. Fine to see, but it ain’t going nowhere.”62 As a writer, she took full responsibility for failure: “I do not believe actors break plays or make them either,” she asserted.63 For these reasons she wanted to maintain control over her work and found collaboration of any kind difficult. She wielded a heavy hand with regard to casting her plays, attended rehearsals regularly, and accompanied plays when they first went out on the road. She believed in the importance of every word she had written, refusing to allow actors or director any input at all. She would, and did, fight in defense of her positions, insisting that this was a way to work out differences and often revealing her legendary temper if opponents continued to disagree. “I didn’t know about my nature,” she wrote in the early forties, “which turned out to be angry at the suggestion of any change, even the most innocent and foolish.”64 But she chided those who took her anger seriously, dismissing her explosions as “a comic waste” and attributing them to nerves “in a time when people believed too much in the civil rights of something called temperament.”65

  Hellman claims to have discovered these qualities when The Children’s Hour went into production. In one of her first stands, she fought successfully for the child, Mary Tilford, to retain a lisp that everyone including her producer-director, Herman Shumlin, thought overdone. As she explained, “I learned early that in the theater, good or bad, you’d better stand on what you did.”66 She learned her lesson well. “I took a stand on the first play and now I have a reputation for stubbornness,” she told an interviewer.67 The quality earned her a reputation as “difficult”—a label she acknowledged with some humor. Being difficult, she told a group of Swarthmore college students, “means refusing to alter a line, protecting your own work, arguing for salary,” and then she described the qualities of the difficult woman as “pig-like stubbornness” and “rigidity.”68 Harold Clurman, who directed Hellman’s 1951 production of The Autumn Garden, agreed with Hellman’s assessment of her persona. “There’s a certain rigidity about her, a certain self-protective element,” he told an interviewer.69

  To be fair, Hell
man’s refusal to budge seemed to be as much a principled decision for her as one based on ego. Much later in life, she exercised the same kind of control over the work of Dorothy Parker (of whose estate she was executor) when she refused permission to adapt her work to film. Nor would she allow Hammett’s unpublished stories to see the light of day, claiming that he had not thought them ready. Of her own work she was equally protective. Even when she saw the need for changes, she could not easily make them, and never at a moment’s notice. It threw her off when she tried to do otherwise—as she did, for example, when she worked with Leonard Bernstein and several lyricists including, finally, Richard Wilbur on the 1956 production of the musical Candide. She had adapted the book and designed the characters, but as the musical went into rehearsal she found herself overwhelmed by demands to alter one element after another to fit the needs of a musical production. The musical that finally appeared was far too long and something of what she called a “mish mash.” She defended herself later from accusations about its messiness: “I was working with people who knew more about the musical theatre than I did, I took suggestions and made changes that I didn’t believe in, tried making them with speed I cannot manage.”70