A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The question, then, was whether the ends were large enough to carry the violence—and here Hellman claimed innocence. She did not see her characters as quite as greedy or as mendacious as her critics insisted. Nor did she see them as good or bad: “Such words have nothing to do with the people you write about.”100 In her eyes, The Little Foxes was a family saga—a tale of the greed and hatred that infuse a family eager to make its profit from a changing world. Hellman sometimes described it as a satire and other times as a morality play. She had meant, she wrote in Pentimento, “to half-mock my own youthful high-class innocence in Alexandra, the young girl in the play; I had meant people to smile, and to sympathize with, the sad, weak Birdie, certainly I had not meant them to cry; I had meant the audience to recognize some part of themselves in the money-dominated Hubbards; I had not meant people to think of them as villains to whom they had no connection.”101

  Whether it went through the nine drafts she claimed to have written or not, The Little Foxes was the play that Hellman described as the most difficult to write and the one with which Hammett was most involved. The play—once again produced and directed by Herman Shumlin and with Tallulah Bankhead in the leading role—was a huge financial success. It would also become her most enduring claim to artistic fame. It ran for 410 performances and was immediately bought for the movies by Sam Goldwyn, who asked Lillian to write the movie script. The film, starring Bette Davis, still appears regularly on late-night television. The play has had several first-class revivals, with great stars vying to play the role of Regina. And it has become a staple of American repertory theater.102

  After The Little Foxes, no one could doubt that Hellman was a serious playwright. But the dual sin of well-madeness and melodrama continued to vex her. John Gassner, sympathetic to her accomplishments and one of those who continued to count her among the great American playwrights, wrote in 1949: “We have had our reservations; we have felt she plotted too much or calculated her effects for theatrical purposes, if not indeed for propaganda.”103 And twenty years after its opening, Jacob Adler had not resolved his critical ambivalence toward The Little Foxes. He thought its carefully tailored plot was subverted by “the total depravity of the Hubbards … their murdering, blackmailing, scheming and stealing sensationalize the play, ultimately making it unbelievable.”104 Critics continued to ask whether Hellman was not too good at what she did: too effective, too careful, too measured. They accused her of writing in a vein that was too vituperative, too direct, and too real. They asked if she was not too angry for a southern playwright, for a moral playwright, for the times in which she wrote, and especially for a woman playwright. They wondered about her political agenda. Such comments would haunt Hellman for the rest of her playwriting career, leading her ultimately to dismiss criticism and to claim that she never read it.

  Hellman’s considerable successes with audiences did little to diffuse critical judgments of her plays by criteria that seem, in retrospect, to be narrowly tailored to unexamined assumptions of how a woman should write. These assumptions were just one step removed from judgments about Hellman as an individual. Herald Tribune reviewer Richard Watts and other critics dismissively acknowledged Hellman’s meticulous preparation and careful use of language as if these reflected qualities of womanhood rather than the skills of a playwright.105 Her effort to draw moral lessons seemed to them typical of women writers. In that context, her penchant for melodrama seemed to cross gender lines. When New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson took her to task for writing sheer melodrama, Hellman challenged the designation. She thought his criticism an expression of discomfort with a woman who paid attention to the serious problems of evil that existed in the world. This she thought was a comment on his nature, not on hers.106

  The commentaries would not be worth dwelling on had they not been a harbinger of what was to come. Whether used positively or negatively, the melodrama label would stick. Fifteen years later, Walter Kerr, a critic who admired Hellman’s work, would note that the quality that lifted her above that of her playwriting contemporaries was “an almost masculine control of the more melodramatic emotions, a muscular arm that comes down on a situation as though it were a handy anvil. Her sound, if I may say so, is usually the sound of steel.”107 Conflating Hellman’s persona with the content of her plays turned both into fair game. Moralist she may have been, and as moralist she deserved to be taken to task. As a female moralist she was not only fair game but also meddling in politics that were not her sphere. She would be judged not in light of the validity of her positions, but in the shadow of the difficult and opinionated woman that critics perceived.

  Firmly and consistently, Hellman resisted the label of a “woman playwright.” The idea, Margaret Chase Harriman discovered when she interviewed her for a New Yorker profile, simply made her angry.108 Women playwrights, she pointed out in her defense (and with reference to peers who included Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, and Clare Boothe Luce), tended to write sentimental plays. The label conjured up writers of comedies and romances rather than the tough-serious issues with which Hellman dealt. She dismissed such comparisons as “products of the facile imaginations of reviewers and reporters who will go to any length to achieve an easy and meaningless generality.”109 Protest as she might, Hellman could not escape the designation. “Even the best of our women playwrights,” critic George Nathan wrote of her, “falls immeasurably short of the mark of our best masculine.”110 Hellman would not concede: “I am a playwright. I also happen to be a woman,” she told Harriman, “but I am not a woman playwright.”111

  Chapter 4

  Politics Without Fear

  I don’t understand personal salvation. It seems to me a vain idea. Conscience includes the fate of other people.

  —Lillian Hellman, 1977

  It was one thing to become a famous playwright; quite another to make one’s way in the bracing political scene of the 1930s. When Hellman returned to New York from Hollywood in March of 1931, she found a city deep in the throes of the Depression. In that year, the city’s unemployment rate doubled, reaching an astronomical 15 percent of the city’s work-force. That figure would increase every month of her first year in the city until by March of 1932, one of every four workers was unemployed. Hellman seems at first to have been uninvolved in the political scene. Broke and unemployed herself, she did not identify with the men and women on the breadlines; she did not join the ranks of those demanding unemployment insurance or participate in the unemployment councils sponsored by the Communist Party. Nor did she march with any of the hundreds of political factions waving banners on the streets of the broken city. We have no evidence that she participated in any of the anti-eviction activities that tried to protect increasing numbers of families struggling to pay their rent. And Hellman does not seem to have been involved in the formal political proceedings of those years, as Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up a run for the presidency and clinched the nomination in the summer of 1932, or good-government groups clamored for an investigation into the corruption of Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was forced out of office in September 1932. In the summer and fall of 1931 and in the winter of 1932, as the nation sank deeply into the Depression, the young Lillian Hellman took no visible political position.

  And yet we know that Hellman was not without social compassion or sympathy for the working class. A resourceful and creative young woman surrounded by writers and artists, most of them on the left and some of them already beginning to choose sides, she must have been pulled in many directions. Though she had matured into a 1920s culture that placed a premium on individual expression and achievement and was personally ambitious, she harbored a streak of anger toward the rich and corrupt members of her own family that translated into visceral hatred of power and wealth. She had long valued class equality and racial justice, and she understood that achieving these goals would disturb cherished individual rights, including those of property ownership. To this extent she was a socialist.

  Together
these translated into what some later called naïve politics. She wanted desperately to believe, in the jargon of the day, that “a better world” was possible, wanted to believe in a world where democracy, individual liberty, and especially freedom of speech could thrive. No political program captured these desires. Rather she invoked a desire for decency, justice, and morality as though these were self-evident and easily definable goals. As her friend Peter Feibleman puts it, she had the “sense of justice of a very small child.”1 Hellman’s commitment to an ethic of justice often presented itself as a stubborn certainty about the righteousness of particular political positions and a persistent loyalty to those who shared her beliefs. Hellman was not unusual in the 1930s, a decade riven by ideological arguments, each proposing the one right solution to the ills of the economy and the discontents of the poor. But moral ideals are like blank checks: real people confront real problems, full of paradoxes and contradictions. Like millions of others drawn into the complicated politics of the thirties, Hellman found herself caught up in the currents of the moment as she responded to the situation around her.

  While she struggled to find her place within the maelstrom of ideas and juggled with her personal life, Hellman became involved with organizing a union of writers among the drama and film communities on the East and West coasts. This would be her first leap into the political maelstrom of the thirties, and it would lead her straight into the larger political conflicts of the day.

  1938: She wanted desperately to believe that a better world was possible. (Photofest)

  East-and West-coast communities of writers were closely connected. Dramatists who wrote for the stage lived a precarious economic existence until and unless they achieved renown. Those who worked in Hollywood, on the other hand, tended to live much better. Since the advent of talking pictures, screenwriters had been highly valued by the Hollywood studios and relatively well paid. In 1933, a time in which a family of four could live comfortably in most parts of the country on $25 a week, run-of-the-mill screenwriters routinely drew $50 weekly salaries. This was Hellman’s salary in her first years in Hollywood. The talented among them earned an exceedingly generous wage of between $200 and $1,000 a week. The best, including Hellman after the success of The Children’s Hour, earned much more: $2,500 weekly, in Hellman’s case. Such high wages attracted the nation’s most talented writers, who, governed by their need for income, participated in a commuting culture between the East and West coasts. In this community Hellman’s friends Laura and S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Kober, and Nathanael West joined the likes of John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The large studios each kept a stable of writers, none of them larger or more respected than those who worked for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios headed by Louis B. Mayer.2

  Already by 1933 there had been rumblings of discontent across the ranks of theater and studio employees. On the East Coast, some of the craft workers had organized themselves into guilds under the umbrella of the International Association of Theater and Stage Employees (IATSE). The Authors’ League of America sponsored a special unit for dramatists, and some dramatists organized into a Dramatists Guild. These spread, along with the workers, to the West Coast studios. In self-defense, the producers created their own association, which they called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and which they described as intended to bring disputing parties together. A few writers, some of them members of the Writers Club of the Authors’ League of America and others inspired by the example of playwrights who had formed the East Coast–centered Dramatists Guild, called a meeting in February 1933 to discuss the possibility of unionizing. They wanted a share in the royalties earned by movies on which they worked, and, crucially, they wanted screen credits for their scripts.

  Then in March, under cover of the Depression and as other studios struggled to pay their bills, Louis Mayer announced that he was cutting the wages of MGM’s employees by 50 percent. The moment seemed ripe: FDR had only just been sworn in as president; the unemployment and banking crises had reached catastrophic levels. Mayer and other producers saw an opportunity to cut costs, and they took it. But movies had flourished during the early years of the Depression, and the industry had prospered. Employees, among them the writers, were outraged, especially as it became clear that MGM could well afford to continue to pay its work-force. Albert Hackett, then writing for MGM, recalled that “when they found out what Mr. Mayer did, everybody started to organize. The screen-writers got together and they got into an organization.”3 To avoid the appearance of a union, still somewhat distasteful to professionals, they called their organization the Screen Writers Guild. The producers, in turn, felt betrayed by their relatively coddled writers. They had, they claimed disbelievingly, provided generous wages and extensive creative freedom. High wage scales led Irving Thalberg and other producers to believe that writers would never jeopardize their livelihoods by joining a union. As Thalberg put it, “These writers are living like kings. Why on earth would they want to join a union like coal miners or plumbers?”4

  Hellman was then on the East Coast and only just beginning the challenging task of writing The Children’s Hour, so she was not involved in the initial West Coast unionization effort. But she was a member of the Authors’ League of America, under whose auspices the campaign initially emerged and which housed the stage playwrights’ Dramatists Guild, to which she also belonged. Among the organizers of the Screen Writers Guild were old friends of Hellman’s and especially of Hammett’s, some of them either members of or sympathetic with the Communist Party. They included John Howard Lawson, and Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the team that had written the screenplay for Hammett’s Thin Man. Hellman’s friend Dorothy Parker, who worked with Hellman in the organizing campaign, was probably already active in the party. The writers argued that their creativity had been purchased: they had sold their artistic freedom to the producers. They wanted either greater control over the content of their scripts or a share in the profits.

  Lillian cut her teeth in the ensuing conflict as she firmly supported writers in their claims against producers. The struggle was painful: striking workers lost their jobs, those sympathetic to the Guild discovered their contracts would not be renewed, and some workers settled for smaller pay reductions. The writers took their case to the newly created National Recovery Administration, claiming a right to organize under section 7a, which mandated recognition of organizations of workers. The producers contended that writers were not employees at all but independent contractors. The writers won this first round, but it was a short victory. Within the year, the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, leaving the producers free to try once again to control them.

  By the summer of 1934, Lillian, like all her friends, was flirting with the Communist Party. That winter had witnessed a wave of strikes, some of the most successful led by communists of one stripe or another. To Kober she wrote that she had spent an evening arguing with Mani—Herman Shumlin. “Mani as you know is now an ardent Communist, and being more intelligent than most, sees things more clearly. However there are many things which he also gets confused and dogmatic about and we screamed at each other for several hours.”5 Midst the screaming, Hellman struggled to find a place within the turmoil on the left, moving at every step closer to the communism of the 1930s.

  The 1935 decision of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) to embrace Popular Front tactics provided an opening. Since 1928, the CPUSA had followed a path dictated by Joseph Stalin’s conviction that the Soviet Union would lead the way to a new worldwide revolutionary moment. The Communist International (Comintern) then ordered the Communist parties of the countries within its orbit to avoid all compromise with socialist, social-democratic, and labor parties that did not strictly follow the communist line. The CPUSA responded by policing its own ranks, expelling those like Jay Lovestone who would not accept Comintern leadership, and turning venomously on those who followed Leon Trotsky’s faith in the
possibilities of worldwide revolution. Instead of creating coalitions with former allies in the farmer-labor parties and the various socialist parties, the CPUSA declared all these groups to be enemies and labeled them “social fascists.”6 As the Depression deepened and the left grew in influence, factional struggles among left-wing groups grew sharp and deep. Leading American socialists like Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste strongly disagreed that a revolutionary path required adherence to a dogmatic line disseminated by an increasingly paranoid and Stalinist Soviet Union. Some New Deal liberals and reformers toyed with the ideals of communism without following the party line; others strongly believed that bigger government, stronger regulation of banking and industry, and a larger voice for labor would save capitalism. Decrying the sins of fascists and “social fascists” alike, the CPUSA demanded a defense of even the worst delusions of the Soviet Union.

  In the summer of 1935, after nearly a decade of attacking anyone who did not fully and completely support Stalin’s Soviet style of communism, the Seventh World Congress of Communist Parties adopted a new Popular Front policy. Convinced that the worst enemy of the Soviet Union was fascism, it called on Communist parties the world over to lead an attack on fascism in all of its forms. To this end, the Comintern called for a change from revolutionary strategies to cooperation and alliance with existing left-wing groups. In the United States, the Communist Party, encouraged by Chairman Earl Browder, led a campaign to reconfigure the image and practice of the CPUSA, turning from virulent antagonism against potential allies on the left to efforts to join with them in antifascist coalitions. From early opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the party lent its support to New Deal programs. Instead of organizing alternative trade union structures, Communists embedded themselves in existing trade unions, particularly those organized under the banner of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). At the same time, the CPUSA adopted the language of democracy, progressivism, and social justice—a language that Hellman had been employing for at least a decade. And it participated in a multifaceted array of coalitions of like-minded people, with or without membership in the party. The effort was captured in the party’s new slogan, “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” The outcome was Popular Front politics, a term that aptly designates the millions of people then sympathetic to socialism.