A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The Communist Party’s new appeal immediately manifested itself in dramatic growth. From a pre–Popular Front strength of perhaps 30,000, the party’s membership climbed to close to 100,000 members by 1938. All kinds of people joined, including a large assortment of writers, public intellectuals, and theater figures. Their numbers were enhanced by the party’s growing willingness to countenance dissent in a wide variety of front organizations that supported a range of popular causes and that did not make an issue of the participation of party members. Hellman joined several of these, including the League of Women Shoppers, the League of American Writers, the Anti Fascist League, and the Motion Picture Artists’ Committee. What mattered now was not what party one belonged to or worked with, but how effectively one could join with others to pursue antiracist, antifascist, and trade union activities.7

  Dashiell Hammett most likely found a home in communism before Hellman did. Flailing a bit after completing The Thin Man, which was to be his last novel, he became increasingly committed to left-wing positions. His letters to his daughter Mary, written in the early fall of 1936 in the midst of FDR’s campaign for a second term as president and in the aftermath of the CPUSA’s turn to Popular Front politics, have the ring of the insider. “There is no truth in the statement that the Communists are supporting Roosevelt,” he wrote to her disingenuously on September 11, “that’s just the old Hearst howl.”8

  For Hellman, the catalyst might well have been the war in Spain. Both Hellman and Hammett were horrified by the brutal fascist bombardment of what Hellman called “Little Spain.” In 1936, the Spanish elected a Popular Front government that included communists and social democrats among its members. Hellman and her friends watched, paralyzed, as a group of generals led by Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy attacked a legally elected government. None of the Western democracies—not Britain, not France—would do anything about it. When Franco began his offensive on July 17, 1936, both refused the Spanish government’s request for aid, and, to make matters worse, they, along with the United States, embargoed arms to Spain. Popular Front movements all over Europe came to the government’s defense, as did the Soviet Union.

  Both Hellman and Hammett strongly sympathized with Spain. To his daughter Mary, Hammett wrote that losing the war in Spain would be a

  great set-back for the cause of working people everywhere. Don’t believe too much of what the papers say: they are largely on the side of the rebels, and so are such Fascist countries as Germany, Italy and Portugal. The truth is that the present Spanish government is far from perfect, but it at least tries to be on the side of the poor people … while its enemies are the sort of people that most of our ancestors came to this country to escape.9

  Later that fall, he tried to enlist in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American soldiers who fought on the Loyalist side. If legend is to be believed, the Communist Party urged Hammett to remain in the States, where he could usefully serve as a fund-raiser and advocate.10 He was then perhaps already a member of the Communist Party.

  Hellman took longer to decide. Her indecision illuminates the tensions of many thoughtful people in the mid-1930s, sparked perhaps by the dramatic growth of the party itself. Large numbers of liberals, socialists, and communists became vaguely aware in the 1930s of Stalin’s increasingly ruthless methods, of the thousands of people who had starved as a result of his economic policies, and of the thousands more subject to arrest and murder as a result of his growing paranoia. They objected to what seemed to be the growing subservience of the CPUSA to the Comintern in Moscow. In their eyes, the American wing of the party, financially supported by and consistently favorable to Soviet leadership, could not be trusted. These left-wing opponents accused party members of slavish adherence to an evil bureaucracy, of overlooking the anti-democratic methods of the dictatorial Stalinist regime.

  Neither Hellman nor Hammett stood among these opponents. Their relationship to the left-wing activities of the thirties was as members of the entertainment community, rather than as intellectuals. Like many others, they believed themselves independent of Soviet influence and capable of thinking for themselves with regard to the direction of U.S. politics. Still, they held the Soviet effort as a model and accepted its leadership. Though they understood, vaguely perhaps, the imperfections of the Soviet Union, they strongly believed in its potential and trusted that communism with a small c could be harnessed to the purposes of democratic and progressive causes. If they heard rumors of purges and deaths, they remained skeptical. This was, after all, a period when rumors flew. In circles like Hellman’s, solidarity in the interests of class politics and international harmony seemed an achievable goal, not to be undermined by factionalism and in-fighting.

  Hope and belief in the future guided Hellman’s vision of a nation that could solve problems of class injustice, racism, and poverty. In this she was not unusual. Betsy Blair, a blacklisted actress who was, perhaps ironically, denied membership in the Communist Party because she was married to the famous Gene Kelly, who did not wish to join up, recalled what her left-wing activity meant to her: “It’s like the light that comes from heaven in paintings of saints. We felt such joy believing in the better world that communism would bring, feeling part of the great brotherhood of man. I guess it was a kind of religious ecstasy that we thought would embrace the most deprived and persecuted.”11 Many of Hollywood’s entertainment community and certainly huge numbers of writers and intellectuals shared this hope. For Blair, as for Hellman, the central issue in this period was the search for social justice that the ideal of communism seemed to represent. Only the Soviet Union provided a living example of this ideal, even if it did not fully live up to its promise. And in any event, most believed that the dangers of an aggressive fascism posed a greater threat to democratic practice than the Soviet Union. Blacklisted screenwriter Alvah Bessie, responding to a question about why he joined the party, replied, “Why? I was intellectually convinced that it was the right thing to do, and I thought—as any number of people thought—this was the only organization that was actually fighting Fascism in the world, that was actually fighting unemployment, racial discrimination, national chauvinism.”12

  In February 1937, depressed by the failure of Days to Come, Hellman returned to Hollywood to work on a film script for Dead End. With one brilliant stage success and one flop behind her, she was not yet a name to be reckoned with, but she was certainly a known quantity. The film adaptation of Children’s Hour, for which she had written the script, had opened to critical acclaim. Her liaison with Dashiell Hammett assured her entrée into all the celebrity circles. And with a lucrative contract in her pocket from Samuel Goldwyn, head of MGM studios, she had enough money to live well without relying on Hammett’s erratic funds. Her timing could not have been better, for the Hollywood scene had taken on its own political furor.

  In the aftermath of the unfavorable decisions around their efforts to organize, playwrights and screenwriters briefly called off their campaign. The producers created an alternative organization called the Screen Playwrights, which they insisted their writers join and whose members got preference for jobs. They went so far as to call all SWG leaders communists and to blacklist those who had been active in the SWG. Among those blacklisted was John Howard Lawson, the SWG’s first president. Lawson, who was to be blacklisted again for political reasons in the late forties, called this the first blacklist.13 The SWG struggled against the Screen Playwrights for a while, but it could not retain members who had no work. Reluctantly, it dissolved. To all appearances, the Screen Writers Guild had died.

  Here was a cause after Hellman’s heart—one in which principle overruled pecuniary interest. By 1936, she ranked among the best paid of Holly-wood’s well-compensated screenwriters. In January she had signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn, committing herself to adapt five stories (to be selected by Goldwyn) for the screen. Each assignment was expected to take ten weeks, and she would be paid $2,500 a week
.14 Yet like her writer colleagues, she had little control, even over her own work. When it came to adapting the stage version of The Children’s Hour, she grudgingly altered the plot into a heterosexual triangle to satisfy the demands of the movie code and to meet the requirements of the movie moguls who feared that a lesbian theme would not be commercially viable. And she agreed to rename the film These Three to distance it even further from the controversial play.

  Hellman readily identified with the demands of the writers for a voice in how credit was distributed and attributed on the screen. The producers believed that, having hired writers for particular tasks, they also owned and controlled the work produced. Hellman and others agreed to a point, but insisted that as artists they deserved credit for their work, distributed according to the proportion of work they had contributed to a picture. Because producers had the authority to move writers around at will or to insist that they work in teams, they could deny any writer ownership of his or her work or attribute it to replacements whose names they wished to promote. This amounted to a kind of censorship because it gave producers complete control not only over words but over who got the credit for them. Like her fellow writers, Hellman wanted to constrain the power of movie producers—to retain at least a modicum of control over how her words were used. To her, the producers’ acts resembled the bullying with which she already identified fascism and that she would soon deplore in the case of the Spanish Civil War. A member of the New York–based Dramatists Guild, the author of a failed play that empathetically depicted factory workers, she became a labor organizer.

  Just a few months after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This board was charged with supervising union campaigns and monitoring fair elections, free from employer intervention. Now the Screen Writers Guild quietly regrouped.15 When Hellman returned to Hollywood in the winter of 1937, the SWG had already begun a new organizational campaign. Lillian’s friend Dorothy Parker (already a celebrity) and Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, immediately became involved. Lillian, who had come west to work on the script for Dead End, joined the cause. She seems to have been quite serious about her trade union commitments, belying accusations that she never took politics seriously. She lectured on “The Stage and Social Problems” for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union on January 21, 1937; along with Dorothy Parker and Hammett, as well as such early activists as Donald Ogden Stewart and John Howard Lawson, she held meetings in her home.16 With them she handed out leaflets at studio gates, knocked on doors in Hollywood, and buttonholed writers at parties and events. And she was effective. According to Maurice Rapf, whom she recruited to membership in the guild and who had never previously met her, she “was working to sign everybody up for the Guild. She could have asked me to join the local fire-fighters; I would have joined. It didn’t make any difference to me.”17

  Determinedly, this group began to gather the signatures necessary to conduct an NLRB-supervised election, finally coming out into the open in June 1937. Then it elected a new leadership that included communist and noncommunist left-wingers, staunch conservatives and writers who had grown wealthy working for the industry, and hacks who ground out B movies for a weekly wage.18 Hellman, along with Hammett, was elected to a new board. With the board, she participated in a March 1938 meeting with NLRB executive secretary Nathan Witt to discuss the guild’s capacity to represent the writers. A few months later—on June 7, 1938—the NLRB ruled that screenwriters were employees under the provisions of the Wagner Act and scheduled an election for just three weeks from that date. On June 28, 1938, the SWG roundly defeated the Screen Playwrights to become the screenwriters’ legal representative.

  The struggle wasn’t over. Along with Philip Dunne, Charles Brackett, and Donald Ogden Stewart, Hellman became part of the negotiating team that first tried to bring in a contract. But though they had lost the election, the producers were not yet ready to settle. As Dunne recalled, “they pretended to negotiate with us” but they were “full of dirty tricks and evasions.”19 “The main thing we were interested in,” remembered Dunne, “was that we wanted to determine the screen credit … it was the most important issue for writers … We didn’t want control of the material, because we recognized ourselves as employees, but what we did want was control of credits, because credits meant hiring … so long as the producers could designate who got the credit they controlled the hiring hall.”20 The producers held out for almost three years, settling only after the United States entered World War II. By then Hellman was no longer on the negotiating team, which had shed its communist members. The final contract was a victory of sorts. It called for a minimum wage of $125 per week for all writers as well as minimum periods of employment, and put the guild in control of screen credit.21 Hellman played only a bit part in this victory, her own political commitments less relevant to the successful establishment of a guild for screenwriters than her activities in the ensemble.

  While the guild negotiated with producers over how to acknowledge the work of writers, it harbored a simmering internal dispute. The producers, eager to discredit the SWG, accused its leadership of communist sympathies. In the period of the Popular Front, when communists and noncommunists often worked together and when attachment to communism was often understood as a search for social justice rather than a commitment to Stalinism, the accusation did little more than roil the waters. To be sure, many who were involved in organizing the SWG were sympathetic to communist goals of racial equality and social justice and opposed to untrammeled capitalism. Some (including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr.) were probably members of the CPUSA in 1936 and 1937. Hellman had not yet joined the party.

  Increasingly the producers insisted that the issue was as much political as it was economic. Only the producers, they argued, could adequately police political content in order to diffuse the influence of communism that crept into the language of writers. This seemed farfetched to experienced writers like Albert Hackett (who early served on the SWG steering committee). “Mr. Mayer,” he concluded after reflecting on the emergence of the left in the movie industry, “really is the cause of all the communism in Hollywood.”22 In his view, the source of the problem was Mayer’s heavy-handed insistence on controlling both wages and credits for writers, denying them ownership of their work or any element of creativity. John Howard Lawson agreed. Himself a member of the Communist Party by the mid-1930s, he confirmed Hackett’s sense that “nobody was ever suspicious about our slipping anything into the pictures.”23 Even later in the decade, most denizens of Hollywood still insisted on the distinction between party membership and Marxist convictions. When screenwriter Allen Boretz, a party member, glimpsed Dashiell Hammett at a meeting in 1937, he noted that he “stood in a corner and said very little … It was a Marxist study group,” he emphasized. “These were not yet Communists, if they ever did become Communists.”24

  To the outside world, however, this was a distinction without a difference. Association with communists, such as existed in many trade union groups in the Popular Front period, seemed to be evidence of subjection to communist dogma. Fearful that communism and membership in the CPUSA amounted to the same thing, insistent that loyalty to the CPUSA involved taking orders from Moscow, and conceiving those orders to be mandatory and therefore an abrogation of the free will and free thought essential to a democratic society, those suspicious of the left, including the producers, accused writers of acting as foils of the Communist Party. Producers pointed to the League of American Writers (a front organization founded in 1935) and its creation of the School for American Writers in 1940, where some of the leading left-wing screenwriters (including Lawson and Stewart, Paul Jarrico, and Michael Blankfort, but not Hellman) taught. By hurling accusations of communism, producers hoped to divide the writers, to discourage uncommitted writers from joining the union, and perhaps to discredit the union altogethe
r. Inadvertently, they created a political whirlwind of sorts when state and federal legislatures took a hand in the situation—setting up committees to explore communist influence in the entertainment industry.

  On the very same day—June 7, 1938—that the National Labor Relations Board ruled that screenwriters could organize, the U.S. House of Representatives resolved to form a new committee—the House Committee on Un-American Activities—under the leadership of Texas congressman Martin Dies. Modeled after an already existing California committee headed by Jack Tenney that had weighed in on the side of the producers, the committee took it upon itself to “inquire into the realm of political thought, affiliation, and association” of everyone in the industry.25 Tenaciously, the committee, better known as HUAC, called upon members of the many front groups that now appeared in Hollywood to testify as to whether they were or were not party members. Hellman was not called.

  The producers now had an ally, and the writers a larger concern. The Dies Committee called on members of the SWG and its parent organization, the League of American Writers, to defend themselves against charges of communist leadership.26 Their efforts were buttressed a year later by the passage of the Smith Act, which prohibited the dissemination of ideas and the distribution of literature that sought to overthrow the U.S. government. This, thought Hellman, marked the moment when the United States officially declared war against communist ideas inside and outside the Communist Party. And yet bitterly as Hellman felt about the act’s prohibition against advocacy of communist ideas and its chilling effects on the ability of writers to speak their minds, she and other party members would cheer when, in 1943, the Smith Act was used to investigate Trotskyists.27 Even when the Second World War came and the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union, both the SWG and the League of American Writers remained targets of suspicion. And when the two organizations joined forces to sponsor a fifth annual Writers Congress in 1943, the Dies Committee condemned the effort by the Congress to allow writers to say what they wanted as “a plot by communists to take over the industry.”28 Fearing destruction, the Screen Writers Guild began to purge its leadership of known communists. Hellman remained a member and staunch supporter of the organization but did not again assume a leadership position.