A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Hellman had a chance to stand by this principle when it came to the production of North Star, a 1943 film designed to familiarize American audiences with the Soviet war effort. She had not yet fulfilled a three-year contract, signed in 1936 with Sam Goldwyn, when Goldwyn proposed the film to her. The offer came as a relief. For more than three years theirs had been a tense relationship as Goldwyn offered her a series of books to adapt to the screen that Hellman routinely labeled “junk” or insulting. But in 1942 the Roosevelt administration called for film studios to provide a positive image of the Soviets “to counter the negative Soviet image that dominated mass media before the war.”18 Goldwyn saw a chance to make peace with Hellman. Her friend William Wyler agreed to direct the film, and everyone hoped that Hellman could persuade the Russians to give her a visa for Moscow, where she and Wyler might do some research. When Goldwyn balked at spending studio money on such a trip and Wyler accepted a commission in the air force, Hellman was left hanging.

  Goldwyn and Hellman finally worked out an uneasy compromise. Hellman agreed to write the script for a film that Lewis Milestone would direct. Through the spring and summer of 1942, Hellman worked on North Star. Following her usual pattern, she read extensively, keeping thick notebooks of research notes on the nature of collective farm villages and typewritten summaries of stories from the Moscow News, Anna Louise Strong’s recently published The Soviets Expected It, and Alvah Bessie’s The Soviet People at War. She followed the progress of the war in Cyrus Sulzberger’s August–September 1942 series in the Herald Tribune, and she kept track of German atrocities, noting especially German massacres of Jews in Kiev.19 Most of what she read was uncritical—even of the collective farms that had drawn such antagonism from the Ukrainian and Russian peasantry. Still, she made note of the occasional cynical comment. Along with notes about the extensive legal rights accorded to women, she recorded the telling Russian proverb: “What are you doing? Nothing. And him? He’s helping me!”

  By December 1942, the script was complete. Hammett had enlisted in the army that fall and was doing his basic training in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Despite his occasional weekends at Hardscrabble, she was more or less on her own. The script she turned over to Goldwyn and Milestone was a hard-hitting story about a prosperous collective farm village in the Ukraine, peopled by brave young men and women committed to socialist ideals. The village comes under attack by Germans who commit such atrocities as draining the blood of children to trans-fuse into wounded soldiers, leaving the children at the point of death. The heroic peasants of the village rebel; the German officer who has ordered the bleeding is shot; the peasants burn their own village to the ground and flee, vowing to return as an armed resistance to fascism.

  Hellman thought she had written a film that called attention to the courage of unarmed and peaceful people struggling against a fascist menace. Her script juxtaposed caring socialist values against fascist cruelty in a struggle for the human soul. Romantic though it was, the script did not satisfy either Goldwyn or director Milestone. Though it idealized the collective spirit and reified Soviet prosperity, Hellman had written a complex portrait of real people and their fight to defend themselves. Goldwyn and Milestone quickly moved to eliminate the ideological thread of the story, rewriting huge portions of the script and providing the film with a saccharine musical background that gave it an American idiom and flavor. “Mother dear, do not fear, we’re the younger generation,” sang the collective’s bright young sparks. In an effort to turn the village into “anywhere,” Milestone and Goldwyn removed everything distinctively Russian and socialist about the village, noting only once that this village was a collective and eliminating the words socialism, communism, and comrade wherever possible. In the process, they turned characters Hellman had drawn as angry and resistant peasants into a posse of cowboys intent on wiping the Germans out.

  This was the first time that Hellman had experienced what she called a betrayal. She had written a script; Milestone rewrote first fifty pages, and then another fifty, removing its core points. She did not immediately walk away. Under contract to Goldwyn, she gamely tried to link the new parts of the film together. But she was incensed that the possibility of producing an honest film had been sabotaged and, even before its release, she gave a long interview to New York Times reporter Theodore Strauss in which she deplored the diminishing power of writers in the face of an industry wedded to “a lovely dollar.”20 A few months later, Hellman once again reiterated her commitment to the struggles of the Screen Writers Guild to achieve some respect for writers and their craft. She vented to Strauss about the writers’ helplessness in the face of the studios and averred that “an author’s final security probably can come only in finding craftsmen with whom he can work harmoniously and, if need be, join in an independent unit as so many craftsmen in Hollywood are beginning to do.”21

  Goldwyn produced a picture admired by most of the critical reviewers, a box-office success that won six Oscar nominations—one of them for best original screenplay. Some critics noted the elements of political unreality introduced by Milestone. Mary McCarthy wrote a particularly vituperative account of the film. In a survey of wartime films, she mercilessly attacked North Star as “political indoctrination,” noting that it represented the Soviet Union as “a peace loving country; an idyllic hamlet” instead of depicting “the terror which held the country in domestic siege long before the first German company moved across the frontier.” McCarthy, then a young novelist who identified with the Trotskyist faction on the left, insisted that “the Soviet Union had never been innocent.” “Here,” she wrote, “was where liberals parted company with communists.” She described the film, in language to which she would return more than thirty-five years later, as “a tissue of falsehoods woven of every variety of untruth.”22

  Hellman might, on this occasion, have agreed with McCarthy. She hated the film, describing it as an “extended opera bouffe peopled not by peasants, real and alive, but by musical comedy characters without a thought or care in the world.” But while she complained bitterly about Milestone’s version, she did not entirely abandon it. It had, she thought, “said some true things about fascism” and “had been useful in promoting the united front.”23 Of her own romanticization of the farm and its peasants she said nothing. She had, after all, chosen to ignore Ukrainians’ massive resistance to collectivization and to depict them as a gentle and quiet people. When Goldwyn and Milestone turned peasants into actors in a musical comedy, she experienced their disagreements as artistic rather than political. She had lost a battle with Goldwyn that she had always previously won—the battle to retain the integrity of the writer’s voice. She left her name on the film. But she dug deep into her pockets to buy back her contract with Goldwyn for $30,000. She vowed never to work with Goldwyn again, and she never did. Ironically, perhaps, the screenplays of the film version of Watch on the Rhine (written by Hammett and revised by Hellman), and North Star were both nominated for Academy Awards in 1943. Both films lost to Casablanca. Still, North Star became the most commercially successful wartime propaganda film.

  Though she consistently denied interest in “political messages,” Hellman thought her next play, The Searching Wind, “the nearest thing to a political play” she had ever written. The Searching Wind opened on April 12, 1944, to mixed reviews—some of them praising Hellman’s courage in confronting the problems of the day, others attacking the confusion that ensued from trying to follow the story of a love triangle through the complex interwar years. The Searching Wind condemns as cowardly the misguided attempts of the Western powers to appease Mussolini and Hitler before the war, creating a wounded hero to pay the price for the failures of that policy. As in her earlier dramas, the family serves as the pivot around which Hellman constructs two confrontations, one a love triangle and the second the refusal of a diplomat and his father-in-law to speak up against fascism. And as in her earlier plays, Hellman leaves room for ambiguity about her political stance.

>   The play is set in 1944 with the world engaged in a war Hellman thought “could have been avoided if Fascism had been recognized early enough.”24 Through flashbacks, the action recalls moments when Americans chose to overlook the potential dangers of fascism or to appease fascists. As a young diplomat stationed in Italy in 1923, Alex Hazen trivialized the rise of Mussolini. As a consul in Germany in the late 1920s, Hazen minimized the dangers of German inflation and ignored rising anti-Semitism. As an ambassador in 1938, he advised supporting the strategy of appeasement that led to Munich. Along the way he is challenged briefly by his father-in-law, a liberal newspaperman, who chooses to retire rather than to fight against the tide. Repeatedly his perceptive former sweetheart alerts him to the coming dangers, but he spurns her affections rather than heed her warnings. Refusing to see, Hazen buries himself in the arms of his rich and ignorant wife, who supports his diplomatic silences. The price of denial and cowardice is paid for by the next generation. Their son Sam enlists in the war that America enters in 1941, and at the time of the play is in danger of losing his leg to wounds suffered in Italy.

  Hellman wrote The Searching Wind while Hammett, who at age fortyeight had enlisted in the army, was stationed in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Writing for the first time completely on her own, she fussed over the play and wondered whether she could get a copy of it through the army censors to him. Hellman’s letters to Hammett are lost, but Hammett’s replies to her reveal that even from a distance, he provided a remarkable level of support for a relatively high level of anxiety. He asked her not to worry about writing to him while she was deeply engaged in the play and reassured her that her anxiety was appropriate. “I’m sorry you’re going through one of those worry-worry spells about the play, but I guess that’s part of writing,” he wrote to her on February 9.25 As the play came closer to production her level of anxiety must have increased, because Hammett wrote to her, “You’re practically breaking my heart with your letters about the play. I think we’re going to have to make a rule that you’re not to tackle any work when I’m not around to spur, quiet, goad, pacify and ease you, according to what’s needed at the moment. It is obvious that you’re not capable of handling yourself.”26 And yet in the end he encouraged her to stand on her own feet: “What the hell,” he wrote, “you did your best and you’ll have to let it go at that no matter what you’d like to do.”27

  From Pleasantville, Hellman sent Hammett a finished draft of the play that arrived at his Alaskan outpost just a month before the play was to open in New York. His comments were reassuring but not uncritical. He wished, he wrote, that she had told her story in chronological order so that the love triangle could follow the historical trajectory. He wondered if catching the characters “now here, now there” would do justice to any of them, or leave in the audience’s hands the task of rounding them out. And most of all, he argued that “the essential frivolity that fucked things up … isn’t shown. No answer is provided to the question, But what else could these people have done?”28 He closed with the needed reassurance: this was “in ways the most interesting play you’ve done, and it’s got swell stuff in it, and, as I said before, it’s defter than any of the others, and you are a cutie.” And then he added a final postscript that identified himself as one “who does not always know as much about everything as he acts like he does, and who hopes the play gets its points over in a manner that makes this letter sound like the work of a smart-aleck.” When the play did in fact turn out to be a box-office success, Hammett expressed genuine delight: “Let this be a lesson to you, my fine buxom cutie. You are a big girl now and you write your own plays the way you want them and you do not necessarily give a damn for the opinions of Tom, Dick or Dashie unless they happen to coincide with your own. No matter how close to you T, D or D may be and no matter how hard they try to think in terms of your play, you must always bear in mind that what they’re actually fooling around with is some slightly different idea of their own, which may be all right, but with which you have no business involving yourself.”29

  Given the weight of Hammett’s comments, we are tempted to wonder if Hellman was being disingenuous when, later, she observed that she meant, in The Searching Wind, “only to write about nice, well born people who, with good intentions, helped to sell out a world.”30 There is something unsatisfying in her refusal to claim the play for what it was: a pointed condemnation of rich liberals whose refusals to “see,” whose denials and silences around world-shaking historical events, finally led the world into war. Sam, the son whose leg will soon be sacrificed to the silence of his grandfather and the denials of his parents, makes the point directly. He recalls conversations with his fellow soldiers as they sat in the mud of the trenches fulminating against the “old tripe who just live in our country now and pretend they are on the right side.” He repeats to his parents his desire to get away from the people who “believe they’re all for everything good” despite the fact that they “made the shit we’re sitting in.”31 The rage speaks for itself, forecasting feelings Hellman would express thirty years later in Scoundrel Time when she would direct her venom at the same liberals who, in her view, had continued to betray the world. In The Searching Wind, Sam asserts only shame at the behavior of his parents. He won’t mind the loss of the leg, he tells them, “as long as it means a little something and helps to bring us out someplace.”32 The next generation, he seems to be saying, would speak up. Hellman soon learned that they would not.

  Insofar as The Searching Wind called to account those who refused to stand up to Hitler and the fascists, the play affirmed Hellman’s position as a moralist whose finger pointed blame. When Sam hurled at his parents and his grandfather a painful assessment of their responsibility, Hellman indicted an entire generation. History, Sam told the audience, was “made by the masses of people” not by “one man or ten men.” But, he continued, that was no “excuse to just sit back and watch,” to act as if “nothing anybody can do makes any difference, so why do it?”33 This was the moral issue that Addie had posed in The Little Foxes when she deplored those who ate the vines just like locusts eating the earth, and then asked if it was right for others “to stand and watch them do it?”34

  Many critics judged The Searching Wind as the best, the most impelling play of the season. Hellman was, wrote one admiring critic, “the least reluctant [of contemporary playwrights] to admit to being alive and thoughtful in a parlous time.”35 The Searching Wind, wrote another, “brought back a full measure of dignity, perception and beauty to the theater.” He then went on to praise Hellman’s “bitter and lucid” indictment “of supposed men of good will who brought us to this terrible moment of the present.”36 Hellman was at her best, thought a third, when she was dealing with the politics of the world. She left the audience “wishing for more politics and less emotional triangle.” “To get an audience thinking in this day and age probably is a matter of the sheerest genius.”37

  Other critics found Hellman’s effort to grapple with the politics of her time mystifying. The play, wrote one reviewer, might be “superb theater,” but Hellman’s political aim remained unclear to him. She had not, he mourned, solved the problem of how to keep Europe from going periodically to war … a problem that has defied solution for at least 2,000 years.”38 Others were even more critical. They appreciated her efforts to turn a mirror to her times but at the same time fulminated that Hellman had pretended to a social omniscience that nobody could have had in the twenties or even the late thirties; they accused her of exhibiting “a general impatience with, or contempt for, people less elaborately informed than herself.”39 Why, they asked, did The Searching Wind not include a fourth flashback that condemned the 1939 Soviet-German pact? Why not denounce Stalin’s efforts to make peace with Hitler as no more than appeasement? Hellman, they argued, was preaching the lessons of collective security to a nation that doubted it could ever fully trust a communist regime. She was accused of being a political playwright.

  But the most veheme
nt protests came from those on the left who wondered why Hellman had failed “to link the appeasers of yesterday with the defeatists, the ‘nationalists’ and ‘isolationists’ of today.”40 The play, argued the Daily Worker’s Ralph Warner, was strongest when it recalled “the support democracy gave to its mortal enemy, fascism.” But it fell short in many ways, most pointedly by refusing to acknowledge “the unwavering anti-fascist position taken by the Soviet Union” and failing to see “that many Americans worked and are still working to perpetuate the policies of appeasement” that continue to support fascism.41 So pointed were these critiques that several nonparty publications commented that “the rich and famous Miss Hellman, hitherto one of the most ardent of the Communist fellow travelers,” may well have fallen out of favor with the party.42

  Inevitably, perhaps, Hellman’s ambiguous political stance inserted itself into judgments of the play itself and resulted in ad hominem attacks. Had her talent deserted her? As one skeptic wondered, could it be that this latest play was merely a “shallow meretricious piece of reactionary claptrap?”43 With barely disguised irony, critics complained that the play reflected her status as an “advanced or indignant woman.” In one remarkable assessment, the New Republic’s reviewer let loose a diatribe on Hellman’s writing—the subject of almost universal admiration—calling it “pseudo-analytical-psychological, head-in-the-box-office-feet-in-the-clouds, feministic, novelistic rubbish.”44 Hellman, as she tended to do, publicly shrugged off the criticism, insisting that this was a play about well-intentioned people who had simply let their opportunities pass and attributing the personal attacks to narrow political disagreements. For all its relevance in 1944, when The Searching Wind appeared as a film two years later—Hellman adapted the script for the screen herself—it fell completely flat. By 1946, nobody was interested in analyzing whether American appeasement of fascists had brought on the war.