A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Like the hero of any Horatio Alger story, Hellman accumulated her wealth through luck, pluck, and hard work. In the late twenties and early thirties, when her own income was sporadic and she was still a young adult, she relied on her husband, Arthur Kober, and then on Dashiell Hammett. The first significant sums she earned came from the successful run of The Children’s Hour in 1934 and from the lucrative employment in Hollywood that followed it. Lillian was familiar with the Hollywood scene, having worked as a reader before the success of The Children’s Hour. She returned afterward to work on the movie script that became These Three, then accepted an offer from Samuel Goldwyn to write the script for The Dark Angel. Goldwyn, pleased at her success and convinced of her ability, offered to put her under a long-term contract. Hellman portrays this negotiation in Pentimento as an act of courtship: she enticed Goldwyn to chase after her by disappearing to Paris. When he finally tracked her down, he offered her “a contract with a fine clause about doing nothing but stories I liked and doing them where and when I liked. I had become valuable to Mr. Goldwyn because I had left him for reasons he didn’t understand. For many years that made me an unattainable woman, as desirable as such women are, in another context, for men who like them that way.”4 The contract she finally negotiated with Goldwyn allowed her to write two films of her own choosing per year, over a three-year period. She would be expected to live in Hollywood during the ten-week writing period set aside for each film, and she would be paid the then astonishingly high sum of $2,500 for each working week. Writing and living in Hollywood had its drawbacks, of course, but it not only paid very well and regularly, it was good training.

  Hellman tells us that she squandered the money she earned on drink and parties. She called these the “wild fat” years. Perhaps. But it was in this period that she moved from the second-class hotels and furnished rooms in which she had been living to take up more comfortable quarters in various sublet apartments and residence hotels. She lived off and on with Hammett, generally in apartment hotels, sometimes escaping to more isolated places to write and occasionally creating a home at more elegant residences such as the St. Moritz and the Plaza. By the late thirties she had begun to live well. When she traveled west by train, she occupied drawing rooms rather than sleeping compartments, or she chose to fly on the newly scheduled airlines. On the West Coast, she stayed with Hammett in rooms he took at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There, he notoriously partied and drank until he was out of money, then hid away until someone bailed him out or his next check came.

  For all her success in Hollywood, Hellman remained contemptuous of it as a place to live and could not stay there for any length of time. Hammett often engaged in his most flagrant alcoholic binges there and gave vent to his most outrageous sexual and social behavior. By habit, he invited young women to his rooms, where they remained for days until his money gave way and his alcoholic haze lifted. Undoubtedly Hammett’s free-spending ways contributed to Hellman’s perception that Hollywood “stands as the most preposterous civilization of all time.” But she objected as well to its flaunting of money. She could not bear “the elaborate and pretentious dinner parties” given by the film people. “You find yourself twelve at table with twelve footmen and two majordomos,” she explained to one interviewer, “and then food that you’d throw right back at the counterman in a dairy lunch is set before you with fancy gestures and on gold plate.”5 Yet the commute had its benefits: she earned enough money in Hollywood to support a bicoastal life style, and she enjoyed the glamour that rubbed off on her through association with the famous and the powerful. Despite her protests about spending too freely, she lived extravagantly, and mostly in hotels. “Anybody’s a fool who doesn’t live in a hotel,” she wrote to Arthur Kober around this time, “and me—I’m going right back to the Plaza where everything comes up in a silver service elaborate enough for royalty.”6 She was living there when she signed the contract for The Little Foxes in December 1938.

  The Little Foxes turned into a big hit that enabled her to put a down payment on the 130-acre farm in Pleasantville, New York, that she called Hardscrabble. With a little financial help from Max Hellman and some from Hammett, she closed on the farm on June 1, 1939, and after a period of renovation, moved in the following May.7 The farm, bought in her name alone, turned out to be everything she had hoped. In the light, airy rooms of the old house, she wrote five of her plays, following a rigorous work schedule that involved several hours at her desk in the morning, staying away from visitors until after lunch, and often returning to work in the late afternoons and evenings.

  From Pleasantville, where Hellman and Hammett lived for thirteen years, it took just an hour and a half to drive to New York City. Hellman kept a car (a Cadillac after the war) to get back and forth and never gave up on urban life. She sublet apartments—often very elegant ones like the one she occupied on the third floor of the Henry Clews house at 27 West 51st Street. Small though it was (two rooms and a kitchen and bath), the Clews house was a distinguished, mansion that added luster to Hellman’s name. She moved from the Clews house in November 1941 to a somewhat larger space at 5 East 82nd Street, just off 5th Avenue. Three years later, she purchased a graceful Georgian townhouse at 63 East 82nd Street for $15,000 down and a $33,000 mortgage. She was not yet forty years old and the owner of two spacious homes, each of them bought with income she earned as a writer. The new house was just two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the heart of the fashionable Upper East Side that she loved. The house featured a duplex that she rented out, a triplex for her own use, a basement apartment for a resident superintendent, and two sixth-floor maid’s rooms.

  The farm turned out to be everything she had hoped. With Hammett about 1949. (Eileen Darby)

  She purchased a graceful Georgian townhouse. (Photo by Alice Kessler-Harris)

  Sixty-three East 82nd Street was not just a house purchase but a carefully explored and managed investment: Hellman first considered a partnership with the house’s current owners, then asked her accountant to carefully calculate the costs and benefits of various other ownership strategies, including the lost income from other investments, the price of her own rent, and the operating expenses of the house. She subsequently invested $16,000 to renovate the plumbing and two kitchens and to install a passenger elevator. Much of the renovation was completed and supervised in Hellman’s absence: she was in Moscow during the winter of 1944–45. By the time she returned in March, her apartment was ready for occupancy, and the upper two and a half floors (containing ten rooms, three baths, and a private terrace) had been rented “at a very satisfactory figure,” as her lawyer, Stanley Isaacs, informed her.8 Her lawyers successfully appealed the assessment of the house in order to lower the property taxes while raising the ceiling on the rent she could charge her tenants. Bernard Reis, her accountant, wrapped up the deal by preparing a statement showing how she had come out on the investment. The process beautifully illustrates one of the perquisites of wealth: the ability to purchase the labor of others.

  As The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine affirmed her box-office value, Hellman became increasingly prudent in her management of her literary properties and inflexible about the financial remuneration she expected from her work. She agreed to revivals and performances only without changes or cuts of any kind, and almost never to amateur companies. If a proposed performance threatened to detract attention from a new play or draw an audience from a touring company, she often refused. She signed contracts that gave her the right to approve the director and the cast of any revival; if adaptations were necessary for a broadcast version, she wanted the right of approval. She rarely granted permission for anything but a full production of her plays, routinely refusing to permit excerpts from any of her writings to be performed onstage.

  Hellman’s decisions about whether to grant the rights to perform particular plays rested partially on the amount of her royalty or the payment she could expect, and here she adopted a hardheaded and unsentiment
al stance. On one memorable occasion, Julian Feibelman, rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans and a good friend of her father’s, made a mistake. He scheduled a reading of Watch on the Rhine without asking for permission. When the problem was called to his attention, he canceled the reading and wrote to her to apologize. Then he pleaded. Could she see her way clear, he asked, to giving them permission to do just one reading? An audience of fifty, which included her two aunts, had already been assembled. The fifty-cent admission fee would go directly to buy textbooks for poor children in the religious school. Hellman remained adamant. “It is too obvious to need much going into to say that the only way a playwright has of earning a living is to have a paying public come into a theatre, and any time people do come in without paying, he is, of course, being dishonestly cheated.” Anyone who decided to read a play without paying royalties was in violation, but that somebody should decide to read a play that was still running in New York was, in her eyes, “the most impertinent I have ever heard of.”9

  If she could be sticky about permissions for idiosyncratic performances, making no exception for friends and relatives, she became positively strident when larger sums were involved. Jack Warner of Warner Bros. learned this to his sorrow when he decided to push back the release of the film version of Watch on the Rhine. His company had, despite wartime exigencies, completed the film in a timely fashion. But he didn’t want its release to interfere with another Warner Bros. product, a wartime propaganda film called Mission to Moscow that was designed to assuage fears of a newly allied Soviet Union. Hellman threw a metaphorical tantrum. She insisted that Watch on the Rhine was equally important “and what it has to say should be said now.” She had agreed to shut down the successful road tour of Watch on the Rhine, she wrote to Warner, “and cost ourselves a good deal of money by doing so … because we felt the need of the play’s message.”10 Warner’s efforts to reassure Lillian that a later opening would be just as lucrative did not allay her feelings of having been slighted. She was, she wrote back, concerned about the money to be sure, but she had willingly sacrificed it “because we believed we had something to say and our financial sacrifices were small in the light of it.”11 There the matter rested until, two months later, Hellman learned that Warner Bros. had scheduled the film to open in the Strand Theatre, an undistinguished and relatively small movie house. Now she was outraged and her temper unconstrained. “By the postponement of the picture, by the way it has been treated, and by the theatre at which it will open, there are few people now who are not convinced that the Warner Brothers believe it to be a minor effort. You will understand that I can only consider this treatment of my play as a violation of the principle on which the contract was originally signed.” Bluntly commenting that “this letter, like the last letters, will make no difference to anybody,” she announced that she “had looked forward to a future of good years with you people.” Now that was over. She never signed another contract with Warner Bros.

  Hellman generally defended her efforts to protect her properties as matters of principle coming out of her concern for the rights of all authors. But the record reveals so many arguments over large and small sums of money that we are led to wonder whether her defense obscured simple penny-pinching. Certainly the trivial nature of some of her dealings with Watch on the Rhine suggest an unfortunate penchant for haggling. She declined, in 1942, to purchase a ten-dollar audio recording of her acceptance speech when she won the Drama Critics Circle Award for the play because it was “too expensive.”12 She wanted Random House to pay her $250 rather than the $150 they offered to reprint Watch on the Rhine, and then settled when Bennett Cerf reluctantly agreed.13 In 1946, she refused to forgo her royalties on the production of a Japanese version of Watch on the Rhine that had lost money because, as she told her agent, “I do not believe in giving away the work by which one lives … and I have no interest in the rehabilitation of displaced Japanese.” In her typically blunt style, she admonished the unlucky man: “I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I tell you that you are mistaken in recommending to any writer the waiving of royalties for a commercial production in any country, but particularly an enemy country.”14

  And yet Hellman could and did surrender her claims when alternative principles appealed to her or garnering payment became too difficult. During the Second World War, and in support of the troops, she readily gave permission for Random House to publish a special “Armed Service Edition” of four of her plays despite the promise of only a tiny share of the royalties.15 When she discovered that Watch on the Rhine had been performed, without permission, by the American military in Germany and Austria, she did not ask for royalties. Rather she insisted that they be “turned over to the proper officials of the United Jewish Appeal in those countries.”16 And, in one of her great gestures to principle, she left her name on North Star even when the final film so displeased her that it caused a permanent breach in her relationship with Sam Goldwyn.

  To be fair, she could afford these gestures because the war years—years when the politics of the nation allied with Hellman’s inclinations—proved politically comfortable and financially lucrative for her. She sold The Little Foxes to Goldwyn for $75,000 in 1940; she received $150,000 from Warner Bros. for Watch on the Rhine in 1941. She and Herman Shumlin set up their own production company to produce the film version of The Searching Wind in 1944; Lillian owned 60 percent of the stock in this company, Shumlin 40 percent, and Lillian got 10 percent of the gross weekly receipts for the run of the play as well.17 Proudly, she announced to Dash, on army duty in Alaska, that they had called the company Dashiell Pictures, Inc. It was to be a short-lived affair. Dashiell, Inc, produced an unsuccessful film version of The Searching Wind and then folded in a spate of recriminations between Lillian and Shumlin. But Lillian was now box office magic. She partnered with Kermit Bloomgarden to produce her next play, Another Part of the Forest, and sold it to Universal Pictures for $250,000 (of which Bloomgarden got 20 percent) plus a hefty share of box office receipts.

  These sums enabled Hellman to buy two more Manhattan rental properties, to begin her lifetime habit of investing small sums regularly in the production of the plays of others, and to accumulate a substantial portfolio of stocks on her own account. She chose her investments carefully, putting her money in relatively small amounts in individual blue-chip stocks and seeking financial advice from friends as well as professionals. Her largest investment in the forties was in American Telephone and Telegraph (now AT&T), in which she owned four hundred shares.18

  Hammett, too, was doing well. Though he was not writing fiction, his army service in Alaska restricted his penchant for lavish spending. The royalties from his earlier stories and plays accumulated in accounts over which Hellman held power of attorney. Nancy Bragdon, Hellman’s secretary, released small sums for one purpose or another. Hellman chose and sent presents to the people he designated when he asked. For larger amounts, he participated in a game of asking for Hellman’s approval. Before he increased the support he provided to his divorced wife and their two children, he wrote to Hellman, suggesting that he wanted to do so. A couple of weeks later, he wrote, “emboldened by your silence I clear my throat again and ask you will you do whatever’s necessary to … send them—meaning those Hammetts—their millions at the rate of $200 a week instead of at the lower rate hitherto obtaining. Thank you, Ma’am.”19 Hellman punctiliously responded. She did not hesitate to chastise Hammett when she judged that he was spending money frivolously, and she scrupulously deducted from his account the costs of the gifts he asked her to buy for herself. Hammett, for his part, participated in the game by declaring his freedom to defy her wishes—as, for example, when he proposed to invest in war bonds.

  That was during the war. At its end, when America’s brief friendship with the Soviet Union faded into bitter enmity, Hellman’s fortunes faltered. In the war years, her plays, appearances, and appeals drew ready and sympathetic audiences. But in light of a rising fear of Soviet terri
torial and ideological expansion, these activities no longer seemed admirable. Her services, especially as a scriptwriter, fell out of favor. Presented by Hollywood producers with the opportunity to sign a loyalty oath in 1949, she refused, joining the list of those who would no longer be allowed to work in Hollywood. Her subsequent failure, and Hammett’s, to cooperate with government investigating committees affirmed her position as at least a fellow traveler and probably a communist. Shut out of the film industry that had provided much of her income, Hellman began to worry about money.

  Income tax investigations added to her troubles. The Federal Bureau of Taxation (to become known as the Internal Revenue Service in 1953) had investigated Hammett in 1950 and found that he owed taxes on his royalties back to 1943. When he got out of jail in 1951, the bureau sent him a bill for back taxes in the range of $100,000. He refused to pay, so the bureau attached all his future income. He was earning something under $5,000 a year at the time, most of it from radio adaptations of his novels and stories.

  Hammett now relied fully on Hellman for support. But she too was in trouble. In March 1951, the tax bureau conducted a full-scale investigation of her income. Edith Kean, then her secretary, reported to Hellman after the visit of the inspector. He had asked not only why she needed two studies (one in Pleasantville and one in the city) but wanted a detailed breakdown of the cost of all the furniture in both; he queried her visits to the Soviet Union, France, Czechoslovakia, and England in 1947 and to Yugoslavia in 1948; he challenged her contention that her car, a Cadillac, was used only for business purposes; and he discounted the effort to claim the receipts from Watch on the Rhine as capital gains, declaring them taxable as income. But the most devastating questions were around Hellman’s claim to losses incurred by the farm. Kean reported his comment verbatim. “Since it has steadily lost for 11 years—and no business could continue such heavy losses for so long—it should be considered as ‘gentleman farming’ and not a business for profit making.”20 A hefty bill for back taxes now came due.