A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The passport came through a week later. It was too late. Her European counterparts backed off and refused to sign the contract she had so carefully negotiated. She set off for London anyway, eager to leave a United States where Hammett was heading to jail for refusing to reveal names to an investigatory committee. The two had agreed that she should get out of the way if possible. And she was still hoping for work. She departed despite warnings from her lawyers that the trip might be futile and that she had no grounds to press for a completed deal, preceded and followed by an angry flurry of telegrams, including one from her agent, Kay Brown, that insisted that “the responsibility for going to Europe was entirely yours.” It tells us something about her state of mind that Hellman not only went, but that she felt unfairly treated by those who had warned her off. She wrote to Henry Beeson, Gregory Zilboorg’s secretary, to report testily that she was at loose ends. “My original plan was to make a movie in France but I’m afraid that offer has been withdrawn.”61 When he suggested that she meet with Zilboorg in Switzerland, she wrote to say that she could not, and though she would not admit it, her restricted passport would not have allowed it. She consulted her lawyers about legal action only to be told that she had “no grounds for action. Because of the delay in connection with the passport, these people in the meantime changed their minds.”62 Kay Brown wrote to express sympathy that the expected contract had not materialized and to hope that “an assignment which you might like comes up for you in London.”63 But if Lillian had no legal ground to stand on, she continued to press her case until the Ventura production company agreed to pay her travel costs and expenses.

  Hellman returned to the United States in the fall of 1951, Hammett in jail, to find the dragnet was moving ever closer. In the 1947 Hollywood hearings, her closest colleagues, including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr., were among those who went to jail. But in 1951, when investigations of the entertainment industry resumed, she saw her friends turn tail and confess. In turn Larry Parks, Clifford Odets, Budd Schulberg, and Elia Kazan cooperated with investigating committees and implicated others. Kazan argued that he needed to protect his livelihood. “I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he wrote in his autobiography.64 Others simply saw no reason to protect a Communist Party they had come to despise. They not only publicly renounced communism but agreed to reveal everything they knew, including the names of those with whom they had worked. After all, to refuse to identify oneself as a former communist implied that one had something to cover up. And once one revealed one’s past, cooperating with investigatory committees provided the best evidence of sincere contrition. Offering the names of other once and future party members not only provided the government with a huge list of potential subversive suspects that HUAC and the FBI could question, but it meant that those named, in turn, could name still others. The list could expand indefinitely.

  The trouble, as Hellman and others quickly understood, was that the process rewarded the informer and encouraged people to exaggerate their knowledge. “The good American,” noted Ted Thackrey in the left-wing New York Compass, “is the informer and the conformist who is willing to confess that associations once regarded as innocent must have been evil … and that those associates must be denounced by name no matter how tenuous the association, how vague the memory.”65 The behavior, Hellman perceived, produced “confessions of sin that never happened.” She thought this “one of the comic marks of the years between 1948 and 1958,” when many men “marched themselves before committees to confess what they never knew, beg pardon for what they had never done.”66

  Hellman did not and could not believe that Americans would remain silent in the face of such injustice. Her sense of bewilderment is palpable. All around her, friends and acquaintances positioned themselves with respect to the assault on the left. As they did so, the lines between and among them with respect to the sanctity of civil liberties sharpened. She was, she wrote just a decade later, “a very frightened woman,” and she felt “the sadness of watching people be punished for so little—because the truth is that the radical or liberal movement in America was always very small and almost always very foolish. But then fools also have a right to justice and to freedom.” At first she laughed “at anybody’s right to deny that.”67 But her laughter was short-lived. Hellman was not among those who frighten easily, she had written “Judas Goats,” and yet she was afraid. Her hero in this period was Anton Chekhov, in whom she had become interested in early 1950 and whose collected letters she would soon edit and publish. From Chekhov she copied into her notebook an early statement that reflected her disillusionment with her colleagues. “I do not believe in our educated class, which is hypocritical, false, poorly educated and indolent; I don’t believe in it even when it suffers and complains for its persecutors emerge from its own bosom,” Chekhov had written.68 Hellman shared the belief and wished she could emulate his courage.

  Hellman’s Armageddon came when she was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the spring of 1952. For several years she had preached defiance of the investigatory committees, suffered from the movie industry’s blacklist, and watched her friends weigh the impossible choice of cooperating with the committees, going to jail, or losing their livelihoods. Now it was her turn. She was part of an entertainment industry that had been targeted for several years; she had made no secret of her sympathy for world peace or racial equality, both key programs of the CPUSA. And she knew that her name had come up before HUAC and other committees on several occasions. In a list of names he turned over to HUAC in July 1950, FBI informant Louis Budenz had identified Hellman as a party member from 1937 to 1945.69 Her name surfaced again during an April 1951 investigation of her friend Dorothy Parker, and a third time when former party member Martin Berkeley identified her, the following September, as having attended a meeting at his California home in the late thirties. Still, the call came at a particularly difficult time. Hammett had just been released from a four-month jail term; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat in jail, each under sentence of death. Joe McCarthy was at the peak of his career.

  When the subpoena arrived, Hellman lost her cool. By her own account, she tasked the African-American man who delivered it with serving an inglorious master. Finally she succumbed to the numb calm that comes, as she put it later, from knowing that “there is nothing to do but to face trouble with a roped control.”70 She consulted one lawyer and then another before she came to the man who would finally counsel her through the episode. He was Joseph Rauh, a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action and a liberal anticommunist who had not previously represented admitted communists. This was not, he later told Hellman, entirely his choice. Rather he sensed that potential clients who remained within the Communist Party chose to follow the advice of party lawyers, even when they sought him out. He could not, he thought, represent them, because they could not be fully open with him.71 But Hellman was different. She had, he wrote to her as they tried to frame her defense, “made it quite clear in our talks that you genuinely disagree with the activities of the Communist Party … and recognize that you were wrong in joining the Party.” Rauh believed that Hellman refused to distance herself from the party or to acknowledge her error in joining up because of “your feeling that somebody might think you were saying so because you were afraid of public opinion rather than because that was your true view.”72 He counseled her to set aside her fear of public opinion and to admit that she had been wrong in joining the party. She refused. Only later did he begin to understand why. She believed, he wrote shortly after Scoundrel Time began to attract attention, that “it only added to the witch hunt to criticize Communists and Communism—even rationally and thoughtfully.”73 Rauh disagreed with that position. He did not believe, as Hellman did, that attacking communists would simply play into the hands of the committee. “It seems to me that the struggle for freedom is a two-front war against both communists and
their right wing opposition,” he would confess later. But he admired her stand, and “the courage with which she held it.”74

  With Rauh, Hellman confronted the Hobson’s choice she now faced. She was, Rauh’s assistant Daniel Pollitt recalled, terrified. When she came into the office, “she was very polite and she didn’t interrupt. I thought she was extremely frightened.”75 Still, she was adamant that she would not name names. Rauh thought she “would even have accepted jail before naming names. What she really wanted to do was tell the committee off without violating the law and that is what she ended up doing.”76 But how would she behave? She could choose to answer no questions about her relationship to the Communist Party and simply take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, as others had done. But that course suggested that she had something to hide. Though those who had taken it had avoided jail, they had not shed the taint of communism. School boards routinely fired teachers who pleaded the Fifth Amendment; employers would not hire them; Hollywood refused them jobs. She could admit her earlier association with communism, repent the mistake, and apologize. That option curdled her blood. She had done nothing of which she was ashamed. As she later told Rauh, if she had briefly joined the Communist Party, she had never taken it seriously. To confess to a wrong she did not feel would be tantamount to groveling before the bullies of the committee. Besides, if she confessed she would be asked for the names of those she had encountered in the party. Rauh tried to persuade committee counsel Frank S. Tavenner Jr. and member Richard Nixon to allow her to testify in executive session. But the approach came to nothing.

  In the end Rauh and Daniel Pollitt devised a halfway strategy, to which she agreed. She could, as she wished, tell the committee “under oath everything about yourself but nothing about anyone else.”77 Rauh cautioned her about the risk involved: if the strategy failed, it would invite a citation for contempt and the jail sentence she hoped to avoid. But Rauh and Pollitt thought they might pave the way by appealing to public opinion. They would hedge her refusal to testify about others with a letter to the committee in which she would offer to answer anything they wanted to know about her if they agreed to ask her about no one else. That letter would explain the dilemma in which the committee put her and others like her, and appeal to their sense of decency. Rauh was almost sure that committee chair John Wood would refuse this overture, and he advised Hellman to prepare a public statement that she could release to the press after the committee hearing, explaining her position.

  This second, public statement was never released, but in some ways the various drafts that Hellman composed provide what is possibly the most accurate assessment of her association with the Communist Party. She joined in 1938, “attended very few Communist party meetings in Hollywood in 1938–39 and an equally small number in New York in 1939–40. I stopped attending meetings or taking part in Communist Party activities in the latter part of 1940 and severed all connection with the Party.” Under Rauh’s prodding, she added a sentence admitting that she was “wrong about the Communist Party”; she had joined out of a misplaced idealism, and she had no bitterness with those with whom she associated in the party. She would not, she wrote, “become the instrument for damaging these lives and those of their families.”78 Together she and Rauh completed this statement as she drafted the initial version of the letter she would send to committee chair John Wood. She did not wish to claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, she wrote to Wood: “I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own opinions and my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself.” She could not and would not answer questions about other people. The letter, duly rejected, left her and Rauh fearful of what would happen next.

  On the morning of the hearing, May 21, 1952, Dan Pollitt and Joseph Rauh picked Hellman up, a bundle of nervous energy. She had tried to calm her nerves the day before by shopping and was wearing the fruits of her expedition. Newspapers described the “blonde, forty-six and trim figured” Hellman wearing “a close-fitting black hat and a tailored brown-and-black checked silk dress.”79 As she took the stand, she “clenched a handkerchief in clasped hands.” The hearing started slowly, and then twenty minutes in, counsel Frank Tavenner asked her whether it was in fact true that she had been present at a June 1937 meeting in the home of Martin Berkeley. Hellman ducked the question. “Most seriously I would like to ask you once again to reconsider what I have said in the letter,” she replied. “In other words,” said Tavenner, “you are asking the committee not to ask you any questions regarding the participation of other persons in the Communist Party activities.” Hellman’s back rose: “I don’t think I said that, Mr. Tavenner.”80

  Then Chairman Wood, in a mistake he must have long regretted, suggested the letter be entered into the record. Rauh had brought with him copies he intended to distribute to the press after the hearing. Now he seized the opportunity. Dan Pollitt jumped up and passed copies of the letter to waiting hands.81 Briefly, it looked as if Rauh would be disciplined for causing the letter to be distributed, but it had been entered into the record, which forced the committee to read it out loud. Ten more minutes of fruitless questioning later, the committee closed the hearing. It had been exactly thirty-seven minutes long, and it would situate Hellman as a heroine.

  As Pollitt whisked her out of the hearing room, a dazed Lillian Hellman did not fully realize what had happened. She had won, a triumphant Rauh told her when he joined them later in a local coffee shop. She had defeated the committee; she had given no names and would serve no jail time. Rauh attributed the victory to her letter. In it, Hellman eloquently asked the committee to respect “simple rules of human decency and Christian honor” by not forcing her to betray people who had never done any harm. “I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition, and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country,” she had written. “To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman, and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.”82 The letter was now public, its plea for decency part of the public record. She had stood up to the committee by articulating a defiant moral position that quickly caught the American imagination.

  Public and private praise poured in. LILLIAN HELLMAN BALKS HOUSE UNIT, headlined the New York Times.83 Journalist Murray Kempton contrasted her behavior with that of others who debased themselves by confessing to sins they had not committed. This was a “courageous act of conscience,” he concluded, “worthy of a lady.”84 One precious tribute came from Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times drama critic who had previously taken her to task for writing melodrama. He wrote to compliment her: “If we are to have a society that is not totalitarian and in which people do not denounce each other, as they do in Communist Russia and did in Nazi Germany, your attitude has a basic moral force that every lover of the American system must adhere to. It is the code of honor among civilized people of all national origins.”85

  Hellman reveled in this position. “It was like a wedding here yesterday, with strange people getting happy,” she wrote to her friend Bill Alfred two days later, enclosing some of the newspaper clippings. “I must say the New York papers treated me fine … The Mirror, maybe, best of all.”86 She had been surprised to learn that when her name was mentioned at a luncheon at the American Jewish Congress, “the ladies applauded loud and long.” The euphoria continued for a while. “I am a local heroine,” she wrote to Melby a week after the event.87 To Rauh she gushed, “The reaction here has been just too good to believe. There has been the largest amount of mail I have ever received about anything, and an equally large number of telephone calls.” She sent her “deepest thanks and absolute conviction that we did e
verything as well as we could do it, and that the legal decisions you make were sound and thoughtful, and no matter what comes from them I will be fully satisfied and happy.”88

  Privately, she was not as confident. To Melby she complained about part of the strategy he had developed, regretting that she had agreed to deny Communist Party membership for the two years before the hearing and to take the Fifth Amendment for questions before that point: “I am sorry that I didn’t take the legal risk and go back 13 years. I think it was the only unwise decision that Rauh made and stupid of me to have followed it.”89 For all her courage at the HUAC hearing, she could not hide a sense of vulnerability. To Melby she confessed to being “foolishly restless and frightened to be alone. That is new for me, and I don’t like it.”90 She had difficulty working—difficulty that persisted through the summer, forcing her to set aside work on her new play and to focus instead on the Chekhov introduction. “One of the penalties of this year,” she told Melby, “has been a restless refusal to sit down and work, or even to read or think.” In the same letter, she elaborated: “I have got myself into kind of a bad, aimless state of depression and discomfort … I am doing foolish things, and feeling foolish things.”91

  The things she was doing were not only foolish, they were sometimes narcissistic and unprincipled as well. The Pleasantville farm sold, Dash rented the cottage in Katonah from their old friends Helen and Sam Rosen; Lillian often joined them there for a Saturday-night dinner. The Rosens were close friends and loyal supporters of Paul Robeson, with whom Hellman had fought for an end to racial segregation in the army during the war. Robeson, then still either in or close to the Communist Party and himself hounded by various government investigating agencies, was at dinner one night shortly after Hellman’s HUAC hearing. Helen Rosen recalled watching Hellman, who “evidently did very well in public but was shivering inside of herself.” That night “when she came into the kitchen to get her drink, leaving Paul and Dash and Sam in the other room, she gave me hell for having Paul there when she was there. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. She was in a fury, and she said, ‘I’ve had a terrible time. I’ve been followed, my phone is probably tapped, and of all people to walk into—I don’t need to be in the same room with Robeson!’” Helen tried to calm her down. “I said, ‘Lillian, take it easy. He’s your friend, he’s my friend, he’s our friend. You’ve been through the worst, what is this all about?’” The response from a still enraged Lillian was simply, “‘Well it’s too much, everything’s too much.’”92