A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  And indeed, Hellman was still suffering. Her victory over HUAC enraged political enemies on the right who remained convinced that she was a communist and that her clever strategy had enabled her to escape punishment. How could a woman who refused to cooperate with a government committee claim to be acting in the American tradition? Was it possible for political dissenters, for rebels and radicals, to love their country? Was it fair to allow those who refused to divulge their past commitments to hide behind claims of truth telling? Advocates of security turned on her old lover and continuing friend, John Melby. Melby was by then a well-regarded senior State Department officer stationed in the Philippines who visited Hellman on his not infrequent visits to the United States. The most recent visit, in Philadelphia, occurred just a month before her HUAC hearing. And he had briefly seen her just after the hearing itself. His association with Hellman drew the attention of the Department’s Loyalty-Security board, which targeted him for investigation even before her HUAC hearing and picked it up with intensity afterward. To accuse Melby of disloyalty, his biographer Robert Newman tells us, was absurd. Since 1947, Melby had become a valued China hand with an unblemished record and a lengthy list of supervisors all attesting to his loyalty. “With his rock-ribbed reputation for anti-communism,” Newman tells us, Melby and his lawyer “were sure that no puny guilt by association with a playwright who was also a friend of eminent officials, could do him in.”93

  But drifting away from Hellman did not protect Melby from the investigations of government committees. In late June 1952, the Loyalty-Security Board repeatedly grilled him about his relationship with Lillian Hellman. Convinced that she was a dangerous communist and that his admitted association with her convicted him of duplicity, the board continued to ask him about her communist associations. Two days later, Melby and Hellman met in Joseph Rauh’s office. Lillian wanted to clear his name by appearing as a witness for Melby. Rauh, worried about her future as well as Melby’s, counseled against it. Melby, increasingly worried about Lillian’s political past, wavered but, according to Newman, finally gave in to the board and admitted that Hellman might well have had a past about which he did not know. For months the Loyalty-Security Board dueled with Melby, with Lillian on the sidelines, begging to appear as a witness on his behalf. If she could convince the board that she was not a communist and had herself never been disloyal, then the board would have no evidence of his disloyalty, no grounds to dismiss him. But when she finally testified in February 1953, the committee asked her nothing about her politics—they were already convinced on that score—and fastened instead on the repeated evidence of a devoted and committed relationship. John was fired the same spring of 1953 that Hammett was called before McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Government Investigations to explain why so many of his detective stories could be found in government libraries overseas.

  Hellman, a fresh new passport in hand, once again granted to her by Mrs. Shipley (who could not have issued it had she believed Lillian to be a communist), left for an extended visit to Europe, where she again hoped to find work. Though she could leave the country, Hellman never outran her public image as a communist. She had defeated the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to be sure, satisfying those who railed against its violations of elemental civil liberties. But she had not squelched the increasingly certain, though surely mistaken, public perception that she was a communist. Repeatedly the label came back to haunt her—a powerful weapon in the accusatory arsenal leveled against her. She might evade the “known communist” label to emerge as a “fellow traveler” in the late fifties and sixties, only to descend to the level of “unrepentant Stalinist” in her later years. The labels suggest less about Hellman’s beliefs and practices than about the public mind-set from which they emerged. They tell us something about the long-lasting fear generated by Soviet communism and the McCarthy period, and the search for suspects during an interminable Cold War. And they lead us to wonder how Hellman—whose major sins were a continuing if misguided hope, an outspoken and voluble rebellion, and an angry and stubborn refusal to bow to bullies—managed to become the public face of Stalinism for as long as she did.

  Chapter 9

  The Most Dangerous Hours

  I see a road in this lovely land, crowded with people I liked and respected being pushed aside as the gay and very mischievous face of Joe McCarthy moves steadily faster than they do and so may catch up with us once again.

  —Lillian Hellman, 1970

  You have grown up in a country that has possibly come closest to its most dangerous hours if you believe that the corruption of liberty, the invasion of personal freedom is the sin of sins, the final sin.

  —commencement address, Mount Holyoke College, 1976

  How does one make a free womanhood, or a liberated womanhood, unless there are jobs and opportunities for women to have?

  —American Scholar Forum, 1972

  The lessons of the McCarthy period remained with Hellman for the rest of her life even as the hysteria of the Red Scare subsided. The 1950s witnessed the emergence of a solid middle-income class in the midst of unprecedented prosperity; at the same time, under Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership a positive national consensus grew around some of the most contentious innovations of the New Deal years, including old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and welfare support for the poor. But fear of war and subversion faded more slowly. After the Communist Control Act of 1954 declared the Communist Party “an agency of a hostile foreign power” and “a clear and present and continuing danger to the security of the United States,” the party itself shrank into a tiny hard core of perhaps five thousand members, of whom one third might have been undercover FBI agents. The following December, the U.S. Senate censured Joseph McCarthy for impairing the dignity of the chamber. Yet HUAC continued to investigate the influence of communist thought in academia, education, and the entertainment industry. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI did not cease its search for communists, and it labeled “pink” or “red” those who supported liberal causes such as trade unionism and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Nor did the Subversive Activities Control Board stop investigating federal employees accused of affiliation with communist front organizations. Loyalty oaths became commonplace in states and educational institutions.

  Hellman remained blacklisted by the movie industry throughout the decade, as did actors, directors, and screenwriters of all kinds. She survived the ordeal by working in the theater, where, bolstered by her fame, she continued to attract an audience. Slowly, she reemerged as the celebrity she had once been. Her adaptation of The Lark drew wide acclaim and played for more than six months. The 1956 musical version of Candide added to her luster even as it failed at the box office. Though she vowed after the disappointment to leave the theater scene behind her, she wrote one more great play, Toys in the Attic, which opened in February 1960. Some say it was her greatest play.1

  Feeling more economically secure, she bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard in 1955. There she befriended a distinguished group of literary neighbors who included novelist John Hersey and his wife Barbara, Sue and John P. Marquand, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and, later, William and Rose Styron. Putting politics behind her, she socialized with an eclectic group of celebrities and intellectuals and met and grew to like some of the leading liberals of the moment. She made friends with Senator John Kennedy’s speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who shared her love of fishing; she came to know McGeorge Bundy, then dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an advocate of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential aspirations. Both Bundy and Schlesinger were noted for their liberal anticommunism. In the same period from the late fifties to the early sixties, she established intimate friendships with conservative columnist Joseph Alsop, Philadelphia lawyer Arthur Cowan, and CBS news executive Blair Clark. She might have disagreed politically with each of these individuals, but all of them remained lifetime friends.

  With the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and t
he shift from a political climate of fear to one of hope, the honors and the work poured in. Bundy paved the way to a teaching job at Harvard, where she took her first crack at teaching a seminar of undergraduate students. She did not want, she said, to teach them how to write plays but to teach them how to write. “Are there students,” she asked Bundy, “who are interested as I am, in the relation of drama writing to all other writing?”2 In 1963, she won election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honorary degree from Douglass College, and another from Wheaton College. The film version of Toys in the Attic appeared that summer. As the blacklist lifted, Hellman accepted an offer from Twentieth Century Fox to write the movie script for The Chase, a play written by Horton Foote that would be directed by Arthur Penn and feature Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Robert Redford. She didn’t like the way the film turned out, but still, she was back in the swing again. This was only part of it. More honorary degrees came from Brandeis in 1965 and Mount Holyoke in 1966. Visits abroad to attend openings of her plays spiced her days: Moscow in the fall of 1966, London and Paris in the spring of 1967, Paris and Moscow the following fall. At home, Mike Nichols mounted a first-class revival of The Little Foxes in 1967. Lillian Hellman was in full celebrity mode once more.

  But in the sixties, the political debate took on a new shape, and Hellman once again found herself a target of criticism. President Kennedy’s electoral victory and his desire to return to the domestic visions of FDR, the emerging civil rights and antiwar movements, and, later, the claims of feminism all seemed to Hellman to signal a newly energized population. At Harvard in the spring of 1961, she met with a small group of students whose critical minds she admired. She welcomed their incipient turmoil as an indication that students, among others, were emerging from the apathy of the fifties. At Harvard, and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Yale and in the commencement addresses and lectures she gave at prestigious colleges and universities around the country, she invariably told her audiences to remember the lessons of the fifties: to be courageous, not to give in to bullies. Not to stand up for what you believe, she repeated to a generation of students, was the greatest dereliction of civic duty.3 Hellman vigorously applauded the emergence of what came to be called a New Left, especially when, as at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, young people turned their attention to political protest. She loved it when young people demonstrated “spunk” or courage.

  Others on the left as well as on the right mistrusted students and despised the New Left. The young, they argued, lacked a sense of history, knew nothing of the perils of Marxism, and romanticized nonconformist and aesthetic lifestyles.4 Around her, especially among the New York intellectuals and in the anticommunist left, Hellman heard only criticism of students. Cultural leaders such as Irving Howe thought them guilty of undermining a necessary vigilance against the Soviets. The controversy severed old political alliances and realigned partnerships. Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol opted to seek shelter by moving increasingly toward a right-wing stance. Socialism, they thought, would inevitably lead to totalitarianism of either the communist or fascist variety. To avoid that fate, they opted for programs that would suppress socialist impulses or socialist ideas. In the name of preserving democracy, oblivious to the cost to freedom of expression and civil liberties, an increasingly conservative minority targeted anything that did not look like free-market individualism. In their view, government intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged (African-Americans, migrant workers, women, the poor) constituted a slippery slope that would end, they thought, in totalitarianism. Focused around magazines like Encounter and The New Leader, most of this group, as historian Alan Wald puts it, “not only denuded themselves of past radicalism but developed sophisticated rationalizations for tolerating the essence if not the precise McCarthyite form of the witch-hunt.”5

  All through the sixties and into the early seventies, majority opinion deviated from this view. Men such as Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, and Dissent editor Irving Howe sought a distinctively American path toward the social-justice goals of the old left. Convinced that the future of American transformation lay in distancing themselves from communism in any form, they sought to recreate an audience for liberal or socialist programmatic change. Partisan Review and Dissent became the voices of transformative, noncommunist change.

  Hellman did not participate in, and perhaps was even oblivious to, the sectarian arguments. Her politics remained a moral politics vested in the belief that too much attention was being paid to the Soviets, too little to civil liberties in America. For her the legacy of the McCarthy period rested in defending decency and loyalty and, most of all, in the courage to defend one’s beliefs. So she hovered on the fringes of all these groups, continuing to value social change while for the most part ignoring unfounded sporadic accusations that she remained faithful to communist ideas. Her celebrity as a survivor of HUAC shielded her from explicit attack; her refusal, even in the sixties, to denounce Stalinism or to turn away from friends who clung to their own principles, rendered her politically untrustworthy to the continuing idealists. She was not, by their standards, an intellectual: she lacked what Irving Kristol called critical intelligence. When in the early 1960s some of the younger generation of the New York intellectuals (Jason Epstein, Robert Silvers, Barbara Epstein) founded the New York Review of Books—a magazine explicitly designed to foster conversation on the left outside the realm of the old Communist Party debates—Hellman was simply irrelevant. Friends and acquaintances including Robert Lowell, John Hersey, and John Marquand wrote for the NYRB; Hellman remained marginal.

  In the politics of the sixties, the largely nonideological choices of activist students (and the New Left into which they merged) appealed to Hellman. She liked the fact that young people were standing up for something: they had what she called “spine.” At a 1968 political rally, she declared with pleasure, “Our children black and white have caught up with our hypocrisies, and whatever our doubts about their actions or their methods, they have a right to sneer at us.”6 She would later describe their protests “as a mixed bag of the good and the foolish.” The good part, she thought, was “the insistence upon examination of what they had been told, taught, and read.” The bad consisted of “the taking over of college offices, damaging of files, bullying of teachers, and so on.” But she did not condone the sending in of police to quell the protests of “good-natured young men and women with much to complain about that needed complaint.”7 Nor, on the other side, did she have much patience for the youth movement that questioned parental, political, and corporate authority, promoted sexual liberation, and suspected that anyone over thirty was already part of an unredeemable establishment. She considered this emerging counterculture (dropping out, turning on, communal living, flower power) mere foolishness. She later applied the same label to the cultural expressions of the women’s movement.

  The rise of grassroots efforts by southern blacks to stand up for themselves stirred Hellman deeply. The civil rights movement, she noted in her journal, was “the first deeply felt movement since the Spanish Civil War,” an indication that people could not “live long on non-something” without belief. Recalling her own political epiphany, she scrawled notes in her own hand: “suddenly something like 1930s has appeared again and man is once more angry that other men don’t eat very well, get snubbed and insulted, haven’t proper rights.”8 Hellman never participated in the ongoing strategy sessions and debate as she had with efforts to eliminate Jim Crow from the army in the forties. This time around, she found a way to support the cause of civil rights by doing what she did best: raising money and writing.

  In the summer of 1963 Hellman persuaded Ladies’ Home Journal to send her as a journalist to report on the August 28, 1963, March on Washington organized by Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a coalition of labor union and civil rights groups. To prepare the artic
le, she did her usual job of research, clipping pieces from several newspapers and familiarizing herself with the Civil Rights Act then before Congress. She interviewed protest organizer Bayard Rustin along with a range of young southerners, many of them marchers in previous demonstrations. Among her contacts were two virulent southern opponents of civil rights, Louisana’s senator Allen Ellender and Alabama’s John Sparkman. She scrawled notes from her informants in a three-by-five notebook—to which she also included references to hair appointments, lists of expenses, and instructions she wanted to convey to her secretary at home. The notes reflect something of her feelings. Of a jail in Alabama, she noted “toilet facilities—toilet in room they slept” and “food was 2 times 5AM & 6PM. Grits & gravy & bread & no sugar for coffee.” On another occasion, she recorded: “Treated girls as bad as boys. Electric prodders used on private parts … Police came in during night and used electric prodders. 24 girls to a cell—3 beds or 4 beds … Struck some of girls on breast.”9