McCarthy’s effort to tarnish Hellman as an unregenerate Stalinist encouraged sparks to fly in unanticipated directions. McCarthy quickly tried to stamp them out. She learned early on that Diana Trilling wanted to participate in a defense committee on McCarthy’s behalf. But McCarthy mistrusted Trilling and believed that she had her own motives for wanting to help. “The intrusion of Diana affects me disagreeably,” she wrote to her lawyer.132 Later she elaborated: she would resist the idea of a defense committee “even if it came from other sponsors rather than from that Cold-War Bellona.”133 Above all she resented the fact that Trilling seemed less interested in raising money for McCarthy’s defense than, in Trilling’s words, “to mobilize sentiment on Mary’s behalf and extrude Lillian from the community of the fair-minded.”134 When Sidney Hook, who earned his political stripes as an anticommunist and had since moved to the far right, offered to provide McCarthy with evidence of Hellman’s political misdeeds, McCarthy found the offer repugnant.135 This was another offer she wanted to refuse.
As the details of McCarthy’s search began to coalesce, they turned all of Hellman’s life into a trough of suspicion in which truth was the first casualty. When McCarthy contacted Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife and a distinguished journalist, Gellhorn responded eagerly. She would cooperate “with pleasure and would do the same for anyone against all liars and self vaunters as I am sick of the lot.”136 From Castine, Maine, McCarthy mailed to Gellhorn in London a copy of An Unfinished Woman. Gellhorn replied before she had finished it: “As I read this book, I think it’s ALL lies,” she wrote to McCarthy, adding that she thought the book “egomaniacal malarkey.”137 Later, she added, “everything she writes is self praise and all rot.”138 Gellhorn had already made up her mind about Hellman based on an earlier experience with her. She had met Hellman first on the boat that took both of them to Europe in the summer of 1937. Gellhorn resented Hellman, who, accompanied by her friends Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, traveled first class. In Paris, Gellhorn, not yet married to Hemingway, kept a low profile and then joined Hemingway to travel with him to Spain. Hellman claimed to have seen a good deal of Hemingway in the weeks before they left for Spain. Gellhorn, deeply involved with him, denied it. The three would meet again in Valencia.
Gellhorn, digging enthusiastically into the material that McCarthy sent her, filled McCarthy with advice about how to go about her research: “You should take specific statements and demolish them—make her out to be what she is, a self-serving braggart.”139 Gellhorn advised going for the jugular: “Specific details, wherever she actually names a place, a street, a fact: simply prove it cannot be true.” Find out, she told McCarthy, whether Lillian was actually on the Russian front, as she claimed to have been in An Unfinished Woman. Gellhorn doubted it. How could she have perched in a dugout with a glass wall? How could a grenade be thrown at her if she was five hundred feet from the enemy lines?
McCarthy pursued these leads with zest. At Gellhorn’s suggestion, she wrote to John Hersey, who had shared some of Hellman’s Moscow experiences and accompanied her partway to the front. Hersey, who had since become one of Hellman’s closest friends, disappointed McCarthy. He had not personally witnessed the event, he replied. Hellman’s interpreter and companion, Raisa Orlova, who had been with her at the front and recently defected, was just then publishing a memoir of her own. Recalling the trip to the front, Orlova described Lillian’s courage under machine-gun fire and “during the moments that brought us close to death.” She was, according to Orlova, “clever, sharp witted, and often full of anger.”140 McCarthy dropped her inquiry into Hellman’s experience under fire to follow more promising leads.
Particularly sure of herself about events in Spain during 1937, Gellhorn denied that Hellman could have been there for as long as she claimed. She mocked Hellman’s self-proclaimed courage under bombing that could not have happened and accused her of making up encounters with Hemingway that she could not have had.141 McCarthy could neither confirm nor deny most of Gellhorn’s stories and in the end did not use them, but Gellhorn persisted. Inspired by McCarthy’s search, she set to work on an article based on her research. Resentment infected her quest. “I cannot bear liars, apocryphiars,” she explained to McCarthy to justify her continuing interest. “As a reporter, I regard them as wicked, deforming the news and the facts. As a writer, I consider that fact and fiction are totally different and I object fiercely to lying. And besides I do despise self aggrandizement in a general way.”142 Gellhorn did not use the word liar in the piece that the Paris Review published in June 1981.143 Cautioned by the editors, she invented instead the euphemism apocryphiar and acquiesced grumpily when the same editors altered the essay’s title from “Close Encounters of the Apocryphal Kind” to “Plume de Guerre.”144
But she did her best to demolish Hellman’s account of her experiences during the Spanish Civil War and her encounters with Hemingway. Hellman, Gellhorn claimed, could not have been as close to Hemingway as she protested, for he was simply not in the locations at the times Hellman described. He could not, for example, have been with Gustav Regler at the Stork Club at the time that Lillian recalled Hemingway challenging Hammett to bend a spoon with one elbow. Gellhorn insisted Hemingway was abroad at the time of the purported meeting. Nor could Hellman have read the manuscript of To Have and Have Not during one Paris night. The manuscript, Gellhorn claimed, was in press at the time. Besides, Gellhorn wrote to friends, Hemingway could not stand her.
The piece drew wide attention despite the fact that Gellhorn’s veracity was itself called into question. When she leveled accusations of lying against Stephen Spender (former editor of the neoconservative publication Encounter and, incidentally, former lover of Muriel Gardiner and friend to Mary McCarthy), Spender responded dismissively, telling her that her memory was faulty.145 Yet he and the world at large continued to hold the opinion that her account of Hellman’s lies was substantially correct. A year later, in 1981, he cited Gellhorn’s piece as evidence for asserting that Hellman was no more than a “fiction writer and a plagiarist.”146
Eventually the idea that Lillian was no more than a liar spread to every detail of her life. “Being a liar is deeper than politics—ingrained, surely,” wrote McCarthy to a friend.147 Was Hellman really born in New Orleans? What about the two aunts: had Hellman made them up too? How old was she? McCarthy suspected that Hellman had deducted a year or two from her age and enthusiastically broadcast her suspicions to Gellhorn, who promptly exaggerated the difference. Hellman, Gellhorn guessed, had probably been born between 1899 and 1901. Indeed Hellman did routinely (and in the fashion of many women of her generation as they grew older) deduct a year and sometimes two from her age. She was born in 1905. But the casual accusations against her veracity descended to an ugly level of callousness. When witnesses could not be found to support Hellman’s stories, McCarthy suspected that she had deliberately chosen anecdotes that could not be verified. To CBS news anchor Charles Collingwood, who could not find information about a CBS radio broadcast that Hellman claimed to have made from Madrid in October 1937, McCarthy wrote, “There’s an unusually high mortality rate among witnesses to her doings wherever she was.”148 Gellhorn agreed with this assessment: “That’s the clever side of mythomanes,” she wrote to McCarthy, “they wait until everyone is dead (except me) before they really go to town.”149
The coup de grâce came from the story of Julia, the fifth chapter of Pentimento, which purported to describe Hellman’s courage in aiding antifascist resistance in 1937 Austria. The story became a film starring Vanessa Redgrave as Julia and Jane Fonda as Lillian. Released in the fall of 1977 at a fund-raising party for the Committee for Public Justice, it produced immediate accolades for Hellman. European editions of Pentimento followed, along with invitations to read the story and describe her experiences to college audiences. Suddenly Hellman turned into the beautiful blonde she had always wanted to be; she became the courageous woman of her fantasies and an icon of twentieth-c
entury womanhood. But was this Lillian’s story or someone else’s?
Julia had long been rumored to be based on the life of Muriel Gardiner, then a psychiatrist living just outside Princeton, in Pennington, New Jersey, and the only American woman known to have worked in the Austrian resistance. Lillian shrugged off the rumors, insisting that although she had heard them, nobody had ever publicly come forward. She said she had never received a letter that Gardiner claimed to have sent her, pointing out the similarities between her life and Julia’s. She and Gardiner shared one friend in common—a lawyer named Wolf Schwabacher who had talked about Hellman to Gardiner and who could easily have shared Gardiner’s story with her. But Lillian insisted that the story was that of her pseudonymous friend. Though her memory was poor—as she wrote in Pentimento and repeated in interviews—she remembered this story absolutely. Instead of retreating as the rumors began to spread, Hellman elaborated on them. Before McCarthy’s interview, before the lawsuit, she told one interviewer that “nothing on God’s earth could have shaken my memory about” Julia.150 To another, she described in great detail how she had discovered the fate of Julia’s baby from the doctor who treated Julia in London at her death.151
McCarthy learned about Muriel Gardiner in the summer of 1980, probably from Stephen Spender, once Gardiner’s lover and still a close friend. She wrote immediately to Gardiner, who responded positively. But Gardiner did not want the story repeated. McCarthy wrote to a friend that “the distinguished professional woman who has come to recognize herself as the original of Julia” was “hesitating as to whether to offer a deposition.” And then, perhaps projecting her own feelings onto Gardiner, McCarthy added, “She has been warned that Hellman is a dangerous antagonist, quick to revenge herself.”152 When Gardiner subsequently published an account of her experiences in the resistance, she did not claim the identity of Julia. Instead she merely acknowledged that she “had often been struck by the similarities between my life” and that of Hellman’s heroine.153 But others noted that Gardiner, like the fictional Julia, was born to a wealthy family, studied at Oxford, went to Vienna to be analyzed, and there enrolled in medical school. Crucially, as Gardiner pointed out, Julia had worked in the Austrian resistance—the Austrians could identify only one American who had been so active. And she was Muriel Gardiner.
Was this, then, a lie? Most likely, Hellman concocted the outlines of Julia’s story from the comments she had heard about Muriel Gardiner from Schwabacher. After Gardiner’s book appeared, Hellman went to some lengths to contact Gardiner, only to be rebuffed. To her friend and psychiatrist George Gero, who tried to arrange a meeting, Hellman wrote that she feared McCarthy would “use the publicity on Gardiner’s book to discredit my word on everything.”154 Later she reported to him that her lawyer, Ephraim London, “was very frightened of her and so indeed am I.”155 London, increasingly disturbed by the idea that Hellman had invented Julia, pressured Hellman to reveal the name of Julia’s family. She tried to convince him that she should not mention Julia’s last name with a story so convoluted and fanciful that those named in it could only laugh at the whole cloth out of which it was made.156 But the puzzle is why Hellman tried to keep this story going for so long; why she could not admit that, though she might have been inspired to invent the tale from the little she knew of Gardiner’s life, most of the story came out of her fantasy life, out of her desire to be the courageous woman she imagined she might be.
This was not the first time Hellman had created and kept spinning a long-running tale that could not have been true. There was her insistent saga to Blair Clark about an aristocratic foreigner and the child she claimed to have borne him. She invented a story about why she kept changing her age, which she told with a straight face to Hunter College colleague Alex Szogyi. Her father, she said, was a gallant gentleman who never wanted her to know her age, and by the time she was interested enough to ask, “the hospital in which she was born had burned down and the records were lost.”157 Nor was it the first time that she had built on the experiences of others (including family members) to construct portraits or stories out of her imagination. She was, after all, a dramatist, and self-dramatization was her strength. Unaccountably, she continued to stand by the veracity of the Julia story.
By continuing the tale, by appropriating the outlines of somebody else’s life, Hellman overstepped the bounds of memoir, crossed an invisible line, and—in the context of the lawsuit against Mary McCarthy—revealed her lying habits. Conversations around the lawsuit quickly deteriorated into name-calling, venom, and malice. Hellman was a “Bloody vindictive old broad,” wrote CBS reporter Charles Collingwood to McCarthy. Hellman supporters responded in kind: “I have been incensed since I heard about that ‘bitch’ Mary McCarthy’s attack on the television. You have more in your ASS than she has in her brain,” wrote Sam Jaffe to Hellman. Hellman replied, “Dear Sam, Thank you very much.”158
The swiftly unfolding events quickly turned friends into enemies. When Norman Mailer begged the two women, in print, to reconcile, Richard Poirier wrote a passionate defense of his old friend Hellman. Mailer responded with a personal note that he copied to several of the literati. “Your righteous mind and sulphurous bottom,” he wrote to Poirier, “produce much brimstone.”159 Hellman promptly broke off a thirty-year friendship with Mailer. “I am sorry about you and me,” she wrote to him, “genuinely sorry.”160 Hellman reached out to Barbara Epstein—an editor at the New York Review of Books with whom she had long been close. Epstein responded cautiously, indicating her distress at the lawsuit and hoping that they could “meet again soon.”161 Then in private correspondence with McCarthy, Epstein expressed her distaste for Hellman. She refused Hellman’s subsequent requests to meet. Hellman expressed only a little regret at this. “My lawsuit against Mary McCarthy,” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Pritchett, “has caused Barbara to increase her already very stern dislike of me. She actually told me that she thought it was disgraceful of me to take so crazy a statement seriously and to cause McCarthy pain.”162 Bob Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books and for a decade Hellman’s colleague in the Committee for Public Justice, rallied to McCarthy’s side. A year or so after the lawsuit was filed, he wrote to McCarthy to tell her that he had denounced Lillian’s suit to her face: “Since then silence from her and most of her friends.”163 Elizabeth Hardwick (also part of the New York Review of Books circle and the ex-wife of Lillian’s friend Robert Lowell) had offended Lillian in 1967 with a scathing review of a revival of The Little Foxes. Now she tried to organize her friends to write a public letter condemning the suit. The letter, she suggested, would support Mary McCarthy’s position that she was entitled to express her opinions freely.164
But Hellman remained staunch in the face of criticism. Bill Alfred, who had arranged her first job at Harvard, wrote to tell her that he hadn’t called to talk about the suit because “I would have to tell you that I think it mistaken.”165 Hellman replied with uncharacteristic dispassion. “I don’t think we will ever agree about the Mary McCarthy mess … You must know from the tone of my letter that I was offended by yours. But that, of course, will heal, and has nothing to do with an old affection, and one that I hope can soon be mended.”166 Bill Styron wrote her a letter of apology when a reporter quoted him saying that the lawsuit “was unfortunate all around.” Hellman accepted the apology, which was filled with admiration and praise, telling him, “I am deeply glad we can continue in great friendship with each other.”167
Some took sides on the grounds that the rich, vindictive Lillian wanted to pursue the lawsuit merely to bankrupt McCarthy. Hellman, irascible and old, they suggested, wanted only revenge. Rumor spread that the lawsuit would cripple McCarthy financially and wreck her health.168 Hellman had little sympathy. “Quite simply I feel I was treated in a most brutal fashion and, while I have no desire to ruin her, or anybody else, I have heard no words of apology or attempt to make one.”169 Lillian, McCarthy’s friends carped, was represented without char
ge by her old friend Ephraim London. But McCarthy was no victim. Though she worried about the money the lawsuit would cost, especially if it went to trial, she desperately wanted victory. Two years into the proceedings, she received a $25,000 contribution from an anonymous “angel” and around the same time bought herself a new fur coat.170 Lillian insisted throughout the entire ordeal that money was not the object. Honor was at stake. McCarthy’s assertions of lying, she argued, constituted the last straw in a long campaign to undermine the integrity that Hellman held so dear. Egged on by friends, one of whom wrote, “Here’s hoping you get every nickel she’s got,” she withheld public comment about McCarthy’s refusal to say she was sorry.171 In the meantime, and over London’s objections, Hellman sent several checks to cover some of the cost of court expenses. “Please, please, please,” she wrote to London, “If you do not accept any money from me, I will become an even greater cripple than I am.”172
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