1983: She grew increasingly frail. (Photofest)
All this took second place to the most forceful argument against the suit, and perhaps the one that rankled most. Increasingly, the literati focused their discontent on what they viewed as Hellman’s attack on freedom of expression. Hellman’s suit, insisted her detractors and some of her friends, violated an unspoken code of writers. As Gellhorn put the case to McCarthy, “Miss H, by resorting to libel law, has broken an ancient and noble tradition of writers, which is to call each other any names they like, in print, insult not law being the proper behavior.”173 Herself the victim of blacklisting, Hellman was now thought to be engaged in muffling the free expression of others, leading some to say that she embraced the First Amendment only in her own defense. When Hellman dismissed Stephen Spender’s support of Mary McCarthy as coming from someone who had “long been a member of the anti-Hellman group,” he responded quickly.174 He had never heard of an “anti-Hellman group,” he told her, and then later explained his opposition to the suit. “I think such cases, whatever the provocation, lower the status of literature. A writer, after all, is someone who believes in the power of words, and if he wishes to defend himself he can do so in language without resort to the law.”175 Others thought the suit could have devastating effects. “Should it be successful,” Charles Collingwood wrote to McCarthy, sympathetically, “it would have the most inhibiting effect on critical comment within whose bounds of propriety your observations certainly fell.”176
Hellman, bothered by this line of attack, consulted Burke Marshall, distinguished law professor at Yale and an active member of the Committee for Public Justice. Marshall gave her little comfort, but he was in an odd position. He was an old friend of Renata Adler, once Lillian’s protégé and now on McCarthy’s side. Lillian turned to him in 1983, as the suit dragged on, to ask whether he could support her position in the suit. Marshall replied in the negative. “I think the courts should be left out of that kind of business and that it should be left up to dispute in other places.”177
Through almost four years, while the lawsuit bounced around, Hellman grew increasingly frail. What was left of her eyesight diminished rapidly. Sometimes she could hardly breathe. Often she had to be carried in and out of public appearances that she stoutly refused to cancel. Still, she had one more victory to savor. McCarthy’s lawyers tried to get the courts to issue a summary judgment against the case on the grounds that Lillian Hellman, as a public figure, was fair game for criticism. Ephraim London responded by claiming that Hellman was not a public figure at all. The claim drew loud chortles from some of Hellman’s enemies. But it persuaded Judge Harold Baer Jr., who, after many months of delay, refused the plea. “In addition to being a person of general notoriety,” Baer wrote in May of 1984, “a public figure must be someone who is involved in a public issue, question, or controversy.”178 Siding with Hellman, the judge reminded the participants of McCarthy’s deposition. Hellman might not consciously have lied, McCarthy conceded there. She was not speaking of “ ‘prevarication per se’ or a conscious intent to state an untruth.” “I don’t mean literally nothing when I say ‘nothing in her writing rings true,’ “ McCarthy said. “I don’t mean of course … say perhaps 70 per cent of her factual statements are probably true … I mean the general tone of unconvincingness and falseness.” Asked directly if she thought that all of Hellman’s writings were in fact lies, she replied: “I would say, no.”179 Under the circumstances, to call Hellman a “dishonest writer,” the judge concluded, “crosses the boundary between opinion and fact.”180
Both sides now regeared for action. McCarthy promptly hired distinguished First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to represent her in court. Hellman claimed to relish the court trial that would soon occur. The trial never happened. Hellman grew sicker and more irascible by the day, and a month later she was gone. McCarthy, hearing the news, expressed sorrow only that she would not get her day in court.
Chapter 11
Life After Death
Life owes it to you to die your own way.
—Lillian Hellman, Harvard lecture, 1961
You don’t necessarily have to like her, but you should understand her. It’s more about empathy than sympathy.
—William Luce
It may be that her life, with its strong loyalties, combative courage and abiding hatred of injustice, will eventually be considered her greatest theatre.
—Robert Brustein
Lillian Hellman died in her home on Martha’s Vineyard on June 30, 1984, a few days after her seventy-ninth birthday. The night before, Bill Styron carried her into a small dinner party at John and Barbara Hersey’s. She ate and drank almost nothing, but she was in good spirits and planned a fishing expedition for the next morning. Anecdote has it that she propositioned a guest at dinner, inviting him back to her place for a nightcap. He declined the playful request. She returned home after dinner to the care of her nurse and housekeeper and died quietly in the night. The coroner listed the death as coronary arrest, but most likely the underlying cause was the emphysema from which she had suffered for years.
Her death was no surprise. Over a period of several years, Hellman had become increasingly frail. Bronchial problems caused by her ubiquitous cigarettes impeded her blood circulation and contributed to heart failure; a series of small strokes reduced her ability to walk and eventually to eat by herself; glaucoma and cataracts reduced her eyesight to near zero. Hellman’s eyesight became so poor by the winter of 1980 that she could no longer read a printed page. At that point her helpers began to write in large spiral-bound notebooks, using bold markers to make block letters. The notebooks contain schedules and plans, as well as reminders to Lillian. The one she kept from February to March 1980, while she was in California, includes a poignant comment on her troubles that winter. A single page, written in block letters, contained the words: “MARY MACARTHY QUOTE ON THE DICK CAVETT SHOW: EVERY WORD SHE WRITES IS A LIE INCLUDING ‘AND’ AND ‘THE.’”1
That was the winter that Hellman spent in San Francisco, where she celebrated the publication of Three, a single-volume edition of her memoirs. Billy Abrahams, her editor, arranged a tribute to the book at the Marin County Veterans’ Center and agreed that he and Peter Feibleman would host the event. As it turned out, Hellman was too weak to make the trip without help, and Abrahams and Feibleman together assisted her onto the stage. Abrahams introduced her to an enthusiastic crowd, telling them that she was ill but that “she said if she had to, she’d come by ambulance. And in fact, she did.”2 Her appearance, said Abrahams, demonstrated her “indomitability.” Peter Feibleman pitched in to read a section of Pentimento for her. Hellman read two pages from a new afterword she wrote for Scoundrel Time. “I am angrier now than I hope I will ever be again,” the piece concluded, and then went on to say that she wanted to take the moral stand she tried to avoid taking when she wrote Scoundrel Time. “I never want to live again to watch people turn into liars and cowards and others into frightened, silent collaborators. And to hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did.”3 The audience gave her a rousing ovation, and Lillian left in a limousine followed by two ambulances, one of them filled with friends, just in case.
The next day, the writer Kay Boyle wrote to her friend Jessica Mitford, also Lillian’s friend. She was, she wrote, shattered by the “macabre performance” of the previous evening: “The ambulance might have been a hearse from which they lifted the poor, desperately ill, emaciated creature that Lillian has become.” She blamed William Abrahams and the publishing house for “its total horror of exploitation.” And she spluttered that “that terrible liquid cough that shook her was like a sound from the grave.”4 Little did she suspect that Lillian had in fact insisted on appearing.
Lillian gave everyone trouble in those years, her irascibility and impatience rising with increasing infirmity. Friends withdrew from her withering tongue: embittered by her stubborn refusal to abandon the suit against Mary McCarthy, they stopped s
eeing her. But many remained loyal, forgiving her temper tantrums and reveling in her continuing ability to make fun of everything and everyone.5 Unable to withstand northern winters, she moved each year to California, where she took rooms for herself and her nurses at the Beverly Wilshire hotel or rented houses from absent friends. The nurses who cared for her wrote of their plight to Rita Wade, Hellman’s secretary, who coordinated their efforts from New York. After one particularly difficult period at the Beverly Wilshire, one wrote to describe the “absolutely incredible” and “miserable” time that Hellman had given her and her coworker. The registered nurse who replaced them the following year wondered if she could survive Hellman’s “mental abuse.” She had, she reported, won one battle: she convinced Lillian that no nurse could sleep, night after night, on a couch in the sitting room. She persuaded Hellman to hire an aide to relieve her at night. “I am going out of my mind,” she protested. “What am I doing as Lillian Hellman’s personal slave? Pray for me!!”6 All the nurses complained of Lillian’s tightfistedness about money, the requirement that they send each receipt, no matter how small, to Rita on the day it was acquired, and Hellman’s insistence that they notify Rita immediately if they cashed checks. The nurses, with Rita’s acquiescence, passively resisted these instructions, notifying Rita when and as it seemed appropriate.
Over a period of about eighteen months, Hellman ate less and less and lost weight rapidly until she was down to about eighty pounds. Still she accepted invitations, allowed her friends to carry her from cars to restaurants, and invited guests for dinner. Often she was, as her friend Robert Brustein described, “carried into the house, placed in a chair, and fed her food,” little more than “a bedridden Job imprisoned inside a broken bag of bones.”7 In California, Hannah Weinstein came to visit while she could. In New York and on the Vineyard, Annabel Nichols read to her several times a week, providing one of Hellman’s few sources of pleasure. Her nurse described her at the end to Peter Feibleman as a woman who “is half paralyzed, legally blind; she’s having rage attacks that are a result of strokes; She cries at night; she can’t help that. She can’t eat. She can’t sleep. She can’t walk.”8 And still she could hold a room with her offbeat humor, or interrupt a dinner conversation with a withering disagreement that always began with a rasping “forgive me” before she launched a tirade. Most of her friends thought she survived these last years not on food but on anger.
Everyone remembered the anger. To be sure, Lillian had been bad-tempered and irascible all her life. But, as Brustein noted, before her illness “her anger was more focused; after, it became a free-floating, cloud-swollen tempest that rained on friend and foe alike.”9 Peter Feibleman agreed; he believed that her personality changed after the small strokes she suffered in the mid-seventies. Most of her good friends took the anger in stride, understanding that it was not directed at them personally but rather, as John Hersey described it, constituted “a rage of the mind against human injustice.”10 Anger, Hersey thought, was “her essence.” Bill Styron agreed. He, among others, bridled at her quarrelsome nature, regularly refusing to speak to her after a spat about one insignificant thing or another. He recalled one such incident over how to cook a Smithfield ham that kept them apart for an entire summer.11 In the end Styron, like Hersey, believed the “measure of her anger was really not personal, but cosmic, directed at all the hateful things she saw as menacing to the world.”12
1983: Still she could hold a room. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)
To the end, Hellman retained her capacity for fun—the continuing, wicked humor—that her friends cherished. At their last dinner together, William Styron recalled, “We carved up a few mutually detested writers and one or two mediocre politicians and an elderly deceased novelist whom she specifically detested … I remember that gorgeous cackle of laughter which always erupted at moments when we were together … which followed some beautiful harpooning of a fraud or a ninth-rater.”13 Like Styron, those who spent the most time with her balanced anger against this capacity for humor. Alex Szogyi, a Hunter College professor, caught her two-sidedness. She was “naturally contentious and cantankerous,” he wrote, “in a manner that was humorous or disturbing, depending on one’s proximity.”14 Her old friend Jules Feiffer commented on “the girlishness, the brattishness and incredible sense of fun.” Asked what she missed most about Lillian, Maureen Stapleton replied, “She made me laugh more than anybody I’ve ever known.” She was “deeply funny. Deeply funny.”15
Vanity and pride persisted even as Hellman’s body deteriorated. Each morning she got up, dressed carefully, and applied heavy makeup and mascara.16 Too ill to go very far or to do very much, she nevertheless surrounded herself with all the acroutrements of elegance to which she was accustomed. On one two-month trip to California, she instructed Rita Wade to send her four handbags (gray, red, the Blair Clark bag, Hannah’s brown bag) and three evening bags (rose, black, and gold) along with an assortment of shoes and coats.17 Her nurse, convinced that Hellman did not need heavy coats in California, suggested that Rita simply ignore that part of the instruction. Just days before she died, Hellman showed up at a party at Patricia Neal’s house, looking divine in a “magnificent Russian amethyst necklace.”18 Regularly she lied about her age. Bill Styron recalled that she deducted six or seven years just days before she died. She had been doing this all her life, Styron thought, “not as vanity, but as a kind of demonstration that she was hanging on to life.”19
Peter Feibleman—her friend, for awhile her lover, and the man whom she later called her son—learned of Lillian’s death in his Los Angeles home. Though he knew she was close to the end, he had been waiting impatiently in California for the galleys of their coauthored cookbook to arrive. He wanted to bring them to her. In some ways, the cookbook, Eating Together, effectively capped her life. Unable to see, she dictated most of it and listened as recipes and portions of it were read back to her. Many of the recipes emerged from memories of New Orleans; others came from her travels over Europe and her New England experiences. A sprinkling (added as an afterthought) came from Hannah Weinstein’s Jewish kitchen. They were all peppered with commentary, not about food but about the occasions on which she had eaten the dishes and with whom. Because the two authors could not agree on which dishes to feature, they divided the book into two parts labeled “Her Way” and “His Way.” It was the only kind of collaboration she could tolerate. Peter arrived on the Vineyard two days late, without the manuscript, and just in time to participate in the funeral arrangements.
1981: To the end, Hellman retained her capacity for fun. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)
The funeral was an impressive affair. Two hundred people, many of them celebrities, some of them her Vineyard neighbors, gathered under a crop of pines at Abel’s Hill cemetery in the village of Chilmark to say good-bye. The theme of the day was not her anger or humor or vanity or love, though these were often mentioned, so much as her ability and desire to communicate. Jules Feiffer recalled her capacity to speak across generations, “to effortlessly engage the old, the young, the middle-aged, the left, the middle, the right, and just about anyone except on occasion the women friends of the men she admired.” Patricia Neal remembered her eagerness to find out about her daughter Lucy’s plans and noted that “she was very eager to help the next generation.” Jerome Wiesner, the former president of MIT who had helped to found the Committee for Public Justice, remarked on “her special caring for students and her excitement in helping them to learn and grow and … the enormous enthusiasm and love with which they responded.” And Peter Feibleman cried as he recalled her last conversation with him. When he asked how she felt, she replied that she was suffering from “the worst case of writers’ block I ever had.”20
Lillian Hellman’s body may have been in her grave, but quickly it became apparent that she would find no rest there. A residue of ill will, still very much alive, continued to corrode an already damaged reputation. Within days after her death, the quarrels about her name and her r
eputation resumed. Letters poured into William Abrahams (who, in addition to being her editor at Little, Brown and her friend was also one of three literary executors), whose agreement to undertake an authorized biography of Hellman had just been announced. Many of the letters praised and complimented her “courageous stand against the infamous [Joseph] McCarthy.”21 Others suggested that controversy would continue. “You will be at the mercy of this frightful old harridan as an arbiter of verification for allegations, often contradictory, which she commonly made and which history repeatedly refutes,” wrote one New Yorker.22 “Writing an authorized biography of Lillian Hellman is like trying to square a circle. I feel sorry for you,” wrote another correspondent.23
The notion that she was a liar not only persisted but took on a life of its own. Just days before she died, questions of Hellman’s veracity resurfaced in a Commentary article written by Samuel McCracken, which purported to establish definitively that “Julia” was mere fiction.24 Christopher Hitchens affirmed and sealed Hellman’s fate as a liar in a few paragraphs that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement two days after the funeral. There he declared that McCracken demonstrated “every verifiable incident” of the Julia episode “false or unconvincing.”25 Though he heard about Hellman’s death before the piece went to press, he wrote, he “saw no reason not to leave” the piece as it stood. No one, he thought, would disagree that she was a liar.
Hellman did not think of her stories as lies. She was, after all, a dramatist who used the material at hand to invent tales. She made up stories about herself, her mother’s family, her father’s past. All her life she used the experiences of friends, wars, and journalistic forays to make up stories. Like Ibsen, she believed that drama was meant to make a point, not just to entertain. She never claimed a good memory; she always said her books were portraits, inventions, so she wrote memoirs that were not memoirs, fulfilling the mandate that memoir is the art of lying. If her work exaggerated or misplaced incidents, or engaged in self-dramatization, she believed that she had lived a life of integrity, honesty, and trust. The difference between her opinion of herself and the opinions of others earned her the tag of hypocrite.
A Difficult Woman Page 44
