A Difficult Woman
Page 45
Then there was the moralism. That Lillian was a moralist, nobody would want to deny. That she proclaimed her moral principles loudly—in her plays and her memoirs and at every public opportunity—must have irked friends and enemies alike. She fully earned the labels of self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement that her critics leveled at her. But these labels might have disappeared after her death had she chosen not to replay her courageous stance before HUAC and to taunt others about their behavior then. She was, after all, a woman whose memoirs had been praised as “moral beacons for the generation coming of age, telling of an effort to remain truthful to one’s convictions in the face of the forces of dishonesty and repression.”26 The claim to a higher morality could only have been humiliating to the targets of Hellman’s attack.
The label of Stalinism, too, became indelibly affixed, plausible because it melded with that of the liar. Hitchens fended off potential criticism of his easy acceptance of McCracken’s piece, which, he admitted, “goes on to cite examples of her lack of scruple in the political world.” Such criticism, he wrote with skillful innuendo, would come from members of “Miss Hellman’s faction” who “will say that it is motivated by the dislike of her opinions which inspires the rest of the magazine.” The New York Times received letters that insisted that even as Hellman was being praised as a great playwright, she be remembered for her skill “in moralizing even at the expense of truth, honor, and common sense.” This was a woman, the writer reminded readers, who “accepted the murderous crimes of J. Stalin, never questioned.”27 Soon, identifying Hellman as a “Stalinist” became simply a matter of course, lightly tossed off as one among many adjectives used to locate her presence.28
After death, every crack and crevice in Hellman’s literary record seemed to reveal a Stalinist cast. If she had refused in 1953 to support a presentation of Anne Frank’s story that was specifically Jewish, it must be that she was not only anti-Semitic but that she was then trying to cover up the deaths of Jewish nationalists in the Soviet Union.29 If her plays were melodramatic, wrote one distinguished biographer, so were her politics.30 In her will, she created three trusts: one to protect her piece of the beach on the Vineyard for the use of local children; a second, named for her, to help deserving writers anywhere in the world. Hellman intended the third fund, named for Dashiell Hammett, to be used for the “promotion and advancement of political, social and economic equality, civil rights and civil liberties.” She requested that fiduciaries distribute the revenue from this fund in accordance with “the political, social and economic beliefs, which of course were radical, of the late Dashiell Hammett who was a believer in the doctrines of Karl Marx.”31 The clause demonstrated to all and sundry that Hellman herself continued to be a believer.32
Attributions of Stalinism quickly became part of Hellman’s public reputation, their ugly implications tarnishing many who had never met her. When conservative pundit William Buckley sought to impugn the reputation of presidential candidate Bill Clinton by going after Hillary Rodham Clinton, he traced her association with leftist groups. Mrs. Clinton, had, he wrote, chaired the New World Foundation (“one of the most left-leaning foundations in America”), on whose board had sat one Adrian DeWind, who in the 1970s had been a member of the Committee for Public Justice, an organization “formed to attack the FBI” and whose founder was none other than “Lillian Hellman, a member of the Communist Party well after she reached the age of puberty.”33
Soon Lillian Hellman’s name evoked a visceral, negative response. She had pretended to moralism, argued her detractors, and spent a lifetime railing against silence in the face of evil. Yet she had remained silent before HUAC rather than speaking up. To call her a hypocrite was simply to identify what was the case. Hellman, critics argued, never repented her self-righteousness, her lies, and her self-aggrandizements. To label her a communist was to offer a simple description. Had she not, after all, “year after year, held the Soviets blameless for all their crimes?”34 Nor did she get credit for courage. “She was awarded laurels for valor,” wrote William Wright, one of her biographers, “in spite of others quietly going to jail for the same, but less well-worded bravery.”35 So well accepted did these assertions become that within a decade after her death, the mention of her name produced vituperative, visceral responses. None but a fool could believe she was other than an apologist for Stalin. Friends and admirers retreated in the face of the onslaught. Some quietly denied that Lillian had any continuing association with Stalin. Others, giving a little, defended her brilliant way with words and acknowledged that she was loath to fully acknowledge the Stalinist horror and quick to criticize those who did. Evidence to the contrary, the general consensus was captured in a 1997 biography of the Hellman-Hammett relationship, which was described by one reviewer as a chronicle “of their love affair with Stalinism.”36
Within a decade after her death, and continuing into the twenty-first century, Lillian Hellman’s name came to serve a symbolic purpose. Invoking it negatively became shorthand for designating one’s own place in the political universe, a way of capturing what had gone wrong with the twentieth century, of explaining one’s own behavior in the face of evil. To seize on Hellman and attack her created solidarity with those who had always opposed communism and who had not succumbed to the politically naïve temptations of a New Left, who, with the dawning of neoconservatism, stood solid in the face of the nation’s enemies. To assail her revealed the assailant as a patriot, polishing his image and turning accusations of cowardice and betrayal into the virtuous partisan. This was precisely the line taken by some of Hellman’s detractors. After her death, but not before, film producer Elia Kazan, who had named names and subsequently suffered from Hellman’s accusations in Scoundrel Time, vented his fury on “this bitch with balls” who spent the last fifteen years of her life “canonizing herself.” As if exonerating himself from responsibility, he continued, “I believe now she wanted me to become the villain I became.”37
In this context, Hellman’s sexuality became fair game: just another example of her perverse and unattractive nature, another source of resentment. It wasn’t just that she slept with men. She was plain, and she slept with whomever she pleased, and then remained friends with them afterward. She was plain and she claimed a great love who reciprocated her affection; she was plain, and even at the end of her life she attracted men to her side. “Most women as plain as Hellman would have slunk off into a comfortable marriage or sublimated their amorous side altogether,” wrote William Wright.38 But Lillian had done the opposite, turning herself into a seductive and sexually attractive woman. This clearly galled some men. Kazan accused her of using sex to gain her political ends. “She was able to ease what she seemed to have considered her misfortune of birth … by gathering men around her, living testimonials to her allure.” Kazan continued, revealing his offended manhood with every word: “Once, it is said, she kept a house in which she provided hospitality for a cadre of vigorous intellectuals … the chosen”—he went on to name those involved in this household, and claimed “to admire the lady for providing herself with this mini-harem.” This was the kind of setup many males have secretly yearned for, he insisted, extending tribute to Hellman for doing what other men and woman were not brave enough to do.39
Distasteful stories about Lillian’s sexuality surfaced from every corner. Elia Kazan avowed that she had come on to him but that he had resisted—he would have preferred someone else.40 Stanley Hart insisted that he had to sleep with her to get her signature on a contract with Little, Brown, and that he left her when the sexual interest palled.41 Occasional newspaper columns insinuated that there was something odd about Hellman’s penchant for young men, or hinted of Hellman’s secret love for women: “Hellman detractors, of which there are many,” one insisted, “have often hinted that she had lesbian tendencies and point out her play ‘The Children’s Hour’ and the film ‘Julia’ as examples of her fondness for unusually close female relationships.”42 At the same time,
other detractors described with complete certainty her inability to get along with women.
There is no doubt that she was a difficult woman, impassioned, tempestuous, transgressive with regard to gender roles. “She went after what she wanted the way a man does,” Elia Kazan commented.43 She was demanding, peremptory, and often rude. And she could be vindictive and sometimes vengeful. Such qualities, often forgiven in death, might have been judged differently had Hellman not been female, or a displaced southerner, or come from a Jewish background, or appealed to highbrow rather than middlebrow audiences. But Hellman was all of these things, and in acting against the grain she distanced herself from communities of support, turning into the rebellious individual she always imagined herself to be.
Her loud and contentious nature identified her, stereotypically, as a Jew, as did her concern for money onstage and off. But Hellman’s Jewishness was by no means her most dominant identity, nor did it constitute a religion or a politics. Rather it was a source of comfort and reassurance. So she alienated those who identified with Jewish spiritual content as well as those who supported the state of Israel. If she thought of herself as a southerner, she reserved her southern charm and hospitality for those she cared about. In private she exhibited joy at creating hospitable environments and sharing her talent as a cook. In public, Hellman deployed her southern heritage like a trump card to claim the last word against racists and bullies.
The speed with which Hellman’s image came to personify evil in some minds did not entirely mask her skills as a playwright and memoirist. If she was the most evil of people to some, she was still a treasure to others. Her continuing popularity and her ability to attract an audience rankled many. William Luce’s play Lillian, mounted just months after her death, drew reactions that spoke to both of these. Conceived while she was still alive, the play linked together passages from Hellman’s three memoirs. Before she died, she listened as the finished version was read to her, and she approved. Several actresses turned down the role before Luce showed the script to Zoe Caldwell, who immediately accepted the challenge. Caldwell’s husband, the distinguished Robert Whitehead, agreed to direct the one-woman play. Whitehead had earlier directed some of Arthur Miller’s plays with no political fallout.
There was no question that the play effectively captured Lillian, nor that Caldwell’s acting brilliantly rendered what one fan described as “the soul of your Lillian.” Caldwell prepared for the role carefully, consulting with her friends and visiting Hellman’s old New Orleans home. She, who did not smoke, puffed continuously onstage and off; she manicured her nails in just the careful way Lillian would have done. Two hours before curtain every night, she made herself up by fitting a large molded nose to her face; each night she wondered why Lillian, always impeccably dressed and vain of her appearance, had not had her nose fixed. She concluded that Lillian wore the nose as “a badge of courage.”44 Before every performance, Caldwell splashed on a little of the tea-rose perfume Lillian generally wore. Her performance captured Lillian so well that the actress disappeared into her. “I saw a woman whom I shall never forget become a woman whom I have long admired and have never forgotten,” wrote one fan. “Mesmerizing … brilliant … extraordinary,” wrote another.45 The one-woman play toured the Midwest and parts of the South before opening in New York in January 1986, then going on tour again in both Europe and America.
Despite the fact that Caldwell so effectively captured Lillian Hellman, leading audiences to share the pathos of her childhood and her life in the theater and with Hammett—or perhaps because of it—the play risked once again popularizing a woman now buried. Critics, unhappy with seeing Hellman resurrected, took the occasion, in the words of one of them, “to say more about Lillian Hellman than to discuss the biodrama they were offered.”46 Again and again they followed glowing descriptions of Caldwell’s performance and Whitehead’s direction with attacks on Luce and on Lillian herself. The performance might be a tour de force, one critic averred, but he did not understand why it avoided “the issue of whether she was a Communist at any time in her life.”47 Luce, said another, “misrepresented Hellman by glossing over the more controversial aspects of her life and by whitewashing her notorious career as a playwright, a mendacious memoirist, a relentless Stalinist, and a vindictive, self-serving celebrity.”48 Luce responded by telling everyone that Hellman had final approval of the script: “She wouldn’t let me use any words of my own. I call it a job of carpentry.”49 But he stood by his work.
Discontent with Hellman surfaced once again as reviewers commented on her “profound contempt for virtually everyone with whom she came into contact” or noted “her bitterness and petty vindictiveness,” her “steely presence,” or the “meanness and transparency” of her nature. “The larger issue,” one thought, “is how such a vile person could have exercised so much influence on a culture she so haughtily despised.”50 In the New York Times, Frank Rich savaged the play. Caldwell, he began, “surely captured the seething physical presence of Hellman.” But Caldwell was “chained to a sanitized Hellman portrait,” Rich continued, a portrait that omitted her “controversial attack on fellow liberals with whom she parted ways” as well as “her scathing portraits of friendly witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee.”51 When the play opened in London the following fall, critics followed suit. The play failed to pay attention to Hellman’s politics, trumpeted the Observer, headlining a full-page review, THE LIFE AND LIES OF LILLIAN HELLMAN. Caldwell’s performance was brilliant: “The only snag is that Hellman’s autobiographical works are full of lies.” Nor could the author resist throwing in a negative comment about Hellman’s politics: “She certainly never said a word against Stalin until long after Khruschev’s denunciation; and she very rarely criticized Russia.”52
Like a cat with nine lives, Lillian Hellman survived this criticism. Her work continued to reach the stage, repeatedly revived into the turn of the new century. Regional theaters turned to The Autumn Garden and The Children’s Hour in the 1990s. The decade after the new century began, New York theaters mounted major productions of Another Part of the Forest, Toys in the Attic, and The Little Foxes. In London in 2011, a new production of The Children’s Hour drew packed audiences. Late-night television regularly showed the films into which Hellman had poured her heart: Dead End Kids, Dark Angel, The Little Foxes, and The Children’s Hour all became staples. And Hellman herself continued to inspire public attention. Nearly twenty years after Hellman’s death, Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends (a reflection on the relationship of Mary McCarthy to Hellman) hit the boards. The play, which opened in New York in December 2002, was described by one reviewer as “an uncomfortable cross between vaudeville and conventional musical comedy.”53 Another called its story that of “a feud between two politically engaged, exceptionally feisty women within a literary world of men.”54 In what may well be the supreme irony, in 2010 the Committee for Recognizing Women in Theater established its “Lilly Award” in honor of Lillian Hellman, the playwright who never wanted to be placed in the company of “women playwrights.” Gloria Steinem offered the invocation at the first award ceremony.
If we can attribute to Hellman’s persona some of the virulence of the charges against her and her continuing hold on the American imagination, much of the explanation for her continuing presence surely lies in the twentieth-century moment. During her lifetime, Hellman’s political positions remained remarkably consistent, taking on different colors as the political climate changed. Critic Richard Bernstein has noted that “the posthumous reexamination has to do with the playing out of old battles between American liberals and conservatives, or to put this another way, between anti-Communists and those who felt that American anti-Communism was more dangerous than Communism itself.”55 Hellman belonged in the latter camp, along with a goodly number of the intellectuals of her generation. But in the late twentieth century, victory went to those who defined communism as the enemy of national security. Each new revelation of espi
onage, every document that revealed a close relationship between the Comintern and the CPUSA, strengthened the hand of anticommunists. Though most American radicals, like Hellman, never involved themselves in party activities, the idea that government investigatory committees had been right to demand retraction, apology, and information took hold. Even after the communist threat had passed, her critics remained furious that Hellman had never been called to task for failing to acknowledge its seriousness. Hellman was forever viewed through the lens of a persistent communist threat.
Patterns of association that seemed ordinary or benign to observers of the forties and even of the fifties turned, by the late seventies, into evidence of guilt. In Hellman’s case, the unbroken pattern stemmed from her fateful 1930s decisions with respect to the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow trials of 1937, and her refusal to denounce the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. In the eyes of detractors, these demonstrated her commitment not only to communism but to Stalin. She committed further sin, in the eyes of detractors, when she remained silent about that commitment in her appearance before HUAC. That made her a liar and justified unsubstantiated assertions of “fealty to a foreign power.” All the while, so the story went, she never wavered in her sympathy for Stalin. That made her an irredeemably evil person. Worse, instead of silently suffering the slings and arrows of persecution, she rewrote the story, turning her escape from a jail sentence into a moral claim to courage and heroism. This tendency to self-aggrandizement, most readily confirmed by what was seen as the theft of the Julia story from an innocent woman, was in this context simple confirmation of Hellman’s evil nature. To those who saw the world through the schisms of the twentieth century, Hellman’s effort to redeem her good name from Mary McCarthy constituted “the mark of high Stalinism.”56