A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  53 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Wellesley Address,” March 22, 1951, box 43, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  54 Hellman, Four Plays, xiii.

  55 On her gift for drawing character, see Adler, Lillian Hellman, 19.

  56 Hellman, Four Plays, xiii.

  57 Hellman, Pentimento, 193.

  58 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 89.

  59 LH to “Dearest Art,” no date, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

  60 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 83.

  61 Beebe, “An Adult’s Hour,” 2.

  62 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 68.

  63 Hellman, Four Plays, x.

  64 Lillian Hellman, typescript, “The Children’s Hour,” 1.

  65 Lillian Hellman, “The Time of the Foxes,” New York Times (October 22, 1967): sec. 2, 1.

  66 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 83.

  67 Ibid.

  68 Hellman, “Typescript: Swarthmore Address,” 6, 7.

  69 Reminiscences of Harold Clurman (1979), on page 131 in the Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection.

  70 Hellman, Pentimento, 202–3.

  71 Hellman quoted in Gretchen Cryer, “Where Are the Women Playwrights?” New York Times (May 20, 1973): 129.

  72 Jerome Weidman, “Lillian Hellman Reflects Upon the Changing Theater,” Dramatists Guild Quarterly 7 (Winter 1970): 22.

  73 Walter Kerr, “Whose Play Is It?” New York Times (October 12, 1969): SM66.

  74 Remiscences of Harold Clurman (1979), on page 132, CCOH.

  75 Austin Pendleton, interview by author, December 12, 2009; and Pendleton to author, personal communication, August 14, 2011.

  76 Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 1,” 10–11.

  77 Austin Pendleton, interview by author, December 12, 2009.

  78 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 72; Hellman, Pentimento, 162–63.

  79 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 68.

  80 Hellman, “The Time of the Foxes,” sec. 2, 1.

  81 Miller, Timebends, 231.

  82 Weidman, “Lillian Hellman Reflects,” 20.

  83 This idea first put forward by Edith J. R. Isaacs, “Lillian Hellman, A Playwright on the March,” Theatre Arts 28 (January 1944): 20.

  84 LH to Arthur Kober, 1935, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

  85 Beebe, “An Adult’s Hour,” 2.

  86 Joseph Wood Krutch, “Unpleasant Play,” Nation (February 25, 1939): 244; James Eastman, “Image of American Destiny: The Little Foxes,” Players 48 (1973): 70–73.

  87 Beebe, “Stage Asides,” in Jackson Bryer, Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 7.

  88 Transcript from interviews by Gary Waldhorn and Robert Murray, “Yale Reports,” June 5, 1966, box 30, folder 10, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  89 Lillian Hellman, “Theatre Pictures: Excerpts from a Theatrical Journal, Remembered in Subacid Tone,” Esquire (August 1973): 64.

  90 Lillian Hellman, The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 188.

  91 Atkinson, “Children’s Hour,” sec. 10, p. 1.

  92 John Mason Brown, “Tallulah Bankhead and ‘The Little Foxes,’” New York Post (March 11, 1939): 8. Brown credited Bankhead with “creating the kind of villainess even the Grand Guignol has never been able to match.”

  93 Brooks Atkinson, “Tallulah Bankhead appearing in Lillian Hellman’s Drama of the South, ‘The Little Foxes,’” New York Times (February 16, 1939): 16.

  94 Joseph Wood Krutch, American Drama Since 1918: An Informal History (New York: G. Braziller, 1967), 132

  95 Richard Watts, “The Little Foxes,” New York Herald Tribune (February 16, 1939): 14.

  96 Stark Young, “Watch on the Rhine,” New Republic (April 14, 1941): 498.

  97 Hellman, Four Plays, x–xi.

  98 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 3,” spring 1961, box 44, folder 6, 5, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  99 The critic Barrett Clark agrees with Hellman on this point: “Melodrama is melodramatic not because it is violent or striking but because it uses violence for violence’ sake.” See Barrett H. Clark, “Lillian Hellman,” The English Journal 33 (December 1944): 524. Thanks to Emma Hulse for making this connection.

  100 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 70; Richard Stern, “An Interview with Lillian Hellman,” May 21, 1958, box 1, folder 23, Richard Stern Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

  101 Hellman, Pentimento, 180. See also Lillian Hellman, “Back of Those Foxes,” New York Times (February 26, 1939): sec. 9, pp. 1, 2, and Richard Lockridge, “Lillian Hellman’s ‘The Little Foxes’ Opens at the National Theater,” New York Sun (February 16, 1939): 12. Lockridge described the plot as touching melodrama now and again, but “touches it effectively.”

  102 Thanks to Anita Chapman for pointing out that The Little Foxes took on new life after the arrest of Bernard Madoff for constructing a financial Ponzi scheme in 2008.

  103 John Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times: A Survey of the Men, Materials, and Movements in the Modern Theatre (New York: Crown, 1954), 78.

  104 Adler, Lillian Hellman, 17.

  105 Richard Watts Jr. “The Theater: Miss Hellman’s Play,” New York Herald Tribune (February 26, 1939): sec. 10, 1.

  106 Lillian Hellman, “Author Jabs the Critic,” New York Times (December 15, 1946): 3.

  107 Walter Kerr, “Voltaire’s Candide as a Light Opera,” New York Herald Tribune (December 26, 1956): sec. 4, 1.

  108 Margaret Harriman, “Miss Lilly of New Orleans,” New Yorker (November 8, 1941): 22.

  109 Beebe, “Stage Aside,” in Bryer, ed., Conversations, 10.

  110 George Jean Nathan, “Playwrights in Petticoats,” American Mercury (June 1941): 750.

  111 Harriman, “Miss Lilly of New Orleans,” 22.

  4. Politics Without Fear

  1 Peter Feibleman, interview by author, August 4, 2002.

  2 This story is drawn from Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982), Christopher Dudley Wheaton, “A History of the Screen Writers’ Guild (1920–1942): The Writers’ Quest for a Freely Negotiated Basic Agreement” (doctoral thesis, University of Southern California, January 1974), and Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992).

  3 Reminiscences of Albert Hackett (1958), on page 26 in the Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection.

  4 Wheaton, “A History of the Screen Writers’ Guild (1920–1942),” 82.

  5 LH to Arthur Kober, June 1934, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

  6 Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 280.

  7 On the history of the Popular Front, see especially Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 10–12.

  8 Hammett to Mary Hammett, September 11, 1936, in Richard Layman, ed., Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921–1960 (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 107.

  9 Ibid., 111.

  10 Richard Layman, Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 171.

  11 Betsy Blair, The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood, and Paris (New York: Knopf, 2003), 195–96.

  12 Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, “Alvah Bessie,” in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, eds., Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 97.

  13 Lawson interview in Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein, The Cineaste Interviews on the Art and Politics of Cinema (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1983), 197.

  14 A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1989), 267

  15 This story is full
y explored in Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. See also Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood: 1915–1951 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990), chs. 7 and 12.

  16 Dan Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

  17 Patrick McGilligan, “Maurice Rapf,” in McGilligan and Buhle, eds., Tender Comrades, 508.

  18 This interpretation follows Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, 99–103.

  19 Philip Dunne interviewed by Douglas Bell, October 29, 1989, 142, Oral History Collection, Margaret Herrick Papers, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

  20 Ibid.

  21 Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, 172. The successful negotiating team included Dore Schary, Boris Ingster, Mary McCall Jr., Charlie Brackett, Ralph Block, and Sheridan Gibney.

  22 Reminiscences of Albert Hackett (1958), on page 26, CCOH.

  23 Ibid., 27.

  24 Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, “Allen Boretz,” in McGilligan and Buhle, eds., Tender Comrades, 115.

  25 Dalton Trumbo, Time of the Toad: A Study of Inquisition in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 7.

  26 See especially Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), ch. 6.

  27 Most elements of the act were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1957. See Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298.

  28 Larry Ceplair and Steven England, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 257.

  29 Hammett to Mary Hammett, September 11, 1936, in Layman, ed., Selected Letters, 109–10.

  30 Hellman incorrectly places this showing in March 1938 and recalls it with pleasure in An Unfinished Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 67.

  31 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, 82. On Katz, see Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996), 47–48. Katz, probably a lover of Hellman’s, was executed by the Czech Communist regime after the Second World War.

  32 Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, 82.

  33 Lillian Hellman, “A Bleached Lady,” New Masses (October 11, 1938): 21.

  34 Lillian Hellman, “Day in Spain,” New Republic (April 13, 1938): 298.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Lillian Hellman, “The Word Noble,” The Village Fair Almanac June 28–30, 1938, box 2, folder, 1938, Millen Brand Papers, 1906–1980, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University New York, NY.

  37 Lillian Hellman, “Day in Spain,” 298.

  38 D. D. Guttenplan, American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 113–14.

  39 Lillian Hellman, “The Word Noble.”

  40 Lillian Hellman, “The Lyons Den,” New York Post (July 22, 1938): 12. Clip courtesy of Justin Jackson.

  41 Edward Barsky, “Typescript: Address of Dr. Edward Barsky: Hotel Astor,” March 22, 1945, Edward Barsky Collection, box 2, folder 37, 1, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University Libraries, New York, NY.

  42 Lillian Hellman to Alvah Bessie, July 14, 1952, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Records, ALBA 019, box 12, folder 5, TL.

  43 This story is in Chapter 10.

  44 Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (New York: Counterpoint, 2005), 131–32, attributes Hellman’s political commitment and awakening to her fall 1937 trip to Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Spain.

  45 Milton Meltzer, “Hollywood Does Right by ‘The Little Foxes,’” Sunday Worker (August 24, 1941): 7.

  46 Memo submitted by Louis Budenz, no date, Investigative Name Files, box 24, “Lillian Hellman” folder, National Archives and Records Administration, RG233, Records of the House of Representatives House Un-American Activities Committee.

  47 Statement by Miss Lillian Hellman, draft, April 28, 1952, 1–2, box 71, “Lillian Hellman, 1950–57” folder, Joseph Rauh Papers, part I, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. The statement was drawn up before Hellman’s 1952 HUAC hearing but was never publicly released.

  48 “A Statement by American Progressives,” New Masses (April 3, 1938): 32.

  49 Catherine Kober Zeller, interview by author, November 11, 2009.

  50 On the complex motives behind the positions taken by intellectuals to Soviet atrocities, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  51 Quoted in Guttenplan, American Radical, 108.

  52 FBI report, “Lillian Hellman,” June 18, 1941, box 119, folder 1, 1–2, Lillian Hellman Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  53 Sam Jaffe interviewed by Barbara Hall, April 25, 1991, 264–65, Oral History Collection, Margaret Herrick Papers.

  54 “Sees Finnish Aid Imperiling Peace,” New York Times (January 21, 1940): 27

  55 Hellman’s fullest version of the story is in “An Evening with Lillian Hellman,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 27, no. 7 (April 1974): 19; a slightly different version is in Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 183.

  56 Hellman, Pentimento, 184.

  57 Typescript, “Statement by Miss Lillian Hellman,” draft, April 14, 1952, box 71, “Lillian Hellman, 1950–57,” folder, 2. Joseph Rauh Papers, LOC.

  58 This story comes from Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 5.

  59 Ibid., 401

  60 Lillian Hellman, “The Little Men in Philadelphia,” PM (June 25, 1940): 6.

  61 Several sets of these files are now located in the archives. The first set collected by Peter Benjaminson is now in box 119, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC. The second, collected by Robert Newman, was also donated to Harry Ransom Center. The William Miller Abrahams Papers, Stanford University Libraries, also includes some originals. They differ in minor ways.

  62 Hellman, Pentimento, 186.

  63 Alvah Bessie, “Watch on the Rhine,” New Masses (April 15, 1941): 26; Ralph Warner, “Watch on the Rhine: Poignant Drama of Anti-Fascist Struggle,” Daily Worker (April 4, 1941): 7.

  64 Ibid., 195.

  65 These names culled from records of the U.S. House of Representatives, House Un-American Activities Committee, Master Name Index, box 291, NARA, RG233.

  66 Memo from special agent in charge (SAC) to director, FBI, December 19, 1951, box 4, folder 3, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  67 Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), ch. 12.

  68 This event was sponsored by the women’s division of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee at the Hotel Commodore on December 14, 1943. Apparently a thousand guests lauded her for her aid to the loyalists. FBI report, box 119, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  69 FBI files, March 23, 1945, box 4, folder 3, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  70 FBI report, August 18, 1944, box 119, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  71 FBI memo, October 7, 1944, box 119, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  72 FBI report, October 14, 1944, box 119, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  73 Lillian Hellman, “Russian Diaries,” box 103, folder 3, 2–3, 4, 10, 11, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  74 Ibid., 3.

  75 Ibid., 10, 11.

  76 Lillian Hellman, “I Meet the Front-Line Russians,” Collier’s (March 31, 1945): 68; Lillian Hellman, “Russian Diaries,” 6.

  77 Raisa Orlova, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983), 117.

  78 Hellman, “I Meet the Front-Line Russians,” 71. For Hellman’s behavior at the front, see Raisa Orlova, Memoirs, 116–17.

  79 Lillian Hellman, “I Meet the Front-Line Russians,” 71. In
An Unfinished Woman, 163, the gift is described as “a cigarette lighter made from a gun barrel.”

  80 FBI memos, January 2, 1945, February 9, 1945, March 27, 1945, May 17, 1945. Copies of these files are located in box 74, folder 1, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  81 SAC, New York, to director, FBI, March 17, 1947, box 119, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  5. An American Jew

  1 On issues of identity, see Judith Smith, Visions of Belonging (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Matthew Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and especially David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

  2 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982), 251.

  3 Edmund Wilson, The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 313.

  4 Mary McCarthy, How I Grew (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 45.

  5 Ibid., 215. Such examples of the silence of Jews about their backgrounds are not unusual. See, for example, Reminiscences of Kitty Carlisle Hart (November 15, 1978), on page 407, in the Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection.

  6 Dashiell Hammett to LH, no date, box 75, folder 3, William Miller Abrahams Papers, M1125, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

  7 Dashiell Hammett to LH, April 5, 1944, box 77, folder 9, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  8 Dashiell Hammett to LH, February 25, 1944, box 77, folder 8, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  9 Dashiell Hammett to LH, January 8, 1944, box 77, folder 8, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  10 Dashiell Hammett to LH, July 24, 1944, box 77, folder 8, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  11 LH to “Darling Arthur, darling Maggie,” no date, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI.

  12 LH to “Arthur Baby Darling,” August 4, 1948, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

  13 Carl Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 418