IF Victor Gollancz was an intellectual who tampered with the truth in the interests of his millenarian aims, Lillian Hellman seems to have been one to whom falsehood came naturally. Like Gollancz she was part of that great intellectual conspiracy in the West to conceal the horrors of Stalinism. Unlike him, she never admitted her errors and lies, except in the most perfunctory and insincere fashion; indeed she went on to pursue a career of even more flagrant and audacious mendacity. It may be asked: why bother with Lillian Hellman? Was she not an imaginative artist to whom invention was a necessity and the worlds of reality and fantasy inevitably overlapped? As in the case of Ernest Hemingway, another notorious liar, is it fair to expect absolute truth from a contriver of fictions? Unfortunately for Hellman, disregard for the truth came to occupy a central place in her life and work; and there are two reasons why it is difficult to ignore her. She was the first woman to achieve international status as a playwright, and as such became a symbolic figure to educated women all over the world. Second, during the last decades of her life, and partly in consequence of her deceptions, she achieved a position of prestige and power in the American intellectual scene which has seldom been equalled. Indeed the Hellman case raises an important general question: to what extent do intellectuals as a class expect and require truth from those they admire?
Lillian Hellman was born on 20 June 1905 of middle-class Jewish parents. Like Gollancz, though for political as much as for personal reasons, she sought in her autobiographical writings to downgrade her mother and exalt her father. Her mother came from the rich and prolific families of Newhouses and Marxes who had flourished in American capitalism. Isaac Marx, following a common pattern in Jewish immigration, had come to America from Germany in the 1840s, started as a travelling peddler, settled down as a merchant and achieved wealth during the Civil War; his son had founded the Marx Bank, first in Demopolis, then in New York. Hellman described her mother, Julia Newhouse, as a fool. In fact she seems to have been cultured and well-educated, and it is likely that she was the source of Hellman’s gifts. But Hellman found it politically desirable to dismiss the Newhouses and the Marxes, and she almost tried to pretend that her mother’s family was Gentile.1
By contrast, her father Max was her hero. Hellman was an only child and Max spoilt her, frustrating such discipline as her mother tried to impose. She presented him as a radical, whose parents had fled as political refugees to the US in 1848. She exaggerated his education and intellectual gifts. In fact he seems to have been just as anxious to make capitalism work for him as the Marxes and Newhouses, but not so good at it. His business failed in 1911 (Hellman later blamed a non-existent business partner) and thereafter he lived mainly off his rich in-laws, ending as a mere salesman. There is no evidence of his radicalism, other than Hellman’s assertions. She described, in an article about race relations, how he had saved a black girl from being raped by two white men. But then she also told a tale about how, when she was eleven or twelve, she insisted that she and her black nurse Sophronia sit down in the ‘whites only’ section of a streetcar, and about how they were evicted after a noisy protest. This anticipation, by forty years, of Rosa Parks’s famous act of defiance in 1955 seems improbable, to put it mildly.2
Max’s sisters kept a boarding-house, where Hellman was actually born and where she spent much time, a lonely but lively and sharp-eyed child, watching the inmates and telling stories to herself about them. She got a lot of material from the boarders; and later in Manhattan, she and Nathanael West, who managed the hotel where she lived, used secretly to open the guests’ letters-the source of his book Miss Lonely-hearts, as well as incidents in her plays. She described herself as ‘a prize nuisance child’, which we can well believe, who smoked, went joy-riding in New Orleans, and ran away, undergoing amazing adventures, which seem less credible. When her father moved to New York for work, she attended New York University, cheated at exams, and emerged as a five foot four, ‘rather homely’ girl, with the possibility of becoming a successful jolie laide; she seems, even as a teenager, to have had an assertive sexual personality.
Hellman’s early career, like her childhood, has been traced by her careful and fair-minded biographer, William Wright, though he did not find it easy to disentangle it from her highly unreliable autobiography.3 At nineteen she got a job at the publishers Boni and Liveright which, under Horace Liveright, was then the most enterprising firm in New York. She later claimed she had discovered William Faulkner and was responsible for the publication of his satirical novel Mosquitoes, set in New Orleans; but facts prove otherwise. She had an abortion and then, pregnant again, married the theatrical agent Arthur Kober, left publishing and took up reviewing. She had an affair with David Cort, subsequently foreign editor of Life; in the 1970s he proposed to publish her letters, some with erotic drawings in the margins, and she took legal action to prevent him-when he died, destitute, the letters were accidentally destroyed. Married to Kober, Hellman made trips to Paris, Bonn (in 1929), where she considered joining the Nazi Youth, and Hollywood. She worked briefly as a play-reader for Anne Nichols and later claimed she had discovered Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel; but this was not true either.4 In Hollywood, where Kober had a staff-writing job, she read scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at $50 a week.
Hellman’s radicalism began with her involvement in the trade-union side of the motion picture industry, where writers were bitter at their treatment by the big studios. But the crucial event in her political as well as her emotional life occurred in 1930 when she met Dashiell Hammett, the mystery-writer. As she subsequently romanticized both him and their relationship, it is necessary to be clear about what kind of man he was.5 He came from an old, genteel-poor Maryland family. He left school at thirteen, did odd jobs, fought in the First World War and was wounded, then gained his inside knowledge of police work as a Pinkerton detective. At the agency he had worked for the lawyers employed by Fatty Arbuckle, who was broken by the court case in which the film comedian was accused of raping Virginia Rappe, who died afterwards. According to what detectives told him, the woman died not of the rape but of venereal disease, and the case seems to have given him a cynical dislike for authority generally (and also a fascination for fat villains, who figure largely in his fiction). When he met Hellman he ha published four novels and was in the process of becoming famous through The Maltese Falcon, his best.
Hammett was a very serious case of alcoholism. The success the book enjoyed was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to him; it brought him money and credit and meant he had little need to work. He was not a natural writer and seems to have found the creative act extraordinarily daunting. He did, after many efforts, finish The Thin Man (1934) which brought him even more money and fame, but after that he wrote nothing at all. He would hole up in a hotel with a crate of Johnnie Walker Red Label and drink himself into sickness. Alcohol brought about moral collapse in a man who seems to have had, at times, strong principles. He had a wife, Josephine Dolan, and two children, but his payments to them were haphazard and arbitrary; sometimes he was generous, usually he just forgot them. Pathetic letters to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, survive: ‘For the past seven months Mr Hammett has sent me only one hundred dollars and has failed to write and explain his troubles-right now I am desperate-the children need clothing and are not getting the right food-and I am unable to find work-living with my parents who are growing old and can’t offer us any more help…’ Hammett, with a script contract, was to be found in Bel Air, drinking. The studio secretary assigned to him, Mildred Lewis, had nothing to do as he would not write but lay in bed; she described how she heard prostitutes, summoned by phone from Madame Lee Francis’s-they were usually black or oriental women-creeping up and down the stairs; she would turn her back so she could not see them.6 He probably made over two million dollars from his books but often contrived to be penniless and in debt, and would sneak out of hotels in which he had run up large bills (the Pierre in New York, for instance, where he owed $1000) wearing his clothes in layers.
Alcohol also made Hammett abusive and violent, not least to women. In 1932 he was sued for assault by the actress Elise de Viane. She claimed he got drunk at his hotel and when she resisted his attempts to make love to her, beat her up. Hammett made no effort to contest the suit and $2500 damages were awarded against him. Shortly after he met Hellman, he hit her on the jaw at a party and knocked her down. Their relationship can never have been easy. In 1931 and again in 1936 he contracted gonorrhoea from prostitutes, and the second time had great difficulty in getting cured.7 There were constant rows over his women. Indeed it is not clear whether, and if so for how long, they ever actually lived together, though both eventually divorced their respective spouses. Years later, when her lying about many other things had been thoroughly exposed, Gore Vidal asked cynically: ‘Did anybody ever see them together?’
Clearly Hellman exaggerated their relationship for her own purposes of self-publicity. Yet there was substance to it. In 1938, by which time she had moved to New York, where she had a town house and a farm at Pleasantville, Hammett was reported to be lying hopelessly drunk in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he had run up a bill of $8000. Hellman had him brought by air to New York; he was met by an ambulance and taken to hospital. Later he lived for some time at her house. But he made a habit of visiting Harlem brothels, which were much to his taste. So there were more rows. In 1941, while drunk, he demanded sex with her and she refused; after that he never made or attempted to make love with her again.8 But their relationship continued, if in tenuous form, and for the last three years of his life (he died in 1958) he led a zombie-like existence in her New York home. This was an unselfish act on her part for it meant sacrificing the work-room she adored. She would say to guests: ‘Please keep it down. There’s a dying man upstairs.’9
What is clear about their friendship is that Hellman, as a writer, owed a great deal to Hammett. In fact there is a curious, and some would say suspicious, asymmetry about their writing careers. Not long after he met Hellman, Hammett’s writing dwindled to a trickle, then dried up altogether. She, by contrast, began to write with great fluency and success. It was as though the creative spirit moved from one into the other, remaining in her until his death; once he had gone, she never wrote another successful play. All this may be pure coincidence; or not. Like almost everything to do with Hellman, it is hard to get at the truth. What is certain is that Hammett had a good deal to do with her first hit The Children’s Hour. Indeed, he may be said to have thought of it. The subject of lesbianism on the stage had been a Broadway issue ever since 1926, when the New York police had closed down The Captive, a translation of a play about lesbianism by Edouard Bourdet. When Hellman began to work for Herman Shumlin as a reader, and started to write plays herself, Hammett drew her attention to a book by William Roughhead, Bad Companions. It dealt with an appalling case in Scotland in 1810 in which a black mulatto girl, from unprovoked malice and by skilful lying, ruined the lives of two sisters who ran a school and whom she accused of lesbianism. It is a curious fact that the devastation caused by lies, particularly female lies, fascinated both Hellman and Hammett; the lies of the woman are the threads which link together the brilliant complexities of The Maltese Falcon. When drunk, Hammett lied like any other alcoholic; when sober, he tended to be a stickler for exactitude, even if it was highly inconvenient. While he was around, he tended to exercise some restraint on Hellman’s fantasies. She, by contrast, was both obsessed by lies and perpetrated them. She often lied about the origin of The Children’s Hour, and the circumstances surrounding the first night. Moreover she did not indicate her indebtedness to Rough-head’s book and when the play appeared one critic, John Mason Brown, accused her of plagiarism-the first of many such charges she had to face.10
All the same, it was a brilliant play, the changes made to the original story being the key to its excitement and dynamism. How large a part, if any, Hammett played in the actual writing is now impossible to establish. One dramatic gift Hellman had in abundance (like George Bernard Shaw) was the ability to provide her most reprehensible or unsympathetic characters with plausible speeches. It is the chief source of the powerful tension her plays generate. The Children’s Hour was bound to arouse controversy because of its subject matter. Its eloquence and verbal edge exacerbated the hostility of its opponents and enthused its defenders. In London it was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, and it was banned in Chicago and many other cities (in Boston the ban remained in force for a quarter of a century). But the police made no move against it in New York, where it was an instant critical and box-office success, running for 691 performances. Moreover, the daring of the theme and the brilliance of the treatment-and, most of all, the fury it provoked among the bien-pensants-immediately gave Hellman a special place in the affections of progressive intellectuals, something she kept until her death. When it failed to win the Pulitzer Prize for the best play of the 1934-35 season because one of the judges, the Reverend William Lyon Phelps, objected to its topic, the New York Drama Critics Circle was formed to create a new award precisely so it could be given to her.
The play’s success also brought her a contract to write screenplays in Hollywood at $2500 a week, and for the next decade she alternated between screenplays and Broadway. The achievement was mixed but impressive on the whole. Her play Days to Come, dealing with strikes, was a disaster. It opened on 15 December 1936 and closed six days later. On the other hand The Little Foxes (1939), which deals with the lust for money in the South, circa 1900, and was based on people she knew as a child, was another big success, running for 410 performances. Thanks to some brutal but constructive criticism by Hammett, it is the best-written and constructed of her plays and the most frequently revived. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that it succeeded against strong competition: the 1939 season included Maxwell Anderson’s Key Largo, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story, Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me, Life with Father and some hot British imports. She followed it with another hit, Watch on the Rhine, two years later. Meanwhile, of her six Hollywood screenplays, half became classics. The film of The Children’s Hour she wrote for Sam Goldwyn, who persuaded her to retitle it These Three and remove the lesbian element, was a big success; so was her brilliant Dead End (1937). She also won a notable victory over the Hays Office in writing the screenplay of Watch on the Rhine. The left-wing hero of the play, the German anti-Nazi, Kurt Muller, eventually contrives to kill the villain, Count Teck. The Hays Office protested that, under their rules, murderers must be punished. Hellman countered that it was right to murder Nazis or fascists and, it being wartime, she gained her point. Indeed, the movie was chosen for a benefit performance before President Roosevelt himself. That was a sign of the times. Another was her writing, for Sam Goldwyn, a straight, pro-Soviet propaganda movie, North Star (1942), about a delightful Soviet collective farm, one of only three CP-line films made in Hollywood (the others were Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia).11
The themes of Hellman’s theatre and screen plays suggest a close involvement with the radical left from the mid-1930s. The notion of her being recruited to the Communist Party by Hammett, however, is probably mistaken. In the first place, she tended to be more aggressively political than he was, If anything, it was she who drew him into serious and regular political activities. Moreover, while she continued to have intermittent sexual relations with Hammett until 1941 (1945 according to her account), there were many affairs with men: with the magazine manager Ralph Ingersol, with two Broadway producers, and with the Third Secretary of the US Embassy in Moscow, John Melby, among others. Hellman was notorious for taking the sexual initiative with men. Moreover she enjoyed considerable success. As a friend put it, ‘It was simple. She was sexually aggressive at a time when no women were. Others were promiscuous, God knows, but they wouldn’t make the first move. Lillian never hesitated, and she cleaned up.’12 Not always, of course. Martha Gellhorn claimed she made an unsuccessful pass at Hemingway in Paris in 1937. Arthur Miller attributed her bitter enmity towards him to the fact that he turned her down: ‘Lillian came on with every man she met. I wasn’t interested and she never forgave me for it.’13 In late middle age she had to use her money to buy the companionship of good-looking young men. But her successes were common enough to give her an unusual reputation on which rumour fed. It was said, for instance, that she attended all-male poker parties at the home of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, the winner taking Hellman into a bedroom. Her memoirs, otherwise boastful, make no mention of her conquests.
A woman with such a reputation and tastes is unlikely to have been greatly trusted by the American Communist Party of the 1930s, a highly doctrinaire body. But her name was certainly useful to them. Was she ever an actual member of the Party? Her strike play, Days to Come, was not a Marxist-inspired work. Watch on the Rhine ran counter to the Party line of August 1939-early June 1941, which was to back the Hitler-Stalin Pact. On the other hand, Hellman was very active in the Hollywood Screen Writers Guild, which was dominated by the CP, especially during the bitter battles of 1936-37. It would have been logical for her to have joined the Party in 1937, as she said Hammett did. It was the peak year for CP membership, when the party was backing Roosevelt’s New Deal and Popular Front policies everywhere. Whereas the early thirties’ converts had tended to be serious idealists, who had read Marx and Lenin (like Edmund Wilson), and were slipping away again by 1937, the Popular Front line made the CP briefly fashionable and attracted a good many recruits from the show-biz milieu, who knew little of politics but were anxious to be in the intellectual swim.14 Hellman fitted into this category; but the fact that she continued to support Soviet policies over many years and did not renege when the fashion faded strongly suggests that she became an actual Party apparatchik, though not a senior one. She herself always denied being a Party member. Against this, Martin Berkeley testified that in June 1937, Hellman, along with Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart and Alan Campbell, attended a meeting at his house with the precise purpose of forming a Hollywood branch of the CP; later, Hellman took the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about this meeting. Her interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee strongly suggests she was a member, 1937-49. Her FBI file, nearly 1000 pages long, though full of the usual rubbish and very repetitious, contains much solid fact. Apart from Berkeley, Louis Budenz, former managing editor of the Daily Worker, likewise stated she was a Party member, as did two other informants; others testified to her taking an active role at Party meetings.15
What seems most probable is that, for a variety of reasons, including her sexual promiscuity, the CP found it more convenient to have her as a secret rather than an open member, and to keep her under control as a fellow-traveller, though allowing her some latitude. This is the only explanation which fits all her acts and attitudes during the period. Certainly she did everything in her power, quite apart from her plays and scripts, to assist the CP’s penetration of American intellectual life and to forward the aims of Soviet policy. She took part in key CP front groups. She attended the tenth National Convention of the CP in New York, June 1938. She visited Russia in October 1937, under the tuition of the pro-Stalin New York Times correspondent, Walter Duranty. The trials were then at their height. On her return she said she knew nothing about them. As for the attacks on the trials by Western libertarians, she said she was unable to distinguish ‘true charges from the wild hatred’ and ‘fact from invention when it is mixed with blind bitterness about a place and people’. But the next year her name was among the signatories (together with Malcolm Cowley, Nelson Algren, Irwin Shaw and Richard Wright) to an advertisement in New Masses which approved the trials. Under the auspices of the notorious Otto Katz, she paid two visits to Spain in 1937 and contributed, along with other writers, $500 to the pro-CP propaganda film with which Hemingway was also connected. But her account of what she did in Spain is plainly full of lies-it was refuted in detail by Martha Gellhorn-and it is difficult now to establish exactly what she did there.
Like most intellectuals, Hellman engaged in rancorous quarrels with other writers. These envenomed and complicated her political positions. Her anxiety to support the Soviet line in Spain drew her into a row with William Carney, the New York Times correspondent there who persisted in publishing facts which did not fit in with Moscow’s version. She accused him of covering the war from the safety and comfort of the Côte d’Azur, Again, she backed the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland, stating: ‘I don’t believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I’ve been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me.’ That brought her into conflict with Tallulah Bankhead, who had starred in the stage version of The Little Foxes and was already an enemy for a number of reasons (mainly sexual jealousy). Bankhead had done a benefit show for Finnish relief agencies. Hellman accused her of refusing an invitation to do a similar benefit for Spain. Bankhead retorted that the accusation was ‘a brazen invention’. There is no evidence, as it happens, that Hellman ever went to Finland, and her biographer thinks it improbable.16 But she continued to attack Bankhead in various publications, even after the actress was dead. She wrote of Bankhead’s drunken family, use of drugs and described her making passes at black waiters; she told a repellent story (in her autobiographical Pentimento) of Bankhead insisting on showing a visitor her husband’s gigantic erect penis.
The quarrel between Hellman and Bankhead was really about who was on the side of ‘the workers’. The truth is that neither knew anything about the working class beyond occasionally taking a lover from its ranks. Hellman once did an investigation in Philadelphia for the New York liberal evening paper, PM, which involved talking to one cab-driver, two men in a shop and two black children; from which she concluded that America was a police state. But she had no friends among the workers with the exception of a longshoreman, Randall Smith, whom she made friends with at Martha’s Vineyard after the war. He had served in the Lincoln Brigade in Spain and was certainly not typical of the American proletariat. Moreover, he grew to dislike Hellman, Hammett and their wealthy radical friends. ‘As a former Communist,’ he said, ‘I used to resent their attitude-so lofty and intellectual. I doubt if either of them ever went to a meeting or did any work. They were like officers, I had been an enlisted man.’ He particularly disliked Hammett’s habit, in company, of showing off his power over women by ‘taking his cane and lifting the skirt of his current girlfriend’.17 The life Hellman led was certainly remote from what she liked to call ‘the struggle’. At her house on East 82nd Street and on her 130-acre Westchester farm she lived like the New York rich, with a housekeeper, butler, secretary and personal maid. She went to the most fashionable psychiatrist, Gregory Zilboorg, who charged $100 an hour. Her stage and screen plays brought her deference as well as wealth. In September 1944 she went to Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet government and stayed in Ambassador Harriman’s house, where she had her affair with the diplomat Melby; but she kept rooms at the Metropole and National Hotels as well as at the Embassy. This trip produced the usual crop of lies. She said she was in Russia five months; Melby, a more reliable witness, said three. Hellman published two quite different accounts of her Russian experiences, in Collier’s magazine in 1945, and in her first autobiographical volume, An Unfinished Woman, in 1969. The magazine article made no mention of seeing Stalin. The autobiography stated that, although she had not asked to see Stalin, she was informed he had granted her an interview. She politely declined, on the grounds that she had nothing of importance to say and did not wish to take up his valuable time. This preposterous tale is contradicted by what Hellman said at the time of her return, when she told a New York press conference that she had asked to see Stalin but had been told he was ‘too busy with the Poles’.18
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Hellman was a left-wing success heroine, a feted celebrity. In the late 1940s her life went into a new phase, subsequently glorified in radical legend as a time of martyrdom. For a time her political activities continued. Along with other members of the far left, she backed Wallace for president in 1948. In 1949 she was among the organizers of the Soviet-backed Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf. But her troubles were beginning. The post-war plays did less well than their predecessors. A sequel to The Little Foxes, written about the same family and called Another Part of the Forest, opened in November 1947 and ran for 191 performances, but got some poor notices. It was notable for the appearance of her wayward father Max, who sat in the stalls noisily counting new dollar bills throughout the first act, then announced in the interval: ‘My daughter wrote this play. It gets better.’ Six months later, on the advice of her psychiatrist, she had him committed for senile dementia. There were difficulties over her next play, The Autumn Garden. Hellman later said that, after Hammett criticized the first draft, she tore it up; but an entire manuscript marked ‘First Draft’ survives in the University of Texas library. When it opened in March 1951 it ran for only 101 performances.
Meanwhile the House Un-American Activities Committee had been combing through the movie industry. The so-called Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer the Committee’s questions about political activities, were cited for contempt. In November 1947 the studio producers agreed to sack any writers who fell into this category. The magazine of the Screen Writers’ Guild attacked the decision in an editorial entitled ‘The Judas Goats’ written by Hellman, which contained the astonishing statement: ‘There has never been a single line or word of communism in any American picture at any time.’ The mills of the law continued to grind slowly. Hammett contributed to the bail fund for the screenwriters indicted for contempt. Three of them jumped bail and disappeared. The FBI believed Hammett knew where they were and a team arrived at Hellman’s farm to search the place. Hammett himself was brought to court on 9 July 1951 and asked to help find the missing men by giving the names of other contributors to the fund. Instead of saying he did not know them (which was true) he stubbornly refused to answer at all, and was jailed. Hellman claimed she had to sell her farm to pay his legal expenses of $67,000.
She herself had been blacklisted in Hollywood in 1948, and four years later, on 21 February 1952, she got a summons to appear before the dreaded Committee. It was at this point she snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. She had always been good at public relations; it was a skill she shared with many of her intellectual contemporaries such as Brecht and Sartre. Brecht, as we have seen, managed to turn his appearance before the Committee into a propaganda score for himself. Hellman’s achievement was even more remarkable and laid the foundation for her subsequent fame as the martyr-queen of the radicals. As with Brecht, she was helped by the stupidity of Committee members. Before appearing, she took very careful legal advice from her counsel, Joseph Rauh. There is no doubt she understood the legal position, which was complex. Her instructions to Rauh were that she would not name names; on the other hand, she did not want to go to jail under any circumstances. Thirdly, she did not wish to plead the Fifth Amendment if by doing so she appeared to be protecting herself, as this would be seen as an admission of guilt (the phrase at the time was ‘a Fifth Amendment communist’). She would, however, be prepared to plead the Fifth if, by doing so, she appeared to be protecting only others. Therein, however, lay Rauh’s difficulty, for the Fifth Amendment protects the witness only against self-incrimination. How could Hellman be saved from jail by the Fifth while at the same time presented as an innocent saving others? He said later there was never any question of her going to jail. ‘It was like an algebra problem,’ he said. ‘But then I began to see it as primarily a public relations problem. I knew that if the headline in the New York Times the next day read “Hellman Refuses to Name Names”, I had won. If it said “Hellman Pleads the Fifth”, I had lost.’
Hellman solved the problem for him by writing a cunning and mendacious letter to John S. Wood, the chairman of the Committee, on 19 May 1952. She argued that she had been advised she could not plead the Fifth about herself, then refuse to answer about others. Then came the big lie: ‘I do not like subversion and disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities.’ There followed a brilliant debating trick, which upended the true legal position, making it appear that Hellman would be happy to go to jail if only her own freedom was at stake but was taking the Fifth to protect other, quite blameless people: ‘But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman, indecent and dishonourable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.’ To the fury of the chairman, who seems to have understood the trick Hellman was playing, a member of the Committee who had failed to grasp the legal point moved that the letter be read into the record, and this enabled a delighted Rauh to issue immediate copies to the press. The next day he got exactly the headline he wanted. In her autobiographical volume about these events, Scoundrel Time, Hellman subsequently embroidered the story, inventing various details, including a man shouting from the gallery, ‘Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it.’ But she need not have bothered. Her letter was the only ‘fact’ that emerged from the hearing into the history books. It went into the anthologies too, as a moving plea for freedom of conscience by a selfless and heroic woman.19
This was the core of the later Hellman legend. But a collateral myth was that she had been ruined financially by a combination of the blacklist and by the huge legal bills with which she and Hammett were faced as a result of the witch-hunt. But there is no evidence she was ruined at all. The Children’s Hour was revived in 1952 and brought in a handsome income. She kept her New York townhouse until, in old age, she moved into a more convenient apartment. It is true she sold her farm, but in 1956 she bought a fine property on Martha’s Vineyard, which had by then become a smarter place for wealthy intellectuals to relax in than the fringes of New York. Hammett’s financial troubles sprang from many causes. When he finally stopped drinking he did not begin to work but merely sat glued to the television set. He had also been recklessly generous. There was no danger of that in Hellman’s case but she shared with Hammett another habit-a failure to pay income tax. As the cases of Sartre and Edmund Wilson suggest, there is a common propensity among radical intellectuals to demand ambitious government programmes while feeling no responsibility to contribute to them.
Hammett’s failure to pay income tax went right back to the 1930s and did not come to light merely as a result of his going to jail. Indeed his habit was noted by the FBI before the war. But of course his sentence spurred the Internal Revenue Service, along with other creditors-of whom there were many-to press claims. On 28 February 1957 a federal court entered a default judgment against him for $104,795, and this was just for the years 1950-54. The authorities were not particularly harsh, a court deputy reporting that no money was to be had: ‘In my opinion after my investigation, I was speaking to a broken man.’ By the time of his death the sum owing, including interest, had risen to $163,286.20 Hellman’s debts to the tax-man were even greater: in 1952 they were estimated at between $175,000 and $190,000-enormous sums in those days. She later claimed she was so broke she had to take a job in Macy’s department store; but there was no truth in this either.
Hellman lay low in the 1950s, a difficult decade for radicals. But by 1960 she was on the upsurge again. Her play Toys in the Attic, based on an idea by Hammett and using her childhood memories of the boarding-house, opened in New York on 25 February 1960 with a superb cast. It ran for 556 performances, won the Circle award again and made Hellman a lot of money. But it was her last serious play, and the death of Hammett the next year suggested to many that, without him, she could not write another. Be that as it may, she had a second career to pursue. Radicalism was reviving throughout the 1960s, and by the end of the decade it was almost as strong as in her thirties’ heyday. A trip to Russia produced another batch of fibs and the assertion that Khrushchev’s Secret Session speech, confirming Stalin’s crimes, had been to stab his old patron in the back.21 Hellman, sniffing the wind of opinion in America, decided it was time to write her memoirs.
They became one of the great publishing successes of the century and brought Hellman more fame, prestige and intellectual authority even than her plays. They were, indeed, a canonization of herself while she was still alive, an apotheosis by the printed word and the public-relations machine. An Unfinished Woman, published in June 1969, was a best-seller and won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters. Pentimento, out in 1973, was on the best-seller list for four months. The third, Scoundrel Time (1976), was on the best-seller list for no less than twenty-three weeks. She was offered half a million dollars for the film rights of her life. She found herself with a completely new reputation as a master of prose style and was asked to take writing seminars at Berkeley and MIT. The awards and honours came rolling in. New York University made her Woman of the Year, Brandeis gave her its Theatre Arts Medal, Yeshiva its Achievement Award. She got the MacDowell Medal for Contributions to Literature and honorary PhDs from Yale, Columbia and many other universities. By 1977 she was back at the top of Hollywood society, presenting at the Academy Awards. The same year a section of her memoirs appeared as the much-praised movie Julia, which won many awards in its turn. On the East Coast, she was the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligentsia and the society people who seethed round them. Indeed in the New York of the 1970s she dispensed the same kind of power which Sartre had wielded in Paris, 1945-55. She promoted and selected key committees. She compiled her own blacklists and had them enforced by scores of servile intellectual flunkies. The big names of New York radicalism scurried to do her bidding. Part of her power sprang from the fear she inspired. She knew how to make herself unpleasant, in public or in private. She would spit in a man’s face, scream abuse, smash him on the head with her handbag. At Martha’s Vineyard the fury with which she assailed those who crossed her garden to the beach was awesome. She was now very rich and employed posses of lawyers to attack the slightest opposition or infringement of her rights. Sycophants who thought they were merely worshipping at her shrine might get a nasty shock. When Eric Bentley, Brecht’s friend, put on an off-Broadway anti-witch-hunt play, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, which involved actresses reading from her letters, Hellman demanded royalties and said she would close the show down unless the owners complied. She was a fast woman with a writ. Most people preferred to settle. She is said to have got a million-dollar buy-out to avoid a lawsuit over a 1981 revival of The Little Foxes. Supposedly powerful institutions jumped to do her bidding, often before she had issued her commands. Thus Little, Brown of Boston cancelled a book by Diana Trilling when she refused to remove a passage critical of Hellman. Mrs Trilling, who was merely trying to defend her late husband Lionel from one of Hellman’s vicious attacks in Scoundrel Time, said of her: ‘Lillian was the most powerful woman I’ve ever known, maybe the most powerful person I’ve ever known.’
The basis of Hellman’s authority was the extraordinary myth she had created about herself in her autobiographies. In a way it was comparable to the self-canonization of Rousseau in his Confessions. As has been shown repeatedly, the memoirs of leading intellectuals-Sartre, de Beauvoir, Russell, Hemingway, Gollancz are obvious examples-are quite unreliable. But the most dangerous of these intellectual self-glorifications are those which disarm the reader by what appears to be shocking frankness and admission of guilt. Thus Tolstoy’s diaries, honest though they appear to be, in fact hide far more than they reveal. Rousseau’s Confessions, as Diderot and others who really knew him perceived at the time, are an elaborate exercise in deception, a veneer of candour concealing a bottomless morass of mendacity. Hellman’s memoirs conform to this cunning pattern. She often admits to vagueness, confusion and lapses of memory, giving readers the impression that she is engaged in making a constant effort to sift the exact truth from the shadowy sands of the past. Hence when the books first appeared many reviewers, including some of the most perceptive, praised her truthfulness.
But amid the chorus of praise and the din of flattery by Hellman courtiers during the 1970s, dissenting voices were raised by those who had personally experienced her lies. In particular, when Scoundrel Time appeared, her account was challenged by such weighty figures as Nathan Glazer in Commentary, Sidney Hook in Encounter, Alfred Kazin in Esquire and Irving Howe in Dissent.22 But these writers concentrated on exposing her shocking distortions and omissions. They were largely unaware of her inventions. Their attacks were part of the continuing battle between the democratic liberals and the hard-line Stalinists; as such they aroused comparatively little attention and did Hellman no serious damage.
But then Hellman made a catastrophic error of judgment. It was an uncharacteristic one, in an area where she was usually very much at home, public relations. She had long had a feud with Mary McCarthy. This dated from the Stalinist-Trotskyist split among the American left of the 1930s. It had been kept alive by a row at a Sarah Lawrence College seminar in 1948, when McCarthy had detected Hellman lying about John Dos Passos and Spain, and by further exchanges over the 1949 Waldorf Conference. McCarthy had since repeatedly accused Hellman of lying on a large scale, but had apparently done her no harm. Then in January 1980, on The Dick Cavett Show, McCarthy repeated her most comprehensive charge about Hellman’s lies: ‘I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”.’ Hellman was watching. Her fury and her taste for litigation overcame her prudence. She began a suit for $2,225,000 in damages, and pursued it with great persistence and vigour.
What followed was a classic proof of the contention that to sue for defamation merely draws attention to the charge. Earlier accusations of lying had left Hellman unscathed. Now the public pricked up its ears. It scented a hunt-possibly a kill. Litigation was bad public relations anyway, for writers who sue other writers are never liked. It was known that Hellman was rich, whereas McCarthy would have to sell her house to meet the cost of the suit. Friends on both sides piled in with money and advice, and the case, with its preliminary hearings, became a major story, thus drawing further attention to the question of Hellman’s veracity. More seriously, the case promoted a new intellectual game: detecting Hellman’s inventions. McCarthy, who rapidly had to fork out $25,000 in fees, had no alternative but to lead the pack, as she faced financial ruin. As Hellman’s biographer, William Wright, put it: ‘By suing McCarthy, Hellman forced one of the country’s sharpest and most energetic minds to pore through the entire Hellman oeuvre in search of lies.’23 Others were happy to join in. In the Spring 1981 issue of the Paris Review, Martha Gellhorn listed and documented eight major Hellman lies about Spain. And Stephen Spender drew McCarthy’s attention to the curious case of Muriel Gardiner.
Spender had had a brief affair with Muriel, a wealthy American girl who had once been married to an Englishman, Julian Gardiner. She had gone to Vienna to study psychiatry and had there become involved in the anti-Nazi underground, under the alias of ‘Mary’, smuggling out messages and people. She had fallen in love with another anti-Nazi, an Austrian socialist called Joe Buttinger, and married him. After war broke out in 1939 they left Europe and settled in New Jersey. Hellman never met Muriel, but she heard all about her, her husband and their activities underground from her New York lawyer. The idea of a rich American heiress married to a Central European socialist resistance leader is the starting point for Watch on the Rhine, which Hellman started to write five months after the Buttingers came to New Jersey, though the actual plot has little to do with them. When Hellman came to write Pentimento, she again made use of Muriel’s experiences, calling her ‘Julia’; but this time she brought herself into the story, in a heroic and flattering light, as Julia’s friend. Moreover, she presented it all as autobiographical fact.
When the book appeared, no one challenged Hellman’s account. But Muriel read it and wrote a perfectly friendly letter to Hellman pointing out the similarities. She got no reply and Hellman later denied ever having received such a letter. Since she had never actually met Muriel, her contention had to be that there were two American underground agents, ‘Julia’ as well as ‘Mary’. Who, then, was Julia? She was dead, said Hellman. What was her real name, then? Hellman could not reveal it: her mother was still alive and would be persecuted as a ‘premature anti-Nazi’ by German reactionaries. When the controversy over Hellman’s lies got going, Muriel gradually abandoned belief in Hellman’s good faith. In 1983 she got Yale University to publish her own memoirs, Code Name Mary. When it was published reporters from the New York Times and Time magazine began to ask awkward questions about Pentimento and the movie Julia. The Director of the Austrian Resistance Archives, Dr Herbert Steiner, confirmed there was only one ‘Mary’. Either Julia was Mary or she was an invention and in either event Hellman was exposed as a liar on a massive scale. McCarthy, in touch with Muriel, filed much of this material for the preliminary proceedings of the libel action. Then, in June 1984, Commentary published a remarkable article by Samuel McCracken of Boston University, ‘Julia and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman’. He had done a great deal of police-type research into train times, boat-sailing schedules, theatre programmes and other checkable facts which made up the detail of Hellman’s account of Julia in Pentimento. Nobody with an open mind, reading this article, could be left with any doubt that the Julia episode was a piece of fiction, based upon the true experiences of a woman Hellman had never met.
McCracken’s investigation also lifted the cover on another murky corner of Hellman’s life: her pursuit of money. She had always been avaricious, and the propensity increased with age. Most of her lawsuits had had a financial object. After Hammett died, she formed a liaison with a rich Philadelphian, Arthur Cowan. He advised her on investments. He also put her up to a dodge to acquire Hammett’s copyrights, held by the US government in lieu of his tax debts. As very little was coming in royalties, Cowan persuaded the government to put the rights up to auction, setting a minimum bid of $5000. Hellman persuaded Hammett’s daughters to agree to the sale, telling them, falsely, that otherwise they would themselves be liable for Hammett’s debts. Cowan and Hellman were the only bidders, at $2500 each, and got the rights. Hellman then began to work this literary property vigorously and it was soon bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars-$250,000 for one television adaptation of a Hammett story alone. When Cowan died in turn, he left no will, according to Hellman’s account in Pentimento. McCracken established that he did leave a will, and Hellman got nothing, suggesting they had a quarrel before he died. But Hellman evidently persuaded Cowan’s sister that it had been his intention she should get his share of the Hammett rights, as the sister wrote a letter relinquishing them to her. Thus Hellman enjoyed the increasingly valuable Hammett copyrights in toto until her death, and it was only then that she left something, in her will, to the impoverished Hammett daughters.24
Hellman died on 3 July 1984, a month after the publication of McCracken’s article. By that time her fantasy world, on which she had built her reputation, was crashing down about her ears. From being the aggressive queen of the radical left, she was everywhere on the defensive. However, intellectual heroes, or heroines, are not disposed of so easily. Just as south Italian peasants continue to make offerings and present petitions to their favourite saints long after their very existence has been exposed as an invention, so the lovers of progress too cling to their idols, feet of clay notwithstanding. Though Rousseau’s monstrous behaviour was well known even in his own lifetime, the reason-worshippers flocked to his shrine and institutionalized the myth of his goodness. No revelations about Marx’s private conduct or his public dishonesty, however well-documented, seem to have disturbed the faith of his followers in his righteousness. Sartre’s long decline and the unrelieved fatuity of his later views did not prevent 50,000 Parisian cognoscenti turning out for his obsequies. Hellman’s funeral, in Martha’s Vineyard, was also well attended. Among the notables who paid homage were Norman Mailer, James Reston, Katherine Graham, Warren Beatty, Jules Feiffer, William Styron, John Hersey and Carl Bernstein. She left nearly four million dollars, most of which went to two trusts. One was the Dashiell Hammett Fund, enjoined to make grants, ‘guided by 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’. Despite all the revelations and exposures, the nailing of so many falsehoods, the Lillian Hellman myth industry continued serenely on its course. In January 1986, eighteen months after her death, the hagiographical play Lillian opened in New York, and was well attended. As the 1980s wane, votive candles to the goddess of reason are still being lit, secular Masses said. Will Lillian Hellman, like her hero Stalin, ever be finally buried in decent obscurity, or will she-fables and all-remain a fighting symbol of progressive thought? We shall see. But the experience of the last two hundred years suggests that there is plenty of life, and lies, in the old girl yet.