A Difficult Woman (11 page)

She met John Melby in the winter of 1944. (University of Pennsylvania Archives)

Eventually, Melby found himself called before a government investigating committee questioning his loyalty. The charges against him included his relationship with Lillian (a “known Communist”). Hellman enlisted Joe Rauh, the lawyer who helped to defend her before HUAC, to represent him, and did what she could to stay quiet and not complicate his life; she shared his anger and distress when he ultimately lost his job and his career in the State Department. Briefly they resumed their affair, but in the end, Melby married another woman and reappeared in Hellman's life only intermittently.
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While Melby was in China, Hellman dealt with the illness and death of her father, and here, too, a sense of family feeling is palpable. Her father began to develop symptoms of dementia in 1948. Hellman tried first to provide nursing care for him at home and then, reluctantly and on the advice of his doctors, placed him in an expensive private nursing home. From there he wrote long anguished letters to his family and friends, begging to be released and venting his frustration on Lillian. His sisters, Hannah and Jenny, pleaded with Lillian to return him to his home, convinced that she was restraining him against his will and accusing her of being hard-hearted. Lillian responded angrily at first. She was hurt at their mistrust and invited them to come and visit their brother to see for themselves. For more than a year letters flew back and forth, each of them demonstrating Lillian's misery at having to incarcerate her father and her outrage at having to explain herself to her two beloved aunts. Not until they came to visit did they desist. The episode suggests something of Lillian's sense of herself as a daughter. Though she never felt close to anyone in her mother's family, she cherished her relationship with her
father and his sisters until they died, and their memories long afterward.
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Family relationships did not come easily to Hellman, and in the fifties she seemed to become needier and more emotionally dependent as well as more fearful about her standing and status. Surely this is linked to the devastating betrayals of the McCarthy period and the dissolution of many friendships under the stress of government investigation. But the fifties must have challenged Hellman in other ways as well. This was the decade in which ideas about traditional marriage and heterosexual fidelity were linked to patriotism, when maintaining a home and family sustained American prosperity and the American way of life. In the parlance of the time, a happily married suburban housewife represented security and stability, the promise of capitalism in an age of potential nuclear conflict.
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Hellman's position as an unmarried and independent woman now seemed anomalous rather than admirable, vaguely subversive of American values rather than celebrated. A woman of her age and generation should, it was thought, have settled down with a husband as so many of Hellman's female friends had done. Hellman, in contrast, continued to relish both her independence and her sexuality, attributes some thought of as symptoms of communism. Yet Lillian seemed entirely comfortable in her double role. With Dash she acted, as actress and friend Patricia Neal recalls, “like a little girl,” solicitous and flirtatious.
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After 1952, while Hammett occupied the cottage in Katonah, he briefly maintained his apartment on 10th Street. Hellman apparently visited him in Katonah “often, not so very often, but often,” as Helen Rosen, the cottage's owner, put it; and he spent infrequent weekends in New York with her.
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In the context of the decade, the absence of a shared residence struck many as odd. After Dash became ill in the mid-fifties, he no longer had the resources to live alone. Reluctantly he moved into her New York City townhouse. But for all that she provided for him until he died in January 1961, she never felt confident in his affection, never secure in his love for her. “With other people there was warmth and need and maybe even the last weeks a sexual need,” she wrote in her diary two months after he died, “but not with me.”
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Dash didn't want to be in her house, didn't want to be dependent, but had little choice. Without him, she conducted an active social life, traveling at whim and dining out frequently. When she entertained at home he often disappeared; when she went out
it was generally to see her friends alone. Her loneliness was certainly exacerbated by the death of Gregory Zilboorg just a year and a half before Dash died.

It took Hellman a while after Hammett died to come to terms with what their relationship had been. With uncharacteristic honesty, she confided to her diary, “sometimes, now, I think he wanted to be good friends, but more often I know that he didn't.”
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When she wasn't angry with Hammett, she blamed herself. “I did my best,” she divulged to the diary, “and I know now and am sad about it, that it wasn't a very good best.” Hellman buried her sorrow and her loneliness in her memories of Dash, turning him, in death, into the romantic and idealized soul that the living Hammett was not.
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The memory of Hammett, and the stories she made up about him, became a crutch as she entered into her late fifties and sixties—a reminder of joy and physical vitality, of sensuality and happiness. She kept photographs of him everywhere, managed his estate and his image, recalled anecdotes about him, and quoted remarks he might have made.

Self-reliant now, and without Dash as an emotional backup, she resituated herself both with relation to the men she loved and in her social relationships. She met and fell for Arthur Cowan, a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, in the late 1950s and remained close to him until he died in 1964. Cowan's wealth, not his politics, created the glue that drew them together; her cynicism and anger about old political allies still got in the way of re-creating some of her old relationships. And though she denies wanting to marry him, her denials have a bit of the quality of protesting too much. She was willing to settle, she tells us in
Pentimento
, for the continuing, dependable, and generous male companionship he offered along with financial and legal counsel when she needed it. And yet when Cowan became involved with another woman, she suspected he would renege on his promise to take care of her forever. After his sudden death, Lillian insisted that he must have left something for her and set her lawyers to hunting for the will. It could not be found, and Hellman, feeling cheated and abandoned, was convinced that the family had destroyed it.

Her dependence on another friend, Blair Clark, was more emotional than financial. Clark was an executive at CBS and had been the college friend of Robert Lowell, who with his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, was then Lillian's frequent companion. He became close to Lillian shortly after Dash died.
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There is something of pathos in this relationship. Blair Clark befriended Lillian in 1962 with notes and phone calls and expensive
dinners. Lillian believed and hoped that their friendship would develop into an ongoing intimacy and perhaps something closer. Clark claimed to have been unaware of Hellman's sexual attraction toward him and to have feared her neediness. Perhaps we must believe him, for Hellman's diaries of the period are filled with longing for him that include waiting for his calls, noting his silences, commenting on whether she called him. They record when they went out to dinner together, when he visited, how long he stayed, and whether the visit was good or not. Through the lines appears a kind of lovesick longing that suggests the wish for, if not the reality of, a more permanent relationship. To stir Clark's feelings and assuage her own desires, Hellman created an elaborate and fantastic fable about a fictional Yugoslav diplomat with whom she claimed to be engaged in a long-running affair. She had, she said, had a son with this man, and then she spun a complicated tale about the boy's youth and education, his career, his marriage, and his children.

The tale, clearly made of whole cloth, prefigures some of the later stories Hellman would tell to capture the self that she wanted to be. This style—critic Richard Locke calls it “inventing all the time”—endeared her to many people. It was, says Locke, “part of who she was”; Locke's partner, Wendy Nicholson, adds that it was “part of her gift.” Friendship, in Locke's view, “involved play, a fantasy self-presentation, a different kind of exaggeration, a good story.”
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Certainly this seemed to be the case with Blair Clark. He remained fond of Lillian and affectionate toward her into the 1970s and after he remarried. Until she died, he took her out for dinner several times a year, acted as confidant when she needed a shoulder, and played a major role in the influential Committee for Public Justice that she founded in 1970. But, he claimed after she died, “we were never lovers, which may come as a surprise to some and which was surely a disappointment, and more, to her.”
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The relationship suggests Lillian's continuing capacity to create emotional intimacy even as her physical attractiveness waned. As she moved into her sixties, she became increasingly close to young men who were attracted by the force of her personality and tempted into her orbit by the wacky sense of humor, the charming directness, and the confrontational stance. “Playfulness,” as Blair Clark put it, “was very much part of her nature.”
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And she loved to pick an argument, to fight. Her continuing zest and energy compensated for the now leathery skin and the wrinkled, smoke-scarred face. In person, remembers Wendy Nicholson, “she had this incredible electrical charge about her … She really had a
tremendous sort of personal force.”
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Many men, particularly younger men, found her both attractive and seductive. Her sometime lover and close friend Peter Feibleman, twenty-five years younger than she, called her the sexiest woman he had ever known.
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And yet her loneliness and her desire for male companionship sometimes led her down hurtful paths. Stanley Hart claims to have been tempted into Hellman's sexual service in the mid-sixties. Hart, then an editor at Little, Brown who had encountered Lillian several times when they were both on Martha's Vineyard, proposed to his boss Arthur Thornhill that she be invited to write a memoir. Hart claims that he learned from Lillian's agent (then Robby Lantz) that the deal would carry a proviso. “If I slept with Lillian Hellman,” concluded the then-thirty-six-year-old Hart after discussions with Hellman's agent, “I could get her signature on a contract.”
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Hart was not averse to the exchange. She was, after all, a star. Sleeping with her, he frankly admits, “offered the promise of a friendship that I thought would elevate me into an echelon in which writers, and artists and actors and the very rich tended to socialize.”
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Lillian, in his memory, was “game, sexy and flirtatious.” She was also robust and energetic. Hart recounts how he made a date with Lillian and ended up in bed with her, beginning a reluctant romance that lasted for the better part of two years until he had her signature on the contract and she began to treat him with the disdain she reserved for those who served her. Then, in his eyes, she turned into an irritable, “self-centered, aging and ungainly” woman into whose “cruel, contentious” face he could no longer look.
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Hart published the story thirty years later and fifteen years after Lillian's death. If it is true, it suggests some sense of Hellman's vulnerability to the existential loneliness from which she suffered and provides a clue to her unrequited need for physical affection.

Lillian generally satisfied her needs for companionship in an exciting social life in which she became involved after Dash's death in early 1961. At Harvard, where she taught in the spring of 1961, she met Richard Poirier, then a young lecturer who would become a close friend and one of her literary executors. She also got to know Harvard instructor and playwright William Alfred. There too she met Martin Peretz, who would become editor of the
New Republic
, and Fred Gardner, the young student who introduced her to the world of the student left. To these young men and to many others who recalled her defiance toward the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, she was still a heroine. “She was thought of as gutsy, brilliant, witty, noble, socially desirable, and sexually liberated,” Stanley Hart tells us.
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Her new contacts melded with her New York life to provide a place on the edges of the intellectual world of the sixties. She did not belong in the quasi-political group that became known as the New York intellectuals or in the literary circle that surrounded the
New York Review of Books,
but many of its members became her friends. They included Philip Rahv of
Partisan Review
, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Barbara and Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. To this mix, and to her dinners, she added many others, among them conservative columnist Joseph Alsop, Norman Podhoretz (who became editor of
Commentary
in 1960), and McGeorge Bundy.

Celebrity provided access to broader and broader circles and simultaneously affirmed her status, a position she assiduously cultivated. Putting politics into the backseat, she constructed relationships with the rich and the powerful. She dined at the Princeton Club with Edmund Wilson and partied with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jackie Kennedy, Richard Goodwin, and Norman Mailer. She was recognized and offered a table at the most elegant restaurants; she attended and held court at the season's fashionable parties. An avid hostess, Hellman became, in Edmund Wilson's choice phrase, the Queen of the Cocktail Belt.
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“No writer I had ever met before … or would ever meet again,” recalled Norman Podhoretz of his younger days, “lived in as opulent a style as she did.” When he went to one of her lavish dinner parties, he met “famous theatrical personalities—producers, directors, actors, and actresses—with the women all richly begowned and bejeweled and the men radiating the special air of self-assurance that seems always to accompany the making of a lot of money.”
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The numbers of these friendships, and the amount of time Hellman invested in them, suggests the plausibility of John Hersey's claim that he knew “no living human being whom so many people consider to be their one best friend.”
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