A Difficult Woman (16 page)

To write well she claimed the need for calm, “for long days, months of fiddling.”
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Not infrequently, she complained, as she did to Arthur Kober at one point, about the interruptions that got in the way. “It is becoming increasingly obvious,” she wrote Kober from New York, “that I cannot work here: the telephone, the cause, the thousand nuisances who want me to speak or breathe or donate, the friends and half-friends who see no reason why you can't stop working and come to dinner and run right back and work after dinner.”
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Playwriting was, like any other form of writing, not glamorous, she told a Wellesley College audience.
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Hellman thought writing for the theater a magical thing—a gift that you either had or didn't and that could not be taught. Yet she credited Hammett with teaching her how to write. “Patiently and persistently he hammered away. He began by attacking most of what I had written, teaching me along the way that writers must go to school at writing, and learn and read and think and study.”
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But she was a good student and learned quickly to use dialogue to evoke character. Under Hammett's tutelage, she became expert at drawing sharply delineated characters and providing them with succinct and often raffish voices. In a few lines, she could capture the essence of a personality as well as its major flaws.
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About 1942: She credited Hammett with teaching her how to write. (© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Hellman counted on Hammett for critical readings of one draft after another: “Over and over again he would tell me how bad was the first draft, the second, the fifth, the sixth; over and over again I would bring the next drafts, giving them to him with what I thought was the truthful notice that if this wasn't any good I would never write again and might kill myself.”
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The Little Foxes
went through nine drafts, each of them worked on by Hammett, perhaps, thought Hellman, because after
Days to Come
he was as scared for her future as she was.
Watch on the Rhine
was “the only play that came out in one piece,” she recalled.
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Hammett never shirked. In one instance—the last speech of
Autumn Garden
—when
she could not get it right, he rewrote the speech for her. Repeatedly and gratefully, she acknowledged his role as a critic. “He was generous with anybody who asked for help,” she told an interviewer after his death. “He felt that you didn't lie about writing and anybody who couldn't take hard words was about to be shrugged off, anyway. He was a dedicated man about writing. Tough and generous.”
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Her biggest difficulty, she would often say, was plotting. “I'm scared of plotting,” she confided to Arthur Kober. “The few things I've ever done well were plots laid out for me beforehand.”
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Unsurprisingly, Hellman leaned heavily on Dashiell Hammett for many of her plot ideas. The idea for
The Children's Hour
came from him, as did the framework of her last original play,
Toys in the Attic
. But her plot structures tended to be contrived: in the manner of the “well-made” play, they relied on surprising revelations and twists. To bring her plays to their conclusions, Hellman introduced such devices as a letter found in a Bible, an overheard telephone conversation, or a revelation that there was no keyhole in the door through which sexual contact was said to have been observed. These fed the popular audience's desire for drama but did little to enhance the literary quality of the work.

Wanting her plays to be read as well as acted, Hellman made sure that the literary and dramatic forms “come together.”
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When she did not have time to ensure that she had got things right in a script prepared for rehearsal, she edited it for the published version, recasting a sentence, changing the place of a verb, or revising punctuation to meet the standards of readers. She was finicky about every word, seeking, as the drafts of her plays show, the right adjective and the pithy phrase, attempting in a sentence to capture a character's personality or a complicated motive. And she was sensitive about efforts to change anything: “It is not getting an idea for a play that drives playwrights mad so much as the business of having the idea still recognizable, even to its author, at the completion of the script,” she explained to an interviewer.
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As her plays entered production, Hellman became more possessive of her work and reluctant to cede even an iota of control. The writer, she insisted, was the heart of the process of producing plays. She had seen the Russian theater, she said more than once, and appreciated its sometimes wonderful “production, directing and acting,” but Russia was no longer producing good new writers and so, she judged, it could have only “dead end theatre. Fine to see, but it ain't going nowhere.”
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As a writer, she took full responsibility for failure: “I do not believe actors break plays or make
them either,” she asserted.
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For these reasons she wanted to maintain control over her work and found collaboration of any kind difficult. She wielded a heavy hand with regard to casting her plays, attended rehearsals regularly, and accompanied plays when they first went out on the road. She believed in the importance of every word she had written, refusing to allow actors or director any input at all. She would, and did, fight in defense of her positions, insisting that this was a way to work out differences and often revealing her legendary temper if opponents continued to disagree. “I didn't know about my nature,” she wrote in the early forties, “which turned out to be angry at the suggestion of any change, even the most innocent and foolish.”
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But she chided those who took her anger seriously, dismissing her explosions as “a comic waste” and attributing them to nerves “in a time when people believed too much in the civil rights of something called temperament.”
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Hellman claims to have discovered these qualities when
The Children's Hour
went into production. In one of her first stands, she fought successfully for the child, Mary Tilford, to retain a lisp that everyone including her producer-director, Herman Shumlin, thought overdone. As she explained, “I learned early that in the theater, good or bad, you'd better stand on what you did.”
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She learned her lesson well. “I took a stand on the first play and now I have a reputation for stubbornness,” she told an interviewer.
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The quality earned her a reputation as “difficult”—a label she acknowledged with some humor. Being difficult, she told a group of Swarthmore college students, “means refusing to alter a line, protecting your own work, arguing for salary,” and then she described the qualities of the difficult woman as “pig-like stubbornness” and “rigidity.”
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Harold Clurman, who directed Hellman's 1951 production of
The Autumn Garden
, agreed with Hellman's assessment of her persona. “There's a certain rigidity about her, a certain self-protective element,” he told an interviewer.
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To be fair, Hellman's refusal to budge seemed to be as much a principled decision for her as one based on ego. Much later in life, she exercised the same kind of control over the work of Dorothy Parker (of whose estate she was executor) when she refused permission to adapt her work to film. Nor would she allow Hammett's unpublished stories to see the light of day, claiming that he had not thought them ready. Of her own work she was equally protective. Even when she saw the need for changes, she could not easily make them, and never at a moment's notice. It threw her off when she tried to do otherwise—as she did, for example, when she worked with Leonard Bernstein and several lyricists including, finally,
Richard Wilbur on the 1956 production of the musical
Candide.
She had adapted the book and designed the characters, but as the musical went into rehearsal she found herself overwhelmed by demands to alter one element after another to fit the needs of a musical production. The musical that finally appeared was far too long and something of what she called a “mish mash.” She defended herself later from accusations about its messiness: “I was working with people who knew more about the musical theatre than I did, I took suggestions and made changes that I didn't believe in, tried making them with speed I cannot manage.”
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But in the end she put down the weaknesses of
Candide
to her own failure at the art of collaboration. “I am not a good collaborator because I am unable to do the kind of pressure work that goes with other people's understandable demands. I am unable to take other people's opinions about writing. I work best on my own for good or bad.”
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She generalized this into a commentary about herself. Noting about
Candide
that she “had become, with time, too anxious to stay out of fights,” she remarked that “everything I had learned about the theater, all my instinct went out the window.” Finally she concluded that collaboration “was truly not my nature, that I must never go through it again.”
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Hellman's ready acknowledgment of her weakness at collaboration did not prevent her from defending her original book and attributing the musical's failures to repeated efforts to tinker with her original conception. Finally, when Bernstein wanted to adapt the original music to a new treatment of the subject, she agreed, provided that her name be removed from its revivals.

At the root of Hellman's neurotic behavior lay anxiety about the end product. The production process overwhelmed her—perhaps because, much as she tried, she could not control it. Though she insisted on a heavy hand in selecting or approving casts, in attending rehearsals, in faithful adherence to her words, she found, as the critic Walter Kerr noted, “the simple act of entering the production process so fundamentally distasteful, such an invasion of creative privacy, that she can rarely bring herself to write about it; one senses that she does not wish to remember it.”
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She once recalled that she “complained and fussed a good deal” during rehearsals for
The Little Foxes
and then added that she only knew that “because I have continued to do so through the years.” Others testify to her irascibility. Harold Clurman remembered her whispering audibly during rehearsals. “It's disturbing to me and disturbing the actors,” he told her. “She didn't understand that the actor is also a sensitive being just as she is.”
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Austin Pendleton, who acted in a 1967 revival of
The Little Foxes
,
remembers her sitting in the back row of the orchestra section during rehearsals loudly dictating notes about the actors' performances to her assistant. Once she walked around the theater to check sight lines and called out to director Mike Nichols all the mistakes she thought he was making. This incident, according to Pendleton, drove Nichols to ask her to stay away from rehearsals until the first public preview.
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As her plays came closer to opening night, she became increasingly nervous—pacing through rehearsals, drinking, and unable to sit still. “I have never felt anything but fear and resentment that what was private is now to become public, what was mine is no longer mine alone,” she told a Harvard audience. “More than anything else the commitment takes place on that day, and final commitments, a final having to stand up, stand beside, take responsibility for, open yourself to, is for me an act of such proportion that I have never on all the many first days that came, ceased to be my kind of sick.”
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Pendleton, who directed the 1981 production of
The Little Foxes
that starred Elizabeth Taylor as Regina, provides a vivid picture of her behavior on such occasions. There wasn't “one scene that could make it to opening night without her saying she hated it,” he affirms. Toward the end of the New York previews, Hellman, still unhappy with how things were going, stormed out of the theater at the second intermission and, in full view of the preview audience, pounded her cane on the ground to emphasize how much she hated the performance. Pendleton says of himself: “I just lost it, and I started yelling—the lobby's jammed, people are ordering drinks in line—and I started yelling, ‘This is the worst fucking night of my life.' To which Hellman yelled back, ‘Every night I see this fucking production is the worst fucking night of my life.'” This incident so upset Pendleton that he left the theater, unable to watch Act 3. He walked around the block several times, threatening to quit the show, until the curtain came down, and then he retreated with some close friends to an obscure bar where he thought nobody could find him. Just a few minutes into their first drinks, Hellman, who had tracked him down, called. “You still angry?” Pendleton recalls her asking in a way that he found enchanting. “We laughed for a few minutes about our blow-up,” he remembers, “and I had a wonderful hour or so of drinking with my friends.” The relationship mended; the revival turned out to be a critical success.
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