A Difficult Woman (20 page)

In the aftermath of the unfavorable decisions around their efforts to organize, playwrights and screenwriters briefly called off their campaign. The producers created an alternative organization called the Screen Playwrights, which they insisted their writers join and whose members got preference for jobs. They went so far as to call all SWG leaders communists and to blacklist those who had been active in the SWG. Among those blacklisted was John Howard Lawson, the SWG's first president. Lawson, who was to be blacklisted again for political reasons in the late forties, called this the first blacklist.
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The SWG struggled against the Screen Playwrights for a while, but it could not retain members who had no work. Reluctantly, it dissolved. To all appearances, the Screen Writers Guild had died.

Here was a cause after Hellman's heart—one in which principle overruled pecuniary interest. By 1936, she ranked among the best paid of Holly-wood's well-compensated screenwriters. In January she had signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn, committing herself to adapt five stories (to be selected by Goldwyn) for the screen. Each assignment was expected to take ten weeks, and she would be paid $2,500 a week.
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Yet like her writer colleagues, she had little control, even over her own work. When it came to adapting the stage version of
The Children's Hour
, she grudgingly altered the plot into a heterosexual triangle to satisfy the demands of the movie code and to meet the requirements of the movie moguls who feared that a lesbian theme would not be commercially viable. And
she agreed to rename the film
These Three
to distance it even further from the controversial play.

Hellman readily identified with the demands of the writers for a voice in how credit was distributed and attributed on the screen. The producers believed that, having hired writers for particular tasks, they also owned and controlled the work produced. Hellman and others agreed to a point, but insisted that as artists they deserved credit for their work, distributed according to the proportion of work they had contributed to a picture. Because producers had the authority to move writers around at will or to insist that they work in teams, they could deny any writer ownership of his or her work or attribute it to replacements whose names they wished to promote. This amounted to a kind of censorship because it gave producers complete control not only over words but over who got the credit for them. Like her fellow writers, Hellman wanted to constrain the power of movie producers—to retain at least a modicum of control over how her words were used. To her, the producers' acts resembled the bullying with which she already identified fascism and that she would soon deplore in the case of the Spanish Civil War. A member of the New York–based Dramatists Guild, the author of a failed play that empathetically depicted factory workers, she became a labor organizer.

Just a few months after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This board was charged with supervising union campaigns and monitoring fair elections, free from employer intervention. Now the Screen Writers Guild quietly regrouped.
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When Hellman returned to Hollywood in the winter of 1937, the SWG had already begun a new organizational campaign. Lillian's friend Dorothy Parker (already a celebrity) and Parker's husband, Alan Campbell, immediately became involved. Lillian, who had come west to work on the script for
Dead End
, joined the cause. She seems to have been quite serious about her trade union commitments, belying accusations that she never took politics seriously. She lectured on “The Stage and Social Problems” for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union on January 21, 1937; along with Dorothy Parker and Hammett, as well as such early activists as Donald Ogden Stewart and John Howard Lawson, she held meetings in her home.
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With them she handed out leaflets at studio gates, knocked on doors in Hollywood, and buttonholed writers at parties and events. And she was effective. According to Maurice Rapf, whom she recruited to membership in the guild and who had
never previously met her, she “was working to sign everybody up for the Guild. She could have asked me to join the local fire-fighters; I would have joined. It didn't make any difference to me.”
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Determinedly, this group began to gather the signatures necessary to conduct an NLRB-supervised election, finally coming out into the open in June 1937. Then it elected a new leadership that included communist and noncommunist left-wingers, staunch conservatives and writers who had grown wealthy working for the industry, and hacks who ground out B movies for a weekly wage.
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Hellman, along with Hammett, was elected to a new board. With the board, she participated in a March 1938 meeting with NLRB executive secretary Nathan Witt to discuss the guild's capacity to represent the writers. A few months later—on June 7, 1938—the NLRB ruled that screenwriters were employees under the provisions of the Wagner Act and scheduled an election for just three weeks from that date. On June 28, 1938, the SWG roundly defeated the Screen Playwrights to become the screenwriters' legal representative.

The struggle wasn't over. Along with Philip Dunne, Charles Brackett, and Donald Ogden Stewart, Hellman became part of the negotiating team that first tried to bring in a contract. But though they had lost the election, the producers were not yet ready to settle. As Dunne recalled, “they pretended to negotiate with us” but they were “full of dirty tricks and evasions.”
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“The main thing we were interested in,” remembered Dunne, “was that we wanted to determine the screen credit … it was the most important issue for writers … We didn't want control of the material, because we recognized ourselves as employees, but what we did want was control of credits, because credits meant hiring … so long as the producers could designate who got the credit they controlled the hiring hall.”
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The producers held out for almost three years, settling only after the United States entered World War II. By then Hellman was no longer on the negotiating team, which had shed its communist members. The final contract was a victory of sorts. It called for a minimum wage of $125 per week for all writers as well as minimum periods of employment, and put the guild in control of screen credit.
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Hellman played only a bit part in this victory, her own political commitments less relevant to the successful establishment of a guild for screenwriters than her activities in the ensemble.

While the guild negotiated with producers over how to acknowledge the work of writers, it harbored a simmering internal dispute. The producers, eager to discredit the SWG, accused its leadership of communist
sympathies. In the period of the Popular Front, when communists and noncommunists often worked together and when attachment to communism was often understood as a search for social justice rather than a commitment to Stalinism, the accusation did little more than roil the waters. To be sure, many who were involved in organizing the SWG were sympathetic to communist goals of racial equality and social justice and opposed to untrammeled capitalism. Some (including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr.) were probably members of the CPUSA in 1936 and 1937. Hellman had not yet joined the party.

Increasingly the producers insisted that the issue was as much political as it was economic. Only the producers, they argued, could adequately police political content in order to diffuse the influence of communism that crept into the language of writers. This seemed farfetched to experienced writers like Albert Hackett (who early served on the SWG steering committee). “Mr. Mayer,” he concluded after reflecting on the emergence of the left in the movie industry, “really is the cause of all the communism in Hollywood.”
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In his view, the source of the problem was Mayer's heavy-handed insistence on controlling both wages and credits for writers, denying them ownership of their work or any element of creativity. John Howard Lawson agreed. Himself a member of the Communist Party by the mid-1930s, he confirmed Hackett's sense that “nobody was ever suspicious about our slipping anything into the pictures.”
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Even later in the decade, most denizens of Hollywood still insisted on the distinction between party membership and Marxist convictions. When screenwriter Allen Boretz, a party member, glimpsed Dashiell Hammett at a meeting in 1937, he noted that he “stood in a corner and said very little … It was a Marxist study group,” he emphasized. “These were not yet Communists, if they ever did become Communists.”
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To the outside world, however, this was a distinction without a difference. Association with communists, such as existed in many trade union groups in the Popular Front period, seemed to be evidence of subjection to communist dogma. Fearful that communism and membership in the CPUSA amounted to the same thing, insistent that loyalty to the CPUSA involved taking orders from Moscow, and conceiving those orders to be mandatory and therefore an abrogation of the free will and free thought essential to a democratic society, those suspicious of the left, including the producers, accused writers of acting as foils of the Communist Party. Producers pointed to the League of American Writers (a front organization founded in 1935) and its creation of the School for American Writers
in 1940, where some of the leading left-wing screenwriters (including Lawson and Stewart, Paul Jarrico, and Michael Blankfort, but not Hellman) taught. By hurling accusations of communism, producers hoped to divide the writers, to discourage uncommitted writers from joining the union, and perhaps to discredit the union altogether. Inadvertently, they created a political whirlwind of sorts when state and federal legislatures took a hand in the situation—setting up committees to explore communist influence in the entertainment industry.

On the very same day—June 7, 1938—that the National Labor Relations Board ruled that screenwriters could organize, the U.S. House of Representatives resolved to form a new committee—the House Committee on Un-American Activities—under the leadership of Texas congressman Martin Dies. Modeled after an already existing California committee headed by Jack Tenney that had weighed in on the side of the producers, the committee took it upon itself to “inquire into the realm of political thought, affiliation, and association” of everyone in the industry.
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Tenaciously, the committee, better known as HUAC, called upon members of the many front groups that now appeared in Hollywood to testify as to whether they were or were not party members. Hellman was not called.

The producers now had an ally, and the writers a larger concern. The Dies Committee called on members of the SWG and its parent organization, the League of American Writers, to defend themselves against charges of communist leadership.
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Their efforts were buttressed a year later by the passage of the Smith Act, which prohibited the dissemination of ideas and the distribution of literature that sought to overthrow the U.S. government. This, thought Hellman, marked the moment when the United States officially declared war against communist ideas inside and outside the Communist Party. And yet bitterly as Hellman felt about the act's prohibition against advocacy of communist ideas and its chilling effects on the ability of writers to speak their minds, she and other party members would cheer when, in 1943, the Smith Act was used to investigate Trotskyists.
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Even when the Second World War came and the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union, both the SWG and the League of American Writers remained targets of suspicion. And when the two organizations joined forces to sponsor a fifth annual Writers Congress in 1943, the Dies Committee condemned the effort by the Congress to allow writers to say what they wanted as “a plot by communists to take over the industry.”
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Fearing destruction, the Screen Writers Guild
began to purge its leadership of known communists. Hellman remained a member and staunch supporter of the organization but did not again assume a leadership position.

While the campaign to unionize screenwriters unfolded, Hellman found herself increasingly involved in the debate over the Spanish Civil War. Under the auspices of left-wing groups including the Communist Party, sympathetic individuals everywhere volunteered to fight on the government's side in an international brigade. By the fall of 1936, American volunteers, organized into what was called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, were already on their way to Spain. Additional numbers of young men and women joined the cause of the Republican Loyalists as ambulance drivers and reporters. The war took a complicated turn in early 1937 when the Republican Loyalists turned to the Soviet Union for help, which was quickly granted. As Soviet money and influence escalated, government defenders found themselves helpless to resist a disastrous and divisive Soviet effort to exert leadership over all the Spanish Republican forces. Anarchist and socialist members faced off against the Soviet-led communists, leaving Republican Loyalist fighters in disarray. American and non-Soviet partisans found themselves not only fighting Franco but torn apart by Soviet attacks on those who resisted their leadership. What was an American to do?

In the early fall of 1936, while confusion reigned, antifascists of all stripes tried to provoke some sort of intervention by the United States. Hellman, her heart clearly with the Spanish Republican Loyalists but her head deeply involved with the production of
Days to Come
, stayed on the sidelines. Hammett wrote long letters to his teenage daughter Mary to try to explain why he supported the Republican cause. The Spanish Civil War had started, he told her, when a triumvirate of wealthy landowners persuaded the army to overthrow the elected government (only two of whose twelve members were communists). “They decided to buy a revolution,” he wrote, and then followed this assertion with advice to “be in favor of what's good for the workers and against what isn't. Follow that and you may not be the most brilliant person in the world, but you'll at least be able to hold your head up when you look at yourself in the mirror.”
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