A Difficult Woman (27 page)

This was the background behind attacks on Hellman around the publication and stage adaptation of the diary of Anne Frank, a subject worth exploring because it enacts the alliance of heightened Jewish nationalism and anticommunism. Together they created a political vortex in which Hellman found herself spinning, turning what might have been a trivial conflict into one with a much larger significance. The enormously popular diary, written by the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Dutch Jewish family who had hidden in an Amsterdam loft, appeared in Dutch, German, and French before it was finally published in English in 1952. Journalist and author Meyer Levin read the diary in French and contacted Otto Frank (Anne's father and the only surviving member of the family) to see if he might play a role in its English-language publication. In the event the book was published by Doubleday, without Levin's intervention.
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Encouraged by Otto Frank and hoping to reach a larger audience, Levin then prepared a theatrical treatment of
The Diary of a Young Girl.
His purpose, he would later write, was to bring to the public “the voice from the mass grave.”
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In Levin's mind, Anne Frank's diary spoke to the specifically Jewish suffering engendered by the Nazi policy of extermination. He and many others read the diary as a tribute to the six million Jews who had died and as a memorial to their brutal executions. In contrast, the diary was read by many, including Anne's father, as a more generic tribute to human suffering. The Soviet Union, still wounded by the loss of twenty million civilians and soldiers, took a similar line around the Jewish question. It acknowledged Jews as a symbol of universal suffering but did not focus
on them alone. These differences led Levin to target Lillian Hellman as the architect of the rejections that would follow.

Levin's dramatic treatment got short shrift. Herman Shumlin, Hellman's now-estranged longtime producer, refused the play because he thought audiences wouldn't come to a play about “people they know to have ended up in the crematorium.”
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Cheryl Crawford, an equally distinguished producer, considered the play at length. She turned it down after she asked for the opinion of good friends, including Hellman. Asking Hellman's advice should have surprised no one. She was then a dominant figure in the literary world, her critical judgment highly valued. Writers as talented as Saul Bellow turned to her for criticism and advice, which she generously gave. Bellow commented at one point that he was reduced to misery by Hellman's judgment that what he had written was “admirable, but not a play.”
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Hellman read the play and didn't like it, commenting only that it had little dramatic content. Crawford turned it down but suggested that Kermit Bloomgarden, producer of Hellman's most recent play,
The Autumn Garden
, might be willing to produce it; Bloomgarden, too, refused. In the face of all these rejections, Otto Frank backed out of his commitment to Levin. Grateful to Levin for resurrecting the diary in English and reluctant to offend him, he nevertheless turned to other avenues to ensure that a play based on the diary would finally see the light of day. Bloomgarden took a new option on the diary and asked his old friend Lillian Hellman to suggest new writers. Soon the newspapers announced that Albert and Frances Goodrich Hackett had been commissioned to write a new play.

Meyer Levin now began to wonder whether he had been somehow blacklisted. He was convinced that the diary should be produced as it existed, with Anne's consciousness of suffering as a Jew intact. He could not imagine any better interpreter of the diary than himself. Only an anti-Jewish conspiracy, he believed, could account for his dismissal; only a “merciless critical cabal” of communists was powerful enough to explain the play's rejection.
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Now he began, publicly, to talk about “possible ideological intrusion in the handling of the Jewish content of the Diary.”
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The implication was clear. He blamed anti-Semitic communists for suppressing his version of the diary.

The Hacketts had been Lillian's companions during her early days in Hollywood. Well known in Hollywood circles, they had successfully
brought Hammett's
Thin Man
stories to the screen and had since written a range of prizewinning films including
It's a Wonderful Life
(1946),
Easter Parade
(1948), and
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
(1954), which was then in production. To Levin, however, they had two serious flaws: they were not Jews, and they were closely associated with Hammett and Hellman, in his mind two of Hollywood's leading communists. It did not help that the Soviet Union was, at this moment, persecuting and executing Jewish writers. Levin, putting together his own interpretation of events, accused Hellman of blindly following a communist party line that denigrated Jewish suffering in deference to the human tragedy that the Holocaust represented. Hellman, he insisted, had exercised undue influence over Bloomgarden: she was a communist and an anti-Semite.
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In desperation, Levin began what would become a lifelong campaign to produce his version of the diary. He wrote endless letters to Otto Frank begging for a chance to try his play out in Buffalo or other small venues; he took an advertisement in the
New York Times
claiming that he had been ousted by those who disliked his Jewish approach and accusing those who had suffered from McCarthyism of using innuendo to smear him and his reputation. He consulted distinguished lawyer Ephraim London (who reappears in our story later as Lillian's lawyer in her suit against Mary McCarthy), who told him he had no grounds for legal action and no rights to the diary.

The Hacketts' play, which reached Broadway in 1955 to rave reviews and an almost two-year run, presented Anne as a teenager who identified with all of suffering humanity rather than as an Anne whose Jewish God had allowed her people “to suffer so terribly up to now.” Levin could not be controlled. Anne's words had been altered to omit any hint of her Jewish identity and consciousness, he argued; the family's commitment to Judaism had disappeared; one could hardly tell why they were in hiding. And the Hacketts were, in his view, guilty of plagiarism. They had quoted some of the same words from the diary that he had selected for his play. Small matter to him that by now Otto Frank wanted the play to provide a message that would embrace its audience, nor that the director Garson Kanin, agreed with the playwrights that removing most of the Jewish ritual, as well as references to Nazis and concentration camps, would yield a play whose audiences didn't have to be Jewish to identify with it. The play's heartfelt critical and popular reception suggests that it spoke effectively to its 1950s audience, affirming the accuracy of Hellman's commercial instinct. In a decade when few were ready to come to
terms with the Holocaust—indeed the word did not yet exist in the common vocabulary—the play hit the right note. Whatever the morality of the Hackett's decision to de-emphasize the Jewish theme, it is plausible that any other interpretation would have failed to reach its mark.

Tortured by the successful production, Meyer Levin first sued the Hacketts for plagiarism, and when that proved unsuccessful, he launched attacks on Bloomgarden and Hellman. To explain his rejection, Levin settled on the notion that he had been victimized by nothing less than Stalinism, and that Hellman (whom he characterized as an assimilationist German Jew) was at the center of a conspiracy against him and all Jews of his ilk. From the start, he later wrote, he “had suspected that some doctrinaire formulation rather than pure dramatic judgment had caused Miss Hellman's attack on my play and after the substitute work was written, I became convinced that I had been banned because my work was in her political view ‘too Jewish.'”
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Neither the fact that others (including Otto Frank) shared Hellman's view nor that Hellman had been only marginally involved deterred Levin. And the commercial success of the Hackett play infuriated him. In his eyes, Hellman had simply followed a party line that obfuscated Jewish suffering in a shroud of more generic hatred that was also directed at gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and communists.

Little evidence supports the notion that Hellman was central to the diary's transition to the stage and then to the screen.
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At the height of the McCarthy period, Hellman could hardly have been a major player, even had she wanted to be one. Hellman did suggest the Hacketts as writers, and she read their script toward the end, offering some suggestions for staging. As was her habit, she invested a small sum (in this case $750) in the company that staged the play. The play, and the movie that emerged four years later, were so successful that over the years she managed to make a tidy amount from them. The total (about $25,000 over fourteen years) suggests the validity of her instincts about what made a good dramatic story.
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Despite Hellman's tangential association with the play, its producer, and its playwrights, Levin continued to attack Hellman both as a self-hating Jew and as a Stalinist. Over the course of two decades he brought one unsuccessful lawsuit after another and signed agreements to desist from accusations that he routinely violated. He accepted compensation not to seek productions of his play, then claimed exemptions; he agreed to stop talking publicly about the diary and continued to do so. The campaign
drew many supporters in the Jewish community. Norman Podhoretz would say later that one reason he stopped speaking to Lillian Hellman was her “de-Judaization” of the stage version of
The Diary of Anne Frank.

Hellman responded to these attacks wearily. She could not, she wrote to her friend Bill Alfred in 1959, sue Levin, because she lacked the money. And she did not know if she would, even if she had the resources. “Now I just think he's crazy and I take my beating.”
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Arguing that the damage had been done once Levin's accusations were printed, she would not accept invitations to respond to them in writing: “They all know full well the harm that has been done me on this and other grounds, and they can go fuck themselves before I defend myself from the Levins of the world.”
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As late as 1974, she complained to her lawyer that “Mr. Meyer Levin has begun the red baiting all over again.”
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The Meyer Levin experience suggests something of the complexity of living as a secular Jew in the Cold War moment. As Hellman became caught in Levin's obsession with his particular view of Jewishness, so the idea of what it meant to be a Jew became the subject of larger conversations and debates. Hellman's reluctance to accede to the primacy of identification as a Jew, her recalcitrance in the face of the successful politics of the new Jewish nationalism, made her a perfect target. To her, a literature rooted in the Jewish immigrant tradition appeared to be only a momentary fad. Though she admired Arthur Miller and read Philip Roth, she did not see their work as great literature, nor believe that its use of Jews successfully captured the larger social meanings she thought important. When, in the early sixties, she tried to play in this ballpark by adapting Burt Blechman's novel
My Mother, My Father and Me
into a stage play, she failed miserably. The play, like the book, meant to satirize the purposeless new middle class, whose lives contained no trace of old-world values of caring and community. But the satire is rooted in a Jewish family, and when it turns into a multipronged attack on the aimlessness of children, on business practices, on old-age homes, Hellman exposes her own bitterness about the failure of family life in general and Jewish family life in particular. Lacking empathy for Eastern European immigrant communities and without patience for the self-centered aimlessness of young people, Hellman turned family relationships into a parody of racism and materialism. What she had intended as comedy emerged as vulgar parody.

The play she wrote featured a businessman husband who flirted daily with bankruptcy as he tried to control a spendthrift wife. Their twenty-six-year-old son lacks external or internal constraints. When the wife's elderly immigrant mother briefly joins the family, she exposes their inauthentic feelings about the importance of kin. As she treads on the toes of the African-American helper, she also challenges the shallow liberal ideals of those for whom status and comfort are final goals. Retreating to a nursing home, the grandmother cashes in her funeral policy to support the youth's effort to find himself. Hellman skewers his search in a final scene where, masquerading in Indian costume, he is shown selling doodads to tourists. Filled with black humor and rife with casual racism, the play offered such a barren and hopeless portrait of Jewish family life that it closed after only seventeen performances. Its lead player, Walter Matthau, himself a Jew, told Hellman the play was anti-Semitic.
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As American Jewish identity shaped itself around nostalgia for the Eastern European past and pinned its hopes on Israel, so it also encompassed a growing antagonism to the Soviet communism that now added anti-Semitism to its other sins. In the Cold War years, intellectuals rushed to join the ranks of anticommunism, claiming fervent opposition to the Soviet Union while insisting that they had not abandoned the humane values of their younger days. But the vortex of anticommunism allowed little space for maneuvering. Hellman, still committed to the larger values of social justice, egalitarianism, and antiracism, seemed to give comfort to Soviet-style communism, to aid and abet enemies of democracy and the free market. Hellman's decision to remain loyal to values that had seemed self-evident before the war negated the new Americanism of the postwar period. To be pro-American meant signing on to free-market democracy. For Jews, this meant a movement away from the goals of shared responsibility and economic security that characterized the Roosevelt period; it meant a pull toward the new liberalism of individualism, consumption, and philanthropy. The old values, so consistent with the Americanism of the 1930s, became, in the context of the fifties, outdated. Hellman was out of step, her claims to decency, honesty, and loyalty to friends now confronted by the animus of a newly influential group of Jewish intellectuals.