A Difficult Woman (35 page)

The farm turned out to be everything she had hoped. With Hammett about 1949. (Eileen Darby)

She purchased a graceful Georgian townhouse. (Photo by Alice Kessler-Harris)

Sixty-three East 82nd Street was not just a house purchase but a carefully explored and managed investment: Hellman first considered a partnership with the house's current owners, then asked her accountant to carefully calculate the costs and benefits of various other ownership strategies, including the lost income from other investments, the price of her own rent, and the operating expenses of the house. She subsequently invested $16,000 to renovate the plumbing and two kitchens and to install a passenger elevator. Much of the renovation was completed and supervised in Hellman's absence: she was in Moscow during the winter of 1944–45. By the time she returned in March, her apartment was ready for occupancy, and the upper two and a half floors (containing ten rooms, three baths, and a private terrace) had been rented “at a very satisfactory figure,” as her lawyer, Stanley Isaacs, informed her.
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Her lawyers successfully appealed the assessment of the house in order to lower the property taxes while raising the ceiling on the rent she could charge her tenants. Bernard Reis, her accountant, wrapped up the deal by preparing a
statement showing how she had come out on the investment. The process beautifully illustrates one of the perquisites of wealth: the ability to purchase the labor of others.

As
The Little Foxes
and
Watch on the Rhine
affirmed her box-office value, Hellman became increasingly prudent in her management of her literary properties and inflexible about the financial remuneration she expected from her work. She agreed to revivals and performances only without changes or cuts of any kind, and almost never to amateur companies. If a proposed performance threatened to detract attention from a new play or draw an audience from a touring company, she often refused. She signed contracts that gave her the right to approve the director and the cast of any revival; if adaptations were necessary for a broadcast version, she wanted the right of approval. She rarely granted permission for anything but a full production of her plays, routinely refusing to permit excerpts from any of her writings to be performed onstage.

Hellman's decisions about whether to grant the rights to perform particular plays rested partially on the amount of her royalty or the payment she could expect, and here she adopted a hardheaded and unsentimental stance. On one memorable occasion, Julian Feibelman, rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans and a good friend of her father's, made a mistake. He scheduled a reading of
Watch on the Rhine
without asking for permission. When the problem was called to his attention, he canceled the reading and wrote to her to apologize. Then he pleaded. Could she see her way clear, he asked, to giving them permission to do just one reading? An audience of fifty, which included her two aunts, had already been assembled. The fifty-cent admission fee would go directly to buy textbooks for poor children in the religious school. Hellman remained adamant. “It is too obvious to need much going into to say that the only way a playwright has of earning a living is to have a paying public come into a theatre, and any time people do come in without paying, he is, of course, being dishonestly cheated.” Anyone who decided to read a play without paying royalties was in violation, but that somebody should decide to read a play that was still running in New York was, in her eyes, “the most impertinent I have ever heard of.”
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If she could be sticky about permissions for idiosyncratic performances, making no exception for friends and relatives, she became positively strident when larger sums were involved. Jack Warner of Warner Bros. learned this to his sorrow when he decided to push back the release of the film version of
Watch on the Rhine
. His company had, despite wartime
exigencies, completed the film in a timely fashion. But he didn't want its release to interfere with another Warner Bros. product, a wartime propaganda film called
Mission to Moscow
that was designed to assuage fears of a newly allied Soviet Union. Hellman threw a metaphorical tantrum. She insisted that
Watch on the Rhine
was equally important “and what it has to say should be said now.” She had agreed to shut down the successful road tour of
Watch on the Rhine,
she wrote to Warner, “and cost ourselves a good deal of money by doing so … because we felt the need of the play's message.”
¹⁰
Warner's efforts to reassure Lillian that a later opening would be just as lucrative did not allay her feelings of having been slighted. She was, she wrote back, concerned about the money to be sure, but she had willingly sacrificed it “because we believed we had something to say and our financial sacrifices were small in the light of it.”
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There the matter rested until, two months later, Hellman learned that Warner Bros. had scheduled the film to open in the Strand Theatre, an undistinguished and relatively small movie house. Now she was outraged and her temper unconstrained. “By the postponement of the picture, by the way it has been treated, and by the theatre at which it will open, there are few people now who are not convinced that the Warner Brothers believe it to be a minor effort. You will understand that I can only consider this treatment of my play as a violation of the principle on which the contract was originally signed.” Bluntly commenting that “this letter, like the last letters, will make no difference to anybody,” she announced that she “had looked forward to a future of good years with you people.” Now that was over. She never signed another contract with Warner Bros.

Hellman generally defended her efforts to protect her properties as matters of principle coming out of her concern for the rights of all authors. But the record reveals so many arguments over large and small sums of money that we are led to wonder whether her defense obscured simple penny-pinching. Certainly the trivial nature of some of her dealings with
Watch on the Rhine
suggest an unfortunate penchant for haggling. She declined, in 1942, to purchase a ten-dollar audio recording of her acceptance speech when she won the Drama Critics Circle Award for the play because it was “too expensive.”
¹²
She wanted Random House to pay her $250 rather than the $150 they offered to reprint
Watch on the Rhine
, and then settled when Bennett Cerf reluctantly agreed.
¹³
In 1946, she refused to forgo her royalties on the production of a Japanese version of
Watch on the Rhine
that had lost money because, as she told her agent, “I do not believe in giving away the work by which one lives … and I have no
interest in the rehabilitation of displaced Japanese.” In her typically blunt style, she admonished the unlucky man: “I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I tell you that you are mistaken in recommending to any writer the waiving of royalties for a commercial production in any country, but particularly an enemy country.”
¹⁴

And yet Hellman could and did surrender her claims when alternative principles appealed to her or garnering payment became too difficult. During the Second World War, and in support of the troops, she readily gave permission for Random House to publish a special “Armed Service Edition” of four of her plays despite the promise of only a tiny share of the royalties.
¹⁵
When she discovered that
Watch on the Rhine
had been performed, without permission, by the American military in Germany and Austria, she did not ask for royalties. Rather she insisted that they be “turned over to the proper officials of the United Jewish Appeal in those countries.”
¹⁶
And, in one of her great gestures to principle, she left her name on
North Star
even when the final film so displeased her that it caused a permanent breach in her relationship with Sam Goldwyn.

To be fair, she could afford these gestures because the war years—years when the politics of the nation allied with Hellman's inclinations—proved politically comfortable and financially lucrative for her. She sold
The Little Foxes
to Goldwyn for $75,000 in 1940; she received $150,000 from Warner Bros. for
Watch on the Rhine
in 1941. She and Herman Shumlin set up their own production company to produce the film version of
The Searching Wind
in 1944; Lillian owned 60 percent of the stock in this company, Shumlin 40 percent, and Lillian got 10 percent of the gross weekly receipts for the run of the play as well.
¹⁷
Proudly, she announced to Dash, on army duty in Alaska, that they had called the company Dashiell Pictures, Inc. It was to be a short-lived affair. Dashiell, Inc, produced an unsuccessful film version of
The Searching Wind
and then folded in a spate of recriminations between Lillian and Shumlin. But Lillian was now box office magic. She partnered with Kermit Bloomgarden to produce her next play,
Another Part of the Forest
, and sold it to Universal Pictures for $250,000 (of which Bloomgarden got 20 percent) plus a hefty share of box office receipts.

These sums enabled Hellman to buy two more Manhattan rental properties, to begin her lifetime habit of investing small sums regularly in the production of the plays of others, and to accumulate a substantial portfolio of stocks on her own account. She chose her investments
carefully, putting her money in relatively small amounts in individual blue-chip stocks and seeking financial advice from friends as well as professionals. Her largest investment in the forties was in American Telephone and Telegraph (now AT&T), in which she owned four hundred shares.
¹⁸

Hammett, too, was doing well. Though he was not writing fiction, his army service in Alaska restricted his penchant for lavish spending. The royalties from his earlier stories and plays accumulated in accounts over which Hellman held power of attorney. Nancy Bragdon, Hellman's secretary, released small sums for one purpose or another. Hellman chose and sent presents to the people he designated when he asked. For larger amounts, he participated in a game of asking for Hellman's approval. Before he increased the support he provided to his divorced wife and their two children, he wrote to Hellman, suggesting that he wanted to do so. A couple of weeks later, he wrote, “emboldened by your silence I clear my throat again and ask you will you do whatever's necessary to … send them—meaning those Hammetts—their millions at the rate of $200 a week instead of at the lower rate hitherto obtaining. Thank you, Ma'am.”
¹⁹
Hellman punctiliously responded. She did not hesitate to chastise Hammett when she judged that he was spending money frivolously, and she scrupulously deducted from his account the costs of the gifts he asked her to buy for herself. Hammett, for his part, participated in the game by declaring his freedom to defy her wishes—as, for example, when he proposed to invest in war bonds.

That was during the war. At its end, when America's brief friendship with the Soviet Union faded into bitter enmity, Hellman's fortunes faltered. In the war years, her plays, appearances, and appeals drew ready and sympathetic audiences. But in light of a rising fear of Soviet territorial and ideological expansion, these activities no longer seemed admirable. Her services, especially as a scriptwriter, fell out of favor. Presented by Hollywood producers with the opportunity to sign a loyalty oath in 1949, she refused, joining the list of those who would no longer be allowed to work in Hollywood. Her subsequent failure, and Hammett's, to cooperate with government investigating committees affirmed her position as at least a fellow traveler and probably a communist. Shut out of the film industry that had provided much of her income, Hellman began to worry about money.

Income tax investigations added to her troubles. The Federal Bureau of Taxation (to become known as the Internal Revenue Service in 1953) had investigated Hammett in 1950 and found that he owed taxes on his royalties back to 1943. When he got out of jail in 1951, the bureau sent him a bill for back taxes in the range of $100,000. He refused to pay, so the bureau attached all his future income. He was earning something under $5,000 a year at the time, most of it from radio adaptations of his novels and stories.