A Difficult Woman (38 page)

This was heady stuff and Hellman thrived on it, using every opportunity to enhance her income. She was not above accepting small commissions—$700, for example, from an advertising agency to prepare five comments of one hundred words each on women's dress styles.
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She would not go to speak at Iowa State University for a fee she considered too low. “Miss Hellman thinks it should be $1,200 or $1,500 whatever you think. She gets many of these offers to speak and usually turns them down,” her secretary wrote to Robby Lantz. “But she may do this one if they pay more.”
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Nor would she participate at a symposium organized by
Esquire
magazine for the paltry sum of $500. “How would you like to tell them that $1,500 is the price?” she wrote to Robby Lantz, who promptly did.
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Sometimes her requests to Lantz were crude: “What do you think about this?” she wrote to Lantz of one request. “Should I do it, or should you ask the guy how much money I get for doing it.”
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1961: She discovered that she liked to teach. With Harvard students Robert Thurman, Peter Benchley, Charles Hart, Matthew Zion, and Frederick Gardner. (Photofest)

Journalism provided something of an outlet, and in 1963 Hellman worked out an arrangement with
Ladies' Home Journal
to publish three pieces “on anything I wanted to do anywhere, with expenses paid, etc.” Hellman anticipated a $5,000 fee for each piece, “a good arrangement for me because I, Saturday night, turned down a great deal of money” for a movie script. Editor Caskie Stinnett sent her to Israel to cover the pope's visit there, and to Washington to cover Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Poverty.
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Robby Lantz, Hellman's agent, carefully negotiated the terms under which the pieces would be written. As Lantz wrote to Stinnett on signing the contract, Hellman was “particularly happy at your confirmation of the fact that no cuts or changes in Miss Hellman's material will be made without her prior express approval.”
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By the mid-sixties, with the McCarthy period well behind her and the political activism of the civil rights movement and the New Left under way, Hellman's star once again rose. Requests for rights to perform her plays in both the United States and foreign countries poured in:
The Children's Hour
in Austria in 1966, Dresden in 1967; an Italian edition of her plays and a festival of five of her plays in Italy in 1967;
The Little Foxes
in Prague in '67; a radio production of
The Little Foxes
and
Another Part of the Forest
in Norway on December 31, 1968. The BBC inquired whether it could do
Another Part of the Forest
as well on March 28, 1960. In the United States, Hellman's popularity mounted and with it her celebrity status. A Caedmon recording of
The Little Foxes
succeeded a 1966 revival of
Watch on the Rhine
at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. Her agents received inquiries about reviving productions of
Another Part of the Forest
and
The Little Foxes
. Television and radio stations wondered if they might do parts of
The Autumn Garden
. Finally, Mike Nichols brought in a full-scale New York production of
The Little Foxes
, which opened in New York's Lincoln Center in 1967.

But the return of good times did not diminish Hellman's sense that her popularity and her income could shift with the political winds. No matter the increase in her prosperity, she continued to exercise an ever tighter control over her financial affairs. She monitored every transaction large and small, relying on the principles that had long guided the distribution and performance of her work and scrupulously respecting the rights of others. She routinely deferred to the Dramatists Guild and the Authors' League of America over such questions as who owned performance rights to which plays in what venues, or who controlled continuing rights over plays originally signed over to producers and film companies. But she kept daily decisions over fees and production rights in her own hands. She acknowledged and made decisions about a veritable mountain of requests to reproduce her work and Hammett's from public and private groups all over the world: Norway, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, Australia, and elsewhere. Though formally fielded by her agents, each demanded a response from her. She was called on to consider whether an amateur production one year might undermine a first-class production planned for a year later, or whether a book publication should preempt a request for a lecture or a play reading. She considered, and mostly rejected, adaptations of Hammett's work, and then of Dorothy Parker's and finally of her own. On a daily basis she decided whether to lend her name, her presence, her voice, and her pen to events small and large.

Each request demanded an individual answer from her agent, who faithfully consulted her about the price she was willing to accept for how many words, or minutes, or paragraphs, and whom she generally advised to say no unless the payment was generous.
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Despite its prestige, she wrote to Don Congdon (who succeeded Robby Lantz as her agent), she would not allow the BBC to broadcast a forty-five-minute version of
The Children's Hour
for a “disgusting sum of money.”
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She would have to be paid $1,000 for an initial TV production of
Toys in the Attic
, she told a Yugoslav agency, and $500 for every rerun.
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A German film producer who offered to pay her $1,500, the normal rate, for a filmed interview, was told that she would do the interview for $2,500. To make sure she got that sum, her agent set a negotiating price of $3,000.
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Money was the bottom line, for, as she protested, she had often been cheated of her due. She'd willingly agreed to an interview with Bill Moyers in 1968, and she had also agreed to reproduce the tapes on cassettes. But when the reproducer sold the cassettes for a profit, she balked. “It is a racket, and someone is making money on it,” her
secretary wrote to her lawyer, Ephraim London. “Miss Hellman's point is that since the studio gets a royalty on it, shouldn't Miss Hellman get a royalty?”
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This vigilant oversight continued all of her life.

Sometimes good causes, nonprofit organizations, and “educational” programs got a break, but not always. She would not allow her plays to be performed in South Africa, no matter who sponsored them. She could not permit a sentence or two in a women's calendar, or a paragraph in a staged celebration of women without payment. She would allow a high school student to read an excerpt of her work in a high-school auditorium only if the passage did not exceed twenty-five words. One such incident in the winter of 1976–77 is paradigmatic. When the producers could pay no fee, Hellman refused permission to allow her work to be used in a public television program intended to “highlight the important literary contribution made by women.”
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The producers reduced their request to a bare paragraph from
Pentimento
and, on the advice of counsel, informed Hellman's agent that “though they were uncomfortable doing something that will displease her,” they had decided to go ahead. An incensed Hellman pushed Donald Congdon to respond. “Miss Hellman's work is in great demand and has a value in the market place,” he replied, “the equity of which would surely be reduced if such free use as you propose were permitted.”
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The producer's agents and lawyers consulted, concluding that they were on solid ground in resisting payments. But Congdon, spurred on by Hellman, pursued the case: “The creative artist should not be told, as Miss Hellman was, that her work was going to be used whether she gave permission or not. Both of us found that offensive,” he wrote.
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Two months later, Hellman settled for an apology and a token fifty-dollar fee.

Hellman's hardheaded calculations did not succumb to the temptations of participating even in performances designed to celebrate her. Producer Viveca Lindfors offered her $2.50 per performance to use four lines from
An Unfinished Woman
in a show planned to highlight the role of women in letters. Lillian countered by claiming that her words were worth at least $25 per performance. After some negotiating, Lindfors offered her $5, and Lillian came down to $10. When they could not bridge that gap, Lillian abruptly pulled out. Nor did she succumb to requests for magazine interviews unless they were in connection with the publication of one of her books: she believed commercial magazines that would make a profit by publishing her spoken words should pay artists an appropriate
fee. And she believed very strongly that to garner the respect it was due, she should not sell her work short.

Those who produced her plays or used her words without permission infuriated her. Not atypically, Congdon, who became her agent in the summer of 1971, wrote to object when an unsuspecting playwright inserted a few lines from
An Unfinished Woman
into a play: “This is to request an explanation from your client without delay, and to put him on notice that he has no right to use any material of Miss Hellman's without a license to do so.”
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The same lines appear repeatedly in Congdon's letters to Hellman suggesting that she remained vigilant on the principle of ownership. About a Yugoslav agency that ignored or overlooked a request for payment and performed
The Little Foxes
without permission, Congdon advised Hellman to take the tiny sum they put up after the fact and offered to “put their agency on notice that in no circumstances can they permit future performances of your work unless the theatre can pay an acceptable advance and guarantee to supply royalty statements.” Hellman replied, “Yes, do this very firmly.”
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Hellman's objections covered Hammett's work as well as her own: when a producer pleaded that he had already gone some distance toward the making of a musical based on Sam Spade, Congdon described Hellman as “affronted by the thought that professionals would go so far in developing a property they did not control.”
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Looked at from the perspective of her ample financial resources in the late sixties and seventies, Hellman's behavior appears to be greedy. But in light of her status as an economically independent woman, the fear evoked by her blacklisting in the fifties, and the new possibilities that her celebrity status suddenly made available to her, Hellman's behavior deserves a more charitable assessment. Certainly, in the seventies, America shed whatever temptations had drawn it to the idea of cultural revolution, communal living, and a diminished concern for material goods. The New Left's vision of hippies wandering the world with all their possessions in a knapsack vanished. It was replaced by a new spirit of materialism and a new respect for corporate power. By the late seventies, a new market ideology reigned. Neoliberal ideals that glorified individual achievement and competition floated in the air and would soon replace the spirit of social responsibility that Hellman appreciated about the sixties. Hellman, approaching her seventies and still involved in every detail of her financial affairs, learned to use the market to her benefit. She understood herself as
a valuable property whose protection lay primarily in her own hands and who could and should make as much as possible from a market in which she held a valuable position. Her work was, after all, her largest resource. To manage her complicated financial affairs and her literary properties, she relied on the meticulous attention of secretaries, agents, accountants, and lawyers, all of whom worked with each other, as well as with her, to ensure that her rights and interests were appropriately acknowledged and paid for. Unquestionably, she acted the prima donna. She believed in her own value and the value of her work; she expected deference. She wanted immediate attention to her affairs and thoughtful consideration of her desires. She expected accountants and agents alike not only to understand and respect her principles but to honor all her unspoken as well as spoken wishes. For this we might take her to task, but by the seventies these behaviors had become part of a tough persona and a self-protective veneer necessary to living well by her own efforts.

To guide her, Hellman hired talented literary agents who painstakingly helped her to maximize her income and advised her as to what she might and might not accept by way of remuneration. These relationships inevitably became touchy, with agents consulting with her over even the smallest decisions and eating crow when they overstepped their boundaries. Robby Lantz, who represented her in the sixties and again in the eighties, repeatedly wrote her notes about large and small requests, noting that “I think I know your answer, but don't want to answer for you.”
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The files of letters to and from Don Congdon, her literary agent in the seventies, contain similar language. After he had represented her for little more than a year, he wrote to explain why he had settled for a relatively small payment for one of Hammett's stories, apologizing at length for the arrangement. “Ordinarily, I would check any unusual request for permission to quote from Hammett's work with you,” he wrote. “Because this material was to be used in a ‘scholarly monograph,' and because it seemed clear that the quotes would be used in a proper fashion, I assumed that it would meet with your approval. If this assumption was incorrect, let me know and I will check all permissions with you in the future.”
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The apology seems to have worked, because Congdon eventually represented Lillian for nearly twelve years. But his deference did not diminish. Years later he continued to ask her approval for trivial decisions. “This,” he would write to her in reference to one request or another, is “something you probably won't approve, and if that is so, just say the word.”
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