A Difficult Woman (41 page)

When Julia died in 1935, the fund went to Lillian. From it, she initially received $900 quarterly. But Gilbert entrusted the fund to an accounting firm headed by Arthur Ernst that managed it ineffectively, eventually reducing the principal by a third. Still the trust continued to provide Lillian with an income of about $3,000 a year—a significant sum in 1940. To prevent a further erosion of its value, in 1942 Lillian asked her father to look into the situation and then hired attorney Stanley Isaacs to represent her. She encouraged him to question even small charges, because, as her secretary wrote, “Miss Hellman says to tell you not to worry about what you tell Ernst because she doesn't like him much.”
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With Isaac's guidance, Lillian tried to influence the investments made by the trust, channeling them from stocks to tax-free bonds of various kinds. When Gilbert died in 1946, he was replaced by his niece, Florence (Julia's sister and Lillian's aunt). Florence was well intentioned but utterly incompetent in financial matters and left Ernst and his successors to handle the trust at will. Over the years it continued to do badly, shrinking in value and by the 1950s providing Lillian with less than $1,500 in annual income. The relatively small sums and the declining assets added fuel to Lillian's ire: Why had her monies, alone of all the original Sophie Newhouse estate, been left in trust?

Several times Lillian demanded accountings and expressed concern
at the loss of income. But in the end, she feared that the expense of scrutiny would destroy the trust entirely. Instead she sought advice on how to invest the trust's funds from her lawyer friend Arthur Cowan. Encouraged by Cowan, in 1957 she began to try to obtain access to the trust itself.
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To no avail. Florence had been advised that turning the trust over to Lillian would encourage a suit against Florence's estate after her death. “Lillian, I am sorry,” she wrote to her in the spring of 1960, “but I can't do anything about it; I can't break the law. I feel very badly and if I could I would hand it over to you but I don't want to get into any trouble.”
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Lillian responded churlishly: “It is very difficult for me to understand what Mr. Ernst means when he says you could be in any trouble, but most important to me, I feel sad and bewildered.”
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The issue created tension for many years. Lillian simply did not understand how her aunt could continue to exert influence over money that she conceded belonged to Lillian. But in Lillian's view, her aunt shared the perspective of her mother's family, which, as she wrote to her lawyer, “talked very little about anything but money and several times Florence and I have had sharp minutes about that.” This created endless ill feeling: “I see her only because my mother would have wanted it, and that amounts to about four visits a year.”
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Her friends gathered as much. One remembered “her talking all the time to some elderly aunts who were living well into their nineties because she was determined that they would leave her money.”
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Hellman's visits to Florence diminished as Florence grew older and more senile. Toward the end, she wrote a pathetic note to her niece: “Dear Lillian, What is wrong? I haven't heard from you, even on my birthday. Was it anything to do with the money for your trust?”
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Florence's growing senility encouraged Lillian to continue her efforts to dissolve the trust. In 1972 she hired a politically savvy lawyer, Paul O'Dwyer, who, with Florence's knowledge, petitioned the surrogate court to remove her from her position and to name him as trustee. The maneuver succeeded: Florence resigned her position on August 4, 1972, and O'Dwyer became her successor the following June. Lillian now insisted that the fund be reinvested to disregard growth and produce as much income to herself as possible. This, she told O'Dwyer, was necessary because “since I have no ability to will the trust to anybody else, my chief interest is in the highest possible yearly earnings to myself.”
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O'Dwyer continued to serve as executor until a run for political office forced him to give up the job and Lillian to seek a new strategy to control it.

All along, Lillian believed that Florence disliked and distrusted her.
Florence had, Lillian wrote to Paul O'Dwyer, “of course known about my father's anger and about my agreement with it.” But this was a matter of justice. “I have no idea,” she continued to O'Dwyer, “whether our petitioning for a change of executor would cause her to remove me from her will—if indeed I have ever been put there—but I think we should do it.”
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Lillian was wrong about Florence's feelings. When Florence died in 1975 she left Lillian the bulk of her estate, a sum amounting to $270,000 as well as some expensive jewelry and household objects. It took a while to clear the estate, and Lillian waxed impatient, pushing her lawyers to extract advances on the money due her and complaining that some of the jewelry left to her had gone missing. At this point in her life she did not need the money. Lillian came into her aunt's bequest at a moment in time when she was reaping many thousands of dollars in royalties from the first two volumes of her bestselling memoirs. By 1973, her accountant, Jack Klein, valued her net worth at a little more than $812,000, including $320,000 worth of securities, and her aunt's legacy made not a whit of difference in her lifestyle.

But there remained her grandmother's trust. At age seventy Lillian still had not escaped the penumbra of her mother's acquisitive family. In 1976, Florence now dead, Hellman approached a fourth lawyer, Donald Oresman of the distinguished law firm of Simpson Thacher and Bartlett to try once again. This time she succeeded. On August 15, 1977, Lillian received the news that the trust fund had been legally broken. She gave Arthur Kober's daughter, Cathy, $10,000 to fulfill her mother's bequest to Kober, paid all the fees, and inherited $132,500. She was seventy-two years old; she had lived her entire adult life under the shadow of the Newhouse family financial umbrella and had finally worked her way clear of it.

She turned now from worrying about what others would leave her to how she would distribute her own substantial assets. True to form, she worried over every detail, changing the will almost yearly in large and small ways, trying as hard as she could to control what would happen to the money she had so carefully accumulated in her lifetime. The list of beneficiaries changed as her old friends died off, but with a few exceptions she sought to leave those who remained with meaningful personal items rather than gifts of cash. To her secretaries, the choice of a piece of jewelry as well as a small amount of cash; to Annabel Nichols, a diamond bracelet; to Barbara and John Hersey, a Queen Anne table, and to Barbara a piece of jewelry too. And so it went. She named her friends and the particular item or items she wanted them to have: an antique chest or
dressing table to one, a pair of candlesticks or wall sconces to another, Russian icons to a third, and then choices of anything left over to others. As each year passed, she crossed out those who had died or offended her, or added a new friend. The specificity of the final versions suggests that Lillian wanted her heirs to know that she had thought about each of them individually, that she held for each of them a particular affection that she could express only with something that was irremediably hers.

As the wills changed over the years, she left more and more of her property to Peter Feibleman, who had loved and cared for her since the mid-sixties. And yet there were strings attached that also changed over the years. She wanted to leave the cooperative apartment to him, but only if he lived in it. If he chose to sell it, then he could keep the largest part of the money it brought in—but, she wrote to her lawyers, “I would like to make the provision that he has no right to bequeath the apartment to his heirs and that if he owns it on his death the total sale reverts to my estate.”
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The Martha's Vineyard house would go to Feibleman, but additional property on the Gay Head beach would be left to the town for the use of local children. Cantankerous to the end, she sought to assign separate fiduciaries for her literary properties, as executors for her estate, and for the two trusts she established—as well as for the trust she set up for the royalties that would go to Hammett's daughters and for the Vineyard property. Her lawyers protested, finally, the “fragmented authority” that would result. Under that version of the will, they calculated, nine individuals would be involved in each decision as to any literary property. She wanted to tie her executors and literary fiduciaries to their jobs by paying them a flat fee, plus an executor's or trustee's commission on the services they rendered.

In the early eighties, when her estate was probably worth more than $2 million and would soon, by one estimate, amount to $3.5 million, she was still dithering.
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She signed the last version of her will on May 24, 1984, just a month before she died. The will that she rewrote many times teaches us something about what history had done to her, for she wanted both to recognize those who had been kind to her and to ensure that her wealth would continue to support the work to which she had devoted her life. The final distribution of her estate suggests her need both to believe that she was loved and to use her resources to express what love she still could. For in the end money was not simply a way of sustaining herself, but a way of convincing the world that she mattered. And who could blame her, a woman alone, a woman without money or beauty, for extracting from her talent and her fame the emotional sustenance that no partner provided?

He who has seen a war and plans another must either be a villain or a madman.

—Lillian Hellman, “Judas Goats,” 1947

It's still not un-American to fight the enemies of one's country.

—“From America,” 1949

We are or are being made into a fearful people, and fearful people will stand for very little deviation.

—speech at Swarthmore College, 1950

The Communist Party was not illegal in the years when Hellman and Hammett moved into its orbit in the late 1930s. Despised and feared by some, the CPUSA commanded the loyalty of many who believed that communism augured economic democracy and social egalitarianism. Like Hellman and Hammett, many in and around the Communist Party hoped that communism would bring a fuller and more complete political democracy than any yet achieved in the Western world. They would learn that they were wrong, but at the time many clung to the idea that, whatever the defects of the existing Soviet Union, the idea of communism remained the last, best hope for a socialist nirvana. For this reason, many idealists dismissed revelations and rumors about forced collectivization
of farms, the removal and forced labor of millions of peasants, fake trials and executions of senior officials, and arbitrary imprisonment of critics of all sorts in a brutal system of gulags. Later they would wonder how they could have been so blind to Stalin's malfeasances, but at the time the belief in the saving power of communism ran deep.

The reputation of communism rebounded during World War II as the United States allied with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler's Germany. Stalin's stature and the American public's admiration for the courage of Russian soldiers increased as Americans watched its ally single-handedly—and with enormous loss of life—resist a massive assault of German troops at Stalingrad. At one with her country and its policies, Hellman could and did support the Soviet-American alliance with all the energy at her disposal. But the war's aftermath quickly ruptured the brief friendship, spawning a polarizing struggle for influence between two very different economic and political systems and a bitter stalemate as both sides sought to draw allies around the world into their orbits. As it became clear that the Soviets sought to create for themselves a series of barrier states and spheres of influence, the West became increasingly suspicious. By March 1946, only eleven months after the end of the European war, Churchill delivered the Fulton, Missouri, speech that would mark the beginning of the Cold War.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
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The ally had turned into an enemy, and those who had too enthusiastically supported that ally, Hellman among them, became objects of mistrust. Espousing communist ideas, once considered merely eccentric, now became subversive. Attributions of communism or excessive sympathy for communism (fellow traveling) signaled disloyalty rather than dissent. Just two months after Churchill's ominous speech, a giant railroad strike broke out in the United States, fomented by workers whose wages had
been constrained during the war and who now wished to garner some of their deferred benefits. President Truman, suspecting communist leadership, declared that this was a strike of “a handful of men against their own government and against every one of their fellow citizens.” On May 26, 1946, he asked Congress for authority for a government takeover of the railroads, their operation to be handled by the army.
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Hellman described the events to John Melby in China as “absolutely unbelievable.” She was in shock, she wrote, calling the day of the speech a “black, black day.” Truman's speech, she thought, was “the most remarkable document ever issued by a president.”
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