A Difficult Woman (45 page)

That was only the beginning. Lillian recalled a second story in which Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, sent her a contract “for any job I wanted, writer, producer, director, and that the contract sent to my house carried a clause of such mysterious words that I hastened around to ask what it meant.” She discovered, she says, that it meant “I could not visit, or have visit, a prescribed list of people who were thought to be too liberal, too radical, or too talkative.” Hellman remembers “laughing at the sheer gall of it, sure that they couldn't be serious.”
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But they were to have the last laugh. In 1950, the right-wing newsletter
Counterattack
, whose sponsors included former FBI agents, published a list of 150 entertainment-industry individuals believed to be communists.
Counterattack
editors made a point of going after people who were well known and had reputations to hurt. The detailed information they collected about Hellman's activities could only have come from the FBI.
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Hellman, her name on the latest list, now knew she was excluded from the American movie industry.

Hellman and Wyler talked about the plan during a European trip. Here with William Wyler in 1960 on the way to Europe. (Photofest)

She watched now, her world in chaos, as her friends and acquaintances allied themselves with those who championed curtailing civil liberties. Some of the most liberal organizations refused to protect the rights of
communists. Americans for Democratic Action, founded in 1947 to preserve the New Deal, took a strong anticommunist position in order to preserve its own legitimacy. Traditional defenders of the First Amendment like the American Civil Liberties Union refused to defend the rights of those suspected of communism to speak.
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Both organizations willingly purged their memberships in order to defend their anticommunist credibility. Trade unions fell into line, policing themselves, though often only after fierce fighting and internal political tensions. Hellman's own Screen Writers Guild agreed to eliminate communists from leadership positions. Universities followed suit. Though at first the American Association of University Professors issued a statement insisting that faculty members could be dismissed only for acts of disloyalty, not for Communist Party membership, it never so much as publicized the names of dozens of institutions that fired suspected party members.
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The Board of Regents of the University of California dismissed thirty-two faculty members who refused to sign loyalty oaths in 1950. Three years later, thirty-seven institutions (including Yale, Stanford, and Brown) agreed that since “loyalty, integrity and independence are incompatible with membership in the Communist party … party membership extinguishes the right to a university position.”
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Their stance effectively curtailed the “full academic freedom … guaranteed to professors and scholars,” for it was assumed that not cooperating with government investigatory bodies was tantamount to admission of Communist Party affiliation.

Hellman responded, naïvely perhaps, but nevertheless with stubborn refusal to concede to fear. On numbers of occasions she had demonstrated her own willingness to stand by her convictions. By the late 1940s she was a celebrity who had lent her name to causes that she believed would further her visions of equality—against racism, for world peace, and on behalf of social justice. Many of the organizations she had joined—she counted thirty-nine of them in a list she prepared in 1952—appeared on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations. Some of the petitions she had signed explicitly attacked HUAC, calling on Congress to abolish it and the Supreme Court to declare that it imposed censorship.
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The FBI duly reported these attacks as indications of Hellman's continuing attachment to communism.
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She also lent her name to an endless number of dinners and appeals on behalf of a variety of an eclectic series of groups that included the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Congress, Ethical Culture, FDR's Four Freedoms Award, and, after the president's death, the National Committee for Roosevelt Day. Some of
these were front organizations in the sense that the Communist Party led them into paths consistent with Soviet policies at the time. Others were formed by non–party members, though they welcomed communists and everyone else who shared their goals. Hellman did not distinguish among these groups, participating in one after another, seemingly paying little attention to their leadership: “I joined a great number of organizations which I believed were dedicated to peace and to other humanitarian aims,” she would write later.
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She must have felt something akin to panic as she tried to sort out what was happening to her world. “I had never, during my grown life, lived in a period of reaction and I did not identify it quickly,” she wrote a decade later.
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Repeatedly she faced moments when decisions about how to act tormented her. As a member of the board of the Authors' League of America, she was asked in 1950 to sign an affidavit testifying that she was not a member of the Communist Party. She agonized over the decision, deciding at last to sign it: “If it must be done now then it must be done and that is all there is to it.” But she asked to speak to the issue at the next meeting, and she accompanied her affidavit with a statement of protest condemning “the requirements of affidavits of this sort as violating my constitutional freedom of opinion and association.”
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“We are—or we are being unnaturally made into—a fearful people,” she warned an audience of Swarthmore College students around the same time.
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She and Hammett, who was then living part of the time in his 10th Street apartment in New York, and part of the time with her, remained under sporadic surveillance. In July 1951, as Hammett was preparing to go to jail for refusing to reveal the names of contributors to a bail fund for Communist Party leaders, the FBI came to call. They were both at home when a team of agents knocked on the door of her Pleasantville farm to search for eight Communist Party leaders whom they believed were in hiding there. Hellman denied knowing anything about the fugitives, and a search of the farm produced no trace of them.
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Hoping to find work in Europe, Hellman decided to travel there. This was a familiar scenario. Ring Lardner Jr. recalled that during this period he was reduced to working incognito for Hellman's friend Hannah Weinstein, who had taken her family off to England, where she set up the television production company that produced the first Robin Hood series using blacklisted Hollywood writers.
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But Hellman was not desperate enough to write under an assumed name. She had traveled to Europe in 1948 with some success, and in early 1951 she applied for a new passport. But now she
ran into trouble. In 1950, Congress passed the Subversive Activities Control Act, also known as the McCarran Act, which contained a provision denying passports to communists. The decision to grant a passport rested in Ruth B. Shipley's State Department Passport Division. Mrs. Shipley needed to be convinced that Lillian was not a communist. Hellman, with a potential job waiting for her in Paris—an adaptation of Ibsen's
The Doll House
—pleaded her case and then waited. Desperate, in July she told Shipley that she would lose the job if she delayed her departure. “I am not a Communist. I am not a member of the Communist Party,” she wrote. “In the past I have been a member of many left wing organizations but, while I have made many foolish decisions in my life, I have never done anything which could be called by any honest person, ugly or disloyal or unpatriotic.”
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The passport came through a week later. It was too late. Her European counterparts backed off and refused to sign the contract she had so carefully negotiated. She set off for London anyway, eager to leave a United States where Hammett was heading to jail for refusing to reveal names to an investigatory committee. The two had agreed that she should get out of the way if possible. And she was still hoping for work. She departed despite warnings from her lawyers that the trip might be futile and that she had no grounds to press for a completed deal, preceded and followed by an angry flurry of telegrams, including one from her agent, Kay Brown, that insisted that “the responsibility for going to Europe was entirely yours.” It tells us something about her state of mind that Hellman not only went, but that she felt unfairly treated by those who had warned her off. She wrote to Henry Beeson, Gregory Zilboorg's secretary, to report testily that she was at loose ends. “My original plan was to make a movie in France but I'm afraid that offer has been withdrawn.”
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When he suggested that she meet with Zilboorg in Switzerland, she wrote to say that she could not, and though she would not admit it, her restricted passport would not have allowed it. She consulted her lawyers about legal action only to be told that she had “no grounds for action. Because of the delay in connection with the passport, these people in the meantime changed their minds.”
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Kay Brown wrote to express sympathy that the expected contract had not materialized and to hope that “an assignment which you might like comes up for you in London.”
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But if Lillian had no legal ground to stand on, she continued to press her case until the Ventura production company agreed to pay her travel costs and expenses.

Hellman returned to the United States in the fall of 1951, Hammett in
jail, to find the dragnet was moving ever closer. In the 1947 Hollywood hearings, her closest colleagues, including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr., were among those who went to jail. But in 1951, when investigations of the entertainment industry resumed, she saw her friends turn tail and confess. In turn Larry Parks, Clifford Odets, Budd Schulberg, and Elia Kazan cooperated with investigating committees and implicated others. Kazan argued that he needed to protect his livelihood. “I'd hated the Communists for many years and didn't feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he wrote in his autobiography.
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Others simply saw no reason to protect a Communist Party they had come to despise. They not only publicly renounced communism but agreed to reveal everything they knew, including the names of those with whom they had worked. After all, to refuse to identify oneself as a former communist implied that one had something to cover up. And once one revealed one's past, cooperating with investigatory committees provided the best evidence of sincere contrition. Offering the names of other once and future party members not only provided the government with a huge list of potential subversive suspects that HUAC and the FBI could question, but it meant that those named, in turn, could name still others. The list could expand indefinitely.

The trouble, as Hellman and others quickly understood, was that the process rewarded the informer and encouraged people to exaggerate their knowledge. “The good American,” noted Ted Thackrey in the left-wing
New York Compass
, “is the informer and the conformist who is willing to confess that associations once regarded as innocent must have been evil … and that those associates must be denounced by name no matter how tenuous the association, how vague the memory.”
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The behavior, Hellman perceived, produced “confessions of sin that never happened.” She thought this “one of the comic marks of the years between 1948 and 1958,” when many men “marched themselves before committees to confess what they never knew, beg pardon for what they had never done.”
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Hellman did not and could not believe that Americans would remain silent in the face of such injustice. Her sense of bewilderment is palpable. All around her, friends and acquaintances positioned themselves with respect to the assault on the left. As they did so, the lines between and among them with respect to the sanctity of civil liberties sharpened. She was, she wrote just a decade later, “a very frightened woman,” and she felt “the sadness of watching people be punished for so little—because the truth is that the radical or liberal movement in America was always very small and almost always very foolish. But then fools also have a right to
justice and to freedom.” At first she laughed “at anybody's right to deny that.”
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But her laughter was short-lived. Hellman was not among those who frighten easily, she had written “Judas Goats,” and yet she was afraid. Her hero in this period was Anton Chekhov, in whom she had become interested in early 1950 and whose collected letters she would soon edit and publish. From Chekhov she copied into her notebook an early statement that reflected her disillusionment with her colleagues. “I do not believe in our educated class, which is hypocritical, false, poorly educated and indolent; I don't believe in it even when it suffers and complains for its persecutors emerge from its own bosom,” Chekhov had written.
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Hellman shared the belief and wished she could emulate his courage.