A Difficult Woman (46 page)

Hellman's Armageddon came when she was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the spring of 1952. For several years she had preached defiance of the investigatory committees, suffered from the movie industry's blacklist, and watched her friends weigh the impossible choice of cooperating with the committees, going to jail, or losing their livelihoods. Now it was her turn. She was part of an entertainment industry that had been targeted for several years; she had made no secret of her sympathy for world peace or racial equality, both key programs of the CPUSA. And she knew that her name had come up before HUAC and other committees on several occasions. In a list of names he turned over to HUAC in July 1950, FBI informant Louis Budenz had identified Hellman as a party member from 1937 to 1945.
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Her name surfaced again during an April 1951 investigation of her friend Dorothy Parker, and a third time when former party member Martin Berkeley identified her, the following September, as having attended a meeting at his California home in the late thirties. Still, the call came at a particularly difficult time. Hammett had just been released from a four-month jail term; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat in jail, each under sentence of death. Joe McCarthy was at the peak of his career.

When the subpoena arrived, Hellman lost her cool. By her own account, she tasked the African-American man who delivered it with serving an inglorious master. Finally she succumbed to the numb calm that comes, as she put it later, from knowing that “there is nothing to do but to face trouble with a roped control.”
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She consulted one lawyer and then another before she came to the man who would finally counsel her through the episode. He was Joseph Rauh, a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action and a liberal anticommunist who had not previously represented admitted communists. This was not, he later told
Hellman, entirely his choice. Rather he sensed that potential clients who remained within the Communist Party chose to follow the advice of party lawyers, even when they sought him out. He could not, he thought, represent them, because they could not be fully open with him.
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But Hellman was different. She had, he wrote to her as they tried to frame her defense, “made it quite clear in our talks that you genuinely disagree with the activities of the Communist Party … and recognize that you were wrong in joining the Party.” Rauh believed that Hellman refused to distance herself from the party or to acknowledge her error in joining up because of “your feeling that somebody might think you were saying so because you were afraid of public opinion rather than because that was your true view.”
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He counseled her to set aside her fear of public opinion and to admit that she had been wrong in joining the party. She refused. Only later did he begin to understand why. She believed, he wrote shortly after
Scoundrel Time
began to attract attention, that “it only added to the witch hunt to criticize Communists and Communism—even rationally and thoughtfully.”
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Rauh disagreed with that position. He did not believe, as Hellman did, that attacking communists would simply play into the hands of the committee. “It seems to me that the struggle for freedom is a two-front war against both communists and their right wing opposition,” he would confess later. But he admired her stand, and “the courage with which she held it.”
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With Rauh, Hellman confronted the Hobson's choice she now faced. She was, Rauh's assistant Daniel Pollitt recalled, terrified. When she came into the office, “she was very polite and she didn't interrupt. I thought she was extremely frightened.”
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Still, she was adamant that she would not name names. Rauh thought she “would even have accepted jail before naming names. What she really wanted to do was tell the committee off without violating the law and that is what she ended up doing.”
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But how would she behave? She could choose to answer no questions about her relationship to the Communist Party and simply take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, as others had done. But that course suggested that she had something to hide. Though those who had taken it had avoided jail, they had not shed the taint of communism. School boards routinely fired teachers who pleaded the Fifth Amendment; employers would not hire them; Hollywood refused them jobs. She could admit her earlier association with communism, repent the mistake, and apologize. That option curdled her blood. She had done nothing of which she was ashamed. As she later told Rauh, if she had briefly joined the Communist
Party, she had never taken it seriously. To confess to a wrong she did not feel would be tantamount to groveling before the bullies of the committee. Besides, if she confessed she would be asked for the names of those she had encountered in the party. Rauh tried to persuade committee counsel Frank S. Tavenner Jr. and member Richard Nixon to allow her to testify in executive session. But the approach came to nothing.

In the end Rauh and Daniel Pollitt devised a halfway strategy, to which she agreed. She could, as she wished, tell the committee “under oath everything about yourself but nothing about anyone else.”
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Rauh cautioned her about the risk involved: if the strategy failed, it would invite a citation for contempt and the jail sentence she hoped to avoid. But Rauh and Pollitt thought they might pave the way by appealing to public opinion. They would hedge her refusal to testify about others with a letter to the committee in which she would offer to answer anything they wanted to know about her if they agreed to ask her about no one else. That letter would explain the dilemma in which the committee put her and others like her, and appeal to their sense of decency. Rauh was almost sure that committee chair John Wood would refuse this overture, and he advised Hellman to prepare a public statement that she could release to the press after the committee hearing, explaining her position.

This second, public statement was never released, but in some ways the various drafts that Hellman composed provide what is possibly the most accurate assessment of her association with the Communist Party. She joined in 1938, “attended very few Communist party meetings in Hollywood in 1938–39 and an equally small number in New York in 1939–40. I stopped attending meetings or taking part in Communist Party activities in the latter part of 1940 and severed all connection with the Party.” Under Rauh's prodding, she added a sentence admitting that she was “wrong about the Communist Party”; she had joined out of a misplaced idealism, and she had no bitterness with those with whom she associated in the party. She would not, she wrote, “become the instrument for damaging these lives and those of their families.”
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Together she and Rauh completed this statement as she drafted the initial version of the letter she would send to committee chair John Wood. She did not wish to claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, she wrote to Wood: “I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own opinions and my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself.” She could not and would not answer questions about
other people. The letter, duly rejected, left her and Rauh fearful of what would happen next.

On the morning of the hearing, May 21, 1952, Dan Pollitt and Joseph Rauh picked Hellman up, a bundle of nervous energy. She had tried to calm her nerves the day before by shopping and was wearing the fruits of her expedition. Newspapers described the “blonde, forty-six and trim figured” Hellman wearing “a close-fitting black hat and a tailored brown-and-black checked silk dress.”
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As she took the stand, she “clenched a handkerchief in clasped hands.” The hearing started slowly, and then twenty minutes in, counsel Frank Tavenner asked her whether it was in fact true that she had been present at a June 1937 meeting in the home of Martin Berkeley. Hellman ducked the question. “Most seriously I would like to ask you once again to reconsider what I have said in the letter,” she replied. “In other words,” said Tavenner, “you are asking the committee not to ask you any questions regarding the participation of other persons in the Communist Party activities.” Hellman's back rose: “I don't think I said that, Mr. Tavenner.”
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Then Chairman Wood, in a mistake he must have long regretted, suggested the letter be entered into the record. Rauh had brought with him copies he intended to distribute to the press after the hearing. Now he seized the opportunity. Dan Pollitt jumped up and passed copies of the letter to waiting hands.
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Briefly, it looked as if Rauh would be disciplined for causing the letter to be distributed, but it had been entered into the record, which forced the committee to read it out loud. Ten more minutes of fruitless questioning later, the committee closed the hearing. It had been exactly thirty-seven minutes long, and it would situate Hellman as a heroine.

As Pollitt whisked her out of the hearing room, a dazed Lillian Hellman did not fully realize what had happened. She had won, a triumphant Rauh told her when he joined them later in a local coffee shop. She had defeated the committee; she had given no names and would serve no jail time. Rauh attributed the victory to her letter. In it, Hellman eloquently asked the committee to respect “simple rules of human decency and Christian honor” by not forcing her to betray people who had never done any harm. “I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition, and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country,” she had written. “To hurt innocent people whom I
knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman, and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.”
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The letter was now public, its plea for decency part of the public record. She had stood up to the committee by articulating a defiant moral position that quickly caught the American imagination.

Public and private praise poured in. LILLIAN HELLMAN BALKS HOUSE UNIT, headlined the
New York Times
.
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Journalist Murray Kempton contrasted her behavior with that of others who debased themselves by confessing to sins they had not committed. This was a “courageous act of conscience,” he concluded, “worthy of a lady.”
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One precious tribute came from Brooks Atkinson, the
New York Times
drama critic who had previously taken her to task for writing melodrama. He wrote to compliment her: “If we are to have a society that is not totalitarian and in which people do not denounce each other, as they do in Communist Russia and did in Nazi Germany, your attitude has a basic moral force that every lover of the American system must adhere to. It is the code of honor among civilized people of all national origins.”
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Hellman reveled in this position. “It was like a wedding here yesterday, with strange people getting happy,” she wrote to her friend Bill Alfred two days later, enclosing some of the newspaper clippings. “I must say the New York papers treated me fine …
The Mirror
, maybe, best of all.”
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She had been surprised to learn that when her name was mentioned at a luncheon at the American Jewish Congress, “the ladies applauded loud and long.” The euphoria continued for a while. “I am a local heroine,” she wrote to Melby a week after the event.
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To Rauh she gushed, “The reaction here has been just too good to believe. There has been the largest amount of mail I have ever received about anything, and an equally large number of telephone calls.” She sent her “deepest thanks and absolute conviction that we did everything as well as we could do it, and that the legal decisions you make were sound and thoughtful, and no matter what comes from them I will be fully satisfied and happy.”
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Privately, she was not as confident. To Melby she complained about part of the strategy he had developed, regretting that she had agreed to deny Communist Party membership for the two years before the hearing and to take the Fifth Amendment for questions before that point: “I am sorry that I didn't take the legal risk and go back 13 years. I think it was the only unwise decision that Rauh made and stupid of me to have
followed it.”
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For all her courage at the HUAC hearing, she could not hide a sense of vulnerability. To Melby she confessed to being “foolishly restless and frightened to be alone. That is new for me, and I don't like it.”
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She had difficulty working—difficulty that persisted through the summer, forcing her to set aside work on her new play and to focus instead on the Chekhov introduction. “One of the penalties of this year,” she told Melby, “has been a restless refusal to sit down and work, or even to read or think.” In the same letter, she elaborated: “I have got myself into kind of a bad, aimless state of depression and discomfort … I am doing foolish things, and feeling foolish things.”
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The things she was doing were not only foolish, they were sometimes narcissistic and unprincipled as well. The Pleasantville farm sold, Dash rented the cottage in Katonah from their old friends Helen and Sam Rosen; Lillian often joined them there for a Saturday-night dinner. The Rosens were close friends and loyal supporters of Paul Robeson, with whom Hellman had fought for an end to racial segregation in the army during the war. Robeson, then still either in or close to the Communist Party and himself hounded by various government investigating agencies, was at dinner one night shortly after Hellman's HUAC hearing. Helen Rosen recalled watching Hellman, who “evidently did very well in public but was shivering inside of herself.” That night “when she came into the kitchen to get her drink, leaving Paul and Dash and Sam in the other room, she gave me hell for having Paul there when she was there. I couldn't understand what she was talking about. She was in a fury, and she said, ‘I've had a terrible time. I've been followed, my phone is probably tapped, and of all people to walk into—I don't need to be in the same room with Robeson!'” Helen tried to calm her down. “I said, ‘Lillian, take it easy. He's your friend, he's my friend, he's our friend. You've been through the worst, what is this all about?'” The response from a still enraged Lillian was simply, “‘Well it's too much, everything's too much.'”
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