A Difficult Woman (61 page)

Lillian gave everyone trouble in those years, her irascibility and impatience rising with increasing infirmity. Friends withdrew from her withering tongue: embittered by her stubborn refusal to abandon the suit against Mary McCarthy, they stopped seeing her. But many remained loyal, forgiving her temper tantrums and reveling in her continuing ability to make fun of everything and everyone.
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Unable to withstand northern winters, she moved each year to California, where she took rooms for herself and her nurses at the Beverly Wilshire hotel or rented houses from absent friends. The nurses who cared for her wrote of their plight to Rita Wade, Hellman's secretary, who coordinated their efforts from New York. After one particularly difficult period at the Beverly Wilshire, one wrote to describe the “absolutely incredible” and “miserable” time that Hellman had given her and her coworker. The registered nurse who replaced them the following year wondered if she could survive Hellman's “mental abuse.” She had, she reported, won one battle: she convinced Lillian that no nurse could sleep, night after night, on a couch in the sitting room. She persuaded Hellman to hire an aide to relieve her at night. “I am going out of my mind,” she protested. “What am I doing as Lillian Hellman's personal slave? Pray for me!!”
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All the nurses complained of Lillian's tightfistedness about money, the requirement that they send each receipt, no matter how small, to Rita on the day it was acquired, and Hellman's insistence that they notify Rita immediately if they cashed checks. The nurses, with Rita's acquiescence, passively resisted these instructions, notifying Rita when and as it seemed appropriate.

Over a period of about eighteen months, Hellman ate less and less and lost weight rapidly until she was down to about eighty pounds. Still she accepted invitations, allowed her friends to carry her from cars to restaurants, and invited guests for dinner. Often she was, as her friend Robert Brustein described, “carried into the house, placed in a chair, and fed her food,” little more than “a bedridden Job imprisoned inside a broken bag of bones.”
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In California, Hannah Weinstein came to visit while she could. In New York and on the Vineyard, Annabel Nichols read to her several times a week, providing one of Hellman's few sources of pleasure. Her nurse described her at the end to Peter Feibleman as a woman who “is half paralyzed, legally blind; she's having rage attacks that are a result of strokes; She cries at night; she can't help that. She can't eat. She can't sleep. She can't walk.”
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And still she could hold a room with her offbeat
humor, or interrupt a dinner conversation with a withering disagreement that always began with a rasping “forgive me” before she launched a tirade. Most of her friends thought she survived these last years not on food but on anger.

Everyone remembered the anger. To be sure, Lillian had been bad-tempered and irascible all her life. But, as Brustein noted, before her illness “her anger was more focused; after, it became a free-floating, cloud-swollen tempest that rained on friend and foe alike.”
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Peter Feibleman agreed; he believed that her personality changed after the small strokes she suffered in the mid-seventies. Most of her good friends took the anger in stride, understanding that it was not directed at them personally but rather, as John Hersey described it, constituted “a rage of the mind against human injustice.”
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Anger, Hersey thought, was “her essence.” Bill Styron agreed. He, among others, bridled at her quarrelsome nature, regularly refusing to speak to her after a spat about one insignificant thing or another. He recalled one such incident over how to cook a Smithfield ham that kept them apart for an entire summer.
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In the end Styron, like Hersey, believed the “measure of her anger was really not personal, but cosmic, directed at all the hateful things she saw as menacing to the world.”
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1983: Still she could hold a room. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)

To the end, Hellman retained her capacity for fun—the continuing, wicked humor—that her friends cherished. At their last dinner together, William Styron recalled, “We carved up a few mutually detested writers and one or two mediocre politicians and an elderly deceased novelist whom she specifically detested … I remember that gorgeous cackle of laughter which always erupted at moments when we were together … which followed some beautiful harpooning of a fraud or a ninth-rater.”
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Like Styron, those who spent the most time with her balanced anger against this capacity for humor. Alex Szogyi, a Hunter College professor, caught her two-sidedness. She was “naturally contentious and cantankerous,” he wrote, “in a manner that was humorous or disturbing, depending on one's proximity.”
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Her old friend Jules Feiffer commented on “the girlishness, the brattishness and incredible sense of fun.” Asked what she missed most about Lillian, Maureen Stapleton replied, “She made me laugh more than anybody I've ever known.” She was “deeply funny. Deeply funny.”
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Vanity and pride persisted even as Hellman's body deteriorated. Each morning she got up, dressed carefully, and applied heavy makeup and mascara.
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Too ill to go very far or to do very much, she nevertheless surrounded herself with all the acroutrements of elegance to which she was accustomed. On one two-month trip to California, she instructed Rita Wade to send her four handbags (gray, red, the Blair Clark bag, Hannah's brown bag) and three evening bags (rose, black, and gold) along with an assortment of shoes and coats.
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Her nurse, convinced that Hellman did not need heavy coats in California, suggested that Rita simply ignore that part of the instruction. Just days before she died, Hellman showed up at a party at Patricia Neal's house, looking divine in a “magnificent Russian amethyst necklace.”
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Regularly she lied about her age. Bill Styron recalled that she deducted six or seven years just days before she died. She had been doing this all her life, Styron thought, “not as vanity, but as a kind of demonstration that she was hanging on to life.”
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Peter Feibleman—her friend, for awhile her lover, and the man whom she later called her son—learned of Lillian's death in his Los Angeles home. Though he knew she was close to the end, he had been waiting impatiently in California for the galleys of their coauthored cookbook to arrive. He wanted to bring them to her. In some ways, the cookbook,
Eating Together
, effectively capped her life. Unable to see, she dictated most of it and listened as recipes and portions of it were read back to her. Many of the recipes emerged from memories of New Orleans; others came from her travels over Europe and her New England experiences. A sprinkling (added as an afterthought) came from Hannah Weinstein's Jewish kitchen. They were all peppered with commentary, not about food but about the occasions on which she had eaten the dishes and with whom. Because the two authors could not agree on which dishes to feature, they divided the book into two parts labeled “Her Way” and “His Way.” It was the only kind of collaboration she could tolerate. Peter arrived on the Vineyard two days late, without the manuscript, and just in time to participate in the funeral arrangements.

1981: To the end, Hellman retained her capacity for fun. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)

The funeral was an impressive affair. Two hundred people, many of them celebrities, some of them her Vineyard neighbors, gathered under a crop of pines at Abel's Hill cemetery in the village of Chilmark to say good-bye. The theme of the day was not her anger or humor or vanity or love, though these were often mentioned, so much as her ability and desire to communicate. Jules Feiffer recalled her capacity to speak across generations, “to effortlessly engage the old, the young, the middle-aged, the left, the middle, the right, and just about anyone except on occasion the women friends of the men she admired.” Patricia Neal remembered her eagerness to find out about her daughter Lucy's plans and noted that “she was very eager to help the next generation.” Jerome Wiesner, the former president of MIT who had helped to found the Committee for Public Justice, remarked on “her special caring for students and her excitement in helping them to learn and grow and … the enormous enthusiasm and love with which they responded.” And Peter Feibleman cried as he recalled her last conversation with him. When he asked how she felt, she replied that she was suffering from “the worst case of writers' block I ever had.”
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Lillian Hellman's body may have been in her grave, but quickly it became apparent that she would find no rest there. A residue of ill will, still very much alive, continued to corrode an already damaged reputation. Within days after her death, the quarrels about her name and her reputation resumed. Letters poured into William Abrahams (who, in addition to being her editor at Little, Brown and her friend was also one of three literary executors), whose agreement to undertake an authorized biography of Hellman had just been announced. Many of the letters praised and complimented her “courageous stand against the infamous [Joseph] McCarthy.”
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Others suggested that controversy would continue. “You will be at the mercy of this frightful old harridan as an arbiter of verification for allegations, often contradictory, which she commonly made and which history repeatedly refutes,” wrote one New Yorker.
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“Writing an
authorized
biography of Lillian Hellman is like trying to square a circle. I feel sorry for you,” wrote another correspondent.
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The notion that she was a liar not only persisted but took on a life of its own. Just days before she died, questions of Hellman's veracity resurfaced in a
Commentary
article written by Samuel McCracken, which purported to establish definitively that “Julia” was mere fiction.
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Christopher Hitchens affirmed and sealed Hellman's fate as a liar in a few paragraphs that appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement
two days
after the funeral. There he declared that McCracken demonstrated “every verifiable incident” of the Julia episode “false or unconvincing.”
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Though he heard about Hellman's death before the piece went to press, he wrote, he “saw no reason not to leave” the piece as it stood. No one, he thought, would disagree that she was a liar.

Hellman did not think of her stories as lies. She was, after all, a dramatist who used the material at hand to invent tales. She made up stories about herself, her mother's family, her father's past. All her life she used the experiences of friends, wars, and journalistic forays to make up stories. Like Ibsen, she believed that drama was meant to make a point, not just to entertain. She never claimed a good memory; she always said her books were portraits, inventions, so she wrote memoirs that were not memoirs, fulfilling the mandate that memoir is the art of lying. If her work exaggerated or misplaced incidents, or engaged in self-dramatization, she believed that she had lived a life of integrity, honesty, and trust. The difference between her opinion of herself and the opinions of others earned her the tag of hypocrite.

Then there was the moralism. That Lillian was a moralist, nobody would want to deny. That she proclaimed her moral principles loudly—in her plays and her memoirs and at every public opportunity—must have irked friends and enemies alike. She fully earned the labels of self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement that her critics leveled at her. But these labels might have disappeared after her death had she chosen not to replay her courageous stance before HUAC and to taunt others about their behavior then. She was, after all, a woman whose memoirs had been praised as “moral beacons for the generation coming of age, telling of an effort to remain truthful to one's convictions in the face of the forces of dishonesty and repression.”
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The claim to a higher morality could only have been humiliating to the targets of Hellman's attack.