A Difficult Woman (9 page)

Interviewers routinely found themselves confounded by the contrast between the “tough broad” of record and the woman who appeared before them. “It was teatime,” wrote one, “and Miss Hellman was sipping a pale sherry. She wore a gray dress fastened up the front with a zipper but open at the throat, with a black silk scarf crisscrossed in front like a soldier's and secured with a crystal clasp. She had a slender gold wrist watch and black pumps.”
²³
Such responses were routine. Hellman's warmth and affability in person belied the public image and the masculine writing. “She is genuinely feminine to a degree that borders engagingly on the wacky,” wrote Margaret Chase Harriman in a
New Yorker
profile.
²⁴
This appraisal remained consistent throughout Hellman's lifetime. “In her own drawing room,” one interviewer commented, “Miss Hellman, less a woman playwright than a woman and a playwright was gentle, thoughtful, courteous, her manner affable … The ferocity she so relentlessly anatomizes in the theater … nowhere in evidence.”
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A decade later, a British reporter affirmed the judgment, declaring that “although she has the kind of forthrightness and directness usually called masculine” she was in fact extremely feminine.”
²⁶

1938: She cultivated a flirtatious charm. (Photofest)

Still, Hellman was consumed with doubt about her own lovability, full of fear of both success and failure, and prone to feeling lonely and isolated even when she was surrounded by people. She ran away when she anticipated a negative response to one of her plays or when she saw successful love on the horizon. Furiously jealous of Hammett's dalliances and angry with him for his continuing attractions to women of all sorts, she responded, characteristically, by soliciting affection and sex from other men, as well as with displays of bad temper and bouts of anger that she readily acknowledged but could not control. When Hammett hit bottom, she invariably came to his rescue, grudgingly forgiving him his faults and remaining attached to him nonetheless. Fearful of loneliness, she arranged to have company and then complained that she was with “all people I deeply like but people I wanted to run from.”
²⁷
After a while, she
began to recognize her behavior as what she later called “an old pattern.”
²⁸
Fearing abandonment, she courted rejection; fearing loneliness, she surrounded herself with people she then wished away.

But Hammett was often a generous partner, and there were good weeks and months. During their frequent separations, Hammett wrote Lillian loving letters, begged her to join him, and sometimes rearranged his life so he could be with her. But he did not stop sleeping with other women. The stories about Lillian's reaction to this behavior are legendary. Hellman once traveled cross-country to be with him, only to find him drunk and in bed with a prostitute. In a rage, she smashed up his furniture and returned immediately to New York. There were times when his friends Albert and Frances Hackett would call from the West Coast, pleading with her to come and rescue him from a hotel in which he was trapped because he could not pay the bill.

Hellman, in turn, engaged in a series of sexual relationships, each of them more meaningful than Hammett's one-night stands but none as powerful as her pull toward him. In the half dozen years after she met Hammett, she remained involved with Kober, from whom she never separated emotionally. Nor, apparently did Arthur seek such a separation. Long after their divorce, she continued to express concern for his well-being. “Please, please do not go into the swimming pool,” she begged him when she feared infection from crippling polio disease. She concluded her plea with an admonition to “pay attention to mama and take care of yourself.”
²⁹
Once, she advised him to change his living quarters. “I do think you would be more comfortable with a beach house, a servant and someone to look after the dogs,” she wrote. In the same letter, she urged him to suspend decisions about what he wanted to do after his current contract ended. She signed this letter, “You got Mother Lillian behind you if that means anything.”
³⁰
In 1934, Kober sent Lillian a new typewriter and she responded with delight: “It's a grand present and you don't know how much I needed it … you're a lovely, generous man. You always send me such fine presents and I'm so grateful. Maybe next year I can give you something very good too. It's about time. Maybe I can earn some money with this new one … It was a wonderful gift to me and I love you very much.”
³¹

Through the 1930s, during the first decade with Hammett, Hellman maintained her on-and-off-again relationships with several friends and former lovers. She saw much of fellow playwright Louis Kronenberger. She had an ongoing affair with up-and-coming producer-director Jed Harris. She maintained a decade-long intermittent sexual relationship
with Herman Shumlin, who produced three of her plays. She probably got involved with Otto Katz, a communist double agent, when she went to Spain in 1937. Her relationships with these men, and with others, began as (or included) sexual liaisons and grew into committed work-related friendships. In 1936, she fell passionately in love with Ralph Ingersoll, who was then editor in chief of
Fortune
magazine. She met Ingersoll when they were both stranded by bad weather in a New Mexico airport lounge. The two fell quickly into an intense romance that ultimately foundered on Ingersoll's unfulfilled promises to leave his wife. Still, the liaison seeded a three-way friendship with Hammett and inspired the creation of
PM
magazine. There were more, many more, sexual encounters, but these are the most important ones.

Hammett disliked these involvements, but never, according to Lillian, expressed jealousy or did anything to resist them. He called them “juggling oranges” and distinguished them from his own behavior, which he characterized as simply having fun. Eventually the Hammett-Hellman relationship became asexual. As Lillian told the story, this was a result of Hammett's addiction to drink. One summer evening, probably in 1941, she rejected his drunken advances, and he vowed never to sleep with her again. According to Lillian, he never again did so.
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There are, of course, other possible explanations for Dash's withdrawal from a sexual relationship with Lillian. She had just then begun a relationship with
New Yorker
writer St. Clair McKelway. Perhaps Dash was following through on his threat to leave her if she continued to juggle oranges, or perhaps she had revealed a weakness—her comment demonstrated that she was not as tough as he wanted her to be. Lillian never quite got over the humiliation of the rejection. She spoke about it when she was in her seventies to Hammett's biographer, Diane Johnson, who concluded that she remained attached to him even after his death because she never stopped struggling to “possess and command at last the elusive ghost of a man about whom she was insecure in life.”
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But Hellman had, by all accounts, a far more complicated relationship with men. In the eyes of most observers, she seemed genuinely to love being around them and to cherish an enormous affection, especially for Dash. A strong-willed and highly sexual woman, not unlike such figures as Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn, she needed men in her life.
³⁴
The actress Zoe Caldwell, who played Lillian onstage and studied her closely, thought Hellman must have adored men, that she loved to be
around them and enjoyed making love with them.
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Caldwell attributes Hellman's special appreciation of men to an absence of mothering that came from Julia's too-early rejection of her child. But vanity contributed to Hellman's persistent insecurity as well: she needed constant reassurance about her desirability and her attractiveness. Attached to a man around whom she was often insecure, she exhibited in public all the outward qualities of strength demanded of the free woman of the interwar decades. In private, she allowed her feminine self to slip out. The cost of women's freedom, as literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, is “emotional impoverishment and restriction.”
³⁶

We catch a glimpse of how closely Lillian guarded her feelings around Hammett when she tells us that occasionally she and Hammett talked of marriage, most seriously when Hellman became pregnant for the third time in 1937. On his own, Hammett urged his wife, Josie, to file for a Mexican divorce, which was granted on August 31, 1937. By the time he wrote Lillian the news a week later, Lillian had already had an abortion. This was the third time she had lost a child, and yet she did not comment. The moment passed and marriage did not come up again.
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“I don't know why we didn't marry,” Hellman told an interviewer some years later. “We thought of it but then after a while it became silly even to discuss it.”
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Somewhat later, in 1942, Lillian visited Arthur and Maggie Kober's newborn baby. She was caught staring at it for a long while with tears in her eyes. She readily agreed to be godmother.

Despite the gloom cast by the continuing Depression and an impending war, the period from the late thirties through the forties must have been among the most gratifying of Lillian's life. In May 1939, with money earned from
The Little Foxes
, she indulged in the then decidedly male prerogative of purchasing a home of her own. The house, which she called Hardscrabble Farm, and its 130 acres of woods and meadows were located in Pleasantville, New York, an hour or so north of the city. The property contained a large restored colonial house with four and a half baths, five fireplaces, and a four-car garage.

It boasted as well a six-room caretaker's cottage, two guest houses, barns, and an eight-acre, spring-fed lake. Together, she and Hammett, along with farmer Fred Hermann, who occupied the caretaker's cottage, set themselves to reclaiming some of the neglected land, raising poultry and poodles as well as pigs and cattle, immersing themselves in other farm chores. At Hardscrabble, Hellman participated in slaughtering animals, helped to
make sausage and head cheese, and learned how to hunt, trap turtles, and to fish. She delighted in her dogs and especially in the new puppies that came regularly.

In some ways the years at Hardscrabble allowed her to open up her many-sided persona. She was in her mid-thirties, with two successful plays and several movie scripts behind her. She had achieved fame as well as fortune, and she had a satisfying male companion at hand. At the farm, she began the pattern of nurturing and entertaining that provided continuing fulfillment. She surrounded herself with guests of all sorts, including her father, who often showed up for weekends, and Hammett's children, who came for summer holidays. On weekends she invited the cast of whatever play of hers was then running on Broadway. The house was so often filled with people that Hellman sometimes remembered it as a sort of boardinghouse where “people came and stayed.”
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Still she found time to sequester herself in the study, where she wrote four great plays (
Watch on the Rhine
,
The Searching Wind
,
Another Part of the Forest
, and
Autumn Garden)
that solidified her reputation as a playwright of the first rank. To the study door, she taped a notice:

This room is used for Work
Do not enter without knocking
After you knock wait for an answer
If you get no answer, go away and
Don't come back
This means everybody
This means you
This means Night and Day
By Order of the Hellman-Military-Commission-for-
Playwrights. Court Martialling will Take Place in the Barn,
and your Trial Will Not be a Fair One.
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The thirteen years Lillian spent at Hardscrabble, most commentators would agree, were surely the happiest years with Hammett, and probably the happiest of Lillian's being. By the 1940s, Hellman's relationships with men and women had taken the shape that would persist for the rest of her life. The heavy drinking over, more secure in her craft and capable of
earning her own way, she cultivated the love and loyalty of good friends and colleagues without dependence on a single partner. In addition to her ex-husband and his new wife, Maggie, her close friendships included Lee and Ira Gershwin, lifelong friends, who persuaded producer Herman Shumlin to read and produce
The Children's Hour
; Talli Wyler and her husband, William, who directed her screenplays for
These Three
and
Dead End
; and Dorothy Parker. Lillian first met Parker in 1930, in Hollywood. The two became good friends when they shared scriptwriting and union-organizing experiences in Hollywood. They later traveled to Spain together and spent time supporting anti-fascist causes. Their friendship survived Hammett's fierce dislike of Dottie and Lillian's contempt for Dottie's husband, Alan Campbell. It foundered only at the end of Parker's life when Parker could no longer control her addiction to alcohol. In her lifetime, Lillian achieved a goodly measure of deep and reciprocated love. And with those she loved, she created long-term relationships that sometimes included sex and often did not. She may never have had a sexual relationship with a woman (there is no evidence that she did), but with women, as with men, she created long-term loving relationships and lifelong loyalties.