Lillian and Dash (4 page)

I attended the final trial. The jury deliberated about six minutes, declared him innocent, and issued an exceedingly rare statement of apology for any injustice done to the defendant. No one I spoke to had ever heard anything like it in a courtroom. The apology didn’t matter. All was lost for Arbuckle and he knew it. Keaton gave him some work afterward but Arbuckle could never be funny again.

“Scotch verdict. Or worse, Hearst verdict,” Lilly said.

“So why in the world would I want to write about that?”

“For the same reason you gave me the Drumsheugh idea.”

“We’re only allowed just one great idea per family.” Lilly loved that I called us family.

“If you won’t write about that, then why not write about us?” Said grumpily, almost as a throwaway.

That was her gift to me that day. Exactly what I was looking for, right in front of me all along yet something I’d never have seen in a million years. Ex-detective, private eye, marries a clever, wisecracking doll who travels in a smart, glamorous social world living the high life. They’re careless, they drink—before and after repeal—they’re eccentric and funny and chic and irreverent and Jesus Christ … they solve murders together. Exactly the sort of idea that might hit me walking from the parking lot to a story conference—but it never did and never would—a flighty antidetective detective story, a flip on every dark private eye cliché ever invented,
full of sarcasm and puns and irony and wit and bad jokes. And sex. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the fun and the challenge of it, something I thought I could still pull off. All I’d have to do is write about the two of us and throw in a murder or three.

I showed Lilly a three-page outline of
The Thin Man—
modestly named after myself—two weeks later.

She said, as Nora would, “Darling, your character’s not tipsy enough and I’m not clever enough, but it is a start.”

Later she said, “Let him always seem to be just a little inebriated, even when he’s not drinking, roguishly off balance and carefree. After all, he’s happy as hell to be living on her money, happy not having ever to be a working stiff again. And his wife loves the hell out of the guy—his looks, his brains—and she always keeps him from going too far over the line. It’s moderately funny already. He’s a very sharp detective when he wants to be. She’s an amateur but not so bad either. It’s going to work. Take it directly to Mayer, no middlemen. Then maybe, afterward, the Arbuckle story.”

I was shaking my head. “Before the
Thin Man
screenplay, the novel. For Knopf.”

Lilly thought the names were wrong. I had Gilbert and Jillian. She thought the same first initials were important and that there ought to be a paired rhythm to the names. They also had to suggest different class backgrounds. We worked that out on a tablecloth at the Trocadero later that night. She suggested Nino for him. I told her there were no Nino
private eyes. So I became Nick. And for Lillian, Nora. Our waiter was named Charles. Nick and Nora Charles it was.

The little dog Asta didn’t get added until Lillian came back from a visit to New York with a description of a woman she saw in Bendel’s who had the smartest little pooch she’d ever seen.

These were good times for us. We fought, not so much with each other as over ideas. Ideas were like sex, an excitement, a frustration, a disappointment, a thrill. As long as ideas interested us we could share our lives, and there was then no reason to think ideas would ever stop. I knew better, of course, but Lillian Hellman was overwhelming, a rare young woman who could make you believe the limitations the world placed upon you, and those we placed upon ourselves, might be suspended indefinitely. And in those working days for us they were.

L
OVE IS HARDLY EVER MENTIONED
in Hammett’s novels, appropriately so because the Hammett world is such bleak terrain populated only by wanters, needers and takers, victims and victimizers. Love in Hammett is desperate and financial. When the word is employed, it is not love at all but a transaction, a useful sexual trade between a woman who has something to sell—information usually—that the detective, either
the Op or Sam Spade, happens to need. The barter is rarely consummated on the page because there’s a limit to what magazines will allow, but mostly because love in his dark world is such a bad deal. Dashiell Hammett, the detective story writer, does not believe in love.

In 1918, when he was a member of the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps at Fort Meade, Maryland—his only contribution to the war effort was turning over an army vehicle—Hammett contracted tuberculosis as a result of the great influenza epidemic of that year and was hospitalized. Eighteen months after discharge he picked up his Pinkerton career in the Northwest. His TB flared up again quite seriously and Hammett was admitted to the infectious diseases ward at Cushman Institute, a U.S. Public Health Service hospital in Tacoma, Washington. One of his nurses was twenty-three-year-old Josephine Dolan, a prairie girl from Montana.

Josephine Dolan was very beautiful. He was swept away by her movie-star looks; she was taken by the tall, gentle, well-mannered boy from Maryland, a distant place she could barely imagine. The encounter had all the elements of tragic romance—youth, beauty, disease, random chance, courage, war—indeed all the elements of a great love story. She called herself Jose and pronounced it “Joe’s.”

The two really could not have helped but fall in love. They were married in a Catholic church in San Francisco’s Chinatown in July 1921. A first child, Mary Jane, was born in October. The Hammetts were a family briefly
in San Francisco. Hammett’s health remained poor. A second daughter, Josephine, was born five years later, by which time Jose and the girls were living back in Montana. Hammett supported his wife and his daughters from a distance thereafter. Love may have produced a family, but there wasn’t enough of it to sustain a family. Hammett convinced himself then that love, like good health, was rare and most of all a matter of luck.

When they met that first night at Zanuck’s party at the Brown Derby in 1930, neither Dash nor Lilly was a great believer in love or marriage, which is why biographers are befuddled by their long, inconstantly constant relationship. None of those biographers understood the rare power of their love. When the word is mentioned at all, it is defined in ways that torture it, that make it to be not love at all but some sort of grotesque love monster. That bond, however it is presented and whatever it is called, endured for three decades, contorted, stretched, and strained but unbroken by distance, professional jealousy, countless flings and more serious affairs by each, pathetic need, insult, drink, recrimination, and disappointment.

Hammett once told a would-be biographer, “Beware biographers, young man, they eat lives whole and spit out all the wrong details. Samuel Johnson himself once told me that before he died.” No wonder, then, so many biographers don’t understand what love is or make so much of the fact that Lillian Hellman was not a pretty woman. It is reason enough to
dismiss anything else they might have to say about her and the relationship. The implication is that a good-looking guy like Hammett would only seduce or be seduced by beauty. This was Hollywood, for Christ’s sake; everyone was beautiful. Almost no one was remarkable.

You wonder if these biographers know anything about seduction. Do they know anything about attraction or why people fall in love to begin with? Could they so easily overlook how remarkable this Hellman girl, Mrs. Arthur Kober, must have been? Or how preternaturally perceptive Hammett was in finding her attractive, and then incomparably interesting, for all those years? Of course, the very premise is incorrect to begin with, for Lillian Hellman was indeed beautiful. All originals are beautiful. Unoriginals do not know this simple fact, which is why the judgments of biographers in matters biographical cannot be trusted.

A more interesting question about looks is this—did Lillian consider herself homely? Likely she did. Hammett’s affection and admiration for who she was and what she meant to him must have made her less self-conscious about her looks. It might even have confirmed in her the unique beauty he perceived.

L
ILLY, BECAUSE SHE WAS YOUNGER
and less accomplished in the world’s eyes when they met, saw Dash as the brilliant and successful writer she desired to be. She had felt the same
way years earlier when she first met Arthur Kober in New York, but now the ante had been raised. Hammett immediately saw a first-rate creative mind, a very well-read and independent thinker, a woman who told her husband to take a hike so that she could fuck the more successful Dashiell Hammett. That word, by the way, was not in his personal lexicon when they met and he never got to be comfortable with it. Lilly teased him about such selective scrupulousness since she so loved the power of profanity in social situations. Once while at Louis Mayer’s house Dash told a story in which he said “effing.” She broke in with “You mean to say ‘fucking,’ don’t you, darling?” and added, à la Mae West, while playing with his belt buckle, “S’matter, big boy, my Anglo-Saxon botherin’ you?” Ruined his story but he loved it.

They stayed more or less together for a whole mishmash of reasons. Let the mishmash fall away and you have something very simple really. It was the sudden satisfaction of Hammett upon seeing Lillian enter a room. Or Lilly listening to Hammett on the phone with a director. It was the vaulting thrill of a wink or a shared sarcasm, the intimacy of a true smile. It was there when Hammett would say after a bad writing day, “I hate myself,” and Hellman would counter, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I hate you more.”

I
WAS WITH
the Pinkerton Detective Agency before the war—that would be “the war to end all wars,” 1918, in case you missed it—and for a while again afterward, at least while my postwar health held up. To the extent that my detective stories have the real smack of truth to them, it is owing to my training and work with Pinkerton. Probably the best job I ever had, even though the company has a shameful reputation and history, doing a lot more strikebreaking and union head-busting than real detective work.

Was I proud of myself working for a company like that? Hell no. Did I like having a job and did I like the job I had? Damn right. My starting assignments were tailing wayward husbands, which was lousy because mostly you just sat in a car or on a bench eyeing a doorway till all hours in all kinds of weather, waiting for them—the
subjects
, we called them in our reports—to be done with their necessaries. Or sitting behind a newspaper in a hotel lobby. Naturally I liked the lobby
better because I got to be warm, could talk to a few people and maybe get a drink or two. I got to know house dicks all over the country, a far more interesting fraternity than you’d ever guess from the movies, where they’re pretty much all drunks and dopes. I can vouch for the fact they’re not dopes.

I never had to break into a room with a flash camera; that was for sleazebags, and Pinkerton didn’t work that way. The courts back then generally accepted an accurately written Pinkerton report of a so-called illicit liaison as sufficient to prove a spouse’s infidelity. It’s worth mentioning that I enriched my vocabulary and improved my spelling while writing up those reports. Imagine me, a simple country boy—
liaisons
. More often than you’d think, said spouse was a good-looking young Missus with a substantial amount to lose. So I got to see the power of the irrational at work in a lot of second-rate hotels. Only three times in my years on the job did the fallout from one of these situations become violent and only once result in a homicide—a rich old man who first forgave his wayward young Missus and then poisoned her two months later.

S
HADOWING PEOPLE IS
an art form, and I was an artist. Each person has a unique way of moving, of holding head and shoulders, torso, either slightly forward or back, bobbing and swaying distinctively. Inevitably you’re bound to lose your guy for brief moments but you pick him up again not so much by
the color of his clothes but much more by how he moves. I ought to mention that the company gave us what we called a shadow allowance, a few extra bucks to buy a different hat or jacket so we wouldn’t stand out on shadow jobs. I liked that, the extra money, I mean.

In those days we were “Ops,” Operatives, a better-sounding term than dicks, which meant back then exactly what it means today. When I finally wrote about an Op for
Black Mask
, I couldn’t call him the Pinkerton Op, so he became my Continental Op. The Continental Detective Agency was modeled in every way on Pinkerton and I had my first popular detective.

I didn’t really have many missing person cases—
missings
was our shorthand—maybe four or five, and frankly I didn’t solve any of them, but the best jobs by far were the missings. Not the ones where foul play was suspected—those people probably were dead—but cases where someone just took it into his head to up and disappear. These were the most interesting cases for me, especially when a guy just wanted to drop off the face of the earth or get out of his own life and become someone else. Ever since I was a kid I always tried to imagine what it would feel like to be someone else. I still do. I think everybody does in some way or other. I don’t think I lacked the daring, it was just that everything in my life would become too damned messy.