Lillian and Dash (9 page)

“But look at our spouses,” Lilly said. “They’re both writers, both as virile as Turks—I believe I’m correct in surmising—and they don’t write that garbage.” Of course she was really talking about Hammett, since Phil would write anything Selznick asked him to, a wet-hankie for Bette Davis or a Jack Oakie college romp with fart jokes. And probably there was more he-man, stoical Hemingway in Hammett than she was comfortable with.

Hammett rose and blunted his cigar in a tray. “There you have it—the importance of being Ernest.” He knew this was about the time when Lilly usually went up to and then over the line. “C’mon, Miss Broadway, no one here is bending spoons, no one here is beating their chests. Can’t you see, they just want to go to sleep.”

Lillian didn’t stand up. “I want to stay. I want to tell the whole world that was the best damned meal since I had a rhino roast at the foot of Kilimanjaro.”

Hammett finished his drink while standing and lifted Lillian’s hand.

“Jesus,” said Phil, “it’s not even one. This isn’t like you people.”

“Lillian’s brain is still on Eastern time.”

“It’s not.”

“One more drink then.”

Myra moved everyone to the living room. Phil set cognac snifters on small tables. The couples sat across from one another on matching sofas. Myra turned down the lights and said, “There.”

Silence matched the change of mood until Edmunds said, “I didn’t want to bring this up earlier.” His altered tone matched the new subject. “It would have been unseemly to bring up business before … We really did invite you to celebrate Lilly.”

Lilly muttered, “Unseemly. Some word.”

“It’s not business,” Myra corrected her husband. “It’s politics.”

Phil glared at his wife: “Then you do it.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“We’re thinking of trying to organize the writers.” He let the words sit there while he looked at each of them. Hammett smiled. Lillian frowned. “It’s all preliminary, very preliminary. We’re just feeling people out, good idea, bad idea, what? The technical people—electricians, sound and camera guys—seem to be way ahead of us on this. In fact, they want us to be a part of what they’re doing …”

Myra interrupted: “Word is the studios are getting together to fund a fake writers’ union.
Screen Writers Association
, they want to call it. They want to control all the talent at bargain basement prices. If we want a real union, we’ve got to act, we really can’t be screwing around.”

“As you can see, my wife gets passionate. But she also happens to be right. We have to figure out what sort of association we want and when we want it.”

“Union,” Hammett said, stopping Edmunds short, “not association, not organization—union. It’s important to call a thing what it is.”

“Fine,” Phil said. “So you think we need a union. What sort of union should it be? And when should we get it started?”

Hellman said, “Some of us do, some of us don’t. The question isn’t really about who needs what, it should be about whether all of us would benefit from a union now.”

Hammett said quickly, “I find I must disagree somewhat with my esteemed friend from New York. Unions are always about need. The four of us here are fine, aren’t we? But you never know what the future holds. No, let me amend that … You can be sure as hell that somewhere down the line one of us is going to need some protection. That’s a given. So count me in. Ditto for my skeptical young friend here.”

Lillian turned and glared at Hammett: “First of all, I’d like to know more. I’d like to know who’s doing the organizing. Secondly, I’d like to know who else is in and who’s out
and why. I’d like to know what to expect from Mayer and the other studios. And finally”—here she stuck a finger into Hammett’s stomach—“I’d like to answer for myself.”

Myra Ewbank began to outline some of the reasons why a writers’ Writers Union was a good idea.

Lilly broke in: “Myra, Myra, I know why we have to protect ourselves, but isn’t that what we each do before we sign our contracts?”

Hammett whistled: “Spoken like a woman with a Broadway hit in the oven …”

“Don’t turn me into the villain here, Comrade.”

“I think you’ve done that pretty well for yourself already.”

Everyone felt the tension building. Myra said, “Lilly’s right in asking for some more time, more information. At this point we’re just asking people how they feel in general.”

“And?” Hammett asked.

“There’s a great deal of interest … and there’s a great deal of uncertainty.”

“There usually is at this stage. It changes.” Hammett rose. “Count me in no matter what.” He yawned. He reached down for Lillian, who pulled her arm away.

O
UTSIDE, A SOFT, SWEET-SMELLING RAIN
had begun to fall. Lillian, who had driven to Myra’s house because she knew the way, had the keys and insisted on driving back to Santa Monica.

The wet road wound down toward Burbank over hilly, lightly forested land, twisting ever so slightly, almost no road lighting to guide a driver in the dark. He could sense her anger in the blue silence. The hum of the great Packard engine, accelerating and slowing by turns, was almost musical. The beat of the windshield wipers supplied the tempo. The scratch and flare of the match surprised her when Hammett lit a cigarette.

“Want one?”

“Why not.”

He lit hers too. “I should not have answered for you. I have no idea why I did that.” She noticed as she always did that he would not say the word
sorry
.

“Yes, you do.”

“I do?”

“Sure you do. Because you have no idea where you end and where I begin, that’s why.”

He was silent, thinking over what she had just said.

There was a traffic light ahead. Hammett knew Lillian had no intention of stopping if the light turned red. It did. She didn’t. He glanced to either side of the tree-lined intersection where a motorcycle cop or a police car might have been hiding. He saw none. The wet road glistened in their headlights and the humming silence began to comfort them again.

Hammett may have seen it first, a squirrel darting across the road, stopping suddenly, looking up at them stupefied.
Lillian pulled to the left and hit the brakes. The squirrel ran forward into her path. Lillian turned the steering wheel abruptly to the right and set in motion a long, unnerving skid that ended with the Packard off the road, front forward in a ditch. Amid the high pitch of brakes on wet road, Hammett’s sustained grunt, Hellman’s nasal squeal, another sound, a barely perceptible
klup
that nevertheless stood out on its own. They knew. The squirrel.

Before he got out of the car, Hammett touched Hellman’s arm and said, “Okay?”

She snorted. “I’ll live. He won’t.”

Hammett went back up the road but couldn’t find the squirrel. He almost convinced himself she hadn’t hit it after all when Lilly called, “Here. It’s here.”

The squirrel was on the far side of the road, off the surface, on the pebbly shoulder. Literally knocked for a loop, it lay on its side breathing slowly but deeply, its eyes blinking. Lillian was saying “Shit” repeatedly.

The rain had not diminished. Behind them, from the direction they had come, a car with a swirling red light approached.

Hammett knelt down quickly and ended the squirrel with a sudden and efficient crack.

Two cops, the same size exactly, interchangeable it seemed, came out of their car. One carried a flashlight. “Seen you run the light back there, ma’am. Big hurry. Seems to be the trouble?”

Hammett said, “I was having a problem with the accelerator back there, officer. Proof is I couldn’t avoid this fellow when he ran into my path.”

“No, no, let’s not try this. Lady was driving. We both saw her, right, Newt?”

“My wife doesn’t drive.”

“Sure, sure. Driver’s license. Both of you.”

Lillian said, “My husband’s telling you the truth, officer. I wouldn’t even know how to start up a big car like this.”

Newt put the flashlight on her face and said, “Doing some celebrating?”

Hammett said, “Some good food with friends, nothing crazy.”

Newt put the light on Hammett’s wallet: “You two sure you want to stick to your story? Because if you think you got trouble now, you have no idea what’s in store when …”

His partner, inspecting Hammett’s wallet under the flashlight, said, “Pinkerton man? How long?”

“Too long.”

Newt said under furrowed brow, “Hey. You’re the guy writes the detective stories. I read them all the time. They’re good.”

“Thank you.”

“You know what you’re talking about. The other stuff is pretty much just made-up crap. Excuse me, ma’am.”

“Why? They are just made-up crap.”

“Exactly. Well, well …” To his partner: “This is Dashy Hammot.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe you fellows could call someone, help us get the car out of there?”

“Might be able to help you ourselves. We’ve still got the hook and the tow rope, right, Newt?”

“If the Missus could get behind the wheel, Mr. Hammot and I could help push.”

“You forget, she can’t drive.”

“What the hell was I thinking?”

The police car tow rope hooked the Packard’s bumper and the huge car came out easily. The cops asked for autographs. Hammett said, “You’ll want my wife’s more. It’ll be very valuable some day.” They each autographed blank speeding tickets.

“Put down something that says who you are and what we did, like,
To my favorite nonarresting officer
, or something like that.”

Lillian wrote,
Thank you for this second chance at freedom!

Hammett:
To the sweet pleasure of getting away with murder!

After they all shook hands and began to leave the scene, Hammett took the squirrel’s body into the woods.

Hammett was driving now. The rain had intensified. The mood was better than it had been before the Packard struck the squirrel. He looked over to see her sadness.

“It couldn’t live on that way.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What then?”

“Everything.”

“H
OW DO YOU EXPLAIN
the fact that there are only four people I have ever wanted to sit down and talk with seriously and all four of them happen to be Jews?”

Hellman, who had been scribbling in a leather-bound notebook, didn’t quite stop, merely slowed, and said without looking up, “They don’t just
happen to be
. But, just out of curiosity, who are the other three?”

“Two of them are dead. Don’t know the whereabouts of the third. And the fourth won’t return my calls.”

She put down her pen: “I’m hooked. Tell me.”

“Jew number one. Jesus …”

“He doesn’t return anyone’s call … Number two?”

“Karl Marx. Dead.”

“Three?”

“Siggy Freud. I doubt he’s still in Vienna …”

“Actually he is. I spoke to people in New York who are trying to get him out but he’s stubborn and won’t leave.”

“Or gripped by a death wish.”

“But why not give him a call? I’m sure he reads
Black Mask
.”

“The point is: Do you have any idea how many billions of people have been in the world and how few of them have been Jews? One-hundredth of one percent. So why do they become so damned important?”

“Figure that out and you’ll know why everyone hates us so much.” She began writing again.

Later that evening Lillian remembered to ask who important Jew number four was.

“L.B.”

“Mayer? Why him?”

“I need to find out if I’m going to be working here a while longer.”

“You’ve got a contract.”

“He has a legal department.”

“It’s about what Phil said, isn’t it, about the
Thin Man
sequels?”

“I’ll know where I stand if I can see his face. He won’t return my calls.”

Dashiell Hammett, whenever he got into a serious conversation with someone he didn’t know well, usually about the time the second drink was being poured, often asked, “So what’s your story?” Clearly, every life had a plotline and every plotline developed in interesting ways, at least potentially interesting to Hammett, a brilliant listener and
questioner, qualities that had served him so well at Pinkerton. Most people said, “What do you mean, ‘What’s my story?’ ” So Hammett usually engaged the bartender instead. Bartenders always got it. Once on a radio program when the interviewer asked him to describe his profession, Hammett said, “I collect life stories.”

Here is what he collected on Louis B. Mayer over the years, not from Mayer himself of course, who made it a point to bury the true story and create his own biography, but from people who claimed to have known Mayer along the way: A Russian Jew, probably Meier or Meyer, whose family emigrated from Minsk. Louis took over his father’s scrap iron business, a more respectable way of saying he owned junkyards. Then he bought one theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts, which he quickly grew into the largest movie house chain in New England. Lots of guys, Hammett realized, would have stopped there, which was why those guys were not Louis B. Mayer. No one, by the way, ever discovered what the B. stood for.

Mayer leaped from local theater exhibition to national film distribution and motion picture production in Hollywood in no time at all. As its production boss, Mayer built M-G-M into the most financially successful studio in the world, the only one to pay shareholders dividends every year during the Depression. Even Boy Zanuck wasn’t able to do that. Louis B. Mayer was all about selling—scrap iron or dreams, the product didn’t much matter—and that he
did brilliantly. Hammett was honestly impressed by Mayer’s story. He’d done in Hollywood what Isaac Marx had done half a century before in Demopolis, Alabama.

What Hammett knew about recent Mayer activities, he admired less. Mayer had been vice-chairman of the California Republican Party, and as a delegate to the 1932 national convention publicly endorsed Hoover for a second term over upstart FDR. Mayer was a man of profits; Republicans were bad for unions, good for profit. So Mayer was a Republican.

Among most of Hammett’s colleagues, the writers, directors, studio intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, and lefties in general, Louis B. Mayer was a laughingstock and a pain in the ass. Hammett had no problem working for him and being well paid, mostly because he had no pretensions about what product he was making. For him, movie studios cranked out mostly harmless diversions; Mayer and M-G-M did it more successfully—and profitably—than any of the others.