The Last Days of Dorothy Parker (11 page)

In his popular novel
The Thin Man
, Dashiell Hammett created a beguiling fictional couple, Nick and Nora Charles, a pair of witty sophisticates who owned an adorable schnauzer Asta.
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In his own life, Hammett was a sadistic husband who fled his marriage and never achieved a successful relationship with any woman, in or out of wedlock. The characters of Nick and Nora, as played by William Powell and Myrna Loy, became America's favorite movie couple, practically role models for an ideal marriage in the 1930s. The greatest irony, though, is that Hammett's relations with the opposite sex involve textbook incidents of physical violence. And the abuse extended to his older daughter, Mary, with whom he tried, but failed, to have sex.

As everyone who had known the ex-Pinkerton detective could affirm, he was not a happy person. During his lifetime, fearing and despising women, he forced them to play by his rules. When he was no longer around to call the shots, Lilly deftly reassembled him into a charismatic marionette, as deliberately as Geppetto had fashioned the wooden boy Pinocchio.

Lilly had suffered terribly from his cruelty, more than anybody realized, not only the promiscuity, drunkenness, and battering, both verbal and physical, but also the rejection of her sexually, his refusal to marry her, and the pregnancy she felt obliged to terminate. Washed up by the age of forty, Hammett never published another book after
The Thin Man
, never had sexual relations with Lilly after 1939 (and probably earlier). In the last years of life, he relied on Lilly to support him.

Lilly's revenge was to restyle a selfish bastard into a saintly scamp with a few garden-variety tics who was trying to make the world a better place. In her makeover, the real Dash was replaced by a sensitive fictional Dash, “my closest, my most beloved friend,” the love of her life, the Nick to her Nora, the Rhett to her Scarlett, the Dick to her Liz.
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Even his most devout beliefs got retooled when she claimed not to know for sure if he'd ever been a member of the Communist Party.

The writing of
An Unfinished Woman
began mid-1967, the manuscript was delivered in the fall of 1968, and the book subsequently released in the spring of 1969, altogether a period of around twenty months. It was not a coincidence that Lilly spent these very months simultaneously sparring with John Keats and fending off assorted publishers with clumsy excuses about her “moral obligation” to stop all Parker biographies. Just as Keats had requested a formal sit-down interview, so would other writers, but cooperation was not in her interest when she could use her Dottie memories in a book of her own. Never to the day she died would she speak about Dottie with any biographer.
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The disarmingly winsome style of
An Unfinished Woman
, just the right blend of self-deprecating candor and confession, enchanted readers and earned accolades from critics. Better than that, it earned money and won a National Book Award. Her first endeavor as a memoirist proved so successful that she decided to embark on a sequel.

•

Norman Mailer, a friend of Lilly's, diagnosed that she “didn't know the boundary between fact and fiction.”
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Presumably, she did know but chose to ignore it. As she put it in
The Little Foxes
, “God helps those who invent what they need,” a showbiz-type adage akin to “there's a sucker born every minute.”

Playwrights make stuff up: invention was her business, imagination her bread and butter, and strict accuracy not an issue. Having worked hard to perfect her craft, Lilly had become a specialist at massaging a tale for maximum impact. Rather than tell a story straight, she was accustomed to perking up a yarn by use of hyperbole. By her standards, taking liberties was not fibbing.

Nevertheless, some of her stories did more than fudge the facts; they peel off into fantasies masquerading as truth. If the exaggerations in
An Unfinished Woman
were not conspicuous, the second volume of memoirs,
Pentimento: A Book of Portraits
, shows her sliding toward calamity.

The literal meaning of the unusual title is repentance and refers to an original image painted over by the artist, in its way, almost what a writer might think of as a second draft. Drifting through Lilly's revised images are family members in New Orleans, colorful figures like an eccentric attorney and the actress Tallulah Bankhead, and encores from several by-now stock characters: Dash, Dottie, and Alan. At the heart of the book was a fifty-page chapter, “Julia,” a spy thriller recalling the summer of 1937 when she accompanied the Campbells to Europe, during the brief period when they went off to Spain and left her behind in Paris. The character who figures centrally in this segment is a childhood friend, Julia (no last name given), an heiress studying medicine in Vienna and an activist in the anti-Fascist resistance. And here, where Lilly enters the scenario, is the moment when her undoing began.

Writing a role for herself as a brainy Bond girl, she agrees to become a courier and deliver $50,000 to the Austrian resistance, to be used for bribing Nazi guards into freeing prisoners. It is a dark, mysterious train journey of a fearless Jewish woman risking her life by smuggling refugee aid money concealed in the lining of a gray fox hat, making her way through perilous border crossings and past Nazi customs officials in Berlin, forced to fend for herself in foreign lands on the brink of war. The danger of this adventurous mission is confirmed by the fate of Julia, who is subsequently killed by the Germans.

Skeptics found it curious that a strong storyteller like Hellman produced a narrative marbled with ambiguities and a bundle of contradictions. For example, the fuzzy chronology placed her in several countries at once. Attempts to fact-check the story were inevitable.

The most thorough investigation,
“
‘Julia' and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman” (1984), was made by Samuel McCracken, assistant to the president of Boston University. In an exhaustive effort to challenge Hellman's accuracy, McCracken and his researchers poured over the 1938 London phone book but found no listing for the funeral home where Julia ended up; examination of old train schedules show no Paris–Moscow trains stopping in Berlin; the boat on which Hellman brought back Julia's corpse sailed from Le Havre without stopping in England. And so forth. No specifics could be verified, they reported.

Publication of
Pentimento
in 1973 raised questions for a New Jersey psychoanalyst, who was unpleasantly shocked to recognize herself and her own life in Austria during the thirties. Her name was not Julia; it was Muriel Gardiner, and at no time, she said, had she ever met Lillian Hellman. At the outbreak of war, she returned to America with her husband, Austrian socialist Joseph Buttinger, and their daughter. The two women knew one person in common, a mutual friend who possibly had mentioned Muriel's exploits to Lilly. For ten years Gardiner and her family had shared a house with Wolfgang Schwabacher in Pennington, New Jersey.

Taking the high road, Lilly remained lock-jawed and resisted the temptation to engage with Gardiner. It was not worth wasting time on fussy allegations that would blow over.

As the final indignity for Muriel Gardiner, the purloined tale of “Julia” would end up as a Hollywood film, with Jane Fonda playing Lilly and Vanessa Redgrave winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Julia/Muriel.
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•

Some who knew Lilly could not help snickering about Lilly the Memoirist. Some who knew her exceedingly well held even stronger opinions. In the latter group was Sid Perelman, a friend for close to forty years, who valued
An Unfinished Woman
for its portrait of Dottie but found it otherwise unremarkable. His opinion of the melodramatic life-and-death Julia story in
Pentimento
went unmentioned, but her third volume of memoirs made him roar with laughter. Seriously, had Lil taken leave of her senses? Evidently, she was viewing herself as a “historical character” – George Sand for the Age of Aquarius.
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He feared “lest those men in the white jackets armed with butterfly nets suddenly appear and entice her into their wagon.”

But Lilly hardly cared what people said, whether they were friends or foes. Her books, spectacularly popular, had sharpened her image, and for the first time she was known to a national audience that had probably never seen one of her plays.

What tickled Sid Perelman was Lilly's humorless testimonial to herself in her political memoir
Scoundrel Time
, in which she blithely rewrote history. The 150-page book, set primarily during the McCarthy era, is a period piece taking the form of a duel between good and evil, almost entirely given over to her battle with the U.S. government, and her differences with various liberals, by this time boring ancient history to most Americans. Detailing her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, she reprinted the full text of her letter to the committee in which she declared that “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.” The climax came during her testimony when she refused to give the names of party members or answer other incriminating questions and instead pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
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In reality, previous witnesses had used exactly the same strategy (and a few refused to answer all questions), but Lilly's emotional account left the impression that she alone had done something extraordinary. Some of her recollections had the hallmarks of a Charlton Heston biblical epic, as when a disembodied voice called out from the press gallery, “Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it,”
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a hurrah apparently heard by Lilly alone. At another point in
Scoundrel Time
, she interrupts the narrative and devotes four pages to an evening in New York, shortly after the hearing, when she took part in a concert program at the 92nd Street Y. Her appearance onstage, she said, was greeted with thunderous applause.

Unquestionably, her story was dramatic. But it led her down a slippery slope that ended in embarrassing questions, among them had she ever been a member of the Communist Party?

In
Scoundrel Time
, she continued to pass herself off as a nonmember, conceding only that she had tagged along to several meetings with Hammett, but “I did not join the Party,” she wrote.
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This simply was not true. She was a member from 1938 to 1940, as her biographer Carl Rollyson would discover at the Library of Congress while sorting through the papers of her attorney, Joseph Rauh.

Little, Brown released the book in the spring of 1976 with a flowery introduction by the conservative Catholic historian Garry Wills and a twelve-page photo insert billed “Lillian Hellman. An American Heroine.” Despite this song-and-dance number, hilarious to some readers other than Sid Perelman, the book attracted admiring reviews. The
Times
, as usual, went overboard; one critic paid homage to her “clear-eyed, pithily-written account,”
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while it reminded another of Henry David Thoreau's
Walden
. Lilly had come to expect no less from the paper, which routinely endorsed her self-mythologizing and printed fawning articles by her close friends and loyal cheerleaders Nora Ephron and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Contrariwise, a handful of detractors voiced reservations or pointed to her naïveté. As one unfriendly review put it, “What she cannot understand yet is that politics is politics and full of tough cookies, and that writers who meddle in it solicit destruction by it.”
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An exceptionally harsh opinion came from the critic Hilton Kramer, who wrote on Lillian's death that
Scoundrel Time
was “one of the most poisonous and dishonest testaments ever written by an American author.”
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Leftist politics was not an interest of Perelman's, so he could laugh. Those not amused remembered that Lilly had supported the verdicts of the Moscow purge trials in the 1930s, when “enemies of the people” were executed or marched off to labor camps, and that she also had defended the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression treaty of 1939 – and, furthermore, had never renounced her belief that Stalin's Russia was a democratic country. So the fact that, after five decades, she remained an unregenerate Stalin apologist was not harmless drivel. It seemed repugnant.

These unsavory passages from her earlier life were nowhere to be found in the pages of
Scoundrel Time
, which was essentially a paid message selling Lillian Hellman, the writerly equivalent of an infomercial for the purpose of marketing a brand. The book was calculated to inflate her status and provide a seductive blueprint to the way Lilly wished to be remembered. And although her story cast a spell on many readers, not all the attention was favorable. For that matter, suspicions that had surfaced with her story of Julia in
Pentimento
were about to take a direction she could not have predicted.

(1977–1988)

On March 28, 1977, Lilly appeared on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to present the Academy Awards for best documentaries. With the majestic air of Glinda the Good Witch, she stepped out of her 1930s bubble, you might say, as the Hollywood Munchkins stood and cheered. This fanfare, having nothing whatsoever to do with the documentaries, signified recognition for Lilly herself, the courageous author of the greatly anticipated
Julia
, which was scheduled for release that fall. The following year, nominated for eleven Oscars,
Julia
would win awards for Jason Robards, Alvin Sargent, and Vanessa Redgrave, but it lost Best Picture to
Annie Hall
. Redgrave turned her acceptance speech into an awkward political oration saluting blacklisted Hellman – though not by name – and all the people who had stood up to the McCarthy witch hunt “against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truth they believe in.”
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Throughout the 1970s – possibly her best years ever – she was an electric personality on the American literary scene and more, she was a name. Blackglama furs invited her to model a mink coat for its national ad campaign, “What Becomes a Legend Most?” featuring divas such as Elizabeth Taylor, Beverly Sills, and Marlene Dietrich. Unlike Judy Garland, who had clopped through her photo session in a vodka fog, Lilly posed in a $7,000-dollar coat holding a cigarette and barely suppressing a smile of cool triumph. She was seventy-one and frankly thrilled. Still in fairly decent health despite four packs of cigarettes a day, almost beautiful, definitely glamorous, she seemed to be leading an enviable life, the very embodiment of fabulous.

Now, whenever Lilly made a trip abroad, she liked to fly the Concorde, another emblem of her quest for class. Still hungry for experience, she made holiday jaunts to London and Venice, Martinique and Barbados, streamed down the Nile, shared a vacation house in Florida with friends like Sid Perelman. Summers on the Vineyard brought a procession of blueblood houseguests; in the city she was sought after by journalists clamoring for interviews. In 1976, after the release of
Scoundrel Time
, it seemed everybody wanted a piece of her. There may be no second acts in American lives, as Scott Fitzgerald had written romantically, but Lilly proved that adage incorrect. Weren't all her dreams of success coming true, again?

At her Park Avenue apartment came calling a young reporter, sweetly costumed in a dainty white blouse and a single strand of pearls, who seemed awestruck in her presence. Afterward, evidently, the reverence must have worn off because her published piece wounded Lilly's vanity. It described Hellman's “wonderful stone face” as looking like “it had fallen off Mount Rushmore.”
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For years Tallulah Bankhead, the original star of
The Little Foxes
, an actress who despised her, had been comparing her face to George Washington's. And now this? She should have known better than to trust anybody in a single strand of pearls. “The bitch,” she growled, and vowed never to give another interview to a stranger.

More potentially troubling than the reporter with the pearls was a growing pack of fact-checking sharks, still in the distance but growing more visible, the Muriel Gardiners and the assorted nitpickers with their insinuations of dishonesty. No matter, though, because Lilly never ran from a fight. When Little, Brown collected her trio of memoirs into a single volume,
Three
(1979), and asked her to add commentaries, she reread the books and decided that “on the whole, they please me.” That reassurance was for her admirers, to let them know she would not back down.

And to prove discretion was not her forte, she threw out a handful of condescending remarks about veracity for the fact-checkers. With Icarus-like bravado, she declared, “I tried in these books to tell the truth. I did not fool with facts.” Readers, she added, should judge for themselves.

And readers did, sending her books to the best-seller lists and reinforcing her image as a fearless truth teller. In her favor was an ingratiating style of writing that made people want to like her, to believe her incapable of fooling with facts. It was hard to imagine that such an uncompromising person had stolen another's achievements. Especially admired by her own sex, she became a figure of inspiration to the women's movement, which enthusiastically identified her as a feminist role model. Even so, their social revolution left her cold. She had personally liberated herself long before these banner-waving, consciousness-raising sisters were born.

•

Late at night Lilly liked to watch television in her bedroom. Never a great fan before, she had taken up the habit after dismaying physical ailments – emphysema and heart problems – began to slow down her social life. On evenings when there was nothing to do besides watch television and smoke, she turned on the news or various talk shows. One of her regulars was the popular
Dick Cavett Show
on Channel Thirteen (PBS).

A former standup comic, Cavett was a small man with an engaging personality on-screen, irascible offscreen, whose success relied on persuading celebrities to engage in conversation on serious issues of the day. Unlike the late-night hosts on the networks, Cavett didn't do jokes, magic tricks, or chitchat with plastic starlets. He went for intellectual guests – he loved writers – who would have something provocative to say, which to certain viewers like Hellman was the best kind of entertainment.

On the evening of January 25, 1980, Lilly was listening to Cavett interview Mary McCarthy, a writer Lilly had always disliked for her anti-Stalinist sentiments. Who, Cavett asked, were the most overrated contemporary writers? It was a variation on one of his stock questions, posed countless times to professionals in other fields, which made his program so much fun to watch.

McCarthy didn't hesitate. Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, she replied quickly, and in addition to those deceased writers she would add Lillian Hellman who, still alive, was unmistakably a has-been. To which she added that Hellman was “tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.”
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All that Joan of Arc preening before HUAC was ludicrous. As for
Scoundrel Time
, a self-congratulatory book that mangled history, it was nothing but warmed-over Stalinism and therefore more Hellmanology.

Lilly promptly pricked up her ears.

Cavett, who delighted in goading his guests, followed through with the obvious question immediately: What was dishonest about Lillian Hellman?

In a flash, McCarthy took a swing. “Everything,” she breezily declared. “I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and' and ‘the.
'
” The woman was a virtuoso of deceit.

Cavett's question was not as impromptu as it seemed because, apparently, McCarthy had known in advance that it would be asked.

In her bedroom, Lilly laughed out loud. The next morning, she called her attorney and told him to sue Mary McCarthy and the
Dick Cavett Show
.

Their decades-old acrimony involved two issues: professional rivalry and politics (because McCarthy had supported Leon Trotsky). Certainly Lilly had never made a secret of her scorn for McCarthy, aiming slurs at her whenever offered the opportunity. And sometimes she lobbed a sizable insult, as when, in an interview with the
Paris Review
, she called her “often brilliant” but unfortunately her fiction revealed her as an amateur, only “a lady writer, a lady magazine writer.”
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In fact, McCarthy was hardly a dabbler. Her novel about a set of Vassar graduates,
The Group
, spent two years on the best-seller list.

Practically everybody advised Lilly that suing McCarthy was a bad idea. Most likely she was seeking attention for her latest novel,
Cannibals and Missionaries
. But to Lilly, defiant as ever, it was outrageous that such ignominy could find its way into her bedroom through the television screen. McCarthy was a disgusting woman whose “poisonous nonsense” should not go unchallenged.
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Why shouldn't she hold her feet to the fire?

Let it go, Peter Feibleman urged sternly. Move on with your life.

“What life?” she replied.
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She declined Cavett's offer to rebut McCarthy. Did he really expect a response? What was she supposed to say – that she was not a liar? On February 15, Lilly filed a lawsuit for libel claiming $2.25 million in damages against McCarthy, Cavett, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Initially, Mary McCarthy's reaction was to treat the lawsuit as a joke. It was a shame that Hellman couldn't recognize hyperbole, she said. All she had done was to offer an opinion – after all, she was a literary critic. Once before, she had made the same comment in almost the same words, all but saying that when it came to dishonesty, Hellman was a career criminal. A year earlier, she had told the biweekly paper
Paris Metro
that she couldn't stand Hellman. Her every word was false including “and” and “but.”

Whatever the case, McCarthy pointed out, Lillian Hellman had no grounds for her suit because she was a public figure.

For the rest of her life, Lilly continued to obsess over the case as it escalated into a tabloid catfight. Annoying Mary McCarthy became “faute de mieux” and a kind of enjoyable therapy rolled into one. Hopefully, the legal fees would ruin her. For her own counsel, Lilly chose Ephraim London, a prominent civil liberties lawyer and close friend who had taken the case gratis.

•

As the critic Diana Trilling had found out the hard way, you could risk losing your publisher if a book offended Lillian Hellman. Several years earlier, Little, Brown (also Lilly's publisher) requested removal from her essay collection of several passages that Lilly found objectionable; when she refused, they canceled the contract, whereupon she took
We Must March My Darlings
to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in a brouhaha that reached the pages of the
Times
.

Hellman's warlike swagger could be extremely intimidating. But not to everyone. For the
Paris Review
Martha Gellhorn drafted a sulfurous piece about lying and denounced Lilly as an “apocryphiar,” a word she coined to mean someone who fabricates a tale with herself as the heroine.
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The editor, George Plimpton, changed “Close Encounters of the Apocryphal Kind” to “Guerre de Plume,” but it didn't matter what he titled it. Lots of people had come to fear Lilly, but Martha had been waiting years for a chance to scorch “that witch.”
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The result was a blistering article that made Mary McCarthy's name-calling look like schoolyard hair-pulling.

The two of them had met for the first time in 1937, during the summer and fall when Martha and Hemingway, Dottie and Alan, and Lilly were in Paris and Spain, and also the very same weeks in which Lilly had set her “Julia” escapade. Gellhorn decided that almost every word in Lilly's self-glorifying account of her visit to Madrid was a lie. On the offensive, she mauled Lilly for draping herself in the Spanish war like it was some Blackglama mink coat. No doubt, too, it must have grated her to find herself in
An Unfinished Woman
frivolously described as wearing “good boots,” a less-than-friendly barb similar to Lilly's characterization of Mary McCarthy as a lady magazine writer.
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Gellhorn was quick to recognize Dottie's importance in discrediting the story of “Julia.” Sensing that Hellman had already chucked any incriminating documents that pertained to the 1937 trip, she wrote that “Mrs. Parker might as well have left her papers to Fort Knox. Until Miss H. releases Mrs. Parker's papers, there is no way to prove how long Miss H. stayed in Spain.” Likewise, there was no way to prove or disprove her train trip to Berlin with the currency in her hat. And for that matter, none of Lilly's three memoirs would have been possible had Dottie – or Dash – been around.
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Martha Gellhorn's venom provided a green light to critics who had once feared Lilly's reprisals. The next writer to go after her was a former confidante, the journalist-novelist Renata Adler. In the early 1970s, Lilly had mentored the opinionated young woman whom she considered brilliant and hoped would be a friend for life. During her career at the
Times
and
New Yorker
, Adler simultaneously turned to fiction and in 1983 published her second autobiographical novel,
Pitch Dark
, based on her relationship with the civil rights lawyer Burke Marshall. In a memorable walk-on, drizzled with malice, Lilly appears as Viola Teagarden, described as a disagreeable woman who paraded around her anger as if it were some prizewinning thoroughbred bull, “to be used at stud,” and who brought a juicy lawsuit that had utterly no merit.
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Instead of confronting Adler, Lilly expressed her disdain to Marshall, telling him that Renata needn't worry about a lawsuit from her. She regarded her hostility as inconsequential.

In fact, she faced more pressing matters because another ugly crisis had erupted. Only weeks earlier, Muriel Gardiner, who had done nothing about
Pentimento
for ten years, decided to publish a book about her life. In
Code Name “Mary,”
the psychoanalyst, eighty-two and soon to die of cancer, recounted how she had joined the anti-Fascist resistance while studying medicine and psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna, and how she had used the name Mary to smuggle passports and money. Unlike Julia, Muriel had not lost a leg or been killed by the Nazis, but otherwise her resemblance to Lilly's heroine was remarkable. As Gardiner pointed out, she and Lillian Hellman had never met, but there was a connection because they had shared a friend at one time.
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