Table Of Contentlillian hellman
Lillian Hellman
An Imperious Life
DOROTHY GALLAGHER
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2014 by Dorothy Gallagher.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gallagher, Dorothy.
Lillian Hellman : an imperious life / Dorothy Gallagher.
pages cm. — (Jewish Lives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16497-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Hellman, Lillian, 1905–1984—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dramatists,
American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women dramatists, American—
Biography. I. Title.
PS3515.E343Z686 2013
812(cid:2).52—dc23
[B]
2013027579
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Frontispiece: Author Lillian Hellman smoking a cigarette as she chats with author
Dashiell Hammett while dining at Club 21. (Photo by George Karger/Pix Inc./
Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
contents
Prologue, 1
1. The Hubbards of Bowden, 9
2. The Marxes of Demopolis, 16
3. Two Jewish Girls, 28
4. Marriage, 37
5. The Writing Life: 1933–1984, 47
6. Along Came a Spider, 56
7. Eros, 64
8. Counterparts, 74
9. The Incurious Tourist, 81
10. Lillian Hellman’s Analyst, 90
11. “You Are What You Are to Me,” 94
v
contents
12. Having Her Say, 102
13. Jewish Lit, 114
14. An Honored Woman, 120
15. Mere Facts, 129
Notes, 145
Acknowledgments, 161
Index, 163
vi
Prologue
At the height of her celebrity—and it is difficult to say
exactly when that would have been, since she was almost un-
flaggingly famous over a period of five decades—Lillian Hell-
man was as glamorous and visible a public presence as any
movie star. But let’s say that one peak moment came in 1939,
with the opening of The Little Foxes, which was her second hit
play. Hellman was thirty-four years old. The play opened in
February, which would have given her the opportunity to wear
the furs she loved, a new mink in this case. She was seldom in
public without her friends, and she would have been seen with
Dashiell Hammett, her tall, handsome lover; and with her di-
rector and soon-to-be lover, Herman Shumlin; with her friend
Dorothy Parker; and perhaps with the very glamorous Sara and
Gerald Murphy, whom she had met in Paris. When Hellman
appeared at restaurants, theater openings, and at the best par-
ties, she was beautifully coiffed and made up. When reporters
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lillian hellman
wanted to interview her in 1939, they came to her suite at the
Plaza Hotel.
From 1934, when her first play, The Children’s Hour, had been
a Broadway hit, through the early 1960s, Hellman produced a
play almost every other year. Between plays she wrote screen-
plays. If not every one of her plays was a hit, still, for thirty years,
Hellman was the queen of Broadway playwrights. In fact, she
was the only woman playwright of her generation. In those
years, when people spoke of the American theater, they spoke
of Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Hellman; a few years
later they would add the names of Arthur Miller, Tennessee
Williams, and William Inge.
Much later, sometime in the late 1960s, or early seventies,
I stepped onto a crowded elevator and caught my first and only
glimpse of Lillian Hellman. She was unmistakable, though
smaller than I would have thought. (A “mighty little woman,”
Norman Mailer once said of her; an admiring phrase, even
when placed in his complete sentence: “Oh, she was mean, ma-
nipulative and heroic—she was a mighty little woman.”1)
By the time I saw her in the elevator, Hellman was in her
mid-sixties; her plays had all been written, and the first of her
three volumes of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, had recently
been published. If I hadn’t yet read the book, I did soon after
that elevator sighting, and I then passed on the book to my
mother, who was, as I knew, a fan of Hellman’s. My mother
admired Hellman’s plays, particularly her anti-Fascist play
Watch on the Rhine; she admired Hellman even more for her
out spoken political views, which, like her own, often echoed
the views of the Communist Party; she admired Hellman al-
most as much for having lived openly with a man to whom she
was not married. And, of course, my mother admired her, as
so many did, for Hellman’s courageous testimony before the
House Committee on Un-American Activities.
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prologue
Hellman was Jewish, as my family was, a fact she did not
make much of, nor did we, but which was nevertheless central
to our sense of ourselves in the world. Apart from the fact that
Hellman was rich and famous, and we did not know any rich
and famous people, Hellman seemed exactly like the sort of
person we would know—bohemian (although Park Avenue in
her personal style), opinionated, and politically one of us. This
is by way of saying that I do not come to Lillian Hellman tabula
rasa.
Lillian Hellman died in 1984. Four full-scale biographies
have since been devoted to her life and work. The first was
begun while she was still alive, the last appeared less than two
years ago. There is also a fifth book that is a double biography
of Hellman and Dashiell Hammett and their near-marriage of
thirty years. There are a number of biographies of Hammett
that naturally include material about Hellman, and a collection
of Hammett’s letters, many of which are written to Hellman.
Still another book about Hellman is an apparently affectionate
reminiscence of a long friendship, but it is ultimately a devas-
tating portrait of a desperate woman in her declining years.
These are a lot of books even for a mighty little woman.
The numbers indicate that even thirty years after her death
Hellman excites interest. Not only as a writer, which would be
reason enough, but as a conundrum—a woman whose deter-
mination to prevail in all aspects of her life was often at odds
with the persona of moral rectitude she presented to the world.
“The power of LH—a puzzlement,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote
to Mary McCarthy, “even when one knows how concentrated she
has been in its service.”2 Everyone who has written about Hellman
runs smack into her capacity to outrage, and to enrage. Hellman
was a woman of enormous energy—talented, ambitious, restless,
audacious, highly sexual, funny, generous, avaricious, mendacious,
demanding, greedy, contemptuous, dogmatic, irritable, mean,
3
