Lillian and Dash

by Sam Toperoff

  Rule number one in detective fiction: Thou Shall Not Stop the Plot. For any reason. Ever. So then what made me want to begin Chapter Seven with the Flitcraft story and bring everything to a dead halt? And why in the world do I have Spade—my own Samuel—tell the Flitcraft story to Brigid as though it were a case he worked on himself when it has nothing to do with the Falcon? Why? You tell me. Lillian says I put it there precisely because I realized that was where it didn’t belong, and that’s why she loved it. Who knows, maybe I thought the plot needed the squeal of brakes to build suspense. A couple of times that night I almost pulled it out but decided finally that’s what editors are for.

  Here is what Krinsky told me: “A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office in Tacoma to go to luncheon one day and never returned. As best I could make out, his wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned a house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty bucks in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even another woman in his life …”

  Krinsky said Flitcraft’s wife wanted Pinkerton to find her husband, bring him home, and make him pay for what he had done to their family. Krinsky was the company’s missings specialist in the Northwest so he began by picking up the usual loose ends. The guy didn’t gamble. The dealership was still making money for the family. Even a good-looking secretary didn’t lead anywhere. Nothing led to Flitcraft’s whereabouts. It was one thing to type out Krinsky’s story, quite another to have Spade take up the tale and tell it to Brigid as his own.

  I had Spade pick up Flitcraft’s trail after someone spotted a man in Spokane who had won a car race in a vintage Packard. His description matched Flitcraft to a T. Years had lapsed since Flitcraft’s disappearance when Spade finally caught up with his man and discovered that he had indeed changed his name, owned a successful business, and was married with a baby boy. Flitcraft, when Spade discovers him, didn’t feel a great deal of guilt; after all, he had left his Tacoma family well provided for and felt that what he had done was perfectly reasonable under some very bizarre circumstances.

  Five years earlier in Tacoma Flitcraft was walking past an office building that was being put up—just the superstructure. A beam fell eight or ten stories down and struck the sidewalk alongside him and then toppled over. Now even Brigid, who was only interested in matters that affected her well-being, became a bit more attentive. At that point I went back to my Krinsky notes and read: “He felt that somebody had taken the lid off of life and let him look at the works. And that scared the bejesus out of the man.” He realized that the good father-citizen-husband could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died haphazardly like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. Chance ruled everything. So why were we kidding ourselves?

  After the beam fell and missed, Flitcraft chose to live a random, uncommitted life of chance. But a few years later up in Spokane when there were no more falling beams in his life, he pretty much becomes his old Flitcraft self again, a stable, predictable, solid citizen. This idea Spade particularly enjoys and he tells Brigid, “That’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.” If you want to know our species in a nutshell, there you have it.

  Rarely do I falter or allow myself to be taken in by my own rare good writing. “Somebody had taken the lid off of life and let him look at the works.” Jesus, that’s an epitaph. Does it even matter whether that was Krinsky or me? My whole life up to the Falcon—up to Lillian—was nothing but dealing with “the works” under the lid, so much so that I thought that “works” were all life had to offer. Not complaining, no, not at all. Some people don’t even know life has “lids” and “works” and couldn’t even give a damn about the difference. Samuel Spade, however, is not one of them. Nor am I. Lillian, of course, makes metaphysical poetry out of Flitcraft, but then again she functions on an entirely different plane of existence than I do.

  Even though we’re both Samuels, Spade is not quite Hammett, nor vice versa. I have to remind myself of that in certain situations. It made sense to me then that Spade wanted to hear himself tell Brigid something she couldn’t possibly understand. And I certainly knew better than to allow myself to wax philosophical in a thriller and stop things cold. But that’s what I did, so I wrote a note to Alfred telling him to knock the story out if he didn’t think it worked. He left it in. Thank God, John Huston, when he made the movie, got rid of the damned thing.

  WHICH VERSION OF IT is he dishing up now? The old Buddy Krinsky bullshit or the truth as he invents it on the run? I hope you’re smart enough to figure out why he made up that Krinsky cover story out of whole cloth. I called him on it the moment I saw it in an Esquire interview.

  I was in New York when I read it and phoned the apartment in L.A. He was there but wouldn’t pick up. I left a message three places at the studio for him to call me, which he did, three days later. God only knows how he filled those days. He swore he was crashing on a Thin Man script. Not possible, but I allowed myself to believe him. It didn’t matter at that point for me, my concern was the unadulterated crap he was telling people about the Flitcraft section. When he finally phoned back, I said, Why are you doing this? There is no Krinsky. You know there is no Krinsky and I know there is no Krinsky. He said, Lill, I swear to you there is. I said, I called Pinkerton. There is no Krinsky. There never was a Krinsky. Long pause. He said, I do not appreciate the people I care about not believing me. He was seething. And you never would have called Pinkerton.

  I told him he was right, that I hadn’t actually called Pinkerton. I told him I wanted to but finally didn’t. I loved him too much.

  I’ve desired many men over the years for a variety of reasons but mostly for the short term. Dash was for a lifetime, unfortunately his lifetime. He was still unusually handsome until well into his ruin, but even ruined he was beautiful. I was the only one of his women to have known him fully because we worked so closely for so long.

  Once, I remember, he read a book about sixteenth-century glassblowing in Bohemia—he collected esoterica like Lincoln pennies—and after we made love he talked so teasingly about how Cranberry glass was blown that we made love again. The Bohemians made many kinds of glass; cranberry, though, became our code word for sex. If we were at a bar and I asked for a little cranberry juice in my gin, Dash knew I had expectations for the evening. So, no, I wouldn’t have called Pinkerton about Krinsky; I didn’t have to. I knew.

  Ask yourself this question. Why would a writer, a fiction writer, invent a story attributing some of his very best work to some crude working stiff who does not even exist?

  What you had with Dash was, on the one hand, someone who accumulated knowledge like a coin collector but refused to ever show anyone his collection. And on the other hand, someone who absolutely humiliated himself in public with asinine pranks and fall-down drunkenness. Not to mention his insulting faithlessness. It took me a long while to see these were uncorrectable parts of the essential man. Extract them and there was no Dashiell Hammett left. Damn it.

  And, really, how could I help him when, let’s face it, back then I was often something of a drunk myself. But never, I don’t believe, out of shame.

  I’d always felt—and I told him this too often—that he suffered from a Goldilocks complex, couldn’t or wouldn’t find the bed or the chair or the porridge that was just right. The novels and screenplays were too easy for him—that’s why they were pulps or bad movies. When I wanted to get him angry with himself, I used to pout and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I know you won’t forgive me. I—I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.” Except I used to say “sowwy.” />
  Trust me, there was no fucking Buddy Krinsky. Flitcraft is pure Hammett, perhaps for the only time on paper. It’s Hammett lying next to me, his head on a pillow, smoking a Fatima, sharing a true, intimate thought. It’s great thinking and writing and in Falcon it’s two and a half pages. But, oh, how I do love it.

  Naturally, afterward, that craziness in him had to find a way to disclaim the good work, to disinherit it, invent another source, and then castigate anyone who saw how very good and important it was. That’s the essence of Hammett, the man with all his quills out. Too bristly and dangerous to approach. Too tough and inconstant to allow himself to be admired.

  Here’s what you really have to know about people like Dash—and there’s only Dash, not people “like” him—who grow up piss-poor and unloved. They’re ashamed. Ashamed of what they come from, of who they are, and if they happen to be successful, ashamed of their talent and accomplishments. I do not suffer from those particular deprivations—there are others we can talk about later—but if you spent any serious time with Dash you couldn’t miss the symptoms of profound shame. No one else was ever allowed to spend any serious time with Dash but me. So you just have to take my word for it. The Flitcraft story is brilliant and it’s all Hammett.

  . 4 .

  Hatred

  IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME he’d humiliated her, or the second, or the fifth. This time, though, it was of longer duration and at a greater distance—she in New York, he in Hollywood; behind her back, it seemed to her. And more people appeared to know about it than ever before, making the sheer quantity of humiliation greater than it ever had been.

  It took her the better part of three days to cover the United States, first by train and then by plane. Lilly had much time to cosy up to the humiliation, so quite naturally its effects ran deeper. Which bothered her more, she wondered, that he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants for two weeks or that so many people she disliked intensely now knew that the man she loved couldn’t—or wouldn’t—keep his dick in his pants? Lilly didn’t even need an hour to figure that one out. She’d been made into a laughingstock. The taste on her tongue was gall.

  If Hammett wanted to fuck around, fine. No, not fine, but given the bastard’s track record, certainly not unexpected. What was exasperating, truly maddening, about this one was that he’d done it so publicly it was obviously meant to be deliberate. It was one thing, she explained to herself, to care about her as sincerely as she knew he did and still not be able to quell his need to be with other women, as pitiful as that need was. It was quite another to undo her just as she was poised for a great personal success. She tried to convince herself on the journey westward that, at least until she confronted him, she might be able to accept that Hammett loved her still but was simply bad Hammett being bad Hammett, boys’ll be boys … or some such bullshit.

  Hadn’t she, after all, once gone to bed with men, a fairly wide variety of them, simply because the experience promised to be interesting and possibly more than that? Perhaps she wasn’t so different from him after all. She told herself this while avoiding the most important difference: she had flirted to the very brink of bedding but actually slept with no one—and certainly not her husband—since the night she met Dashiell Hammett. Sentimental as it may have sounded for the Hollywood of the early thirties, Lillian Hellman had finally chosen to be faithful.

  Throughout the trip west she grudged and ruminated and found herself swinging back and forth emotionally—and strategically too, because she didn’t want to lose him over this. Her fury always triggered the same question: Why should it be different for him? Why did she feel as though this time something had broken within her that could not be repaired? And why for Christ’s sake couldn’t she even breathe right? She wanted to pummel him, scream obscenities at him, beat him down, and then kick him until she herself, exhausted, collapsed.

  He really did not love her.

  No sooner had she allowed herself to think the thought than she conjured up moments of Hammett’s kindness, his encouraging notes about her writing, his surprise gifts—a first edition Père Goriot, a jeweled nightingale hatpin, imported New Orleans gumbo—his affectionate nicknames—Lillushka, Lillia, Lilletta—the tenderness he displayed in bed when he knew she needed attention. He loved her of course. Of course. But, no, clearly their fidelities were not equivalent. If that were so, Lilly concluded it could not be love.

  She’d heard the statement uttered as truth her entire life. Men were just different. Constitutionally. She’d heard it first at the Demopolis dinner table even when the pseudo-aristocratic Marxes and Newhouses and the far more plebeian Hellmans thought she was too young to understand. Even then it was all too clear that the banter about uncles and cousins who visited those “certain ladies” was perceived one way by the gents at the table and very differently by the ladies. It was something men did, a need they had, this one should understand. The women, of course, knew what was their business and what was not their business and opted to look askance, a small price to pay for their privileges and protection. Yes, Lillian understood the subtleties at an early age. She was merely young, she wasn’t stupid.

  New Orleans life in the Hellman sisters’ boardinghouse significantly furthered her sexual education. Her aunts often joked quite openly about who was visiting whom after the lights went out. But that was unnecessary. From her room on the fourth floor, Lillian could hear and discern the treads of different gentlemen calling on Amanda Sweet—this time the name is not fictional—next door in 421. Sometimes three different treads on the same night. Prepubescent Lillian thrilled to the ghostly sounds, the repressed squeals, the moans, the occasional growl, that came through her flocked wall.

  She enjoyed seeing the participants at breakfast the next morning playing their public parts. Invariably Miss Amanda was the first one up, sitting proudly by the bay window, sipping coffee, teasing a croissant, perusing the Picayune, ready with a welcoming “Maw-nin’ ” for all who entered. The gentlemen, some of whom came in with their wives and children, more or less acknowledged their breakfast companion with polite smiles. Really, what else could they do given Amanda’s charming civility? The women were even more guarded, perhaps only because Amanda was so darkly beautiful, perhaps because she was so completely free to be herself—and dangerous to them if only for that reason. Lilly appreciated Amanda’s breakfast room performances.

  The Hellman aunts—neither of whom was ever to marry—were of two minds where Miss Sweet was concerned. Aunt Jenny wanted the woman spoken to and her activities in the house curtailed; well, spoken to at least. Aunt Hannah cherished and protected Amanda as an older sister would, deeply appreciative of a strong, self-made woman who made her way proudly in a man’s world with what she called “admire-able a-plum.” Aunt Hannah, Sophronia, the maid, and through them, Lillian, those three were the only ones in the house who knew Miss Sweet owned a short row of buildings down on Bourbon Street. “Beat the hypocritical bastards at their own game” is how Hannah Hellman put it over some late-night cognac, which Lilly was allowed to sip. Beating the bastards at their own game made perfect sense to Lillian too, even when she was twelve.

  Lillian had been in New York for those two weeks trying to beat the bastards at their own game. Rehearsals finally over, The Children’s Hour was working its way to Broadway for its premiere. Everyone who had read it knew it could be a hit. Word spread quickly, expectations grew—good things—but now Lillian felt more pressed than ever to deliver something special on opening night. She was polishing dialogue, even rewriting some very delicate scenes between the schoolmistresses—indeed, Drumsheugh and the nineteenth century had been left far behind—working with the director, the actors, trying to get the damned thing absolutely perfect. She was working so bleeding hard she honestly didn’t know if she was now making the play better or worse.

  Hammett knew how important this was to her. Damn him. He was the one who told her to give it a month, to bring it from Boston to New Haven and then to Broadwa
y and to make absolutely sure the story always stayed exactly the story she wanted to tell the way she wanted to tell it. His idea from the outset, from the Drumsheugh history to pushing her through half a dozen killing revisions, and now it was to become completely hers, the great success on Broadway, her success. His part, he told her before she left, was long done; this time, the glory was all for her. The bastard. He knew the play was still in New Haven. She’d left her notes with the director. How could he do this to her? Just now, just when … It had to be deliberate.

  Just before she married Arthur Kober, actually in the cab on the way to the temple, her mother Julia said, while facing away from her, with an ironic tone Lilly rarely heard from her, “They say Jewish men are different. Maybe, I’m not so sure. Friday nights, then the Shabbos, maybe it’s only harder for them to find the time to squeeze it in.” They both laughed.

  Sitting alone in the darkness of Pan Am Flight 82, Chicago to Los Angeles, Lilly laughed again at the thought. What was all this crap she was telling herself about men? How did she allow herself to get so off track? This wasn’t about men. Or Jewish men. This was about Hammett. About his willingness—his desire—to hurt her.

  Her stomach ached. That was where she’d always been vulnerable, even as a girl. Now she recalled something Hammett once told her about fistfights. Hammett’s Continental Op, when he gets into it with the bad guys, tries to punch at the body. “That’s where the real damage gets done, and it doesn’t even show,” the Op explains to a naive client. Hammett told Lilly that was true and also you didn’t hurt your hands on bone. Lilly touched her own stomach tenderly. That’s where the damage is and it doesn’t even show. She was very angry again.