by Sam Toperoff
Business was business of course. Only a fool would allow himself to become vulnerable in this Ewbank situation. But look how much he paid for Clare Luce’s The Women, budget already over a million and a half, and the damned thing still creaked like a stage play. The Ewbank girl could make it feel like a movie in a week. Maybe a grateful Lillian Hellman would be good business all around. Before he called Elise, Mayer said aloud, just to feel the pleasure of it, “A mentsh tracht und Gott locht” (A man plans and God laughs). Then he said, “A zeit gezunt” to the ceiling just in case God was listening.
IN HER SWELTERING CAR Lillian immediately rolled down the front windows and pulled off the foolish hat and that damned sweater. She threw her glasses on the front seat and opened her blouse to bra level. She ran her comb through stiff hair. Then she closed her eyes and simply breathed. There was only one review of her performance that mattered.
Before she started the car, Lilly thought back to New Orleans, to the aunts’ rooming house, to the last time she’d heard real Yiddish spoken. It wasn’t used often, usually when Hannah and Jenny didn’t want the help, the Schwartzeh, to know what they were saying, which was precisely why she was drawn to the language.
Her family story wasn’t, after all, so very different from the junkman’s. She imagined Isaac Marx trudging through rural Alabama on his horse cart, if it really was a horse cart—probably he owned an ass—decades before the American Civil War. This lone, itinerant Jew from Chemnitz, wandering the back roads, landing finally in godforsaken Demopolis. It was a mule cart, she recalled now with something close to certainty. Why didn’t she know these important things about her remarkable progenitor? Why in the world hadn’t she taken a greater interest in Isaac? It wasn’t the old man’s fault his children and his grandchildren coveted his wealth, took his power, and then erased him.
She remembered seeing a tintype of a little old man sitting rigidly under a willow tree, dressed in stiff clothes a size too large. Bearded, yes, definitely bearded. And wearing a skullcap. This was Isaac Marx at the end, a boy who came with nothing and amassed a fortune, who came speaking Yiddish and left a family that was ashamed of Yiddish, ashamed to have their “Newhouse” Julia married to an itinerant Yid like Max Hellman.
How the hell did that little man converse with those salt-of-the-earth Bible belters? With numbers, of course. How, almost one hundred years ago now, did he even find his way around Alabama safely? Find places to stay? How much English could he have had? He must have been brilliant. How in the world did he defend himself in that dangerous place? With a gun, of course. My god, he must have been brave. This was a genius of a little man. Lillian had never before given Isaac Marx this much continuous thought or the consideration he had earned and deserved. She spoke to him then: “You must have been charming as hell, too, little Isaac.” Did she look like him? Where was that photograph now?
The great Victorian house in Demopolis was still there. Cousins lived in it now. She should go visit, she really should, with Hammett next time they went back East. While sitting there in her car envisioning the Demopolis house, she allowed in the generation of Newhouses and Marxes she grew up with, remembered anew how hateful they were, how selfish and cold and how, apparently unlike Mayer, at least today, without sentiment.
Lillian pulled her notebook out of her bag. She wrote the description that would become, with few changes, the stage setting for her next play: The living room of the (family name needed) home, in a small town in the Deep South, the spring of 1900. Upstage is a staircase leading to the second floor. Upstage, right, are double doors to the dining room. Upstage, left, an entrance hall with a coatrack and umbrella stand. She stopped and saw it clearly as she wrote. There are large lace-curtained windows on the left wall. The room is lit by a center gas chandelier and painted china oil lamps on the tables. Against the wall is a large piano.
That was indeed how the room was furnished; but it was not what the room was. The room is good-looking, the furniture expensive; but it reflects no particular taste. Everything is of the best and that is all that can be said for it.
Lillian’s decision to write a play using her mother’s family did not come only because of her meeting with Mayer. Hammett’s accumulation of family stories had already got her thinking about those Marx and Newhouse lives. What had activated the process today was her discovery that the family’s rejection of Yiddish Isaac and his language were the first family betrayals that made all subsequent betrayals possible and probably inevitable. Since Mayer had become such a demonstrably patriotic American, such a prominent and public Republican, Lillian doubted there could still be much of a connection back to the immigrant junkman days. Her hope rested on the dramatic insight that not every betrayer was willing to betray that last true part of himself. And by so doing betray the memory of his father and mother and grandparents. The second generation of Marxes did precisely that in the blink of an eye.
That day Lillian had her setting for The Little Foxes. She had her characters—her grandmother Sophie and her two older brothers. She had the situation—an actual business deal she recalled as a child: the acquisition of vast cotton fields partially through marriage and partially through political manipulation and bribery. The construction of the necessary cotton mill and the purchase of mill equipment were done with money borrowed on nonexistent collateral. This is what the Marxes talked about openly in little Lilly’s presence. When her mother, Julia, indicated these were not matters a girl of eight ought to be exposed to, Grandma Sophie said, “Don’t be silly. You’re never too young to learn how the world really works.”
Part of the play’s drama would be the appalled fascination of the audience watching betrayers at work for whom no betrayal was beyond consideration and execution. Multiple betrayals would be like mounting bets in a no-limits poker game. There was continual drama in that. None of the Marxes, to her certain knowledge at least, had ever murdered for personal gain. Lillian decided her drama would explore even that possibility of “how the world really works.”
Hammett’s interest in the Song of Solomon eventually brought her to the verse that gave her a larger idea into which she could grow her drama: Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. For our vines have tender grapes … The process may have started before that moment in the M-G-M parking lot; that day it became the first words put to paper.
When Lillian returned to their Santa Monica house from her meeting with Mayer, she was excited that something good and important had begun. She told Hammett about how suddenly and unexpectedly the echoes of the Yiddish exchange with Mayer called up the theme and much of the structure of a new project. “There I am, sitting, dressed like a yenta, begging the man for a personal favor, and it all comes together for me. It was completely impossible.”
“That’s why it happened.” Hammett wreathed himself in cigar smoke.
“I said impossible.”
“I’ve lived with you long enough to know impossible is your SOP.” She tipped her head. “A military term, dearie: Standard Operating Procedure.” Hammett had been writing a Secret Agent X-9 radio script he thought was going pretty well until Lillian burst in with her “impossible” news. The National Broadcasting Company was interested in bringing X-9 to the airwaves, although Hammett could not for the life of him imagine why.
A few years earlier Hammett had been contacted by Sol Gewirtz of King Features, who told him they’d like Hammett to write a comic strip about spies. King had already hired the artist Alex Gordon, who had also just begun Flash Gordon with great success. Gewirtz told Hammett he only needed the new strip’s concept and story line.
“Only that? Imagine.”
“You’re who we want, Mr. Hammett.”
“Then I must be your first call?”
“Absolutely. We went right for the top.”
“Mr. Gewirtz, I have to tell you the liar signal on my phone is blinking.”
“Mr. Hammett, I can assure you …”
“Let’s do th
is. Call me sometime tomorrow and I’ll have an idea of what I’d like to do. If you like it, maybe we can do business. If we don’t do business, you’ll steal the idea and say it’s your own.”
Sol Gewirtz got it, laughed, and said, “Tomorrow.”
When finally they connected Hammett offered his idea. “Secret Agent X-9. An operative so secret he doesn’t even have a name. Working for an agency so clandestine it doesn’t exist officially. X-9 has the authority to track down and liquidate anyone who wants to do dirt to the United States of America.” This structure, or lack thereof, would make X-9 a truly free agent and allow him to do anything Hammett could possibly imagine for him.
Gewirtz said, “Secret Agent X-9, I like it. Where’d you come up with that?”
“That’s secret too.”
“Sounds good. Daily strip. No weekends to start with. Six panels. Interested?”
“That’s why we’re talking, Sol.”
“We pay by the word.” There was just the suggestion of tentativeness in his voice.
“You are saying, I assume, you usually pay by the word.”
“Actually always.”
“Sol, I’m sorry but my pay-by-the-word days are over. Flat rate or I’ll have to pass.”
“Fifty dollars.”
“A panel?”
“My god, no. A strip. Daily.”
Hammett had calculated a bit. One hundred dollars a day would bring him about twenty-five thousand a year. That became his bottom number. “Let’s say two hundred a strip, Sol.”
“Mr. Hammett, we don’t pay anyone anything like that.”
“Anyone hasn’t writ anything like Spade or the Op. You know what the Hammett name on the strip would mean.”
The silence was charged and extended. “We can offer perhaps seventy-five.”
Since Gewirtz had upped his offer, Hammett knew there was no we at the other end. Gewirtz alone had the authority. “I’m afraid nothing less than one fifty will win my heart.”
“We can perhaps see one hundred. Tops.”
“Sir. Let’s split the difference. One twenty-five and we have a deal.”
“Mr. Hammett, I’m going to have to go over the numbers. See if this can work at our end.”
“Understood, Sol. I do hope it works out. Sounds like something I’d very much enjoy doing.”
And Hammett did enjoy doing it the first year. The strip was story-driven. Hammett mailed Alex Gordon what was essentially a segment of a chapter—the equivalent of a movie scene. That scene became the day’s script. When Hammett knew what would appear in each panel, he gave Gordon the specific dialogue over the phone. He was trying and almost succeeding in recapturing the sheer fun and adventure of the old Black Mask days. Except back then his tongue was not so completely in his cheek as with X-9.
So there, in a sample day’s story, is X-9, looking dapper in a dark suit, casually stretched on a chair in Mrs. Powers’s boudoir. Mrs. Powers, an enemy superspy, is a very dangerous woman indeed, but not nearly as dangerous as Mr. Big, her boss, the operative Secret Agent X-9 is ultimately after. In the second panel Mrs. Powers is perched on his knee; they are on the bed—a position they would never be permitted in films. Hammett has her say, “Listen to me, you are an attractive man—strong and violent … and I’m an attractive strong and violent woman, so why shouldn’t we …?”
Jump to a bemused X-9 in the next panel: “What is this, a proposal of marriage?”
The strip was not a success. Hammett wrote it for two years, during which time most of his movie work was gone. The comic strip required little work or thought because, as was his tendency, Hammett simply repackaged old stories and crime gimmicks for a new commercial market. His original magazine stories had become his novels; the novels became movie scripts; and those same stories—and much of the original dialogue—found their way into the comic strip.
Now that radio had developed a huge audience, it too demanded storytellers, and the program directors found Hammett. One night he told Lillian, “As long as they keep inventing new bottles for old wine, I can keep my name on the label.” It surprised him that no one seemed to notice he was always using the same stories and essential characters, or if they did, no one seemed to mind very much. He knew, of course, that Lillian did.
Lillian asked to read the new X-9 radio script. Hammett said sure, but managed never to give it to her, and she knew never to ask for it again. Like Sol Gewirtz, however, she did want to know how he came up with the name X-9.
He refused to tell her: “Secret agent … secret name.”
“Why X-9? It could have been B-12.”
“That’s a vitamin.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Our secret? Swear?”
“Our secret. Swear.”
“Look in your bra.”
“What do you mean, ‘Look in my bra’? You didn’t call him 32-C.”
“Not the size. The model. There’s a tag on the strap. X-9.”
“Do you sniff my underwear too?”
“Only when I’m very lonely.” They touched glasses.
Reba was two YEARS OLDER than I was, so when she was fourteen, I was not yet twelve. The chronology does not quite capture the difference. She was already a young woman, easily as beautiful as my mother but in a softer, more welcoming way. Boys were always hanging out near the house just for the chance to see her, I believe. They carried her books home from school, they went on walks with her down to the lake. They even followed her to the movies on Saturday afternoon. Robby Burnett appeared to be her favorite; I saw her kiss him more than once in the woods.
Reba was flirtatious in ways I could not then understand. She made herself madly desirable by being impossibly distant and inaccessible. She had a way of turning down boys and still leaving the impression they had an excellent chance at her affection next time around. Reba could smile in such a way that a boy could …
Hammett stopped cold. Everything was off. Voice and tone and intention. Worst of all, it wasn’t Reba at all. He was writing fearfully again, a problem cropping up more often in his “Tales.” At least he recognized the symptoms and knew to stop. He poured himself a drink, not the red wine. The gin. He watched the sunset beyond Santa Monica for a long while with pleasure. The light from the room behind him touched his page and he began again.
Reba was an unusually beautiful girl. A painting. Raphael in a rare sensual moment. I simply knew that back then without knowing what sensual meant or who Raphael was. She was just my older sister so I didn’t bother to think very much about her at all. I didn’t really think much about any of the members of my family as people in their own right, only as Hammetts, which is to say I thought about them only as their lives affected mine. Doesn’t everyone, I wonder, really think of family members in that way? Deep down, I think so.
Rebecca’s beauty was different from Mama’s. Already tall and shapely, she was precisely what Hollywood would eventually search for, a distinctive American beauty with just the slightest touch of something unfathomable. She was the blond girl you saw on the billboards, a combination of purity and promise. The boys who buzzed around her weren’t interested in Barbasol or Lifebuoy; it was the presence of true beauty in our distinctly unbeautiful world that drew them. Of course, I had no idea back then of the aesthetic state of Hopewell, Maryland. I barely noticed that my sister attracted so much attention; to me, she was my sister and not the town’s most beautiful young woman.
I was gangly and introverted, neither sensual nor sexual, a boy who did not yet know the first thing about procreation in any life form higher than a house fly. And because I associated sex with house flies, I considered them both pretty awful.
It is only now that I have come to realize that Reba’s particular beauty triggered more love than lust in the local boys. Though I did notice something different in the way the men looked at her when I happened to go to town with her on market days, and even when she was in church with me and Mama and Richard. On the street their na
rrowed eyes stole glances. There was something sly and mean in the way men went about looking at Reba. I saw in it hunger and desperation. In church, where her beauty darkened a little, men, at least those who weren’t frightened of her aura, treated her like a child; they patted her head, talked about little-girl things while they sweated profusely. Father Boylan, Mama’s “Priest Charming,” never allowed himself to be alone with my sister. He always called her Little Halo Girl.
All the behavior I noticed without noticing falls under the broad category of desire, which is easy for me to discern now. Back then I understood it, because of my own youthful limitations, as popularity. My sister was pretty and popular.
Dumb and sexless as I was, I nevertheless knew that Reba’s attraction was not that of Hopewell’s two well-known “bad girls,” Nola Harrison, who dropped out of school and worked at the truck stop on Route 7, and Audrey Huff, who worked at the diner across the highway. I didn’t care to know what made them so bad. I knew it wasn’t robbery or murder. It was something darker that couldn’t be talked about. Even my forgiving mother thought their souls were already lost.
Then my mother discovered that there were some people in town, led by Mrs. Laxalt and Miz Quintin, who spread rumors about Reba also being one of the bad girls. So one Monday morning she marched us all up to Miz Quintin’s vegetable stall right next to the town fountain, pointed straight at the deformed old lady and announced loudly, “This woman does the Devil’s work!” The entire market quieted and turned to take notice. “Yes, indeed, this woman does the Devil’s work.” I slipped behind the fountain. “She spreads malicious talk about good girls. She is the Devil’s defamer.” Mama stretched out her arms in a public embrace. “We all know in our hearts it is a sin to steal someone’s good name. This girl …,” holding an embarrassed Reba by the shoulders, Mama showed her daughter to the town. “This is a good girl. You know her, a pure child. Do not take her young goodness from her.”