by Sam Toperoff
By then Hammett was living in nearby Katonah, New York, cranking out his “Spades,” drinking, reading, sometimes adding to his collection of “Tales.” Once a week and soon after once a month, Hammett took the train to Pleasantville where Lillian met him at the station in the Town and Country. They embraced like an old married couple separated too long. When she didn’t see him too often, Lillian felt very comfortable in his arms. Hammett felt less incomplete in hers. These conjugal visits suited them well; they continued into early spring, a new planting season, when Cedric Childs was often in Lillian’s bed. Hammett knew this. He bit his lip and turned away.
DURING AN EXTENDED VISIT to Hardscrabble in early ’42 with the newly declared war going very badly, talk in the kitchen turned to finances. He was doing fine, he said. Not much income, less expenses, more time.
Lillian said, “Fewer.”
“What?”
“Not less, fewer.”
“Of course it’s fewer. I chose to say less. Have we gotten so out of touch?’
Lillian said she had plenty of money saved and offered some to Hammett. He scowled. Other than her royalties, she wasn’t making any; and that troubled her a little.
“The Foxes sequel, how’s that going?”
“Stop and go. I worry it’s still too soon.”
“It’s a sequel, for Christ’s sake. You strike while the iron—”
“Look at the fucking world. Doesn’t a play have to mean something?”
“It will mean something. It will mean money coming in.” He dropped onions in a hot buttered pan and produced a sizzle for emphasis.
Lillian said she’d really rather do something about the war, something inspiring. He groaned. She asked him how he thought the war would go. “Fortunately the bastards are overplaying their hand. They can’t handle both Russia and us. Finally, a good thing for our side. Your man—the cynical bastard—would have temporized till the cows came home doing the goose step.” The cynical bastard was FDR.
“His hands were tied.”
“Funny, they weren’t tied when he stepped in and saved the banking system for the very thieves who brought it all down.”
“In order to save the American people.”
“And saving Jews in Germany?”
“What about saving Jews …?” She turned to him, ready to fight.
There was a metallic edge to their voices now.
At the heart of the Roosevelt conflict was their judgment about America itself. For Lillian America always meant hope—struggle, of course, but a winning struggle. At the heart of her hopefulness was the country’s willingness—albeit reluctant—to make Americans out of not-Americans—her own family story of Marxes and Hellmans, the others overcoming all obstacles and becoming the us faster than you might imagine. She had traveled far more of the world than Hammett and knew there was no such comparable place. Most important, materialistic and infantile as Americans were, they weren’t fascists. FDR wouldn’t allow them to become that. For her America was the Americans.
For Hammett, America was its culture, or its significant lack thereof. No one’s fault, he always pointed out, just bad timing and bad luck. There simply hadn’t been time for a nourishing culture to take root. America became a country while Indians were being killed, plantations were slave-driven, and industry was gearing up to outproduce and outprofit the rest of the world. There was no quiet, growing-up time. Too much hubbub; too much moving about; too much polyglot babble. To drop all this confusion into the richest land on the face of the earth and then allow capitalists to be completely in charge was the recipe for disaster—or hilarity. Hammett called America the Greatest Show on Earth. For him FDR was the latest, most seductive ringmaster.
They were both Marxists, but Hammett was a Communist—the real thing. Hellman was not. Hammett knew there was absolutely no chance for a revolution being ignited on these shores. There were no revolutions at the circus.
He picked up the argument by mocking her statement. “ ‘In order to save the American people’? Are you delirious? What I don’t understand is how you have seen through every bullshitter who has come along ever since I met you, but not him. Does your new farmer friend think he’s the savior too?”
“We don’t talk politics. We talk sweet corn. So how will it go now?”
“The Rooshkies will save our asses, but what a gigantic effort it will have to be for everyone. And at what a cost.”
“How long?”
“Five years, maybe six or seven.” But Hammett wasn’t done with Roosevelt: “I’ve got a particular ring of hell reserved just for him. What he’s done to the Japanese in California, I suppose that’s all right with you too.”
“It’s temporary.”
“Tem-por-ary?” He touched her shoulder. Probably he shouldn’t have touched her. “They’ve got them living in the stables at Santa Anita.”
“It’s terrible. It really is. But it’s an emergency … They bombed—”
Of course his anger had been mounting ever since he stepped off the train, ever since he saw her washing her tractor. Hammett swung the back of his hand up from the frying pan into Lillian’s face. His father’s abrupt motion at the Bog Hill. He felt her nose push into her cheek. She gasped. Blood spurted everywhere until Lillian buried her face in a dish towel, which muffled her voice: “You fucking bastard … you spineless prick … you …”
He reached to help her. She smacked his hands away. “Get out … just get out …”
Still he tried to help her.
“Get the fuck out. Go! Go!”
Hammett took his coat off the rack and prepared to walk to the train station without his valise.
Lillian shouted from the open doorway, “Get as far away from me as you can, you … Anywhere …” She was sobbing now and said but did not shout, “Wherever it is, make believe you’re still a writer …”
. 15 .
Americans
THREE WEEKS AFTER HIS ASSAULT on Hellman, Hammett wrote this:
Lillian:
no, not Lilly or My Dear Lillushka or even Lilly Anna, none of these, simply Lillian:
It occurs to me that I have never written you a letter that I actually had the courage to send through the U.S. Postal Service. Our old drinking buddy, James A. Farley, that political hack whose payoff for delivering NY to Delano was to become Head Mailman of the United States of America, is sure to see this gets to you through rain or snow or dark of night …
I’m putting it in writing because that is the only way I can even consider approaching you after what I have done. You certainly didn’t deserve such treatment, but when you’re dealing with Southern white trash, deserve has nothing to do with what you get. I doubt Dr. Freud his own self could help me understand whence such cruelty, such wanton betrayal of friendship.
Jealousy. That is the only thing I have been able to come up with in these weeks of self-examination. But I’ve always been jealous of you—of your marvelous gifts, of the people you allow into your life, and most of all of your supreme sense of who are and are not. (I’ve only affected the latter; on me it runs no deeper than a skin graft.) So, yes, it’s jealousy. It’s always been jealousy. In the past, though, it caused me to get out of town, to get the hell as far away from you as fast as I could. Why, this time, would I want to damage you? (I did not “want” to; nevertheless, I did exactly that. And done with such vehemence. Calling Dr. Freud.)
To never see you again is a fate I deserve, a fitting punishment for my offense. Still, I can’t imagine living out my life—our lives—and never again spending the evening with you in silence, reading by the fireplace, cooking together, or editing the first draft of a play which will eventually alter the course of American drama. To never see you again would be impossible for me. So how and when becomes the issue, and those are entirely up to you. I’ll wait but not forever.
There is also in my hateful behavior a thorny theological problem, which I have considered at length, one as old as the Testaments. If I wer
e a Jew—yet another source of my personal jealousy—I would willingly want you to haul off and smite me with true Old Testament fury: “A nose for a nose” requires that harsh, demanding God of your put-upon people. This would be true Jewish justice.
But I am, alas, not a bearded Jew but just a po’ li’l Catholic boy who has to turn the other cheek to have any chance of attaining the Kingdom of Heaven. We mackerel-snappers have a very specific way of climbing the ladder to Paradise. When we have sinned, as I certainly have, there is a prescribed ritual—isn’t there always?—to help expiate our sinful behavior. You might find it laughable, Dr. Freud would not, because after remorse and contrition, which in my case, dear, are very real and acute, comes confession and then most importantly good deeds. Protestants, you see, can bullshit their way onto the Heaven Train, Catholics have to pay for their ticket …
Where the fuck, Lillian wondered, where was this crazy religious hogwash going? She went back to the top of page two and reread until she caught up.
… I have suffered remorse every day, every hour, since I harmed you. That is step one. This letter is my confession. That’s step two. I’m going to earn my way to forgiveness by enlisting in the U.S. Army immediately and helping the Angels win this war against Old Scratch hisself. Salvation for me is there.
I wish very much to get to Heaven now because I think I know at last what Heaven is. It’s Hollywood in the early thirties. It’s you and me working well and drinking just enough, and making love, just enough, and being smart and funny and prosperous. That’s my Heaven, Lilly.
What I have done to you is unforgivable. How dare I, to you of all people, my better in every way. I should not ever be forgiven. Yet I hope and beg for your forgiveness.
Dash
Even while reading the letter, Lillian did not feel it apologetic enough. When she scanned it afterward, she confirmed the fact that it did not contain the word sorry or the word please. Nowhere did she find the word love, but she already knew it would not be there. He does say he is “apologetic” and “remorseful,” even “contrite,” but those are descriptions once removed from feeling and as such as unsatisfying as the confessional he claimed the letter to be.
That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that this was a crazy letter. Hammett had never been this crazy before.
It was still Hammett all right, a man with holes in his heart so large love blew right through them. Still, a rare man, a man unlike any she’d ever known, a man she had loved for a long time, a man who worked ceaselessly at making himself unlovable. Lillian read the letter again slowly while seated at the kitchen table. She touched the bridge of her nose, which he had not broken but was now almost pleasantly sore. The eyes he had blackened with his blow were still discolored.
The next time through his letter she found the tone, which he acknowledged to be a problem, his problem, to be truly offensive. She said to the pages, “It’s all about you, for Christ’s sake. What fucking gall. Break my nose and it’s your problem.”
Now, there was nothing in his apology that did not offend and worry her further. And that goddamned theology lesson … that patronizing your put-upon people bullshit … the lie about harsh Jewish justice being superior to God’s love … especially when he can’t even come to use the word himself. And then trying to turn me into his all-forgiving confessor … Sister Lillian of the Broken Nose. Nothing but bullshit piled on more bullshit. This wasn’t even the Hammett she loved to hate.
Two things he wrote required her attention. He was correct: she could never, never, not see him again. She did not have to be with him. But of course she must see him again.
Then there was that army nutiness. Can’t believe the melodramatic bastard is trying to impress me by threatening to join the army. Brave knight going off to slay the dragon to prove worthy. He’s what? Forty-seven, forty-eight? Jesus. Delusional, absolutely delusional.
Lillian had not the least inclination to forgive Hammett; even less than least. She did, however, feel obliged to take care of him. Before he hit her she sent Zenia and her son over to Katonah every Saturday morning to do the week’s cooking and cleaning. Since the attack, she kept Zenia back in Pleasantville. Now seemed the time to send them again; it would be exactly the message she intended—I can’t allow you to live in filth, or to starve, but that’s the extent of my concern.
Hammett was surprised and pleased to see Miss Jackson and Gilbert at his door the following Saturday morning. He asked if there was any message from Miss Hellman, a letter, any word. No, there was not.
Zenia looked around the place and said, “Where you been keeping the pigs?” She put her smock on and started throwing things in the trash. She refused to let her son touch any of the whiskey, beer, or gin bottles. In fact, she told Gilbert to open all the windows wide and then to pick up as many rugs as he could and take them outside. The boy somehow managed to get them on a clothesline and began beating them fiercely. For the first and only time since Zenia and her son started coming over, Hammett helped with the cleaning.
When Zenia saw how inept he was, she gave him simple and specific tasks: dust all the light shades; move the couch and chairs to the center of the room; fill two large pots with very hot water; shake the dust rags outside—busywork essentially, but things he couldn’t mess up. Zenia could not imagine how a man could grow so old and not have sense enough to do for himself what her own nine-year-old had already done for years. Good thing she didn’t know what a Marxist was or she’d have disliked him for being a hypocrite instead of only pitying him as an incompetent.
THIS WAS HIS FOURTH VISIT to the enlistment center on Whitehall Street, the day he expected a final decision. Hammett would be forty-eight in three weeks.
When he had been in California it seemed as though a glamour route to military service might be open to him. The War Department deemed Hollywood propaganda so essential to the war effort that many of the people who made movies were offered military commissions. The heads of all the major studios received significant army commissions. Warner and Mayer became U.S. Army colonels and were issued braided uniforms with epaulets and an honorary ribbon or two. Studio tailors then made the fit stylish. They were assigned to help the war effort in any way they could, which meant making some of the political movies Lillian had been asking them to make for years. Most of the time they remained in civilian garb, but for public events, which meant whenever photographers were present, they were U.S. Army colonels.
Hammett only got to see L.B. in uniform once, in a Movietone newsreel announcing the mobilization of the Hollywood film industry. There he was looking spiffy in his costume amidst a phalanx of Hollywood stars in their uniforms—Jimmy Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Wayne Morris—actual patriots who had signed up for a real war. Hammett smiled at the sight and the thought that the junkman from Minsk had finally become the American of his dreams, Lieutenant Colonel Louis B. Mayer.
The army needed training and morale films of its own, and lots of them. It recruited and commissioned film directors, most notably Frank Capra, Howard Hawkes, George Stevens, and Lillian’s good friend William Wyler, among many others. Hammett contacted each of them, Wyler repeatedly, asking how he could be hired on. They all encouraged him to wait a bit and then wait just a bit more. While waiting he realized he’d prefer to lead the life of an enlisted man, rather do some actual fighting than supply the motivation for it. As preposterous as the idea was, he took himself down to the Whitehall Street recruitment station in New York and attempted to sign up.
It was unheard of, yes, but Hammett discovered that if the examining doctor attested that the candidate was in excellent health and would be a material asset to the service so named, it was possible for such a man to be accepted. Since he was much too old to be drafted, Hammett’s task was to convince that doctor, in this case Major Marvin Gold, he was precisely such a rare specimen. A man with previous military training from the First World War who had unique communication skills the U.S. Ar
my Signal Corps required. A selling job was necessary.
Major Gold met Hammett on his first visit. After filling out a very long enlistment form, Hammett waited on a bench near a large window overlooking Bowling Green. The Statue of Liberty was visible in the gloom of the harbor, faintly green and indistinct; it was not her best day. Ships’ foghorns sounded unhappily. Hammett finished three crosswords while he waited for the interview. He jotted down an idea for a Spade radio script on the margin of his newspaper:
Army general in charge of secret weapon research found dead in his study. Top Secret papers missing—anything but a bombsight! Assumption that enemy agents are responsible. General’s daughter—beautiful redhead, why not! Sheila something—comes to Spade because govt investigation is focused on finding the papers not murderer of father … Can’t take case. Got no authority; government deal. They can break me if they choose. Sheila: But he was killed at home. Palo Alto. Couldn’t you please take a look? Spade’s questions—How? When? Where? She begs … great legs. Okay, he’ll take a look. Stepmother not bad either, not much older than Sheila. An adjutant, Colonel Webb, a Korean gardener, general’s wounded brother in a wheelchair … Need one more suspect? … trouble with army investigators.
Hammett had been waiting for an hour and a half. No one had called his name. No one had come to talk to him. This was the army he remembered. Hammett realized at this point that he could actually begin to write the complete episode rather than merely sketch it. He approached the grizzled master sergeant at the desk and asked for a piece of typing paper. The sergeant, no spring chicken himself, said, “Help yourself, Gramps.”