A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  After Kober returned to the States, Lillian took a job as a publicity agent in Rochester, New York. She left after four months to accompany Kober to Hollywood, where he had received a munificent job offer as a screenwriter. In Hollywood, Kober, desperate to find Lillian something to do, arranged for her to work as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sometime in this period, Lillian stopped using birth control, became pregnant, and had an early miscarriage. She had returned to New York from the West Coast and was staying in the St. Moritz hotel when she discovered the loss. “I cried like hell for almost two solid hours,” she wrote to Arthur. In a rare moment of visible vulnerability, she added, “Please don’t feel bad—we can try again … Write me that you don’t mind very much and cheer me up. It alters no promises I made you and I hope you understand that—if you don’t and are still entertaining the idea of a divorce, now is your time to get it on the record. But please console me a little—I’m ashamed really—I always thought I was a super-creator of babies … Please write more often and please love me. I miss you an awful lot.”15 By then the marriage was all but over. Returning to Hollywood, Lillian Hellman Kober met Dashiell Samuel Hammett, with whom she was to begin a legendary thirty-year relationship.

  By the standards of the literati in the late twenties and early thirties, Hellman’s marriage to Kober was unorthodox but not terribly unusual. Yet it did not entirely free her from the constraints of parental values. Even after she separated from Kober and returned to New York without a partner, she took care that her rebellious lifestyle did not offend her mother’s sensibilities. On the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, she wrote to Kober to complain that “my movements—particularly in the matter of visiting unmarried gentleman [sic]—have all to be accounted for to Mama, so that I am never quite free to move around the way I might want to.”16 If she feared parental disapproval, it did not stop her from behaving as she wished. “I have to account to mama for the details of my life,” she wrote to Kober. “I guess someday she’s going to find out I am not a virgin, and that’s bound to be the end of our beautiful friendship.”17 Her generation, as she repeatedly proclaimed, “did not often deal with the idea of love …” When her aunts Jenny and Hannah challenged her for being part of a generation that “goes about naked all the time,” she made it clear that her value system and theirs differed. “We sleep with everybody,” she admitted, “and drink and dope all night and don’t have your fine feelings.” But, she added, recalling her aunts’ ostracism of Bethe, her standards “did not involve spitting on people because they live with lowdown Wops and get into trouble.”18 Living in Hollywood surely legitimized these feelings. In Hollywood, where physical beauty reigned, Hellman had honed her sensual sense of self. She had also found an environment that encouraged sexual adventurousness.

  Dashiell Hammett not only gave Lillian the space to develop her sexual persona but, in his sometimes brutal way, insisted on it. Married when he met her to a wife with whom he did not live but to whom he continued to remain loyal, the father of two small daughters, he had constructed a life that included sex with whatever woman was within arm’s reach. In addition to being an attractive man in his late thirties, tall and thin, he was then a minor celebrity, the author of a series of bestselling detective stories that had been sold to the movies. Money was no problem: Hammett squandered it on expensive hotels and gifts; he drank excessively, gambled at the race track and at cards, and engaged in endless, meaningless, sometimes costly sexual encounters.

  Hellman was not quite twenty-six when she met Hammett, and she struggled to reshape her life. She fled the West Coast, running from two men, both in love with her and eager for her full attention. One was a sweet and loving husband, a talented but unexciting friend. The other was a famous writer of detective novels, a flamboyant alcoholic, profligate around women and money and married to someone else. While she tried to sort out what she would do, she settled herself into the St. Moritz—a residential hotel—and wrote profuse letters to both of them. She also produced short stories for the New Yorker, which routinely rejected them. Hammett visited her in New York for a couple of weeks in the late spring and then returned to Hollywood. Conflicted and lonely, she sought solace in the company of old friends and sometime lovers, Jed Harris and Louis Kronenberger among them. Occasionally she would hole up with Kronenberger for a night or a weekend. She partied with Ira and Lee Gershwin, Chester Erskine, and Herman and Rose Shumlin when they were on the East Coast. By the fall, she had made her decision; she agreed to divorce Kober and then went, nervously, to New Orleans to tell her aunts about her divorce and her relationship with Hammett. There is no record of how she told her parents, who were still living on West 95th Street.

  He was a minor celebrity. Hammett in the late 1930s. (Photofest)

  1935: Back and forth to the coast she went. (Photofest)

  Back and forth to the coast she went, each time leaving after an angry tiff. Occasionally Hammett came east, taking separate quarters in one residential hotel or another. Finally, late in 1932, Hammett moved to New York, living at first in the Hotel Pierre (one of New York’s most expensive hotels) and then with Lillian in a three-room suite at the Sutton Club Hotel.

  The Sutton, managed by their friend the writer Nathanael “Pep” West, housed a community of writers that included James T. Farrell and Edmund Wilson. There, they lived a life of cheerful dissipation, working, drinking, and partying. Together Hellman and Hammett developed a series of friendships that were filled with mischief and fun. Lillian probably had a short liaison with Pep West, and she grew fond of his sister Laura Perelman and her husband Sid (S. J.) Perelman. According to Edmund Wilson, Lillian “used to help West steam open the letters of the guests by means of a kettle which he kept in his rooms.”19 Hammett had a week-long fling with Laura. Subsidized by his publisher, Knopf, he finished what was to be his last novel, The Thin Man, which he dedicated to Lillian. She continued to write short stories that continued to be rejected. In the winter of 1933–34, she and Hammett moved together into a small apartment in the Florida Keys, and together they completed her first produced play: The Children’s Hour.

  Their behavior flew in the face of the Depression-produced economic misery all around. Amid unemployment and widespread suffering, a growing national concern with social responsibility and traditional family life had replaced the individualism of the twenties. Opposition rose to wage work for women, particularly for women with male partners to support them. Hellman’s image of independent womanhood seemed callow in the face of such attitudes. But the depression that devastated the economic fortunes of many and threw a quarter of the work force out of jobs had a more salutary effect on Lillian. As she became a well-known playwright and developed her talents as a skilled movie scriptwriter, she benefited from a Hollywood industry that flourished by creating fantasies for a nation in despair. The laurels—and the income—Hellman earned in this decade enabled a celebrity lifestyle and encouraged her to continue to flout conventional family relationships.

  When Lillian’s mother died in 1935, Lillian felt free to follow Hammett’s style more fully. The masculine pose she adopted then included an outspoken and brash persona, complete with a foul vocabulary, which she used indiscriminately. Like Hammett (and such other 1930s figures as Hemingway and Faulkner), she drank, smoked, and partied nonstop. She was, wrote one observer, a “tough broad … the kind of girl who can take the tops off bottles with her teeth.”20 Not infrequently she indulged her passion for gambling and managed to make money playing both poker and chemin de fer. Nor did she make a secret of her sexual liaisons: she approached men she desired aggressively and slept with them at will. Quickly she earned a reputation as a “she-Hammett.” But she wanted to be manly in another way, too, by exhibiting qualities of courage and forcefulness, by refusing to back down from a fight. These qualities contributed to her reputation as a stubborn woman, a difficult woman, a fighter.

  To be sure, the tough outer shell hid a core of self-doubt that remained close
to the surface. As a child, she believed she was not pretty. Later in her life, when she was asked to draw a self-portrait, she drew a stick-figure that she labeled “What I wanted to look like and don’t.” The drawing presented a figure that Lillian identified as having “blond curls, natural” and “deep blue eyes, natural.”21 She was always, she said, “jealous of great beauties.”22 The absence of conventional good looks, the prominent nose and irregular features, would shape Hellman’s persona in many ways. She was a woman who needed men yet could not wear the pale orange tulle she thought would attract them. So she adapted. From early on she dyed her mousy brown hair a strawberry blonde that sometimes took on a reddish tinge. She showed off appealing qualities like her slim ankles and expressive eyes. She exhibited pride in her slender and sensuous body, which she dressed with an exquisite sense of style. She cultivated a flirtatious charm reminiscent of her mother’s South.

  Interviewers routinely found themselves confounded by the contrast between the “tough broad” of record and the woman who appeared before them. “It was teatime,” wrote one, “and Miss Hellman was sipping a pale sherry. She wore a gray dress fastened up the front with a zipper but open at the throat, with a black silk scarf crisscrossed in front like a soldier’s and secured with a crystal clasp. She had a slender gold wrist watch and black pumps.”23 Such responses were routine. Hellman’s warmth and affability in person belied the public image and the masculine writing. “She is genuinely feminine to a degree that borders engagingly on the wacky,” wrote Margaret Chase Harriman in a New Yorker profile.24 This appraisal remained consistent throughout Hellman’s lifetime. “In her own drawing room,” one interviewer commented, “Miss Hellman, less a woman playwright than a woman and a playwright was gentle, thoughtful, courteous, her manner affable … The ferocity she so relentlessly anatomizes in the theater … nowhere in evidence.”25 A decade later, a British reporter affirmed the judgment, declaring that “although she has the kind of forthrightness and directness usually called masculine” she was in fact extremely feminine.”26

  1938: She cultivated a flirtatious charm. (Photofest)

  Still, Hellman was consumed with doubt about her own lovability, full of fear of both success and failure, and prone to feeling lonely and isolated even when she was surrounded by people. She ran away when she anticipated a negative response to one of her plays or when she saw successful love on the horizon. Furiously jealous of Hammett’s dalliances and angry with him for his continuing attractions to women of all sorts, she responded, characteristically, by soliciting affection and sex from other men, as well as with displays of bad temper and bouts of anger that she readily acknowledged but could not control. When Hammett hit bottom, she invariably came to his rescue, grudgingly forgiving him his faults and remaining attached to him nonetheless. Fearful of loneliness, she arranged to have company and then complained that she was with “all people I deeply like but people I wanted to run from.”27 After a while, she began to recognize her behavior as what she later called “an old pattern.”28 Fearing abandonment, she courted rejection; fearing loneliness, she surrounded herself with people she then wished away.

  But Hammett was often a generous partner, and there were good weeks and months. During their frequent separations, Hammett wrote Lillian loving letters, begged her to join him, and sometimes rearranged his life so he could be with her. But he did not stop sleeping with other women. The stories about Lillian’s reaction to this behavior are legendary. Hellman once traveled cross-country to be with him, only to find him drunk and in bed with a prostitute. In a rage, she smashed up his furniture and returned immediately to New York. There were times when his friends Albert and Frances Hackett would call from the West Coast, pleading with her to come and rescue him from a hotel in which he was trapped because he could not pay the bill.

  Hellman, in turn, engaged in a series of sexual relationships, each of them more meaningful than Hammett’s one-night stands but none as powerful as her pull toward him. In the half dozen years after she met Hammett, she remained involved with Kober, from whom she never separated emotionally. Nor, apparently did Arthur seek such a separation. Long after their divorce, she continued to express concern for his well-being. “Please, please do not go into the swimming pool,” she begged him when she feared infection from crippling polio disease. She concluded her plea with an admonition to “pay attention to mama and take care of yourself.”29 Once, she advised him to change his living quarters. “I do think you would be more comfortable with a beach house, a servant and someone to look after the dogs,” she wrote. In the same letter, she urged him to suspend decisions about what he wanted to do after his current contract ended. She signed this letter, “You got Mother Lillian behind you if that means anything.”30 In 1934, Kober sent Lillian a new typewriter and she responded with delight: “It’s a grand present and you don’t know how much I needed it … you’re a lovely, generous man. You always send me such fine presents and I’m so grateful. Maybe next year I can give you something very good too. It’s about time. Maybe I can earn some money with this new one … It was a wonderful gift to me and I love you very much.”31

  Through the 1930s, during the first decade with Hammett, Hellman maintained her on-and-off-again relationships with several friends and former lovers. She saw much of fellow playwright Louis Kronenberger. She had an ongoing affair with up-and-coming producer-director Jed Harris. She maintained a decade-long intermittent sexual relationship with Herman Shumlin, who produced three of her plays. She probably got involved with Otto Katz, a communist double agent, when she went to Spain in 1937. Her relationships with these men, and with others, began as (or included) sexual liaisons and grew into committed work-related friendships. In 1936, she fell passionately in love with Ralph Ingersoll, who was then editor in chief of Fortune magazine. She met Ingersoll when they were both stranded by bad weather in a New Mexico airport lounge. The two fell quickly into an intense romance that ultimately foundered on Ingersoll’s unfulfilled promises to leave his wife. Still, the liaison seeded a three-way friendship with Hammett and inspired the creation of PM magazine. There were more, many more, sexual encounters, but these are the most important ones.

  Hammett disliked these involvements, but never, according to Lillian, expressed jealousy or did anything to resist them. He called them “juggling oranges” and distinguished them from his own behavior, which he characterized as simply having fun. Eventually the Hammett-Hellman relationship became asexual. As Lillian told the story, this was a result of Hammett’s addiction to drink. One summer evening, probably in 1941, she rejected his drunken advances, and he vowed never to sleep with her again. According to Lillian, he never again did so.32 There are, of course, other possible explanations for Dash’s withdrawal from a sexual relationship with Lillian. She had just then begun a relationship with New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway. Perhaps Dash was following through on his threat to leave her if she continued to juggle oranges, or perhaps she had revealed a weakness—her comment demonstrated that she was not as tough as he wanted her to be. Lillian never quite got over the humiliation of the rejection. She spoke about it when she was in her seventies to Hammett’s biographer, Diane Johnson, who concluded that she remained attached to him even after his death because she never stopped struggling to “possess and command at last the elusive ghost of a man about whom she was insecure in life.”33

  But Hellman had, by all accounts, a far more complicated relationship with men. In the eyes of most observers, she seemed genuinely to love being around them and to cherish an enormous affection, especially for Dash. A strong-willed and highly sexual woman, not unlike such figures as Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn, she needed men in her life.34 The actress Zoe Caldwell, who played Lillian onstage and studied her closely, thought Hellman must have adored men, that she loved to be around them and enjoyed making love with them.35 Caldwell attributes Hellman’s special appreciation of men to an absence of mothering that came from Julia’s too-early rejection of her
child. But vanity contributed to Hellman’s persistent insecurity as well: she needed constant reassurance about her desirability and her attractiveness. Attached to a man around whom she was often insecure, she exhibited in public all the outward qualities of strength demanded of the free woman of the interwar decades. In private, she allowed her feminine self to slip out. The cost of women’s freedom, as literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, is “emotional impoverishment and restriction.”36

  We catch a glimpse of how closely Lillian guarded her feelings around Hammett when she tells us that occasionally she and Hammett talked of marriage, most seriously when Hellman became pregnant for the third time in 1937. On his own, Hammett urged his wife, Josie, to file for a Mexican divorce, which was granted on August 31, 1937. By the time he wrote Lillian the news a week later, Lillian had already had an abortion. This was the third time she had lost a child, and yet she did not comment. The moment passed and marriage did not come up again.37 “I don’t know why we didn’t marry,” Hellman told an interviewer some years later. “We thought of it but then after a while it became silly even to discuss it.”38 Somewhat later, in 1942, Lillian visited Arthur and Maggie Kober’s newborn baby. She was caught staring at it for a long while with tears in her eyes. She readily agreed to be godmother.

  Despite the gloom cast by the continuing Depression and an impending war, the period from the late thirties through the forties must have been among the most gratifying of Lillian’s life. In May 1939, with money earned from The Little Foxes, she indulged in the then decidedly male prerogative of purchasing a home of her own. The house, which she called Hardscrabble Farm, and its 130 acres of woods and meadows were located in Pleasantville, New York, an hour or so north of the city. The property contained a large restored colonial house with four and a half baths, five fireplaces, and a four-car garage.