A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  After 1952, while Hammett occupied the cottage in Katonah, he briefly maintained his apartment on 10th Street. Hellman apparently visited him in Katonah “often, not so very often, but often,” as Helen Rosen, the cottage’s owner, put it; and he spent infrequent weekends in New York with her.69 In the context of the decade, the absence of a shared residence struck many as odd. After Dash became ill in the mid-fifties, he no longer had the resources to live alone. Reluctantly he moved into her New York City townhouse. But for all that she provided for him until he died in January 1961, she never felt confident in his affection, never secure in his love for her. “With other people there was warmth and need and maybe even the last weeks a sexual need,” she wrote in her diary two months after he died, “but not with me.”70 Dash didn’t want to be in her house, didn’t want to be dependent, but had little choice. Without him, she conducted an active social life, traveling at whim and dining out frequently. When she entertained at home he often disappeared; when she went out it was generally to see her friends alone. Her loneliness was certainly exacerbated by the death of Gregory Zilboorg just a year and a half before Dash died.

  It took Hellman a while after Hammett died to come to terms with what their relationship had been. With uncharacteristic honesty, she confided to her diary, “sometimes, now, I think he wanted to be good friends, but more often I know that he didn’t.”71 When she wasn’t angry with Hammett, she blamed herself. “I did my best,” she divulged to the diary, “and I know now and am sad about it, that it wasn’t a very good best.” Hellman buried her sorrow and her loneliness in her memories of Dash, turning him, in death, into the romantic and idealized soul that the living Hammett was not.72 The memory of Hammett, and the stories she made up about him, became a crutch as she entered into her late fifties and sixties—a reminder of joy and physical vitality, of sensuality and happiness. She kept photographs of him everywhere, managed his estate and his image, recalled anecdotes about him, and quoted remarks he might have made.

  Self-reliant now, and without Dash as an emotional backup, she resituated herself both with relation to the men she loved and in her social relationships. She met and fell for Arthur Cowan, a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, in the late 1950s and remained close to him until he died in 1964. Cowan’s wealth, not his politics, created the glue that drew them together; her cynicism and anger about old political allies still got in the way of re-creating some of her old relationships. And though she denies wanting to marry him, her denials have a bit of the quality of protesting too much. She was willing to settle, she tells us in Pentimento, for the continuing, dependable, and generous male companionship he offered along with financial and legal counsel when she needed it. And yet when Cowan became involved with another woman, she suspected he would renege on his promise to take care of her forever. After his sudden death, Lillian insisted that he must have left something for her and set her lawyers to hunting for the will. It could not be found, and Hellman, feeling cheated and abandoned, was convinced that the family had destroyed it.

  Her dependence on another friend, Blair Clark, was more emotional than financial. Clark was an executive at CBS and had been the college friend of Robert Lowell, who with his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, was then Lillian’s frequent companion. He became close to Lillian shortly after Dash died.73 There is something of pathos in this relationship. Blair Clark befriended Lillian in 1962 with notes and phone calls and expensive dinners. Lillian believed and hoped that their friendship would develop into an ongoing intimacy and perhaps something closer. Clark claimed to have been unaware of Hellman’s sexual attraction toward him and to have feared her neediness. Perhaps we must believe him, for Hellman’s diaries of the period are filled with longing for him that include waiting for his calls, noting his silences, commenting on whether she called him. They record when they went out to dinner together, when he visited, how long he stayed, and whether the visit was good or not. Through the lines appears a kind of lovesick longing that suggests the wish for, if not the reality of, a more permanent relationship. To stir Clark’s feelings and assuage her own desires, Hellman created an elaborate and fantastic fable about a fictional Yugoslav diplomat with whom she claimed to be engaged in a long-running affair. She had, she said, had a son with this man, and then she spun a complicated tale about the boy’s youth and education, his career, his marriage, and his children.

  The tale, clearly made of whole cloth, prefigures some of the later stories Hellman would tell to capture the self that she wanted to be. This style—critic Richard Locke calls it “inventing all the time”—endeared her to many people. It was, says Locke, “part of who she was”; Locke’s partner, Wendy Nicholson, adds that it was “part of her gift.” Friendship, in Locke’s view, “involved play, a fantasy self-presentation, a different kind of exaggeration, a good story.”74 Certainly this seemed to be the case with Blair Clark. He remained fond of Lillian and affectionate toward her into the 1970s and after he remarried. Until she died, he took her out for dinner several times a year, acted as confidant when she needed a shoulder, and played a major role in the influential Committee for Public Justice that she founded in 1970. But, he claimed after she died, “we were never lovers, which may come as a surprise to some and which was surely a disappointment, and more, to her.”75

  The relationship suggests Lillian’s continuing capacity to create emotional intimacy even as her physical attractiveness waned. As she moved into her sixties, she became increasingly close to young men who were attracted by the force of her personality and tempted into her orbit by the wacky sense of humor, the charming directness, and the confrontational stance. “Playfulness,” as Blair Clark put it, “was very much part of her nature.”76 And she loved to pick an argument, to fight. Her continuing zest and energy compensated for the now leathery skin and the wrinkled, smoke-scarred face. In person, remembers Wendy Nicholson, “she had this incredible electrical charge about her … She really had a tremendous sort of personal force.”77 Many men, particularly younger men, found her both attractive and seductive. Her sometime lover and close friend Peter Feibleman, twenty-five years younger than she, called her the sexiest woman he had ever known.78

  And yet her loneliness and her desire for male companionship sometimes led her down hurtful paths. Stanley Hart claims to have been tempted into Hellman’s sexual service in the mid-sixties. Hart, then an editor at Little, Brown who had encountered Lillian several times when they were both on Martha’s Vineyard, proposed to his boss Arthur Thornhill that she be invited to write a memoir. Hart claims that he learned from Lillian’s agent (then Robby Lantz) that the deal would carry a proviso. “If I slept with Lillian Hellman,” concluded the then-thirty-six-year-old Hart after discussions with Hellman’s agent, “I could get her signature on a contract.”79 Hart was not averse to the exchange. She was, after all, a star. Sleeping with her, he frankly admits, “offered the promise of a friendship that I thought would elevate me into an echelon in which writers, and artists and actors and the very rich tended to socialize.”80 Lillian, in his memory, was “game, sexy and flirtatious.” She was also robust and energetic. Hart recounts how he made a date with Lillian and ended up in bed with her, beginning a reluctant romance that lasted for the better part of two years until he had her signature on the contract and she began to treat him with the disdain she reserved for those who served her. Then, in his eyes, she turned into an irritable, “self-centered, aging and ungainly” woman into whose “cruel, contentious” face he could no longer look.81 Hart published the story thirty years later and fifteen years after Lillian’s death. If it is true, it suggests some sense of Hellman’s vulnerability to the existential loneliness from which she suffered and provides a clue to her unrequited need for physical affection.

  Lillian generally satisfied her needs for companionship in an exciting social life in which she became involved after Dash’s death in early 1961. At Harvard, where she taught in the spring of 1961, she met Richard Poirier, then a young lecturer who woul
d become a close friend and one of her literary executors. She also got to know Harvard instructor and playwright William Alfred. There too she met Martin Peretz, who would become editor of the New Republic, and Fred Gardner, the young student who introduced her to the world of the student left. To these young men and to many others who recalled her defiance toward the House Committee on Un-American Activities, she was still a heroine. “She was thought of as gutsy, brilliant, witty, noble, socially desirable, and sexually liberated,” Stanley Hart tells us.82 Her new contacts melded with her New York life to provide a place on the edges of the intellectual world of the sixties. She did not belong in the quasi-political group that became known as the New York intellectuals or in the literary circle that surrounded the New York Review of Books, but many of its members became her friends. They included Philip Rahv of Partisan Review, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Barbara and Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. To this mix, and to her dinners, she added many others, among them conservative columnist Joseph Alsop, Norman Podhoretz (who became editor of Commentary in 1960), and McGeorge Bundy.

  Celebrity provided access to broader and broader circles and simultaneously affirmed her status, a position she assiduously cultivated. Putting politics into the backseat, she constructed relationships with the rich and the powerful. She dined at the Princeton Club with Edmund Wilson and partied with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jackie Kennedy, Richard Goodwin, and Norman Mailer. She was recognized and offered a table at the most elegant restaurants; she attended and held court at the season’s fashionable parties. An avid hostess, Hellman became, in Edmund Wilson’s choice phrase, the Queen of the Cocktail Belt.83 “No writer I had ever met before … or would ever meet again,” recalled Norman Podhoretz of his younger days, “lived in as opulent a style as she did.” When he went to one of her lavish dinner parties, he met “famous theatrical personalities—producers, directors, actors, and actresses—with the women all richly begowned and bejeweled and the men radiating the special air of self-assurance that seems always to accompany the making of a lot of money.”84 The numbers of these friendships, and the amount of time Hellman invested in them, suggests the plausibility of John Hersey’s claim that he knew “no living human being whom so many people consider to be their one best friend.”85

  Others recalled Hellman’s dinners for their warmth and energy: “She wanted everybody to be having a good time,” remembers Peter Feibleman, so she moved people around to make sure that they were not bored.86 Her dinners consisted of a mix of carefully selected people. “She knew who to ask, who to seat them next to. It was like choreographing.”87 At the dinners she was, in one attendee’s words, “very attentive, very generous. The food was always wonderful.”88 Adds Morris Dickstein, “Whether she was throwing a small dinner party or a large party, she treated it like a kind of art. The amount of energy that went into the seating, the meal, the cooking, the mix of people was the kind of effort that a really good writer would expend on a sentence. She worked to get it exactly right.”89 Lillian did not, at these events, control her tongue. She could disrupt her own parties and those of others by fighting with her guests, verbally slugging at them for their likes and dislikes. And yet she had a quick sense of humor and a raucous laugh that concluded a debate and put everyone at ease. Lillian’s parties were so wonderful and such fun that her friends coveted invitations to them. The writer Shirley Hazzard wrote to her friend William Abrahams of one dinner party she knew Hellman was planning: “If we are excluded we will just come round and moan beneath the windows.”90

  After the harrowing and unsettling fifties, in which she had been marginal in many worlds, the renewed celebrity demonstrated Hellman’s importance. She enjoyed the attention thoroughly. “Whenever Lillian would walk into one of those New York parties where there were bankers and pretty girls and famous people there,” remembers Peter Feibleman, “Lillian would walk in and the other ladies would all kind of disappear into the woodwork.” Nor was Hellman above broadcasting her victories. She told all and sundry that “Lord” Sidney Bernstein invited her to dinner in London. And, when Britain’s Lord Snowdon asked if he could take her photograph, she gloried in teasing her agent about it, insisting that he now display the respect properly due her.91 Hellman might have started the decade of the sixties as a star chaser, but by its end she had become a star worthy of chasing.

  The social nature of many of Hellman’s contacts—often efforts to take advantage of celebrity—should not obscure the deep and long-lasting friendships she developed. These drew on her nurturing qualities. On the Vineyard, where she continued to spend her summers and soon built herself a smaller house to replace the large one she had occupied with Hammett, she became close to Jerome Wiesner (later to become president of MIT), his wife, Peggy, and to the poet Robert Lowell (known to his friends as Cal), though not to his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She fished with John Hersey almost daily and sometimes with William Styron too. She gossiped with screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, picnicked with John and Sue Marquand, quarreled with Robert Brustein, played Scrabble with Rose Styron, and planned dinners and parties with Barbara Hersey. She met Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, in the early fifties. That friendship survived an unsuccessful collaboration on the operetta Candide (produced in 1955) to become a robust, complicated, and loving association. Lillian addressed him as “Lennie Pie”; he called her Dear Lillllly or Dear Lilliana. In the seventies, Mike and Annabel Nichols often joined a Vineyard crowd that not only summered together but occasionally spent several winter weeks on an island in the Bahamas. Annabel Nichols would become a loving and attentive companion as Hellman grew older and more irascible.

  These were Lillian’s friends. Irritating, demanding, and bad-tempered as she often was with them, stubborn and willful as she might be, they took her flaws in stride and reveled in the warmth she exuded and the practical jokes and high jinks in which she excelled. To her Vineyard friends, she was simply part of the community: they supported her and listened to endless complaints even as she enlivened their days with her wit and inventiveness. Stories abounded about her swimming nude off her boat or at the Vineyard beach. Brooke Allen, whose family summered in that community, recalls her penchant for practical jokes. Lillian once forged a letter to Bill Styron, signing it with the name of an attractive woman he had long wished to meet. Styron read the letter, imagined that it expressed genuine admiration, and immediately set out to find the supposed correspondent. The joke backfired when Styron briefly took up with the young woman. Hellman’s New York friends cherished the wicked sense of humor that led her to let fly at friends and foes alike and then slyly apologize for what she called “the snake in my mouth.”92

  It wasn’t easy to be Lillian’s friend as she grew older. Her forceful and direct style, her penchant for saying what was on her mind without censorship, her quick temper and occasional tantrums, offended many. When these qualities were not relieved by humor and warmth, they could be destructive. This happened more and more after 1974, when, while in Europe, she apparently suffered the first of a series of strokes. Peter Feibleman tells us that the strokes increased her level of irrational anger astronomically and often led her into erratic emotional behavior. If she quarreled with her Park Avenue neighbor over what kind of table should go under a vase in their shared hallway, the two never spoke again. If she lost a watch on the beach in Gay Head, she complained that the beach was insufficiently patrolled. Her capacity to make both men and women, but especially women, appear invisible was legendary. Anne Navasky tells a story about how, having sat next to her all night at a dinner, she offered Lillian a ride home. Lillian accepted, and Anne went out to get the car. Escorted out of the house by Richard de Combray and Victor Navasky, Lillian noted the woman at the wheel and turned to Navasky to compliment him for having hired a female chauffeur.93

  Even to those she loved, before and especially after the strokes, she could be, and often was, overbearing, arrogant, and just plain rude. She demanded much in terms of
responsiveness and loyalty, and she was thin-skinned and sensitive to slights. But she was also remarkably giving, willing to focus on her companions and to be “interested in your life and what you were.”94 Not surprisingly, her friendships were volatile, marked by arguments that led to days and weeks of anger before reconciliation. She could pick an argument over a recipe, as she did with Bill Styron, and the two stubborn individuals would part company for weeks. If she disliked a question at someone else’s dinner table or perceived an insult, she might pick up her handbag and leave. Or she could silence a conversation by shouting across a table to tell someone that he was wrong about something she had barely overheard.95 Her friends tolerated or accepted these behaviors, in return for the genuine affection that Lillian so often displayed.

  Her sexual energy directed toward men, Hellman often simply ignored the women in their presence. She often referred to wives as “Madam” as if she could not bother to remember their names. Insecure about her own looks and vain of her own appearance, she abhorred vanity in other women. She referred to those she disliked as “Mrs. Gigglewitz” out of aversion for their conceit, their mindlessness, or their careless display of wealth. John Hersey wrote, after her death, “she had a habit of liking husbands and very expressively not liking wives.”96 True, she made no special effort to appeal to the wives of men she cared about, sometimes maintaining strong relationships with men despite, not because of, their wives. Elizabeth Hardwick falls into that category. Lillian was extremely close to Hardwick’s husband, Robert Lowell, in the late fifties and early sixties but maintained a coolly civil social relationship with Lizzie, as she was called. But Lizzie, who reciprocated the cool feelings, turned her back on Lillian once the marriage was over and publicly disparaged her and her work.97 Still, her close woman friends included the wives of William Wyler, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur, Jerome Wiesner, and Arthur Kober, as well as those of V. S. Pritchett, John Hersey, and Mike Nichols. And many of the friends she made in the sixties and seventies, including Anne Peretz, Lore Dickstein, and Wendy Nicholson, testify to the attention she paid them, the notes of appreciation she wrote, and the small gifts she sent. These were friendships Hellman perceived as with equals—with women who had position or accomplishment of their own.