While the campaign to unionize screenwriters unfolded, Hellman found herself increasingly involved in the debate over the Spanish Civil War. Under the auspices of left-wing groups including the Communist Party, sympathetic individuals everywhere volunteered to fight on the government’s side in an international brigade. By the fall of 1936, American volunteers, organized into what was called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, were already on their way to Spain. Additional numbers of young men and women joined the cause of the Republican Loyalists as ambulance drivers and reporters. The war took a complicated turn in early 1937 when the Republican Loyalists turned to the Soviet Union for help, which was quickly granted. As Soviet money and influence escalated, government defenders found themselves helpless to resist a disastrous and divisive Soviet effort to exert leadership over all the Spanish Republican forces. Anarchist and socialist members faced off against the Soviet-led communists, leaving Republican Loyalist fighters in disarray. American and non-Soviet partisans found themselves not only fighting Franco but torn apart by Soviet attacks on those who resisted their leadership. What was an American to do?
In the early fall of 1936, while confusion reigned, antifascists of all stripes tried to provoke some sort of intervention by the United States. Hellman, her heart clearly with the Spanish Republican Loyalists but her head deeply involved with the production of Days to Come, stayed on the sidelines. Hammett wrote long letters to his teenage daughter Mary to try to explain why he supported the Republican cause. The Spanish Civil War had started, he told her, when a triumvirate of wealthy landowners persuaded the army to overthrow the elected government (only two of whose twelve members were communists). “They decided to buy a revolution,” he wrote, and then followed this assertion with advice to “be in favor of what’s good for the workers and against what isn’t. Follow that and you may not be the most brilliant person in the world, but you’ll at least be able to hold your head up when you look at yourself in the mirror.”29
Then film producer Joris Ivens approached Hellman for money to make a documentary film about the war. This was to be the beginning of Hellman’s lifetime commitment on behalf of the Republican Loyalists and wartime refugees. Hellman joined with Dorothy Parker, Herman Shumlin, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and others to found a group called Contemporary Historians. Together they raised $3,000 to send Ivens to Spain, and they put together a script he could use to guide his filmmaking. But Ivens abandoned the script as soon as he arrived in Spain and followed his instincts and opportunities instead. The film that emerged that spring as The Spanish Earth had a narrative written by Ernest Hemingway (whom Ivens had met in Spain) with a little help from John Dos Passos. Marc Blitzstein (Hellman’s friend and the acclaimed composer of The Cradle Will Rock) and Virgil Thomson compiled a score made up of indigenous Spanish music.
The film was never intended to be dispassionate. Joris Ivens viewed it as a fund-raising vehicle for the Republican Loyalist side, and when Hellman first saw it, on July 10, 1937, she was in Hollywood at such a fund-raiser. Hellman was uncomfortable: she had wanted more “facts,” she said; she would have preferred a film more outspokenly condemnatory of fascism.30 Other viewers responded more sympathetically. At its first showing, Hemingway made a pitch for money and raised $20,000 for ambulances in Spain. Legend has it that Hammett contributed the first $1,000. Later in the summer, President Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt invited Hemingway, his partner, Martha Gellhorn, Joris Ivens, and others to a special showing at the White House. Eleanor wrote favorably about the film and the war in her column. And in surprising concord, after the film’s release in August, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the New Masses, and the Daily Worker all reviewed it favorably.
On August 25, just six weeks after the viewing and only a day after the release of the successful film Dead End (on whose script she had worked during the spring), Hellman set off with Alan Campbell and Dottie Parker for an extended trip to Europe. Arriving first in Paris, she left after several weeks to travel through Berlin to attend a theater festival in Moscow. This was the trip on which she may or may not have encountered her old friend Julia (about which more later); it was also her first personal encounter with Soviet communism. She stayed in Moscow only a few days, then returned to Paris through Helsinki. Tired from several weeks of traveling, she was prepared to rest.
Otto Katz intervened. Katz (a man with twenty-one aliases, known to Hellman at the time as Rudolph Breda and later as Otto Simon) was a handsome and dashing Czech-born and German-educated journalist with a reputation for charming women. Some think that he and Hellman had a passionate affair when they met, first in Hollywood in early 1937 and again in Paris. A dedicated communist, loyal to the Comintern, Katz was then engaged in encouraging celebrities to speak out against fascism. He would later serve as a press attaché for the Spanish Republican government.31 At dinner in Paris, he talked Lillian into going to Spain. He probably didn’t have to try very hard. Jim Lardner also influenced her. He was the brother of her old Screen Writers Guild colleague Ring Lardner Jr., who would later be indicted for refusing to testify as to his communist connections. Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell, who had just returned from Spain, may have played a role as well. With so many people encouraging her, she could hardly refuse to go. “I had strong convictions about the Spanish war, about Fascism-Nazism, strong enough to push just below the surface my fear of the danger of war,” she later wrote.32
The trip became an important turning point in her life. As was her style, she focused on the human side of the war, neglecting larger political meanings in deference to its poignant and destructive effects on ordinary people. In one trip across the country, she wrote, she encountered a kind farm family who fed her out of their meager stores. They had taken in a refugee from Madrid, a woman who recognized that Hellman’s bleached-blonde hair would soon need color. In the midst of her misery, she recommended that Hellman go and look up her cousin when she arrived in Madrid: “She works good on the hair. Tell her I send you, tell her I didn’t have the baby. Tell her to put soap in the bleach and do a good job.”33 The gesture touched Hellman’s heart, as did the defenselessness of most ordinary people. She described a bombardment in Madrid that terrified the population the evening before she left. “In a kitchen back of my hotel, a blind woman was holding the bowl of soup that she came to get each night. She was killed eating the bowl of soup.”34 The episode confirmed her sense of fascism as the fountain of brutality and the refuge of bullies. “Finding the range on a blind woman eating a bowl of soup,” she concluded sarcastically, “is a fine job for a man.”35
Spanish Loyalists and their international-brigade allies, in contrast, were doing noble work. “I came to Spain because I was puzzled,” Hellman insisted. “I had been taught in school that it was the right of every man to decide the form of his own life, and the form of the government that was to rule that life. I believed that. I believed that hard.”36 Hellman expressed similar feelings in a piece she wrote on her return. Intended for national distribution, it was turned down by an important newspaper syndicate and published in the liberal weekly the New Republic. In it, she recalled a day of bombing in Valencia and the feelings evoked by the wounded members of the international brigades that had defended it. “They had come,” she wrote after she returned home, “because they thought that if a man believed in democracy he ought to do something about it … I prayed, for the first time in many years, that they would get what they wanted.”37
In a fury against the fascists, she neither saw nor registered the dangers of the divisive Soviet policy. Did this make her a dupe—an ideological fellow traveler with no mind of her own? Why didn’t she, unlike George Orwell or John Dos Passos, see the danger at hand? Did the wish to defeat the fascists blind her, as it did many noncommunists as well as communist partisans of the Spanish Republic? Neither Hemingway nor Dorothy Parker nor hundreds of survivors of the international brigades condemned a destructive Comintern policy that turned weapons agains
t its own allies. Left-wing journalist Isadore Feinstein—also known as I. F. Stone—faced the same dilemma and remembered the confusion. Even as he knew that socialist, anarchist, and dissident communist soldiers were being attacked and killed by the pro-Soviet side, he remarked, “We knew there were anguished choices … we didn’t know what to do.”38
Whatever her initial motives for going to Spain, Hellman invested herself in the morality of the Republican cause. She recalled the courage of the Spanish under bombardment with deference and respect. She remembered the wartime privation with horror. After she returned to Paris, she could no longer tolerate what seemed to her a meaningless social round. She escaped to London, where, she tells us, she spent weeks, hobbled by a broken ankle, reading Marx, Engels, and other left-wing literature for the first time. Afterward she reflected on her experience in the simple language of the newly committed. “The Spanish are a gentle people and patient,” she wrote a few months after her return.
It had taken them a long time to declare … that there was something wrong with a world which allowed a king to have more racing cars than he could use, more pheasant to shoot at than he could eat, when their own children walked without shoes and ate without bread. They wanted, as all people of dignity will always want, a chance to work and to live and to be happy. That was the future they wanted, and that was the future they thought they were making.39
Within months after her return to the United States, Hellman and other single-minded antifascists found themselves embroiled in disputes with American communists deeply critical of Stalin’s ruthless efforts to take control of opposition to Franco. The split ran deep, but despite evidence of vicious Soviet intervention, Hellman insisted on continuing to support the Republican cause as though it were still unified. She lauded the elemental courage of Spanish citizens and castigated the American press for its refusal to weigh in against the forces of fascism. An angry diatribe she wrote in the summer of 1938, published in the New York Post, captured the strength of her feelings. There, she attacked a New York Times correspondent who reported that American prisoners (probably largely communists) were “simply chronic bellyachers.”40 The New York Times, she suggested sardonically, chose to print dispatches of this “very naïve journalist” in preference to those of a “brilliant and daring” reporter already on the scene because it feared attention to its Jewish ownership. “Every Jew must be an anti-Fascist to be either a good Jew or a good American,” she concluded.
The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 in a victory for Franco. Hellman never forgot the international and American soldiers who had been maimed and wounded in Spain. She engaged in fund-raising for them and for the Spanish men, women, and children who fled after Franco proved triumphant. Already a supporter of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had been started by her friend Dorothy Parker in 1936, she helped to found the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain in the battle against fascism. In 1939, this group helped to launch the Hollywood section of the Joint Anti Fascist Refugee Committee, under whose auspices the Spanish Refugee Appeal was formed. Hellman was honored by this group early in 1945 for her tireless fund-raising efforts “in the name of the thousands of Spanish refugees throughout the world.”41 A few years later she agreed to publish a short piece in Alvah Bessie’s collection about the war, The Heart of Spain. When the book appeared without a contribution from Ernest Hemingway, she excoriated Bessie for the omission. “If I had known of your censorship of Hemingway,” she wrote, “I would not have allowed you to include me in the anthology.” She continued by condemning “the self-righteous conviction that censorship is fine if one side practices it, and evil if another side plays the same game.”42
1938: She never forgot the members of the international brigade who had been maimed and wounded in Spain. (New York University Tamiment Library)
Decades later, long after the Soviets had abandoned all interest in Spain, when the war had receded from memory and her own credibility was under attack, Hellman remained a staunch contributor to Spanish refugees. For most of this time she supported a group that favored refugees who had fought with and for the communist side. But after 1969, she agreed to let her name appear on the letterhead as a “sponsor” of Spanish Refugee Aid. That organization was founded by members of the non-communist left to provide help to “the displaced, disabled, hungry, sick, weary Spanish refugees” who had been chased out by Franco’s government and abandoned even by the United Nations’ Refugee Relief Association because the UN had recognized Franco. It helped everyone except those who had fought with the communists. In the spring of 1978, Hellman came under attack for her putative former and continuing Stalinism. In one of those illuminating footnotes to history, Mary McCarthy threatened to resign from the board if Hellman’s name was not removed. In the end the board held fast. Despite other disagreements with Hellman’s politics, most of its members never doubted Hellman’s commitment to all those who fought for a free and democratic Spain.43
Whatever their political differences over the factional fights in Spain and the centrality of the Soviet Union in their politics, whatever their party affiliations, Hellman and her friends could unite over their hatred of fascism. We can watch that hatred build over the course of the 1930s, from Hellman’s political awakening during her 1929 stay in Bonn to her increasing use of the language of antifascism and democracy in the early 1930s. It emerges clearly in Days to Come as well as in the film script for Dead End. We note her disappointed response to the weak antifascist language of The Spanish Earth. Her extended European visit in the fall of 1937, and particularly the attacks on civilians in Spain, confirmed all her worst suspicions.44 Fascism relied on the mindless exercise of power. Democracy, in contrast, counted on the individual’s capacity to express his or her own thoughts, to govern his or her own direction.
But it would be a mistake to see Hellman’s commitment to the left, and particularly her relationship to the Communist Party, as merely transitory exercises directed at defeating fascism. It would be equally misguided to imagine that she espoused antifascism to obscure her sympathy for communism: as a vehicle aimed at change without the language of revolution. Rather, in the context of the moment, these commitments converged. Antifascism was one of many reasons to join the Communist Party. In 1936 and 1937, the heyday of the Popular Front and the moment when the New Deal seemed to be veering leftward, Hellman found in a broadly defined socialism the value system she held dear. In the Communist Party, to which Hammett probably already belonged, she saw the opportunity to oppose fascism and construct a political path for socialism. Her friends Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, Marc Blitzstein, Herman Shumlin, and many of her acquaintances were already members. The question was not why did she join the party, but how could she not have joined?
Her writing in this period, particularly The Little Foxes, embodies the critique of capitalism that party membership implied. By some interpretations, that play, which opened in February 1939, spells out the power of greed to corrupt even the most intimate relationships in the family. Capitalism, The Little Foxes seems to be saying, can destroy even the most intimate relationships. The play’s success, the power of its message, and its resonance with American audiences speak to the mood of a country still enmeshed in economic depression. And yet like many of her plays, The Little Foxes was consistent with some of the favorite themes of American communists without following them mindlessly or even closely. The Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party, admired the play on the whole, but critic Milton Meltzer objected to the film version for placing the character of the family (“they’re terrible because it’s in their nature”) at the film’s center. If only, he lamented, “The Little Foxes had been able to show more directly the necessity under a competitive economic system for the dog-eat-dog of people out to make good by this same society’s standards. It would have reached even greater stature.”45 Perhaps ironically, The Little Foxes made Hellman rich
, providing her not only with enough money to buy her beloved Hardscrabble Farm in Pleasantville, New York, but with the celebrity to make her a valuable asset to what can only be called “front” causes.
By some accounts Hellman was already in the party by 1937. Louis Budenz—a notoriously unreliable FBI informant—told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950 that he had learned about her membership when he joined the party that year. He had, he wrote, been “officially advised” that she continued to be a member until 1945.46 Martin Berkeley claims to have spotted her at a meeting in Hollywood in the summer of 1937. Perhaps so. She was, that summer, briefly in Hollywood for a screening and fund-raiser for The Spanish Earth, which had not yet been formally released. And her presence at a meeting suggests the kind of serious interest in the party that she often claimed. In November, after her trips to Moscow and to Spain, when she retreated to London to recover her stability she says she sat down to immerse herself in Marx and Engels. Perhaps the point is not worth debating. If she wasn’t already in the party in 1937, she was certainly drawn to it by multiple strands. But then so was everyone else she knew.
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