A Difficult Woman
Page 17
By the time she dined at the White House in January 1942, Hellman had probably already withdrawn from the CPUSA. But before and after she withdrew, she joined an astonishing array of antifascist organizations. She remained active in the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign and in the Hollywood Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. If the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sponsored a fund drive to aid wounded volunteers, Hellman’s name appeared on the invitation. If the American Friends of Spanish Democracy held a dinner, Hellman gave a talk. She joined the American League for Peace and Democracy—an organization of mixed provenance formed in August 1939 to sponsor refugee scholarships and to campaign for peace.65 She helped to found the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, whose first act (on January 17, 1940) was to circulate a petition to discontinue the Dies Committee. To the FBI, Hellman’s name on a group’s membership list affirmed the presence of communists and earned the group the label of a “front” organization.
But Hellman seemed to care little about whether a particular group bore the communist imprimatur at any given time. After the United States entered the war, she raised money for Russian war relief; she lent her name to the Artists’ Front to Win the War (sponsor, October 1942); she signed petitions circulated by the League of American Writers to open a second front (in September 1942); she sponsored a call for the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship, November 6 to 8, 1943. She cheered when the Dies Committee suspended its investigations and cooperated happily when the federal government asked Hollywood producers to make films that encouraged sympathy for a Soviet Union under fire. At a moment when the United States and the Soviet Union fought on the same side, Hellman’s American patriotism and continuing admiration for the Soviet Union blended smoothly. Throughout the war years, she retained a warm sympathy for those who struggled for democratic rights, a high regard for the people of the Soviet Union, and a growing commitment to issues of world peace. If she became instrumental in Popular Front activities, she was never a party liner, never an ideologue.
While the United States and the Soviet Union were friends, Hellman could do what she could not bring herself to do when the party was under attack. She could comfortably withdraw from the party, though not from her deep antifascist and antiracist commitments, without feeling that she had somehow betrayed her friends. Perverse as this behavior may seem, it speaks to the code of loyalty that Hellman maintained consistently thereafter, and especially in the years of the Cold War. She could not hit a person, nor attack a friend, when he was down. True to form, as the war drew to a close and suspicions against the Soviet Union’s postwar intentions mounted, she joined the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and later served on its women’s committee. But she did not care for the party, did not like being under its discipline, did not follow a line. She refused always to betray friends who remained within the Communist Party orbit, and she never wavered in her admiration for the Soviet people. Most of all she resisted the efforts of government “bullies” to deny her right to think about communism in any way that suited her. In what is perhaps the most backhanded of compliments, one of the FBI reports on her commented that its sources indicated that “Lillian Hellman is one of the few Communists or Communist sympathizers who will discuss Communism openly and honestly.”66
At the same time she became deeply committed to exorcising racism within the United States in this time of war. When Paul Robeson, who was probably a member of the Communist Party at this point, persuaded a Council on African Affairs meeting on April 8, 1942, to adopt a resolution advocating the end of discrimination in the armed forces and government services, Hellman joined him on the podium. This turned out to be only one of many fund-raising affairs in which Robeson and Hellman were associated. And it turned out to be one of several issues championed by Eleanor Roosevelt as well as by the Communist Party.67 At the end of that month, she and Hammett traveled to Hollywood, where Hellman wrote a short script for an armed-forces documentary called The Negro Soldier. Hellman aimed for a film that debated what were then called Negro rights. The forty-minute short that ultimately emerged in 1944 was not the ringing plea for white and black unity against discrimination that Hellman imagined. Rather, director Stuart Heister produced an upbeat documentary showing the contributions of African-Americans to the armed services over time. It had no relationship to the film Hellman wanted, and neither her name or Robeson’s was later associated with it. September 25, 1943, found Hellman at Hunter College, leading a group discussion of Jim Crow in the armed forces sponsored by the Citizens Emergency Conference for Inter-Racial Unity. Robeson, her ally and friend in these endeavors, in turn joined Hellman on the platform when she raised money for Spanish Loyalists.68
In July 1944, Hellman received a cablegram from the Russian Embassy in Washington with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. Two of her plays, The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine, were to be performed there, and Hellman was invited to observe the rehearsals, expenses paid by the Soviets. She accepted the invitation with alacrity. There followed months of delay during which the FBI recommended refusing her a passport because, as one of their records puts it, “she is considered to be a Key Figure in Communist activities by the New York Field Division.”69 The FBI report on Hellman, sent to assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle, tarred Hellman with the brush of guilt by association, naming her as “a member of many organizations allegedly Communist dominated and that have followed the Communist Party line.” The report also noted that she had been “closely associated with a number of individuals who have been identified as members of the Communist Political Association.” The bureau report took particular umbrage at Hellman’s efforts to protest the activities of the FBI, noting that an unnamed informant had reported in 1940 that “Lillian Hellman had been assigned by the Communist Party to ‘smear the FBI’ in the newspaper, PM.”70 If so, Hellman fell down on the job.
After Harry Hopkins intervened on Hellman’s behalf, it took a while to arrange transportation, but at last in early October she set off. All the while, the FBI tracked her.71 Arriving first in Los Angeles, she stayed for several days with her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, and his wife, Maggie. The FBI carefully noted that she was staying with her mother-in law, though agents must have known she was unmarried. It also noted that she spent most of her time conferring with Hal Wallis. She was then working with him on a film production of The Searching Wind. She took a train to Seattle, stopping overnight in San Francisco. In Seattle, the FBI held her luggage overnight while she flew on to Anchorage, Alaska. Agents duly reported that their search of her baggage “indicates Hellman has contract with Collier Magazine for short stories. No derogatory information developed.”72 Hellman stayed in Anchorage for two days while the Soviets cleared her visa, and finally, on October 19, embarked on an arduous two-week journey via Murmansk to Moscow, where she arrived in early November.
1944, In L.A. on the way to Moscow, she spent most of her time conferring with Hal Wallis. (Photofest)
For all the fuss that the passport office made about her trip, and for all that the FBI followed her travels with keen interest, Hellman herself seems to have treated the trip as an opportunity to get to know the Russian people, and even then her contacts were limited. If her diaries are to be trusted, Hellman judged the Soviet Union in terms of how well it observed her comfort and how tenderly she was cared for. At every stop we learn whether the room is clean or dirty, warm or cold, large or small; we find out about the inadequacy of toilets and read a litany of comments about the freezing outhouses; we know whether and if she had a “fine” dinner. Central in these diaries are comments about the people she met along the way. She writes about those who greeted her, escorted her, and entertained her; she offers generous judgments about the character of the men—most of them in uniform—she encountered. Day after day she comments that “Russian men are nice to women, very kind and tender,” or writes, “They have all been so kind and so nice and so warm,” and concludes, “These peop
le have a real kind of Christianity.”73 These judgments mingle with her sense of herself, for, as always, she cares about what people think of her. “I do alright with these people,” she comments after a few days of traveling. And then again, “I am a little pleased with myself because they like me and yesterday said so.”74
Because she was ill and tired when she finally arrived in Moscow, Ambassador Averell Harriman invited her to stay in the American compound for the duration of her visit. There, comfortably housed and well fed, she wandered about Moscow with her interpreter, Raisa Orlova. Her diary records where she went and her impressions, almost all favorable, of those she met. Over and over again she repeats phrases such as “these are warm, strong men … They are men who know they are men and like all such act with simplicity and tenderness … I think maybe Russians have the best natural manners in the world … All Russians have a sense of humor.”75 She writes that “the Russian soldiers treated Poles courteously” and comments that she witnessed “the deep reverence and respect that even intellectuals have for Stalin.”76 Such remarks evoke the reader’s skepticism about Hellman’s judgment. And yet Orlova remembers a Lillian Hellman who had little admiration for the Soviet system as a whole. When she tried to convince Hellman of the virtues of living under socialism, she writes, Hellman replied acerbically that she would “start listening to the victories of socialism after you’ve built the kind of toilets that don’t make you want to retch at all the airports from Vladivostok to Moscow.”77
1944: Moscow. “I do alright with these people.” (Ransom Center)
A rare invitation to visit the front lines as the Russians moved west affirmed Hellman’s positive impressions of Russian men and perhaps convinced her to characterize them favorably while ignoring issues of power and leadership. Forbidden to ask questions, Hellman absorbed the experience of war with her soul, noticing the devastating destruction, first in Leningrad and then in the villages and towns she encountered as she moved toward Warsaw. After she returned home, she wrote about the bravery and nobility of Russian soldiers in the line of fire, continuing the positive assessments her diary records. Her first article for Collier’s magazine hardly mentions Stalin’s name. Instead it romanticizes the soldiers she met on the way. They are, she writes, open and informed about “political issues at home and abroad.”78 They speak “without self consciousness and without fake toughness; they speak simply, like healthy people who have never, fortunately, learned to be ashamed of emotion.” They engage with her in rituals of mutual admiration. Hellman does not forget to tell us that on leaving the front, she received a tribute from the veterans of Leningrad—an inscribed cigarette case given to her by the “men, officers and generals of the First White Russian Army on the Warsaw front.”79
The story of Hellman’s wartime visit to the Soviet Union ends with a flummoxed FBI. On January 2, 1945, while she was still at the front, the ever-watchful FBI noted that she was likely to return to the United States soon and asked its agents to make arrangements to have her baggage searched. Hellman didn’t leave Russia until early February, and then she flew to London via an arduous route that took her through Iran, Egypt, and France. She stayed in London for several weeks and then flew to Baltimore on February 27, 1945. She seems not to have been aware of the Keystone Cops ritual that accompanied her return to the States. On February 9, the director of the St. Paul office sent a memo to “Director, FBI” indicating they did not know where she was.
Inasmuch as an Agent of this office recently read in a Washington D.C. newspaper that Lillian Hellman had returned to this country, the Bureau is being requested to check its files in order to ascertain whether Lillian Hellman has in fact recently reentered the United States. The Bureau may wish to advise the St. Paul Office and other offices … of the whereabouts of Lillian Hellman.
On March 27, after Hellman had been back in the States for a month, J. Edgar Hoover’s office sent out another memo inquiring whether anyone knew if Hellman had returned to the United States and asking whether her baggage had been examined. Not until mid-May did agent Fred Hallford inform his boss that “the subject had arrived at Baltimore 11 weeks earlier.” “She was not interviewed at great length,” he wrote. “She stated that during this trip she was a guest of the Soviet and British Governments. She described her tour as a cultural tour.” Hallford noted that “no baggage or body search of the subject was conducted upon her entry at the Port of Baltimore.” And then he added: “For your confidential information, Miss Hellman displayed at the time of the interview some indignation that a person of her prominence should be subjected to any questioning upon entrance into the United States.”80
Perhaps Hellman was right to be indignant. On March 21, 1947, the New York Field Division of the FBI told Hoover’s office that they were about to delete Hellman’s name from their “key figure” list. Her name was in fact removed two years later. “No further investigation of this subject is contemplated at this time,” the New York Bureau director wrote, “and the case is being placed in a closed status.”81 Little did he then suspect that Hellman’s code of loyalty and her moral compass would soon face its severest test.
Chapter 5
An American Jew
I’ve asked myself many times what I would have liked to have been born and decided a long time ago that I was very glad I was born a Jew. Whether brought up as one or not, somewhere in the background there was a gift of being born a Jew.
—Lillian Hellman, 1981
As Hellman resisted being thought of as a woman playwright, so she resisted the idea that her Jewish birth and family origins shaped her view of the world. Jewish-born and southern-identified, she occupied complicated positions in both communities, but especially in the bifurcated world of twentieth-century Jews. She was not a Jew in the Yiddish-speaking, upwardly mobile, immigrant sense of the word. Nor was she a member of a close-knit southern community of Jews whose isolation lent itself to creating a public face of assimilation and cooperation. Rather, she imagined herself committed to a set of overarching values that included racial egalitarianism and political and social justice. These provided the framework within which she measured human dignity and judged what she called “decent” behavior.
But the twentieth century—notable for pogroms, migrations, the destruction of most Eastern European Jewry, and the creation of the state of Israel—placed enormous stress on the meaning of Jewish identity, twisting and shaping it in response to historical and personal circumstances.1 For prominent cultural figures like Hellman, the times demanded more than a passive acquiescence to one’s roots. As the political climate changed, she sometimes found herself at odds with a divided Jewish community, struggling to reconcile her commitment to larger values with her sense of herself as a Jew, often unable to see why they should be in disagreement. She was, in this sense, an American Jew, her identity woven into the fabric of political debate.
Hellman took her first journey abroad in 1929, when she went with her husband to Paris. Bored, she traveled alone to Germany that summer. There she watched brown-shirted Nazis march and experienced her first taste of outright anti-Semitism. For the first time she felt herself part of a larger, specifically Jewish, identity. After she returned home, she followed Kober to Hollywood, where he found her a job as a studio script reader. There, as she had in New York, Hellman found herself among Jews of Eastern European descent, many of whom had already risen to prominence in the movie industry. These were not the Jews of her southern heritage, eager to assimilate into southern soil. Rather, they were the transplanted Jews of her New York acquaintance, proudly spreading the cultures and traditions of their parents to the American west while they discarded the spiritual impetus of the old religion. Lillian found their relationship to religion all too familiar. To the Hollywood moguls, as to the writer friends she was coming to know in her bicoastal life, Jewishness did not then, as author and critic Irving Howe would later recall, “form part of a conscious commitment; it was not regarded as a major component of
the culture … It was simply there.”2 Howe, in the thirties a young radical and later to become a chronicler of the Jewish tradition, did not imagine Jewishness as a religious impulse. It was “inherited, a given to be acknowledged, like being born white or male or poor,” something that “could be regarded with affection since after all it had helped shape one’s early years.”
In these years of the 1930s, when Jewish identity seemed more a matter of culture and style than of religious practice, Hellman adopted the manners and politics of her peers. She adapted her voice and her persona to the fractious and argumentative mode of her East Coast friends, and she grew into the opinionated and self-dramatizing self that persisted for the rest of her life. Though she was a southern Jew, a German Jew, she reveled in the vibrancy of the Eastern European literary and entertainment worlds of which she formed a part, and she enjoyed the freedom provided by the rich cosmopolitan lifestyles in which her friends participated. In that world, the success of Jews in the competition for upward mobility could be readily tied to attaining the American dream, and Jewish commitment to social justice could take many political forms, including the adulation of Roosevelt and adherence to communist ideals. In Hellman’s world of the 1930s and early ’40s, Jews tended to gravitate toward the political left, expecting to bury religious differences in campaigns for justice and fairness for all. Though the friends with whom she argued about left-wing politics and whom she enlisted in social causes tended to be Jews, she donned, like them, a cloak of religious invisibility. For all of them, the freedom to argue, the liberty to choose one’s political and social causes, seemed part and parcel of American life, as much a fulfillment of the dream as economic success.