A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  1960: Hellman with Kermit Bloomgarden and Arthur Penn, watching a rehearsal of Toys in the Attic. (Photofest)

  Hellman was now in her mid-fifties, talking repeatedly not about her own failures but about the failures of the theater to live up to its promise and her expectations. She turned to a novel by Burt Blechman, which focused on the transformations within the Eastern European Jewish family as it moved into middle-class America. Blechman, whose family had more or less followed this path, captured the movement with sardonic humor and empathetic prose. But Hellman had little insight into that process. She turned her characters into caricatures, each of them a foil for her anger. The weak and distant father, the overconsuming and silly mother, the visionary grandmother, the teenage son who had no spark of purpose in his life—all of them became a mockery of a community striving to become American. The play fell far short of her other work. My Mother, My Father and Me opened on March 23, 1963; it closed after seventeen performances. Hellman blamed a New York newspaper strike and the consequent lack of publicity for its failure. But even sympathetic critics thought otherwise. “Every playwright earns the right to a lapse of the typewriter,” wrote Walter Kerr, who thought the play failed “because she was trying something new.”93 Hellman put down her play-writing pen.

  It was not fear but something else that drove Hellman out of the theater. Perhaps it was her slowly increasing sense of marginality as the fifties gave way to the sixties. In 1961, when she was asked to speak about her work or to lecture on theater, she was already saying that “the drama as such is not truly my subject.”94 She would repeat that refrain on many lecture platforms, sometimes expanding it to insist that she had always felt uncomfortable in the theater, or, “I don’t think my nature ever fit too well with it.” Occasionally she would respond to questions about drama with “That’s not my subject but that won’t stop me from speaking.”95 There was a wall between her and the theater, she told one interviewer, “which has always been there, which I cannot explain and which has widened with time.” It’s a nice world, “full of charming and gay and witty and generous people,” she continued, “but like all small worlds, it’s a very small one, and it’s a vain one.”96 She had felt this for many years, aligning herself with Chekhov in that respect. She had, after all, written about him that he had no illusions about the theater, and “neither did Shaw or Ibsen—no sentimental stuff about its glamour.”97

  Then there was the question of money. She believed that the commercial theater had pushed writers to orient their work toward subjects that promised high earnings. The 1960s emphasis on “aloneness,” was, she thought, “the surest buck of all.”98 After Watch on the Rhine, she would say, “the theatre, like the rest of the country, became expensive, earnest and conservative.” She came to believe that to meet the needs of the commercial theater, the writer had to sacrifice too much. “It’s a case of wanting, at the same time, a large sounding thing called integrity, and a large amount of money,” she told an interviewer. “Sometimes they go together, thank God, but sometimes they don’t.”99 She blamed the endemic problem of resources, not her own pen, for the final failure of My Mother, My Father and Me. It was a good play, she thought, that ultimately might have found its audience had not a New York newspaper strike kept the play in Boston until the producers ran out of money. This was a line that she continued to tout: “I left the theatre,” she told an interviewer, “because the fun ran out and the raw-money stuff came in.”100 The Broadway audience today, she added at another point, “is mainly an expense account audience for something somebody tells them is stylish. There’s very little place for straight drama now, very few of them can succeed, and then it’s make it fast or fail overnight.”101

  Hellman never attributed her success in the theater, or her withdrawal from it, to her position as a woman in a man’s world. She refused to imagine that she had made it in the theater either because of or despite her sex. And yet her success, along with the negative commentary that followed her, depended in part on her willingness, as a woman, to express her anger, throw tantrums, use forceful language, eschew sentimentality. The sense that she was being treated as a woman—her work measured by its author’s gender as much as her skill—could not have escaped Hellman, yet she would not acknowledge that she had ever been subject to discrimination. Nor did she concede that being a woman who wrote for the theater posed any particular structural difficulties. While other female playwrights, in the thirties and later, cited the demands of family and children as hindrances, and some spoke wistfully of needing to choose between love and writing, Hellman publicly proclaimed the theater to be fair to women.102 Asked why there had been so few women playwrights, she replied, “I just don’t know … I don’t know since women make quite good writers in other fields and certainly write a great deal in other fields. There’s certainly no barrier to women in the theater.”103

  But the principal source of Hellman’s alienation from the theater surely arose from a change in the subject matter and staging of plays. Fifties audiences turned away from the sometimes painful realism of the first half of the century to embrace more abstract approaches that explored the human condition. By the sixties, she declared “a sense of sadness about my not understanding the theatre anymore.” She could not shake the conviction that drama was no longer directed at saying what was “right.” Rather, she thought that writers had turned toward two themes for which she had little but contempt: aloneness and love. “The great answer of our time,” she said of these words dismissively. “The idiot word nobody bothers to define.” She thought they came straight out of “ten-cent store Freud” and laughed that “the discovery that all of us are, finally, alone, must have been made by the first ape as he stood up to look over his shoulder.”104

  Hellman’s style of playwriting, as she was the first to acknowledge, had passed by. “Ibsen goes and Ionesco comes. Ionesco goes and Ibsen returns,” she wrote somewhat cynically, at the same time admiring the work of Brecht, Beckett, and Harold Pinter, who held the day with their disorderly social commentary, their refusal to plot.105 She was, she tells us, “caught between a so-called realistic theater and a so-called new theater coming after the Second World War, the theater of the absurd, the theater of the imagination, whatever words one has for it.”106 After seeing Beckett’s Endgame, she reported that “The play is too consciously odd for me.” But then she added that it had qualities she admired: “it was sharp, and hard-hitting, and funny, and gay.”107 By comparison, Hellman’s work, as critic Jacob Adler concluded, seemed “too limited in theme and attitude for general or permanent value.”108 She lacked Arthur Miller’s capacity to place contemporary disagreements in a universal context, or to adapt the social-realist vocabulary to a looser and less didactic frame.

  The well-made play had gone out of fashion, become a phrase of disparagement. If such plays had earlier attracted a modicum of respect, as Ibsen’s did, for example, to describe a play as well-made in the sixties bordered on insult, implying the limited competence of its author, a lack of creativity. “In our new state of mind,” wrote critic Walter Kerr, who admired Hellman enormously, “we distrust what is orderly because we are now sharply aware that in everything ordered there is something extremely arbitrary. To have an order of any kind—political, religious, social, domestic—some of the things embraced must be arbitrarily embraced, whether they quite suit us or not.”109 Kerr offered a laudatory assessment of a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, arguing that it “reminded us very, very clearly of what it was like to have material fully organized for us. Miss Hellman had known exactly what she was doing every step of the way as she slipped into place just those character traits, just those lines, just those decisive gestures that would build a trim dramatic house.” But even as Kerr wrote in 1968, he understood that those days were gone.

  So did Hellman. At the invitation of the organizers, she went to Edinburgh in 1963 to participate in a four-day conference on the state of drama. One boring afternoon she encountere
d Mary McCarthy returning from a session, and, as if foreseeing the future, begged her agent to find a way “to relieve her from the stunning smile of Miss McCarthy.” Returning to New York, she wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books tellingly called “Scotch on the Rocks” in which she let out her feelings not only about the conference but about the state of the theater. The conference itself was “timid and dull,” she wrote: “People who might have talked seriously among themselves” played to the cameras.110 Others spent time explaining themselves—an exercise she thought pretty useless. Finally, she concluded with a stab at “that fashionable disease which caused the conference to come out in a rash—the need of the well established to be anti-established, the belief that to question the work of the avant garde is to be square … I think the same thing has become true of the theater as in painting—the avant garde has met and embraced the Establishment. Now it’s all just fashions.”111

  But if Hellman recognized that something new was happening in the theater, she did not know how to address it. Instead, in the changing political climate of the 1960s, she found new audiences and new popularity among young people committed to challenging authority, supporting civil rights for African-Americans, and opposing an escalating war in Vietnam. In 1967, Mike Nichols undertook a major new production of The Little Foxes that burnished Hellman’s reputation and revivified her image. But the production regenerated questions of art and politics. This time the attack came from some of Hellman’s former friends in New York literary circles and signaled a reignited warfare between left-wing anticommunists and the remnants of the old left.

  Elizabeth Hardwick, once close to Hellman and herself a southerner, led the charge, condemning Hellman for failing to do justice to the complicated questions of who might benefit from industrializing the South. This, wrote Hardwick, “is an idea of great interest, and in Lillian Hellman’s failure to do justice to its complications so much about our theater and our left-wing popular writers of the Thirties is revealed.” Hardwick then went on to damn Hellman’s plays in general. They included lines reminiscent of popular movies written by leftists of the thirties and designed to articulate the author’s political beliefs rather than illuminate difficult issues. They resorted to a “craftsmanship of climaxes and curtain lines and discoveries” designed to ensure commercial success rather than intellectual profit. In a ringing conclusion, Hardwick condemned Hellman for squeezing her characters to death between “the iron of an American version of Socialist Realism and the gold of a reigning commercialism.”112 A flurry of accusations and denials about the personal nature of the argument ensued. But Hardwick’s dagger struck deep, damaging Hellman’s reputation as a writer with something serious to say. In the world of the literati, a wounded Hellman appeared as merely middlebrow—a woman with a “torn spirit” who vacillated between “the bright stuffs of expensive productions and the hair-shirt of didacticism.”113

  Chapter 7

  A Self-Made Woman

  No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

  —James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson

  I do not believe in giving away the work by which one lives.

  —Lillian Hellman, 1946

  Work hard enough and you are bound to get rich.

  —Lillian Hellman, note to self

  Lillian Hellman was born not exactly poor, but poor enough to see herself as an outcast in her mother’s wealthy family. She died with enough money to endow a trust fund for the benefit of persecuted writers and to contribute to the support of her good friend Peter Feibleman for the rest of his life. In between she mostly made her own way, earning her living as a writer for the theater and for the cinema and as an occasional journalist. She worked hard, invested well, and lived comfortably: an apartment in a fashionable section of New York City, a house in the country or on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she could enjoy the sea she loved. She was well cared for by an array of servants who generally included caretakers for her homes, a cook, a housekeeper, and a secretary, as well as additional help when she needed it and as she aged. She traveled widely and well—sometimes on assignments of one sort or another, but often for the pleasure of the trip. She was famous—some might say infamous—for half of her life, a celebrity in every sense.

  This picture might not be unusual were its subject male. But Lillian Hellman was a female who had neither inherited nor married into wealth. She was certainly not the first or only woman of her generation to rise by her own efforts. Actress and movie producer Mary Pickford, writer Fannie Hurst, and cosmetics entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker all come immediately to mind. But Hellman’s money and lifestyle generated more comment than most. Had she been a male, she would have been perceived as the archetype of the American dream. But she was a female who prospered because she adopted what was, in the mid-twentieth century, a decidedly transgressive gender role. As she aimed to live by her own standards of desire, so she sought to construct an economically self-sufficient life for herself. She paid attention to how much she earned, managed her resources carefully, counted and kept track of her assets. These qualities fit public expectations of an upwardly mobile male. But the casual onlooker, observing these qualities in a female, accounted them tightfisted, miserly, penny-pinching. To that onlooker, Hellman’s lifelong financial vigilance seemed decidedly unwomanly. It generated pejorative adjectives like grasping and greedy. Hellman’s daily involvement with the details of her financial affairs seems at first glance to justify the negative adjectives and even to border on hypocrisy. Her accumulated creature comforts, including expensive jewelry, fur coats, and beachfront houses, seemed to contradict her commitments to social justice in a fairer, more equitable society. But another glance suggests something of a paradox. Hellman’s moral outlook (and the focus of some of her plays) centered on the corruption of money. But to live as an independent woman required her to pay close attention to the very thing she found corrupting.

  Peter Feibleman attributes Hellman’s relationship to money to the New Orleans experience: “She was scared of poverty,” he thought, because she didn’t have either looks or money as a child. She had “a contempt of the rich and an admiration of them, a contempt for money and a desire to have it.”1 But there was something else. The contradiction tells us something about how Hellman arranged her life. To live as an independent writer required financial resources. Yet, as her plays repeatedly suggested, Hellman believed that money inspired human corruption. The challenge of earning large quantities of money and remaining true to herself became Hellman’s test. We are able to reconstruct how she met the challenge by reassembling some of the legal and other documents she left behind. These might help up to understand just what a remarkable achievement it was for an unmarried woman, and a writer at that, to accumulate a small fortune without relying on family money or male support. Reading between the lines of these documents, we see not only the measure of the achievement but something of the price she paid as her personality altered to accommodate her complicated aspirations.

  Hellman came to maturity in a generation when more and more women went out to work, to be sure, but when the idea of an ambitious and economically independent woman still stirred as much animosity as curiosity. To earn her living as a writer and to achieve recognition on the Broadway stage as the author of serious plays—and in Hollywood as a significant scriptwriter—required a range of qualities generally considered in the early and mid-twentieth century to be the province of men. These included a robust vocational commitment, the capacity to identify as a worker who made a living by the pen, and the self-confidence that she had something to say to the larger world. But those alone would not be enough. To sustain and ensure success, Hellman would need not only a strong voice but a forceful and demanding persona. She would need, as Feibleman put it, to make her own opportunity as a playwright to compete in a world with men.2 As she learned to exercise these attributes, she adopted a style of public behavior that seemed a travesty of womanhood. Her reputation
as an angry woman—aggressive, controlling, and rude—preceded her. Admired as a writer, she became the subject of humor and parody.

  At the same time, this difficult woman accumulated the financial resources that permitted her to exercise a quintessentially female role. Those who encountered Hellman in the thirties often expressed surprise at how feminine she appeared. Her designer clothes, her gracious manners, her slim and carefully crossed ankles, the tea rose perfume all suggested a softer, more generous, and kinder persona than her public image allowed. The money Hellman earned provided the temptingly cozy environments where she entertained friends and relations in graceful style, spaces that one friend described as “elegantly furnished, but … comfortable.”3 Money also enabled her to affirm her principles through the generous help she could give to causes she cared about. And when the time came, her money provided for her ill father, for her dying friend Dashiell Hammett, and for her own physical needs as she herself grew older and sicker.