The claims added up until they became something of a problem. Her insurance agent struggled year after year to find personal property insurance for her, only to be refused by company after company. Exasperated, she fired the agent only to discover that her new agent ran into the same difficulties.44 In 1963, her homeowner’s insurance on the 82nd Street house was not renewed: “You have presented four separate claims of losses in a three year period,” wrote the unfortunate insurance agent who tried to find her a new policy. “Not that any of these claims has been large—but the fact that there have been four in the three years supposedly gives them pause, and makes them apprehensive that in a renewal period of another three years, there may be a big claim.”45 A new policy was finally found. Three years later that, too, was canceled.
Did Hellman set out to cheat insurance companies? In all likelihood, no. Her claims support that child’s sense of justice that characterized all her relationships. She had paid for insurance; the losses, however caused and however minor, were real. She wanted the recompense she had paid for. After her 1962–63 debacle with insurance companies, one might think she should have been more careful. But in February 1964 she once again filed a claim. This time it was for an envelope of money ($682) that she had carried with her to a theater performance where she had been jostled, her purse opened, and the envelope taken.46 The following September she signed a sworn statement claiming that her dressmaker had lost a package containing two expensive suits sent for alternation. She settled the claim for $800. April 1966: she reported items missing from her Vineyard home to her insurance agent—a phonograph, ten to twelve records, a transistor radio, and a Hudson Bay blanket. In July 1968, she left an expensive watch ($800) in her shoe while she went “swimming on my own beach” at the Vineyard. She claimed to have been in the water only three or four minutes. The watch was gone; she had fruitlessly raked the beach in an effort to find it.47 This was the second such watch she had lost.
From these endlessly repeated, if minor, incidents, we learn something about Hellman’s relationship to money that is more than confirmed by larger incidents. One of these had to do with how she handled the Hammett estate. When Dashiell Hammett died in January 1961, he was without resources. Lillian had supported him and paid his medical bills in the last years of his life. She estimated the cost of her support at around $40,000. In his will, Hammett named Hellman his literary executor. He divided his estate: half to daughter Josephine, one quarter to daughter Mary, and one quarter to Lillian. Then the Internal Revenue Service confiscated the entire estate in payment of back taxes. Hammett, the government claimed, owed them $163,000; New York State demanded another $10,445. Hellman offered the government $5,000 to clear the debt, which was politely refused in favor of a public sale of the assets. At auction Lillian’s close friend Arthur Cowan bought the entire estate for $5,000, then gifted it to her. Lillian thus came into full ownership of Hammett’s literary properties.48
At the time, the estate wasn’t worth very much, producing by Lillian’s estimate less than $500 a year in revenue. Copyrights had not been renewed, the work had not been managed well, Hammett’s fiction had gone out of style. Lillian took on the task of revivifying the properties with a vengeance, paying attention to the work as if it were her own, fiercely guarding access to the property. Under her guiding hand, helped no doubt by the revival of the hard-boiled-detective-and-tough-dame style that Hammett had originated, the estate flourished. Hellman controlled Hammett’s legacy tightly, asking not only for generous fees but also for the right of approval—and doing so with an air of entitlement for which some of her critics never forgave her. She turned down a 1969 movie offer of $500 for Hammett’s story “Corkscrew,” which she found “almost insulting,” writing to her agent, “I’ve thought up a quite good answer, I think. Why don’t you call him and say that I’ll give him an option on the story for $500 if he’ll give me an option on his restaurant for $500.” Lillian had in mind a figure of $5,000 to option the story and $25,000 if they decided to produce it.49 She maintained control till the end of her days, agreeing to cooperate with those who wanted to film, dramatize, or adapt Hammett’s work only if she were given rights of approval. Additionally, as her agent wrote to one ultimately disappointed British television producer, “I am reasonably sure she would want financial recompense for such help.”50
The Hammett daughters, Mary and Josephine, were at first taken aback by Hellman’s possession of their father’s assets but quickly came to understand that without Hellman the estate would have been worth little. Once the estate began to make money in the seventies, Hellman occasionally doled out a share of the proceeds to each of the daughters, with the lion’s share going to Josephine, as Hammett had willed. Because, Lillian told them, she paid high taxes on the income earned by the estate, she kept a good portion for herself. When she died, she willed half of the income from the now-profitable estate to Josephine, Hammett’s surviving daughter. The other half, including some of the profits she had derived from Hammett’s work over the years, went to a trust fund in Hammett’s name. The property itself remained under the control of literary executors she appointed. Money and control both entered into these arrangements. Unsurprisingly, Josephine Hammett did not resist them, although she expressed both gratitude for Hellman’s successful management of her father’s affairs and anger at the rigid control involved.
Hellman’s adventures with Hammett’s literary properties fueled suspicions of her as a greedy woman. And although much in her behavior confirms the description, she must, after Hammett’s death in 1961, have felt herself truly alone. Her penchant to go after money reached a low level during her unsuccessful effort to acquire a share of Arthur Cowan’s estate. She was sure that Cowan, a rich Philadelphia lawyer and sometime lover who had been her financial adviser for several years, had left her the bulk of his estate. He had, she claimed, talked all through the years about his will and “made constant jokes about what a rich woman I would be if he died.”51 When he died unexpectedly in 1964, she found letters from Cowan that corroborated her claims: one offering to start a portfolio of stock in both their names and to leave his half to her; another promising to do nothing to “diminish your share (the lioness’ that is) of my estate—which by the way is something one should enjoy while alive.”52 And she insisted that her secretary could confirm her expectations. To no avail. The will could not be found. Hellman suspected the family had destroyed it.53
Still destined to make her own living, discouraged by the theater and disillusioned by the movies that no longer blacklisted her, Hellman found herself by the early sixties in need of substantial income to retain her comfortable lifestyle. She turned to making money in other ways. Surprisingly, she discovered that she liked to teach. Just before Hammett died, she accepted an appointment at Harvard for the spring of 1961. She went to Cambridge alone. She found the appointment satisfying—good for her ego as well as for her pocketbook. Living in a university residence normally occupied by her friend Archibald MacLeish, accompanied by her cook and housekeeper Helen Richardson, she socialized with students as well as with her distinguished colleagues. This was the first of a series of residencies at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities: Yale in 1966, MIT and Harvard again in 1968, Berkeley and MIT in 1971, Hunter College in 1972. At Berkeley she earned $9,000 a quarter to teach one class and deliver one public lecture. That sum equaled the annual salary of a beginning assistant professor at the time. At Hunter, she earned $35,000 for a semester as a distinguished professor—a salary that raised some eyebrows.
This was heady stuff and Hellman thrived on it, using every opportunity to enhance her income. She was not above accepting small commissions—$700, for example, from an advertising agency to prepare five comments of one hundred words each on women’s dress styles.54 She would not go to speak at Iowa State University for a fee she considered too low. “Miss Hellman thinks it should be $1,200 or $1,500 whatever you think. She gets many of these offers to speak and u
sually turns them down,” her secretary wrote to Robby Lantz. “But she may do this one if they pay more.”55 Nor would she participate at a symposium organized by Esquire magazine for the paltry sum of $500. “How would you like to tell them that $1,500 is the price?” she wrote to Robby Lantz, who promptly did.56 Sometimes her requests to Lantz were crude: “What do you think about this?” she wrote to Lantz of one request. “Should I do it, or should you ask the guy how much money I get for doing it.”57
1961: She discovered that she liked to teach. With Harvard students Robert Thurman, Peter Benchley, Charles Hart, Matthew Zion, and Frederick Gardner. (Photofest)
Journalism provided something of an outlet, and in 1963 Hellman worked out an arrangement with Ladies’ Home Journal to publish three pieces “on anything I wanted to do anywhere, with expenses paid, etc.” Hellman anticipated a $5,000 fee for each piece, “a good arrangement for me because I, Saturday night, turned down a great deal of money” for a movie script. Editor Caskie Stinnett sent her to Israel to cover the pope’s visit there, and to Washington to cover Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Poverty.58 Robby Lantz, Hellman’s agent, carefully negotiated the terms under which the pieces would be written. As Lantz wrote to Stinnett on signing the contract, Hellman was “particularly happy at your confirmation of the fact that no cuts or changes in Miss Hellman’s material will be made without her prior express approval.”59
By the mid-sixties, with the McCarthy period well behind her and the political activism of the civil rights movement and the New Left under way, Hellman’s star once again rose. Requests for rights to perform her plays in both the United States and foreign countries poured in: The Children’s Hour in Austria in 1966, Dresden in 1967; an Italian edition of her plays and a festival of five of her plays in Italy in 1967; The Little Foxes in Prague in ’67; a radio production of The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest in Norway on December 31, 1968. The BBC inquired whether it could do Another Part of the Forest as well on March 28, 1960. In the United States, Hellman’s popularity mounted and with it her celebrity status. A Caedmon recording of The Little Foxes succeeded a 1966 revival of Watch on the Rhine at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. Her agents received inquiries about reviving productions of Another Part of the Forest and The Little Foxes. Television and radio stations wondered if they might do parts of The Autumn Garden. Finally, Mike Nichols brought in a full-scale New York production of The Little Foxes, which opened in New York’s Lincoln Center in 1967.
But the return of good times did not diminish Hellman’s sense that her popularity and her income could shift with the political winds. No matter the increase in her prosperity, she continued to exercise an ever tighter control over her financial affairs. She monitored every transaction large and small, relying on the principles that had long guided the distribution and performance of her work and scrupulously respecting the rights of others. She routinely deferred to the Dramatists Guild and the Authors’ League of America over such questions as who owned performance rights to which plays in what venues, or who controlled continuing rights over plays originally signed over to producers and film companies. But she kept daily decisions over fees and production rights in her own hands. She acknowledged and made decisions about a veritable mountain of requests to reproduce her work and Hammett’s from public and private groups all over the world: Norway, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, Australia, and elsewhere. Though formally fielded by her agents, each demanded a response from her. She was called on to consider whether an amateur production one year might undermine a first-class production planned for a year later, or whether a book publication should preempt a request for a lecture or a play reading. She considered, and mostly rejected, adaptations of Hammett’s work, and then of Dorothy Parker’s and finally of her own. On a daily basis she decided whether to lend her name, her presence, her voice, and her pen to events small and large.
Each request demanded an individual answer from her agent, who faithfully consulted her about the price she was willing to accept for how many words, or minutes, or paragraphs, and whom she generally advised to say no unless the payment was generous.60 Despite its prestige, she wrote to Don Congdon (who succeeded Robby Lantz as her agent), she would not allow the BBC to broadcast a forty-five-minute version of The Children’s Hour for a “disgusting sum of money.”61 She would have to be paid $1,000 for an initial TV production of Toys in the Attic, she told a Yugoslav agency, and $500 for every rerun.62 A German film producer who offered to pay her $1,500, the normal rate, for a filmed interview, was told that she would do the interview for $2,500. To make sure she got that sum, her agent set a negotiating price of $3,000.63 Money was the bottom line, for, as she protested, she had often been cheated of her due. She’d willingly agreed to an interview with Bill Moyers in 1968, and she had also agreed to reproduce the tapes on cassettes. But when the reproducer sold the cassettes for a profit, she balked. “It is a racket, and someone is making money on it,” her secretary wrote to her lawyer, Ephraim London. “Miss Hellman’s point is that since the studio gets a royalty on it, shouldn’t Miss Hellman get a royalty?”64 This vigilant oversight continued all of her life.
Sometimes good causes, nonprofit organizations, and “educational” programs got a break, but not always. She would not allow her plays to be performed in South Africa, no matter who sponsored them. She could not permit a sentence or two in a women’s calendar, or a paragraph in a staged celebration of women without payment. She would allow a high school student to read an excerpt of her work in a high-school auditorium only if the passage did not exceed twenty-five words. One such incident in the winter of 1976–77 is paradigmatic. When the producers could pay no fee, Hellman refused permission to allow her work to be used in a public television program intended to “highlight the important literary contribution made by women.”65 The producers reduced their request to a bare paragraph from Pentimento and, on the advice of counsel, informed Hellman’s agent that “though they were uncomfortable doing something that will displease her,” they had decided to go ahead. An incensed Hellman pushed Donald Congdon to respond. “Miss Hellman’s work is in great demand and has a value in the market place,” he replied, “the equity of which would surely be reduced if such free use as you propose were permitted.”66 The producer’s agents and lawyers consulted, concluding that they were on solid ground in resisting payments. But Congdon, spurred on by Hellman, pursued the case: “The creative artist should not be told, as Miss Hellman was, that her work was going to be used whether she gave permission or not. Both of us found that offensive,” he wrote.67 Two months later, Hellman settled for an apology and a token fifty-dollar fee.
Hellman’s hardheaded calculations did not succumb to the temptations of participating even in performances designed to celebrate her. Producer Viveca Lindfors offered her $2.50 per performance to use four lines from An Unfinished Woman in a show planned to highlight the role of women in letters. Lillian countered by claiming that her words were worth at least $25 per performance. After some negotiating, Lindfors offered her $5, and Lillian came down to $10. When they could not bridge that gap, Lillian abruptly pulled out. Nor did she succumb to requests for magazine interviews unless they were in connection with the publication of one of her books: she believed commercial magazines that would make a profit by publishing her spoken words should pay artists an appropriate fee. And she believed very strongly that to garner the respect it was due, she should not sell her work short.
Those who produced her plays or used her words without permission infuriated her. Not atypically, Congdon, who became her agent in the summer of 1971, wrote to object when an unsuspecting playwright inserted a few lines from An Unfinished Woman into a play: “This is to request an explanation from your client without delay, and to put him on notice that he has no right to use any material of Miss Hellman’s without a license to do so.”68 The same lines appear repeatedly in Congdon’s letters to Hellman suggesting that she remained vigilant on
the principle of ownership. About a Yugoslav agency that ignored or overlooked a request for payment and performed The Little Foxes without permission, Congdon advised Hellman to take the tiny sum they put up after the fact and offered to “put their agency on notice that in no circumstances can they permit future performances of your work unless the theatre can pay an acceptable advance and guarantee to supply royalty statements.” Hellman replied, “Yes, do this very firmly.”69
Hellman’s objections covered Hammett’s work as well as her own: when a producer pleaded that he had already gone some distance toward the making of a musical based on Sam Spade, Congdon described Hellman as “affronted by the thought that professionals would go so far in developing a property they did not control.”70
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