She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  Nora not only (literally) faced up to aging, she rued it. She was not one of those who found chirpy compensation in decay—wisdom in lieu of youth, patience in lieu of energy, and the comfort that, yes, while passion was either gone or going, so, too, was the regrettable behavior it brought on.

  “Is there anything right with getting older?” she said on Charlie Rose. “Wisdom when you can’t remember anything? . . . Having more time to read when you can’t see? . . . I don’t think it’s better to be older.”

  The honesty of Nora’s approach to almost everything—she did sometimes fib about others’ work when she met them—is present in this essay. It says that this aging business, this stuff about the neck, was a woman’s thing—and it was unfair. It comes on faster for women. It is more obvious and more consequential. Nora wrote that she avoided mirrors. But she did not avoid saying so. The essay bookends her piece on breasts. It is its (fraternal) twin, a deeply personal shriek written in a jaunty style, saying both “I care” and “I don’t care,” but finally, “The only thing I can do about it is turn tragedy into comedy.” Which she did.

  “I can’t tell you how many women I know who never met Nora, who, when she died said, ‘I can’t believe it. I based my life on Nora,’ ” Gottlieb said. “ ‘Everything she said was relevant to me.’ That did not happen after Heartburn.”

  Heartburn, in fact, sold 102,568 copies in the original hardcover; I Feel Bad About My Neck sold almost 800,000. In total sales—hardcover, paperback, ebook and audio—both books broke the one million mark.

  * * *

  The whole aging process, this reverse puberty, everything going backward, so much so that sooner or later we would be returned to the diapers where we all started and the mental state of an infant, terrified us all. Nora wrote about her neck, because the neck can be seen (unless it is hidden by a scarf from Loro Piana), but the visible stands for so much that is invisible. The neck was only breasts elevated just a bit—yet another physical catastrophe that Nora was dead honest about and with which any woman could identify—women, that is, of a certain age and, of course, any who thought they would make it to that certain age.

  “Are any of you feeling the pressure that time is running out?” Oprah asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Nora said. “This is one of the reasons I’m so in love with one of the most important things in life at the moment—carbs. You know, because I’ve been really good my whole life. What if you are hit by a bus and the last thing going through your head is, I should have had that doughnut? You know?”

  Oprah repeated, “Carbs.”

  “By which I just mean, savor everything. I mean, we live, let’s just stick to carbs. We live in the greatest era of bread since the dawn of civilization. You can get good bread everywhere. But everything, you should just savor everything in some way or other so that every day is, did I do the thing I really wanted to do today?”

  * * *

  The Oprah show aired October 5, 2006. I have quoted from the transcript—Nora being witty, relaxed, charming, and soaking up Oprah Winfrey’s praise of her book. The eye, however, sees something the reader of the transcript does not. Nora’s face is bloated. She had recently been told of her fatal condition. She had begun treatment—steroids.

  The Cut of Her Clothes

  * * *

  In 1973, Lillian Hellman published the second of what would turn out to be three memoirs. This one was stylishly titled Pentimento, which was an exotic term regarding an underlying image in a painting. The book was true to its title. Buried in it was a story of the heroic Lillian Hellman bringing $50,000 in cash to an anti-Nazi in Hitler’s Berlin. The story was made into the movie Julia, starring Jane Fonda. Lillian Hellman, who had been more or less famous most of her life, was now a celebrity, known to people who knew nothing of her plays or her books or her lovers, one of whom was the former Pinkerton cop turned writer of detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett. For Hellman, this was another of her high-wire acts. This time, though, she fell.

  Julia was a lie. The woman who had brought the cash to Berlin was named Muriel Gardiner. She lived in New Jersey. News of Pentimento came to Gardiner slowly. Friends called. Acquaintances inquired. Gardiner wrote to Hellman. She never heard back. Finally, she sued, and while it might be said that Lillian Hellman was exposed as a liar, that was not quite the case. Many people already knew that.

  But not Nora. The same year Hellman’s book was published, Nora went off to Martha’s Vineyard to interview the grand lady for the New York Times Book Review. As was often the case with Nora, the interviewee became her friend. The much older and much more famous Hellman was clearly charmed by Nora and, I imagine, impressed by her intelligence and her bona fides. She was a child of Hollywood screenwriters and Hellman had been one herself. The Ephrons worked in the movie business during the McCarthy period, when ten screenwriters went to prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In that dark period for Hollywood, a spotlight shone on Lillian Hellman. She took a star turn.

  * * *

  Imaginary Friends is Nora’s most interesting and revealing work. The play is about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy and their famous, and famously vindictive, feud. It is to my mind more about Hellman than McCarthy but not, at bottom, about either one of them. It is about Nora—the writer, the woman, and particularly the woman who felt she was not as pretty as she was smart.

  To a remarkable degree, Hellman kept reappearing in Nora’s life. The Ephrons had not been Communists, but they were liberals and, despite their avowed atheism, they were Jews. The combination was sufficient to warrant suspicion. The so-called Red Scare—tinged with anti-Semitism—surely dominated their dinner table conversation. They knew at least two of the ten screenwriters who went to prison for not cooperating with congressional inquiries—and probably many others who feared a subpoena and subsequent ruination. Hellman was the ultimate target. She was both a Communist and a Jew, the former by enthusiastic choice, the latter at the insistence of others. She was sure to have figured in dinner table conversation.

  Mary McCarthy was a less important figure. Younger than Hellman—and very pretty—she was also a leftist but, unlike Hellman, no fan of Stalin’s. By the late 1930, McCarthy was a book critic for the Nation magazine and well known in New York literary circles. She was a talented and often biting writer and something of a sexual omnivore. She not only recounted sleeping with three different men in twenty-four hours, but when she finally paused, she chose two leading intellectuals as her lovers. She lived with Philip Rahv, an editor of the influential Partisan Review, and later married the critic Edmund Wilson, a rotund man with an astonishing talent for seduction. Theirs was a tempestuous, sometimes violent, union.

  In 1952, Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to say she would not testify about anyone but herself. Her words—a tribute to her gifts as a dramatist—became even more famous than any of her plays: “I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive.

  “I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable.

  “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

  The line—written by Hellman but spoken by her lawyer, Joseph Rauh, Jr.—resonated on the political left with the force of the “La Marseillaise” among French revolutionaries marching toward Paris. Hellman, short and homely, instantly was transformed into another Marianne, although she was hardly bare breasted, swaddled instead in what she called a Balmain “testifying dress” and white gloves.

  * * *

  Nora maintained her friendship with Hellman for several years. They were both great conversationalists,
bright as hell, voracious readers, talented writers—and they loved to cook. On the political left, Hellman was an adored and admired figure who got a standing ovation in 1977 at the Academy Awards when she presented the Oscar for Best Documentary. She already possessed a passel of honorary degrees.

  It’s not clear when Nora caught on to Lillian or if she suspected anything at all until Mary McCarthy, promoting a book, appeared on Dick Cavett’s TV show in 1979. McCarthy had wanted to be asked to name an underrated young writer. Instead, Cavett asked her to name an overrated older writer. She named three—John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, and Lillian Hellman. She said Hellman was “tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.”

  “What’s dishonest about her?” Cavett asked.

  “Everything,” McCarthy replied. “I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ”

  The next morning, Hellman announced she was suing Cavett, his network, and McCarthy. She was asking $2.5 million in damages.

  * * *

  Hellman was a woman of great presence. She may not have been a great playwright, but she was a great dramatist. Her most original production was herself—a plain woman of metastasizing ugliness who nevertheless exuded a flamboyant sexuality. I had met her originally in 1968, when the Post sent me to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton to cover a meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Ironically, the Congress had been created by the CIA to encourage Europe’s anti-Communist left. Hellman, a former and unrepentant Stalinist, was one of the attendees.

  At the conference, we became friendly. Later I learned that she was always on the lookout for young men—and it may have been my youth and not my dazzling intellect that attracted her. For a brief time, we corresponded. She wrote me about her life—nothing that I can recall, but it was surely more exciting, more literary, than mine. I was mired in the Washington suburbs, covering the school board’s interminable nighttime meetings, the zoning commission, the sewer commission, and erotically tinged anti–sex education rallies in high school gyms.

  All this was either fodder for parody or the daily newspaper, but not—I thought—for letters to the great intellectual-playwright-screenwriter-activist-memoirist who was so famous she was a celebrity model for Blackglama, the maker of a line of tony fur coats. She posed in one, a cigarette dangling from her right hand. “What becomes a Legend most?” the ad asked. Not a pen pal from suburbia, I thought. I dropped the correspondence.

  * * *

  I next met Hellman at Katharine Graham’s in Washington. Graham was giving a small dinner party—just me; my wife; Carl; Nora; Joseph Alsop; the Washington columnist who was almost as important as he thought he was; and Hellman. This was late 1976, the very night there was a struggle in progress for control of New York magazine. Katharine Graham was involved, trying to save it for her friend Clay Felker and thwart Rupert Murdoch. She not only failed to get the magazine, she missed a swell dinner party. (Her son, Donald, substituted.)

  I may now write matter-of-factly about that night, but I was knocked out by it. I was hardly a regular at Graham’s house—a Georgetown mansion, actually—and I was so unaccustomed to her regal style that when, a couple of years earlier, I had been invited for dinner, I mistook what the invitation meant by “informal” for, well, informal, and not Georgetown lingo for “not black tie.” All the men wore dark suits, white shirts, proper ties. I wore a sports jacket. A turtleneck sweater. And a mortified expression.

  This night was different. But what I remember most about it was not what I wore, but Nora. She was totally at home. Joe Alsop was an imperious, intimidating man, once possibly the most important of Washington columnists. (Certainly, he thought so.) He affected a concocted Etonian accent—not speaking but proclaiming. He was easy to dismiss as a Vietnam War hawk and a droll fool, but his was the home John F. Kennedy went to after his inaugural. His erudition was awesome. He took a keen and sophisticated interest in the local public schools as well as fine art, archaeology, and statuary. There was little he didn’t seem to know. He awed me, but Nora awed him.

  I did not know that night that Nora and Lillian were already pals, but by then I was accustomed to Nora knowing everybody and everybody in return knowing her. It sometimes seemed that she had lived in a different era or that she had started her career at the age of fourteen or so—that she had stepped out of the rotogravure section of a defunct newspaper—the Trib, the Sun—or a magazine only found in dusty attics. This was the only way to account for how she knew the people she knew and who knew her—these historic figures, of which Hellman was most definitely one. Hellman to me was a figure out of a newsreel, a woman of the 1940s and 1950s who had stood up to Joe McCarthy and his ilk—and McCarthy was long dead.

  In that respect, Carl complemented Nora. He, too, seemed to know everyone, but then he was magazine-cover famous, downright likable, and hardly shy. It was only a bit more than two years after Nixon had resigned, and so when Carl entered a room, history seemed to accompany him. Still, the room belonged to Alsop and Hellman, virtually statuary figures, and while they had different politics, in the not too distant past they had united in the fight against Joe McCarthy.

  Alsop and Hellman traded stories. Joe told about being interned by the Japanese in Hong Kong after America entered World War II and having had gems sewn into the collar of his jacket. She told how she visited the Eastern Front in Russia and stuck her head up from a trench to view the fighting. When her military escort did the same, he had his head blown off.

  That and other stories were extremely dramatic and told with the flourish of a playwright making a pitch, but they were probably not true. Soon after, Hellman came out with the memoir Pentimento and I recognized some of these tales in it—and so did others, including, of course, Muriel Gardiner. She cried “thief!” and Hellman was undone.

  It was never entirely clear why McCarthy went after Hellman. And it was not clear, either, why Hellman thought she could win a $2.5 million libel suit. But it was abundantly clear why the feud and the lawsuit intrigued Nora. As a story, it was uniquely rich. It was about her childhood. It was about female writers. It was about lefty politics and the political pogroms of the 1940s and 1950s. It was, in short, about everything—including the inexplicable hate that occasionally courses through the sisterhood.

  Hellman was a human question mark. She personified so many questions: What would you have done? What would you do now? Could you sacrifice your Hollywood lifestyle—the house, the pool, the car(s), the Japanese gardener, the mistress, the club membership, your very identity as a screenwriter, producer, or director for . . . For what? Exile in misty, gray England and minor writing jobs under a politically compelled nom de plume?

  Hellman, in fact, had done so. She had been blacklisted. Her earnings plummeted. She lost her farm in Westchester County; Hammett was sick, blacklisted in Hollywood and creatively blocked everywhere else. Lillian Hellman was a vainglorious figure, a liar, but also admirable. She was better than a dramatist. She was a theatrical creation.

  It was not only politics and questions of conscience, though, that drew Nora into the story, I believe. And it was not, either, sexual politics—the fact that Hellman and McCarthy were often the only women at the table and sometimes playing musical chairs with the same men. I think part of the allure was that Hellman was highly and boldly sexual and yet handicapped by dismal looks. She had to attract men with her fame, her achievement, her literary standing, her wealth. She was the flipped coin—the female version of the ugly man with the pretty girl.

  As for McCarthy, she dowdied as she aged, but she was once a smashing looker and always a marvelous writer. Along with her best friend, Hannah Arendt, McCarthy was a rarity—a female public intellectual. She traveled in interesting circles and slept with interesting men, but her life was not nearly as flamboyant as Hellman’s, and while she was truthful, she had never done anything as brave as choosing to sta
nd up to HUAC.

  McCarthy’s best seller was a novel called The Group, a fictionalized account of her Vassar days. Her classmates felt betrayed, much as Nora’s did after she wrote about their tenth reunion. That, though, was not enough to balance a play. Hellman is the weightier, more compelling figure—a fabulous fabulist—who intrigued or repelled many of the people who knew her. One of these—indeed, maybe foremost of these—was the unavoidable Mike Nichols.

  Nichols had acquired a raconteur’s fortune in Hellman stories, some of them appalling, some of them humorous, but all of them gripping. He found her loathsome. Also riveting. It’s not possible he withheld them from Nora. In fact, he could barely repress them. He felt conflicted. He admired Lillian Hellman. He also found her despicable and somewhat frightening.

  “Lillian was ugly. She had to make you forget it, and she could. That’s how good she was.

  “I did, in a twisted way, love her, but she was a terrible person, which was a shame because she was so brilliant. Nobody can improve that sentence. ‘I cannot and I will not cut my conscience to fit the fashion of the time,’ and I will not, which is ungrammatical, is a genius . . . The whole thing is a genius thing to say that made everybody look like shit, and that’s what she wanted, and that’s what she got. . . . She finally fucked it all up. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop, and she died alone and defeated. She made it work for a long, long time.”

  Nichols clearly had first crack at directing Imaginary Friends, but for some reason—possibly to protect his friendship with Nora—he passed. So he called Jack O’Brien, the artistic director of the Old Globe Theater in faraway San Diego. He asked him to come to a meeting at Nora’s apartment at the Apthorp. It was an ambush.