In 1930, Hammett knew that with The Maltese Falcon he had broken through genre barriers. What he had created was a work of art.
What he wanted to do now, he said to himself, was to write a literary novel. That was his goal for The Glass Key.
CHAPTER 7
During the first half of 1930, Hammett worked on The Glass Key with surprising dedication and seriousness. As Knopf had brought out The Maltese Falcon in the spring and Blanche did not want to publish two Hammett novels in one year, publication of Key was delayed until 1931. 1
The delay disturbed Hammett. He worked, he stalled, he fretted, he finished, then was desperate to see results. The patience sickness had forced on him had not carried over to his healthy self.
The new novel meant a great deal to him. This was probably because it came closest to a literary novel and showed a deeper understanding of his characters’ psychological makeup. It had greater elegance and seriousness than his previous work, a polished, lucid style, and a more ambitious subject. It also reflected some emotion deep inside him to do with male honor.
Hammett was always happiest in male-only society. Think about Pinkerton’s, hospitals, army, even jail. Those were places where a man’s loyalty to another man could be tested. Where what could be lost was irretrievable. In The Glass Key, Hammett wrote a book with male bonding at its core. The novel’s themes of male friendship, male competition, male loyalty, and male betrayal dug as deep as the ultimate treachery of a man murdering his own son. For the first time, Hammett dealt with commitment to another person. Spade could not make the ultimate emotional connection to Brigid, whose villainy saved him from trying. But Ned Beaumont, The Glass Key’s antihero, does try for commitment and to another man, Paul Madvig.
This book has an assured, easy tone, a feeling of camaraderie that the previous novels lack. It rests on what Hammett knows about his kind. Men don’t talk things through; they lean on one another, they stand with one another, they stand side by side. They laugh at the same poor jokes. Jose understood this about Sam.
Though The Glass Key contains murder, the investigator, Ned Beaumont, is not a detective but a gambler on a losing streak, as well as an advisor and confidant to Madvig, his corrupt political boss. The setting is a city based on Hammett’s own Baltimore, where Madvig intends to support Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry’s reelection, partly because he is in love with the senator’s daughter, Janet. Janet, however, despises Madvig for his social inferiority and begins to take an interest in Beaumont.
On the night of Janet’s birthday dinner, Beaumont finds the senator’s son, Taylor Henry, dead in a street. Taylor had seduced Madvig’s twenty-year-old daughter, Opal, and appears to have paid the price. Later, Beaumont begins a relationship with Janet, who is convinced Madvig killed her brother. Complexities ensue when Madvig falsely confesses privately to the killing. Ned, out to defend his friend, swiftly discovers that it was the senator himself who murdered his child.
Ned wants above all to remain committed to Madvig. But male friendship breaks down when Madvig comes to Ned’s apartment to thank him for getting him off the murder rap and discovers Janet in the bedroom.
Though she apologizes to Madvig for the harm she has done him, Madvig and Beaumont are fixated on each other. With no expression on his face or in his voice, Beaumont says: “Janet is going away with me.” Madvig turns white, mumbles something about luck, then stumbles out of the apartment, leaving the door open. Hammett continues: “Janet Henry looked at Ned Beaumont. He stared fixedly at the door.”
Ned may have won Janet, but he has lost Paul and in so doing lost a part of himself.
The book ends with a most enigmatic scene involving Hammett’s most ambivalent character. We don’t know why Ned wouldn’t accept Paul’s apology during a fight they had earlier. We don’t know whether Paul was frightened because he knew Ned wanted Janet for himself or because he suspected Ned wanted Paul for himself. The man is as mysterious as his motives.
Ned is Hammett’s most fallible hero, the nearest to a self-portrait. Tubercular, principled, uneasy in a new world, a gambler, a man who sleeps with a woman of a higher social class.
Hammett, too, had now moved into a society quite different from his origins. However, he still sent money and letters to Jose and the girls, who were settled in Los Angeles, where Mary and Jo attended a Catholic school. The Kellys, Jose’s relations, saw them frequently, and their Uncle Dick and Aunt Reba regularly wrote to them.
Hammett was exhausted. He had written four novels in three years. He had endured a thirty-hour writing session to finish The Glass Key. Later, he attributed his subsequent writing block to this marathon. Still good friends with Nell Martin, he decided to dedicate the novel to her before he finally left both her and New York.
When the lure of Hollywood was suddenly presented to him in summer 1930, he found it irresistible. Hollywood producer David O. Selznick offered Hammett a four-week contract at $300 a week, with an option of a further eight weeks at the same salary, plus $5,000 for an original story. He was to work on a Paramount gangster movie called City Streets, starring Gary Cooper.
In July, Hammett accepted Selznick’s offer and headed for Los Angeles. It was a turning point in his career and life. He left behind his shiny success as a fiction writer. If he had known he would write only one more novel, would he have stayed? Hammett’s philosophy does not even allow such speculation.
Hammett sent a telegram to Blanche’s team on July 19 about copyrights for The Glass Key. “JUST HOW ARE WE TIED UP WITH WARNER BROTHERS ON THE GLASS KEY STOP THINK I CAN PUT OVER BETTER SALE WITH PARAMOUNT.” He begged Knopf to send him proofs of Key.
Knopf reassured him Key was not tied up with Warner and they were sending proofs. By August 14, 1930, Hammett was worrying them again. Was Key going to be published? When? He hoped to place the Key movie rights before he returned east again; meanwhile, he assured them Hollywood “has been a lot of fun, except that I haven’t found time to do much work on the new book.” 2
Under contract to write one original story for Paramount, he took a mere weekend to handwrite the seven-page version of “After School” and the eleven-page version of “After School” called “The Kiss-Off.” His first assignment completed. Then he went on to develop it as City Streets, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, which would be released in April 1931. Hammett felt moderately satisfied with the script and with Gary Cooper as “the Kid,” its tough hero. Delighted, Paramount assigned Hammett to work on scripts for William Powell in Ladies’ Man (1931) and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Despite Hammett’s new work, his sole screen credit for Paramount before he left the studio at the end of 1930 remained City Streets.
Though he started work in Hollywood with a burst of creativity, more drink and more money led to feelings of elation, which translated into wild, erratic behavior and further promiscuity with prostitutes. He felt optimistic. When, however, he suffered a renewed bout of illness, many of his fears returned.
One of Hammett’s new friends at Paramount was the screenwriter and playwright Arthur Kober, the amiable husband of Lillian Hellman. Lily was a young woman who desperately wanted to be a writer of significance. Like Hammett, she had been working in Hollywood, in her case at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, where she read manuscripts and wrote reports. She was less happy in her marriage than people generally thought, though she herself was not sure of the cause, since she loved and trusted her husband. But like the work she was engaged in, her relationship lacked some sparkle, some stimulation. She began to feel that the long drive to MGM, which had often depressed her, had become a symbol of something wrong in her marriage. She and Arthur decided to separate for a while, without ill feeling, and she returned to New York. While apart, they wrote streams of letters, offering each other lifelong loyalty and continued love. There was no definite break. Lillian and Arthur were as loyal to each other for years in the way that Dash and Jose were, so no one was surprised when she drifted back to Hollywood.
She made
new friends with Hollywood writers and artists, including Ira and Lee Gershwin. Now Lily felt less dull, less aimless, more flamboyant, more like an intellectual party girl waiting for a challenge that might be around the corner. And she was in luck. Around the next corner lurked a meeting place for two people—herself and a stranger—that would become legendary. The location of this much mythologized corner was disputed at the time and has been disputed ever since.
Lee Gershwin remembered producer Darryl Zanuck taking her, Ira, and the Kobers to a movie premiere, after which they accompanied him to a crowded corner of the Roosevelt Hotel for Bing Crosby’s opening concert. Helen Asbury remembered the legendary corner was situated in a party on Vine Street. Some biographers suggest Zanuck was hosting a party at the Roosevelt. Hellman herself decided years later, memory failing, that the corner must have been in Hollywood’s Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard.
If no one knows the location, no one is quite sure of the date, either.
Richard Layman gives the date as “late in 1930 or early in 1931” in his first biography, then alters it to a robust and definite “22 November 1930,” in his updated Literary Masters series. 3
Diane Johnson confesses she is unsure but adds, so was Lillian, who told her years later she had no idea. Hellman the memoirist retrieved this disorderly situation by choosing November 25, 1930, as the date to be celebrated. 4
If date and place are variable, the name of the stranger is not. In the most popular version, Lillian at the hotel party saw an extremely tall, rather rumpled man, who strode from his corner to the toilets. He had a shock of white hair, a twisted nose, intense brown eyes, and the rangy walk of someone aware of his talent and looks.
“Who’s that man?” Lillian asked Lee Gershwin.
He was, by everybody’s account, Dashiell Hammett.
CHAPTER 8
Hellman was twenty-five and Hammett thirty-six the day they met. Legend, disseminated initially by the Gershwins, suggested that when Lillian saw Dashiell she leaped up from her seat, raced to his side, and talked to him all the way to the men’s room.
Legend assured readers that within minutes they left the party, rushed out to the parking lot, and sat in the back seat of Lillian’s car, talking animatedly until daylight. Dashiell was startled by the way the stranger sharpened her wits as she spilled her words. He stared at this woman who liked Pushkin and fishing, grasped literature, believed in justice, and understood politics, art, and culture.
She was not one of the beautiful women who always lay in wait for him, but her vibrant energy masked her ugliness. Later, he told her she was “better than pretty,” a cruel line that destroyed her confidence. His humiliating phrase would spread like a canker through her plays.
She had spent hard years, plain and lumpish, fighting the importance of beauty. The expectations of New Orleans society, where you could not be better than pretty, were that she would be a Southern belle like her exquisite mother, Julia, or her fellow artists, beautiful Zelda Fitzgerald, delicate Sara Haardt, and exotic Tallulah Bankhead. The two requirements were beauty and money. She had neither.
She had a determined jaw and an aggressive nose. She was a Jewish ugly duckling who scorned the shy, pretty girls and the boys who found her forbidding. Her anger, uncontrollable, was often directed against her father, Max, whom she loved with a passion more than was wise.
Max, the feckless president of a New Orleans shoe company that went bankrupt, never protected Lily financially or emotionally. Losing his house, he bundled his family into the home of his sisters, Lily’s caring aunts Hannah and Jenny, who took in lodgers.
Would Lily get security with Hammett? In late 1930, overawed by Hammett’s sophistication, she thought about his lifestyle. He knew tweeds were classy but never wore them with silk socks; he hired two black men, Jones and Jones’s lover, as chauffeur, valet, and cook, and lived in swell hotels. But a rich hotel client was not a homemaker, something she needed.
Lily felt she had always been homeless. She was born on June 20, 1905, of no fixed address. In Lily’s birth year, the New Orleans household records did not list Max Hellman, her thirty-one-year-old father, or Julia Newhouse Hellman, her twenty-six-year-old mother, both from German Jewish families, as either owning or renting a property in New Orleans.
Her mother, Julia, came from a wealthy intellectual family who moved to New York. Her father, a self-educated tradesman, was always poor. When the rash and restless Max lost his job, his firm, and his wife’s dowry, he hustled his family to New York, hoping for help from Julia’s rich relatives. He underestimated their utter lack of faith in his business skills and so became a traveling salesman for a Gotham clothing firm, covering the Southern territory, placing his family in mean lodgings and sleazy apartments.
Max took long business trips for five months each year. At first, he left Julia and Lily in so many different towns that Lily later felt Memphis merged with Macon and Macon with Yazoo City. Then Julia and Lily returned to New Orleans for half of each year. Education became a frantic tennis game sometimes played with children whose strokes had force and brilliance, sometimes with those who could barely hold the racket. She rarely succeeded in school or college. She preferred solitary reading to schoolwork.
From 1918, Lillian and her aunts lived in the main Orthodox Jewish area of Dryades Street in New Orleans, which was steeped in Eastern European traditions. But as Max and his sisters became assimilated New Orleans citizens, comfortable with Southern rituals, they lapsed into cultural rather than Orthodox Jews. Julia was spiritual but, to her daughter’s shock, prayed in churches as well as synagogues. Lillian told Dash she felt Jewish, and later he watched her follow Jewish ritual in burying her aunts and her parents.
She grew up even hazier about money than about religion. The riches of her grand New York relatives protected her. But in New Orleans, her family scrapped for pennies, wasted nothing, had nothing to save. For the New Yorkers, wealth had an almost fanatical status. For the New Orleans aunts, money was useful but less valuable than art and literature.
Too many schools, too many homes, too many religions, and too little money made Lillian rootless and impatient. Yet none of those challenges was as hard as the problem of her appearance. She felt out of control and spent her days organizing, making plans, being bossy, punctual, neat, contriving order and meaning. Suddenly, she found herself captivated by an enigmatic man who believed in neither.
Lily was amazed by Hammett’s breadth of reading and, ironically, even more by his productivity. In the time she had turned out a few short stories, he had written three acclaimed and best-selling novels, and his fourth would be published soon. He was supposedly writing his fifth novel.
What Lily saw was a lean, laconic man, taller than her Jewish husband, Art, and her Jewish father, Max, and with a personality utterly unlike their outspoken emotional ones. Hammett, virtually silent, cool, observant, rarely showed emotion. He was secretive, private, inaccessible. That evening, the night they met, he was getting over a five-day drunken binge, the reason for his rumpled demeanor.
His form, figure, and style were those of the iconic Aryan, the goyisha forbidden fruit, the secret dream of the well-brought-up Jewish girl. A man who would never be accepted by Lily’s Jewish family, who would always stand on the edge of their noisy world, surveying it with cynical detachment. He probably ate prohibited shrimp and unclean pork. Hammett himself was taboo. And since her unsettled New Orleans childhood, Lily had been seduced by the sinful.
What Hammett saw was a short redhead, with a husky voice, big breasts, a big nose, and an intense manner. That she was brash, Jewish, and spoke like a New Yorker in an attempt to lose her Southern intonation made her seem exotic.
Hellman’s and Hammett’s mutual unfamiliarity meant each felt more alive in the other’s presence. A particle of that would last over thirty years.
Lillian, who always hoped for romance along with sex, decided she had fallen in love. Whatever Dashiell had fallen int
o, he did not term it “love.” Suspicious of the label, he brutally dissuaded Lily from using it.
Dash’s courtship of Lily was different from Sam’s courtship of Jose. Different and less romantic. The raw emotions he had expressed in early words to Jose were not repeated with Lillian. Occasionally, he wrote the word “love” in letters, usually when Lily was in another town. Even then his affection was self-deprecating. On March 4, 1931, he wrote from Hollywood: “The emptiness I thought was hunger for chow mein turned out to be for you, so maybe a cup of beef tea.”
Writing in late April 1931, he ended with the line: “I, as the saying goes, miss you terribly,” with which she had to be content. 1
Dashiell thought this headstrong creature might be good to take to bed. This was a frequent thought of his about women and carried no provision for long-term commitment. In bed, he demanded women who were docile, passive, and allowed him the kind of behavior, often edged with cruelty, usually purchased from whores. He was amused when the forceful Lily appeared as submissive as his other women. He did not know that Lily took sexual risks because she was not beautiful.
Hammett informed her that he would not give up other women: neither Jose, nor Nell, nor any other affairs.
Lily raged with unbounded jealousy. Her hysterical reaction to Dashiell’s affairs stemmed from childhood nightmares induced by her father Max’s greedy sexual appetites. Lily, who had yearned for Max’s love, was eight when she trailed her father and their sexy lodger Fizzy down Jackson Avenue. She saw them kiss then drive off in a cab. Her black rage made her want to kill them. Instead, she threw herself down from her favorite fig tree and broke her nose. She always saw herself, not her mother, as the woman betrayed.
She ran to her black nurse, Sophronia, her “first and most certain love,” who warned her against telling anyone about Max and Fizzy. “Don’t go through life making trouble for people.” 2 Not to name names, not to inform, those become Hellman’s precepts, ones she would share with Hammett when they entered politics.
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