Dashiell Hammett

by Cline, Sally; Penzler, Otto;

  Dorothy Parker, now Lily’s friend, warned her that Hammett was cruel. Lily should stick to sweet-natured Arthur. When Hammett was sober, he was mild-mannered, introspective, sensitive. When drunk, which was most of the time, he was indeed cruel, heartless, violent. Worried friends heard their rows, saw Lily’s blackened eyes, bruised face. She refused to talk about it. During one public argument, Dashiell punched Lily so hard she fell to the floor. Later, she said furiously: “You don’t know the half of it. I can’t bear even to be touched.” 3

  Hammett did not confine his intimidation to Lily. With stupid pride, he treated many women abusively. It was as if this former invalid, suddenly living on borrowed time, was trying to match up to some Last Frontier ideal of manhood, lashing out in alcoholic rages, degrading women and himself.

  With an exotic starlet, Elise De Viane, he went too far. Elise had met and charmed little Mary and Jo on a shopping trip for a gift for Jose. Already they knew they must keep quiet about Papa’s ladies. Mary whispered to Jo: “Don’t tell Mama.” 4 During winter 1931–1932, Dashiell invited Elise to supper in his hotel room. Later, she called the police and had him charged with assault, claiming that Hammett had raped and beaten her. She sued him for $35,000 damages in California’s Superior Court. On June 30, 1932, he was found guilty in absentia, and The New York Times reported Elise was awarded $2,500.

  Sometimes Dash wished to share his starlets with Lily. He liked to watch the pretty woman and the feisty woman have lesbian sex. Sometimes he joined in. Just as Lily started drinking heavily to keep pace with him, so she allowed these sexual threesomes. But it was not only to please Hammett. She realized that making love with another woman pleased her, too. She did not mind her male lover watching. She grew afraid. Female sexual behavior with another woman was not merely outlawed in a Jewish household, it was seen as so gross it was invisibilized. One evening in a cab en route to a lesbian fling, the other woman started stroking Lily’s leg. Lily instantly ordered the cab to stop. She hurtled out, told Dashiell it must stop. After Hammett’s death, she admitted to a young bisexual companion that she feared liking it too much.

  She had after all been strictly brought up in the South. Significantly, Hellman’s experiences of and responses to lesbianism, still taboo in the late twenties and early thirties, prior to Radclyffe Hall’s groundbreaking work, would become the controversial theme of Hellman’s first play, The Children’s Hour.

  Hammett’s participation in those threesomes was less about sex than power, another way he could control Lily. The threat of violence even more than its practice kept Lily “in line” but did not entirely subdue her spirit. She often walked away. Frequently, during their first years, she escaped to another town, hoping he would stop his violent ways. He did not.

  Jose, whose early life had taught her the abusive ways of men, put up with Sam’s drinking and his “ladies.” Perhaps it was her gentle, unswerving loyalty that saved her from any hint of violence. Lily’s early life had taught her the same lessons. Her father’s constant infidelities and betrayals had savaged her spirit, yet she chose to take on a quintessential philanderer, then bucked at his behavior. She would not accept what Jose had accepted. She expected Hammett to change.

  She grew angrier about Hammett’s use of the double standard. He insisted she stop “juggling oranges” (other men). But he could not make this rule stick. Like an old-fashioned belle, she knew her flirtations would keep him close. He called her “a she-Hammett!” 5 But she was far from that. Despite women’s new sexual liberation, Lily was still uneasy about sex.

  Lily and Dash appeared publicly as a couple. They hung out at the Trocadero, danced at the Café Montmartre, drank at the Brown Derby, and dined at Hollywood’s Musso and Frank Grill. Gossip columnists linked their names. They made newspaper headlines. Angry Montana relatives sent Jose the humiliating newspaper clippings. Across the miles, Jose read those stories and was at first disbelieving, then ashamed.

  Lily was often late home, distressing Art terribly. Sometimes, she did not go home at all, though she did not lie about her meetings with Hammett, merely trivialized them.

  Lily thought it wise to stick by Art, to make bigger efforts to show how important he was. Their mutual dependence and respect meant that Arthur would never lose a place in Lillian’s life. But that place was changing in ways Lily recognized and Arthur denied. Lily still needed Arthur’s emotional security. But she also hankered for adventure.

  So Arthur, already Dashiell’s friend, became part of their trio. The three drank and dined with Sid and Laura Perelman and Pep (Nathanael) West, Laura’s brother. Lily arrived for Perelman and Gershwin parties with Arthur on one arm and Dashiell on the other. One evening, their closeness to the Perelmans misfired. Dash played a trick on Sid by paying a hooker to strip nude in his bathroom. Sid went upstairs, was away a long time. Laura, enraged by catching them having sex in the bathroom, escaped to San Francisco for a brief fling with a more than willing Hammett. Lillian never forgave either of them.

  Arthur could see Lily was besotted with Hammett but downplayed their relationship, deluding himself that Lil would return.

  Then Jose tracked Arthur down in Hollywood, deeply concerned that her husband might commit himself to Lily. Arthur reassured her that he was not divorcing Lil. There was no need to take Dash’s affair seriously. Arthur had good reasons to believe this was true, remembering the loving letters Lily had written to him after her miscarriage, when she had taken a leave of absence from MGM and had stayed at the St. Moritz Hotel in New York City. Lil had written to say she was distressed because she had had a period. She had thought she would have been a natural “super-creator of babies,” but she had failed. She had assured Art they could try again. Yet, even then she knew she would not return to him.

  Hellman, hopeless at ending relationships, preferred blurred edges. Dash and Arthur both wanted her back. Kober said he needed Lil by his side if he were to write well. Dash, also missing her, wrote provocatively that he was being more or less faithful, then taunted her by saying if she did not come home he would have to go on “practically masturbating.” Lily did not come home, and as a consequence of several mindless affairs, Dashiell contracted gonorrhea for the third time in his life. This was the start of renewed illness.

  In the world outside their circle, President Hoover and Congress were unable to stave off the collapse of the US economy, but inside their Hollywood bubble Hammett was rich when he met Lillian. In 1930, he had earned $100,000, which covered the high expenses of the Ambassador’s accommodation and his gifts to his children and Lily. He gave her a jeweled brooch, pearls set in black metal. Did it cost more than $500? she asked. Yes, he said, but not as much as $600. He put her down as the five-hundred-dollar type.

  She recalled in later years that one of the kindest things Dash did was to support her until she earned enough to support herself. He constantly left money on his bureau for her to take whatever she needed. No mention of it was ever made. “He fed me,” she said. “You never forget somebody who does that for you.” 6

  He was so profligate with money, loaning or giving it to anyone in need, that he rarely kept any for himself or laid away any for what might be hard times in the future. Meanwhile, Lily remained as sensible with his money as she was with her own.

  Dashiell encouraged Lillian to meet his daughters. She disliked children and felt jealous of Mary, nearly ten, and Jo, four, who lapped up the glamour of Hollywood. They watched Lillian pretending to be fond of them and saw cracks in the pretense. Dash was buying the girls new clothes in a store when Lillian arrived, petulant and irritable. The counter clerk asked her if she’d like to sit and wait. Lillian snapped: “No, I’m not going to sit there.” Mary thought Lillian’s attitude was not unreasonable. Why should this rich, smart lady like them? Lillian wanted Papa’s attention, but he was giving it to her and Jo.

  Jo knew Lillian was married, but she behaved like Papa’s rich, bossy wife. Not his real wife. Not Mama. Jo recalled that ge
nerally Lillian tried to be kind to her: “Though she would try to sway me in lots of ways. It was always, ‘Well us girls are on an equal level, and I’m telling you this because you’ll understand.’ I was, of course, terribly flattered to be considered on her level!” Jo recalled that when she was about seven or eight, on one occasion Lillian was deliberately unkind.

  I was in the swimming pool. . . . Out of the blue sky, Lillian suddenly asked me in a mocking tone if I was devout, knowing I was a Catholic. What do you say to a question like that? Fortunately, my father said very offhandedly: “Oh well, she figures if she’s wrong she’s only lost a little time, and if she’s right why you know she’s saved.” He did it just to turn Lillian aside from me. . . . Today, I think she was being bitchy . . .

  One difference Jo noticed between her mama and Lillian was that Lillian ran a “tight ship”: “There were rules for everything, and order, whereas Mother ran a pretty loose ship. We were kind of lippy. She was very lenient.”

  Jo pointed to a central contradiction in her father’s character:

  In one way he could be free, talking about things like sex and what went on in Hollywood when ordinary fathers wouldn’t have told those horror stories. On the other hand, he was very much the Victorian father. “You do what I tell you and don’t answer back” would be his terms. He made my sister wipe lipstick off her face when she was fifteen. There was this big contradiction between easygoing and “Never forget that I’m Daddy.”

  Jo felt he was not fit for the domestic scene. “Even when I was in high school and had a date arranged, if he was due, I would cancel it and stay home. When Papa was there, you were there. He was our focus.”

  About Hollywood, Jo said: “Papa hated it and most of the people in it. He had a contempt for the gross ignorance and commercialism that was rife there. . . . I think he also had contempt for himself for taking the money then not doing what he should be doing. So to come to our house, where Mama helped him stop drinking, was to be some place where he could get away from all that.”

  Hammett found a peace with his wife and children that he never replicated anywhere else. “Mother was kind of passive with him and would act as his nurse. He might be in bed a lot of the time. She’d bring him food then encourage him to get up. She loved him and never until the very last days said in her head that they were really separated. It was like she was still his wife, even though he might be off with other women.”

  Dashiell continued the pattern toward his family he would maintain all his life. He would write to them, send them money irregularly, visit them laden with gifts, and spend time with them, often collapsing with exhaustion and being nursed back to recovery by Jose.

  Lillian always grossly underestimated Dashiell’s love and loyalty toward Jose, Mary, and Jo. They were his only family. Sam had told Jose that if she took care of the children, he would take care of her. Jo said her mother held on to those words as long as she could, and her father did, too. Even when his support checks were late, nobody doubted that they would come. The three of them always knew they were his family, even if they lived apart.

  Although his family knew about his relationship with Lillian, what they didn’t know about were his drunken excesses and constant partying. They certainly were not privy to his mounting anxieties about his novel writing.

  Hammett, though successful in Hollywood, felt something ominous was happening to his fiction. Instead of drinking less to tackle the problem, he drank more, as if to deny the problem existed.

  Yet another bout of gonorrhea in March 1931 accompanied his sexual excesses. More significantly, severe tuberculosis struck. Terrible head pains and trouble in breathing forced him to stop drinking for a brief recuperative period. Then, back on the bottle, he was again seriously ill.

  Hammett had left Paramount at the end of 1930, and in January 1931, Warner Brothers executive Darryl Zanuck hired him to write an original Sam Spade story. It would star Powell, who, like Hammett, had come from Paramount. On January 23, 1931, Zanuck gave Hammett $5,000 (the first of three equal installments) on signing the contract for “On the Make.” When Hammett delivered the treatment, he received the second $5,000, but when he completed his assignment on April 28, Zanuck rejected it and refused to pay the final installment.

  Released from his contract, in spring 1931, he began then abandoned a fragment called, like his later novel, “The Thin Man.” As Blanche wanted to delay the proposed delivery and publication date of The Thin Man so that it did not clash with that of The Glass Key, Hammett thought it pointless to turn the fragment into a book. Instead, he offered it to his new literary agent, Ben Wasson of the American Play Company, to hawk around as a teaser.

  The Glass Key, first published in England on January 20, 1931, was published in the United States on April 24, 1931. Hammett’s spirits rose at the ensuing critical acclaim.

  The reception was even hotter than for The Maltese Falcon. In the first two weeks, The Glass Key sold 11,000 copies, and by December sales had reached 20,000. In the first two months, there were five printings at $2.50 a copy. Movie rights were sold to Paramount later in 1931 for $25,000.

  The book was praised as one of the most excellent American detective novels ever published. Bruce Rae in The New York Times (May 3, 1931) said there could be no doubt about Hammett’s gifts in this special field and no doubt about Key’s success. The New York Herald Tribune (April 26) described it as twice as good as Falcon, while in Outlook (April 29) Walter Brooks proclaimed Hammett had now written the three best detective novels ever published.

  It was the high point of Hammett’s writing career, marked as such by Dorothy Parker, whom Hammett had not yet met but who suddenly discovered him for The New Yorker (April 25): “It seems to me that there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett. My own shrill yaps have been ascending since I first found Red Harvest, and from that day the man has been, God help him, my hero.” She heaped exuberant praise on The Maltese Falcon and said that, though the hero of The Glass Key could not “stand near Sam Spade,” she found the book “enthralling.”

  Hammett’s own later appraisal was that The Glass Key was his best book.

  Blanche urged him on by post to make progress in his next novel. He answered her by telegraph on April 17, 1931: “ THOUSANDS OF APOLOGIES FOR NOT HAVING ANSWERED YOUR LETTER BEFORE. . . . JUST BACK FROM A FEW WEEKS IN SAN FRANCISCO EXPECT TO STAY HERE SEVERAL MONTHS BUT EXPECT TO HAVE NEXT BOOK THE THIN MAN FINISHED IN A COUPLE OF MONTHS.” 7

  The Knopfs hoped to publish The Thin Man in January 1932, but they would have to wait much longer than they could have imagined.

  Hammett’s depressions and disease worsened. He was unable to write and unable to quit drinking. His frail, tubercular condition could not take that amount of alcohol. Determined to commit suicide, he left the accommodating Knickerbocker Hotel, where he did not want to upset the management, checked in to the Roosevelt, and declared his life was not worth living.

  A stranger told Jose Hammett was threatening suicide. She raced to the Roosevelt, but he refused to open the door. Then someone told her it was a false alarm and she left. It was in fact a warning signal of how frail his mental condition was and how afraid he was of not being able to write again.

  When Lillian arrived, she pounded on the door until Dash, who believed drink and TB would kill him soon anyway, opened it, saying weakly: “I’m a clown.” Lily, dismissive, entirely failed to understand the depths of his despair.

  On August 6, 1931, Hammett entreated Knopf for money in order to leave Hollywood. Broke and self-destructive, he settled into New York’s Hotel Elysee to write The Thin Man with absolutely no success. Instead, he communed drunkenly with William Faulkner. After a full day’s drinking, he and Faulkner went to a Knopf party for Willa Cather, at which Hammett passed out and Faulkner was abusive to the Knopfs.

  By May 1932, Hammett and Hellman were living in grandeur at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, while poor Jose, in despair because she had recei
ved only $100 from her husband in seven months, wrote to Alfred Knopf. She said she was desperate, the children needed clothing, and she didn’t have enough money to feed them the right food.

  “I feel as thou [sic] he is not getting my letters—someone is holding them back—I know he loves his family—would hate to hear they are in this condition.” 8

  The Knopfs said Hammett had checked out of his New York apartment, leaving no forwarding address. Hammett did love his family, but at this point he felt as incapable of helping them as he was of helping himself.

  No wonder Lily clung to Kober and was distressed when, in 1932, she and Arthur together told Julia and Max they planned to divorce. Julia adored Arthur, disliked Hammett, and felt ashamed her married daughter was living in sin. Though Max felt certain wayward bonds with Hammett, he was concerned that his daughter was linked to a non-Jewish drunk.

  Kober told his family he would never love any girl as he did Lil. “Lillian is all cut up about the divorce,” he wrote his mother in the Bronx. “She is still very much in love with me.” 9 In court, chivalrously he insisted that Lil prefer charges of cruelty against him: a laughable but sad procedure.

  Kober’s unpublished autobiography was called Having Terrible Time,10 and at that point, privately he, Lily, Jose, and Hammett were doing just that.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hammett and Hellman’s outrageous public behavior was still making headlines, which continued to distress Jose. “Mother was terrified Papa might marry Lillian,” said Jo. “Publicly, she told everyone that she and Papa were temporarily living apart because he needed solitude for his books.”

  Jose’s pride did not allow her to speak negatively about Lillian. “The only time Mama spoke harshly was after Papa’s death, when she said Lillian should have given us some of Papa’s possessions.”