PART FOUR
HELLMAN AND HOLLYWOOD, 1934–1936
CHAPTER 10
Lily wrote. Dash edited. Homestead, Florida, was ablaze with activity. And rows. Long days. Hard nights. Dash ripped up page after page. “He tore them to pieces,” Lily said later. The fight was over The Children’s Hour. “There was a great deal at stake, great deal of feeling at stake.”
Dash staked their whole relationship on the fact that he wanted Lily “to be some good.” He was “pleased and proud” when she was. His constant criticisms came from his belief that Lily was “good enough to fix things.” On an early draft, Lily wrote, “he spared me nothing.”
Hammett forced her to rewrite dialogue, use fewer words, shape the structure. Never give up.
Hellman whined that she wanted to give up. “Don’t be a writer,” he baited her. “Nobody asked you to be a writer. This is what it costs.” She whined some more. “If you never write again,” he said coldly, “what difference will it make?” Try again. She tried again. They were both worn out.
She attempted to intimidate him into sparing her. “If this isn’t any good, I’ll never write again. I may even kill myself.” 1 He did not spare her. She did not die. The disciplined work went on. She called him “teacher.” She was not unhappy. She would have other critics but none as sharp. She would have other audiences but none as necessary.
One of Dashiell’s most appealing characteristics was his generosity toward other writers. What he downplayed was his sense of shame about his own inability to write. The writer’s block seemed to have settled into his spirit and could not be shaken off. Over the months, it got steadily worse until he wrote to Lily a poor attempt at a joke, with the typing diagonally down the page like a poem, admitting, “What little imagination I’ve got is used up.” 2 He felt as if he had suffered a stroke. He thought the writing side of his brain had become paralyzed.
Lily was grateful for his constant attention, but her savage yet kind mentor was simultaneously playing the fond father and affectionate, absentee husband. Dash wrote two loving letters to Jose and a gentle one to Josephine and Mary, telling them he had gained weight, had managed ten days on the wagon, was suntanned, felt better than for years, was becoming expert at deep-sea fishing. He planned to return to Homestead next year but promised to come and see them first. He sent them kisses. He did not mention Lily or Lily’s play.
But the play preoccupied him. The Great Drumsheugh Case concerned a Scottish girls’ boarding school forced to close in 1810 because a mixed-race schoolgirl lied about her two headmistresses, who were subsequently accused of lesbianism. The girl’s grandmother believed the accusation and influenced parents to withdraw their children. When the teachers sued for libel, the case dragged on for ten years. When they were finally exonerated by the House of Lords, their lives had been destroyed. 3
Hellman relocated the story to New England, changed and added to the plot. Manipulative, white schoolgirl Mary tells her seemingly liberal grandmother, Amelia Tilford, the school’s major funder, the lie about teachers Karen and Martha doing unnatural things, then blackmails her fellow pupil, Rosalie, to substantiate her lie. Mrs. Tilford phones other parents, who remove their children. Karen’s and Martha’s careers are destroyed; Karen’s engagement to Mrs. Tilford’s nephew, Dr. Joseph Cardin, is ruined, as he half-believes the lie; and Martha, who suddenly recognizes she might be a lesbian, kills herself.
Eric Bentley, reviewing the 1952 version, believed Hellman spoiled the play by telling two conflicting stories simultaneously. “The first is a story of heterosexual teachers accused of lesbianism: the enemy is a society which punishes the innocent. The second is a story of lesbian teachers accused of lesbianism: the enemy is a society which punishes lesbians.” 4 Hellman refuted this by saying the play was about a lie, not about lesbianism.
My new evidence shows the close relationship between Hellman’s play and the novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, whom Lily met in Paris when Hall was finishing writing it in early 1928. 5 Dash and Lily watched the fierce flames of condemnation overtake Hall’s book, and Lily’s fears for her own play probably tempered this early insistence that her drama was not about same-sex.
When the play was produced, several concerned in the production were also fearful. Lee Shubert, owner of the Maxine Elliott Theatre, watched the confession scene rehearsal where one woman recognized her love for the other. “This play,” he said to Lily, “could land us all in jail.”
While she polished the play, Lily was working as a fifteen-dollars-a-week reader for thirty-six-year-old Herman Shumlin, one of Broadway’s finest directors, so Dash felt she stood a good chance of having the play staged. He was right. When the manuscript was finished, Lily put it unsigned on Shumlin’s desk. “This is the best one I’ve read,” she said. Even before he discovered her identity, Shumlin was so excited about the writer’s power, he took it on. “I was all a-tremble, it was so good,” he said. “When I finished the second act, I was afraid to go on, for fear it couldn’t last. As soon I was through reading, I immediately agreed to produce it.” 6
Shumlin soon mattered to Lily almost as much as Kober and Hammett. He became her theatrical mentor and, after The Children’s Hour, produced and directed Days to Come, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, and The Searching Wind. He would intermittently also be Lily’s lover for a decade from 1934.
For years, critics have asked whether Hammett wrote The Children’s Hour. Some anti-Hellman reviewers implied Hammett wrote all Hellman’s plays. Lily discussed themes and symbols with Dash. She followed his every criticism to the letter. She openly acknowledged his help. But the archives show no evidence of Hammett’s original rewriting, just many of his edits and ideas. Hammett’s granddaughter Julie Rivett saw such detailed editing on The Children’s Hour that she thought he could be regarded as a cowriter. However, many writers have substantial editing help but do not credit editors as cowriters. Hammett himself always said it was entirely Hellman’s play.
Lily dedicated it: “For D. Hammett With Thanks.” She said that without his initial aid, she would never have become one of the four most famous Broadway playwrights along with Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.
“I’m not at all sure that I would have written without Hammett because I had written. . . . I had stopped writing. I had decided I was not going to be any good and that I wasn’t going to be bad. It was he who teased me back into writing, annoyed me back into writing, baited me back into writing. And then watched for as long as he lived.” 7
Telegrams arrived before the show opened on November 20, 1934. Laura and Sid Perelman wrote: “WE HOPE IT’S A BOY LOVE AND KISSES.” Lee and Ira Gershwin wrote: “A GIRL WHO CAN MAKE LEE SHUBERT CRY DESERVES THE NOBEL PRIZE.” West wrote: “IT IS REALLY A SWELL PLAY DARLING A REALLY SWELL PLAY.” Moss Hart’s telegram said: “TO TELL YOU HOW THRILLED I WAS WITH THE PLAY AND I WISH I WERE IN YOUR BOOTS TODAY.” Her Newhouse relatives characteristically cabled: “MAY YOUR OPENING BE CROWNED WITH SUCCESS AND FINANCIAL GLORY,” while her Hellman family wrote: “LILLITH THE LITHE, LILLITH THE LOVELY, LILLITH THE MAZELTOV.”
Hammett, who had left for Hollywood on October 26, hired by MGM at $2,000 a week for ten weeks to write a film sequel to The Thin Man, did not send a cable. Nor a card. Nor flowers. He felt his faith in his pupil was justified by the queues outside the Maxine Elliott Theatre. She felt his loss at her side. Was he to become an absentee mentor, an absentee lover, in the same way he had become an absentee father and husband? Lily did not know. She still lacked faith in her talent. She needed Dash.
Two nights before the opening, she began to drink and did not stop for several weeks. She went to see Max and Julia, who had not read the play. Both were proud, but also frightened for her in a world they could not comprehend. They were right to be frightened. For despite Julia’s view that Lily had been the sweetest-smelling baby in New Orleans, on opening night, Lily smelled only of drink. She saw the play from the back of the theat
er, holding on to the rail.
At the opening night party, Lily passed out on the floor by the elevator. Nobody missed her. But she missed one person in the crazy crowds. Missed him bitterly. Dash was not there in New York to share their triumph.
She had promised to phone Dash after the opening. She put through a call to Dash’s rented house in the Pacific Palisades, which contained a soda fountain. After many rings, a woman answered, said she was Hammett’s secretary, admonished Lily for calling at such a strange hour. Two days later, Lily realized she had called at 3:00 a.m. California time but that Hammett had no secretary. In her explosive version of events, she impulsively took a plane to Los Angeles, went immediately to the soda fountain, smashed it to bits, then flew back to New York on a late-night plane.
Hammett did in fact have a secretary, Mildred Lewis, of whom he was fond, whom Lily always “forgot” about. But any one of the beautiful women who surrounded Hammett could have answered that phone call. The nearly impossible plane times made the story unconvincing, but Lily’s rage was not in doubt.
Six days after the opening, Dash wrote Lily an abject note. “I love you very much please. I haven’t a single bit of news beyond what I told you over the phone except that I still love you very much please and would ask that you might find it possible to return my affections if it so happens you could do it without too much trouble.”
He had already written from Hollywood: “I miss you awfully honey. . . . I hope the rehearsals are going smoothly and I hope you are being a good girl.” 8 As he had ignored all her rehearsals and, worse still, had been absent for the first night, she saw no reason to be a good girl. She slept with both Kober, who had not fallen out of love with her, and Shumlin, who suddenly fell in love with her.
Lily had taken revenge and found some comfort. But in behaving as Hammett behaved, she had lost something irreplaceable in their relationship.
In 1973, in Pentimento, Hellman referred to an infamous trip that she claimed she made during this period to see her friend Julia, who she said was involved in anti-Nazi undercover work. There is no sound evidence to back up this statement, made by the much older Hellman, who had become an unreliable though compelling narrator. Possibly, her distress over Dash’s absence and her subsequent low self-esteem caused her to invent this tale of herself as heroine in a fight against the Nazis.
The reviews for The Children’s Hour cheered her immensely. She wrote about the first night: “I remember Robert Benchley pressing my arm and nodding his head as he passed me on the way out of the theatre. . . . I don’t think I knew what he meant.” 9 The next morning, newspapers revealed exactly what Benchley meant. Every critic congratulated her on a stunning, well-crafted drama. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times (December 2) called it a “stinging tragedy.” Walter Winchell (New York Daily Mirror, November 21) elevated Lily to stardom by saying she was “perched high on the pedestal.” Robert Benchley (New Yorker, December 1) thought the play had “too many endings” but praised her for an outstanding event in American footlights history. Her bold hit ran and ran, for 691 performances. It would have the longest run to that point in the Maxine Elliott Theatre’s history.
Suddenly, Lee Shubert’s fear was proven prescient. The Children’s Hour was banned in Boston, banned in Chicago, banned in London, where only private performances were permitted. Bans increased its fame and audiences.
Dash and Lily hoped their play would win prizes. But The Children’s Hour was a scandalous triumph. Radclyffe Hall had won two literary prizes and had been expected to win another for The Well but failed to do so because of subject matter deemed inappropriately inflammatory. Hellman expected to win the Pulitzer Prize, but her subject matter also was deemed inappropriate.
The New York drama critics were so appalled when it did not win the Pulitzer that indignantly they formed the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and, though Lillian did not win it for The Children’s Hour, she did win it twice later.
Dash faced new problems. On May 2, 1934, he had come to the attention of the FBI for the first time. The director of the Investigation Division for the US Department of Justice dispatched a note to Special Agent R. E. Vetterli in San Francisco. The division had been advised that an alarming series of illustrated stories about Special Agent K-9 [sic], supposedly a former Justice operative, was running in several West Coast newspapers. The director wanted information immediately about the storyteller’s identity. Did he (surely not she?) have any departmental affiliations? Vetterli amended the fictional special agent’s name to X-9 and revealed that Hammett was the author of the humorous features in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. Vetterli reassured the director that Hammett was not a special agent. A second agent, H. R. Phibrick, added that this man was known to be very successful in his field and had made considerable money from his “detective yarns.” Temporarily satisfied, the FBI put the case into “closed status.” 10 But within five years, the FBI would reopen that file and start to scrutinize Hammett’s activities with much more serious consequences.
In Hollywood that fall and winter, Hammett was feted, photographed, and publicized. He fraternized with Marlene Dietrich and Frank Tuttle, a Fox movie director who specialized in crime films. Dash told Lily he was surprised at the fuss The Thin Man had made in Hollywood, where “people bring the Joan Crawfords and Gables over to meet me instead of the usual vice versa! Hot-cha!” 11 He went to cocktail parties at Dorothy Parker’s. He joined Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, and Alexander Woollcott for dinner. There were distinctly shabby japes. He stole a cat’s-eye ring, his producer Hunt Stromberg’s good luck charm. At the Basque speakeasy, he suddenly scooped up handfuls of knives and threw them around the room. He slept with Sis, a doped-up woman who insisted he sleep with her mama first. He fell flat on his face at the Trocadero and was found prostrate in gutters.
Charming one minute, boorish the next, always unpredictable, he was usually drunk.
He hung out with Nunnally Johnson, currently writing screenplays for Twentieth Century Fox. Johnson said Hammett’s behavior could only be explained by his assumption that he had no expectation of being alive beyond Thursday. The recurrence of his clinging sickness made this assumption not unreasonable. Did he wish Jose were there to take care of him? He never verbalized it, and his willful disregard of increasing alcoholism paralleled his stoicism in the face of fate’s blows. He continued his binging with Edward G. Robinson and Arthur Kober, who had another successful screenwriting job at Fox.
Even Hammett’s laconic friend Budd Schulberg had left his well-paid post as head of production at Paramount in 1932 to produce original movies. It was painful for Hammett to mix with such productive people. Unable to write anything, he fended off messages from Blanche, who was being hounded by Hammett’s public about the next book. As Hammett had contractual obligations, Alfred suggested they bring out “The Big Knock-Over” and a related story, “$106,000 Blood Money,” in hardcover.
Foolishly, Dashiell would not let Alfred do it. Six months later, he was forced to confess to Alfred: “Yellow fellow that I am, I turned tail before the difficulties the new book was presenting and scurried back here to comparative ease and safety.”
“Here” was the tinsel world of MGM where he would stick it out through the summer of 1935, while reassuring Alfred that he would try to get in “some licks” on his book meanwhile. 12 The Knopfs were not reassured.
MGM’s disapproval of his tardiness was more urgent than Knopf’s. On January 8, 1935, Hammett finally submitted his story to Stromberg before briefly returning to New York. By June, he had signed a three-year agreement with MGM, which would be canceled before its term because of his alcoholism and unreliability. By September 17, he managed to give Stromberg a 115-page typescript of After the Thin Man, which MGM released on Christmas Day 1936.
During fall 1935, Hammett moved restlessly between New York’s Plaza and Hollywood’s Beverly Wilshire, utterly unable to write. Between 1934 and 1936, six movies were made from h
is original or adapted stories, as though his talented past had risen up to taunt him. Even an income of around $100,000 in 1934 failed to keep him from debt. Between 1933 and 1936, five lawsuits for nonpayment of debts were filed against him. He gained temporary creditworthiness when the film of The Glass Key was released in June 1935. He moved his writer’s block from his luxury hotel to a six-bedroom penthouse at 325 Bel Air Road. Jones, his black chauffeur/butler, and Jones’s lover, Winston, cared for him.
The studio would not leave him alone. Every day, they sent twenty-year-old Mildred Lewis to his home. Some days, Hammett never got up. So Mildred, notebook in hand, waited till 5:00 p.m. then slid into the studio’s limousine to go home. Some days, Hammett came downstairs in pajamas and suggested she help him with the crossword puzzle. If it was Thursday, the servants’ day off, she cooked, badly. This was Mildred’s first job as an untried secretary. But Hammett told her she was attractive and clever. Occasionally, he called her into his bedroom, where he lay quietly in bed. Nothing would happen, he promised. He would merely hold her tight if she lay beside him. She had no idea if this was in her contract, but she preferred the crossword, or better still, dinner out with a fully clothed Hammett. Sometimes at the Clover Club (gambling with his chips), she met scary Dorothy Parker, but even worse, some mornings she saw a series of black and Oriental fancy women from Madame Lee Francis’s house tiptoeing downstairs from Hammett’s bedroom. Mildred got used to the letters that arrived regularly from his wife and daughters, who lived nearby, and at the photo on the piano of his girlfriend Lily. Mildred told her husband very little about her position, but when the famous writer filled their house with flowers, the husband wondered about her job. It’s the way writers work, the secretary said loyally. But the truth was that this writer and this secretary did no work at all. 13
Throughout the rest of 1935, Blanche sent long, persuasive letters encouraging Hammett to send them the book. She visited him in California and reported to Alfred he looked “simply superb” and was going “to write a novel soon.”
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