Dashiell Hammett

by Cline, Sally; Penzler, Otto;

  Meanwhile, Knopf’s hopes for a new novel faded when Hammett cabled: “WILL YOU DEPOSIT MY CCOUNT [sic] GUARNTY [sic] TRUST SIXTIETH AND MADISON ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS AND WIRE ME. . . . THANKS AND BEST REGARDS AND DON’T BE SURPRISED IF YOU GET A BOOK BEFORE SNOW FLIES=DASHIELL HAMMETT.”

  Alfred, cynical, sent only $500. Hammett, unable to write books or screenplays, was managing a fine line in cables. His riposte arrived at Knopf’s mailbox less than a month later. “CAN YOU DEPOSIT THAT SECOND FIVE HUNDRED TODAY AND LET ME KNOW=DASHIELL HAMMETT.” 14

  If Hammett found Blanche hard to face, his shame with Lily was greater. Unable to write, instead he had to watch as Hellman became one of Hollywood’s biggest screenwriter successes.

  When her play opened, Lily had $55 in her bank account. The theatrical production earned her $125,000. Unused to large sums of money, she spent it instantly. “I bought presents—expensive luggage—for my friends, most of whom couldn’t use it because they couldn’t afford to travel.” 15 She also bought herself a mink coat.

  She began research for her second play, Days to Come, but was perfectly happy to accept Sam Goldwyn’s offer of $2,500 a week to return to Hollywood. “I’m going back to take a job at just thirty times what the movies paid me the last time I worked for them.” 16 She was now one of the highest paid screenwriters in town.

  Hammett’s own income in 1934 was also huge, around $100,000. In 1935 it topped $100,000. He was still unbelievably rich but, unbearably, no longer a novelist.

  CHAPTER 11

  Hammett, employed by MGM as a $2,000-a-week screenwriter, was brilliant but unreliable. He drank, sharpened pencils, thought about Communism, and monitored Hellman’s sudden fame.

  Lily’s Children’s Hour triumph had offered her a splendid reentry into Hollywood. As a lowly paid reader at MGM, she had worked in Culver City’s dusty gloom. Now, in 1935, as a high-salaried screenwriter, she had a desk in Sam Goldwyn’s palatial Formosa Avenue studio. Dash and Lily never pretended to feel degraded by film work, as did some screenwriters. Instead, Dash taught Lily toughness and to use her quick temper, which Hollywood moguls would respect. It worked with Goldwyn, for whom Hellman wrote five screenplays, starting with The Dark Angel, which was censored and not allowed distribution until Hellman had removed all sexual implications between the two main characters. Goldwyn, mightily impressed with its 1936 Academy Awards, paid $40,000 for screen rights to The Children’s Hour, whose title he was not allowed to use and whose purchase he was not allowed to advertise because of Hays Office objections.

  In 1922, movie producers who believed Hollywood culture was immoral had appointed a censorious regulator, Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, where his job was to insist on rigid Christian principles from screenwriters, casting directors, and producers, promulgated in a Motion Pictures Production Code. He was especially fierce with anyone Jewish or Communist. Hammett had helped ensure that Hellman, left-wing, Jewish, and feisty, managed all right within the Code. Now he advised her to be pragmatic about the fact that their “baby” was being retitled These Three, under which label all suggestions of lesbianism were removed, and its publicity material contained no direct or indirect reference to Hellman’s drama. She could not even receive credit for writing the play.

  As members of the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), Hammett and Hellman had begun negotiations in 1934 for rules to help writers, which infuriated the studios. The guild was a quasi-union that stood up to studio heads determined to keep writers anonymous, divided, and largely underpaid. Thirty percent of Hollywood writers earned less than $2,000 yearly, and only 10 percent more than $10,000 at a time when the average wage in the United States was $1,600. Hammett, though a high earner, believed in protecting fellow workers. He recalled his strikebreaking Pinkerton days and soon took leadership roles in both the SWG, where he would become a board member in 1937, and the League of American Writers. The League of American Writers (LAW) was founded by the Communist Party in 1935 to unite Hollywood’s left-wing political forces against the rising Nazi threat. Hammett would become president of the LAW in 1941.

  Hammett’s nascent political activism also included attending Communist Party meetings in Hollywood, and later joining the party and participating in writers’ groups sponsored by it. (I’ll discuss this at length in the next chapter.)

  Samuel Goldwyn, like many other studio heads suspicious of employees’ unions, felt employees should be absolutely loyal. On May 11, 1927, several Hollywood studio heads had established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to maintain their power. Radical screenwriters, including Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Hammett’s friends Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, found unionization gave them shared commitment and some bargaining power.

  Dash no longer took much pleasure in his sexual relations with Lily. He feared his new impotence in his writing would be mirrored in his sex life. So he used Lily as he used his chippies, but made clear that although she came free, she did not have their skills. Lily became very disturbed by this new situation. Dash told no one that sex with Lily had gone badly wrong. Lily told her diary. She speculated that it was because they no longer had a “grand passion.” Immersed in her own exciting writing, it did not occur to her that the reason might be the absence of Hammett’s own passion: writing.

  Neither Dash nor Lily could decide what might improve their relationship. Lily thought their unwed status might be one cause. So she shocked Dash by finally asking him to marry her. He refused. He said Jose was a Catholic. She would never divorce him. He did not say he had one wife and did not need another. No matter how carefully he chose his words, Lily felt rejected. She consoled herself by lunching with Art, who saw she was “very unhappy.” Two days later, she told Art she felt distanced from Dash and now wished to act as if unattached. She started by sleeping more often with Kober, then when Shumlin arrived, she slept with him again, too.

  Modest Kober had suddenly become a big name as a successful stage and screenwriter who, between 1930 and 1946, would pen more than thirty screenplays and plays, including two Broadway hits. He knew everybody and introduced his ex-wife to them. Initially, Lily shared Hammett’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire and contributed half the rent. Despite her “strong tie” to Dash, her deep affection for Art meant they lunched, dined, went to bed together before she returned to Dash. Increasingly, with Dash’s sexual withdrawal, she used sex with other men, including Kober, to gain approval. Dash intimidated her when they made love; Art did not, so she learned to relax.

  Noticing her slight withdrawal, Dash, when invited to meet Gertrude Stein, said he would accept if he could bring “someone.” He took Lily, whose recent artistic prestige appeared to have bypassed Stein, for she lavished praise on Hammett and Charlie Chaplin but said nothing to Hellman or the other female guests, who included Paulette Goddard and Anita Loos. Snubbed lady visitors were always left to the attentions of Stein’s wife, Alice B. Toklas.

  Though dining out with Dash as a couple pleased Lillian, she was unable to stop him from sleeping with chippies.

  Jose suffered privately from Dash’s absences, but Lily shrank publicly from his cruelty. Wretchedly, she recalled her mother’s tolerant despair over Max’s women. Perhaps Julia had felt she had no other choice. Hellman was determined to exert her options. But every time she bedded Art, she remained compulsively attached to the unavailable Dash. The attention Dash gave his family did nothing to raise Lily’s spirits. Now that they all lived on the West Coast, he saw his children frequently and asked Lily to engage with them. Discovering that young Jo wanted to learn to ride, he took her to a store to select an equestrian habit. Lily, who came reluctantly, was mercilessly sharp with the assistants. Jo was mortified, but her father laughed. Yet he never behaved like that or allowed them to be rude. Jo understood her mother’s silent disapproval of Lillian, but desiring her father’s love, she, too, kept quiet.

  Jo had heard their Kelly relatives complain about the way
her seemingly wealthy father ill-treated Mama. Jo, however, had also heard her father complain about the dollars that ran away. She was aware that often the dollars ran into generous gifts for her and Mary, the new riding coat, the matching hat and boots, and huge boxes of candy, even stuffed ducks overflowing with goodies. The previous year, from Florida, he had sent Mary an expensive wristwatch and Jo an Alice bracelet. He bought Mama a silver brush and mirror and had given her garnets she was too shy to wear. Jo knew he had given Lillian a mink coat, which Lillian was not shy about. Papa even rented a Beverly Hills house for them and told Jose: “Get someone in to do the work.”

  Jo thought about the Kellys’ comments. Could a grownup be mean as well as generous? Poor as well as rich?

  Hammett was poor, said one friend, because he would give you the shirt off his back. Hammett was poor, said another, because money meant nothing to him. He appreciated people paying him back, but he never once asked for it. Hammett was poor, said Lily, because he did not care about money, made no complaints, and had no regrets when it was gone. 1 Hammett was poor, said Jo, because when he had money, he gave it to you, and when he didn’t, he gave it to you anyway.

  Hammett’s already low self-esteem over his inability to write sank further. His fear that impotence in one area would be matched by impotence in another was accelerated when gonorrhea and other genital ailments returned. Lily became scared she would catch a sexual disease. She felt more lonely when Kober quit his job with Fox in April, saying it was a burden off his shoulders, then left Hollywood after a lavish farewell party on May 23, 1935, at which Dash became excessively tight, partly because he, too, valued Kober’s friendship.

  Hellman, who believed she could solve problems by traveling, escaped in June when These Three was completed. Although Dash felt he could treat Lily any way he liked and she would still not look for other men, except for occasional comfort, he was wrong. In Albuquerque, she met a bright, young man of twenty-five, Ralph Ingersoll, former managing editor of the New Yorker, currently managing editor of Fortune magazine, who for a brief time introduced Hellman to his bed and a more sophisticated form of politics. Yearning for Hammett, Lily nevertheless made love with Ingersoll. Soon, however, they began to have arguments. He was a married man, too. Dash noticed Lily was still juggling oranges, but what he didn’t realize was that she still wanted him very much. The fact that Dash and Lily were rarely open with each other about their feelings meant that briefly she did consider marrying Ingersoll and told Dash she was semi-serious “about another man.” But when later she mentioned that she had decided not to marry the man, her version was that Hammett had said, “I would never have allowed that, never.” 2

  During 1935, Lily confided in Dash about her increasing concerns over the health of Julia, her mother. Dash seemed unable to work out how best to support her, and when untreatable colon cancer resulted in Julia’s death on November 30, it was Kober who was there to comfort her. Dash kept away. Max could not contain his grief. Every time he mentioned Julia, he burst into tears. Lily longed for Dash’s support, but he remained in Hollywood. Perhaps he knew he would seem out of place at a Jewish funeral. Perhaps he was drunk. Lil and Max quarreled over the funeral arrangements, while Arthur, who loved Julia, soothed everyone and quietly took charge.

  Lily realized too late how much she had misunderstood her mother. Only now, suffering Hammett’s philanderings, did she comprehend what Julia went through. But her belated respect for Julia was tempered by the strange relief she felt that the rival for her father was dead.

  Max needed her desperately, wanted her love, desired her. Ironically, she suddenly fell out of love with him. Her desire was only for Dash. Max and Lily continued to argue into 1936, yet for years Hellman could not admit the roots of her twisted relationship with her father, until she wrote about it first in Another Part of the Forest then in Toys in the Attic. In Dash’s absence, she slept with Kober through December’s difficult days.

  In the fall of 1935, Hammett had moved back and forth between New York and Hollywood, staying at the Plaza in New York and the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills. By January 1936, his drinking and partying lowered his resistance to illness, and he again collapsed with lung disease. He entered Lenox Hill Hospital on January 11. Briefly released, he reentered on January 16 to be treated for venereal disease, lung disease, alcoholism, and generally dreadful health. That was the first of a series of Lenox Hill hospitalizations, which continued in March and July 1936, May and June 1938, June 1940, and December 1948. On finally leaving Lenox Hill Hospital in early February, clutching the books Blanche had sent for his convalescence, he took a room at the Hotel Madison on East 58th Street, where he was so financially insecure that the Knopfs rescued him with a Valentine’s Day gift of an early royalty payment of $478.99.

  Characteristically, he made light of his hospitalization. A letter to Mary postmarked January 16, 1936, from the New York Plaza said: “It’s mighty nice being back in New York, though I haven’t been feeling well enough to get around very much. Tomorrow I’m going to the Lenox Hill Hospital, 76th St. and Park Avenue, for a week or two to see what’s the matter with me. Don’t any of you worry too much about it. My doctor seems to think it’s only that I’m run down and need a good rest.”

  He asked Mary to kiss Jo and Jose for him, then curiously signed it, “Love, Dash.” A few days later in a letter to Jo, he asked her to “tell Jose I’m feeling a lot better.” Reassuring them in a fatherly manner that there was nothing to worry about as the doctors kept him in bed where the nurse even scrubbed his face for him, strangely he yet again signed the note “Dash.” 3 Until this point, Hammett had always signed letters to his children “Love, Papa” or “Love, Pop.” This new signature might reflect a sudden distance from his role of father. But hospitalization is as likely to symbolize acute alienation from a sense of self. Such a change is not untypical of those who are institutionalized even briefly. When Zelda Fitzgerald entered her second mental hospital, the signature on her letters to her young daughter, Scottie, changed from “love, Mama” to the stark “Zelda.” Time in hospital is life out of control. Perhaps his own name was all Hammett could cling to.

  Dash wondered whether Lily would invite him to share her first New York apartment at 14 East Seventy-Fifth Street. She did not, and he said nothing. Their relationship was going through another phase of silences and misunderstandings.

  In spring 1936, she spent a month traveling between Cleveland and Cincinnati, gaining background information for her new play, Days to Come. She invited Dash to Tavern Island off the shore of Connecticut to read a draft, but he was still too ill to give his expertise. Later, when Ralph Ingersoll joined her at Tavern Island in September 1936, assuming they would have time alone, he found Hammett at the head of the table, and Shumlin and Kober in residence.

  In October, Hammett left New York City for Princeton University, where he had been hired to teach creative writing seminars. He rented a fashionable mansion at 90 Cleveland Avenue, ensconced his manservant Jones and his dog named Baby. Lily, in an anxious state, arrived with her revisions. Her second play was an astute evaluation of the crisis between labor and management during the Depression, but it was less a political argument than a moral one. Lily explored her characters’ psychological intricacies as if in a novel, which Dash felt might not work on stage. But drinking heavily, he made only perfunctory criticisms, said foolishly the words were “fine.” Both knew they were not.

  When Lily returned to New York, he brought in Pru Whitfield, with whom he had begun an affair in January 1936 at the time of entering Lenox Hill Hospital and while he was recovering. Despite the fact that Pru’s ex-husband, writer Raoul Whitfield, had been a fellow Black Masker, was a protégé of Blanche’s, and had always been a decent friend to Dash, he did not hesitate to woo Pru and form an intimate friendship with her.

  While neighbors in Princeton complained bitterly about Hammett’s loud, boorish behavior, Hellman in New York worked to correct the play’s f
aults. Without Hammett’s discipline, however, she did not pare the dialogue or focus the action.

  Dash nevertheless believed in the play. Shumlin eagerly directed it. A talented cast, including Florence Eldridge, William Harrigan, and Ben Smith, opened on December 15, 1936 at the Vanderbilt Theatre.

  Hellman had analyzed society’s ineffectuals, the incompetent bosses who let decay and evil destroy others. Later plays of hers would succeed magnificently, but without Hammett’s help, the well-intentioned Days to Come, a rehearsal play, defeated her.

  The audience grew restless. At the end of act three, applause was muted. Hellman vomited in a side aisle as the curtain went down. Hammett and Kober found her lying distraught in an alley behind the theater, weeping and crying: “It’s a flop.” It was. The opening night party resembled a wake. She yelled at Hammett that he was a son of a bitch. He had said her play was good. Hammett was silent, gathered his cloak, headed for the door. Then he turned. “I did indeed. But I saw it at the Vanderbilt tonight and I’ve changed my mind.”

  The play ran for only six performances.

  She had dedicated it to Julia and Max. When it opened, her mother was dead and she was alienated from her beloved father. Lily had always felt Max had failed her. Now she felt not only that she had failed Julia, but for the first time Dash, their politics, and playwriting had failed her.

  However, Lily, unlike Dash at that point, had enormous resilience, which helped her confront her failures. She knew Dash believed life had no meaning. She felt differently. Life had to have meaning. She must stay in control. Passionate politics and effective drama had to be her future.

  Hammett, still unable to write, for the first time envied Lily’s optimistic determination. He watched her yet again invent order out of disarray. If he was to survive his current writing failure, then he must construct something different; he must pay more attention to Lily’s work, which he had neglected when drunk and ill; and he must further develop his interest in politics.