by Marion Meade
To be sure, it was hearts and flowers fluff but seemed appropriate nonetheless. By 1945, after fifteen years of economic depression and a brutal war, everybody was starved for a bit of giddiness. Soon, Alan and Dash would be back safely from the service,59 life would go on as before in peaceful Beverly Hills and pastoral Bucks County. With every reason to believe in the future, they envisioned stories, plays, and movies, love, money, and fun. Anything else, they didn’t want to know about.
But that was a mistake, because in the years following the war, they would have to grapple with epic burdens, the kind of messes that made no sense. One question, by then, was whether they were going to prison. The other question was for how long.
Chapter 4
NORMA PLACE
(1951–1963)
Lilly knew the subpoena was coming. When a man wearing a black preacher’s suit showed up at her house, he removed his hat before politely asking if she was Lillian Hellman. Then he handed over the envelope ordering her appearance before the committee investigating Communist influence in the motion picture industry. While he stood waiting, she read the subpoena, then slammed the door in his face.
She did not think that she could feel so calm. Without telling anyone about the subpoena, she spent the next hour reading her mail and finally lay down for a nap. But she awoke drenched in sweat.
In September 1951, a screenwriter named Martin Berkeley had told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party for seven years, while working at MGM and Columbia. He testified under oath that scores of actors, directors, and fellow writers also belonged to the party and went on to identify, by name, 161 individuals. Among them were Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, and Alan Campbell. He placed the four of them, plus Donald Ogden Stewart, at his home on the day when, he said, the Hollywood section of the party was organized in June 1937. His place, he added, was chosen because he had a large living room and ample parking facilities. Nobody coughed up more names than Berkeley, who seems to have panicked and tossed in the names of innocent bystanders, like Alan, having no involvement with the party.
As Lilly soon learned, all her alternatives were unpleasant. The Fifth Amendment gave her a constitutional right to refuse to answer questions on the grounds of self-incrimination, but she did not wish to claim the privilege, which she considered a sleazy circumvention famously favored by drug dealers and Mafioso. Knowing that she was in great trouble, she took the subpoena to a Washington attorney specializing in civil liberties and emphatically stated her own agenda. “I’m not going to jail,” she told Joseph Rauh.60 Neither would she name names or take the Fifth. In fact, she would only answer questions about her own life. But, he warned, if she replied to questions about herself, she could be forced to talk about other people or face contempt charges. It was pointless to attempt horse-trading with the committee. Once again, she said that her main purpose was to avoid jail.
Following Rauh’s instructions, she prepared an account of her political activities for the committee. Accordingly, she wrote about how she’d joined the party in 1938 without giving it much thought and remained a member until 1940. She would willingly tell the committee about her own activities but could not, in all good conscience, hurt innocent people to save her own skin. Leaning toward a strategy of moral outrage, she continued: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.” Rauh rewrote her statement but omitted the troublesome admission of party membership and dispatched it to the committee on May 19, 1952. Lilly, meanwhile, had her hair freshly colored and bought a lovely silk dress, a black-and-brown-checked Balmain.
Two days later, at 11 A.M., she presented herself at the Old House Office Building wearing the Balmain with a black hat and carrying a handkerchief. Her stomach in knots, but appearing cool, Rauh at her side, she was sworn in and cautiously began responding to the committee’s questions.
What studios had she worked for? What was she doing in 1937?
To these routine inquiries she kept her answers concise. Rauh had warned her not to make a spectacle of herself, no strutting and posturing, specifically, to refrain from jokes or express belligerence, like some previous witnesses had done, to their regret. Then the committee members got down to business: Had she ever met Martin Berkeley? She must refuse to answer, she said. Berkeley’s testimony was read aloud. At this point, Joseph Rauh distributed copies of her statement of conscience to the committee, to be read into the record, and also passed out copies to the press gallery. The committee continued to concentrate on Martin Berkeley. Did she attend the meeting at his house? She declined to answer.
There was more. Questions followed questions until, finally, came the sixty-four-dollar question: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Like so many others before her, she refused to incriminate herself and invoked the Fifth Amendment. After one hour and seven minutes, she was surprised when they suddenly excused her. Now what?
Tense, she sat waiting for the next question. It was a badly run operation. “Get up,” Rauh whispered in her ear. She must leave the building immediately, walking swiftly without running, and speaking to no one. Interviews or a press conference would make more trouble for herself.
That same afternoon on the plane back to New York, she broke down and vomited, she would remember. Regrettably, she had been forced to take the Fifth, but she had not named names, and that was a victory of sorts. An even bigger surprise was getting off without being prosecuted. Did her sex save her?
Although Martin Berkeley swore Dottie was present at the organization meeting of the Hollywood Communist Party, HUAC failed to subpoena her. Neither did they bother to call Alan Campbell, who was viewed by the government as nothing more than a bystander and thus not worth questioning. Several years earlier, Dottie had divorced Alan who remained in England after the war because of another woman. By the time he made his way home in 1946, tail between his legs, she rejected the possibility of reconciliation. Nothing remained of either their marriage or their professional collaboration, and Alan would not share her Oscar nomination for Smash-Up.
Living without Alan proved more difficult than expected, and so in 1950 she took an unusual step, one that horrified Lilly. “Her husband was a pip-squeak, but she saw fit to remarry him.”61 The decision was, in some respects, predictable, a case of not being able to live together or apart. The ceremony took place in Hollywood, where Alan was trying to get work at the studios. Mainly, he scraped out a living from income as one of the original investors in the musical South Pacific, directed by his friend Joshua Logan. Lilly’s skepticism turned out to be realistic because the second marriage didn’t work either. Dottie quietly retreated to New York after just a few months and moved into the Volney, a residence hotel on East Seventy-fourth Street in which she would make her home off and on for the rest of her life and which served as the inspiration for her feminist play The Ladies of the Corridor.62
Four years after Berkeley’s testimony, Dottie was finally called as a witness, in February 1955, and then it was not by HUAC but a New York State committee investigating financial contributions to organizations considered to be Communist-run. In the thirties and forties, Dottie had lent her name and money to so many of these supposed “front” groups that she might have lost count. (The actual number was thirty-three.)
Worried that Dottie might panic, Lilly made a special point of offering to accompany her downtown to the court house.
“Why?” replied Dottie,63 who chose to view the summons as a request, not as a command, and consequently saw no reason to make a big deal of it. Several weeks earlier, not for the first time either, FBI agents came by and commenced asking questions about her various affiliations. Did she belong to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? The League of American Writers? The agen
ts could barely make themselves heard above the yammering of her poodle. Dottie frowned and pretended to be mystified by their inquiries. “My influence?” she said, as if unfamiliar with the word. 64 Jesus Christ, she couldn’t even get her dog to shut up. Unbeknownst to her, the FBI had been keeping an eye on her activities since 1939, even though their surveillance files consisted largely of newspaper clippings and fund-raising letters.
Still, when she arrived at the New York County Courthouse, she had taken pains to look stylish. She was wearing a mink jacket and a spiffy Tyrolean hat, along with an expression of discreet contempt. The questions, predictable, centered on how much money had been raised and what happened to the funds. Dottie’s position was that she could do nothing for the Committee, unfortunately. How was she supposed to know what the Spanish Refugee Appeal did with its money? The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League? She had no idea it was controlled by Communists.
Was she a member of the Communist Party? Raising her voice for the first time, she promptly invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.
Shortly thereafter, the government concluded that she presented no danger to national security and finally closed its Parker files, which by this time ran to beyond nine hundred pages.
•
In time, Lilly would write about the financial consequences of the blacklist, the overwhelming hardships it created for the victims. Some writers did not work in their professions for ten years, some never again. Unfortunately for Hammett, the cost was even greater. His association with a left-wing group designated as a Communist front – and his refusal to name contributors to its bail fund – led to a conviction for contempt of court. Five months in prison left him sick and broken. In her own case, it meant both the loss of Hollywood assignments and her country home at Hardscrabble Farm. In 1953, she briefly took a movie-writing job in Rome and tried to save by living in a cheap hotel. Back home, pinching pennies, she gave up taxis and allotted herself five dollars a week to splurge on candy bars and dime-store lipsticks. To make ends meet, she would later claim to have worked as a part-time clerk, under an assumed name, in the grocery section of a department store.
But for all the painful losses, her plight was not quite the catastrophe she pictured. For the most part, her everyday life was little changed. In fact, she continued to soldier on as before in her Manhattan townhouse, with a housekeeper and dinner parties, and she still appeared in tasteful if less showy designer clothes. She was, to be sure, not so wealthy as she had been. Still, it seemed like a great comedown.
What was a setback – and sometimes nothing more than a nuisance – for Lilly was a calamity for Dottie. Almost sixty, she had been earning her living as a professional writer for more than thirty-seven years. Her last nonwriting employment was playing piano at a dance studio in 1913. Without question, she was a miserable businessperson, neglecting to cash checks promptly and relying on her husband to manage the checkbook, and she had made no plans for her older years.
For a while, the sale of the Bucks County farm provided a comfortable nest egg, but it didn’t take long to exhaust the money, and when debts stacked up she was forced to borrow from Lilly – indeed, Lilly claimed, “a good deal of money.”65 True to form, they didn’t talk about repayment because good friends did not discuss such disagreeable subjects. Instead, Dottie insisted on giving her the Picasso watercolor and the Utrillo she had owned since the thirties. Afterward, during another emergency, she had to reclaim the Utrillo and sell it. The true extent of Lilly’s financial woes is suggested by the fact that Dottie felt comfortable asking for a loan, which would not have been the case otherwise. Besides, in Dottie’s eyes, Lilly may not have appeared exactly broke because she’d just purchased a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.
On the face of it, their friendship continued unchanged during the fifties. When Lilly was working with Leonard Bernstein on a musical adaptation of Candide, she invited Dottie to contribute lyrics for the song “Gavotte.” Apart from such professional favors, Lilly was a hospitable hostess who regularly extended invitations to the Vineyard. For whatever reason, unclear to Dottie, she could never be in the house when Dash was around. After a ferry ride churning through seven miles of seas from Woods Hole, she sometimes would find herself relegated to a guesthouse down the road. Being a good sport, she never complained.
Once she was visiting when Lilly got a call to drop everything and leave the island. Before dashing off, she started flitting around chopping and stirring, spooning the mixtures into little pans. She slapped together three days of suppers, writing down instructions about how long to heat each casserole and even lighting the oven before leaving. Besides the hot meals, she left an assortment of fancy sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs.
Lilly got home to find the casseroles untouched, the eggs and sandwiches uneaten. It looked like Dottie had consumed nothing but a large chunk of cheese. If this wasn’t bad enough, the oven was still on. All that effort to be a good hostess, all those dried-up casseroles and soggy sandwiches. Needless to say, Lilly felt like throttling her. But there was no showdown, not so much as a mention of the uneaten meals.
One of Lilly’s obsessive concerns happened to be food, especially what she considered superior food. Anything less than the best was disdained as “drek,” or “goy drek.” Her culinary tastes were traditional, her gastronomic fetishes inherited from a previous generation of cooks. The dishes she prized were tripe, kippers, quail, chicken hash, calves liver, rabbit, venison, and boiled short ribs. She made soufflés and mousses and of course mayonnaise from scratch. A cook of high standards, she purchased ingredients at first-class stores and bought her meats and poultry at Schaller & Weber, an overpriced German butcher in Manhattan’s Yorkville.
To Dottie, who had never learned to cook, a fixation with food seemed completely daft. She didn’t know the first thing about kitchens and would eat raw bacon before turning on the stove. When Ruth Goetz had her over for dinner, she knew what to expect. Dottie would pick at her plate, sample a morsel or two, and whisper, “Oh that’s lovely.”66 Like a well-behaved child, “she overthanked you when she arrived and overthanked you when she left,” Ruth said. Considering the length of Lilly’s friendship, twenty years by then, it’s rather odd that she remained unaware of Dottie’s indifference to food. Give her a meal in a glass and she would be happy.
•
One day in 1959 a woman came to the Volney to interview Dottie. It was for a Columbia University program that was collecting oral histories of illustrious public figures, described to her as one of those scholarly projects that had become something of a trend lately. As she was being hooked up to the recorder, already wanting to jump out the window, she adopted a grande dame strategy in preparation for taking liberties with the facts.
“I’m not very important,” she warned the interviewer Joan Franklin, who had showed up with her husband, Robert. Furthermore, nobody cared to hear what she had to say. “The Lord knows I don’t want to hear about myself.”
Basically, her poor-little-me routine was meant to generate a bit of sympathy or, at the very least, a laugh, but this time she misjudged because her exaggerations seemed to intimidate Franklin. Jittery, she proceeded to tiptoe through a list of bland, flat-footed questions, mainly about Hollywood, the blacklist, and other subjects that Dottie preferred not to think about. Had she not been drinking, she might have behaved herself. The alcohol, apparently, encouraged her to sweep aside practically every question with the hauteur of a queen.
Her motion pictures? “Never saw them. Not in my contract, for God’s sake.”
Screenwriting? “Why do you keep asking me about Hollywood?”
The blacklist? “For heaven’s sweet sake. I don’t know about the blacklist thing.”
Her fiction? “Not important. Listen, my dear, I do the best I can.”67
Her friends? “Dead. I go staggering on with my graying hair.”
The Spanish Civ
il War? “The Spanish are wonderful people.”
A memoir? “I’ve considered it.”
In the end, she had two choices: shoot Franklin or quote Samuel Johnson. She quoted Dr. Johnson – “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” – at which point Franklin shut off the recorder. Dottie had managed to yap her head off for an hour without saying a single thing of importance.
The transcript, archived at Columbia University’s Butler Library, reads on paper like an ordinary conversation, at least for much of the time. But on the tape, Dottie shows no sign of her soft feathery voice and sounds like what she was – gassed. Likewise, the forlorn interviewer also sounds like what she was – a nervous wreck.68
•
During the fifties, with Hollywood barred to her, Lilly returned to Broadway. She wrote adaptations for four shows, including the book for a Leonard Bernstein operetta based on Candide. Dottie wrote a play too, her first since 1924, in collaboration with one of her boyfriends, Arnaud d’Usseau. The Ladies of the Corridor depicted the lives of older women living on their own in a Manhattan hotel, and the inspiration was, of course, her own home at the Volney.
For both women, love was as hard to get in the 1950s as a screenwriting job. Casual sex was a different story. Although Lilly had never fallen out of love with Dash, she was obliged to seek affection elsewhere. She made do with a string of exemplary but uninspiring males: one a career diplomat, one a young thing twenty-five years her junior, two theatrical producers, others who were journalists, editors, publishers, lawyers; men who, for one reason or another, were stolen from their wives or otherwise unavailable. In the end, there were no deep ties (except to the boy writer who one day would inherit her estate) and no man as thrilling as Hammett.
The men that set Dottie’s heart aflutter seemed to reinforce her reputation for choosing unsuitable lovers. A perfectionist in her writing, she put up with the biggest jackasses in her bed. As usual, the dalliances came to nothing, and the men slunk back to their hopeless marriages. One time in Cuernavaca, the fellow with whom she was living dumped her for another woman. On top of that he stole her dog. She had to find her way, alone and without luggage, from Mexico City to the Plaza Hotel in New York. Another time, when she and d’Usseau were working on The Ladies of the Corridor, his wife Susan rationed her liquor and forced her to eat home-cooked dinners. From time to time she saw Alan Campbell, to whom she was still legally wed, but after two marriages there could be nothing more between them.