I first heard of her through my interest in movies and Dashiell Hammett. They were lovers for many years and it was said that he modeled Nora Charles on her. She wrote the courageous play, “The Children’s Hour,” (1934) about two teachers tragically accused by a student of being lesbians. The second movie version, with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn (1961) seemed to be an apt metaphor for the McCarthy era — like Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” which was about the Salem witch trials.
I had heard that Miller, Hammett and Hellman were all victims of the HUAC witch hunts. Hammett went to jail, and Hellman bravely challenged the committee, famously writing: “I refuse to cut my conscience to fit the fashions of the day.”
TV often showed the movie version of Hellman’s anti-fascist play, “Watch on the Rhine,” starring Bette Davis and Paul Lucas. Davis had starred in another adaptation of a Hellman play, “The Little Foxes.” Both were directed by William Wyler, Hellman’s good friend. She had written the screenplay for “Dead End” on of my favorite Depression era films, which starred Humphrey Bogart, also directed by Wyler.
Hellman next came to my attention in the 1970's with her memoir, “Pentimento” which included a story called “Julia.” The movie starred Jason Robards as Hammett, Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as her tragic and heroic childhood friend who was killed by the Nazis. The film won three Oscars.
This book claims that the image was almost all bullshit.
It is refreshing to read a biography written by someone who is not an apologist or in awe of the subject. Dorothy Gallagher’s book has been called by reviewers bitchy, and a hatchet job. It is scathing in its criticism, nasty in its tone. Even her acknowledgments of Hellman’s achievements — her talent, her skill as a playwright, her wit, are often grudging, sarcastic, and conditional, accompanied by far more convincing “Buts”. When she does relate Hellman’s version of an event or person, Gallagher conditions it with “maybe” or “possibly.”
Hellman’s life also touched other characters whose lives interested me: Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Dorothy Parker.
According to the author, Gellhorn and Hemingway both despised Hellman, denied her inflated claim of involvement in the Spanish Civil War cause.
Parker, though a life-long friend who was helped financially by Hellman during her decline, was a posthumous victim of Hellman’s predatory greed when she became her executor and tried to negate Parker’s wish to leave her estate to Martin Luther King and the NAACP. Hellman made nasty remarks about both: “he’s just a southern preacher.”
Hellman also became executor of Hammett’s estate, made vast sums exploiting his copyrights and tried to deny his daughters their share.
Although admitting Hellman’s talent as a writer, Gallagher asserts that Hammett gave her the plot of “The Children’s Hour” from a story he had heard about a trial in Scotland. She strongly implies that he deserves more credit for her work than Hellman was willing to admit. He was so much a part of Hellman’s writing, with advice, editing, revising this and all of her plays, that after his death, she wrote no more plays.
Hellman’s anti-fascist, anti-McCarthy courage was not so courageous, nor very noble. She was not “right” about her steadfast support for Stalin, dishonestly and stupidly ignoring obvious facts contrary to her beliefs of the righteousness of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.
Hellman was foolish in other respects as well. In what seems a bit mean-spirited gossip mongering, Gallagher points out that tor years Lillian Hellman paid for therapy with a psychiatrist who was little more than a charlatan. He gave celebrities advice about their health and sex lives, had sex with some patients, fleeced others. Gallagher claims that George Gershwin and his lover, Kate Swift, were both his clients. He had sex with Swift, told Gershwin, who had a brain tumor, that his headaches were from neuroses. Hellman took his advice regarding her many love affairs.
In detail, Gallagher snipes at almost every aspect of Hellman’s life, exposing the meanness, self-deceiving, selfishness that Gallagher documents in Hellman’s work, her relations with lovers, friends, the public.
It is ironic that Gallagher’s book is published as part of a Yale Press series called “Jewish Lives” because, according to the author, Hellman was a pretty bad Jew. She was born into a nominally Jewish but very secular family whose German ancestors landed in Georgia in the 1840's and thrived in business in the antebellum south. Hellman’s father married into the wealthy family, but he was a failure in business, died leaving her mother a poor relative of a rich family, an obvious and traditional source of resentments. Two of her famous plays, “The Little Foxes” and “Another Part of the Forest,” were about southern families corrupted by greed.
Her fictitious families (called the Hubbards) are not overtly Jewish, a fact which Gallagher sees as a noteworthy example of Hellman’s less than noble denial of her Jewish identity. I think this is a weak argument: if Hellman had made the family Jewish, it would have been dismissed as stereotypically (for the time) anti-semitic. Gallagher also quotes Hellman’s occasional negative quips about Jews as further evidence, but I have heard this stuff all my life, sometimes from members of my own family. Although Hellman readily acknowledged being Jewish, she denied any knowledge of the religion or identified with it as “race” or a “people.” This is not unusual, especially among that era’s long assimilated Jews, and especially those raised with no real sense of community. Hellman looked down her long nose at New York ghetto Jews. This too was not unusual for her time and society, even among liberals.
Gallagher make a similar point about “Watch on the Rhine” which Hellman based on Otto Katz, an anti-Nazi German who was a communist and a Jew. Hellman amended both of those traits, creating her hero as a liberal generic anti-Nazi resistance leader. Gallagher also notes that Hellman’s friend was later “purged” by the Soviets, tried and executed for imagined crimes against the state, facts which Hellman ignored in her blind love of the Party.
Hellman was also involved in the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary into the play. She was offered the chance to write it, but turned it down, suggested Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, two non-Jewish screenwriters who had written the scripts for the “Thin Man” movies. She advised them to diminish the Jewishness of the story, deleting the girl’s ardent self-identification as a Jewish victim.
Contrary to Gallagher’s implied criticism, I think both of these modifications are justifiable as commercially viable choices. I think that Hellman was no different from many Jewish artists of her generation, who suppressed their Jewishness to assimilate. Her friend George Gershwin knew it and did it too.
Although Hellman was actively and vocally anti-Nazi from early in the 1930's, she was quoted as focusing more on the evils of fascism in general and against communists in particular than on the Jews, even after exposure of the holocaust.
It is in Hellman’s life-long commitment to communism that Gallagher finds the richest paydirt. Gallagher indicts Hellman for many sins of deception, stupidity, immorality.
She points out that both Hellman and Hammett had lauded Stalin and the USSR despite news of the brutal purges of Trotskyites and other opponents, the suppression of dissent including artists, writers, and intellectuals, the forced famine of the Ukraine. Their worst sin was continuing blind approval of Stalin long after others had abandoned the Party in the face of the non-aggression pact with Hitler. For most this was a last straw. But Hammett and Hellman both hewed to the party line: now refusing to criticize their new “ally” Hitler and in fact bitterly attacking those who abandoned the Party line as weak liberals, until all was forgotten after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and eventually, the U.S. entered the war as Stalin’s ally.
Hellman later in life dissembled, tried to revise her previous stances, claiming that she never wholly supported Stalin, etcetera, grudgingly acknowledged her ignorance of the true facts, while still keeping to her general leftish bent. Gallagher challenges even this, noting all the many chances Hellman had to learn the “true facts,” including several visits to the USSR during which she could have learned the truth of Stalin’s evil but chose to stay ignorant.
Which brings me to Gallagher’s overall theme: that Hellman ignored the facts and hid the truth about almost everything in her work, politics, life.
The crux of the thing occurs when “Julia” became famous. A woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a letter to Hellman and then wrote her own book, noting the coincidence between her life and “Julia’s.” Gardiner had been raised in wealth and privilege, but in Europe had become an active anti-Nazi, had gone to Austria, worked for the resistance, and eventually returned.
Critics began to question the sources of Hellman’s supposed memoir. No corroborative evidence existed to support Hellman’s claims. Eventually, Mary McCarthy, writer and critic, was asked by Dick Cavett on his T.V. show about overrated writers. She named one, Lillian Hellman. Pressed by Cavett to explain, McCarthy uttered one of the most quoted jibes ever: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Hellman sued McCarthy for slander, and died before the suit came to trial. But the damage was done. Gallagher cites many sources to challenge the veracity of the Julia tale. It never happened, not to Hellman, or her childhood friend, if she ever really had one.
After noting all of the discrepancies in the details of Hellman’s account of the “Julia” story, Gallagher poses the theme of her book this way:
“It was no secret to Hellman’s friends that she ‘didn’t know the boundary between fact and fiction’ as Norman Mailer said after she died. In her personal life this mattered only to her friends: they could take her with a grain of salt, or not at all. But Hellman had a public life, and she wrote about it. She wrote about herself as witness to the world — in Moscow, in Spain, in Vienna and Berlin . . . at the very time of crucial historical events. Her readers saw the world through her eyes. She wrote about her relations with celebrated people . . . and her readers saw them through her often unadmiring eyes.
“Does it matter if she was actually in all of those places, at those times, and if she saw what she said she did? Does it matter if one or many of the stories that make up her memoirs are invented? Readers enjoy them and, after all, every memoirist, everyone who tries to tell a true story for that matter, fails to some degree. It is not the truth that is tricky and unreliable, as Hellman would have it. Memory is the problem: the color of a dress, the arrangement of furniture in a room, the words of a conversation — these things can be lost or confused. Truth remains in the facts; facts can be verified, but only if the writer cares to do so.
“Hellman either knew or did not know Julia. . . . She did or did not belong to the Communist Party.”
Gallagher quotes “historian and author Timothy Garton,” about the “‘frontier’ between ‘literature of fact’ and the ‘literature of fiction’”:
“Imagination is the sun that illuminates both countries. But this leads us into a temptation . . . ‘look just across the frontier there is a gorgeous flower — the one novelistic detail that will bring the whole story alive. Pop across and pick it. No one will notice.’ ... But if we claim to write the literature of fact, it must be resisted.
“Why? For moral reasons, above all. Words written about the real world have consequences in the real world. ... moral reasons are sufficient; but there are artistic ones too. Writers often cross this frontier because they think their work will be enhanced as a result. Reportage or history will become literature. Paragraph for paragraph that may be true. But as a whole, the work is diminished.
“... It is the one question was always ask of those who bring us news of the world. Did that really happen? Is it true?”
In our time, other memoirists have been exposed as frauds; journalists have manufactured news, invented sources, imagined interviews. So what? Isn’t it all entertainment. “Infotainment?” the web, blogs, free lance agenda driven reporting is the new norm.
These questions I’ve thought about with regard to the border of art and reality, the difference between fact and truth. Does the artist have any responsibility to tell the truth? Does the goal of entertainment always justify or excuse deception?
Movies and novels are meant to entertain. Art aspires to some more: to express beauty, to tell at least a part of the truth about nature, humanity, life. Artists talk a lot about seeking truth. There is something called “poetic truth” which implies seeking a deeper reality than exists in “mere facts.”
All art is a lie, we are told by modern and post-modern philosophers. Of course, this clever argument is a truism. Yes, a painting of a pipe is not a pipe. Yes, Ben Kingsley was not Gandhi. T.E. Lawrence looked nothing like Peter O’Toole and many of the events of “Lawrence of Arabia” did not happen. This was a fictional story, not a documentary, and even those make choices to include, omit, emphasize, dramatize facts about the subject, take a point of view.
The greatest works of historic historians have all included biased reportage.
And yet I have often been troubled by things I have read and watched about things I knew about, and knew to be false, deceptive, manipulative. As a lawyer, I groan at the misrepresentations of the law and the system I know. Acquaintances in other professions have similar complaints: doctors, teachers, ministers, even movie makers, moan about dramas about their professions.
But “it is only a show, or “only a movie” I am told. True, and I can ignore the dramas that don’t purport to be anything other than mere entertainment. No one can take seriously Perry Mason’s weekly ability to pluck the guilty from his courtroom audience, although I do remember when this show was popular, that we lawyers took the time to caution prospective jurors not to expect us to pull that rabbit from our hats.
My problem comes in the kind of “docudrama” that is intended to do more than merely amuse or entertain: but to expose an issue or to send a message, to teach. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a good example of a courtroom drama that sends a message. I have never heard a southern lawyer complain about any lack of authenticity in its depiction of the rape trial and I have no qualms about it.
But what about other legal dramas or satires which are intended to reveal something about the law or lawyers or the justice system. “The Verdict” is one of those. Lawyers protested the implausible plot that had an incompetent alcoholic shyster suing a Catholic hospital for medical malpractice while the prestigious firm representing the Church planted a spy to have sex with the plaintiff’s lawyer. After the lawyer insults the judge, incompetently prepares and argues his case (which if real would have been settled), the jury returns a huge verdict in his favor, ignoring the judge’s instructions. This is the happy end of the movie, which every lawyer laughed at, knowing that any judge would have reversed the verdict, and any appeal would have left the client poor.
But it was a good movie. Paul Newman was great in it.
Al Pacino was terrific in “In Justice For All,” in which he is forced to defend a corrupt judge, but then exposed his guilty client in court. Friends mimicked his tag line: “No, judge, you’re out of order; this whole system is out of order!” wished they had the guts to shout it in their cases. But some took it as an indictment of defense lawyers and their corrupt complicity in an unjust system, a dangerous distortion of reality.
The most outrageous example is the oldest one: “Birth of a Nation” in 1915 depicted the rise of the KKK as a justifiable and even noble response to the asserted evils of the reconstruction era. With D.W. Griffith’s immense artistic skill taking full advantage of the new technology of the cinema: editing, musical score, close-ups, stirred emotions of the audience to a fever pitch. Race riots resulted in lynching of Negroes and supported the nationwide revival of the Klan, resulting in fifty more years of murder and repression. Yet President Wilson, the great intellectual and morally pious president, praised the movie as “writing history with lightning.”
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