Lillian Hellman
June 20, 1906-June 30, 1984
Genre(s): Short stories; Plays; Adaptations; Memoirs; Melodrama; Film scripts
Biographical and Critical Essay
The Children's Hour
These Three
Days to Come
The Little Foxes
Watch on the Rhine
The Searching Wind
Forest
The Autumn Garden
The Lark
Candide
Toys in the Attic
My Mother, My Father and Me
An Unfinished Woman
Pentimento: A Book of Portraits
Scoundrel Time
Maybe
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay
At Lillian Hellman's funeral, John Hersey, referring to the title of Hellman's 1969 volume of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, declared that Hellman was at last a finished woman. Just as some of her plays enjoy periodic revivals, however, Hellman's reputation, dramatic writings, and memoirs continue to be reexamined and reevaluated. The classification of her plays as "well-made" and "melodramas" has been challenged by many who believe her plays cannot be easily categorized. The veracity of Hellman's memoirs continues to be questioned. Since her death Hellman has been the subject of two plays, a television movie, a documentary, and several biographies; interest in her life at times seems to eclipse interest in her drama. Yet, her contributions to the American stage cannot be ignored. Her unflinching examination of individuals' actions and their consequences, her fully realized characters speaking realistic dialogue, and her ability to bring her characters to a climactic confrontation epitomize Hellman's dramaturgy.
Lillian Florence Hellman, an only child, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 20 June 1906 to Max Hellman and Julia Newhouse Hellman. Both parents were descendants of German Jews who immigrated to the United States during the 1840s. The Newhouse side of the family was wealthy and successful, and through his marriage Max Hellman acquired enough money to open the Hellman Shoe Company. Sophie Marx Newhouse, Lillian's maternal grandmother, ruled the family. Sophie and her brother, Jake, became the models for Regina and Ben in The Little Foxes (1939). In her memoir, Hellman recalls meals with the Newhouse family as tense, unpleasant affairs where talk about money and possessions dominated, and reminders of her father's lower-class background and business failures were frequent. Hellman did not truly appreciate her mother until after the latter's death; instead, Hellman remembered her as refined, quiet, eccentric, and overly religious. Traces of her mother later appeared in Birdie of The Little Foxes . Although Hellman idolized her father, this feeling diminished as she learned of her father's infidelities.
At the age of six, Hellman moved with her family to New York City, where the Newhouses had relocated. After his shoe business failed, Max Hellman became a traveling salesman, and for the next eleven years the family divided their time between New York and New Orleans. The two worlds could not have been more different. When in New York, Hellman lived with her mother's wealthy relatives on West Ninety-fifth Street; when in New Orleans, she lived in a boardinghouse full of eccentric roomers and run by her father's sisters. These two unmarried aunts, Jenny and Hannah, were favorites of Hellman. The rooming house later served as the model for the Tuckerman home in Hellman's 1951 play, The Autumn Garden, and the situation of two sisters devoted to their married brother appeared, with violence and intrigue unknown to the Hellman sisters, in Toys in the Attic (1960).
This disruptive lifestyle had several consequences. Hellman's schooling became erratic with the shuttling between two divergent school systems; she was never a stellar student, and her brief college career at New York University and Columbia University was pursued without great enthusiasm or diligence. The constant moving, a frequently absent father, and life as an only child also bred in Hellman lifelong character traits of independence and rebellion. One of the few constants in her childhood was her black nurse, Sophronia Mason, whom Hellman describes in her memoirs as "the first and most certain love of my life." The number of black characters in Hellman's plays, many of whom serve as moral compasses, has been attributed in part to the positive influence of this woman. Sophronia Mason was the only person from Hellman's childhood who escaped criticism in her writings.
Leaving college at the age of nineteen, Hellman took a job as a manuscript reader for Horace Liveright, owner of the prestigious publishing firm of Boni and Liveright. During the heyday of the firm, it published works by such authors as Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O'Neill. The excitement of the discovery of new writers was matched by the glamour of the after-hours party life. Hellman's vocation and lifestyle were undoubtedly influenced by this early professional experience.
In December 1925 Hellman married press agent Arthur Kober, later known for his plays "Having Wonderful Time" (1937) and Wish You Were Here (1952) and his thirty movies. Hellman quit working for Boni and Liveright but held several jobs during this period. She did publicity for Bunk of 1926, an unsuccessful show, and for a Rochester, New York, stock company. Her first published work was a book review for the New York Herald Tribune. During her marriage to Kober, Hellman also became a play reader for Anne Nichols, author of Abie's Irish Rose (1927). Hellman's great "discovery" was Vicki Baum's play Grand Hotel (1930), which had a long Broadway run.
In 1926 Hellman and Kober left for Paris after Kober was offered a position as editor of the Paris Comet, a new English-language literary periodical. Hellman's first two works of fiction, short stories she described as "lady-writer" tales, were published by the Paris Comet. Hellman traveled frequently during this period and decided in 1929 to study at the university in Bonn, Germany. Through the boardinghouse in which she lived, Hellman was recruited by a Nazi student group and briefly considered joining, mistakenly thinking it was a socialist organization. When she discovered the nature of the organization, she promptly left Germany, recalling in her memoirs that "for the first time in my life I thought about being a Jew." This experience later influenced the writing of two plays, Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944).
In 1930 Hellman and Kober moved to Hollywood, where Kober had been offered a scriptwriter position with Paramount. Through Kober's connections Hellman acquired a job writing synopses of potential material for M-G-M, a position that was terminated because of her militant support for the nascent Screen Writers' Guild. Her marriage also ended, on amicable terms, in 1932. By this time she had begun what became a lifelong relationship with Dashiell Hammett, the former Pinkerton agent and best-selling detective writer, whom she met in November 1930. Hammett proved to be her most devoted mentor, companion, and critic.
Biographer William Wright perhaps articulates the relationship best when he writes that Hammett's "collaboration" with Hellman was not as much in the development of her plays as it was in the development of Hellman herself. From Hammett she learned the importance of research and revision, habits she continued to develop throughout her lifetime.
Shortly after her return to New York, Hellman published two short stories in the American Spectator, a literary journal recently begun by Theodore Dreiser and others. "I Call Her Mama Now" (1933) and "Perberty in Los Angeles" (1934) are narrated by precocious pre-teenage girls who are encouraged by bohemian adults to give up their bookish ways and embrace the "brave new world." Both are funny stories that satirize those enamored with sexual liberation. Hellman first attempted playwriting in 1932 with Louis Kronenberger on a collaborative effort called "The Dear Queen," a comedy about a royal family that attempts to become commoners, finds middle-class morality too stifling, and returns to the life of royalty. Although they offered the play to several producers, there was no interest, and "The Dear Queen" was neither published nor produced. Hellman later wrote that they knew it was pretty bad but they had great fun writing it.
During this time Hellman worked as a script reader for Herman Shumlin (who later produced and directed her first four plays) but was known primarily as "Hammett's girl." In 1933 Hammett completed his last novel, The Thin Man (published in 1934, the same year as Hellman's first playwriting success), modeling the character of Nora, he said, on Hellman. In his reading for new ideas, he found a book by William Roughead called Bad Companions (1931), about British court cases. One chapter in particular, "Closed Doors, or The Great Drumsheugh Case," struck Hammett as good material for a play, and he suggested it to Hellman. The true story about two women who ran a boarding school for girls in Scotland and were ruined after a student falsely accused them of a lesbian relationship appealed to Hellman. Hammett supervised the writing and extensive rewriting of the resulting play, The Children's Hour. Opening at Maxine Elliott's Theatre in Manhattan on 20 November 1934 for 691 performances, it became Hellman's longest-running production and one of her most popular plays.
The play focuses on Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, who own and operate a private boarding school and have finally reached a point when financial stability and success seem possible. The women's dreams are destroyed when Mary Tilford, an evil pupil trying to avoid punishment at school, tells her wealthy grandmother, Mrs. Tilford, the social pillar of society, that Karen and Martha are involved in an unnatural sexual relationship. Despite the fact that Mrs. Tilford's nephew, Dr. Joe Cardin, is engaged to Karen, Mrs. Tilford believes Mary and convinces the other parents to withdraw their daughters from the school. The headmistresses sue for libel but lose the case because Martha's aunt fails to appear in court to help clear their names. Karen breaks her engagement, and Martha--who realizes that she does have feelings for Karen--commits suicide. Mrs. Tilford learns too late that her granddaughter has lied and comes to Karen to make amends. Karen replies: "You've come to the wrong place for help. . . . A public apology and money paid, and you can sleep again and eat again. That's done and there'll be peace for you. . . . But what of me? It's a whole life for me. A whole God-damned life." The play ends with Karen agreeing to let Mrs. Tilford try to help as they talk about the weather.
Because Hellman was provided with a story, she was able to devote her attention to dialogue, character development, and structure. The Children's Hour reveals the elements that helped categorize her as a writer of melodrama or of the well-made play, such as the blackmail device and use of the "significant" phone call. The sensationalism of the lesbian issue, rare on the stage in 1934, drew attention away from Hellman's primary concern, an issue that appeared in almost all of her plays: the damage that a single lie can do to multiple lives. For Hellman, the interest is not in who tells the lie or why, but in examining the consequences.
Most of the reviews were positive. A critic for The New York Times (21 November 1934) complained, however, of the overwriting of act 3, saying, "In the last ten or fifteen minutes of the final act she tries desperately to discover a mettlesome dramatic conclusion. Having lured The Children's Hour away from the theatre into the sphere of human life, she pushes it back among the Ibsenic dolls and baubles by refusing to stop talking." Hellman agreed with this assessment, writing in her introduction to Four Plays by Lillian Hellman (1942) that the play should have concluded with Martha's suicide but that she could not prevent herself from a final summation.
Despite the occasional criticism, the play met with success and some notoriety. The Children's Hour was banned in London, Boston, and Chicago, although it was performed privately in London at the Gate Theatre in November 1936 to enthusiastic audiences but tepid reviews. The play earned Hellman $125,000, but it did not win any major awards. Many people felt it should have won the Pulitzer Prize, bestowed instead on Zoë Akins's Old Maid (1935), a play lacking a controversial theme. Indignant theater critics joined together to form the Drama Critics' Circle with the intention of awarding its own annual prize for drama.
The play created other interest as well. In 1935 Samuel Goldwyn hired Hellman as a screenwriter for $2,500 a week. Her first screenplay was an adaptation of Guy Bolton's play The Dark Angel (1925). The movie, released in 1935 with Merle Oberon and Fredric March, did well, but Hellman later characterized it as "silly." Goldwyn was pleased and allowed Hellman to choose her next project. According to Hellman biographer Wright, Goldwyn acquired the movie rights to The Children's Hour for $50,000, and Hellman had her next project: turn the play into a movie that would pass the censors. She felt this task would be easy, for she always maintained that the play was not about lesbianism but about slander. These Three (1936), the finished product, utilized a heterosexual love triangle instead (which also made it easier for Goldwyn to find actresses to accept the roles) to dramatize the damage of lies. In this version Mary tells her aunt that Joe and Martha are having an affair; a slander suit is brought and dismissed; and Martha confesses her love for Joe, but he and Karen find happiness in the end. Although it bears little resemblance to the play, the movie received good reviews. In 1962--after a revision of the Production Code that made homosexuality a permissible topic for movies--William Wyler released another movie version, calling it The Children's Hour and adhering more closely to the play. Despite a strong cast, including Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, this movie was less successful.
Hellman's next play, Days to Come, which opened at the Vanderbilt Theatre on 15 December 1936, was a failure, lasting for only seven Broadway performances. The action is set in a small town in Ohio, home of the Rodman Brush Company. Arthur Rodman, owner of the once-profitable company, has been forced to cut wages in order to keep the factory going. A union leader, Leo Whalen, has incited the workers to go on strike, and after several weeks Rodman, with the help of his attorney, brings in Sam Wilkie and his band of strikebreakers. Problems intensify when one of the strikebreaking agitators knifes another in a card game, and Wilkie decides to dump the dead body outside Whalen's office in an effort to frame him. When Whalen is arrested, a riot breaks out between the workers and strikebreakers, during which the foreman's young daughter is killed. Rodman's wife, Julie, who had been having an affair with her husband's attorney and best friend and had attempted to seduce Whalen, provides an alibi and confesses her indiscretions. The strike comes to an end, but not without losses on every side. The disdain and disappointments of each family member have been revealed, and the trusting relationship between factory owners and workers has been forever destroyed.
One of Hellman's political plays, Days to Come suffers from too many plots. None of the characters is fully developed, and the last act suffers because too many conflicts have to be resolved. Hellman clearly delineates the good, the bad, and the bystander characters; however, because there are too many characters and conflicts, the evil characters are mere stereotypes, and the others lack the requisite depth for audiences to care about them. Critics trounced the play. A reviewer for The New York Times (16 December 1936) complained of an "elliptical style of writing" that left one uncertain whether the play was about crime, neurotic females, or labor troubles. Hellman admitted weaknesses but liked the play overall: "It is crowded and overwrought, but it is a good report of rich liberals in the 1930's, of a labor leader who saw through them, of a modern lost lady, and has in it a correct prediction of how conservative the American labor movement was to become."
Hellman recalled the feelings of failure following the poor reception of this play: "The failure of a second work is, I think, more damaging to a writer than failure ever will be again. It is then that the success of the first work seems an accident. . . . You go into the second work with confidence you will never have again if you have any sense." Two years passed before Hellman started another play.
During her hiatus from playwriting, Hellman returned to screenwriting, this time to write the 1937 screenplay adaptation of Sidney Kingsley 's play Dead End (1935). After completing that project, she left for Europe. During her visit to Paris, she met Hemingway and the American expatriates through her friend Dorothy Parker. She also went to Russia and to Spain. With Hammett, Archibald MacLeish, and Margaret DaSilva, she became a member of a group called Contemporary Historians, which financed The Spanish Earth, an early antifascist movie directed by Joris Ivens and narrated by Hemingway. (John Dos Passos was originally to collaborate but withdrew over political differences.)
In 1939 Hellman's next play, The Little Foxes, was produced. The prodigious research she did for this play into turn-of-the-century America, particularly the American South and American business practice and development, filled notebooks. Hellman rewrote the play nine times and said it was the most difficult play to write, in part because of her experiences with Days to Come : Hellman assumed guilt for the failure of that play, and guilt became "an excuse for not thinking." The play may also have been challenging to write because of the connections to her own family: the characters of Birdie, Regina, and Addie were inspired in part by Hellman's mother, grandmother, and Sophronia Mason, and Hellman said she also meant to mock herself in youth through the character of Alexandra. Parker supplied the title, taken from the Song of Solomon 2:15: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes." The Hubbard family demonstrates the cunning, destructive greed suggested by the biblical reference.
The play is set in the elegant home of Regina and Horace Giddens in an unidentified Southern town in Alabama in 1900. Regina, with her two brothers, Oscar and Ben Hubbard, have persuaded a Chicago businessman, William Marshall, to build a cotton mill, to be controlled by the Hubbard siblings if they can raise the required investment of 51 percent into the company. One-third of the money will have to come from Horace, who has been in a Baltimore hospital with a heart condition. When Horace fails to respond to his wife's letters, Regina sends their daughter, Alexandra, to bring him home. Once apprised of the situation, Horace recognizes that the success of the factory depends on capitalist corruption and refuses to invest in the plan. Ben, the eldest brother, is delighted, for he had hoped his domineering sister would be shut out of the deal. Oscar, the weaker brother, also sees that this financial obstacle could work to his advantage and consents to his son Leo's suggestion that Leo "borrow" $88,000 in bonds from Horace's safety-deposit box. Regina cannot believe that her plans are being thwarted, and the second act ends with her raging at Horace and wishing he were dead.
In the next act Horace learns of the theft and sees it as an opportunity to permanently prevent Regina from partaking of the deal. He tells Regina he will loan his brothers-in-law the money rather than press charges of theft, but before he can tell them his decision, Horace has a heart attack. Regina denies Horace his lifesaving medicine; in desperation Horace stumbles out of his wheelchair and tries to climb the stairs. Regina turns her back. When Horace dies shortly thereafter, Regina gives her brothers a choice: they can go to jail, or they can give her a 75 percent share of the mill. This blackmail threat brings Regina her desired money and the opportunity to move to Chicago. Although defeated, Ben nonetheless admires his sister's cunning. Regina's victory, however, comes with a price. Alexandra has listened and learned from her father, her aunt Birdie (Oscar's wife), and the maid, Addie, who have warned her about the viciousness of the Hubbard siblings. She vows to leave home: "I want to leave here. As I never wanted anything in my life before. Because now I understand what Papa was trying to tell me." Regina is alone onstage as the curtain descends.
Critics have studied The Little Foxes from multiple perspectives. Many praise the play as an examination of the rape of the agrarian South by the industrialized North. Horace explains that Northern companies come to the South because of cheap labor, and he sees how race relations can further deteriorate. More metaphorically, the values of the Old South, as represented by Horace, Birdie, and Addie, are destroyed by the new industrialists, such as Regina, Ben, and Oscar. In this context the play demonstrates the role American society plays in shaping individuals. Consequently, some saw the play as a warning to a nation coming out of the Depression. Some, of course, believed Hellman was attacking America's capitalistic system. Hellman discounted these interpretations, saying she was not intending to make a statement about capitalism or the changing South. What draws audiences to this play are the characters whose motivation is a greedy lust for power. Particularly intriguing is Hellman's development of the evil characters. As in her previous two plays, the "good" and "bad" characters are clearly marked, and as in The Children's Hour , evil succeeds because decent people do not try to prevent it.
The theme of evil triumphing because of well-intentioned but impotent people pervades Hellman's works and is most forcibly articulated in this play by Addie: "Well, there are some people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it. . . . Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it." Implicit in Addie's remarks is the thrust of Hellman's theme: abdicating one's social responsibility can be costly for everyone.
Hellman had not intended people to take the play as seriously as they did. She felt the play had humor in it, and she expected people to see themselves: "I had meant the audience to recognize some part of themselves in the money-dominated Hubbards; I had not meant people to think of them as villains to whom they had no connections." Only recently have critics begun to see the mixture of humor and seriousness as a strength rather than a weakness. John Gassner commented that the mix of tragedy and comedy has roots in William Shakespeare , and Katherine Lederer noted the use of irony.
The play opened at the National Theatre in New York on 15 February 1939 and ran for 410 performances. Most reviews were fairly good. Many commented, once again, on Hellman's debt to Ibsen, her skill with dialogue, and her tendency to write melodrama rather than tragedy. The most common complaint was that the plot seemed too contrived. Much praise was given for the performances, particularly that of Tallulah Bankhead as Regina. The Little Foxes held its own in a rich theatrical season: William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, Philip Barry's Philadelphia Story , George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's Life with Father were running at the same time. In 1941 a movie version of The Little Foxes opened with Bette Davis in the lead, and in 1949 a musical version, Regina, with music by Marc Blitzstein, opened on Broadway. Hallmark Hall of Fame produced a version for television with Greer Garson as Regina. Despite the occasional negative review, The Little Foxes continues to be Hellman's most revived play. One of the most notable revivals was a 1981 production with Elizabeth Taylor making her stage debut as Regina. This production was so popular that it went on an international tour. A 1997 production at Lincoln Center with Blythe Danner as Regina was panned, partly because it attempted to make Regina more sympathetic and less vicious. The Little Foxes has been produced in French, Spanish, and English; it has also been performed in Moscow and Belgrade.
By her early thirties, Hellman was an established playwright. She had made considerable money from her first play but had squandered her earnings; however, in 1939 she and Hammett made an investment that brought great pleasure to both of them. Hardscrabble Farm, a 130-acre property in New York, remained her primary residence until she was forced to sell it to pay legal bills and taxes thirteen years later. She and Hammett hosted a steady stream of visitors who would stay in the various outbuildings, one of which also became her studio. When she was not writing, she devoted herself to gardening, raising ducks, and becoming a gourmet chef. Hellman and Hammett spent some of their happiest times at Hardscrabble Farm.
Watch on the Rhine, Hellman's next play, responds to the political climate of the day. The play is set in 1940 in the Washington, D.C., mansion of Fanny Farrelly, the widow of an American diplomat. As the play opens, Fanny is awaiting the arrival of her daughter, Sara, whom she has not seen in twenty years. Arriving with Sara will be her German husband, Kurt Müller, and her three children, none of whom Fanny has met. Sara and her family have been living abroad for the past twenty years as Kurt has worked with the anti-Nazi underground movement. (Kurt was based on Otto Katz, a communist organizer and friend of Hellman's.) Living with Fanny are her son, David; Marthe, the daughter of a family friend; and Teck de Brancovis, Marthe's husband, a Romanian count and former diplomat. Teck, penniless, has survived by taking advantage of the hospitality of others and keeping his connections with the German embassy, where he goes for gambling and gossip. Teck immediately suspects Kurt's political affiliations and confirms his suspicions by going through Kurt's belongings. Teck threatens to expose Kurt unless Kurt pays him $10,000, money that Kurt plans to use to ransom his friends in Europe. Fanny decides to get the money to help protect Kurt, but before that is possible, Kurt kills the count, and the family conspires to dispose of the body. At the conclusion of the play, Kurt flees to help his friends and to avoid arrest. Kurt tells his children that he has done something wrong and must leave, but he is going to make the world a safer place: "In all over the world, in every place and every town, there are men who . . . want what I want: a childhood for every child." Sara and the children remain with Fanny, who recognizes that they, too, will face trouble. Fanny is, as she says, "shaken out of the magnolias," but she is "happy to learn" how to manage and survive.
Opening on 1 April 1941 at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York, eight months before Pearl Harbor, Watch on the Rhine responded to the continuing debate on American neutrality. Hellman did not need to introduce American audiences to World War II, nor did she need to convince anyone of the evils of Nazism. Instead, by placing the antifascist message within a domestic situation, she implicated all Americans through the theme that those who chose to ignore the international crisis were helping to perpetuate it and that no one can count himself or herself free of danger. Most critics hailed the play as Hellman's best to date; some called it the best war play of its time. In calling the play a melodrama, critics this time used the term as one of praise, saying that the form fit the action. Hellman had always been praised for her characterizations, and the character of Kurt was particularly praised for being a modern hero. Overall, Hellman created more likable characters, and even her villain, Teck, is more pathetic than evil. The play ran for 378 performances and won the Drama Critics' Circle Award. Hammett wrote the screenplay for the movie version, cited as one of the best movies of 1943. Paul Lukas reprised his Broadway role of Kurt Müller, for which he won the Academy Award for best actor. Although the Hayes Commission initially balked at the ending because no one was punished for the killing, the movie retained the original outcome. In 1942 the play had the distinction of being chosen by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be performed at a benefit for infantile paralysis, an event the president attended.
During the 1940s Hellman's political activism continued to develop. When Hammett left for the Aleutian Islands after enlisting as a private in 1942, Hellman returned to Hollywood and screenplay writing. She was hired by Goldwyn to write the screenplay for a quasi-documentary movie set in a Russian village during a Nazi invasion. The idea was to foster better feelings toward the Russians. The filming of The North Star proved disastrous, however, and when the movie became more fiction and less documentary, Hellman pulled out. She was able to buy out her contract for $30,000, and her association with Goldwyn came to an end.
During this period Hellman began work on her next play, The Searching Wind, which opened in 1944 at the Fulton Theatre and ran for 326 performances. Once again Hellman set a political theme within a domestic situation, and again the message was that when decent people ignore their political responsibilities, fascism spreads. For the first time Hellman experimented with structure, using a rambling, flashback approach to take the action through three decades and four settings. The play begins in Washington, D.C., in 1944 in the home of Alex and Emily Hazen as they await a visit from Cassie Bowman, Emily's childhood friend whom she has not seen in twenty years. Emily is the daughter of a liberal newspaper owner, and Cassie is a college professor and Alex's mistress. The Hazens' son, Sam, who was wounded in the war, and his grandfather, Moses, are also at home. The next scene flashes back to Rome in 1922 with Benito Mussolini marching on the city. Cassie and Alex are in love despite their divergent political views. Cassie is an ardent antifascist, but Alex, a young career diplomat and an appeaser, believes America cannot take sides and fails to see the implications of Mussolini's rise to power. Later, in Berlin in 1923, Alex has married Emily, an apolitical socialite, on the rebound. The scene is set in a restaurant, outside of which a mob chases Jews. Alex sits by, still believing that noninvolvement is the correct position. From there the play moves to Paris in 1938, where Alex, now an ambassador, has come to believe that Adolf Hitler's demand for Sudetenland will not be his last; however, Alex's policy of appeasement and nonintervention continues. He declares that ambassadors are men with little power who cannot effect change. The final scene is set in the Hazens' home. The evasions that have worked for the Hazens to date will not work anymore. The triangle is made to face the consequences of their actions, political and personal. Sam becomes the spokesman for moral outrage, railing against his father's passivist politics, his mother's carefree lifestyle, and his grandfather's inactivity. The world has had to pay the price of their frivolity through the rise of fascism, and he has had to bear the personal price through the amputation of his leg.
The Searching Wind, Hellman's most political play, fell one vote short of the majority needed to win the Drama Critics' Circle Award (none was given that year). Those who praised it did so for the ideas and the writing, but the structural flaws are clear. The repetitive flashback technique that shifts the action among four countries and three decades results in tedium. The yoking of the personal and the international sacrifices Hellman's usually strong characterization. The relationship between the women, and the development of the grandson and grandfather, are particularly vague. At times the attention to the love triangle seems disproportionate to the larger picture, resulting in characters who seem dehumanized. Hellman also wrote the screenplay for the 1946 movie adaptation, which starred Robert Young, Sylvia Sidney, and Ann Richards.
In 1944 Hellman left for a second trip to Russia at the invitation of the Russian government. At the time of her visit, productions of The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine were being mounted there. The trip is described in detail in An Unfinished Woman. She had the opportunity to meet with the movie director Sergei Eisenstein and to visit a recently liberated Polish concentration camp, but the highlight of the trip seems to have been the two weeks she spent on the Warsaw front with the Russian army.
Back home, Hellman began work on her sixth play, Another Part of the Forest (1946), a prequel to The Little Foxes and part of a planned but uncompleted trilogy. Set in 1880 in Bowden, Alabama, the play revisits the Hubbard family to explore the earlier lives of the siblings and their parents. The third, unwritten play was to have been set twenty years after The Little Foxes to show Regina in Europe and her daughter, an unmarried social worker. In Another Part of the Forest Marcus Hubbard, the family patriarch and tyrant, has amassed a fortune from war profiteering during the Civil War. His unscrupulous actions have made him a hated member of the community. The only person with whom he has a loving relationship is his daughter, Regina, who is in love with John Bagtry, Birdie's cousin and a Confederate war hero who dreams of going to Brazil to fight for the preservation of slavery. Marcus's wife, Lavinia, has been driven nearly insane by the secret she harbors of her husband's criminal past. Her only comfort is found with her maid, Coralee, and Coralee's friends in the black church. Ben is motivated by money and power, just as he is in The Little Foxes. His father treats him and Oscar with contempt and will not share control of the family business. Weak Oscar wants to marry Laurette, the town prostitute, and move to New Orleans.
Each member of the family fights for his or her own selfish desires, regardless of the impact these may have on others. There is no love, no loyalty in the Hubbard household. When Birdie comes to Ben for a loan, Ben sees his opportunity: he will get his father to loan Birdie $10,000, but he will pocket $5,000 for himself. Birdie wants the money for John to travel to Brazil, which would free Regina to marry money. Regina reveals Ben's trick to their father, and Ben retaliates by telling their father of Regina's affair with John.
By the end of act 2, even Oscar's plans are destroyed after Laurette verbally attacks Marcus, who then disinherits Oscar. In act 3, however, Marcus is ruined. Ben gets his mother to reveal Marcus's nasty secret by promising Lavinia she can return to her hometown to open a school for local black children. Ben learns that Marcus inadvertently caused the death of twenty-seven Confederate soldiers, and he uses this information to seize control of his father's assets. By the conclusion of the play, Ben has set into motion all the relationships that will be destroyed in The Little Foxes.
The play opened at the Fulton Theatre in 1946 to mixed reviews. Individual scenes were praised, but most critics complained of overwrought melodramatic contrivances used throughout. Without a socially thematic undercurrent, the play is reduced to unrelieved villainy, and although Hellman meant this work to be a satire like The Little Foxes, there is less humor in this play. Several critics singled out the character of Marcus as one of Hellman's most believable, well-crafted characters. Another Part of the Forest also marked Hellman's directorial debut, for which she received much praise. The play ran for 182 performances. Later critics have noted comparisons to the work of both O'Neill and Tennessee Williams with respect to individual characters.
Hellman's political involvement began to cause her professional trouble during the late 1940s. By 1949 she had been informed by her friend, director William Wyler, who had wanted her to write a screenplay adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), that she was blacklisted in Hollywood. She remained so, unofficially, until the early 1960s. Hollywood had provided Hellman a solid financial resource, and the loss of this work was significant. Hellman stated in a 1968 interview (included in Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 1986) that "I couldn't do movies which I had not only liked but had made a living, a steady living." Hellman did not abandon her political efforts. Instead, she seemed to become more publicly involved in political activities. She was active in Henry Wallace's presidential campaign in 1948, working on some of the Progressive Party committees and assisting in the formation of the party platform, all the while denying that communists controlled the party. That same year she accepted an assignment from the New York Star to travel to Yugoslavia to interview Marshal Tito; the trip resulted in a series of six articles praising his accomplishments. In 1949 she was a sponsor for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, better known as the Waldorf Conference, despite the State Department's denunciation of the conference.
While abroad, Hellman saw a production of Emmanuel Roblès's Montserrat and immediately acquired the American rights for an adaptation of the 1948 French play. The play is set in 1812 during the Spanish occupation of Venezuela. Montserrat, an ally of the South American liberator Simón Bolivar, is arrested by Izquierdo as a traitor for refusing to divulge where Bolivar is hiding. Izquierdo recognizes that torture will not make Montserrat talk, but he believes he can use Montserrat's compassion for others to his advantage. Izquierdo arranges for six people to be randomly chosen from those in the marketplace and then brought to the jail. The six--four men and two women--have one hour to convince Montserrat to reveal Bolivar's location. The six are told they will be released if they are successful; if they fail, they will be shot. Montserrat meets them as they individually plead for their lives. Although Montserrat is moved by their plight, he chooses not to betray Bolivar and what he believes is the greater good. Consequently, each villager is killed, as is Montserrat at the end of the play when Izquierdo learns that Bolivar has escaped. The play clearly suggests that everyone has a role to play in the overthrow of tyranny. Hellman once again directed, although Harold Clurman took over the directing task at some point during the production.
Montserrat was not a success. Although the ideas are interesting, the play itself is not engaging. The six victims are undeveloped; the politics of the time are not explained; and Bolivar, for whom so many are killed, remains an enigma. The monotonous executions render the action of the play static. Hellman admits in her memoirs that she directed the play in "a fumbling, frightened way," at least partially because she was intimidated by the actors. The play, which opened on 29 October 1949 at the Fulton Theatre, ran for sixty-five performances.
In 1950 Hellman began work on The Autumn Garden, which was a departure from her earlier works in several ways, yet retained many of the Hellman trademarks. Set in 1949 at the Tuckerman summer home on the Gulf of Mexico, the play has no political overtones. Instead, it focuses on the middle-age despair of a group of people brought together on vacation at the home of Constance Tuckerman, who has opened her house as a summer resort in order to keep it. Well-bred Constance has remained unmarried after rejecting Ned Crossman, an alcoholic banker who believes he still loves Constance. Both have drifted through life without any purpose or accomplishment. In addition to Ned, retired general Ben Griggs and his wife, Rose, are also visiting. Griggs is trying to convince his wife of twenty-five years to grant him a divorce, but this conversation has been going on for years without any action. Added to this coterie are the Ellises: Carrie; her son, Frederick; and her mother-in-law, Mary. Frederick has recently become engaged to Sophie, Constance's seventeen-year-old niece from France, who desires nothing more than to return to Europe. The relationship between Sophie and Frederick lacks warmth and seems more an agreement than a romance. Frederick would rather go off to Europe with his friend, Payton, an offstage character of whom Carrie disapproves. These people, with the exception of Sophie, have been gathering here in the summer for years. This year a new guest has arrived: Nick Denery, a painter who jilted Constance long ago and is returning to the Tuckerman house for the first time in twenty-three years. Arriving with Nick is his rich wife, Nina.
The Denerys' marriage, like the Griggses', is strained, at least partially because of Nick's philandering. Nick has come, not because he wishes to renew old friendships or romances but because he needs adoration and the memories of the old days. Although charming and attractive at first, Nick soon disturbs everyone by his insinuations about everyone's lives, because of his own need to feel superior. He demands that Constance sit for a portrait, just as she did years ago, and Constance relents in order to keep him at the house, even though she is afraid of the comparison to the early work. He then tells Constance that she must return Ned's love, despite the fact that the relationship is no longer viable. Nick then turns his attention to Frederick and brings out what everyone has probably suspected privately: that Frederick's male companion is a homosexual. Finally, Nina, who has had to follow behind Nick throughout the years to clean up the messes he starts, pleads with him to stop meddling: "Have you ever tried leaving things alone? It's all around us. The flower-like odor right before it becomes troublesome and heavy. It travels ahead of you, Nick, whenever you get most helpful, most loving and most lovable . . . I smell it--and I want to leave." But despite threatening to leave without him, Nina is unable to break away.
The situation reaches a breaking point at the end of act 2, and Sophie, whose philosophy of survival has been to endure and do the best she can, sees a solution to her unhappy situation. Nick, drunk, comes into the living room, which doubles as Sophie's bedroom, and finds Sophie preparing for bed. He drunkenly tries to seduce her but passes out instead, and Sophie leaves the room. Everyone learns of Nick's behavior the next morning, and Sophie tells the Denerys that unless they pay her $5,000, she will tell the lie that Nick did succeed in his seduction attempt. Sophie, the only one who is not self-deluded, straightforwardly calls her demand extortion.
By the end of the play, everyone has come to some realization about himself or herself, but the realization does not equate to change. General Griggs gives up his dream of a divorce from Rose and a new start; Frederick, no longer engaged, consents to a European trip with his mother; Nina gives Sophie the money and decides to stay with Nick; and Constance realizes she has preserved her memory of Nick without acknowledging the kind of person he really was and is. When she acts on Nick's advice and asks Ned to marry her, she and Ned both must face some truths. Despite wanting to love her, Ned no longer harbors romantic desires for Constance; he also accepts responsibility for his own fruitless life: "I not only wasted myself, but I wanted it that way."
Many of the old influences and traits are obvious, but The Autumn Garden is also a departure from Hellman's earlier works. Hellman's aunts' boardinghouse, with its genteel poverty, may have suggested the setting. Blackmail, a favorite Hellman device, once again influences the outcome of the play. Hellman's judgmental views of her own characters also come through. In many other ways, however, The Autumn Garden shows Hellman breaking out of her mold. Part of the difference may be attributed to Hellman's stage of life. She reflected later that she wrote this play during a trouble-free period, which created the perfect working conditions: "For impatient people, calm is necessary for hard work--long days, months of fiddling is the best way of life. I wrote The Autumn Garden in such a period. I was at a good age." Unlike Hellman, her middle-age characters arrive at this time of life with regrets over what might have been and with the awareness that it is too late to change the patterns of life.
The most notable difference in her writing style is the obvious Chekhovian influence. Always disgruntled at having her plays labeled melodramas, she had started reading Anton Chekhov's work, considering him a nonmelodramatic writer (she went on to edit Chekhov's letters in 1955). Hellman's characters are not caught in a crisis from which they must escape; instead, they are stuck in their own lives. The focus of the play is not action but reflection as the characters contemplate their lives and try to ascertain how they arrived at their present, unhappy state. In this play, her characters are similar also to O'Neill's in their confrontation of the unreality of their dreams.
The Autumn Garden is dedicated to Hammett, and his help is most obvious in the often-quoted speech by Griggs that captures the theme of the play:
So at any given moment you're only the sum of your life up to then. There are no big moments you can reach unless you've a pile of smaller moments to stand on. That big hour of decision, the turning point of your life, the someday you've counted on when you'd suddenly wipe out your past mistakes, do the work you'd never done, think the way you'd never thought, have what you'd never had--it just doesn't come suddenly. You've trained yourself for it while you waited--or you've let it all run past you and frittered yourself away. I've frittered myself away.
Hellman had reworked that speech several times but could not write what she wanted to say; so Hammett rewrote it.
The play opened in New York on 7 March 1951 at the Coronet Theatre to mostly favorable reviews. Many noted the Chekhovian mood, the lack of villains and melodrama, and the Hellman trademark of sharp dialogue. Although a few critics complained that the play lacked focus and that Hellman tried to say too much, most agreed that The Autumn Garden was her most mature play to date. Her skill for creating fascinating characters that are true to life was noted by several critics. One reviewer wrote that Hellman had few peers when it came to putting meanness, loneliness, or frustration on the stage.
The 1950s were difficult years for Hellman politically. Her association with communist organizations and her refusal to condemn the actions of Stalin brought her unwelcome suspicion from the federal government. In 1951 Hammett was brought before a federal court and sentenced to a six-month jail term for contempt because he refused to name contributors to a Civil Rights Congress bail fund. The following year, Hellman received her subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman did not want to name names or go to jail, yet she also did not want to use the Fifth Amendment defense. Her initial strategy--one used unsuccessfully by other writers called before the committee who testified in private sessions--was to offer a compromise: she would speak about herself, but only herself. She offered this response in a letter to the committee (which her lawyer, Joseph Rauh, released to the press):
I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
She concluded the letter with an appeal to common values: "I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country, and so on. In general, I respected these ideals of Christian honor and did as well with them as I knew how." She did appear before the committee and did not name names, and she refused to answer questions about her own communist associations. In a little over an hour, Hellman was dismissed. In Scoundrel Time (1976) Hellman recalled her pride when a man yelled from the press gallery, "Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it." The headline for the 22 May 1952 New York Times read, "Hellman Balks House Unit." Hellman later wrote that she wished she had been more defiant.
Hellman survived, but not without a price. She grew increasingly disillusioned and shocked that so many people she had admired would sacrifice their convictions rather than risk suffering for them. Hellman also paid for her stand financially. The blacklisting by Hollywood deprived her of a main source of income, and perhaps more devastating, she was forced to sell her much-loved Hardscrabble Farm to pay the back taxes the government suddenly discovered she owed. A 1952 revival of The Children's Hour, which she directed, provided her with much-needed income until she wrote her next play. The choice of the revival was, of course, deliberate. The reviews were better than for the original, and several acknowledged with the New York Times reviewer (19 December 1952) that "the implications are much broader now and have new political overtones."
Hellman's next play, The Lark (1955), was an adaptation of L'Alouette , Jean Anouilh's 1953 play about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who successfully led the French army to victory at the battle of Orleans in 1429. A year later she was captured by the British and brought to trial, accused of being a witch and a heretic. The play opens on the first day of the trial, and it is obvious that her fate has been decided before the trial begins. The play is structured around flashbacks as Joan tells her life story, interrupted only by comments from the courtroom. One of the most dramatic scenes is her recanting of her confession, which had been given under duress. Joan is tied to the stake and carried offstage against a backdrop of flames. Rather than end the play with this image, Hellman concludes with the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral. The play ends with a chorus singing the Gloria of the Mass, a not-so-subtle reminder that Joan was eventually elevated to sainthood in the twentieth century.
Hellman recalled that she agreed to adapt Anouilh's play even though she disliked it. She had a sense that Joan of Arc's personality would make the play a success with American audiences. Hellman judged Joan of Arc as "history's first modern career girl," whose appeal lay "in the miraculous self-confidence that carried defeated men into battle against all sense and reason." Hellman reinterprets the French national hero as a naive, down-to-earth peasant girl who succeeds because of her invincible spirit, and Joan thus becomes a real person with universal appeal. The alterations Hellman made to Anouilh's play are substantial. Hellman believed Anouilh wrote the play as a comment on the French spirit during World War II, but she did not see the play from that perspective. Consequently, she cut much of the play, simplified the language, altered the ending and thus changed the tone, and added choral music by Leonard Bernstein that underscores the religious aspects of the play. The critics loved The Lark, which ran for 229 performances at the Longacre Theatre.
Hellman's professional association with Bernstein continued with her next project, a collaboration on a musical version of Voltaire's Candide (1759). Bernstein wrote the music; poet Richard Wilbur wrote the lyrics (with contributions from John Latouche and Dorothy Parker ); and Hellman wrote the book. The operetta, set in Westphalia, opens with the impending marriage between Candide and the beautiful Cunegonde. Before they can be married, however, a Hessian army attacks, and Cunegonde is presumed dead. Candide escapes, and because of the tutelage of Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist, Candide remains an optimist, believing with Pangloss that there is good in everything. The remainder of the play follows Candide on his travels in search of Cunegonde, who he has learned is alive. His journey takes him to Lisbon, a brothel in Paris, a Buenos Aires slave market, a Venice gambling establishment, and back to Westphalia, which lies in ruins. Pangloss appears in each location to counteract Candide's growing disillusionment as he comes to see the worst in humans, including Cunegonde. Although Cunegonde has grown old and homely, Candide still wishes to marry her, and he has learned that he must place his hope not in philosophy but in work and in doing one's best.
The play opened on 1 December 1956 at the Martin Beck Theatre, and despite the talents of Bernstein, Wilbur, Hellman, and director Tyrone Guthrie, the play received poor reviews and closed after only seventy-three performances. Several critics praised the ambitious idea of turning the play into a musical, and most commended the music and lyrics. Hellman was largely singled out for criticism, however. In particular, the loss of irony and satire from the original was noted, as was the loss of sexual frankness. Several also noted the heavy-handed moral tone. Hellman recounted later that Candide was her worst theater experience. Unfamiliar with collaboration and musical theater, Hellman said she did not fight for her script. Instead, she claims she gave in to suggestions for changes. When the Kennedy Center revived the operetta in 1972, she refused any connection with it, calling the revival "sad and wasteful." Revivals since that date, including one by Harold Prince, have abandoned Hellman's book.
Hellman recalled in her memoirs that the experience with Candide brought on writer's block, and only the intercession of several friends, including Hammett, helped her to write another play. Hammett suggested the idea of writing a play about a man who is pressured to make money and does so but then fails. Hellman took the suggestion, shifted the focus, borrowed from her past, and in 1960 produced Toys in the Attic, her last original play, for which she received her second New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. The play is set in the New Orleans home of Carrie and Anna Berniers, two unmarried sisters whose lives revolve around repetitive routines of work and concern for their brother, Julian. The sisters have saved money throughout their lives to support Julian's dreams, while their own desires, such as a trip to Europe, have always been postponed. Julian has been living in Chicago with his young, wealthy bride, Lily. Albertine Prine, Lily's mother, arrives at the Berniers house with her black "chauffeur," Henry, to inform the sisters that Julian and Lily are back home. Shortly after Albertine and Henry depart, Julian and Lily arrive laden with gifts: tickets to Europe, a piano, a new refrigerator, a paid-up mortgage on the sisters' home, and resignation letters, already sent, to their employers. For Lily, Julian has purchased an expensive diamond to replace her original cheap wedding band. Julian also has $150,000 in cash with him. The three women are wary of the sudden change in fortune. Lily, not stable to begin with, wanders around in a daze, wanting her old ring back and asking about a woman who calls Julian every night. Julian is disappointed in the lack of appreciation shown for his generosity.
Act 2 brings much of the mystery out into the open. Albertine and her daughter are reunited, and Lily reveals to her mother that Julian has become rich and seems to be seeing another woman. Since arriving home, Julian has also become impotent. Lily confesses that she has traded her diamond ring for a "knife of truth" she acquired from a group of religious fanatics she met the night before as she wandered around time in a mystical fog. Convinced her mother knows the answers, Lily demands to know if Julian married her for her money and who the mysterious woman is. Albertine convinces Lily that sometimes it is best not to seek the truth, and Henry clears up the mystery of the woman and Julian's sudden wealth. The woman who calls every night is Henry's cousin, Mrs. Warkins, an old lover of Julian's. Mrs. Warkins told Julian about some acreage that her husband wants, and Julian bought the land and sold it to Mr. Warkins for $150,000, half of which Julian gives to Mrs. Warkins so she can leave her unhappy marriage. Mrs. Warkins formed this partnership with Julian out of gratitude because Julian had a sexual relationship with her and did not care that she is mulatto, something her husband does not know.
As Henry tells this story, it becomes clear that he and Albertine have also broken the color line and are lovers. Meanwhile, Carrie has overheard all of this news. By the end of the act, the insecurities of Carrie and Lily increase. Lily deliberately hurts herself with a knife to attract Julian's attention. Carrie learns that Julian shared his secrets about Mrs. Warkins with Anna and not her, and Carrie's irrational jealousy provokes Anna into saying that she has always suspected that Carrie harbors incestuous desires for their brother. The act ends with the bond between the sisters destroyed.
The insecure Lily and Carrie, confronted with the truth, bring about the devastation that concludes the play. Julian tells his sisters that he and Lily will leave after he concludes his business with Mrs. Warkins, and for his sake and theirs he cannot tell them where he will go. Carrie is inconsolable over the thought of losing Julian permanently to Lily. Only Anna seems to be able to respond to the changes and turmoil, as she makes plans to leave for Europe, alone. Lily's suspicion that Julian is having an affair continues to grow. Carrie convinces Lily to call Mrs. Warkins to learn the truth about Julian's relationship with her. With Carrie at her elbow, Lily makes the call but speaks to Mr. Warkins instead. She asks him to relay to his wife that she wants one more year with Julian, and then Carrie convinces Lily to tell Mr. Warkins where he can find his wife and Julian. Julian soon returns home, beaten and robbed. Recognizing her culpability, Lily prepares to confess the truth to Julian until Albertine convinces her otherwise. The play ends with the family members returned to their familiar roles. Julian and Lily will stay in New Orleans with his sisters, who will get their old jobs back and resume their roles as caretakers and providers. Although Carrie knows what Lily did, she says nothing, but the play ends with the suggestion that Carrie is not above revealing this secret if she needs to.
Like The Autumn Garden, Hellman's Toys in the Attic develops the themes of the consequences of self-deception and the folly of clinging to dreams. Nick and Carrie share the flaw of meddling in the lives of others as compensation for their own insecurities, yet there is greater compassion shown toward these unstable characters than Hellman had demonstrated in previous plays. These characters have not prepared for the future and cling to their past dreams and roles in life for comfort and security, as one might return to "toys in the attic" for solace. Like O'Neill, Hellman also cautions against pursuing truth. Although Hellman clearly believes that clinging to past dreams dooms one to unhappiness, she does not suggest that truth is always superior to illusions. The probing into Southern depravity and repressed sexuality obviously suggests a comparison to the works of Tennessee Williams, although Hellman's characters lack the psychological complexity of Williams's.
Opening at the Hudson Theatre on 25 February 1960, Toys in the Attic received good reviews. Most critics praised the play and, most particularly, the characters. Some objected to the melodramatic devices of the overheard conversation and the crucial telephone call, and others complained about the rigid plotting, yet Hellman was once again applauded for her crisp dialogue. A reviewer for the New York Post (26 February 1960) summarized the play as "stunning in its frank theatrical power, disturbing in its ugly candor, and brutally alive." The play ran for 556 performances.
Hellman did not end her playwriting career with an original play, however. Instead, she returned to adaptation for her last play, My Mother, My Father and Me (1963), adapted from Burt Blechman's 1961 novel, How Much? The play is not like any other Hellman play and seems to be her attempt to write a theater-of-the-absurd comedy. The only one of her plays to focus on Jewish characters, the play replaces Hellman's tight, methodical plotting with a string of vignettes about the Halpern family. Rather than developing characters with depth, Hellman relies on stereotypes, including the domineering Jewish mother, Rona, who is driven by her materialistic desires; her henpecked, unsuccessful husband; the senile grandmother; and the anti-establishment son, Barney. The play begins in the New York apartment of the Halperns with the arrival of the destitute grandmother and then moves to a nursing home, where the grandmother has been left for being a nuisance. The end of the play takes place on an Indian reservation, where Barney has moved to reject his family's and society's contemporary values and to get in touch with his national heritage. Barney ends the play in Native American attire, selling cheap Indian souvenirs to tourists and writing a book called "My Mother, My Father and Me."
Hellman's experimentation with form and genre was a failure. Opening at the Plymouth Theatre on 12 March 1963, the play lasted for only seventeen performances. Without a coherent plot and with too many targets for criticism, the play lacks focus. Hellman demonstrates her sharp eye for phoniness and cultural critique in the topics she satirizes, ranging from tensions between the Jewish and black communities to the treatment of the elderly and the American obsession with possessions. Critics unanimously excoriated the play. Although some found individual bits funny, all complained of the diffusesiveness. One reviewer for the New York Daily News (22 March 1963) called the play "flimsy whimsy," and another for the New York Herald Tribune (22 March 1963) condemned Hellman's attempt to "mate the extravagant satirical incoherence of the Theatre of the Absurd with the homier, milder, and more plausible nonsense of You Can't Take It With You."
Hellman's next work was the autobiographical An Unfinished Woman, published in 1969 and winner of a National Book Award that year. The book is more an assortment of recollections than a straightforward, chronological account of her life. The first seven chapters take the reader from Hellman's childhood through her 1937 trip to Moscow. In this section she recalls meeting Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris and briefly mentions the trip to Moscow ("Although I have long ago lost the diary of that trip, Dash was right: I did not enjoy the Moscow Theatre Festival, except for a production of Hamlet with the Prince played as a fat young man in a torpor"). She then uses a diary format for a chapter on her trip to Spain and reverts to her previous style to focus on her 1944 trip to Moscow. The last three chapters are devoted to remembrances of three people who were important in her life: Dorothy Parker; Hellman's maid, Helen; and Hammett.
Hellman concludes the book with a certain nostalgia for all that has passed but states that she is "not yet old enough to like the past better than the present." Her primary regret is that she pursued "truth" or "sense" (an ironic statement, since her memoirs have been shown to be full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations) and sacrificed a further development of self because of that pursuit. The book ends with this statement: "All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However." The last word, combined with the title of the book, reminds readers that her life and personality were still developing.
Pentimento: A Book of Portraits , her second volume of memoirs, published in 1973, develops her image through her recollection of others. Four of the chapters are devoted to people who were important to her at various times in her life: her cousin Bethe, her uncle Willy, her friend Julia, and eccentric attorney and suitor Arthur Cowan. There is also a chapter on theater, the only part of any of her memoirs devoted to her writing career. This chapter does not include as much about her craft as it does about the events occurring around the writing or production of the plays. She recalls the opening-night jitters and the hangover she suffered with The Children's Hour, and she recognizes that disaster stories make good comedy. Of the opening night of Days to Come, she remembers vomiting at the back of the theater, leaving to change her clothes, and returning in time to see "William Randolph Hearst lead his six guests out of the theatre, in the middle of the second act, talking very loud as they came up the aisle." She also recalls troubles with various actors and directors. She has no use for critics, saying "there are not many good critics for any art, but there have been almost none for the modern theatre. The intellectuals among them know little about an operating theatre and the middlebrows look at the plays as if they were at a race track for the morning line up."
Hellman also expresses regret over the change that came to theater after World War II: people seem not to have noticed that the theater, "like the rest of the country, became expensive, earnest, and conservative." She finally stopped writing plays because the experience ceased to be fun, and after My Mother, My Father and Me she wanted no further part of theater: "The playwright is almost always held accountable for failure and that is almost always a just verdict. But this time I told myself that justice doesn't have much to do with writing and that I didn't want to feel that way again. For most people in the theatre whatever happens is worth it for the fun, the excitement, the possible rewards. It was once that way for me and maybe it will be again. But I don't think so."
"Julia" has become the most famous of these chapters; it describes a mission Hellman allegedly undertook for a friend in 1937. According to Hellman's story, she was reunited with Julia, a childhood friend whom she had last seen three years earlier in a Vienna hospital, the victim of Nazi attacks on socialist workers. At this reunion Julia asked Hellman, via an intermediary, to take $50,000 across the German border (hidden in a candy box and fancy hat) to help an anti-Nazi group. The story was turned into the 1977 movie Julia, starring Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards.
The movie brought Hellman back into the limelight--she was invited to be a presenter at the Academy Awards in 1977 and enjoyed a standing ovation--but also opened up the floodgates for attacks on her veracity. Several people, in particular journalist and fiction writer Martha Gellhorn, questioned Hellman's participation in the events she depicts because of inconsistencies with dates and others' recollections of her activities at those particular times. Hellman's preface to Three, the 1979 collection of her autobiographical volumes, admits that the truth is elusive: "What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth. I did not fool with facts. But, of course, that is a shallow definition of truth. I see now, in rereading, that I kept much from myself." The most damaging evidence to call into question the truthfulness of Hellman's recounting of Julia came in 1983 with the publication of Muriel Gardiner's memoirs, Code Name "Mary": An American Woman in the Austrian Underground. The book proved that there was a real Julia, but she was not a friend of Hellman's. In fact, both Gardiner and Hellman denied knowing one another.
Hellman's last volume of memoirs, Scoundrel Time, was published in 1976, and it was also attacked for its self-serving, inaccurate account. Unlike the previous two volumes, Scoundrel Time has a limited focus: her experience as an unwilling witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She expresses her disappointment in others who refused to fight for their convictions and disappointment in herself for having had faith in others and for not having recognized Joseph Stalin's crimes earlier: "I feel betrayed by the ones I had believed. I had no right to think that American intellectuals were people who would fight for anything if doing so would injure them." She recalls friends and acquaintances who were called before the committee, the fright of her own ordeal, the loss of her beloved farm, and her disgust with those who cooperated, such as Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan: "But radicalism or anti-radicalism should have had nothing to do with the sly, miserable methods of McCarthy, Nixon and colleagues, as they flailed at Communists, near-Communists, and nowhere-near-Communists. Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised to help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice." She also argues that the Cold War politics of McCarthy led directly to Richard Nixon's crises of Vietnam and Watergate.
Hellman continued as a political activist and writer until ill health prevented her from doing so. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she was much in demand as a visiting lecturer at some of the most prestigious universities in America, including Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley. She was appointed to the editorial board of The American Scholar and received many honorary degrees, including doctorates from Wheaton College (1961), the Douglass College of Rutgers University (1963), Brandeis University (1966), Yale University (1974), Smith College (1974), New York University (1974), Franklin and Marshall College (1975), and Columbia University (1976). Yeshiva University gave Hellman an Achievement Award in 1962; Jackson College of Tufts University presented her with the Jackson Award of Distinction (1968); and in 1973 the Alumni Club of New York University gave Hellman the Woman of the Year Award. She continued to receive awards and recognition from many other organizations. Having been admitted to the National Institute for Arts and Letters in 1946, Hellman was elected vice president of the organization in 1962 and then received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Institute in 1964. She also received the MacDowell Medal and the Actors' Equity Association Paul Robeson Award in 1976.
In 1970 she and some friends founded the Committee for Public Justice, which investigated reports of First Amendment violations by the FBI and CIA. She lent her name to a fund-raising event that brought together celebrities from every field. Along with the adulation came renewed attacks on Hellman's word in her memoirs. Perhaps the most notorious was Mary McCarthy's pronouncement on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980 that Hellman was "terribly overrated, a bad writer and a dishonest writer." When Cavett pressed McCarthy for clarification, McCarthy said that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman immediately filed a libel suit for more than two million dollars against McCarthy, Cavett, and the television station. The suit was still in litigation at the time of Hellman's death but was later dismissed.
Hellman's penultimate book, Maybe (1980), is a partially autobiographical novel. The book is written in the first person and depicts Hellman's relationships with Kober, Hammett, her father, and various other friends and relatives. The center of the book is Sarah, a person who may have been a real friend of Hellman's or a created one. Sarah is depicted as not trustworthy, and the theme of the story is the challenge in determining truth. The conflation of fiction and reality and the whimsical title underscore this emphasis.
Hellman's last published work, Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections , published in 1984, was a collaboration with Peter S. Feibleman, twenty-five years Hellman's junior, who had known Hellman when he was a boy in New Orleans. After Hammett's death in 1961, he seemed to fill an important void in her life and became her close companion until her death. The book reflects Hellman's interest in gourmet cooking and is a cookbook and memoir of their relationship.
Hellman died on Martha's Vineyard on 30 June 1984 after many years of enduring emphysema and poor eyesight. Of her four-million-dollar estate, Feibleman was the primary beneficiary; he received $100,000 cash, half of the royalties from her works, and her home. Other than small cash gifts to various friends and employees, the rest of her estate was divided into two funds. The Lillian Hellman Fund provides grants to encourage the arts and sciences. The Dashiell Hammett Fund provides similar grants but requires the trustees to "be guided by the political, social, and economic beliefs which, of course, were radical, of the late Dashiell Hammett who was a believer in the doctrines of Karl Marx."
Death has not diminished interest in Hellman. In 1986 Zoe Caldwell performed in the one-woman show Lillian, written by William Luce, and in 1993 Elaine Stritch played Hellman in Cakewalk, Feibleman's play adapted from his book Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (1988). In 1999 the Arts and Entertainment network broadcast a television movie on Hammett and Hellman, Dash and Lilly, starring Sam Shepard and Judy Davis; there was also a PBS American Masters documentary, The Lives of Lillian Hellman. Books and articles continue to be written on her, and her importance in the American theater is assured.
Contemporary critics examine Hellman's plays from multiple perspectives. Hellman's politics, her interest in the power and corruption that money brings to lives, and her concern with American capitalism have spawned many studies from a Marxist perspective. Although Hellman's plays have long been categorized as Ibsenesque or Chekhovian, recent studies have been reluctant to pigeonhole her dramaturgy, and her affinity with Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller, Williams, and O'Neill has been noted. Her experimental plays are not considered her strongest, yet her attempts at social satire and theatricality over realism have been noted. In addition, Hellman's plays have been studied as precursors to feminism, particularly with respect to the status of her female characters. Finally, because six of her eight original plays (all except The Children's Hour and Days to Come ) are set in the South, Hellman is recognized as an important playwright of the American South.
Hellman's name will be remembered in association with controversy, from the lesbian theme of The Children's Hour to the discussion of the truthfulness and style of her memoirs. Most of all, however, she will be remembered for her contributions to the American stage. Hellman always resented being called "the first great American female playwright," for as she said, O'Neill is not remembered as a great American male playwright. Yet, her entry into a male-dominated profession and her ability to become a force on the American stage helped the next generation of women playwrights find a place.
Papers: See also the Hellman entries in DLB 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, and DLB Yearbook 1984.The major archive of Lillian Hellman's papers is at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Other materials are housed at the Butler Library, Columbia University, and in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
Jump to Additional DLB Essay(s) on this Author:
Twentieth-Century American Dramatists
About this Essay: Pamela Monaco,
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 228: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Christopher J. Wheatley, The Catholic University of America. The Gale Group, 2000. pp. 96-115.
Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography