Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist, and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway as well as her communist views and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the U.S. film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer HUAC's questions, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belonged to the Communist Party.
As a playwright, Hellman had many successes on Broadway, including The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes and its sequel Another Part of the Forest, Watch on the Rhine, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic. She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay; the movie starred Bette Davis. Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, who also was blacklisted for 10 years.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing to her death, Hellman wrote a series of memoirs of her colorful life and acquaintances. Her accuracy was challenged in 1979 on The Dick Cavett Show, when Mary McCarthy said of Hellman's memoirs that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman sued McCarthy and Cavett for defamation, and during the suit, investigators found errors in Hellman's Pentimento. They said that its "Julia" section, which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1977 movie of the same name, was actually based on the life of Muriel Gardiner. Martha Gellhorn, one of the most prominent war correspondents of the 20th century and Ernest Hemingway's third wife, said that Hellman's memories of Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were inaccurate. McCarthy, Gellhorn, and others accused Hellman of lying about her membership in the Communist Party and of being a committed Stalinist.
The defamation suit was unresolved at the time of Hellman's death in 1984; her executors eventually withdrew the complaint."Seeing Mary Plain", nytimes.com. Retrieved November 25, 2015.
Biography Early life and marriage Lillian Florence Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Jewish family. Her mother was Julia Newhouse of Demopolis, Alabama, and her father was Max Hellman, a New Orleans shoe salesman. Julia Newhouse's parents were Sophie Marx, from a successful banking family, and Leonard Newhouse, a Demopolis liquor dealer. During most of her childhood she spent half of each year in a New Orleans boarding home run by her aunts and the other half in New York City. She studied for two years at New York University and then took several courses at Columbia University.Martinson, Lillian Hellman, pp. 37, 43, 47.
On December 31, 1925, Hellman married Arthur Kober, a playwright and press agent, although they often lived apart.Martinson, Lillian Hellman, pp. 44–46. In 1929, she traveled around Europe for a time and settled in Bonn to continue her education. She felt an initial attraction to a Nazi student group that advocated "a kind of socialism" until their questioning of her Jewish ties made their antisemitism clear, and she returned immediately to the United States.Wright, Lillian Hellman, pp. 52–53; Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, p. 36; Martinson, Lillian Hellman, pp. 57–58. Hellman learned German from her family during childhood; Martinson, Lillian Hellman, p. 53. Years later she wrote, "Then for the first time in my life I thought about being a Jew."Wright, Lillian Hellman, 53, quoting Hellman, Scoundrel Time (1976).
1930s
Beginning in 1930, for about a year Hellman earned $50 a week as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, writing summaries of novels and periodical literature for potential screenplays.Dick, Hollywood, pp. 19–21. She found the job rather dull, but it created opportunities for her to meet a wide range of creative people while she became involved in more political and artistic scenes. While there, she met and fell in love with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. She divorced Kober and returned to New York City in 1932.Martinson, Lillian Hellman, pp. 89–90. When she met Hammett in a Hollywood restaurant, she was 24 and he was 36. They maintained their relationship off and on until his death in 1961.Lillian Hellman, "Introduction", in Dashiell Hammett, The Big Knockover (1972), p. vii.
Hellman's drama The Children's Hour premiered on Broadway on November 24, 1934, and ran for 691 performances.Dick, Hollywood, p. 32. It depicts a schoolgirl's false accusation of lesbianism against two of her teachers. The falsehood is discovered, but before amends can be made one teacher is rejected by her fiancé and the other dies by suicide.Dick, Hollywood, pp. 32–33. After the success of The Children's Hour, Hellman returned to Hollywood as a screenwriter for Goldwyn Pictures at $2,500 a week.Dick, Hollywood, p. 21. She first collaborated on a screenplay for The Dark Angel, an earlier play and silent film.Dick, Hollywood, pp. 21–29. After that film's successful release in 1935, Goldwyn purchased the rights to The Children's Hour for $35,000 while it still was running on Broadway.Dick, Hollywood, pp. 30–31. Hellman rewrote the play to conform to the standards of the Motion Picture Production Code, under which any mention of lesbianism was impossible. Instead, one schoolteacher is accused of having sex with the other's fiancé.Dick, Hollywood, pp. 35–6ff. It appeared in 1936 under the title These Three. She next wrote the screenplay for Dead End, which featured the first appearance of the Dead End Kids and premiered in 1937.Dick, Hollywood, 50ff.
On May 1, 1935, Hellman joined the League of American Writers, whose members included Hammett, Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, and Arthur Miller. Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.
Also in 1935, Hellman joined the struggling Screen Writers Guild, devoted herself to recruiting new members, and proved one of its most aggressive advocates.Wright, Lillian Hellman, 116–18. One of its key issues was the dictatorial way producers credited writers for their work, known as "screen credit". Hellman had received no recognition for some of her earlier projects, including her work as the principal author of The Westerner (1934) and a principal contributor to The Melody Lingers On (1935).Martinson, Lillian Hellman, pp. 126–27The Westerner (1934), imdb.com. Retrieved December 29, 2011.The Melody Lingers On (1935), imdb.com. Retrieved December 29, 2011.
In December 1936, her play Days to Come closed its Broadway run after just seven performances.Martinson, Lillian Hellman, 116, 118–20. The play depicts a labor dispute in a small Ohio town during which the characters try to balance the competing claims of owners and workers, both represented as valid. Communist publications denounced her failure to take sides.Newman, Cold War Romance, p. 5. That same month she joined several other literary figures, including Dorothy Parker and Archibald MacLeish, in forming and funding Contemporary Historians, Inc., to back a film project, The Spanish Earth, to demonstrate support for the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War.Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, p. 106.Wright, Lillian Hellman, p. 136.Martinson, Lillian Hellman, p. 120.
In March 1937, Hellman and 87 other U.S. public figures signed "An Open Letter to American Liberals", which protested an effort headed by John Dewey to examine Leon Trotsky's defense against his 1936 condemnation by the Soviet Union. Some critics view the letter as a defense of Stalin's Moscow Purge Trials.Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (Free Press, 1995), p. 143. It charged some of Trotsky's defenders with aiming to destabilize the Soviet Union and said the Soviet Union "should be left to protect itself against treasonable plots as it saw fit." It asked U.S. liberals and progressives to unite with the Soviet Union against the growing threat of fascism and avoid an investigation that would only fuel "the reactionary sections of the press and public" in the U.S. Endorsing this view, the editors of the New Republic wrote, "there are more important questions than Trotsky's guilt." Those who signed the Open Letter called for a united front against fascism, which, in their view, required uncritical support of the Soviet Union.Spitzer, Historical Truth, pp. 18–19. Hundreds added their names to the Open Letter. Among the initial signers were Heywood Broun, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Lillian Wald, Rockwell Kent, Dorothy Parker, Malcolm Cowley, and Nathanael West. See Ackerman, Just Words, pp. 184–85.Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 132.Newman, Cold War Romance, pp. 9–10.
In October 1937, Hellman spent a few weeks in Spain to lend her support, as other writers had, to the International Brigades of non-Spaniards who had joined the anti-Franco side in the Spanish Civil War. As bombs fell on Madrid, she broadcast a report to the U.S. on Madrid Radio. In 1989, journalist and Ernest Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, herself in Spain at that period, disputed the account of this trip in Hellman's memoirs and claimed that Hellman waited until all the witnesses were dead before describing events that never occurred. But Hellman had documented her trip in the New Republic in April 1938 as "A Day in Spain". Langston Hughes wrote admiringly of the radio broadcast in 1956.Martinson, Lillian Hellman, pp. 131–33, 352–53, includes Hughes' report of the radio broadcast and Hellman's comments the next day citing his I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, first published in 1956. Hellman's reportage was reprinted in an anthology of journalism, This is my Best (1942); Griffin and Thorsten, Understanding, p. 104.
Hellman was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1940. By her own account, written in 1952, she was "a most casual member. I attended very few meetings and saw and heard nothing more than people sitting around a room talking of current events or discussing the books they had read. I drifted away from the Communist Party because I seemed to be in the wrong place. My own maverick nature was no more suitable to the political left than it had been to the conservative background from which I came."Haynes, p. 412.
The Little Foxes and controversy
The Little Foxes opened on Broadway on February 13, 1939, and ran for 410 performances. The play starred Tallulah Bankhead as Regina, and after its success on Broadway, it toured extensively in the U.S. It was Hellman's favorite of her plays, and by far the most commercially and critically successful. But a feud developed between Bankhead and Hellman when Bankhead wanted to perform for a benefit for Finnish Relief, as the USSR had recently invaded Finland. Without thinking Hellman's approval was necessary, Bankhead and the cast told the press the news of the benefit. They were shocked when Hellman and Shumlin declined to give permission for the benefit performance, citing non-intervention and anti-militarism. Bankhead told reporters, "I've adopted Spanish Loyalist orphans and sent money to China, causes for which both Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman were strenuous proponents ... why should [they] suddenly become so insular?"