The Courage of Lillian Hellman

LILLIAN HELLMAN, the writer born in New Orleans in 1905, had a presence, a salty humor, and a raspy voice, tinged with whiskey and cigarettes. She had a long relationship with the writer of “hard-boiled” detective stories Dashiell Hammett. Hellman was a major playwright and wrote three compelling, though not wholly reliable, memoirs. And unlike many of the playwrights of her era, her plays have endured. In the 1980’s, Elizabeth Taylor starred in a well-received version of “The Little Foxes” and in 1997 Stockard Channing played the lead role at Lincoln Center.

The only child of Max Hellman of New Orleans and Julia Newhouse Hellman of Alabama, Lillian spent almost her whole childhood, shuttling back and forth between New Orleans and New York. Six months in the richest southern city and six months in the richest northern one. From ages five to sixteen, she was half a northerner, half a southerner.

Hellman learned a lot in New Orleans about how to tell a story, how to present yourself, how to skillfully use language. Her plays are rich with New Orleans food: crawfish and pecan pralines and beignets and etoufee. As a white southerner, she also learned that she had a right to think as she pleased, and if some of her opinions were eccentric, such as that black people deserved equal rights, well, the South was full of eccentrics.

But there was a lot of pain, too. Her father was a Hellman, her mother a Newhouse and a Marx, and the Newhouses and the Marxes looked down on the Hellmans. Also she was Jewish and a victim of a certain anti-Semitism — and without the joyous rituals and comforts of being raised an observant Jew.

In 1934, her first major play opened, “The Children’s Hour.” It centered on two competent professional women who run a girls boarding school, and how their careers, and lives, unravel after a nasty student at the school is disciplined and, in revenge, concocts a reputation-ruining lie that the women running the school are lesbians.

In 1939, Hellman’s next major play hit Broadway. It was called “The Little Foxes,” a Biblical reference, and centers on a scheming southern matron, who finally grasps great wealth — but in the process loses everyone she loves most. Here was a chance to work off much of her anger and frustration about the way the Marxes and the Newhouses looked down on the Hellmans.

In the late 1940’s, she felt the Republican Party should be ashamed of jumping on Communist subversion as a campaign issue. There was a raw, visceral power to the idea that a foreign nation with an alien philosophy was secretly tunneling into the U.S. government, and polluting Hollywood movies, with the cooperation of duplicitous Democrats and half-wit celebrities. This paranoid anti-Communist narrative ruined the lives of a lot of innocent people.

Hellman was always embarrassed that she couldn’t feel more anger against Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Pat McCarran and other politicians who’d hitched their careers to a reckless anti-Communism that was smearing decent Americans. What they were doing was dead wrong but she found them boring. She’d seen many more compelling villains, including some in her own family.

She did feel angry at the liberal intellectuals who chose to sit on the sidelines and protect their own careers as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) came after the liberals.

She also felt frustrated that too many people were forgetting the desperation of the 1930’s, when millions were out of work, and people weren’t sure democracy would survive. All that was 15 years in the past, and a booming U.S. economy and a hero’s role in World War Two had made people want to forget those old days, and the foolish political gestures that all sides had made, liberals and socialists but conservatives, too.

The 1930’s had been a strained, peculiar decade for Hellman, personally, and she felt buffeted by its politics. She’d divorced her husband in 1931, and was deeply discouraged. After the divorce, she was living with Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective radicalized by the anti-labor work he’d done in the West. Hellman loved Hammett but was uneasily aware that he was supporting her, financially and otherwise. Then she had a great success, both critically and financially, with her play “The Children’s Hour.” Suddenly wealthy and much more confident, she was also guilty amid the desperate poverty of so many Americans and aware that Hammett believed the U.S. was corrupt and that he might well be a Communist. She also knew that she must never ask Hammett if he was a Communist.

One day Hammett, quite uncharacteristically, told her that when he’d worked as a Pinkerton detective, the company had once offered him $5,000 to assassinate a labor leader. Hellman bolted from the room when she heard that, and decided she couldn’t live with this man anymore. She returned a few minutes later to tell him so and found Hammett lying on one elbow, clearly expecting her return, expecting her to break with him. The moment passed, and she stayed.

But the idea struck her with a strange force that the anger she felt at that moment might be a gift.

All that was in the late 1930’s, before the Great Depression ended, before “The Good War” when we proved democracy was strong enough to defeat Adolf Hitler, and liberate Europe. Fifteen years passed and it was 1951, early 1952, and many things had changed but Hellman held on to the idea that her anger might be a gift, an uncomfortable, dangerous gift, but a gift nonetheless.

She was following in the newspapers the theatrics of the House Un-American Activities Committee, but refused to believe she would be called before the committee. She was willfully naïve about the power of the anti-Communist issue, the way that fear had made millions of ordinary Americans give up on civil liberties and the right to dissent. She was living in an apartment on East 82nd Street in Manhattan, and to get through the front door visitors had to hit a buzzer and announce who they were. But the speaker was broken, and Lillian buzzed in everyone who rang.

One day she buzzed in a stranger, and a finely dressed African-American man came to her door. He asked if she was Lillian Hellman. She said she was. He handed her an envelope which she ripped open, to find a subpoena to appear before the House of Un-American Activities. She asked the man if he enjoyed delivering HUAC subpoenas, and slammed the door in his face.

She knew she was going to have to justify to HUAC, if she could, why her activities were American rather than un-American. This directly violated what she’d learned as a girl about every American having the right to think as he or she pleased.

She knew she needed a lawyer, and felt scared and queasy inside.

It was further unsettling when the leftist lawyer-politician friend of hers whom she asked to represent her begged out of it, telling her he was trying to make a political comeback and representing her would make his political life much harder. She then asked Abe Fortas for help, a Washington lawyer with an excellent reputation. She was impressed that he came immediately up from Washington to see her.

On a rainy, nasty day Fortas sat in an armchair taking her measure. Rain pelted down just outside the long windows of the apartment. Fortas got up and admired some china birds at the fireplace. He asked Hellman some questions about her past, simple questions, nothing about Communism. He sat down at her piano, played a few sour notes, and made a face.

Then he returned to his armchair and regarded her carefully. He said what he was going to tell her was only a hunch — NOT a legal opinion. He said that everyone whom HUAC had called to testify had responded with legalisms, for instance saying they couldn’t be forced to incriminate themselves, and therefore were taking the Fifth Amendment. Fortas said his hunch was that it was time to take on HUAC not on legal grounds but on moral ones, that someone should say publicly that what HUAC was doing was wrong, that THEY were the Un-American ones.

Hellman quickly agreed. That’s what she wanted to do.

Fortas said ‘Take a few days. Think about it.’

Hellman said ‘I don’t need a few days.’

‘Well, I do,’ said Abe Fortas, and departed with a grave look on his face.

Hellman felt curiously at ease. Though she could be irritable with small delays and imagined insults, she took in real danger with a deep calm. All of her insecurities had been pushed down inside her somewhere where she couldn’t feel them anymore.

She had to tell Dashiell Hammett the course that she and Fortas were taking. She hoped he would be proud of her. But he stared at her for a long time until she excused herself and went for a walk alone, hoping he would be kinder when she returned. They circled around each other until dinner time when the usually restrained and understated Hammett pushed back his plate and said “It’s shit! Plain liberal shit! They are going to send you to a jail cell and for longer than usual.”

Hammett had himself been to jail for not naming names. He knew how hard doing time could be, and he pressed on, challenging his lover. ‘You think because you have high class morals, you don’t have to play their game?’ He warned her that the press would be brutal, and that all of her friends would turn on her.

She called Abe Fortas and told him what Hammett had said, hoping that Fortas would buck her up, give her courage. But Fortas said his own law partner, Joe Rauh, had told Fortas the same thing. If Hellman used that strategy, calling out the morality of the HUAC proceedings, the hearing would go on for many hours, perhaps many days, and then she would go to jail. So she must decide whether that would still be worth it, whether she could accept losing the legal battle and becoming a martyr for the cause of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

That felt like the lowest moment — but even worse was deciding that she and Hammett had to sell the little farm they’d shared and loved in Pleasantville, New York, because she was going to have big legal bills and no money would be coming in from Hollywood or Broadway for a long time. She had to lay off the people who helped work on the farm, and to auction off the cows and ducks and chickens and the farm machinery…

Then things began to get better. She met with Abe Fortas’ partner Joe Rauh and liked him from the first. He had a crinkly, kind face and the urge to help people mixed with a shrewdness that you don’t always find in good people. And he was pleased to have found out that the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper, had attacked Hellman several times. Rauh would make sure that HUAC learned that, too.

She and Hammett both knew without expressing it that his radicalism and his prison term would only hurt Hellman’s reputation, and so they would keep apart as she and Rauh prepared for the HUAC hearing. In the midst of her whirlwind prep for the hearing, she and Hammett agreed that after the hearing and her jail term, they would take a trip together. He suggested the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. She proposed a crayfish farm in Louisiana.

On May 19, 1952, Hellman and Joe Rauh sent a letter to John Wood, chairman of HUAC, saying that she would be glad to answer any questions the committee had about herself, her own political beliefs and actions — but that she was NOT going to testify about other people, not going to “bring bad trouble” to innocent, good-hearted people who’d been agitated and worried 15 years before but never subversive, never disloyal to their country and its best traditions. The letter said that if forced to testify about others, she would take the Fifth Amendment.

The letter included the line “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

At the hearing, Hellman kept referring to the letter she had sent the committee, and Joe Rauh almost casually said that, to eliminate confusion, the letter should be put into the record, and when the chairman agreed to that, a tactical mistake on his part, Rauh quickly pulled out dozens of copies of the letter and had them distributed to the press who were sitting in a balcony above the proceedings.

The press had been watching these HUAC hearings for some time, and objected to them not so much because they seemed like a cruel persecution, but because they were so one-sided. They lacked the drama of a good story. Now, here was a witness fighting back, and the press jumped on that sentence “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

One reporter even said audibly from the balcony “Thank God someone finally had the guts to do it,” and the HUAC chairman seemed rattled. He threatened to clear the balcony if there were any more such comments made.

After just one hour and seven minutes, the HUAC committee decided that nailing Lillian Hellman was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and they ended the hearing and dismissed her.

Joe Rauh told her ‘Leave the building right now. Don’t run, but walk fast and don’t answer any questions. Shake your head if anyone comes close to you.’ She did as he suggested, got out of the building without talking, and went to a comfortable restaurant and drank Scotch.

She’d often said, ‘I know nothing about being Jewish, I’m sorry to say — though not sorry enough to go to the trouble of learning.’ But I think she DID know something about being Jewish. I think it’s no coincidence that Lillian Hellman, Abe Fortas and Joe Rauh were all Jewish, and never more so than when they stood up for freedom of speech and freedom of association.

For years, people would ask her “Do you forgive them? Do you forgive Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon and the rest of them?” These questions came especially when Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968.

Hellman always said ‘Who am I to forgive somebody?’ Her friends assured her that she was strong and had talent and would recover. The nation would recover from McCarthyism. In a worldly sense, she DID recover. She could write and get her work published. Hollywood began hiring her again and showing interest in her work. But in her heart she did not really believe in “recovery.” She felt the past is always there for us: its joys, its pains and cruelties, the self-serving postures that people take under pressure. The past is always with us — and quite properly so.