American dramatist and screenwriter (1905–1984)
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 American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, 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, which starred Bette Davis. Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, who also was blacklisted for 10 years; the couple never married.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing through to her death, Hellman turned to writing a series of popular memoirs of her colorful life and acquaintances. Hellman's accuracy was challenged in 1979 on "The Dick Cavett Show", when Mary McCarthy said of her memoirs that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman brought a defamation suit against McCarthy and Cavett, and during the suit, investigators found errors in Hellman's "Pentimento." They said that the "Julia" section of "Pentimento", which had been 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 twentieth century, as well as Ernest Hemingway's third wife, said that Hellman's remembrances of Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were wrong. 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. Hellman's modern-day literary reputation rests largely on the plays and screenplays from the first three decades of her career, and not on the memoirs published later in her life.
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 New Orleans, in a 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.
On December 31, 1925, Hellman married Arthur Kober, a playwright and press agent, although they often lived apart. 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 about her Jewish ties made their antisemitism clear, and she returned immediately to the United States. Years later she wrote, "Then for the first time in my life I thought about being a Jew."
1930s.
Beginning in 1930, for about a year she earned $50 a week as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, writing summaries of novels and periodical literature for potential screenplays. Although she found the job rather dull, it created many opportunities for her to meet a greater range of creative people while she became involved in more political and artistic scenes during that time. While there she met and fell in love with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. She divorced Kober and returned to New York City in 1932. 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 January 1961.
Hellman's drama "The Children's Hour" premiered on Broadway on November 24, 1934, and ran for 691 performances. It depicts a false accusation of lesbianism by a schoolgirl 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 commits suicide. Following the success of "The Children's Hour", Hellman returned to Hollywood as a screenwriter for Goldwyn Pictures at $2,500 a week. She first collaborated on a screenplay for "The Dark Angel", an earlier play and silent film.
Following 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. 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. It appeared in 1936 under the title, "These Three". She next wrote the screenplay for "Dead End" (1937), which featured the first appearance of the Dead End Kids and premiered in 1937.
On May 1, 1935, Hellman joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Dashiell 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. 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, although she was the principal author of "The Westerner" (1934) and a principal contributor to "The Melody Lingers On" (1935).
In December 1936, her play "Days to Come" closed its Broadway run after just seven performances. In it, she portrayed 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. 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.
In March 1937, Hellman joined a group of 88 U.S. public figures in signing "An Open Letter to American Liberals" that protested an effort headed by John Dewey to examine Leon Trotsky's defense against his 1936 condemnation by the Soviet Union. The letter has been viewed by some critics as a defense of Stalin's Moscow Purge Trials. 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 United States. Endorsing this view, the editors of the "New Republic" wrote that "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.
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. Nevertheless, 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.
Hellman was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1940, by her own account written in 1952, "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."
"The Little Foxes" and controversy.
Her play "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 the play toured extensively in the United States. The play was Hellman's personal favorite, and by far the most commercially and critically successful play she originated. However, a feud developed between the two 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?"
Hellman countered her star: "I don't believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I've been there and it seems like a little pro-Nazi Republic to me." Bankhead, who hated Nazism and had become a strong critic of Communism since the mid 1930s Great Purge and for what she saw as a communist betrayal of the Second Spanish Republic, was outraged by Hellman's actions and thought Hellman a moral hypocrite. Hellman had never been to Finland. Bankhead and the cast suspected that Hellman's refusal was motivated by her fanatical devotion to the Stalinist regime in Soviet Russia. Hellman and Bankhead became adversaries as a result of the feud, not speaking to each other for a quarter of a century afterwards.
Hellman had aggravated the matter further by claiming that the real reason for turning down the benefit was because when the Spanish Republican government fell to Franco's fascists, Hellman and Shumlin requested that Bankhead put on a benefit for the Spanish loyalists fleeing to neighboring France, and the actress and company refused. Bankhead was further incensed by these comments, as she had helped many Spanish Republican fighters and families to flee the Spanish Civil War in 1937, after they had been turned on by Stalinist fighters behind their own Republican lines. Hellman and Bankhead would not speak again until late 1963. Years later, drama critic Joseph Wood Krutch recounted how he and fellow critic George Jean Nathan had shared a cab with Hellman and Bankhead:
Bankhead said: "That's the last time I act in one of your god-damned plays". Miss Hellman responded by slamming her purse against the actress's jaw. ... I decided that no self-respecting Gila monster would have behaved in that manner.
1940s.
On January 9, 1940, viewing the spread of fascism in Europe and fearing similar political developments in the United States, she said at a luncheon of the American Booksellers Association:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;I am a writer and I am also a Jew. I want to be quite sure that I can continue to be a writer and if I want to say that greed is bad or persecution is worse, I can do so without being branded by the malice of people who make a living by that malice. I also want to be able to go on saying that I am a Jew without being afraid of being called names or end in a prison camp or be forbidden to walk the street at night.
Her play "Watch on the Rhine" opened on Broadway on April 1, 1941, and ran for 378 performances. It won the New York Drama Critics'