Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman | |
|---|---|
| File:Lillian Hellman.gif | |
| Occupation | writer Playwright |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Arthur Kober (1925-1932) |
Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes. She was romantically involved for 30 years with mystery and crime writer Dashiell Hammett (and was the inspiration for his character Nora Charles), and was also a long-time friend and literary executor of author Dorothy Parker.
Early life
Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana into a Jewish family. 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.
Writing
Hellman's most famous plays include The Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939) and Toys in the Attic (1959).
The Oscar-winning film Julia was claimed to be based on the friendship between Hellman and the title character. Upon the film's release, in 1977, New York psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner claimed that she was "Julia" and that she had never known Hellman. Hellman replied that the person upon whom the character was based was not Gardiner. However, the fact that Hellman and Gardiner had the same lawyer (Wolf Schwabacher), that the lawyer had been privy to Gardiner's memoirs, and that the events in the film conform to those in the memoirs, have led some to conclude that they had been appropriated by Hellman without attribution to Gardiner.
Hellman was fond of including younger characters in her plays. In The Children's Hour (1934), the play takes place in a children's school and the antagonist of the play, Mary, is a young girl. In The Little Foxes (1939), an important sub-plot takes place between the potential marriage of the youngest characters in the play, Leo and Alexandra, another example of Hellman's proclivity towards including children.
Blacklist and aftermath
Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. At the time, HUAC was well aware that Hellman's longtime lover Dashiell Hammett had been a Communist Party member. Asked to name names of acquaintances with communist affiliations, Hellman claimed to deliver a prepared statement, which read in part:
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, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.
As a result, Hellman was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios for many years. Prior to the war, as a member of the League of American Writers with Hammett, she had served on its Keep America Out of War Committee during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact.[1]
In Two Invented Lives: Hellman and Hammett, author Joan Mellen noted that while Hellman had excoriated anti-Communist liberals such as Elia Kazan[2] in her memoirs for directing their energies against Communists rather than against fascists and capitalists, she held a double standard on the subject of free speech when it came to her own critics.[3][4] Author Diana Trilling publicly accused Hellman of pressuring her publisher, Little Brown, to cancel its contract with Trilling, who had written a collection of essays defending herself and her husband Lionel Trilling against Hellman's charges.[5][6]
Hellman had shaded the truth on some accounts of her life, including the assertion that she knew nothing about the Moscow Trials in which Stalin had purged the Soviet Communist Party of Party members who were then liquidated.[4][6][7] Hellman had actually signed petitions (An Open Letter to American Liberals) applauding the guilty verdict and encouraged others not to cooperate with John Dewey's committee that sought to establish the truth behind Stalin's show trials. The letter denounced the "fantastic falsehood that the USSR and totalitarian states are basically alike."[7][4]
Hellman had also opposed the granting of political asylum to Leon Trotsky by the United States.[7][4][6] Trotsky was the former Soviet leader and Communist who became Stalin's nemesis in exile (and eventual victim of assassination), after the Soviet Union instructed the U.S. Communist Party to oppose just such a move.
As late as 1969, according to Mellen, she told Dorothea Strauss that her husband was a "malefactor" because he had published the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Mellen quotes her as saying "If you knew what I know about American prisons, you would be a Stalinist, too." Mellen continues, "American justice allowed her now to maintain good faith with the tyrant who had, despite his methods, industrialized the 'first socialist state.'"[4]
Hellman's feud with Mary McCarthy formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. McCarthy famously said of Hellman on The Dick Cavett Show that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman replied by filing a US$2,500,000 slander suit against McCarthy. McCarthy in turn produced evidence that Hellman had shaded the truth on some accounts of her life, including some of the information that later appeared in Mellen's book.
Death
Hellman died on June 30, 1984 at age 79 from natural causes on Martha's Vineyard. She was still in litigation with Mary McCarthy, and the suit was dropped by Hellman's executors.[8][9]
Legacy
Hellman is also a main character in the play Cakewalk by Peter Feibleman, which is about Hellman's relationship with a younger novelist. Hellman did in fact have a long relationship with Feibleman, and the other main character in the play is somewhat based on him. Actress Elaine Stritch portrays Hellman in the audiobook version of the play.
Hellman also appears in the fifteenth episode of the nineteenth season of The Simpsons, in Lisa's hallucination, urging her to take up smoking. The same episode also jokingly and incorrectly identified Hellman as the originator of Hellman's Mayonnaise.
List of works
- The Children's Hour (1934)
- These Three (1936)
- The Dark Angel (1935)
- Days To Come (1936)
- Dead End (1937)
- The North Star (1943)
- The Little Foxes (1939 play)
- Watch on the Rhine (1940)
- The Little Foxes (1941 screenplay)
- Another Part of the Forest (1946)
- The Autumn Garden (1951)
- Candide (1957)
- The Big Knockover (preface) (1963)
- Toys in the Attic (1959)
- An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (1969)
- Pentimento (1973)
- Scoundrel Time (1976)
See also
References
- ^ Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope, University Press of Colorado, 1994, ISBN 0870813323
- ^ Bernstein, Richard, Long, Bitter Debate From the '50's: Views of Kazan and His Critics New York Times article, May 3, 1988
- ^ Glazer, Nathan, An Answer to Lillian Hellman, Commentary Magazine, Vol. 61, No. 6 (June 1976)
- ^ a b c d e Mellen, Joan, Two Invented Lives: Hellman and Hammett, HarperCollins, New York, 1996
- ^ Wright, William, Stage View, New York Times article, November 3, 1996
- ^ a b c Rollyson, Carl E., Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) ISBN 0312000499
- ^ a b c Lamont, Corliss, Hellman, Lillian, et al., An Open Letter to American Liberals, Soviet Russia Today, March 1937 issue
- ^ "Lillian Hellman, Author and Rebel, Dies at Age 79". Los Angeles Times. July 1, 1984. Retrieved 2008-04-18.
Author Lillian Hellman, who delineated evil in such plays as "The Children's Hour" and "The Little Foxes" and fell victim to it during the political persecutions of the 1950s, died Saturday of a heart attack at 77.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ "Lillian Hellman, Playwright, Author and Rebel, Dies at 77 [sic]". New York Times. July 1, 1984. Retrieved 2008-07-07.
Lillian Hellman, one of the most important playwrights of the American theater, died of cardiac arrest yesterday at Martha's Vineyard (Mass.) Hospital near her summer home. She was 77 [sic] years old and also lived in Manhattan. The playwright had been taken to the hospital by ambulance from her home ...
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External links
- Hellman at American Masters (PBS)
- Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
- Lillian Hellman Refuses to Name Names at History Matters
- Hellman at the Internet Movie Database
- Essay about Lillian Hellman's FBI file by Herbert Mitgang
- Read Hellman's interview at The Paris Review
- "Why Lillian Hellman Remains Fascinating" By William Wright, from the New York Times (3 November 1996)
- Hellman at the Jewish Virtual Library
- The Children's Hour at IMDb
- The Children's Hour
- Hellman/Hammett Grant Program
- 1977: Who was the real heroine?
- Festival Devoted to the work of Lillian Hellman and William Wyler