A Difficult Woman (12 page)

Others recalled Hellman's dinners for their warmth and energy: “She wanted everybody to be having a good time,” remembers Peter Feibleman, so she moved people around to make sure that they were not bored.
⁸⁶
Her dinners consisted of a mix of carefully selected people. “She knew who to ask, who to seat them next to. It was like choreographing.”
⁸⁷
At the dinners she was, in one attendee's words, “very attentive, very generous. The food was always wonderful.”
⁸⁸
Adds Morris Dickstein, “Whether she was throwing a small dinner party or a large party, she treated it like a
kind of art. The amount of energy that went into the seating, the meal, the cooking, the mix of people was the kind of effort that a really good writer would expend on a sentence. She worked to get it exactly right.”
⁸⁹
Lillian did not, at these events, control her tongue. She could disrupt her own parties and those of others by fighting with her guests, verbally slugging at them for their likes and dislikes. And yet she had a quick sense of humor and a raucous laugh that concluded a debate and put everyone at ease. Lillian's parties were so wonderful and such fun that her friends coveted invitations to them. The writer Shirley Hazzard wrote to her friend William Abrahams of one dinner party she knew Hellman was planning: “If we are excluded we will just come round and moan beneath the windows.”
⁹⁰

After the harrowing and unsettling fifties, in which she had been marginal in many worlds, the renewed celebrity demonstrated Hellman's importance. She enjoyed the attention thoroughly. “Whenever Lillian would walk into one of those New York parties where there were bankers and pretty girls and famous people there,” remembers Peter Feibleman, “Lillian would walk in and the other ladies would all kind of disappear into the woodwork.” Nor was Hellman above broadcasting her victories. She told all and sundry that “Lord” Sidney Bernstein invited her to dinner in London. And, when Britain's Lord Snowdon asked if he could take her photograph, she gloried in teasing her agent about it, insisting that he now display the respect properly due her.
⁹¹
Hellman might have started the decade of the sixties as a star chaser, but by its end she had become a star worthy of chasing.

The social nature of many of Hellman's contacts—often efforts to take advantage of celebrity—should not obscure the deep and long-lasting friendships she developed. These drew on her nurturing qualities. On the Vineyard, where she continued to spend her summers and soon built herself a smaller house to replace the large one she had occupied with Hammett, she became close to Jerome Wiesner (later to become president of MIT), his wife, Peggy, and to the poet Robert Lowell (known to his friends as Cal), though not to his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She fished with John Hersey almost daily and sometimes with William Styron too. She gossiped with screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, picnicked with John and Sue Marquand, quarreled with Robert Brustein, played Scrabble with Rose Styron, and planned dinners and parties with Barbara Hersey. She met Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, in the early fifties. That friendship survived an unsuccessful collaboration on the operetta
Candide
(produced in 1955) to become a robust, complicated, and loving association. Lillian addressed him as “Lennie Pie”; he called her Dear Lillllly or Dear Lilliana. In the seventies, Mike and Annabel Nichols often joined a Vineyard crowd that not only summered together but occasionally spent several winter weeks on an island in the Bahamas. Annabel Nichols would become a loving and attentive companion as Hellman grew older and more irascible.

These were Lillian's friends. Irritating, demanding, and bad-tempered as she often was with them, stubborn and willful as she might be, they took her flaws in stride and reveled in the warmth she exuded and the practical jokes and high jinks in which she excelled. To her Vineyard friends, she was simply part of the community: they supported her and listened to endless complaints even as she enlivened their days with her wit and inventiveness. Stories abounded about her swimming nude off her boat or at the Vineyard beach. Brooke Allen, whose family summered in that community, recalls her penchant for practical jokes. Lillian once forged a letter to Bill Styron, signing it with the name of an attractive woman he had long wished to meet. Styron read the letter, imagined that it expressed genuine admiration, and immediately set out to find the supposed correspondent. The joke backfired when Styron briefly took up with the young woman. Hellman's New York friends cherished the wicked sense of humor that led her to let fly at friends and foes alike and then slyly apologize for what she called “the snake in my mouth.”
⁹²

It wasn't easy to be Lillian's friend as she grew older. Her forceful and direct style, her penchant for saying what was on her mind without censorship, her quick temper and occasional tantrums, offended many. When these qualities were not relieved by humor and warmth, they could be destructive. This happened more and more after 1974, when, while in Europe, she apparently suffered the first of a series of strokes. Peter Feibleman tells us that the strokes increased her level of irrational anger astronomically and often led her into erratic emotional behavior. If she quarreled with her Park Avenue neighbor over what kind of table should go under a vase in their shared hallway, the two never spoke again. If she lost a watch on the beach in Gay Head, she complained that the beach was insufficiently patrolled. Her capacity to make both men and women, but especially women, appear invisible was legendary. Anne Navasky tells a story about how, having sat next to her all night at a dinner, she offered Lillian a ride home. Lillian accepted, and Anne went out to get the car. Escorted
out of the house by Richard de Combray and Victor Navasky, Lillian noted the woman at the wheel and turned to Navasky to compliment him for having hired a female chauffeur.
⁹³

Even to those she loved, before and especially after the strokes, she could be, and often was, overbearing, arrogant, and just plain rude. She demanded much in terms of responsiveness and loyalty, and she was thin-skinned and sensitive to slights. But she was also remarkably giving, willing to focus on her companions and to be “interested in your life and what you were.”
⁹⁴
Not surprisingly, her friendships were volatile, marked by arguments that led to days and weeks of anger before reconciliation. She could pick an argument over a recipe, as she did with Bill Styron, and the two stubborn individuals would part company for weeks. If she disliked a question at someone else's dinner table or perceived an insult, she might pick up her handbag and leave. Or she could silence a conversation by shouting across a table to tell someone that he was wrong about something she had barely overheard.
⁹⁵
Her friends tolerated or accepted these behaviors, in return for the genuine affection that Lillian so often displayed.

Her sexual energy directed toward men, Hellman often simply ignored the women in their presence. She often referred to wives as “Madam” as if she could not bother to remember their names. Insecure about her own looks and vain of her own appearance, she abhorred vanity in other women. She referred to those she disliked as “Mrs. Gigglewitz” out of aversion for their conceit, their mindlessness, or their careless display of wealth. John Hersey wrote, after her death, “she had a habit of liking husbands and very expressively not liking wives.”
⁹⁶
True, she made no special effort to appeal to the wives of men she cared about, sometimes maintaining strong relationships with men despite, not because of, their wives. Elizabeth Hardwick falls into that category. Lillian was extremely close to Hardwick's husband, Robert Lowell, in the late fifties and early sixties but maintained a coolly civil social relationship with Lizzie, as she was called. But Lizzie, who reciprocated the cool feelings, turned her back on Lillian once the marriage was over and publicly disparaged her and her work.
⁹⁷
Still, her close woman friends included the wives of William Wyler, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur, Jerome Wiesner, and Arthur Kober, as well as those of V. S. Pritchett, John Hersey, and Mike Nichols. And many of the friends she made in the sixties and seventies, including Anne Peretz, Lore Dickstein, and Wendy Nicholson, testify to the attention she
paid them, the notes of appreciation she wrote, and the small gifts she sent. These were friendships Hellman perceived as with equals—with women who had position or accomplishment of their own.

Perhaps Lillian's closest woman friend was Hannah Weinstein, who would become Lillian's touchstone. A loyal friend and companion through the political troubles of the 1950s and a confidante until she died in 1982, Weinstein returned from a self-imposed exile in Europe to found a successful Hollywood production company. In later years she lived around the corner from Lillian's Park Avenue home. The two were almost daily companions, often dining together at local restaurants. By some accounts, Hannah played second fiddle to the much tougher Lillian, but Hannah also seemed to have exercised some control over Lillian, insisting, for example, that she say thank you when appropriate.
⁹⁸
Shirley Hazzard, Frances Hackett, and later Ruth Field and Maureen Stapleton were among the women who shared their thoughts with Lillian over the years and with whom she shared her deepest feelings.

Lillian's large heart and enormous capacity for warmth and generosity drew people to her even as her irascibility repelled them. She responded promptly to friends in need, though not always in the ways they wanted. She lent money—generally accompanied by advice and instruction. Hellman worked closely with the poet Richard Wilbur when he was called in to provide lyrics for some of the songs in her 1955 musical operetta
Candide
. She and Wilbur's wife, Charlee, had become good friends, a friendship perhaps best exemplified by the Wilburs' decision to ask Lillian to be godmother to their son and Lillian's decision, after Hammett died in January 1961, to send all of Hammett's clothes to Richard (who, like Hammett, was tall and thin). Lillian regularly exchanged Christmas presents with the Wilburs and sometimes lent them her Martha's Vineyard home. Charlee addressed her letters to “Dearest Pie” and signed them with affectionate remarks like “so much love, dear, from us all.” Early in February 1961, the Wilburs ran into financial trouble and Charlee, without Richard's knowledge, wrote to Lillian to ask her for a loan. Their son had been ill, she wrote; she had given their only bit of available cash to a cousin without her husband's knowledge; she did not want to trouble Richard because it would cause him anxiety. Lillian responded immediately. She would loan the money—but only if Charlee told her husband everything. Charlee agreed, at first stipulating that the loan be made in her name alone. Once again Lillian balked. Finally, with Richard's full
knowledge and consent, Lillian made the Wilburs the loan. Like every loan she made, she kept careful records of the amount and the repayment record.
⁹⁹

Hellman adopted a similar, sometimes unwelcome, but always well-intentioned interventionist strategy at other times. When she learned that Robert Lowell was searching for a producer for his five-hour drama
The Old Glory,
she insisted that only she had the skill and contacts necessary to find someone good. In the end she failed, but she did help to raise money for the production.
¹⁰⁰
When her goddaughter Dina Weinstein asked her for help in setting up a catering business in France, Hellman replied with a counterproposal to support her for five months while Dina wrote a French cookbook. Characteristically, Lillian imposed a condition. She asked Dina to “turn over your research upon your return, to me and together, or perhaps I alone, will use the research for a cookbook.” Dina turned down the offer but Lillian sent her money anyway, offering her advice about menus, holiday meals, and which customers to entice.
¹⁰¹
These examples suggest a desire to control that others experienced as problematic. In the mid-seventies, Catherine Kober, the daughter of Arthur and one of Lillian's four godchildren, inherited $10,000 that Lillian's mother had meant to leave to Arthur decades before. The money passed through Lillian to Catherine, by now an adult, and Catherine contributed it to her favorite charity. Lillian, incensed that Catherine had not solicited her advice, promptly and painfully broke off relations with Catherine.
¹⁰²

On the other side, Hellman's life was punctuated with routinely munificent gestures. Old friends often drew on her for support, and she gave generously but only to causes in which she deeply believed. Routinely she invested small sums in plays written, produced, or directed by her friends. She provided her producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, with several loans, the first of them in 1946. He did not finish repaying them until 1956. After Bloomgarden's leg was amputated in 1972, she asked her agent to restructure some of the conditions of the contract for
The Lark
, on which they had worked together, in order to give him a larger share of the royalties.
¹⁰³
Later, she guaranteed a $5,000 loan to the ailing Bloomgarden from Bankers' Trust, paying it off when he could not. She willingly lent her 82nd Street house to whomever needed it. At one point, when she was abroad for several months, she instructed her secretary to ask the housekeeper to close down all the rooms except for her bedroom and study, which guests might want to use.
¹⁰⁴
She lent her Park Avenue apartment to Edmund Wilson when
her old friend, and very briefly her lover, became ill with what was apparently a tropical parasite. He and his wife, Elena, spent ten days there before he was admitted to Doctor's Hospital for a throat condition. Wilson's biographer, Lewis Dabney, counts Lillian “among the loyal friends of his later years” and remarks on what he calls the unjustified bitterness with which Mary McCarthy (Wilson's third wife) “would later attack Hellman for not telling the truth about her Stalinist past.”
¹⁰⁵