A Difficult Woman (23 page)

Later she told a different story, one that depicted the disagreement as based on personal animus. Bankhead had earlier refused to perform a benefit for Spanish Republican fighters who needed money to get out of a Spain then falling to Franco.
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Hellman, who had passed through Helsinki in 1937 and noted the posters and rallies in support of Hitler, had little sympathy for the Finns. Along with her like-minded producer Herman Shumlin, she was not inclined to raise money for what she considered a country with fascist sympathies. Angry with Bankhead for denying her an opportunity to raise funds for Spain, she simply took her
revenge. Hellman claimed that Bankhead turned “what had been no more than a theatre fight … into a political attack: it was made to seem that we agreed with the invasion of Finland, refused aid to true democrats, were, ourselves, dangerous Communists.” She claimed to be a victim: “It was my first experience of such goings-on.”
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It is difficult to believe that Hellman did not invent the second story to justify her behavior after the fact, and yet she did not mindlessly support the party line. She would later write of the German alliance with Russia: “While I believed that the Soviet Union's disillusionment with Munich in 1938 afforded some justification for the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, I wholly disagreed with the position of the Communist Party in its glorification of Nazism.”
⁵⁷
Two projects in which she was then engaged illustrate this complicated position:
PM
magazine and her antifascist play
Watch on the Rhine
. Together, they reveal something of her unconventional intellectual stance.

Ralph Ingersoll, Lillian's old friend and sometime lover, planned to develop a new daily newspaper intended to serve truth “whether the truth takes us to the right or to the left.” Ingersoll claimed to have been inspired to produce
PM
by Lillian herself and gave her credit for the name. As the story goes, Ingersoll, the distinguished editor of
Fortune
magazine and soon to become general manager of Time, Inc., fell into a passionate romance with Hellman that lasted through the summer and fall of 1935. When Lillian, in the presence of Dashiell Hammett, mocked him once too often for being under the thumb of the corporation's owner, Henry Luce, Ingersoll vowed to prove his manhood by creating a publication of his own.
⁵⁸

By the fall of 1939, Ingersoll was ready to start the newspaper, whose credo he succinctly described in one of many drafts of his “Proposition to Create a New Newspaper” as “against people who push other people around.” Talented writers of all kinds would write for it, he believed, because “only here can they write honestly what they know and see.”
⁵⁹
This would be possible because
PM
would not be dependent on advertising. Rather it would be supported, at five cents a copy, by the “subway rider.” He proved to be partially right. Launched with the help of funding from a large advisory board and particularly from the department store heir Marshall Field (whose wife, Ruth, was a good friend of Lillian's), Ingersoll produced an afternoon newspaper whose circulation reached nearly two hundred thousand daily.

To get
PM
going and to hire its staff, Ingersoll placed on its planning
committee a range of intellectuals who included Hellman and Hammett, both of them by now understood to be members of the Communist Party. Together they hired a young staff, some of them communists. Others, like Ingersoll himself and the journalist I. F. Stone, were committed to noncommunist antifascist politics. The staff also included liberals who despised the Soviet Union. Among these, the news reporter James Wechsler stood out. Ingersoll deployed his talent effectively, insisting that everyone had to work together and that the paper would publish only independent thought. Communists were fine; single-minded followers of the party line would be rejected. Not everyone believed him.

For a while the paper worked beautifully.
PM
was apparently read in the White House. Avidly antifascist, President Roosevelt and Eleanor used the paper to create support for interventionist policies and to construct sympathy for the refugees of fascism. Both Hammett and Hellman devoted time and attention to it in 1940 and 1941. FDR invited Ingersoll to the White House to consult with him about policy and politics. Despite widespread accusations of sympathy with communism, Ingersoll successfully laughed off any taint of Communist Party influence.

Yet the several pieces that Hellman wrote for
PM
during its short eight-year life span reveal how awkwardly even the most talented writers responded to the injunction to independent thought. Hellman, still drawn to communism in the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact, would not defend either the Soviet Union or the Germans, and yet she demonstrated an unrelenting cynicism with regard to American democracy. Sent to Philadelphia to cover the Republican national convention of 1940, she soon left the convention hall, frustrated by the apparent deal-making that undergirded the process of selecting a president. On the street, she buttonholed “three white men and two black men” to ask them “whether they thought Mr. Roosevelt might run again, or who did they think the Republicans would pick for a candidate.” Unconvincingly she reported that one after the other refused to speak to her. A taxi driver told her “he had been instructed not to talk about politics, the war, or the state of the nation.” Another replied to her questions by telling her, “We don't think around here much. It's too hot to think.” Yet a third replied that he “didn't have any ideas, sometimes it wasn't smart to have ideas.” She concluded, in what can only be interpreted as an obvious projection, that they were “too suspicious and too tired and too frightened to exercise their primary right of free and easy speech.”
⁶⁰

About this time, Lillian Hellman came to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their files on her, numbering close to a thousand pages, start in 1941 and, with sporadic breaks, follow her into the 1970s.
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Hellman seems not to have been aware of the surveillance—and yet this too is part of the American twentieth century. The bureau searched its inventory and newspaper databases back to 1936 to compile evidence of her association with left-wing groups.

Hellman was growing impatient. The Nazi-Soviet pact had effectively, if only momentarily, curtailed the Communist Party's criticism of fascism. But Hellman was not to be silenced. She had always defended the right to speak freely, and, whatever the Soviet line, she would speak up now. Swiftly, she sat down to pen
Watch on the Rhine
, the only play she ever wrote, she tells us, that flowed from her pen in a single draft. The play eloquently celebrated “men willing to die for what they believed in.”
⁶²
In so doing, it implicitly condemned Soviet efforts to convince Americans to remain out of the war then spreading across Europe, and it appealed for engagement with a fascist enemy. Inaction,
Watch on the Rhine
seemed to warn, would stifle freedom everywhere. Hellman had no need to name Germans as the enemy in the play; a German villain who drew on the German embassy for support made its targets clear. She preferred, she would later say, to speak to the issue of sticking by one's convictions.

The communist press predictably attacked the play. As it had taken issue with
The Little Foxes
for being too easy on capitalists, now it condemned
Watch on the Rhine
for its “fabric of omissions.” Why, wondered communist critics, did the play fail to illuminate the economic ills that provoked the rise of fascism? Alvah Bessie, writing in the
New Masses
, deplored the play's lack of sensitivity. Instead of “trying to whip or cajole us into imperialist war against the fascists,” Bessie commented, “Hellman might have used her skills to promote the world-wide organization by the working people against their separate home-grown brands of fascism.”
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Nine weeks after the play opened in April 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The alliance of fascism and communism was over. The west joined with the communists to defeat fascism. Dashiell Hammett settled in at Hardscrabble Farm to write the screen version of
Watch on the Rhine.
Hellman became a darling of the communist press. Simultaneously, she earned a treasured invitation to both supper at the White House and a command performance of her play on January 25, 1942. There, as she remembers it, President Roosevelt inquired about the provenance
of the play and, when she told him she had started it in the summer of 1940, asked her how she reconciled the play with rumors that she had supported communist pickets then opposed to U.S. entry into the war. Hellman denied that she had ever supported the pickets.
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By the time she dined at the White House in January 1942, Hellman had probably already withdrawn from the CPUSA. But before and after she withdrew, she joined an astonishing array of antifascist organizations. She remained active in the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign and in the Hollywood Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. If the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sponsored a fund drive to aid wounded volunteers, Hellman's name appeared on the invitation. If the American Friends of Spanish Democracy held a dinner, Hellman gave a talk. She joined the American League for Peace and Democracy—an organization of mixed provenance formed in August 1939 to sponsor refugee scholarships and to campaign for peace.
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She helped to found the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, whose first act (on January 17, 1940) was to circulate a petition to discontinue the Dies Committee. To the FBI, Hellman's name on a group's membership list affirmed the presence of communists and earned the group the label of a “front” organization.

But Hellman seemed to care little about whether a particular group bore the communist imprimatur at any given time. After the United States entered the war, she raised money for Russian war relief; she lent her name to the Artists' Front to Win the War (sponsor, October 1942); she signed petitions circulated by the League of American Writers to open a second front (in September 1942); she sponsored a call for the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship, November 6 to 8, 1943. She cheered when the Dies Committee suspended its investigations and cooperated happily when the federal government asked Hollywood producers to make films that encouraged sympathy for a Soviet Union under fire. At a moment when the United States and the Soviet Union fought on the same side, Hellman's American patriotism and continuing admiration for the Soviet Union blended smoothly. Throughout the war years, she retained a warm sympathy for those who struggled for democratic rights, a high regard for the people of the Soviet Union, and a growing commitment to issues of world peace. If she became instrumental in Popular Front activities, she was never a party liner, never an ideologue.

While the United States and the Soviet Union were friends, Hellman could do what she could not bring herself to do when the party was under attack. She could comfortably withdraw from the party, though not from her deep antifascist and antiracist commitments, without feeling that she had somehow betrayed her friends. Perverse as this behavior may seem, it speaks to the code of loyalty that Hellman maintained consistently thereafter, and especially in the years of the Cold War. She could not hit a person, nor attack a friend, when he was down. True to form, as the war drew to a close and suspicions against the Soviet Union's postwar intentions mounted, she joined the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and later served on its women's committee. But she did not care for the party, did not like being under its discipline, did not follow a line. She refused always to betray friends who remained within the Communist Party orbit, and she never wavered in her admiration for the Soviet people. Most of all she resisted the efforts of government “bullies” to deny her right to think about communism in any way that suited her. In what is perhaps the most backhanded of compliments, one of the FBI reports on her commented that its sources indicated that “Lillian Hellman is one of the few Communists or Communist sympathizers who will discuss Communism openly and honestly.”
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At the same time she became deeply committed to exorcising racism within the United States in this time of war. When Paul Robeson, who was probably a member of the Communist Party at this point, persuaded a Council on African Affairs meeting on April 8, 1942, to adopt a resolution advocating the end of discrimination in the armed forces and government services, Hellman joined him on the podium. This turned out to be only one of many fund-raising affairs in which Robeson and Hellman were associated. And it turned out to be one of several issues championed by Eleanor Roosevelt as well as by the Communist Party.
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At the end of that month, she and Hammett traveled to Hollywood, where Hellman wrote a short script for an armed-forces documentary called
The Negro Soldier.
Hellman aimed for a film that debated what were then called Negro rights. The forty-minute short that ultimately emerged in 1944 was not the ringing plea for white and black unity against discrimination that Hellman imagined. Rather, director Stuart Heister produced an upbeat documentary showing the contributions of African-Americans to the armed services over time. It had no relationship to the film Hellman wanted, and neither her name or Robeson's was later associated with it. September 25, 1943, found Hellman at Hunter College, leading a group discussion of
Jim Crow in the armed forces sponsored by the Citizens Emergency Conference for Inter-Racial Unity. Robeson, her ally and friend in these endeavors, in turn joined Hellman on the platform when she raised money for Spanish Loyalists.
⁶⁸

In July 1944, Hellman received a cablegram from the Russian Embassy in Washington with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. Two of her plays,
The Little Foxes
and
Watch on the Rhine
, were to be performed there, and Hellman was invited to observe the rehearsals, expenses paid by the Soviets. She accepted the invitation with alacrity. There followed months of delay during which the FBI recommended refusing her a passport because, as one of their records puts it, “she is considered to be a Key Figure in Communist activities by the New York Field Division.”
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The FBI report on Hellman, sent to assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle, tarred Hellman with the brush of guilt by association, naming her as “a member of many organizations allegedly Communist dominated and that have followed the Communist Party line.” The report also noted that she had been “closely associated with a number of individuals who have been identified as members of the Communist Political Association.” The bureau report took particular umbrage at Hellman's efforts to protest the activities of the FBI, noting that an unnamed informant had reported in 1940 that “Lillian Hellman had been assigned by the Communist Party to ‘smear the FBI' in the newspaper,
PM
.”
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If so, Hellman fell down on the job.