A Difficult Woman (40 page)

To prepare for moving, Hellman hired Mildred Loftus, who also took charge of the unpacking. Together the two decided what was to be brought from the old house, what needed cleaning, what should be sold, which bookcases would need to be cut and how, which chairs to recover at what cost. But it was Loftus who got the jobs done. Hellman continued to provide detailed instructions on issues such as which books would go where, which dishes in what cabinet. Hellman thought Mildred a life-saver, calling her “the best friend I have” and complimenting her on her arrangement of the dishes, on finding lost attachments for the shelves of the china closet, and on replacing the dining room curtains.
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She also praised Rita Wade, who took charge of the bills and the billing, typing confirmations of all the instructions and keeping meticulous track of what was done and the cost of everything. An endless array of contractors, “rug men,” and workmen handled the work itself. But Hellman was tired. From the Vineyard, she wrote her gratitude to Mildred Loftus, adding that “the weight of what I've done has been a stone around my neck and all I can do is hope that the stone will soon disappear.”
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By September, when Lillian returned from the Vineyard, the apartment was ready for her.

For all of her irascible character and her quick and angry temper, Hellman seemed not only to get along with her domestic helpers but to develop warm and affectionate relationships with many of those who worked for and with her. Chief among these were her secretaries, who
generally came in for two or three days a week and who took over much of the management of her domestic as well as business affairs. Among the names that stand out: Nancy Bragdon, Edith Kean, Lois Fritsch, Selma Wolfman, and Rita Wade each stayed with her for many years, together spanning a period of almost four decades. They extended their services to supervising moves from and to houses and apartments, caring for the household and for her personal needs while she was away, and keeping track of complicated insurance, financial, and tax records. Bragdon watched over Hammett's accounts while he was in the army; Lois Fritsch fielded the IRS when Lillian ran into tax problems during the McCarthy period; Wade took care of hiring and firing a platoon of nurses as Lillian became increasingly ill at the end of her life.

She had more complicated relationships with her cooks—and, after her favorite Helen Richardson's departure, with the succession of housemaids who lived in one or another of her houses. On the one hand, Hellman seems to have treated them formally, laying out her expectations and drawing up oral and sometimes written contracts with them, expecting them to live up to their commitments and paying salaries, that were, by the standards of her day, more than fair. She scrupulously paid benefits for her household employees, including workmen's compensation and health insurance. More than once she went to bat with insurance companies on behalf of employees injured in household accidents. When her longtime cook Richardson injured her knee, Hellman asked her secretary, Selma Wolfman, to help collect the appropriate compensation; later Hellman made sure that Helen got medical attention for a shoulder injury. She did the same for other, more transient employees.
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But there was another side, one that went against the grain of the feminist environment of the seventies. Her instructions to newly hired employees indicated the kind of service she expected and the tasks to be performed. They were detailed, direct, and somewhat anachronistic. A 1973 “Things to Do” list instructed her new help to dust all rooms and to wipe all windowsills each day; to clean her bathroom daily and to mop the floor several times a week; to vacuum once a week “and please put the soft brush on the vacuum cleaner and vacuum all the furniture and under the cushions at the same time.” Lillian wanted her bath towels washed “each time they are used,” her bed linens changed twice a week, and her mattress turned every two weeks. She wanted the furniture oiled and the floors lightly waxed once a month, the ice bucket filled at noon and again at four every day, and she gave explicit instructions for laying the table
and serving when guests were expected for lunch or dinner.
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She told a twenty-five-hour-a-week helper hired in the spring of 1979 just how to get started: “You will move in Friday, April 13, around 9.30 am,” she wrote to her. “You will not be expected to work each day until 12:30 or 12:45. Every Thursday when you come in at 12:45 pm you will make my bed and dust and straighten the house. Every Thursday evening if I am at home, you will either fix dinner or help me fix dinner.”
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And so on.

These detailed instructions suggest, as do the letters from women who worked for her, more of the two-sidedness of Lillian's nature. She could be extraordinarily generous and by her own lights fair. In return, she demanded not just meticulous and attentive service but caring and affection as well. Her sense of entitlement expanded as she grew older and more irascible, bringing with it displays of bad temper that often offended those who worked for her. She treated her helpers like servants rather than companions, demanding that they perform menial as well as more sophisticated tasks and insisting on promptness, cleanliness, and attention to duty. Rosemary Mahoney, one of the young women she hired, found the relationship an enormous disappointment.
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The lists of duties allowed no room for initiative or the exercise of personal choice. They were precisely tailored to particular employees—to the full-time maid who would live in the second-floor maid's room at 630 Park Avenue as well as to the part-time summer help who came to her on Martha's Vineyard or escorted her to doctors in the years of increasing blindness. An offense could precipitate a stream of violent invective and a burst of temper that could be heard by neighbors and embarrassed her friends and visitors.
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To those who departed, Hellman provided instructions as detailed as those who arrived. “Give your own room a thorough dusting and vacuuming,” she instructed one young woman, and “a good cleaning of the bathroom that you have been using. Please take your curtain down and give it a washing and ironing, remembering to iron it damp in order to get the sides the correct length and then rehang it.” The vacuum was to remain on the bed, she reminded her helper, and the bed and pillows to be covered.
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If the departure was on good terms, Hellman could reach out generously. She offered a young Chinese woman employment as well as lessons in English and driving instruction. Ming Hu's English, however, proved inadequate to Hellman's needs, so she found her another job and earned the young woman's undying gratitude. Ming Hu wrote regularly to Hellman, dropped by the apartment with soup, offered her appreciation and massages, and presented her, in subsequent years, with a handmade nightgown and a sweater.
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Other ex-employees wrote her affectionate and loving notes.

Her sense of entitlement expanded as she grew older. (Photo courtesy Lynn Gilbert)

Given Hellman's difficult persona and her demanding nature, it isn't surprising that some of her employees could not abide her and left abruptly. Those who did so experienced her legendary wrath. She wrote a decidedly unpleasant note to a young women who left her service for unknown reasons just after Christmas in 1980. The letter suggests something of Hellman's increasing narcissism, as well as a paranoia perhaps aggravated by her dependence on others. But it also speaks eloquently to a conception of service that embodied loyalty and love as well as a large sense of entitlement.

I am, of course, shocked that you would leave my house without any notification, particularly when you know that I am not well.

It is my hope that nothing illegal has happened here, but certainly you know that you have cost me a very large fee at the Agency, whereas if you had left one week earlier I would not have been responsible for the fee.

It is also my hope that you do not owe us any money for the telephone bill. If you do, I will have to go through proper channels to collect it.

I don't think anybody in my life has ever done anything quite as unpleasant to me as you have managed; nor do I see the reason for it. But let us hope that nothing will come out of it that is too difficult for you.
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As she became older, sicker, and more needy, Hellman's irascibility and her specificity increased. So too did the speed with which a succession of college and graduate students came and went. She needed these students to read to her, to take her to doctors' appointments, and to help out around the house. So she solicited from her friends and acquaintances the names of students who “would not only like to give up the summer,” but who were “taking a year off from college.” She offered them “a half day job from about 12 noon on” and suggested that she could help them find other employment on the Vineyard if they needed it. Much as she needed the help of these students, she could not bring herself to be kind to them: her abrupt and sometimes angry manners offended more than a few. For several years in the late seventies and early eighties she did not scruple to ask student helpers to make their homes in a tent on her Martha's Vineyard lawn, suggesting that if there were no guests around they might use the house and promising them a maid's room when and if they moved to New York. Some students accepted the arrangement for the privilege of working with the great celebrity.

Nellie Mohn, a Wells College student, chose to do so in the summer of 1980. After some negotiation, Hellman hired her as a “general housekeeper and assistant secretary” in the spring of 1980, sending her a check for $125 to bind her services, which would begin on the Vineyard at the end of May. At the same time, she asked Mohn to sign a letter indicating that she understood and accepted the terms of her contract, which included providing her own tent to accommodate her for the summer. “Feel free to live in the house until your tent is well established,” she wrote to her. Then she suggested that Mohn start work in the kitchen, “giving the ice box a thorough cleaning, the floors and counters a thorough scrubbing, and do the same in the room that contains the freezer and the washing machine.” After that, Lillian would give her further instructions.
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Mohn turned out to be a great success. When she left that fall, Hellman
gave her a letter to take with her. In it, she described Mohn as a “young woman of extraordinary intelligence of serious education … of conscience, of dignity,” concluding that this was “not only a letter of recommendation for Miss Mohn, it is a letter of admiration.”
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But the case of another employee (let us call her Linda) reveals another side of Lillian's character and hints at her growing paranoia as she grew more feeble. Hellman hired Linda while she was visiting Arizona one winter. She did “not much like” her, as she wrote to a friend from whom she solicited suggestions for a replacement. But Linda stuck it out for several months before quitting. When she did so, Hellman asked her to sign a dictated statement that reads as follows:

Dear Miss Hellman,
This is to assure you that I have had a pleasant six months in
your employment, and that we have lived by the rules of our
agreement, which included my weekly salary, my airplane ticket
from Tucson to New York, and half of the cost of my airfare to
Charlotte, North Carolina.
My warmest regards, and thanks.

Two days later Hellman dictated—but did not ask Linda to sign—a confused statement that began with Linda wishing Lillian success on the completion and publication of her new book and ended with Lillian offering Linda some wild game.
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The exchange suggests that Lillian was not in full control of her faculties at the time, but it offers a glimpse into her concern that she not be perceived as having wronged her helper. Linda bore no grudge. “I do worry for her, Rita. Please let me know how all goes,” she wrote to Rita Wade a few weeks later. Then, thanking her for helping to sort the situation out, she concluded by taking responsibility for her departure: “I promise to keep working on getting a little tougher and not being so sensitive.”
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Linda was not free yet, however. Five months after she quit, she received a letter from Lillian demanding that the young woman tell her why she had not noticed that some of her jewelry had been damaged and three diamonds lost. She did not directly accuse her of theft. Rather, she wrote, “I would like to have your immediate reply of why you did not notice either one of these damages when we packed on our return … Please write me of any possible memory you have or any
possible knowledge you might have spared me. I wait eagerly to hear from you.”
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Linda replied promptly, claiming no knowledge of the missing stones and declaring her continuing affection for Miss Hellman.

The story of Lillian's mother's will sheds more light on the question of Hellman's feelings about money. Lillian's grandmother Sophie Newhouse died in 1930, leaving her mother, Julia, a small trust fund. Grandmother Sophie Newhouse had left all the rest of her money directly to her other children. But, probably because Sophie mistrusted Julia's husband, Max, Sophie left Julia's share in trust, making her own brother, Lillian's great-uncle Gilbert, its executor. Julia in turn willed the trust to her only daughter, making small provisions to Arthur Kober and to Max's two sisters should they survive Lillian. The trust fund rankled all of Lillian's life, becoming a symbol of her mother's family's excessive engagement with money and perhaps the main source of her alienation from her mother's family. She later wrote, “I don't see my aunt Florence very often, mostly because my father quite rightly thought my grandmother's will was directed against him.”
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