A Difficult Woman (53 page)

All this activity was funded through Lillian Hellman's efforts and her personal connections. Her verve and her spirit, her shamelessly demanding insistence, and her absolute confidence in the justice of the CPJ's mission held sway. Bravely, the CPJ asserted its voice in the interest of transparency, and increasingly Lillian called on her celebrity friends to
raise money and speak out for the organization. She tapped Ruth Field and the Field Foundation; she softened up her rich friend Max Palevsky—computer entrepreneur and venture capitalist. She lent her name to one benefit after another, shamelessly glorifying in adulation and contributions.

A March 6, 1975, “Citizen's Town Meeting” in Los Angeles, called to disclose domestic surveillance activities of the CIA, featured film star Warren Beatty. The benefit attracted Jacqueline Onassis, Jane Fonda, Ryan O'Neal, and other stars, and proved so popular that Hellman quipped she'd run out of tickets.
⁹⁵
Six months later, Hellman's old friend Hannah Weinstein, a distinguished Hollywood producer and herself a victim of McCarthyism, orchestrated a benefit for the Committee for Public Justice around Lillian Hellman's seventieth birthday. For $150 apiece, contributors heard a dozen actors read from Hellman's plays and memoirs and then adjourned for dinner at Gallagher's steak house. Hellman basked in the glory of extensive coverage of both herself and the event.
⁹⁶
The movie
Julia
, released in 1977, became the occasion of a third benefit. A trip to Los Angeles persuaded Robert Redford to host yet another glamorous benefit for the CPJ.

1975: Increasingly Hellman called on her celebrity friends to raise money. Here with Warren Beatty at a tribute to Hellman. (Photofest)

Though there is little doubt that without Lillian Hellman the Committee for Public Justice could not have survived, Hellman exerted little influence over the daily workings of the committee, the projects it chose, or the books and papers it produced. The substantive issues and the strategies for addressing them were the brainchildren of the lawyers and others who sat at monthly meetings and determined the direction of the organization.
⁹⁷
Hellman attended most of the meetings of the executive board, hosted many of them at her Park Avenue apartment and occasionally at her Vineyard home, and lent her name to every activity that the CPJ undertook. With Hannah Weinstein and Bobbie Handman, she dominated logistical decisions about food and drink, driving the small staff crazy as she repeatedly changed her mind about benefits and entertainments. Yet, except for reasserting the purposes of the organization, she took no part in debating the issues. She could be disruptive at meetings, drawing attention away from substantive matters. She fussed over small details, making Saturday-morning phone calls to Stephen Gillers to check that nothing had been overlooked and harassing some of the later executive directors. The record suggests that, far from being passively “outmaneuvered,” “checkmated,” and “cajoled”—to use one biographer's derogatory description—the brilliant legal and intellectual minds in the CPJ enthusiastically developed the projects that successfully drew attention to instruments of government repression.
⁹⁸

The CPJ lasted as long as Lillian had the energy to mobilize resources for it, petering out as she became sicker in the late seventies and as controversy mounted over her veracity. By then, its agenda had largely been subsumed into a revitalized ACLU. Still, for as long as she lasted, she supported the organization's efforts to move questions of civil liberties to the forefront of the public agenda and to maintain public awareness of the dangers of silent acquiescence. She stuck by that agenda, leading the Committee for Public Justice to a position as an honored and effective organization that educated the public in a decade permeated with lies. The CPJ benefited, to be sure, from the changing climate of the seventies—a decade when President Nixon led a delegation to Communist China, J. Edgar Hoover's death provided an opportunity for the FBI to alter its agenda, and Congressional Committees began to take up the issue of secrecy.
Within that context, Hellman briefly helped to reframe the agenda and move the United States from attacks on communism to self-examination. In so doing, she and the CPJ exposed the harm done by those who insisted on exaggerating the power of Soviet Communism. Her efforts helped to heal a breach on the left by uniting people of different political and social perspectives in the interest of civil liberties. At the same time, she exposed herself to a new set of attacks that emanated from those who still believed her guilty of subversion.

I don't know what the hell the truth is, maybe just not lying.

—Harvard lecture, 1961

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable.

—
from
Three,
1978

Lillian Hellman, I think, is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer. Every word she says is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

—Mary McCarthy, 1979

Lillian Hellman died in 1984, in the midst of a scandalous lawsuit, fighting for her honor and her integrity against accusations of lying. There is more than irony in this, for Hellman struggled all her life to sort out the meaning of truth and to adhere to a high standard of honesty. She had, she tells us in the story of Bethe Bowman, learned as a child the damage that could be done by lying and vowed then and there never to tell a lie, under penalty of torture and the guillotine.
¹
She sometimes thought of herself, as she once said, as “too honest.” Indeed, asked by Dashiell Hammett to identify her worst fault, that's the one she recorded.
²

But what was truth? Efforts to find the answer to that question permeate Hellman's work:
The Children's Hour
rotates around a lie told by a disturbed thirteen-year-old girl that destroys three lives and a cherished
school for girls.
Dark Angel
, her first movie script, focuses on a white lie, meant to hide a marriage, that subjects the hero to a dangerous wartime mission he might otherwise have avoided—and to a lifetime of blindness.
The Little Foxes
turns on a lie about a theft of bonds whose discovery places Regina in a position of power and allows her to win a financial victory over her brothers.
Toys in the Attic
features a young wife from whom truth is withheld who then becomes the unwitting instrument of her husband's ruin. How is it that the writer who spent so much of her energy defending truth became known as the archetype of liars? The answer to that question lies less in Hellman's life than in the historical debates that consumed her final decade.

Hellman continued to puzzle over questions of truth, and particularly its relationship to memory, as she developed her lectures and talks in the 1960s. At a 1960 University of Michigan reading of
Toys in the Attic
, she told an audience that wanted to hear something of the history of the play that she could “not remember all or much” of what they wanted to know. But, she promised, “I will certainly be more accurate tonight than I will be next year or next week.”
³
She told a group of Harvard students in 1961 that her memory had always been poor. When she offered to recall for them her memories of the theater, she paused to warn them that she hoped they would be “accurate and as truthful as anybody can make memory, which is not very truthful at all.”
⁴
Though she admitted that she could not remember where she was at particular times, she did not apologize for her “extremely cranky memory.”
⁵
She understood, as she would say later, that memory “is not the same thing as what happened in the real minute of pleasure or pain.”
⁶
Over and over again, whether the stories were about herself or about others, she deflected the notion that memory could point to truth. “I have no memory for dates,” she told Hammett biographer Diane Johnson, along with a story about how a dozen people she knew each remembered Hammett in a different way.
⁷

The struggle to tell the truth and to recognize that truth itself was elusive persisted all her life. She did not know if it was a writer's task to tell the truth, or what truth meant, she told her Harvard students. Though she kept notebooks, carefully researched and recorded details, and certainly “tried to get things right,” she never escaped her dictum that “truth is larger than the truth of fact.”
⁸
When she turned to writing memoirs in the mid-1960s, questions of truth and memory came to the fore in a literal
as well as a metaphorical sense. She had, she confessed in the last paragraph of
An Unfinished Woman
, never known “what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for.”

Later, after the trouble started, people would return to
An Unfinished Woman
to challenge the literal truth of what she had written. She shrugged off the factual discrepancies. It was no secret that she had a poor memory. She had been speaking about it for years. “I have little sense of time and often when I have tried to walk back through memory's lane I have stumbled in the dark and lost my way,” she wrote in 1967.
⁹
In this respect, Hellman differs little from most memoirists who practice an art that relies exclusively on their unchallengeable memories and distances itself from anything called objective truth. As one commentator remarked, “She heightened things, she shuffled them around, she remembered some things and repressed others.”
¹⁰
Hellman admitted that she could not have written her memoirs without “a feeling for fiction, some belief that what I was writing about was interesting or dramatic.”
¹¹
Doris Lessing would have approved. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” she wrote trenchantly.
¹²

When she wrote
Pentimento
, which Little, Brown published in 1973, Hellman gambled that she could construct her vivid, beautifully written, sharply characterized stories about her past with the license of the fiction writer. The title itself, as she announced in the epigram, refers to the painter's practice of reconceiving an old image as “a way of seeing and seeing again.” To editor William Abrahams, she confided that “the accuracy or lack of accuracy of my memory was not important.”
¹³
And in the book she wrote, “I wanted to see what was there for me once, and what is there for me now.”
¹⁴
She did not want to describe the book as a memoir. “For reasons best known to cranky authors, I am anxious that this book not be thought of as sequel to
An Unfinished Woman
, but as a book of portraits,” she wrote to an editor at
Esquire
who wanted to publish an excerpt from it.
¹⁵

In the seven stories of
Pentimento,
Hellman chose to revisit scenes of her childhood and young womanhood to see if she could recapture the feelings evoked by some key moments. Repeatedly she warned her readers that she was simply writing what she remembered, that she doubted her capacity to remember: What she wrote was her version of what happened, but others, she readily conceded, might remember things differently. “I know all I have written here,” she wrote in
Pentimento,
“or I know it the way I remember it, which of course may not be the whole
truth.”
¹⁶
The book, written in the style she had introduced in
An Unfinished Woman
, was filled with words unspoken, questions unasked and unanswered, places never again visited, and people, once encountered, never again known. “I was never to be angry with him again,” Hellman might write. A few pages later she would maintain, “I was never to see her again,” and shortly afterward, “we were never to talk about it again.” The phrases infused the stories with an air of mystery and suspense that enhanced their intrigue and her own centrality, for they suggested that the unwritten words held secrets never to be unlocked.

Many read into her prose a reflection of her personality, seeing in it either a “Hammett-like parsimony” or an elliptical and evasive quality. Others described “a rich, murky, Henry Jamesian” quality that could be “wildly elusive and vague.”
¹⁷
Those who thought her tough, direct, and honest, as did a
New York Times
book critic, declared that she wrote “a prose as brilliantly finished as any that we have in these years.”
¹⁸
They admired her “elegantly simple style” and, somewhat hyperbolically, described it as shining “with a moral intelligence, a toughness of character that inspires even as it entertains.” Critic John Leonard, who penned that phrase, added, “the prose is as precise as an electron microscope.”
¹⁹
But those who caviled at the image of a courageous and honest Hellman thought her writing style “irritating” rather than “slight and charming.” It was, said one critic, imitative of “a time when Hemingway and Hammett made it seem fresh, new and appropriate.”
²⁰
Another described her style as “obdurate, flat and mannered” and flailed her as a “virtuoso of the ellipsis.”
²¹
The contrasts may be less aesthetic assessments than expressions of feeling about the author.