A Difficult Woman (66 page)

21
LH to Mr. H. J. Whigham, January 2, 1935, box 50, folder 4, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC. See also the controversy over the title of
The Children's Hour
,
New York Times
(November 17, 1935): 3.

22
LH interview with Harry Gilroy, “The Bigger the Lie,”
New York Times
(December 14, 1952): sec. 2, 3, 4.

23
Ibid., 4.

24
“Children's Hour Banned in Boston,”
New York Times
(December 15, 1935): 42.

25
The
New York Times
followed the dispute closely. See “American Play Banned,”
New York Times
(March 12, 1935): 24; “Fight Boston Play Ban,”
New York Times
(December 16, 1935): 22; “Boston Sued on Play Ban,”
New York Times
(December 27, 1935): 15; “Children's Hour Ban Extended,”
New York Times
(December 18, 1935): 33.

26
Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: The Children's Hour,” no date, box 50, folder 36, 3, William Miller Abrahams Papers, M1125, Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

27
Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Days to Come,” no date, box 50, folder 36, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

28
Joseph Wood Krutch, “Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant,”
Nation
(December 26, 1936): 769; Richard Watts Jr., “Class War,”
New York Herald Tribune
(December 16, 1936): 22.

29
Lucius Beebe, “An Adult's Hour Is Miss Hellman's Next Effort,”
New York Herald Tribune
(December 13, 1936): sec. 7, 2.

30
Terry Curtis Fox, “Early Work,”
Village Voice
(November 6, 1978): 127. Fox continued, in remarks that evoked Hellman's battle with HUAC: “All people, Hellman tells us, have their failings: they are to be understood. But when those failings spill out onto other people, they become something which is no longer private and which cannot be overlooked. Hellman does not mind cowardice, but she will never countenance betrayal.” For the circumstances of the play's revival, and for Hellman's efforts to extend the production, see correspondence from November and December 1978 in the papers of Harold Matson Company, Inc. Records, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University New York, NY.

31
Lillian Hellman,
Pentimento
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 160–61; this section first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
, “Flipping for a Diamond” (March 30, 1973).

32
Lillian Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,”
Paris Review
33 (Winter/Spring 1965): 91; LH to “Dearest Art,” box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

33
Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Theatre,” box 31, folder 16, 2, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

34
Hellman,
Pentimento
, 163.

35
The quotation is from Tish Dace's review of a 1978 revival of
Days to Come
. See “Hellman: Beyond the Topical,” November 2, 1978, box 52, folder 9, Harold Matson Company, Inc. Records, RBML.

36
Beebe, “An Adult's Hour,” 2.

37
Krutch, “Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant,” 769.

38
Arthur Miller,
Timebends: A Life
(New York: Grove Press, 1987), 230.

39
Ibid.

40
John Gassner,
The Theatre in Our Times: A Survey of the Men, Materials and Movements in Modern Theatre
(New York: Crown, 1954), 11

41
Jacob H. Adler,
Lillian Hellman
(Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn and Company, 1969), 6.

42
Ibid.

43
Lucius Beebe, “Stage Asides: Miss Hellman Talks of Her Latest Play, The Little Foxes,”
New York Herald Tribune
(March 12, 1939): sec. 6, 1.

44
Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 1,” 2–3.

45
Ibid., 3.

46
Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Smith College,” April 15, 1955, box 43, folder 1, 6, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

47
Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 1,” 3.

48
Hellman, “Typescript: Smith College,” 6; Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Smith/MIT,” April 15, 18, 1955; Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Swarthmore,” April 6, 1950, box 43, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

49
Hellman,
Four Plays
, viii

50
Robert van Gelder, “Of Lillian Hellman,”
New York Times
(April 20, 1941): X1.

51
Hellman,
Pentimento
, 199.

52
LH to Arthur, late 1930s, box 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

53
Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Wellesley Address,” March 22, 1951, box 43, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

54
Hellman,
Four Plays
, xiii.

55
On her gift for drawing character, see Adler,
Lillian Hellman
, 19.

56
Hellman,
Four Plays
, xiii.

57
Hellman,
Pentimento
, 193.

58
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 89.

59
LH to “Dearest Art,” no date, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

60
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 83.

61
Beebe, “An Adult's Hour,” 2.

62
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 68.

63
Hellman,
Four Play
s, x.

64
Lillian Hellman, typescript, “The Children's Hour,” 1.

65
Lillian Hellman, “The Time of the Foxes,”
New York Times
(October 22, 1967): sec. 2, 1.

66
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 83.

67
Ibid.

68
Hellman, “Typescript: Swarthmore Address,” 6, 7.

69
Reminiscences of Harold Clurman (1979), on page 131 in the Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection.

70
Hellman,
Pentimento,
202–3.

71
Hellman quoted in Gretchen Cryer, “Where Are the Women Playwrights?”
New York Times
(May 20, 1973): 129.

72
Jerome Weidman, “Lillian Hellman Reflects Upon the Changing Theater,”
Dramatists Guild Quarterly
7 (Winter 1970): 22.

73
Walter Kerr, “Whose Play Is It?”
New York Times
(October 12, 1969): SM66.

74
Remiscences of Harold Clurman (1979), on page 132, CCOH.

75
Austin Pendleton, interview by author, December 12, 2009; and Pendleton to author, personal communication, August 14, 2011.

76
Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 1,” 10–11.

77
Austin Pendleton, interview by author, December 12, 2009.

78
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 72; Hellman,
Pentimento
, 162–63.

79
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 68.

80
Hellman, “The Time of the Foxes,” sec. 2, 1.

81
Miller,
Timebends
, 231.

82
Weidman, “Lillian Hellman Reflects,” 20.

83
This idea first put forward by Edith J. R. Isaacs, “Lillian Hellman, A Playwright on the March,”
Theatre Arts
28 (January 1944): 20.

84
LH to Arthur Kober, 1935, box 1, folder 20, Arthur Kober Papers, WHS.

85
Beebe, “An Adult's Hour,” 2.

86
Joseph Wood Krutch, “Unpleasant Play,”
Nation
(February 25, 1939): 244; James Eastman, “Image of American Destiny: The Little Foxes,”
Players
48 (1973): 70–73.

87
Beebe, “Stage Asides,” in Jackson Bryer,
Conversations with Lillian Hellman
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 7.

88
Transcript from interviews by Gary Waldhorn and Robert Murray, “Yale Reports,” June 5, 1966, box 30, folder 10, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

89
Lillian Hellman, “Theatre Pictures: Excerpts from a Theatrical Journal, Remembered in Subacid Tone,”
Esquire
(August 1973): 64.

90
Lillian Hellman,
The Collected Plays
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 188.

91
Atkinson, “Children's Hour,” sec. 10, p. 1.

92
John Mason Brown, “Tallulah Bankhead and ‘The Little Foxes,'”
New York Post
(March 11, 1939): 8. Brown credited Bankhead with “creating the kind of villainess even the Grand Guignol has never been able to match.”

93
Brooks Atkinson, “Tallulah Bankhead appearing in Lillian Hellman's Drama of the South, ‘The Little Foxes,'”
New York Times
(February 16, 1939): 16.

94
Joseph Wood Krutch,
American Drama Since 1918: An Informal History
(New York: G. Braziller, 1967), 132

95
Richard Watts, “The Little Foxes,”
New York Herald Tribune
(February 16, 1939): 14.

96
Stark Young, “Watch on the Rhine,”
New Republic
(April 14, 1941): 498.

97
Hellman,
Four Plays
, x–xi.

98
Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 3,” spring 1961, box 44, folder 6, 5, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

99
The critic Barrett Clark agrees with Hellman on this point: “Melodrama is melodramatic not because it is violent or striking but because it uses violence for violence' sake.” See Barrett H. Clark, “Lillian Hellman,”
The English Journal
33 (December 1944): 524. Thanks to Emma Hulse for making this connection.

100
Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 70; Richard Stern, “An Interview with Lillian Hellman,” May 21, 1958, box 1, folder 23, Richard Stern Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

101
Hellman,
Pentimento
, 180. See also Lillian Hellman, “Back of Those Foxes,”
New York Times
(February 26, 1939): sec. 9, pp. 1, 2, and Richard Lockridge, “Lillian Hellman's ‘The Little Foxes' Opens at the National Theater,”
New York Sun
(February 16, 1939): 12. Lockridge described the plot as touching melodrama now and again, but “touches it effectively.”

102
Thanks to Anita Chapman for pointing out that
The Little Foxes
took on new life after the arrest of Bernard Madoff for constructing a financial Ponzi scheme in 2008.

103
John Gassner,
The Theatre in Our Times: A Survey of the Men, Materials, and Movements in the Modern Theatre
(New York: Crown, 1954), 78.

104
Adler,
Lillian Hellman
, 17.

105
Richard Watts Jr. “The Theater: Miss Hellman's Play,”
New York Herald Tribune
(February 26, 1939): sec. 10, 1.

106
Lillian Hellman, “Author Jabs the Critic,”
New York Times
(December 15, 1946): 3.

107
Walter Kerr, “Voltaire's Candide as a Light Opera,”
New York Herald Tribune
(December 26, 1956): sec. 4, 1.

108
Margaret Harriman, “Miss Lilly of New Orleans,”
New Yorker
(November 8, 1941): 22.

109
Beebe, “Stage Aside,” in Bryer, ed.,
Conversations
, 10.

110
George Jean Nathan, “Playwrights in Petticoats,”
American Mercury
(June 1941): 750.

111
Harriman, “Miss Lilly of New Orleans,” 22.

1
Peter Feibleman, interview by author, August 4, 2002.

2
This story is drawn from Nancy Lynn Schwartz,
The Hollywood Writers' Wars
(New York: Knopf, 1982), Christopher Dudley Wheaton, “A History of the Screen Writers' Guild (1920–1942): The Writers' Quest for a Freely Negotiated Basic Agreement” (doctoral thesis, University of Southern California, January 1974), and Brian Neve,
Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition
(London: Routledge, 1992).

3
Reminiscences of Albert Hackett (1958), on page 26 in the Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection.