A Difficult Woman (8 page)

At Boni and Liveright, Lillian met and partied with a range of people who were no strangers to sex. Invitations came to the parties with great frequency, partly, she thought, because she was “young and unjudging” and partly for “reasons not so good.”
¹²
Though she describes herself as shy in this period, to the company she appeared as an icon of flaming youth. Occasionally, Hellman recalled, Horace Liveright asked her and some of her young colleagues to explain the flapper phenomenon to clueless older male guests who seemed dumbfounded by the claims of young women to sexual freedom. Not particularly adept at her job, Lillian believed that Horace Liveright continued to employ her out of admiration for her youthful verve and audacity. To her colleagues, she represented a phenomenon they did not understand.

Lillian invited utter incomprehension when she returned to work one afternoon after having taken the morning off to have an abortion. She had already agreed to marry Arthur Kober but became pregnant by him a few months before the marriage was scheduled to take place on December 31, 1925. Not wanting her friends to assume that the pregnancy had fostered ideas of marriage, she decided on abortion. She returned to the office later in the day, dry-eyed, a bit wobbly, but ready to go to work. She remained there through the rest of the working day, resisting every effort to take care of her and refusing to entertain a word of sympathy. She did not, she said, want to become the “house pet.” Her strength drew admiration from some but alienated others who could not understand her apparently casual attitude toward a difficult act.
¹³

For all her rebellious spirit and her desire to act on her own instincts, Hellman quit her job and married Arthur Kober on New Year's Eve, 1925. She was just twenty. Arthur, then an aspiring writer who worked as a
playwright, satisfied her desire to nurture—to create a loving relationship—that remained one part of her complicated persona. Together the newlyweds went to Paris, where she floated on the fringes of the American expatriate community, wrote a few short stories, traveled a bit in Europe—usually without Kober—and described herself as generally restless. She returned to New York alone and supported herself by writing book reviews for the
New York Herald Tribune
and reading manuscripts for some of her publishing friends. During the months they spent apart from each other, with Arthur's knowledge, she occasionally saw, and slept with, other men. Such behavior was not entirely unusual among the educated and arty young people with whom she traveled. Muriel Gardiner (whom Hellman did not then know but who would later play a significant role in her life) describes her experience in Greenwich Village in those years in language Lillian would have recognized: “There was an attitude of general camaraderie among us all, men and women. Many of the married couples seemed rather independent of each other, wives and husbands often dating someone of the opposite sex in accord with the mores of the ‘roaring twenties.' ”
¹⁴

After Kober returned to the States, Lillian took a job as a publicity agent in Rochester, New York. She left after four months to accompany Kober to Hollywood, where he had received a munificent job offer as a screenwriter. In Hollywood, Kober, desperate to find Lillian something to do, arranged for her to work as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sometime in this period, Lillian stopped using birth control, became pregnant, and had an early miscarriage. She had returned to New York from the West Coast and was staying in the St. Moritz hotel when she discovered the loss. “I cried like hell for almost two solid hours,” she wrote to Arthur. In a rare moment of visible vulnerability, she added, “Please don't feel bad—we can try again … Write me that you don't mind very much and cheer me up. It alters no promises I made you and I hope you understand that—if you don't and are still entertaining the idea of a divorce, now is your time to get it on the record. But please console me a little—I'm ashamed really—I always thought I was a super-creator of babies … Please write more often and please love me. I miss you an awful lot.”
¹⁵
By then the marriage was all but over. Returning to Hollywood, Lillian Hellman Kober met Dashiell Samuel Hammett, with whom she was to begin a legendary thirty-year relationship.

By the standards of the literati in the late twenties and early thirties, Hellman's marriage to Kober was unorthodox but not terribly unusual.
Yet it did not entirely free her from the constraints of parental values. Even after she separated from Kober and returned to New York without a partner, she took care that her rebellious lifestyle did not offend her mother's sensibilities. On the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, she wrote to Kober to complain that “my movements—particularly in the matter of visiting unmarried gentleman [
sic
]—have all to be accounted for to Mama, so that I am never quite free to move around the way I might want to.”
¹⁶
If she feared parental disapproval, it did not stop her from behaving as she wished. “I have to account to mama for the details of my life,” she wrote to Kober. “I guess someday she's going to find out I am not a virgin, and that's bound to be the end of our beautiful friendship.”
¹⁷
Her generation, as she repeatedly proclaimed, “did not often deal with the idea of love …” When her aunts Jenny and Hannah challenged her for being part of a generation that “goes about naked all the time,” she made it clear that her value system and theirs differed. “We sleep with everybody,” she admitted, “and drink and dope all night and don't have your fine feelings.” But, she added, recalling her aunts' ostracism of Bethe, her standards “did not involve spitting on people because they live with lowdown Wops and get into trouble.”
¹⁸
Living in Hollywood surely legitimized these feelings. In Hollywood, where physical beauty reigned, Hellman had honed her sensual sense of self. She had also found an environment that encouraged sexual adventurousness.

Dashiell Hammett not only gave Lillian the space to develop her sexual persona but, in his sometimes brutal way, insisted on it. Married when he met her to a wife with whom he did not live but to whom he continued to remain loyal, the father of two small daughters, he had constructed a life that included sex with whatever woman was within arm's reach. In addition to being an attractive man in his late thirties, tall and thin, he was then a minor celebrity, the author of a series of bestselling detective stories that had been sold to the movies. Money was no problem: Hammett squandered it on expensive hotels and gifts; he drank excessively, gambled at the race track and at cards, and engaged in endless, meaningless, sometimes costly sexual encounters.

Hellman was not quite twenty-six when she met Hammett, and she struggled to reshape her life. She fled the West Coast, running from two men, both in love with her and eager for her full attention. One was a sweet and loving husband, a talented but unexciting friend. The other was a famous writer of detective novels, a flamboyant alcoholic, profligate around women and money and married to someone else. While she tried to sort out what she would do, she settled herself into the St. Moritz—a residential hotel—and wrote profuse letters to both of them. She also produced short stories for the
New Yorker
, which routinely rejected them. Hammett visited her in New York for a couple of weeks in the late spring and then returned to Hollywood. Conflicted and lonely, she sought solace in the company of old friends and sometime lovers, Jed Harris and Louis Kronenberger among them. Occasionally she would hole up with Kronenberger for a night or a weekend. She partied with Ira and Lee Gershwin, Chester Erskine, and Herman and Rose Shumlin when they were on the East Coast. By the fall, she had made her decision; she agreed to divorce Kober and then went, nervously, to New Orleans to tell her aunts about her divorce and her relationship with Hammett. There is no record of how she told her parents, who were still living on West 95th Street.

He was a minor celebrity. Hammett in the late 1930s. (Photofest)

1935: Back and forth to the coast she went. (Photofest)

Back and forth to the coast she went, each time leaving after an angry tiff. Occasionally Hammett came east, taking separate quarters in one residential hotel or another. Finally, late in 1932, Hammett moved to New York, living at first in the Hotel Pierre (one of New York's most expensive hotels) and then with Lillian in a three-room suite at the Sutton Club Hotel.

The Sutton, managed by their friend the writer Nathanael “Pep” West, housed a community of writers that included James T. Farrell and Edmund Wilson. There, they lived a life of cheerful dissipation, working, drinking, and partying. Together Hellman and Hammett developed a series of friendships that were filled with mischief and fun. Lillian probably had a short liaison with Pep West, and she grew fond of his sister Laura Perelman and her husband Sid (S. J.) Perelman. According to Edmund Wilson, Lillian “used to help West steam open the letters of the guests by means of a kettle which he kept in his rooms.”
¹⁹
Hammett had a week-long fling with Laura. Subsidized by his publisher, Knopf, he finished what was to be his last novel,
The Thin Man
, which he dedicated to Lillian. She continued to write short stories that continued to be rejected. In the winter of 1933–34, she and Hammett moved together into a small apartment in the Florida Keys, and together they completed her first produced play:
The Children's Hour.

Their behavior flew in the face of the Depression-produced economic misery all around. Amid unemployment and widespread suffering, a growing national concern with social responsibility and traditional family life had replaced the individualism of the twenties. Opposition rose to wage work for women, particularly for women with male partners to support them. Hellman's image of independent womanhood seemed callow in the face of such attitudes. But the depression that devastated the economic fortunes of many and threw a quarter of the work force out of jobs had a more salutary effect on Lillian. As she became a well-known playwright and developed her talents as a skilled movie scriptwriter, she benefited from a Hollywood industry that flourished by creating fantasies for a nation in despair. The laurels—and the income—Hellman earned in this decade enabled a celebrity lifestyle and encouraged her to continue to flout conventional family relationships.

When Lillian's mother died in 1935, Lillian felt free to follow Hammett's style more fully. The masculine pose she adopted then included an outspoken and brash persona, complete with a foul vocabulary, which she used indiscriminately. Like Hammett (and such other 1930s figures
as Hemingway and Faulkner), she drank, smoked, and partied nonstop. She was, wrote one observer, a “tough broad … the kind of girl who can take the tops off bottles with her teeth.”
²⁰
Not infrequently she indulged her passion for gambling and managed to make money playing both poker and chemin de fer. Nor did she make a secret of her sexual liaisons: she approached men she desired aggressively and slept with them at will. Quickly she earned a reputation as a “she-Hammett.” But she wanted to be manly in another way, too, by exhibiting qualities of courage and forcefulness, by refusing to back down from a fight. These qualities contributed to her reputation as a stubborn woman, a difficult woman, a fighter.

To be sure, the tough outer shell hid a core of self-doubt that remained close to the surface. As a child, she believed she was not pretty. Later in her life, when she was asked to draw a self-portrait, she drew a stick-figure that she labeled “What I wanted to look like and don't.” The drawing presented a figure that Lillian identified as having “blond curls, natural” and “deep blue eyes, natural.”
²¹
She was always, she said, “jealous of great beauties.”
²²
The absence of conventional good looks, the prominent nose and irregular features, would shape Hellman's persona in many ways. She was a woman who needed men yet could not wear the pale orange tulle she thought would attract them. So she adapted. From early on she dyed her mousy brown hair a strawberry blonde that sometimes took on a reddish tinge. She showed off appealing qualities like her slim ankles and expressive eyes. She exhibited pride in her slender and sensuous body, which she dressed with an exquisite sense of style. She cultivated a flirtatious charm reminiscent of her mother's South.