Imaginary Friends (11 page)

1905

Lillian Florence Hellman, the only child of Max and Julia Newhouse Hellman, is born in New Orleans on June 20. “I was the sweetest-smelling baby in New Orleans,” she says years later.

1911

The Hellmans move to New York, but Lillian and her mother spend six months a year living with her two aunts in their New Orleans boardinghouse.

1912

Mary McCarthy is born in Seattle on June 21, the eldest of Roy and Therese (Tess) Preston McCarthy’s four children.

1918

The McCarthy family goes to Minneapolis to visit Roy McCarthy’s parents. Roy and Tess McCarthy die of influenza within a few days of their arrival. Mary and her three brothers are taken to live with their great-aunt Margaret and her new husband, Myers Shriver.

1923

Mary moves back to Seattle to live with her Preston grandparents.

1925

After two years at NYU, Hellman drops out and goes to work for publisher Horace Liveright as a reader. On New Year’s Eve she marries Arthur Kober, a theatrical press agent.

1929-33

McCarthy attends Vassar College. A few days after graduating, she marries Harold Johnsrud, an actor. Years later she recalled her wedding night: “As we climbed into the big bed, I knew, too
late, that I had done the wrong thing. To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action.”

1930-31

After moving to Hollywood, Kober becomes a screenwriter, and Hellman a reader at MGM. One night during a party at Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, she meets Dashiell Hammett, a former detective and author of
The Dain Curse
and
The Maltese Falcon
. They spend the night together, sitting in a car in the restaurant parking lot, talking about books. “A short time later,” Hellman wrote, “Arthur and I separated without ill feeling and I went back to New York.”

1932-34

Hellman and Hammett live together at the Sutton Hotel, managed by Nathanael West. Hammett writes his last novel,
The Thin Man
, and suggests to Hellman that she become a playwright. He gives her a story about two Scottish teachers who sued a student for libel, and it becomes the basis of
The Children’s Hour
. The play is a huge hit. Hellman is twenty-nine. She begins to write screenplays for MGM.

1936

McCarthy, now a book critic for
The Nation
, travels to Nevada to divorce Harold Johnsrud; on the train, she meets and beds a plumbing-company executive from Pittsburgh. Upon her return, she moves to Greenwich Village and becomes a Trotskyite. “I saw all sorts of men that winter,” McCarthy later writes. “I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three.…” Robert Misch, a wealthy young man who became the prototype of “The Genial Host” in one of
McCarthy’s stories, often invited McCarthy to his dinner parties: “The guests at those little dinners were mostly Stalinists, which was what smart, successful people in that New York world were. And they were mostly Jewish; as was often pointed out to me, with gentle amusement. I was the only non-Jewish person in the room. It was at Misch’s that I first met Lillian Hellman.… But I may mix her up with another Stalinist, by the name of Leane Zugsmith.”

1937

Hellman travels to Paris, Moscow, and Spain during the Spanish civil war. Many years later she writes that on her way to Moscow, she secretly stopped in Berlin to deliver $50,000 to a childhood friend she calls Julia, who was involved in the anti-Nazi underground.

1937

McCarthy falls in love and moves in with Philip Rahv, a Russian immigrant and writer. Along with Dwight Macdonald and William Phillips, Rahv revives
Partisan Review
, and McCarthy becomes the drama critic of the publication. Rahv takes McCarthy and several other
PR
staff members to a lunch with the eminent critic Edmund Wilson, who is known as Bunny. “Bunny,” one of his friends once asked him, “how do you get all these dames into bed?” “I talk them into it, of course,” Wilson replied.

1938

McCarthy marries Edmund Wilson. The marriage is stormy from the beginning. In June, after a night of drinking and physical violence on both sides, Wilson commits McCarthy to Payne Whitney Clinic for psychiatric observation. She is discharged after three weeks. Six months later, on Christmas Day, McCarthy and Wilson’s son, Reuel, is born.

1939

Hellman’s play
The Little Foxes
opens on Broadway. She buys a large estate in
Westchester County and turns it into a farm.

1941

Hellman’s play
Watch on the Rhine
opens on Broadway. Among other things, it’s about an American woman married to a man who was active in the anti-Nazi underground.

1941

McCarthy publishes a short story, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” in
Partisan Review
. It’s about a young woman named Meg Sargent who has an affair on a train with a steel-company executive from Cleveland. The story is a sensation. Delmore Schwartz calls it “Tidings from a Whore.” McCarthy is twenty-nine.

1942

Although he is forty-six and well past draft age, Hammett enlists in the American army and is stationed in New Jersey. He spends weekends with Hellman at the farm. From Diane Johnson’s
Dashiell Hammett: A Life:
“One night, as Lillian was driving into town, Hammett was plastered as usual and it all seemed too much to her. He was a disgusting drunk, pawing her and leering, and when he suggested making love, something borne of her deep exasperation, of her sense of his waste of his time, of his life, of the stupidity of all this, made her say no, she wouldn’t sleep with him when he was like this. She had never said no before to any of his demands or sexual whims. Tonight, simply, no. This surprised him, sobered him, shocked him. That was it, then. He loved Lily, would always love her. But he decided he would never make love to her again, and he never did.…”

1942

McCarthy’s first book,
The Company She Keeps
, a collection of stories about Meg Sargent, is published as a novel.

1943

Technical Sergeant Dashiell Hammett is sent to the Aleutian Islands, where he spends the rest of the war working on
an army newspaper. He writes letters to his “Darling Lilishka”: “A goodly batch of mail came today … but … there … was … nothing … from … a … slightly … Jewish … she … playwright who forgets that Vice President Wallace said in Los Angeles, no further back than February 4, “The common man means to get what he is entitled to.” And there is no commoner man than me, and I know what I am entitled to. Think that over, sister. Meanwhile, much love.”

1944

Lillian Hellman goes to Moscow on a cultural mission. She begins an affair with a young American diplomat named John Melby.

1945

McCarthy and Edmund Wilson are divorced. McCarthy testifies that Wilson abused her throughout the marriage. Wilson testifies that McCarthy attacked him constantly and tried to set fire to his office: “She would confuse me with the uncle she’d been sent to live with after her parents’ death. She was under the impression—which must have been exaggerated—that her uncle had beaten her every day.”

1946

McCarthy marries Bowden Broadwater and continues to write theater reviews. Reviewing Eugene O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
, she writes: “To audiences accustomed to the oily virtuosity of George Kaufman, George Abbott, Lillian Hellman, Odets, Saroyan, the return of a playwright who—to be frank—cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion.”

1949

The Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, known as the Waldorf Conference, is held in New York. A parade of Soviet artists, including Dmitry Shostakovich, appear to testify to Joseph Stalin’s benevolence. Lillian Hellman sits on the dais and is identified in newspapers as pro-communist; Mary McCarthy is in the audience with her friends Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, as anti-communists.

1949

McCarthy publishes a new novel,
The Oasis
, about a group of intellectuals in a utopian community, and Philip Rahv threatens to sue her.

1951

Blacklisted in Hollywood, her income greatly reduced, Hellman sells her farm in Westchester County. Hammett serves six months in federal prison for refusing to name the financial contributors to the Civil Rights Congress.

1952

Hellman appears before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refuses to name names. In a letter to the committee read by her lawyer Joseph Rauh, she writes: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” She takes the Fifth Amendment when asked if she was ever a member of the Communist Party.

1954-57

McCarthy publishes
A Charmed Life, Venice Observed
, and
The Stones of Florence
. She writes a critically acclaimed memoir,
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, and her uncle Harry threatens to sue her.

1960

Traveling through Europe for the State Department, McCarthy meets American diplomat James West. Both are married. “My love for Jim is increasing ’till I am quite dizzy,” she writes to her closest friend, Hannah Arendt. To Bowden Broadwater she writes: “You will not believe how painfully sorry I am that I have done this to you. Can’t you, can’t you fall in love with someone else and remember me as I remember you?” Within a year McCarthy and West divorce their spouses and marry in Paris.

1961

Hammett dies in Hellman’s Manhattan town house, where he has lived for three years.

1961

McCarthy publishes
The Group
, a novel about eight Vassar graduates. It receives a mixed critical reaction and is savaged in a
New York Review of Books
parody written pseudonymously by McCarthy’s friend Elizabeth Hardwick. The novel is a huge bestseller and becomes a movie directed by Sidney Lumet. Several of McCarthy’s classmates threaten to sue her.

1964

From Lillian Hellman’s
Paris Review
interview: “[Mary McCarthy] has accused you, among other things, of a certain ‘lubricity,’ of an overfacility in answering complex questions. Being too facile, relying on contrivance.” Hellman: “I don’t like to defend myself against Miss McCarthy’s opinions, or anybody else’s. I think Miss McCarthy is often brilliant and sometimes even sound. But in fiction, she is a lady writer, a lady magazine writer. Of course, that doesn’t mean she isn’t right about me. But if I thought she was, I’d quit.”

1969

Hellman’s memoir
An Unfinished Woman
is published. It’s a critical success and a best-seller.

1967-73

McCarthy and James West live in Paris. McCarthy covers the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings as a journalist and publishes
Birds of America
.

1973-74

Hellman’s memoir
Pentimento
is published. It, too, is a best-seller. The rights to one of the chapters, “Julia,” are sold to MGM. Jane Fonda is cast as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Hellman’s childhood friend Julia. Lillian Hellman receives honorary degrees from Smith, Yale, and NYU.

1976

The third volume of Hellman’s memoirs,
Scoundrel Time
, about the McCarthy period, is published and is a best-seller. Lillian poses for the “What Becomes a Legend Most?” Blackglama mink ad.

1977

Julia
is released. Lillian appears onstage at the Academy Awards and receives a standing ovation.

1984

McCarthy asks Judge Harold Baer to issue an order of summary judgment dismissing the suit on the grounds that Lillian Hellman is a public figure. Baer refuses, instead ruling that Hellman is not a public figure and that in any case,
McCarthy’s remark “seems to fall on the actionable side of the line, outside what has come to be known as the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” Less than two months later, before the suit comes to trial, Hellman dies. In September, before receiving the MacDowell Colony medal, McCarthy tells
The New York Times:
“If someone had told me, ‘Don’t say anything about Lillian Hellman because she’ll sue you,’ it wouldn’t have stopped me. It might have spurred me on.… I didn’t want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that.”