Imaginary Friends (8 page)

Rich and famous
.

LILLIAN
: Rich.

MARY
: Famous.

LILLIAN
: Much more famous.

MARY
: Much less rich.

LILLIAN
: You said it, sister.

MARY
: And much less famous. But famous.
[Beat.]
In 1963 I published a best-seller called
The Group
. It was made into a movie. It was a novel about a group of women who’d gone to Vassar together—

LILLIAN
: —viciously reviewed by some of your closest friends. In 1969 I published my first memoir—

MARY
: You were washed up as a playwright—

LILLIAN
: It was a best-seller called
An Unfinished Woman
—

MARY
: I went to Vietnam and wrote about the war—

LILLIAN
: No one read it. I wrote another best-selling memoir called
Pentimento
.

MARY
: “Pentimento” is Italian for “I couldn’t really remember, so I just made it up.”

LILLIAN
: A chapter in it, called “Julia,” was made into a movie—

MARY
: We’ll get to that shortly. I went to Washington to write about Watergate—

LILLIAN
: Did you? I’d forgotten that if I ever knew it. I wrote another best-seller about the McCarthy period. It was called
Scoundrel Time
—

MARY
: —in which you canonized yourself. I lived in Europe with my fourth husband, and I really didn’t think about you much at all. I mention this because people are going to think we spent our lives thinking about each other—

LILLIAN
: We didn’t. Whole years passed when I didn’t think of you at all. You were, after all, gone.

MARY
: I was in Paris.

LILLIAN
: A diplomat’s wife. Passing out cheese puffs for the deputy consul of the Norwegian Embassy.

MARY
: I was madly in love.

LILLIAN
: Always a mistake to fall in love if it means giving up a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City. Always a mistake to choose love over your career—

MARY
: I didn’t give up my career—

LILLIAN
: But you gave up the world you were part of. It was an awful world, worth giving up, but it was the world you’d lived in your entire writing life. While I stayed in the thick of things—

MARY
: And became a celebrity.

LILLIAN
: Well, don’t say it as if you didn’t want a piece of it. You even did a
People
magazine interview. “America’s first lady of letters,” in
People
magazine.

MARY
: I was trying to sell a book.

LILLIAN
: And you took a pop at me in
People
magazine. The interviewer asked you, “What do you have against Lillian Hellman?” Implicitly saying, “Why keep attacking her?” Why did you?

MARY
: Because you were such a fraud.

LILLIAN
: Nonsense. You were just using me to show off your sharp little tongue. It was lucky for you that I stayed as famous as I did, or you’d have to have found someone else to attack. You virtually sharpened your tongue on my reputation. I was your whetstone. I was part of your routine. “What do you have against Lillian Hellman?” And you answered—

MARY
: “Well, I never liked what she writes.”

LILLIAN
: But it turned out you hadn’t seen most of my plays, and you hadn’t read my books, either—

MARY
: I’d read as much of them as I could. I read that silly story in
Pentimento
about the turtle—

LILLIAN
: What was wrong with the story about the turtle?

MARY
: Who could believe a word of it? You and Hammett kill a turtle, you slice its head off, you leave it in the kitchen to be made into soup, and it somehow manages to resurrect itself and crawl away. The next day, when it turns up dead somewhere on your vast property, the two of you have a fantastically elliptical, cutthroat debate over whether the turtle is—correct me if I’m putting words into your mouth here—some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.

LILLIAN
: Everyone liked that story.

MARY
: Every word of dialogue in it is cocked up, but of course there’s no way to prove it because everyone is dead, including the turtle. You never wrote about anyone until they were dead and were no longer around to correct you—

LILLIAN
: And you never wrote about anyone unless they were alive and you could hurt their feelings. You barely even bothered to change anyone’s name.

A beat
.

MARY
: We always end up this way—

LILLIAN
: On opposite sides.

A beat
.

MARY
: And yet—

LILLIAN
: What?

MARY
: We both loved beautiful things—

LILLIAN
: And we weren’t ashamed of it. We both loved cooking—

MARY
: Yes, I always heard you were a wonderful cook—

LILLIAN
: I was.
[Beat.]
You took yourself out of the running. Big mistake.

MARY
: You thought you could feed the beast forever. Even bigger mistake.

VOICES FROM WINGS
: Miss Hellman, Miss Hellman, Miss Hellman—

LILLIAN
: I can’t talk about this right now. I’m late for my interview. Could I have some coffee?

MARY
:
Un café, s’il vous plaît
.

LILLIAN
is surrounded by interviewers with cameras
.
MARY
sits at a table in a Paris café on the other side of the stage and opens a book
.
LILLIAN
turns from one interviewer to the next and smiles as she’s bombarded with questions
.

INTERVIEWER
#1: Miss Hellman, tell me about the fig tree—

INTERVIEWER
#2: Miss Hellman, did Hammett help you with your writing?

INTERVIEWER
#1, #2,
AND
#3:
[Together.]
Tell us—

INTERVIEWER
#1: —about Sophronia—

INTERVIEWER
#2: —about your imaginary playmate—

INTERVIEWER
#3: —what “pentimento” means—

INTERVIEWER
#1: This ad—advertising ranch mink—what in the world is that about?

LILLIAN
: I don’t know.
[Laughs.]
I don’t know.

On the scrim we see a photograph of
LILLIAN
as the legend in the “What Becomes a Legend Most” Blackglama mink ad, as
LILLIAN
poses and preens for the camera and the photographers shout—

INTERVIEWER
#1: This way—

INTERVIEWER
#2: This way—

INTERVIEWER
#3: Over here—

INTERVIEWER
#1: I want to know why you did that ad.

LILLIAN
:
[Laughs.]
I got talked into it one bad afternoon. Why? Do you object to it?

INTERVIEWER
#1: No, but I don’t quite know what to make of it.

LILLIAN
: I don’t blame you.

LILLIAN
now sits for a television interview, smoking a cigarette. We see her image projected onto the scrim behind her as the interview progresses
.

INTERVIEWER
: Miss Hellman, the story of you and your friend Julia is about to be made into a movie. Tell us about her.

LILLIAN
: Julia was a childhood friend who moved to Vienna to study with Freud and became active in the anti-fascist underground. In 1936 she called and asked me to bring money—fifty thousand dollars—to Berlin.

INTERVIEWER
: Money that was to be used to save people from the Nazis.

LILLIAN
: Yes. She knew that I was afraid of being afraid and might be willing to do something dangerous. So I brought her the money.

INTERVIEWER
: In the lining of a fur hat.

LILLIAN
: Yes. I met Julia in a restaurant near the Berlin train station. I knew she’d been wounded in a demonstration, but when I saw her, and I saw the crutches, I realized she’d lost a leg.…

INTERVIEWER
: Did you ever see her alive after that day?

LILLIAN
: Never. She was murdered by the Nazis. I went to London and brought her body home to America. She’d left her daughter for safekeeping with friends in Alsace, and I never went looking for her—

INTERVIEWER
: Her daughter, Lilly.

LILLIAN
: Yes. I suffered terribly for not looking for the child. Hammett always said I got my worst nightmares from not looking for the child.
[She starts to cry.]
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. This has never happened to me.

All the technicians and makeup people rush in with boxes of Kleenex
.
LILLIAN
dries her eyes, and more makeup is applied
.

INTERVIEWER
: Are you all right, Miss Hellman? Do you want to stop—

LILLIAN
: No. I’ll be fine.

And now we see
MARY
,
in the café in Paris, being interviewed by a very young
REPORTER
with a very low-tech tape recorder. This
PARIS REPORTER
puts a cassette into the recorder and presses record
.

PARIS REPORTER
: Just a second.
[Into the machine.]
Testing one two three four. Sorry about this. I always do this because I’m sure it’s not going to work.

The
PARIS REPORTER
presses the rewind button, and the machine rewinds. The
PARIS REPORTER
presses the play button. The machine says: “Testing one two three four.”

I once interviewed Leslie Caron, and the machine didn’t work, so I lost the whole thing. Which is why I bring a notebook, just in case, but then I usually forget to take notes.
[Pressing the record button.]
All right. All set.
[Picks up the recorder to make sure the tape is spinning, sets it down.]
You are not at all what I imagined—

MARY
: Really. What did you imagine?

PARIS REPORTER
: I don’t know. I mean, I saw
Julia
recently.

MARY
: Who is Julia?

PARIS REPORTER
: The movie. It’s based on this Lillian Hellman story. Jane Fonda, Jason Robards. And I thought you were going to be more like—

MARY
: Like Jane Fonda?

PARIS REPORTER
: No, no. But—

MARY
: Surely not like Lillian Hellman?

PARIS REPORTER
: I don’t know. You’re so ladylike … you’d hardly guess … you’re Mary McCarthy, if you know what I mean.

MARY
lights a cigarette
.

Cigarettes. That’s more like it.
[Fumbling with the notebook.]
I guess you didn’t see
Julia
.

MARY
: No, I didn’t.

PARIS REPORTER
: Oh, it’s great. It’s about how Lillian Hellman smuggled all this money into Germany in a fur hat and saved people from the Nazis.

MARY
: Mmmmmmm.

PARIS REPORTER
: Did you read
Scoundrel Time?

MARY
: No … although I did read about it—

PARIS REPORTER
: She stood up to Senator McCarthy, you know. She was the only one, really. She said, “I cannot fit my conscience into your expectations.” Something like that.

MARY
exhales smoke straight at the reporter
.

What do you think of her?

MARY
: Lillian Hellman? I can’t stand her.
[She smiles.]

PARIS REPORTER
: Really? Gosh. Why?

MARY
: I first met her at Sarah Lawrence—
[To the audience.]
Blah blah blah—
[Back to the
PARIS REPORTER
.]
John Dos Passos—
[Back to the audience.]
Blah blah blah—
[Back to the
PARIS REPORTER
.]
D-O-S P-A-S-S-O-S. Two “S’s”—

PARIS REPORTER
: Thank you.

MARY
: … didn’t like the food in Madrid—
[Back to the audience.]
Blah blah blah—
[Back to the
PARIS REPORTER
.]
She was just brainwashing those girls—it was really vicious. And so somebody like that writes a book like
Scoundrel Time
, and I think that it’s still scoundrel time as far as she’s concerned. It’s as if she thinks she’s the only person who behaved morally during the McCarthy period. Everything she writes is false, including “and” and “but.”