A Difficult Woman (17 page)

Hellman's neurotic misbehavior was in such full play on opening nights that Hammett, whenever he could, avoided them. Time and again she recalled the scene of William Randolph Hearst and a large party walking out during the middle of the first act of
Days to Come
, making loud negative comments as they did so. “I vomited in the back aisle … I had to go home and change my clothes. I was drunk,” she tells us in one version of the story.
⁷⁸
In another she describes herself getting sick in a back alley. She offered her lecture audiences vivid descriptions of herself able to watch a first night only from the wings, or of herself vomiting, getting drunk, or simply leaving the theater. And she admitted that she “jump[ed] up and down through most performances.”
⁷⁹
Almost always, after the opening of a play, successful or not, she fled the scene—for the West Coast (after
The Children's Hour
and
Days to Come
), to Cuba (after
The Little Foxes
). Nor did success alleviate the pain. She “snarled at it,” she wrote. “It took me years to find out that I was frightened of what it did to people and instinctively I did not trust myself to handle it.”
⁸⁰

Her neurotic behavior in full play. With the 1981 cast of
The Little Foxes
, Anthony Zerbe, Maureen Stapleton, and Elizabeth Taylor. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

Embedded in Hellman's persona—her lack of faith in the theater, her fear of failure, her commitment to the craft of writing, her continuing need for adulation and money—are some of the reasons that she took jobs as a Hollywood screenwriter. There were other reasons, of course. In the 1930s, talking films were still quite new and Hollywood was very much in need of the words that would turn actors into mouthpieces. Many of her close friends—Dorothy Parker, the Perelmans, Arthur Kober, and Hammett himself—worked there off and on, transforming plays, novels, and plot lines into movie scripts. Most significant artists, including more
distant friends of Hellman's like John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald, did it for the money. Moving peripatetically from coast to coast, they reaped the lavish rewards and then freely spent their earnings. Many of Hellman's friends thought of this work as “whoring,” selling their souls at the cost of artistic fulfillment. Hollywood, thought playwright Arthur Miller, was “the heart of decadence.” If Lillian were indeed “a genuine lightbearer,” he and others speculated, she would not be “spending so much of her life writing for Samuel Goldwyn and the other merchants.”
⁸¹

Hellman claimed to be “one of the few people who liked writing for pictures” when most of her generation made fun of them.
⁸²
Screenwriting allowed (indeed required) Hellman to relinquish control of the production process and to trust the cameras to do their work.
⁸³
It enabled her to do what she did best: namely to craft believable scenes out of her own, or someone else's, plot and characters. She took the craft seriously, separating the writing from the shooting of the film in a way that she could never separate the writing of her plays from their production. In Hollywood to revise the script of
The Children's Hour
for the film
These Three
, she wrote to Arthur Kober, “it should be finished some time this week, and then I figure two weeks work, and home.” Director Wyler, she added, wanted her to stay for at least part of the shooting. She would not, she wrote Kober, because “Goldwyn wouldn't pay me for that, and I wouldn't do it.”
⁸⁴
Writing for Hollywood had its drawbacks, of course: it offered none of the intellectual challenge of live theater where, she told an interviewer, “you can present an idea for the consideration of intelligent audiences, which of course is completely outside the gaudiest opium dreams of possibility in Hollywood.”
⁸⁵
But it not only paid very well and regularly, it also allowed her to draw characters quickly and precisely through dialogue—a skill at which she excelled.

Hellman more or less redeemed the failure of
Days to Come
when she returned to Hollywood to work on the script for
Dead End
—a Broadway production contracted to Sam Goldwyn as a film. There she made the moral point that had fallen so flat in her failed play. She focused on social injustice and inequality in the context of the Depression, pursuing what one critic called her “single minded devotion to her own idea of what is important today.”
Dead End
's author, Sidney Kingsley, had acted with the Group Theatre and written one piece for them before he wrote the Broadway play that Hellman turned into a movie. In it, a working-class heroine, on strike from her job, seeks to salvage the lives of the slum kids in her neighborhood who are courted by the same gangster who is courting
her. The kids, whose lives of mischief and petty crime are threatened by luxury housing that is slowly displacing them, are tempted by the apparently glamorous life of crime that the gangster represents. He is countered by an idealistic young architect who rejects the wealth of real estate interests to design housing for the poor and who thus wins the heart of the heroine.

Hellman's voice permeates the film. The action is melodramatic, but class conflict holds center stage. The gangster, who is wholly bad, comes to a tragic end; the heroine, wholly good, is saved from a moll's life. But the dead-end kids are good and bad: they could go either way. The film ends with the dream of a hopeful future still only a glimmer in the eye of the idealistic young architect. As in most of her work, Hellman cannot restrain herself from a final summing up. She wants social justice for the poor; she admires not the abstractly idealistic but those who willingly risk their own lives and fortunes to act on their beliefs.

Hellman came closest to hitting her twin goals of attaining artistic success and scoring commercially with
The Little Foxes
(1939), one of the important plays of the American twentieth century. Set in the South in 1900, it explores some of her conflicted feelings about her wealthy grandmother and uncles, whose rise paralleled what one critic called “the ruthless rise of industrialism” in America. But it also contains hints of nostalgia for the mythical past of a South governed by family values rather than competition for position.

The plot revolves around the efforts of Regina Giddens and her brothers, Ben Hubbard and Oscar Hubbard, to capitalize on a proposed new cotton mill that will make them all rich by paying low wages to the displaced black workers who will become its labor force. The proposal requires each of the three Hubbard siblings to invest one third of the necessary capital. When Regina fails to persuade her sickly husband, Horace, to cooperate in the scheme, her brothers steal his bonds from a bank vault and plan to cut her out of the deal. Horace discovers the theft and decides not to prosecute. Regina, furious, withholds his medicine and watches him die as he struggles to retrieve it. Now in a position to blackmail her brothers, Regina bargains for a larger share of the pie and succeeds. Avarice, manipulation, and murder triumph; the romanticized South is destroyed.

In the context of the Great Depression and its ongoing misery, in the face of the apparent failure of capitalism to restore prosperity,
The Little
Foxes
seemed to many to be a more political play than her earlier efforts. Like her fellow intellectuals of the period, Hellman seemed to have lost faith in the free enterprise system. In contrast to those who hoped that recovery would restore economic progress, Hellman foregrounded the moral crisis posed by the process of industrialization, especially as it would affect the value system of an old South that, whatever its sins, had preserved a graceful old culture. In this context,
The Little Foxes
appeared not only cynical of capitalism but perhaps a bit too unwilling to face the racial indignities of the old South. “Plainly,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, a professor of theater at Columbia University, a regular reviewer for the
Nation
magazine, and among the most severe of her critics, “the play is directed against contemporary society.”
⁸⁶

Hellman would have none of this. She denied the political implications of the play, claiming that
The Little Foxes
was designed as “a drama of morality first and last and that anyone who reads too much cynicism into [the Hubbards] is being misled.”
⁸⁷
She told one interviewer, “I just wrote what I thought I'd write. It turned out to be an attack. I suppose somebody had to tell me about it afterwards, because I really didn't know it.”
⁸⁸
For her the key questions of the play revolved around such questions as whether humane values would survive the materialism of capitalist demands; or whether the daughter, Alexandra, representing the next generation, would have courage enough to reject the values of her mother and search for a brighter world. Hellman located these questions in the moral sphere—as issues not of politics but of good and evil.
⁸⁹
The Little Foxes
participated in the broader themes she cared about, including issues of justice and injustice, right and wrong, power and its victims. The play's keystone line, placed in the mouth of the household's loyal black servant, Addie, supports both contentions. Addie notes of the Hubbards, “There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.” And then Addie follows with the quiet observation that could almost be a call to action: “Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.”
⁹⁰

If critics assessed
The Little Foxes
as a more political statement than Hellman had meant to make—as propaganda against industrialism—they explained the play's audience appeal and power as a product of its flaws.
The Little Foxes
marked Hellman as the author of “well-made” plays. Critics had applied this label to her first plays, as when the
New York Times
's Brooks Atkinson commended
The Children's Hour
for its
“hard, clean economy of word and action” and praised the play as “vigorously planned and written.”
⁹¹
But the designation of the “well-made” play took on a more negative connotation when reviewers assessed
The Little Foxes.
While they continued to approve her tightly knit plot structures, they questioned whether her plays relied too heavily on surprising revelations and plot twists designed to maximize their theatrical appeal. “It is not only a play that is well made. It is a play that is too well made,” wrote one reviewer of
The Little Foxes
. “It suffers from being far too well contrived for its own enduring health. Much of its writing is much too expert in the worst manner of Ibsen.”
⁹²
Looking backward from 1939, others wondered whether this had not always been characteristic of her work. Had she not always tailored her plots to fit the needs of the play's message? How was it that
The Children's Hour
turned on the testimony of the only child left in the school over the holidays?

In the eyes of the critics, Hellman was too clever by half. In their view,
The Little Foxes
not only successfully melded the tightly structured and plot-driven play with melodrama; it did so too successfully. Brooks Atkinson led the chorus, declaring that while Hellman had provided “a knowing job of construction, deliberate and self-contained,” “she writes with melodramatic abandon, plotting torture, death and thievery like the author of an old-time thriller.”
⁹³
Joseph Wood Krutch chimed in, claiming that only Hellman's extraordinary gift for characterization rescued her play from the “righteous uncontrollable anger” that overwhelmed “Hellman's carefully contrived plots.”
⁹⁴
Richard Watts, though he described the play admiringly as honest, pointed, and “more brilliant than even her triumphant previous work,” thought it a “grim, bitter, merciless study … a psychological horror story.”
⁹⁵
Hellman never again outlived the verdict of melodrama: “Essentially a melodrama,” wrote one influential critic of her next play,
Watch on the Rhine
(1941). “The sense of artificial contrivance, also, is more conspicuous.”
⁹⁶

In her 1942 introduction to
Four Plays
, Hellman defended herself against the attacks. To her mind, critics simply did not understand that the theater imposed its own limits, providing a “tight, unbending, unfluid, meager form in which to write.”
⁹⁷
Surrounded by three walls, with the audience making up the fourth, Hellman argued that the playwright had little choice but to pretend or, in other words, to “trick up the scene.” She thought the well-made play was one “whose effects are contrived, whose threads are knit tighter than the threads in life and so do not convince.” But she believed her plays did convince, contradicting the notion that her plots
were too tightly knit. “I've never understood this charge because it seems to me that then one would say, ‘well-madeness, if that's what it is, too much technique, is bad because it's bad work, because the writing is bad.' “
⁹⁸
But nobody ever accused her of bad writing, and so the puzzle remained.