A Difficult Woman (19 page)

Then in March, under cover of the Depression and as other studios struggled to pay their bills, Louis Mayer announced that he was cutting the wages of MGM's employees by 50 percent. The moment seemed ripe: FDR had only just been sworn in as president; the unemployment and banking crises had reached catastrophic levels. Mayer and other producers saw an opportunity to cut costs, and they took it. But movies had flourished during the early years of the Depression, and the industry had
prospered. Employees, among them the writers, were outraged, especially as it became clear that MGM could well afford to continue to pay its work-force. Albert Hackett, then writing for MGM, recalled that “when they found out what Mr. Mayer did, everybody started to organize. The screen-writers got together and they got into an organization.”
³
To avoid the appearance of a union, still somewhat distasteful to professionals, they called their organization the Screen Writers Guild. The producers, in turn, felt betrayed by their relatively coddled writers. They had, they claimed disbelievingly, provided generous wages and extensive creative freedom. High wage scales led Irving Thalberg and other producers to believe that writers would never jeopardize their livelihoods by joining a union. As Thalberg put it, “These writers are living like kings. Why on earth would they want to join a union like coal miners or plumbers?”
⁴

Hellman was then on the East Coast and only just beginning the challenging task of writing
The Children's Hour
, so she was not involved in the initial West Coast unionization effort. But she was a member of the Authors' League of America, under whose auspices the campaign initially emerged and which housed the stage playwrights' Dramatists Guild, to which she also belonged. Among the organizers of the Screen Writers Guild were old friends of Hellman's and especially of Hammett's, some of them either members of or sympathetic with the Communist Party. They included John Howard Lawson, and Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the team that had written the screenplay for Hammett's
Thin Man.
Hellman's friend Dorothy Parker, who worked with Hellman in the organizing campaign, was probably already active in the party. The writers argued that their creativity had been purchased: they had sold their artistic freedom to the producers. They wanted either greater control over the content of their scripts or a share in the profits.

Lillian cut her teeth in the ensuing conflict as she firmly supported writers in their claims against producers. The struggle was painful: striking workers lost their jobs, those sympathetic to the Guild discovered their contracts would not be renewed, and some workers settled for smaller pay reductions. The writers took their case to the newly created National Recovery Administration, claiming a right to organize under section 7a, which mandated recognition of organizations of workers. The producers contended that writers were not employees at all but independent contractors. The writers won this first round, but it was a short victory. Within the year, the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, leaving the producers free to try once again to control them.

By the summer of 1934, Lillian, like all her friends, was flirting with the Communist Party. That winter had witnessed a wave of strikes, some of the most successful led by communists of one stripe or another. To Kober she wrote that she had spent an evening arguing with Mani—Herman Shumlin. “Mani as you know is now an ardent Communist, and being more intelligent than most, sees things more clearly. However there are many things which he also gets confused and dogmatic about and we screamed at each other for several hours.”
⁵
Midst the screaming, Hellman struggled to find a place within the turmoil on the left, moving at every step closer to the communism of the 1930s.

The 1935 decision of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) to embrace Popular Front tactics provided an opening. Since 1928, the CPUSA had followed a path dictated by Joseph Stalin's conviction that the Soviet Union would lead the way to a new worldwide revolutionary moment. The Communist International (Comintern) then ordered the Communist parties of the countries within its orbit to avoid all compromise with socialist, social-democratic, and labor parties that did not strictly follow the communist line. The CPUSA responded by policing its own ranks, expelling those like Jay Lovestone who would not accept Comintern leadership, and turning venomously on those who followed Leon Trotsky's faith in the possibilities of worldwide revolution. Instead of creating coalitions with former allies in the farmer-labor parties and the various socialist parties, the CPUSA declared all these groups to be enemies and labeled them “social fascists.”
⁶
As the Depression deepened and the left grew in influence, factional struggles among left-wing groups grew sharp and deep. Leading American socialists like Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste strongly disagreed that a revolutionary path required adherence to a dogmatic line disseminated by an increasingly paranoid and Stalinist Soviet Union. Some New Deal liberals and reformers toyed with the ideals of communism without following the party line; others strongly believed that bigger government, stronger regulation of banking and industry, and a larger voice for labor would save capitalism. Decrying the sins of fascists and “social fascists” alike, the CPUSA demanded a defense of even the worst delusions of the Soviet Union.

In the summer of 1935, after nearly a decade of attacking anyone who did not fully and completely support Stalin's Soviet style of communism, the Seventh World Congress of Communist Parties adopted a new Popular Front policy. Convinced that the worst enemy of the Soviet Union was fascism, it called on Communist parties the world over to lead an attack
on fascism in all of its forms. To this end, the Comintern called for a change from revolutionary strategies to cooperation and alliance with existing left-wing groups. In the United States, the Communist Party, encouraged by Chairman Earl Browder, led a campaign to reconfigure the image and practice of the CPUSA, turning from virulent antagonism against potential allies on the left to efforts to join with them in antifascist coalitions. From early opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, the party lent its support to New Deal programs. Instead of organizing alternative trade union structures, Communists embedded themselves in existing trade unions, particularly those organized under the banner of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). At the same time, the CPUSA adopted the language of democracy, progressivism, and social justice—a language that Hellman had been employing for at least a decade. And it participated in a multifaceted array of coalitions of like-minded people, with or without membership in the party. The effort was captured in the party's new slogan, “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” The outcome was Popular Front politics, a term that aptly designates the millions of people then sympathetic to socialism.

The Communist Party's new appeal immediately manifested itself in dramatic growth. From a pre–Popular Front strength of perhaps 30,000, the party's membership climbed to close to 100,000 members by 1938. All kinds of people joined, including a large assortment of writers, public intellectuals, and theater figures. Their numbers were enhanced by the party's growing willingness to countenance dissent in a wide variety of front organizations that supported a range of popular causes and that did not make an issue of the participation of party members. Hellman joined several of these, including the League of Women Shoppers, the League of American Writers, the Anti Fascist League, and the Motion Picture Artists' Committee. What mattered now was not what party one belonged to or worked with, but how effectively one could join with others to pursue antiracist, antifascist, and trade union activities.
⁷

Dashiell Hammett most likely found a home in communism before Hellman did. Flailing a bit after completing
The Thin Man
, which was to be his last novel, he became increasingly committed to left-wing positions. His letters to his daughter Mary, written in the early fall of 1936 in the midst of FDR's campaign for a second term as president and in the aftermath of the CPUSA's turn to Popular Front politics, have the ring of the insider. “There is no truth in the statement that the Communists are
supporting Roosevelt,” he wrote to her disingenuously on September 11, “that's just the old Hearst howl.”
⁸

For Hellman, the catalyst might well have been the war in Spain. Both Hellman and Hammett were horrified by the brutal fascist bombardment of what Hellman called “Little Spain.” In 1936, the Spanish elected a Popular Front government that included communists and social democrats among its members. Hellman and her friends watched, paralyzed, as a group of generals led by Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy attacked a legally elected government. None of the Western democracies—not Britain, not France—would do anything about it. When Franco began his offensive on July 17, 1936, both refused the Spanish government's request for aid, and, to make matters worse, they, along with the United States, embargoed arms to Spain. Popular Front movements all over Europe came to the government's defense, as did the Soviet Union.

Both Hellman and Hammett strongly sympathized with Spain. To his daughter Mary, Hammett wrote that losing the war in Spain would be a

great set-back for the cause of working people everywhere. Don't believe too much of what the papers say: they are largely on the side of the rebels, and so are such Fascist countries as Germany, Italy and Portugal. The truth is that the present Spanish government is far from perfect, but it at least tries to be on the side of the poor people … while its enemies are the sort of people that most of our ancestors came to this country to escape.
⁹

Later that fall, he tried to enlist in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American soldiers who fought on the Loyalist side. If legend is to be believed, the Communist Party urged Hammett to remain in the States, where he could usefully serve as a fund-raiser and advocate.
¹⁰
He was then perhaps already a member of the Communist Party.

Hellman took longer to decide. Her indecision illuminates the tensions of many thoughtful people in the mid-1930s, sparked perhaps by the dramatic growth of the party itself. Large numbers of liberals, socialists, and communists became vaguely aware in the 1930s of Stalin's increasingly ruthless methods, of the thousands of people who had starved as a result of his economic policies, and of the thousands more subject to arrest and murder as a result of his growing paranoia. They objected to what seemed to be the growing subservience of the CPUSA to the Comintern
in Moscow. In their eyes, the American wing of the party, financially supported by and consistently favorable to Soviet leadership, could not be trusted. These left-wing opponents accused party members of slavish adherence to an evil bureaucracy, of overlooking the anti-democratic methods of the dictatorial Stalinist regime.

Neither Hellman nor Hammett stood among these opponents. Their relationship to the left-wing activities of the thirties was as members of the entertainment community, rather than as intellectuals. Like many others, they believed themselves independent of Soviet influence and capable of thinking for themselves with regard to the direction of U.S. politics. Still, they held the Soviet effort as a model and accepted its leadership. Though they understood, vaguely perhaps, the imperfections of the Soviet Union, they strongly believed in its potential and trusted that communism with a small
c
could be harnessed to the purposes of democratic and progressive causes. If they heard rumors of purges and deaths, they remained skeptical. This was, after all, a period when rumors flew. In circles like Hellman's, solidarity in the interests of class politics and international harmony seemed an achievable goal, not to be undermined by factionalism and in-fighting.

Hope and belief in the future guided Hellman's vision of a nation that could solve problems of class injustice, racism, and poverty. In this she was not unusual. Betsy Blair, a blacklisted actress who was, perhaps ironically, denied membership in the Communist Party because she was married to the famous Gene Kelly, who did not wish to join up, recalled what her left-wing activity meant to her: “It's like the light that comes from heaven in paintings of saints. We felt such joy believing in the better world that communism would bring, feeling part of the great brotherhood of man. I guess it was a kind of religious ecstasy that we thought would embrace the most deprived and persecuted.”
¹¹
Many of Hollywood's entertainment community and certainly huge numbers of writers and intellectuals shared this hope. For Blair, as for Hellman, the central issue in this period was the search for social justice that the ideal of communism seemed to represent. Only the Soviet Union provided a living example of this ideal, even if it did not fully live up to its promise. And in any event, most believed that the dangers of an aggressive fascism posed a greater threat to democratic practice than the Soviet Union. Blacklisted screenwriter Alvah Bessie, responding to a question about why he joined the party, replied, “Why? I was intellectually convinced that it was the right thing to do, and I thought—as any number of people thought—this
was the only organization that was actually fighting Fascism in the world, that was actually fighting unemployment, racial discrimination, national chauvinism.”
¹²

In February 1937, depressed by the failure of
Days to Come
, Hellman returned to Hollywood to work on a film script for
Dead End
. With one brilliant stage success and one flop behind her, she was not yet a name to be reckoned with, but she was certainly a known quantity. The film adaptation of
Children's Hour
, for which she had written the script, had opened to critical acclaim. Her liaison with Dashiell Hammett assured her entrée into all the celebrity circles. And with a lucrative contract in her pocket from Samuel Goldwyn, head of MGM studios, she had enough money to live well without relying on Hammett's erratic funds. Her timing could not have been better, for the Hollywood scene had taken on its own political furor.