Imaginary Friends (2 page)

In the original production, one actor played the parts of Max Hellman, Uncle Myers, Dashiell Hammett, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, James T Farrell, the black maid, Norman Mailer, and Mary’s lawyer.

A bare stage
.

We see two women smoking. They are
LILLIAN HELLMAN
and
MARY MCCARTHY
.
They’re wearing suits and heels
.

LILLIAN
: Did we ever meet?

MARY
: Once or twice.

LILLIAN
: I don’t really remember.

MARY
: Well, then I don’t remember, either.

LILLIAN
: All right. Where was it?

MARY
: At Sarah Lawrence College. Stephen Spender invited us to speak—

LILLIAN
:
I
was invited. You turned up.

MARY
: You thought I was a student because I looked quite young.

LILLIAN
: I didn’t even notice you.

MARY
: My point. I walked onto the sunporch, and you were telling all of them a huge lie—

LILLIAN
: Naturally—

MARY
: —about the Spanish civil war. I couldn’t bear it. You were brainwashing them, and they were looking at you like wide-eyed converts. So I interrupted and corrected you. And we had a fight.
[To the audience.]
And I remember that on her bare arms, she had a great many bracelets, gold and silver—

A long string with a hook on the end falls from the rafters with a bunch of gold and silver bracelets dangling from it
.
LILLIAN
puts them on
.

—and they began to tremble in her fury and surprise at being caught red-handed in a lie.

LILLIAN
holds out her arm and makes the bracelets jangle against one another, louder and louder
.

LILLIAN
: Like that?

MARY
: Exactly. The incident at Sarah Lawrence was in 1948. I was teaching there at the time—

LILLIAN
: I never had to do that. I
did
teach, but I never
had
to teach. Although once, after I testified, after I stood up on the bad morning before the House Un-American Activities Committee and said—

LILLIAN AND MARY
:
[Together.]
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
[A beat as
LILLIAN
looks at
MARY
.]

LILLIAN
: You’re not suggesting I never said it.

MARY
: Of course you said it.

LILLIAN
: Fine. After I said it, and had to sell the farm—

MARY
: It wasn’t a farm. It was a house—

LILLIAN
: It was too a farm. It was upstate—

MARY
: Westchester County is not upstate—

LILLIAN
: There were cows and chickens—

MARY
: Fine. It was a farm—

LILLIAN
: —after that I had no money—

MARY
: —and no place to live but your New York town house—

LILLIAN
:
[Plunging on.]
—I had no money to speak of, but I didn’t teach. I went to work part-time at Macy’s, selling groceries.

MARY
looks at her, entirely unbelieving. After a beat, she turns back to the audience and plunges on
.

MARY
: Stephen Spender invited us to speak at Sarah Lawrence because we were—

LILLIAN
: Women. Let’s face it.

MARY
: You are so right. They were having a writers’ conference, and they couldn’t invite only men—it was a women’s college, after all—

LILLIAN
: We were the logical choices.

MARY
: There were others.

LILLIAN
: Who?

MARY
: There were plenty of others.

LILLIAN
: Hmmph.

MARY
: Martha Gellhorn.

LILLIAN
: She was good.

MARY
: She was first-rate.

LILLIAN
: During the war. But then what? She took herself out of the running. She stayed in England, doomed to be known forever as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. And no one reads her any more. Jean Stafford.

MARY
: Yes, I suppose Jean Stafford.

LILLIAN
: Well, I don’t suppose Jean Stafford. I brought her up only to make myself seem open-minded.

MARY
: And she drank herself right out of the competition, didn’t she?

LILLIAN
: Yes she did.

MARY
: And no one reads
her
anymore, either.

LILLIAN
: No one reads any of us.

MARY
: “We all lead our lives more or less in vain.…” I said that only a few months before I died. I was trying to be brave … about cancer, and death, and the sense that it had all been … for nothing. To have no one know who you are after all that typing—

LILLIAN
: —all that typing and thinking and drinking and flirting and fucking and feuding. But some of it was fun, wasn’t it? We didn’t do all that typing and thinking and drinking and flirting and fucking and feuding just so people would know who we were, did we?

A pause while they think about it
.

When would you say that you and I started feuding?

MARY
: From the beginning. And then, of course, the lawsuit. Lillian Hellman versus Mary McCarthy.

LILLIAN
: We never liked each other.

MARY
: Yes, I was always hearing you didn’t like me.

LILLIAN
: Well, I was always hearing you’d written mean things about me.

MARY
: I didn’t write much about you.

LILLIAN
: When you did, it was always mean. But we rarely saw one another. That night when I turned on the television set, I had no idea what you were going to look like after all those years. I was watching, you know. I saw you say it. I was lying in bed, completely happy at seeing how badly you’d aged, and then you said it.

And now, on the scrim behind them, we see a television show projected:
MARY
being interviewed by
DICK CAVETT
.

DICK CAVETT
: Are there any writers you think are overrated?

MARY
: The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.…

DICK CAVETT
: What is dishonest about her?

MARY
: Everything. But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

A beat
.

MARY
: Most people outgrow the feuding, don’t you think?

LILLIAN
: Well, I never outgrew it.

MARY
: Nor I.

LILLIAN
: My anger—

MARY
: My honesty—

LILLIAN
: “You must choose your enemies well.”

MARY
: Who said that?

LILLIAN
: Goethe. It’s my favorite line from Goethe. I once read a book about two U-boats. It was written with alternating chapters, and the first was about the German U-boat. The captain woke up in the morning and trimmed his mustache and spoke to the cook about sausages. Then came the chapter about the English U-boat, and the captain woke up in the morning and looked at the starboard diesel and spoke to the cook about kippers. This went on throughout the day, day after day, alternating, until the boats finally met up with one another.

MARY
: And then what happened? Did they collide?

LILLIAN
: They did collide. Shall I begin?

MARY
: Why not? You came first.

LILLIAN
looks around. We hear music
.

Music?

LILLIAN
: Why not? We have musicians.
[Beat.]
I need … a fig tree.

She exits
.

Childhood
.

We see a big wooden house with a front porch. Next to it is a big fig tree
.

The
ENSEMBLE
does a cakewalk onto the stage as we hear a New Orleans band start to play. Maybe the band comes onto the stage, like a New Orleans parade procession
.

Projected on the back of the stage, we see the words “New Orleans” and a picture of baby Lillian
.

And the
ENSEMBLE
starts to sing “The Fig Tree Rag.”

ENSEMBLE
:

THERE’S SOMETHIN’ HAPPENIN’ IN DIXIE
I’M FROM DIXIE SO I KNOW
WE GOT A RAG WE CALL “THE FIG TREE”
FOR THAT BIG TREE THAT WE GROW
AND WHEN WE’RE HOPPIN’ ON THE BAYOU
I DEFY YOU TO BE STILL
GET YOU A RAGGY TUNE
GET YOU A CAJUN MOON
GET YOU A JACK OR A JILL

COME ON ALONG
WE’RE GONNA DO THE FIG TREE RAG
YOUR BODY GONNA ZIG AND ZAG
TAKE A LOOK AT
EV’RY CHAP AND EV’RY CHIPPY
ALL ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI
DOIN’ THE DANCE
THEY’RE DANCIN’ TO THE FIG TREE RAG
I WANNA DO THE FIG TREE RAG WITH YOU
.

LILLIAN
enters. She’s playing herself as a child and wearing a white dress almost identical to the one in the picture. The effect should be half baby, half Baby Snooks. She walks toward the tree
.

LILLIAN
: I was the sweetest-smelling baby in New Orleans. You probably heard that about me, and it is one hundred percent true. My father was a traveling salesman, so my mother and I lived in the Garden District with my two aunts, Jenny and Hannah, who owned a boardinghouse. I had a Negro nurse named Sophronia, who took care of me until I was six, when we began to spend half the year in New York and the other half back in New Orleans. Behind my aunts’ boardinghouse was a fig tree, an enormous fig tree. It was quite a ways from the house, and it was so leafy you couldn’t be seen. So I rigged up a seat for myself, and a set of pulleys for soda pop and books, and I would sit up there and read and spy on the orphans down the block, who seemed wildly glamorous—

ENSEMBLE
:

COME WITH ME
UP IN THE TREE
UP IN THE TREE
ALL OUR TROUBLES ARE FAR AWAY
SWING AND SWAY
UP IN THE TREE
UP IN THE TREE WE’LL STAY

LILLIAN
: There was Frances, whose father had been killed by the Mafia, and Louis, who took me to Mass, and Pancho, who once gave me a lock of his hair and then pushed me into the gutter, which was without question the most romantic thing that had ever happened—so romantic that I put the lock of hair into the back of a wristwatch my father had just given me for my birthday. And my watch stopped.

LILLIAN
climbs into a seat at the base of the tree and raises herself into it
.

ENSEMBLE
:

SO IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A HAVEN
WITH A CRAVIN’ TO FULFILL
I’LL SHOW YOU WHAT HEAVEN MEANS
MEET ME IN NEW ORLEANS
I’LL KEEP ON HUMMIN’ UNTIL
YA GET HERE

COME ON ALONG
WE’RE GONNA DO THE FIG TREE RAG
YOUR BODY GONNA ZIG AND ZAG
YA GOT ME THINKIN’
THIS IS WHERE IT ALL WAS LEADIN’
IN THE GARDEN KNOWN AS EDEN
ADAM AND EVE
WERE TRYIN’ OUT THE FIG TREE RAG
I WANNA DO THE FIG TREE RAG WITH YOU
WITH YOU

WE’RE CRANKIN’ LIKE A HURDY GURDY

LILLIAN
:

FLAPPIN’ LIKE A PERDY BIRDY

ENSEMBLE
:

DOIN’ THE FIG TREE RAG

LILLIAN
: From the tree I could also watch the people who lived in the boardinghouse—Mrs. Stillman, who was crazy, and Carrie, the cook, who plucked chickens in the yard, and Sarah and Fizzy, two dizzy sisters who were always picking on me and giggling over nothing. “She’s so wiiiiild and willful,” they’d say, and just stand there together and giggle.