Hellman and Hammett:
The Legendary Passion of Lily and Dash
By Joan Mellen
HarperCollins, 594 pages, $32
Joan Mellen has presented in one volume the biographies of two of the more prominent American writers of this century, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. It is logical that they should be discussed together because for 30 years they were passionate but woefully mismatched lovers whose turbulent affair may have given them more notoriety, at least in the intellectual community, than any of their considerable literary accomplishments. They can also be paired in this way because their lives, careers and personalities constitute a fascinating study of diametrically opposed responses to, and compensations for, the negative influences of their similar backgrounds.
Hellman was born in 1905 into a Jewish family of lower-class circumstances. She was the daughter of a traveling salesman and a woman who came from a wealthy background and clearly felt she had married beneath her. From early childhood, Hellman was driven by anger over her plain looks, her family’s poverty, her mother’s neglect of her and her relationship with her philandering father, for whom she felt an Electral passion even as she hated him for neglecting her in favor of other women. What she obviously needed were sufficient power and prestige to compensate for her lack of beauty, a means of attracting attention, respect and even love, all of which had been denied her as a child. She sought them desperately and finally won them through her success as a playwright.
In 1925 she married Arthur Kober–a press agent who also aspired to be a playwright–apparently because she thought he would give her unqualified adoration. But one observer said that she was unfaithful to him before the ink on the marriage certificate was dry, a pattern that continued through most of her life, in part because, according to Mellen, she sought the kind of sleazy control that her father’s infidelities imposed on her family when she was growing up.
Like Hellman, Hammett came from a family that lived in near poverty, mostly as a result of his father’s ineffectuality as a businessman. Hammett loathed his father because of that, because he was a heavy drinker and because, like Hellman’s father, he was constantly unfaithful to his wife, whom Hammett adored. To help his family financially, and because he believed he already knew more than his teachers, Hammett dropped out of high school after less than a year and went to work. He held a series of small jobs and, feeling different from others and alone, with no one he could trust except his mother, he developed a secretiveness that became a source of constant frustration to Hellman when they became lovers. Using his reticence as a shield, Hammett did what he pleased when he pleased and felt beholden to no one. He was known in the family as “a wild one” who chain-smoked cigarettes, drank heavily like his father and caroused with other working-class boys even as he remained a loner.
In 1918 Hammett joined the Army, became a medical sergeant and, during the influenza pandemic, came down with a serious case that released a latent tuberculosis from which he suffered the rest of his life. After the war he worked for some years as a Pinkerton operative, and when he became a writer of detective novels, he drew in part on that experience for material. The characters he created–Sam Spade and the Op–embodied his self-image: stoical, hardboiled, without illusions or tenderness, unable to give themselves to women, although they enjoyed having sex with them.
Hammett became an alcoholic as a young man, and his life away from writing consisted mainly of binges and incessant, brief sexual encounters with women whom he called his chippies. But when he worked he was highly disciplined, and for a time he rigorously denied himself his habitual pleasures. He and Hellman met in 1930 in Hollywood, where she was working as a lowly writer of story synopses and he was writing film scripts and making more than $100,000 a year. At 36 he was 11 years older than she and at the apex of his career, a widely acknowledged master of the detective genre and the author of three highly successful novels, “Red Harvest,” “The Dain Curse” and “The Maltese Falcon.”
He seemed to Hellman to possess all the qualities she most desired in a man. He was tall, thin, handsome, charming and, above all, a gentile. For him, she was unlike any of the women he had ever known, highly intelligent, sophisticated and witty, and she excited him with her energy and abundant sexual magnetism.
Their long relationship, which Mellen examines in perhaps too much repetitive detail but with great acuity, was remarkable. They were constantly unfaithful to each other. She was a habitual liar. He despised lying in any form for whatever reason. He was profoundly secretive and refused to tell her he loved her, because, as he once said, “If one of us had said `I love you,’ the next instant it would have been a lie.” She was openly emotional, effusively so, hungry for attention and affection, and avidly curious about everything.
But she found in him a person who could instruct and encourage her in her writing and with whom she identified to the point that she adopted his habits and eventually became, as she said, a kind of she-Hammett, chain-smoking, tough-talking, hard-drinking and sexually predatory. In fact, Mellen offers the rather extravagant theory that in her profound identification with Hammett, Hellman ended by making his creative talent her own, an interesting, if vampirish, idea once dramatized with somewhat less than full solemnity by Henry James in “The Sacred Fount.” Still, it makes an eerie kind of sense given that after the publication of “The Thin Man” in 1932, his writing career effectively came to an end, while hers began. Also, Hellman appropriated not only Hammett’s habits but some of his most successful literary mannerisms: his clean prose style, his tough-guy machismo and his stern avoidance of sentimentality. He even generously gave her the plot for her first play, “The Children’s Hour,” when he realized he was unable to use it himself.
The play ran for 21 months on Broadway and established Hellman as one of the leading female dramatists of her time, although she hated the gender designation. Shortly after the opening she joined Hammett in Hollywood and went to work for Samuel Goldwyn for a great deal of money.
Despite their inability to stay away from each other, they remained unhappy when they were together. He continued to drink heavily and sleep with other women, and while this enraged her, she could not bring herself to break away completely because she had become convinced that she could not write without his guidance and encouragement.
In the late ’30s, like many American intellectuals, Hammett and Hellman joined the Communist Party. He joined in part because he had in his fiction long expressed a deep distrust of capitalist society, and he also needed to find something to validate his existence now that he had lost the ability to write. She went along mostly to share something with him and win his approval, but also because of her long-standing liberal principles.
In 1937 she went alone to Spain to observe the war between the fascists and the loyalists. While she was there, she conceived the story she told in her memoir, “Pentimento,” about Julia, an antifascist socialist working in the Austrian underground to whom she falsely claimed she had sent money because Julia had been a close childhood friend. The whole story was fiction, and by no means the first tall tale she ever told for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.
A year later, when Hellman began writing the play “The Little Foxes,” the extent of her dependency on Hammett became pathetically clear. As always convinced that she needed him to write, she became slavish in her acquiescence to all his suggestions for revision. The result was a play that could only be called a work of collaboration, an ominous development for a writer with serious ambition to be known for her distinctive creative vision. Nevertheless, “The Little Foxes” was a great success and helped make Hellman rich. When “Watch on the Rhine” appeared in 1941, the year of America’s entry into World War II, it made her even richer and consolidated her position as a major dramatic force in the national theater.
One of the saddest and most moving passages in Mellen’s book deals with Hammett’s work on the film script of “Watch on the Rhine,” a project Hellman arranged in the hope of reviving his confidence in his writing. What he produced was a disaster and revealed just how badly he had deteriorated. Hellman came to the rescue. Now she was the editor and rewrite person, he the inept, undisciplined author. With great effort, she salvaged the script. Typically, she gave most of the credit to Hammett.
In 1951, during the McCarthy communist witchhunt, Hammett, who had been far more conspicuously active in the political Left than Hellman, was sentenced to 6 months in jail for refusing to reveal in court the details of his activities. Hellman fled to Europe, afraid that the House Un-American Activities Committee would send her to jail.
In 1961, after a prolonged period of failing health, Hammett died at age 67, and Hellman proceeded to trick his heirs out of their share of his estate. The considerable income created by the subsequent revival of interest in his work enriched her for the rest of her life. In her last years, Hellman put together her collected memoirs, published in 1979 as “Three.” In them she rewrote the history of her relationship with Hammett to make it appear to have been the ideal love of her life.
After Hellman died in 1984, Mellen had full access to the private papers of both writers, including Hellman’s diaries, and she possesses the critical intelligence to penetrate Hellman’s heavy cloud of prevarication. Mellen clearly admires Hellman for her literary gift and for her charm, wit and intelligence. At the same time, Mellen skillfully recreates the sadness of Hellman’s last years, when–now old and ailing–she not only lied about her life with Hammett but was devastated over being denounced on TV as a liar by Mary McCarthy.
Even after such public exposure, Hellman could not stop lying. She continued to picture herself as sexually alluring and tried, futilely, to entice young men into her bed. In the end she became a caricature of what she had been all along: a vain, frivolous, selfish woman who had considerable talent but could no longer tell whether what she thought and said was true or false. Hammett would surely have despised her for that.
