Early life and marriage Lillian Florence Hellman was born in
New Orleans, Louisiana, into a
Jewish family. Her mother was Julia Newhouse of
Demopolis, Alabama, and her father was Max Hellman, a New Orleans shoe salesman. Julia Newhouse's parents were Sophie Marx, from a successful banking family, and Leonard Newhouse, a Demopolis liquor dealer. During most of her childhood she spent half of each year in a New Orleans boarding home run by her aunts and the other half in New York City. She studied for two years at
New York University and then took several courses at
Columbia University. On December 31, 1925, Hellman married
Arthur Kober, a playwright and press agent, although they often lived apart. In 1929, she traveled around Europe for a time and settled in
Bonn to continue her education. She felt an initial attraction to a Nazi student group that advocated "a kind of socialism" until their questioning of her Jewish ties made their
antisemitism clear, and she returned immediately to the United States. Years later she wrote, "Then for the first time in my life I thought about being a Jew."
1930s ,
Anne Revere, Florence McGee,
Katherine Emery and Katherine Emmet in the original Broadway production of ''
The Children's Hour'' (1934) Beginning in 1930, for about a year Hellman earned $50 a week as a reader for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, writing summaries of novels and periodical literature for potential screenplays. She found the job rather dull, but it created opportunities for her to meet a wide range of creative people while she became involved in more political and artistic scenes. While there, she met and fell in love with mystery writer
Dashiell Hammett. She divorced Kober and returned to New York City in 1932. When she met Hammett in a Hollywood restaurant, she was 24 and he was 36. They maintained their relationship off and on until his death in 1961. Hellman's drama ''
The Children's Hour'' premiered on Broadway on November 24, 1934, and ran for 691 performances. It depicts a schoolgirl's false accusation of lesbianism against two of her teachers. The falsehood is discovered, but before amends can be made one teacher is rejected by her fiancé and the other dies by suicide. After the success of ''The Children's Hour
, Hellman returned to Hollywood as a screenwriter for Goldwyn Pictures at $2,500 a week. She first collaborated on a screenplay for The Dark Angel'', an earlier play and silent film. After that film's successful release in 1935, Goldwyn purchased the rights to ''The Children's Hour'' for $35,000 while it still was running on Broadway. Hellman rewrote the play to conform to the standards of the
Motion Picture Production Code, under which any mention of lesbianism was impossible. Instead, one schoolteacher is accused of having sex with the other's fiancé. It appeared in 1936 under the title
These Three. She next wrote the screenplay for
Dead End, which featured the first appearance of the
Dead End Kids and premiered in 1937. On May 1, 1935, Hellman joined the
League of American Writers, whose members included Hammett,
Alexander Trachtenberg of
International Publishers,
Frank Folsom,
Louis Untermeyer,
I. F. Stone,
Myra Page,
Millen Brand, and
Arthur Miller. Members were largely either Communist Party members or
fellow travelers. One of its key issues was the dictatorial way producers credited writers for their work, known as "screen credit". Hellman had received no recognition for some of her earlier projects, including her work as the principal author of
The Westerner (1934) and a principal contributor to
The Melody Lingers On (1935). In December 1936, her play
Days to Come closed its Broadway run after just seven performances. The play depicts a labor dispute in a small Ohio town during which the characters try to balance the competing claims of owners and workers, both represented as valid. Communist publications denounced her failure to take sides. That same month she joined several other literary figures, including
Dorothy Parker and
Archibald MacLeish, in forming and funding Contemporary Historians, Inc., to back a film project,
The Spanish Earth, to demonstrate support for the anti-Franco forces in the
Spanish Civil War. In March 1937, Hellman and 87 other U.S. public figures signed "An Open Letter to American Liberals", which protested an effort headed by
John Dewey to examine
Leon Trotsky's defense against his 1936 condemnation by the Soviet Union. Some critics view the letter as a defense of Stalin's
Moscow Purge Trials. It charged some of Trotsky's defenders with aiming to destabilize the Soviet Union and said the Soviet Union "should be left to protect itself against treasonable plots as it saw fit." It asked U.S. liberals and progressives to unite with the Soviet Union against the growing threat of
fascism and avoid an investigation that would only fuel "the reactionary sections of the press and public" in the U.S. Endorsing this view, the editors of the
New Republic wrote, "there are more important questions than Trotsky's guilt." Those who signed the
Open Letter called for a united front against fascism, which, in their view, required uncritical support of the Soviet Union. In October 1937, Hellman spent a few weeks in Spain to lend her support, as other writers had, to the
International Brigades of non-Spaniards who had joined the anti-Franco side in the Spanish Civil War. As bombs fell on Madrid, she broadcast a report to the U.S. on Madrid Radio. In 1989, journalist and
Ernest Hemingway's third wife,
Martha Gellhorn, herself in Spain at that period, disputed the account of this trip in Hellman's memoirs and claimed that Hellman waited until all the witnesses were dead before describing events that never occurred. But Hellman had documented her trip in the
New Republic in April 1938 as "A Day in Spain".
Langston Hughes wrote admiringly of the radio broadcast in 1956. Hellman was a member of the
Communist Party from 1938 to 1940. By her own account, written in 1952, she was "a most casual member. I attended very few meetings and saw and heard nothing more than people sitting around a room talking of current events or discussing the books they had read. I drifted away from the Communist Party because I seemed to be in the wrong place. My own maverick nature was no more suitable to the political left than it had been to the conservative background from which I came."
The Little Foxes and controversy The Little Foxes opened on Broadway on February 13, 1939, and ran for 410 performances. The play starred
Tallulah Bankhead as Regina, and after its success on Broadway, it toured extensively in the U.S. It was Hellman's favorite of her plays, and by far the most commercially and critically successful. But a feud developed between Bankhead and Hellman when Bankhead wanted to perform for a benefit for Finnish Relief, as the USSR had recently
invaded Finland. Without thinking Hellman's approval was necessary, Bankhead and the cast told the press the news of the benefit. They were shocked when Hellman and Shumlin declined to give permission for the benefit performance, citing
non-intervention and anti-militarism. Bankhead told reporters, "I've adopted
Spanish Loyalist orphans and sent money to China, causes for which both Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman were strenuous proponents ... why should [they] suddenly become so insular?" as Regina Giddens in
The Little Foxes (1939) Hellman countered: "I don't believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I've been there and it seems like a little pro-Nazi Republic to me." Bankhead, who hated Nazism and had become a strong critic of Communism since the mid 1930s
Great Purge and for what she saw as a communist betrayal of the
Second Spanish Republic, was outraged by Hellman's actions and thought her a moral hypocrite. Hellman had never been to Finland. Bankhead and the cast suspected that Hellman's refusal was motivated by her devotion to the
Stalinist regime in Soviet Russia. Hellman and Bankhead became adversaries as a result of the feud, not speaking to each other for a quarter of a century afterward. Hellman aggravated the matter by saying that her real reason for turning down the benefit was that when the Spanish Republican government fell to Franco's fascists, Hellman and Shumlin requested that Bankhead put on a benefit for the Spanish loyalists fleeing to neighboring France, and Bankhead refused. Bankhead was incensed by this, as she had helped many Spanish Republican fighters and families flee the
Spanish Civil War in 1937 after they had been turned on by Stalinist fighters behind their own Republican lines. Hellman and Bankhead did not speak again until 1963. Years later, drama critic
Joseph Wood Krutch recounted how he and fellow critic
George Jean Nathan had shared a cab with Hellman and Bankhead: Bankhead said: "That's the last time I act in one of your god-damned plays". Miss Hellman responded by slamming her purse against the actress's jaw. ... I decided that no self-respecting Gila monster would have behaved in that manner.
1940s and
Paul Lukas in the original Broadway production of
Watch on the Rhine (1941) On January 9, 1940, viewing the spread of fascism in Europe and fearing similar political developments in the U.S., Hellman said at a luncheon of the
American Booksellers Association: Her play
Watch on the Rhine opened on Broadway on April 1, 1941, and ran for 378 performances. It won the
New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. She wrote it in 1940, when its call for a united international alliance against Hitler contradicted the Communist position at the time, following the
Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. Early in 1942, Hellman accompanied the production to Washington, D.C., for a benefit performance, where she spoke with President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hammett wrote the screenplay for the
movie version, which appeared in 1943. In October 1941, Hellman and
Ernest Hemingway co-hosted a dinner to raise money for anti-Nazi activists imprisoned in France. New York Governor
Herbert Lehman agreed to participate, but withdrew because some of the sponsoring organizations, he wrote, "have long been connected with Communist activities." Hellman replied: "I do not and I did not ask the politics of any members of the committee and there is nobody who can with honesty vouch for anybody but themselves." She assured him the funds raised would be used as promised and later provided him with a detailed accounting. The next month, she wrote him: "I am sure it will make you sad and ashamed as it did me to know that, of the seven resignations out of 147 sponsors, five were Jews. Of all the peoples in the world, I think, we should be the last to hold back help, on any grounds, from those who fought for us." In 1942, Hellman was nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplay for
The Little Foxes. Two years later, she was nominated for her screenplay for
The North Star, the only original screenplay of her career. She objected to the film's production numbers that, she said, turned a village festival into "an extended opera bouffe peopled by musical comedy characters", but told
The New York Times that it was still "a valuable and true picture which tells a good deal of the truth about fascism". To establish the difference between her screenplay and the film, Hellman published her screenplay in the fall of 1943. British anti-Communist writer
Robert Conquest wrote that it was "a travesty greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but experienced in collective-farm conditions." In April 1944, Hellman's
The Searching Wind opened on Broadway. Her third World War II project, it tells the story of an ambassador whose indecisive relations with his wife and mistress mirror the vacillation and appeasement of his professional life. She wrote the screenplay for the film version that appeared two years later. Both versions depict the ambassador's feckless response to antisemitism. The conservative press noted that the play reflected none of Hellman's pro-Soviet views, and the communist response to the play was unfavorable. Hellman's applications for a passport to travel to England in April 1943 and May 1944 were both denied because government authorities considered her "an active Communist", although in 1944 the head of the Passport Division of the Department of State,
Ruth Shipley, cited "the present military situation" as the reason. In August 1944, Hellman received a passport, indicative of government approval, for travel to Russia on a goodwill mission as a guest of
VOKS, the Soviet agency that handled cultural exchanges. During her visit from November 5, 1944, to January 18, 1945, she began an affair with
John F. Melby, a foreign service officer, that continued intermittently for years and as a friendship for the rest of her life. In May 1946, the
National Institute of Arts and Letters made Hellman a member. In November of that year, her play
Another Part of the Forest premiered, directed by Hellman. It presented the same characters 20 years younger than they are in
The Little Foxes. A
film version to which Hellman did not contribute followed in 1948. In 1947, Columbia Pictures offered Hellman a multi-year contract, which she refused because it included a clause that she viewed as an infringement on her rights of free speech and association: it required her to sign a statement that she had never been a member of the Communist Party and would not associate with radicals or subversives, which would have required her to end her relationship with Hammett. Shortly thereafter,
William Wyler told her he was unable to hire her to work on a film because she was blacklisted. In November 1947, the leaders of the motion picture industry decided to deny employment to anyone who refused to answer questions posed by the
House Un-American Activities Committee. After the
Hollywood Ten defied the committee, Hellman wrote an editorial in the December issue of
Screen Writer, the publication of the Screen Writers Guild. Titled "The Judas Goats", it mocked the committee and derided producers for allowing themselves to be intimidated. It said in part: Melby and Hellman corresponded regularly in the years after World War II, while he held State Department assignments overseas. Their political views diverged as he came to advocate containment of communism while she was unwilling to accept criticism of the Soviet Union. They became, in one historian's view, "political strangers, occasional lovers, and mostly friends." Melby particularly objected to her support for
Henry Wallace in the
1948 presidential election. In 1949, Hellman adapted
Emmanuel Roblès's French-language play,
Montserrat, for Broadway, where it opened on October 29, with Hellman directing. It was revived in 1961.
1950s The play recognized by critics and judged by Hellman as her best,
The Autumn Garden, premiered in 1951. In 1952, Hellman was called to testify before the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had heard testimony that she had attended Communist Party meetings in 1937. She initially drafted a statement that said her two-year membership in the Communist Party had ended in 1940, but she did not condemn the party or express regret for her participation in it. Her attorney,
Joseph Rauh, opposed her admission of membership on technical grounds because she had attended meetings but never formally become a member. He warned that the committee and the public would expect her to take a strong anti-communist stand to atone for her political past, but she refused to apologize or denounce the party. Rauh devised a strategy that produced favorable press coverage and allowed her to avoid the stigma of being labeled a "Fifth Amendment Communist". On May 19, 1952, Hellman wrote HUAC a letter that one historian has described as "written not to persuade the Committee, but to shape press coverage." In it she said she was willing to testify only about herself, and that she did not want to claim her
rights under the Fifth Amendment: "I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself." She wrote that she found the legal requirement that she testify about others if she wanted to speak about her own actions "difficult for a layman to understand". Rauh had the letter delivered to HUAC chairman
John S. Wood on May 20. In public testimony before HUAC on May 21, Hellman answered preliminary questions about her background. When asked about attending a meeting at the home of Hollywood screenwriter
Martin Berkeley, she refused to respond, claiming her rights under the Fifth Amendment, and referred the committee to her letter by way of explanation. The committee responded that it had considered and rejected her request to be allowed to testify only about herself and entered her letter into the record. Hellman answered only one additional question: she denied she had ever belonged to the Communist Party. She cited the Fifth Amendment in response to several more questions and the committee dismissed her. Historian John Earl Haynes credits both Rauh's "clever tactics" and Hellman's "sense of the dramatic" for what followed the conclusion of Hellman's testimony. Reaction divided along political lines.
Murray Kempton, a longtime critic of Hellman's support for communist causes, praised her: "It is enough that she has reached into her conscience for an act based on something more than the material or the tactical ... she has chosen to act like a lady." The FBI increased its surveillance of her travel and her mail. In the early 1950s, at the height of anti-communist fervor in the U.S., the State Department investigated whether Melby posed a security risk. In April 1952, the department made its one formal charge against him: "that during the period 1945 to date, you have maintained an association with one, Lillian Hellman, reliably reported to be a member of the Communist Party", based on testimony by unidentified informants. When Melby appeared before the department's
Loyalty Security Board, he was not allowed to contest Hellman's Communist Party affiliation or learn who informed against her, but only to present his understanding of her politics and the nature of his relationship with her, including the occasional renewal of their sexual relationship. He said he had no plans to renew their friendship, but did not promise to avoid contact with her. In the course of a series of appeals, Hellman testified before the Loyalty Security Board on Melby's behalf. She offered to answer questions about her political views and associations, but the board allowed her only to describe her relationship with Melby. She testified that she had many longstanding friendships with people of different political views and that political sympathy was not part of those relationships. She described how her relationship with Melby changed over time and how their sexual relationship was briefly renewed in 1950 after a long hiatus: "The relationship obviously at this point was neither one thing nor the other: it was neither over nor was it not over." She said: The State Department dismissed Melby on April 22, 1953. As was its custom, the board gave no reason for its decision. In 1954, Hellman declined when asked to adapt
Anne Frank's
The Diary of a Young Girl (1952) for the stage. According to writer and director
Garson Kanin, she said that the diary was "a great historical work which will probably live forever, but I couldn't be more wrong as the adapter. If I did this it would run one night because it would be deeply depressing. You need someone who has a much lighter touch" and recommended her friends
Frances Goodrich and
Albert Hackett. Hellman made an English-language adaption of
Jean Anouilh's play ''L'Alouette
, based on the trial of Joan of Arc, called The Lark''.
Leonard Bernstein composed incidental music for the first production, which opened on Broadway on November 17, 1955. Hellman edited a collection of Chekhov's correspondence that appeared in 1955 as
The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. After the success of
The Lark, Hellman conceived another play with incidental music, based on
Voltaire's
Candide. Bernstein convinced her to develop it as a comic operetta with a much more substantial musical component. She wrote the dialogue, which many others then worked on, and also wrote some lyrics for what became the often revived
Candide. Hellman hated the collaboration and revisions on deadline that
Candide required: "I went to pieces when something had to be done quickly, because someone didn't like something, and there was no proper time to think it out ... I realized that I panicked under conditions I wasn't accustomed to."
1960s Toys in the Attic opened on Broadway on February 25, 1960, and ran for 464 performances. It received a
Tony Award nomination for Best Play. In this family drama set in New Orleans, money, marital infidelity, and revenge end in a woman's disfigurement. Hellman had no hand in the screenplay, which altered the drama's tone and exaggerated the characterizations, and the
resulting film received bad reviews. Later that year she was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A second film version of ''The Children's Hour
, less successful both with critics and at the box office, appeared in 1961 under that title, but Hellman played no role in the screenplay, having withdrawn from the project after Hammett died in 1961. But in the 1961 version of The Children's Hour'', despite the continued existence of the Motion Picture Production Code, the lead characters (played by
Audrey Hepburn and
Shirley MacLaine) were explicitly accused of lesbianism. In 1961,
Brandeis University awarded Hellman its Creative Arts Medal for outstanding lifetime achievement and the women's division of the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine at
Yeshiva University gave her its Achievement Award. In December 1962, Hellman was elected a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was inducted at a May 1963 ceremony. Another play,
My Mother, My Father, and Me, proved unsuccessful when it was staged in March 1963. It closed after 17 performances. Hellman adapted it from Burt Blechman's novel
How Much? In 1965, Hellman wrote the screenplay for
The Chase, starring
Marlon Brando, based on a play and novel by
Horton Foote. Although she received sole credit for the screenplay, she worked from an earlier treatment, and producer
Sam Spiegel made additional changes and altered the sequence of scenes. In 1966, she edited a collection of Hammett's stories,
The Big Knockover. Her introductory profile of Hammett was her first exercise in memoir writing. Hellman wrote a reminiscence of
gulag survivor
Lev Kopelev, husband of her translator in Russia during 1944, to serve as the introduction to his anti-Stalinist memoir,
To Be Preserved Forever, which appeared in 1976. In February 1980, she,
John Hersey, and
Norman Mailer wrote to Soviet authorities to protest retribution against Kopelev for his defense of Soviet dissident
Andrei Sakharov. Hellman was a longtime friend of author
Dorothy Parker and served as her
literary executor after her death in 1967. Hellman published her first volume of memoirs,
An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, in 1969. It touches on her political, artistic, and social life, and received the U.S.
National Book Award in
Arts and Letters, which was an award category from 1964 to 1976.
1970s . In the early 1970s, Hellman taught writing for short periods at the
University of California, Berkeley, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Hunter College in New York City. Her second volume of memoirs,
Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, appeared in 1973. In an interview at the time, Hellman described the difficulty of writing about the 1950s: Hellman's third volume of memoirs,
Scoundrel Time, was published in 1976. It illustrated the exciting artistic time and had an influential tone closely associated with the beginning of the feminist movement. In 1976, Hellman posed in a fur coat for the Blackglama national advertising campaign "What Becomes a Legend Most?" In August of that year, she received the
Edward MacDowell Medal for her contribution to literature. In October, she received the
Paul Robeson Award from
Actors' Equity. In 1976, Hellman's publisher,
Little Brown, canceled its contract to publish a book of
Diana Trilling's essays because Trilling refused to delete four passages critical of Hellman. When Trilling's collection appeared in 1977, the
New York Times critic expressed his preference for the "simple confession of error" Hellman made in
Scoundrel Time for her "acquiescence in Stalinism" to what he called Trilling's excuses for her own behavior during McCarthyism.
Arthur L. Herman, however, later called
Scoundrel Time "breathtaking dishonesty". Hellman presented the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film at a ceremony on March 28, 1977. Greeted by a standing ovation, she said: The 1977
Oscar-winning film
Julia was based on the "Julia" chapter of
Pentimento. On June 30, 1976, as the film was going into production, Hellman wrote about the screenplay to its producer: In a 1979 television interview, author
Mary McCarthy, long Hellman's political adversary and the object of her negative literary judgment, said of Hellman, "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman responded by filing a $2,500,000 defamation suit against McCarthy, interviewer
Dick Cavett, and
PBS. McCarthy in turn produced evidence she said proved that Hellman had lied in some accounts of her life. Cavett said he sympathized more with McCarthy than Hellman but that "everybody lost" in the lawsuit. At the time of her death, Hellman was still in litigation with McCarthy; her executors dropped the suit.
Later years and death In 1980, Hellman published a short novel,
Maybe: A Story. Though presented as fiction, Hellman, Hammett, and other real-life people appeared as characters. It received a mixed reception and was sometimes read as another installment of Hellman's memoirs. Hellman's editor wrote to
The New York Times to question a reviewer's attempt to check the facts in the novel, calling it a work of fiction whose characters misremember and dissemble. In 1983, New York psychiatrist
Muriel Gardiner claimed she was the basis for the title character in
Julia and that she had never known Hellman. Hellman denied the character was based on Gardiner. As the events Hellman described matched Gardiner's account of her life and Gardiner's family was closely tied to Hellman's attorney,
Wolf Schwabacher, some critics believe that Hellman appropriated Gardiner's story without attribution. Hellman died on June 30, 1984, aged 79, from a heart attack near her home on
Martha's Vineyard. She is buried beneath a pine tree on a rise at one end of Abels Hill/Chilmark Cemetery on Martha's Vineyard. ==Archive==