[NOTE: Re-posting an old article from mid-2022, amid the vax-atious mask-&-shot tyranny. I thought I’d lost all my material from my deleted former SS account, and was surprised to find copies of some posts in a different computer! So, I may resurrect a few modified pieces from the old storage vault yet…
Also, please click through to read article, since its length is near the limit for email.]
Presenting an interesting series of incidents in late 20th c. American culture that plays out almost like dramatized fiction, and touches on topics of honesty, integrity, the 1st Amendment, defining what fiction and nonfiction are, contemplating artists’ work and their lives, etc.… .
Are they at all still relevant to our days? Some, or all—will surely think not… perhaps this may serve at least as some diversion from the burdensome worries that bedevil us today ?
Disclaimer: Tarnation, another rambler here…!
As an unworldly, idealistic teen, I greatly admired American writer/playwright Lillian Hellman. (Only one close friend from high school shared my odd hero-worship; everyone else was into that awful disco craze and stuff.)
I was impressed by Hellman’s apparently “heroic” stance during the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the 1950s. She took the Fifth when asked to “name names.”
I had loved her defining quip: the line she spoke before, and sent in a letter to, the HUAC (oft-quoted by Soviet-supporting enemies of Senator Joseph McCarthy and liberals today):
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions…”
How poetic! How dramatic! Oh, how noble! Thus it all seemed to a naif with limited life experience and bare knowledge of all the facts of the matter, as with things to do with most of the world then, truth be told.
I’d read Hellman’s 1973 memoir, Pentimento, and cherished one compelling story in it, the chapter about “Julia.” Was moved by the Oscar-winning film based on it, which starred those leftist activist-thespians, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, respectively playing Hellman and Julia.
JULIA the Movie (1977)
TRAILER
(Excerpt: clip from interview:) Hellman talks to Bill Moyers about the character, Julia, from her book, Pentimento.
To read the transcript of the FULL interview, please click HERE.
Felt righteous anger on reading Scoundrel Time, her 1976 memoir recalling those “red-baiting years” with arch-villain, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Here’s a gushing commentary on the book in the New York Times. [Note: many typos in their digitized version of the article].
I enjoyed her plays, and the riveting movies made from them: The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, and The Children’s Hour, among others.
And, a huge plus: the fact that she was closely linked to writer Dashiell Hammett, ex-Pinkerton detective and hardboiled writer of The Thin Man. (The 1934 pre-Code film loosely based on the novel was what hooked me on 1930s wisecracking Hollywood movies. Those were not easy to find in the era before videotape, and way before the online cornucopia of movies on tap today.)
AND THEN, THE SCANDAL OF PENTIMENTO.
(And, by extension, Julia — the movie based on a chapter in the book.)
Well! What a shocker this was!
I only learned of all this just a few years ago. I’d been blissfully unaware of the scandalous Pentimento affair for all these decades, living abroad then and leaving behind my idolatry of Hellman and company with my youth, and having since turned to other pursuits and interests over the years.
So, I find, that THIS turns out to be the REAL story behind “Julia” (see video below).
It shatters the well-crafted image of a “courageous” and “uncompromisingly truth-seeking” liberal and “freedom of speech advocate” Hellman, one built up over so many decades.
The video succinctly explains the dust-up over the authenticity of the Julia chapter in Pentimento, and widens the scope to include Hellman’s carefully fashioned public persona and life.
THE LITERARY FEUD.
I think that examining Hellman’s behavior regarding her well-known rivalry with fellow liberal Mary McCarthy gives one a peek into Lillian’s true character.
I laughed once more at writer Mary McCarthy’s famously droll and biting TV comment about her literary adversary.
TV host Dick Cavett recalls McCarthy’s offhand comment as a guest on his show in a piece he wrote for the New Yorker:
Lillian, Mary, and Me
How an innocent question launched a life-altering lawsuit.
by Dick Cavett
December 9, 2002
During the interview, in an attempt to be clever, I asked McCarthy to name some overrated writers, thinking that she would take that as her cue. Instead, she answered the question, mentioning John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, and, finally, Lillian Hellman, “who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.”
“What’s dishonest about her?” I asked.
“Everything,” McCarthy replied, smiling. “I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ”
[Emphasis mine.]
SOURCE.
The TV quote is also discussed in the “Scandal” video above, starting at time stamp 21:13. (Note that the actual footage of McCarthy speaking those words does not appear to exist online. Not sure why. Is there some kind of gag order related to that old lawsuit or something?)
For her smart and hyperbolic television comment, McCarthy was soon served a huge libel lawsuit seeking $2.25 million in damages by Hellman, together with co-defendants Dick Cavett, and the New York PBS affiliate. Cavett wrote about the remark that brought a longstanding literary feud into a very public arena in that New Yorker article quoted above.
Thus far, the rivalry has also spawned a couple of posthumous plays, Hellman v. McCarthy, and Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends.
Here, in Theater Talk (2014), Dick Cavett speaks with his usual smooth and dry wit in this lively chat about the play, Hellman v. McCarthy, also featuring the play’s two actresses.
Listen to his opinion on Hellman’s lawsuit, and what he now thinks she should’ve done instead of ill-humoredly filing the suit! This starts at time stamp 20:51. He refers to Hellman in ungentlemanly fashion as “the old bag.” Clearly, there was no love lost between Cavett and Hellman, even decades after she’s already passed on.
THE LAWSUIT
Was there a basis for the suit ? Was what McCarthy had said protected under the First Amendment right to free speech ? How about its consideration as a piece of literary criticism ?
Apparently, afterwards, Cavett had invited Hellman to come on to the show to defend herself, but she never took him up on the offer. He had proposed a debate between the two women, too, but neither showed any interest.
The suit was dropped after Hellman died in 1984. McCarthy, per this article, had just $63,000 in savings at the time of the suit. Fighting it took its toll on her in money and stress, while the more financially successful Hellman sat on her throne of wealth. Hellman is quoted as saying, “I want blood!” in filing the suit against McCarthy (see Carl Rollyson’s article in the “Bonus” post below).
Methinks that in the end, Lillian did get her pound of flesh—er, pint of blood.
THE REAL ‘JULIA’.
Credible persons and sources now agree that the central character of Hellman’s “Julia” tale was most likely a real person: an American psychoanalyst named Muriel Gardiner. Gardiner’s anti-Fascist resistance work in 1930s Austria as well as specific additional details in her life bore an unusually striking resemblance to the depiction of Julia. Gardiner had never met Hellman, but the two women just happened to have had a certain lawyer in common, though.
After Pentimento saw print, questions soon arose about the provenance of Hellman’s “Julia,” thanks to alert readers who knew of Gardiner. The latter’s friends had pointed out the startling coincidences between Hellman’s story about her “friend” in Pentimento and Gardiner’s life. Gardiner then wrote to Hellman to ask if she had been the inspiration for Julia, but never received a reply. Hellman claimed such a letter never got to her.
Gardiner decided to publish her own memoir, ‘Code Name “MARY”’ in the early 1980s, bringing fresh attention to the controversy.
Up to the end of her life, Hellman would continue to deny that the character of Julia was based on Gardiner, asserting that legal reasons prevented her from revealing the person’s true identity.
(See last video below for details about Gardiner.)
NONFICTION VS. FICTION.
Pentimento, a memoir, was of course published as “nonfiction.” One has to wonder, then: how many more lies did Hellman write in her “nonfiction” works ?
I understand, and have seen the tendency in some writers to embroider tales and weave imagined facts and details into the stories they tell to gin up the drama, humor or excitement, intentional or not. This is precisely their craft. The more fully exaggerated writings are rightly (or should be) classed as “fiction.”
As for Hellman, well—to steal a person’s life story wholesale like that, to do so very publicly, and not feel it to be wrong—! That takes some real chutzpah.
Several Hellman biographies, both apologist and detractive, have seen print in the intervening years. However, it’s the painstaking detective work done by Samuel McCracken in 1984 (see below) that might be the last word on the whole “is-Lillian Hellman-honest-or-a-liar” saga.
Word now is that the legendary Hellman line to the HUAC wasn’t even hers, but was from longtime partner, Dashiell Hammett. Go listen to what Cavett has to say in the Theater Talk: Hellman v. McCarthy video posted above. At time stamp 11:37, he shares (in a faux conspiratorial manner) what his writer friend Jean Stafford confided to him about the real source of that unforgettable line. If, indeed, true, it merely adds to the unraveling of Hellman’s once-shining reputation as a beacon of freedom and free speech.
And yet, staunch Hellman defenders remain, who excuse her willy-nilly mixing of fact and fiction. To wit, scan the comments below the “Scandal” video on YouTube to see rationalizations galore.
Here is a Claremont Review writer who vehemently begs to differ with Hellman biographer-apologist Alice Kessler-Harris: (FREE TO READ!)
What Becomes a Liar Most?
[EXCERPT:]
Trying to repair her subject’s reputation, Kessler-Harris justifies Hellman with what amounts to George Costanza’s line on Seinfeld: “It’s not a lie…if you believe it.” As if to show how the incoherent thinking of postmodernism abets shabby morals, Kessler-Harris contends, “Hellman did not think of her stories as lies,” and a dramatist has the right to use “the material at hand to invent tales.” Anyway, Hellman “made up stories” about everyone, and “drama was meant to make a point, not just to entertain.” Moreover, Hellman may not have consciously lied, since she “never claimed a good memory.” The literature of psychology, however, offers no other example of a memory so bad that it took the form of one writer appropriating another’s memoir to make herself look heroic.
Perhaps the most complete, detailed, Sherlock Holmes-style investigation into the whole affair—and then some—was done by Samuel McCracken at Commentary Magazine:
“Julia” & Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman
EXCERPT:
[ … ] Lillian Hellman’s memoirs have received adulatory notices and are taken as authoritative sources on the life not only of their author but of such prominent literary figures as Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and the man with whom Miss Hellman lived, Dashiell Hammett. Moreover, Miss Hellman is widely credited with having set a heroic example when she appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy period and announced, before taking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to answer a question, that she would not “cut [her] conscience to fit this year’s fashion.” It is, therefore, a question of some consequence whether Mary McCarthy is right about Miss Hellman’s honesty.
The answer to this question is to be found in Miss Hellman’s series of memoirs: An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), Scoundrel Time (1976), Three (an annotated compendium of the earlier memoirs, 1979), and Maybe (1980).
The best known of these is undoubtedly Pentimento, which contains a portrait, “Julia,” about a childhood friend. The heroine of this piece, a rich young American, attends Oxford and then the University of Vienna medical school; undergoes analysis at the hands of Sigmund Freud; becomes involved in anti-fascist underground work during the 30’s; and at one point enlists Miss Hellman’s aid in delivering money to the underground in Germany. According to Miss Hellman, Julia had a daughter by one of her fellow students; also, as a result of her work, she had lost a leg. In 1938, fatally wounded by Nazis in Frankfurt, she is smuggled, dying, to London. After her death Miss Hellman receives a telegram from London asking her to advise a funeral home there as to the disposition of the body. In the event, Miss Hellman herself goes to London where she takes charge of the body, brings it back to America, and has it cremated after Julia’s family refuses to accept it.
Miss Hellman fleshes out this outline with her customary taut prose, pungent detail, and barbed expressions of contempt for those actors in the story who fail to meet her moral standards. (I have greatly simplified the memoir here; Miss Hellman recounts in detail her lifelong acquaintance with Julia, and the complex interrelations between the life of Julia and that of another childhood friend.) In 1973, “Julia” was made into a film starring Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, and Jason Robards, Jr. as Dashiell Hammett. All three were nominated for, and Miss Redgrave and Mr. Robards received, the Academy Award.
In 1981, Martha Gellhorn, the well-known reporter who was the second wife of Ernest Hemingway, published an article in the Paris Review severely critical of Miss Hellman’s veracity. Although she dealt largely not with Pentimento but with An Unfinished Woman (in which Miss Gellhorn and Hemingway figure prominently), and thus did not confront “Julia” directly, she raised en passant grave doubts about the internal consistency of Miss Hellman’s account of the travels which included the delivery of money to Julia. These I shall take up presently.
[ … ]
If the tale of Julia were the only example of untrustworthiness in Miss Hellman’s memoirs, one might conclude that it represents no more than a bizarre aberration in the career of a writer otherwise deserving of the reputation for fierce integrity that she has claimed for herself and that has brought her widespread esteem. But if Martha Gellhorn is to be believed, Miss Hellman’s account of her 1937 trip to Spain is as little to be trusted as her account of Julia. And other such problems in Miss Hellman’s work exist as well.
[ … ]
READ THE REST (A VERY THOROUGH ANALYSIS!): CLICK HERE.
IS ANY OF THIS BROUHAHA RELEVANT TODAY?
Placed in the larger context of today’s global, diabolical events that have caused—and continue to cause—real and major casualties to so many innocent lives, one is tempted to dismiss all this with assertions along the lines of “much ado about nothing,” and that, well, “nobody died” from these lies.
True enough.
Yet, might we not see the lesson at the core here about proper forging of that old-fashioned thingy called “character?” Specifically, an honorable and trustworthy one—which hopefully is still considered a virtue by sane people ?
Especially today, in which the lack of basic decency runs rampant among all our social, political and religious leaders of prominent standing ?
Does not every good or bad deed start with character ? We know now that the concept matters little to the Mephistophelian culture that dominates today. Lies, especially colossal ones, now form the core philosophy and ethic of our mortal enemies in this spiritual battle we are presently engaged in against our oppressors and enslavers, all of whom are beholden only to the Evil One.
SHE ALMOST GOT AWAY WITH IT.
For whatever reason she chose to publish the likely fairy tale as a nonfictional “portrait” of a “friend,” Hellman’s once-unsullied, heroic legacy (as far as her bevy of fans goes) has been forever tarnished by this scandal—at least in the eyes of some readers, writers and critics.
So, if Muriel Gardiner had not: (a) survived the war, or (b) written her life story, Hellman would’ve likely “gotten away with it.” And with every other falsehood in her “nonfiction” writings, actually.
WHY DID SHE DO IT?
By boldly pressing ahead with her “memoirs” as is (and not just with Pentimento, as the McCracken article demonstrates), was she testing the abiding worshipfulness and gullibility of the public ? Those of the literary and publishing establishments ?
Or was she secretly hoping to be found out ? Or just didn’t really give a fig, one way or the other— being just that way — an obstinate, crusty woman who never apologized for anything she said or did ?
She was a fantastic writer and dramatist who excelled at her craft, but blurred the lines between truth and fiction. She paraded around as a “free speech defender” yet sought to maliciously destroy someone who merely exercised her free speech right.
Such issues might now seem to belong to a bygone era that still valued “truth” over “lies.”
AN AGE-OLD QUESTION.
And, so, that old question niggles:
Do we judge an artist solely by their craft, or by the way they lived their lives ?
I have my own thoughts on this. How about you?
THE REAL “JULIA”: Muriel Gardiner (1987)
BONUS:
Here’s one Hellman biographer who is unapologetic about his exacting assessment of Hellman’s reputation.
The Lives and Lies of Lillian Hellman
[EXCERPT:]
Her behavior, of course, is the mark of high Stalinism: not merely punishing your enemies but trying to annihilate them as you claim the high moral ground. Hellman ever stood by the Soviet Union, even backing its invasion of Finland (a fact Ms. Martinson does not mention). Only once, when for a few months her anti-fascist play, “Watch on the Rhine,” was out of step with the Hitler-Stalin pact, did Hellman deviate from the party line, and even that act of dissent ought to be viewed as more of a lover’s quarrel – a desire to compel her beloved to return to the anti-fascist fold.
SEE IF THIS LINK WORKS TO READ WHOLE ARTICLE: The Lives and Lies of Lillian Hellman.
(To access this article from 2005, may need to register with an email at the New York Sun website. Please send me an email (pathgirl8@proton.me) if you’d like to receive a copy of the article in MS Word for your own personal use.)
CODA 1:
This adolescent “hero-worship” operated in a period so distant in time, almost in a galaxy far, far away—to wit, in a previous, disremembered life; at a more vulnerable personal era when, perhaps lacking a core of genuine Christian faith, I had sought out in the wrong places heroes to emulate—or, just virtue-signal about. Had succumbed to the underlying drumbeat promoting the religion of leftism as “good,” by the culture that dominated American media and entertainment, and my chosen brand of “intellectualism.”
A lesson, perhaps, in choosing carefully figures and lives to applaud. The object of my admiration would turn out to be, by most accounts, an excellent writer—but also a nasty, thin-skinned, and vindictive liar.
(This isn’t to claim character perfection in myself—heavens, no—far from it! I may not err too shamefully in the “lying” department, but certainly have loads of sins my horrified Guardian Angel would chastise me for!)
Recalling this episode now may be an attempt to exorcise this category of lies, and put behind me these confused, mendacity-laden years of callow youth.
CODA 2:
I knew nothing of writer Mary McCarthy back then, except for that line she spoke about Hellman. And even if people went at each other with barbed words, at least they used wit in doing so. Hellman, alas, was not too witty in her response to McCarthy’s comment (as Dick Cavett opines at time stamp 10:44 in the Theater Talk video above).
Wit has, sadly, disappeared from the verbal and written landscape in the last few decades. Except, perhaps, for H. L. Mencken’s spiritual descendant, Emerald Robinson, and her Substack posts—especially when her sights are trained upon the wretched legacy media, globalists, and all those wicked men and women creating dangerous mayhem today.
I was just wondering today what Hellman and McCarthy would've thought about the current state of things w.r.t. the covid bioterrorism program being used by the globalist cabal to control and eliminate people, with Biden and accomplices in media and entertainment helping to impose the diabolical agenda. Oh—and some “intellectuals” supporting the evil agenda, like Noam Chomsky (whom I used to admire, too, but now wonder if he’s become a mere gatekeeper).
I'm thinking that Mary McCarthy would've seen through all the lies, being a sharp-eyed critic of society back then, and not easy to pin down and assign to a particular "box".
And Hellman? Perhaps not, and could very well side with those who hold illegal power right now.
But who really knows?
Your all's thoughts? All speculation, of course!
I enjoyed your musings and your round-up of sources and details is admirable. My mother was a Hellman fan and I came to Hellman through her when I was about 12. I think I read Julia before the movie--and I of course believed the story. I had read all of Hellman's work before I was 20 and then I learned about the great unraveling a couple years after that.
In grad school, I did my Master's on hardboiled American detective fiction which understandably involved a lot of Hammett. That too is now a long time ago but I've often idly wondered how much of what Hellman says about Hammett is accurate. I know some of it is not, but I haven't really investigated. I'm no longer convinced that Hellman was the model for Norah--although the hard drinking witticisms probably are.
Finally--and I think this is the most important takeaway--it seems quite obvious now--Hellman was a communist. She seeded all of her writing with communist ideas. She was a hardline Stalin supporter. Cast in that light the battle between McCarthy and Hellman takes on mythic proportions--Catholic McCarthy v. atheistic Hellman, Patriot v. Communist. I think Hellman's work is propaganda. It probably didn't help either that both Joseph and Mary shared the same last name.