When Lillian first met Dashiell Hammett in 1930, he almost reached the end of his writing career, publishing four novels "The Red Harvest" (1929), "The Dain Curse" (1929), "The Maltese Falcon"(1930) and "The Glass Key" (1931). Hammett greatly contributed to create "hard-boiled" genre. Sam Spade was his central character after 1929, becoming the symbol of the American private eye.
They met for the first time at a restaurant in Hollywood and fell in love immediately. Lillian described her encounter with Hammett in "An Unfinished Woman"(1969).
PHOTO from "World Literature" published by Asahi Newpaper, (c) Martha Swope, Time Inc.
"We met when I was twenty-four years old and he was thirty-six in a restaurant in Hollywood. The five-day drunk had left the wonderful face looking rumpled, and the very tall thin figure was tired and sagged. We talked of T. S. Eliot, although I no longer remember what we said, and then went and sat in his car and talked at each other and over each other until it was daylight. We were to meet again a few weeks later and, after that, on and sometimes off again for the rest of his life and thirty years of mine.”
Before long Lillian was divorced from Kober. Hammett was married to Josephine Dolan in 1921, divorced his wife in 1937. Though these two never married, they became inseparable and maintained "on and off" relationship for 30 years until Hammett's death in 1961.
With help from a "cool teacher" Hammett, Lillian wrote
"The Children's Hour" (1934) and became the best-known and the only one female playwright in the world.
Hammett wrote his final novel "The Thin Man" (1934). Lillian was a model of his resolute female character Nora Charles. She described how he was writing a long piece of work.
"Life changed: the drinking stopped, the parties were over. The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ten days or two weeks to go out even for a walk for fear something would be lost. It was a good year for me and I learned from it and was, perhaps, frightened by a man who now did not need me." from "An Unfinished Woman"
In April 1951 during the McCarthy era, Dashiell Hammett refused to disclose names and was sentenced to prison for 6 months for contempt of Congress by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Lillian was called upon to testify before the HUAC in May 1952. When she was asked "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?", She answered NO. Then she wrote a letter to the HUAC that she would be willing to answer all questions about herself but no questions about anyone else. The last paragraph of the letter became a kind of slogan:
"To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to suit this year's fashions."
Though she refused to reveal the names of any associates in the theater, she was not sent to jail but blacklisted for ten years. Her plays were banned from theaters and weren't produced much. Then she sold her farm "Hardscrabble" in Pleasantville, N.Y., and had worked as a sales person and an accounting department at Macy's under a different name, according to "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman".
During this period, Lillian wrote and directed "Montserrat" (1949), the first of several adaptations. "The Lark" (1955), a reworking of Jean Anouilh's drama L'alouette based on the trial of Joan of Arc, and "Candide" (1956), adapted from Voltaire's classic novel. Peter Feibleman said in his memoir about her that she didn't have the heart to write another play for a long time, and the luster for her fame as a playwright had dulled over and it never quite came back.
When Hammett came out of jail, she came back to New York to meet him.
"Jail had made a thin man thinner, a sick man sicker." - from "An Unfinished Woman" (1969)
It was the first time she knew he would now always be sick.
"...he lived with me for the last four years of his life. Not all of that time was easy, indeed some of it was very bad, but it was an unspoken pleasure that having come together so many years before, ruined so much, and repaired a little, we had endured. Sometimes I would resent the understated or seldom stated side of us and, guessing death wasn't too far away, I would try for something to have afterwards.
One day I said, "We've done fine, haven't we?"
He said, "Fine's too big a word for me. Why don't we just say we've done better than most people?"" - from "An Unfinished Woman"
Hammett died of lung cancer on January 10, 1961. Their 30 years relationship came to the end.
