1. Early Life of Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman was born as the only child of Julia Newhouse and Max Hellman on June 20th 1905 on Prytania Street in New Orleans. Her mother’s family was rich, upper-middle-class. Her father ran a shoe store but went bankruptcy in 1911, then became a traveling salesman. Lillian lived in New York with her mother's relatives and lived in New Orleans with her father’s sisters every six months.

She described her experiences in “An Unfinished Woman”(1969).

"I was thus moved from school in New York to school in New Orleans without care for the season or the quality of the school. This constant need for adjustment in two very different worlds made formal education into a kind of frantic tennis game, sometimes played with children whose strokes had force and brilliance, sometimes with those who could played with those who could barely hold the racket. Possibly it is the reason I never did well in school or in college, and why I wanted to be left alone to read by myself. I had found, very early, that any other test found me bounding with ease and grace over one fence to fall on my face as I ran towards the next."

She continued this "frantic tennis game" life from the age of six until she attends college.

Her experiences, treated as the poor granddaughter in New York, made her into an angry child and caused her mixture of respect and hatred for money and people who have it. Her avaricious relatives later appeared in "The Little Foxes"(1939), a chilling story of the financial and psychological conflicts within a wealthy Southern family.

Peter Feibleman wrote about her mother's family oriented influence on her in “LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman”:

“It was because of her mother’s family that she was attracted to the rich and hated them all her life. She never came to terms with growing up, and the outraged heart of childhood lasted through old age.”

In the early 1920s, she studied at New York University and Columbia University. Then she immediately got a job as a manuscript reader with Horace Liveright, a publisher in New York. She left the Liveright to marry Arthur Kober in 1925, who was a theatre press agent. In the first few years of marriage, she traveled to Paris and wandered around Europe. Then Kober was offered a job as a scenario writer for Paramount Pictures, and prepared for her job of reading manuscripts & writing reports at MGM.

About her life with Kober, she described in “An Unfinished Woman” (1969) as follows:

“I did not yet know about “inhuman cities” or roads built with no relief for the eye, or the effects of a hated house upon the spirit. I didn’t even understand about my marriage, or my life, and had no knowledge of the new twists I was braiding into the kinks I was already bound round with.”

Though she felt the work dull, it provided her the opportunity to meet a wider range of creative people.

“I was rash, overdaring, certain only that any adventure was worth having, and increasingly muddled by the Puritan conscience that made me pay for the adventures. I needed a teacher, a cool teacher, who would not be impressed or disturbed by a strange and difficult girl. I was to meet him, but not for another four or five years.”

It was in Hollywood that she had a fateful encounter with the hard-boiled ex-detective novelist Dashiell Hammett, beginning a close friendship with "a cool teacher" which lasted for thirty years.

2. "On and Off" relationship with Dashiell Hammett

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"

After that, Hammett stood behind her to help in her writing more plays "Days to Come" (1936), "The Little Foxes"(1939), "Watch on the Rhine" (1941), "The Searching Wind" (1944), "Another Part of the Forest" (1947) and "The Autumn Garden" (1951). 

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. 

3. Cakewalk dance with Peter Feibleman

Lillian and Peter Feibleman first met in 1940 when Peter was 10 years old and Lillian was 35. Lillian had been invited to the party as a friend of Peter's mother.

LILLY: How old are you?
CUFF: Only ten.
LILLY: I don't know what you mean by "only." Ten's not so young.
CUFF: It's n-not?
LILLY: It's not.
- from Act One of "Cakewalk"

When Peter was invited to Lillian's house in Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1960s, he started to build a close friendship as depicted in the Cakewalk. Yes, these two strange amusing communal lives began here.

Lillian was a teacher for Peter as well as Hammett was for her. She encouraged him to write a new book by disclosing everything to overcome trauma in his childhood. Her advice helped him to come out of slump, and he published later "The Columbus Tree" about Spain.
At that time, Lillian had stopped writing a play, but one day she read the article in The Times;

"The great American playwrights who are still active, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee" - no mention of me. I'm not dead yet, but I'll have to prove it. I'd like to start the memoir in New Orleans.  from "Cakewalk"

She wrote "An Unfinished Woman" (1969), "Pentiment" (1973), "Scoundrel time" (1976) and "Maybe" (1980), and they were a great success.

These memoirs provoked much controversy by Diana Trilling, Muriel Gardiner, Norman Podhoretz and others. Especially Mary McCarthy was famously said of Lillian on the Dick Cavett television show in 1979, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Ironically, their attacks on her greatly contributed to remain Lillian as a legendary writer.

According to the article of Washington Post, Lillian won the first round of the suit when a New York state judge ruled that she was not a public figure, which allowed the suit to go forward, a judgment that McCarthy appealed. Lillian's death means that the lawsuit is over. Ephraim London, Lillian's attorney, said "It wasn't the money she cared about. In fact we offered early on to drop it if McCarthy would apologize. But she refused . . . We agreed that if we won the verdict, we would both get a car and a chauffeur."

Peter described her new form of memoirs in Page 148 of  "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman":

"Lillian was in the process of dramatizing her life. She brought to the business of memory the art of fiction and she was begining to forge for herself a new form. Because I was interested in what she was doing it never occurred to me at the time that people would take all the details of the story for literal truth, since it seemed so clear that she was fusing fact with fiction. Lillian wrote about that in the last of the four memoirs, MAYBE, whose title carries the meaning of the whole. Shortly after MAYBE was published and not long before she died, Lilly remarked to a friend that she'd discovered a new form for herself in writing, a form that was neither fiction nor memory but a combination of both, which is probably what most recollection is. "I've been overpraised for the books," she said, "I'll be attacked too hard to make up for it - but maybe one day they'll be read for what they are."

Despite almost losing sight with glaucoma and embedding pacemakers and relying on wheelchairs, she never gave up writing until her last moment.

"Lillian went to the Vineyard at the beginning of the summer and waited for me there. The galleys were held up an extra few days at the publisher's, too late to bring them for her birthday, and I called to tell her so.

"You can't be late," Lilly said.

I told her it was only a matter of days.

"You don't understand," she said, "I want to work, I want to work, I want to work...""
- from "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman" written by Peter Feibleman

Peter could pick up the galleys in time to catch an earlier flight but she died of cardiac arrest on June 30th 1984 before his arrival.

The nurse said "she took one of my hands and held it...so affectionate, you know - and then she began to squeeze my hand very hard - very, very hard - and she said: 'I think you and I are going to get along just fine,' Then she died."

Lillian was a writer until her last moment. I believe she did break "the worst case of writer's block."

Here's some part of graveside eulogy by John Hersey in "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman."

 "Her inmost fire, though, was not sensual. It was in the mind. It was a rage of the mind against the unfairness of death. In everything she wrote, and in her daily life, she fought against slander, greed, hypocrisy, cruelty and everything shabby and second-rate and dangerous in those in power. She was very, very angry at death - and not just at the end. Death became her enemy years ago, when Hammett died, and this enemy made her even more vibrant and alive.

What could calm this anger? Only the sea, and money, and love. Anyone who gave her the slightest flicker of love got in return a radiance of laughter and fun that was unbelievably enjoyable; this was the bright other face of the anger.

Dear Lillian, you are a finished woman, now. I mean "finished" in its better sense. You shone with a high finish of integrity, decency, uprightness. You have given us this anger to remember and to use in a bad world. We thank you, we honor you, and we all say good-bye to you now with a love that should calm that anger of yours forever."