I Remember Nothing [24]
I have no excuse for my infatuation with this story. I was not stupid, and I was not particularly young, both of which might be exculpatory. Like many people who read Pentimento, it never crossed my mind that the stories in it were fiction, and the dialogue an inadvertent parody of Hammett’s tough-guy style. I thought it was divine. I immediately called The New York Times Book Review and asked if I could interview Hellman on the occasion of Pentimento’s publication. They said yes.
Hellman was already on her way to her remarkable third act. She’d published An Unfinished Woman, a memoir, which had been a best seller and National Book Award winner, and now with Pentimento she was on the verge of an even bigger best seller. She turned up on talk shows and charmed the hosts as she puffed on her cigarettes and blew smoke. With her two successful books, she’d eradicated the memory of her last few plays, which had been failures. Eventually the most famous story from Pentimento, “Julia,” was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, the brave anti-Nazi spy whom Hellman claimed she’d smuggled $50,000 to in Germany in 1939, in a fur hat. The end of Hellman’s life was a train wreck, but that came later. I wrote a play about it, but that came even later.
Lillian was sixty-eight when I met her, and by any standard, even of the times, she looked at least ten years older. She had never been a beauty, but once she’d been young; now she was wrinkled and close to blind. She had a whiskey voice. She used a cigarette holder and one of those ashtrays that look like beanbags, with a little metal contraption in the middle for snuffing out the ash. Because she could barely see, the question of whether the perilously ever-lengthening ash would ever make it to the ashtray without landing in her lap and setting her on fire provided added suspense to every minute spent with her.
But in some strange way that you will have to take my word for, she was enormously attractive—vibrant, flirtatious, and intimate.
I went to see her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which sat on a rocky beach near Chilmark. The interview is an embarrassment. I did not ask a tough question, and, by the way, I didn’t have one. I was besotted. She was the woman who had said to the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s patterns.” She had loved the toughest guy there was, and although he had been drunk for almost their entire time together, he loved her back. Now it turned out she had practically stopped Hitler.
In the afternoon after our first interview, I went for a walk down to Lillian’s beach. I’d been there no more than a few minutes when a man turned up. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was older, gray-haired, fleshy. He asked if I was staying with Lillian. I immediately became nervous. I stood up and made some sort of excuse and walked as quickly as I could over the rocks and back to the house. Lillian was sitting out on the patio in a muumuu.
“How was the beach?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Was anyone else there?”
“A man,” I said.
“Older?” she said. “Fat?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That does it,” she said.
She stood up and took off toward the beach.
A few minutes later she came back. The intruder had vanished. She was in a rage. She was apparently in an ongoing war with the man. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stay off her beach. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stop trying to have conversations with her friends. She would tell him again, if he ever dared to come around and she caught him lurking there. She was furious that he’d disappeared before she’d had the chance to order him away. I couldn’t believe it. She was dying for a fight.