I Remember Nothing [26]
T.L. stands for Trade Last, and here’s how it works: you call someone up and tell her you have a T.L. for her. This means you’ve heard a compliment about her—and you will repeat it—but only if she first tells you a compliment someone has said about you. In other words, you will pass along a compliment, but only if you trade it last.
This, needless to say, is a strange, ungenerous, and seriously narcissistic way to tell someone a nice thing that has been said about them.
“Miss Ephron,” she would say when she called, “it’s Miss Hellman. I have a T.L. for you.”
The first few times this happened, I was happy to play—the air was full of nice things about Lillian. She was the girl of the year. But as time passed, the calls became practically nightmarish. Everything was starting to catch up with her. She’d written another book, Scoundrel Time, a self-aggrandizing work about her decision not to testify before HUAC, and followed it with her somewhat problematical decision to pose for a Blackglama mink ad. People were talking about her, but not in any way that gave me something to trade. Not that I was hearing much of it—I was living in Washington, and people in Washington don’t talk about anyone who doesn’t live in Washington, and that’s the truth.
But there she was, on the other end of phone, waiting for me to come up with my end of the T.L. My brain would desperately race trying to think of something I could say, anything. I had to be careful, because I didn’t want to get caught in a lie. And if I made up a story, I had to be sure I was quoting a man, because despite her warmth to me, Lillian didn’t care about nice things women said about her. And I couldn’t say, “I’m in Washington, no one here is talking about you.” So I would eventually make something up, usually about how much my husband adored her (which was true). But it never really satisfied her. Because what Lillian really wanted to hear, T.L.-wise, was that I’d just spent the evening with someone like Robert Redford (to pick an imaginary episode out of the air) and that he’d confessed that he desperately wanted to sleep with her.
When my marriage ended and I moved back to New York, Lillian was shocked. She couldn’t imagine why I’d left him. She called and asked me to reconsider. She said I ought to forgive him.
Neither my husband nor I had the remotest interest in our getting back together, but Lillian was determined, and she kept pressing me. Can’t you forgive him? I took the moment to slip out of her life.
I told myself that I could never have gone on with the friendship because of the way Lillian had reacted to the divorce.
Then, about a year later, a woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a book about her life as a spy before World War II, and it became clear that Hellman had stolen her story. There was no Julia, and Lillian had never saved Europe with her little fur hat.
I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because Lillian had turned out to be a pathological liar.
Then Lillian sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar.
And I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because I could never respect someone who had turned against the First Amendment.
I actually did. I actually told myself that.
But the truth is that any excuse will do when this sort of romance comes to an end. The details are just details. And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends.
If the younger woman is a writer, she eventually writes something about the older woman.
And then years pass.
And she herself gets older.
And there are moments when she would like to apologize—at least for the way it ended.
And this may be one of them.
My Life as a Meat Loaf
A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my