| Lillian Hellman |
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EARLY LIFE Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana into a Jewish family. During most of her childhood she spent half of each year in New Orleans, in a boarding home run by her aunts, and half in New York City . WRITING Hellman's most famous plays include '' The Children's Hour '' ( 1934 ), '' The Little Foxes '' ( 1939 ) and '' Toys In The Attic '' ( 1959 ), in which she displayed a witty and passionate style. The Oscar -winning film '' Julia '' was claimed to be based on the friendship between Hellman and the title character. Upon the film's release, in 1977 , New York psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner claimed that she was "Julia" and that she had never known Hellman. Hellman replied that the person upon whom the character was based was not Gardiner. However, the fact that Hellman and Gardiner had the same lawyer ( Wolf Schwabacher ), that the lawyer had been privy to Gardiner's memoirs, and that the events in the film conform to those in the memoirs, have led some to conclude that they had been appropriated by Hellman without attribution to Gardiner. Hellman was fond of including younger characters in her plays. In '' The Children's Hour '' (1934), the play takes place in a children's school and the antagonist of the play, Mary, is a young girl. In '' The Little Foxes '' (1939), an important sub-plot takes place between the potential marriage of the youngest characters in the play, Leo and Alexandra, another example of Hellman's proclivity towards including children. BLACKLIST AND AFTERMATH Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 . At the time, HUAC was well aware that Hellman's longtime lover Dashiell Hammett had been a Communist Party member. Asked to name names of acquaintances with Communist affiliations, Hellman instead delivered a prepared statement, which read in part: As a result, Hellman was Blacklisted by the Hollywood Movie Studios for many years. Prior to the war, as a member of the League Of American Writers with Hammett, she had served on its ''Keep America Out of War Committee'' during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact .Franklin Folsom, ''Days of Anger, Days of Hope'', University Press Of Colorado , 1994, ISBN 0870813323 In ''Two Invented Lives: Hellman and Hammett'', author Joan Mellen noted that while Hellman had excoriated anti-Communist liberals such as against Hellman's charges.Wright, William, ''Stage View'', New York Times article, November 3, 1996Rollyson, Carl E., ''Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy'', New York: St. Martin’s Press (1988) ISBN 0312000499 Hellman had shaded the truth on some accounts of her life, including the assertion that she knew nothing about the Moscow Trials in which Stalin had purged the Soviet Communist Party of Part members who were then liquidated.Lamont, Corliss, Hellman, Lillian, et al., ''An Open Letter to American Liberals'', Soviet Russia Today, March 1937 issue Hellman had actually signed petitions (''An Open Letter to American Liberals'') applauding the guilty verdict and encouraged others not to cooperate with John Dewey's committee that sought to establish the truth behind Stalin's show trials. The letter denounced the "fantastic falsehood that the USSR and totalitarian states are basically alike." Hellman had also opposed the granting of political asylum to Leon Trotsky by the United States. Trotsky was the former Soviet leader and Communist who became Stalin's nemesis in exile (and eventual victim of assassination), after the Soviet Union instructed the U.S. Communist Party to oppose just such a move. As late as 1969, according to Mellen, she told Dorothea Strauss that her husband was a 'malefactor' because he had published the work of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn . Mellen quotes her as saying "If you knew what I know about American prisons, you would be a Stalinist, too." Mellen continues, "American justice allowed her now to maintain good faith with the tyrant who had, despite his methods, industrialized the 'first socialist state.'" Hellman's feud with Mary McCarthy formed the basis for the play ''Imaginary Friends'' by Nora Ephron . McCarthy famously said of Hellman on '' The Dick Cavett Show '' that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman replied by filing a US$2,500,000 Slander suit against McCarthy. McCarthy in turn produced evidence that Hellman had shaded the truth on some accounts of her life, including some of the information that later appeared in Mellen's book. Hellman died at age 79 from natural causes while litigation was still ongoing, and the suit was dropped by Hellman's Executors . Hellman is also a main character in the play "Cakewalk" by Peter Feibleman , which is about Hellman's relationship with a younger novelist. Hellman did in fact have a long relationship with Feibleman, and the other main character in the play is somewhat based on him. LIST OF WORKS
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