A Difficult Woman (6 page)

New York City proved to be something of a haven for such a young girl. The family settled into a comfortable apartment at 330 West 95th Street. Lillian used the phrase “shabby-genteel” to describe the apartment; census records reveal it to have been solidly middle-class. The neighbors included a dermatologist, an interior designer, a musical director, and an art dealer, occupations that measured well against that of Lillian's father, who earned his living as a traveling salesman with a line of clothing. The family employed a daily housekeeper and, often, a cook. Both parents had a lively interest in all things literary and especially in the theater. They attended regularly, and afterward revisited the plays and actors' performances in the presence of their daughter. Though Lillian attended public schools, she took dancing and music lessons, and, as a teenager, had more freedom to explore the city than most of her peers.

Lillian adored her father, a genial host, a great entertainer, a man of quick wit and charming style. She admired his vitality and resolution, and she forgave him, perhaps even came to admire, his persistent attractions to other women. For Max was a philanderer who did not hide his affairs from his wife and family. True to southern tradition, Lillian's mother ignored her husband's long absences and his unfaithful ways. The small Lillian adapted to this behavior reluctantly, following the precepts of her beloved nurse Sophronia not to go through life making trouble for people.
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Hellman remembers her mother as “small, delicately made, and charming” but also as flighty, timid, and impractical.
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As the child turned into a young woman, she grew to despise her mother's acquiescence, only later coming to see it as a courageous and brave response to her father's misbehavior.

The models presented by her relatives offered a different perspective on life. Lillian's Newhouse grandmother had moved to New York around 1907, settling into a life of ostentatious wealth in a Park Avenue apartment where she lived with two unmarried daughters and a large staff of servants. Lillian remembered the “lovely oval rooms filled with the upper
middle-class trappings that never managed to be truly stylish.”
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She recalled the glamorous parties that she watched as a peeping child from the servants' hall. Lillian and her mother visited often, but she experienced these visits in sharp contrast to her own life, which seemed shabby by comparison. From the discomfort she felt in the presence of her forceful grandmother and from the extended family's never-ending discussions of money and finances, she perceived her own family as economically marginal. The dissonance produced in her an unquenchable anger and at the same time “a wild extravagance mixed with respect for money and those who have it.”
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Did consciousness of class enter her picture of the world as a result of the family dynamics? By her own account, Lillian claims to have learned in her teenage years to despise those who sought only wealth and power. She tells us that she did not want either money, or the lack of it, to control her own life. And yet her sense of injury is palpable: she felt cheated of the wealth that was her mother's due and that she always believed was rightfully hers. The perceived injustice of it all fed a sense of entitlement that led her then and after to claim (even aggressively demand) what she believed to be hers, inside and outside the family. Unwittingly she inherited the pattern her grandmother modeled. She expected and wanted the creature comforts of wealth. One day she might inherit some of them. Until then, she would carve out her own path, earn economic success by her own efforts, or gravitate toward the rich, benefiting from their largesse. Insecure about her place in the world, the teenaged Lillian became impatient, bad-tempered, sharp-tongued, and rebellious. Forever after, even when she became well off, she imagined herself as poor, feared losing her money, and insisted on the comforts that wealth could bring.

Marks of identity mattered in perverse ways in the New York City to which Lillian moved as a child, for once again she was outside. Hers was not the culture of recently arrived Yiddish-speaking immigrants. She experienced neither the poverty of the Lower East Side nor the community spirit of the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. She did not belong to the immigrant community of legend where parents sacrificed to provide education for children who expected to climb the ladder of social mobility. But neither did she belong among the wealthy German Jews whom the East Siders contemptuously labeled “Jeckes”—for jacketed, prosperous Jews.

At thirteen, she entered Wadleigh High School for Girls. Founded in
1903, Wadleigh was the first college-preparatory public high school for girls in a city where there were already several elite public boys' schools meant to train the children of immigrants for college. By the time Lillian enrolled in 1918, Wadleigh boasted nearly three thousand smart female students from all over the city. Lillian was an indifferent scholar in a rather large class of bright schoolmates, and she remembered these years as unhappy. Still, when she graduated in 1922 at the age of seventeen, she had already begun her career as a writer: she wrote a weekly gossip column for the school newspaper entitled “It Seems to Me, Jr.,” and served as an editor of the senior yearbook. In her last year of school she kept a diary that at first she thought of as private, but which she then allowed her boyfriend to read. She recognized, as she did so, that the meaning of what she wrote would change when her words became public.
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This early effort to grapple with whether “truth” would flow from her pen would remain with her for the rest of her life.

A seventeen-year-old bright female high school graduate from a middle-class family in 1922 might reasonably expect to choose college as an option. Fewer than 10 percent of the young women in her age cohort would make this choice, but Lillian had little doubt about it. She wanted to go to Smith College—a destination favored by bright northern young women. Her mother proposed her own alma mater, Sophie New-comb, which didn't suit Lillian's taste for clever and well-read schoolmates. They compromised on Goucher College in Baltimore. Goucher was southern enough for her mother and committed to serious education for women. Lillian applied and was accepted. In the end she enrolled in none of these, telling everyone that her mother was ill and would need her at home. The likelihood is that financial constraints, rather than loyalty to her mother, determined the choice. At any rate, when the fall came, she registered at Washington Square College of New York University.

The college was then a small affair, less than a decade old, and housing a few hundred undergraduate students. Though it was located in the heart of Greenwich Village, its students mingled neither with the literati who frequented the neighborhood nor with the local Italian families. There she encountered some great minds whose efforts to discipline her reading she resisted. College seemed to her to serve no useful purpose. Restless and bored, she quit after two years. An extended trip with her mother through the Midwest and the South followed. In the fall of 1924,
just nineteen, she took a job in the publishing industry as a manuscript reader.

This time she chose well. Boni and Liveright, the firm for which she went to work, was a vibrant and exciting young publishing house that avidly represented itself as the perfect outlet for a city of speakeasies, automobiles, and creative intellectual ferment. Its head, Horace Live-right, founder of the Modern Library—which had introduced Americans to inexpensive editions of great European authors—remained committed to publishing new fiction in uncensored form. Liveright attracted to his lists such authors as Hemingway, Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot. And he published the first novels of William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Bertrand Russell, and S. J. Perelman. If Lillian did not work directly with these authors or on their manuscripts, she found herself in a world exactly suited to her ambitions and her tastes and surrounded by creative and talented writers and cultural pundits, young and old. There she encountered Eastern European Jews who aspired to take their places in the thriving cultural communities of the twenties. This was a world where talent and intellect mattered more than money or religion or family background.

The job introduced Lillian to a world that she would thereafter make her home. At Boni and Liveright, she revealed the sharp critical skills honed by many years of reading in the fig tree, making good use of her quick wit and acerbic tongue. Her employers appreciated the speed with which she read and judged manuscripts and deplored the sloppiness and lack of discipline with which she approached her work. By Lillian's account at least, they valued most her standing as a representative of a younger, freer generation of women—the flapper generation—whose personal style they desperately tried to understand. Among the perquisites of the job were endless parties and gatherings to honor one book and one writer or another. Shy though she was at the time, Lillian did well at these, drinking in a time of prohibition, dressing in the short skirts and clinging fabrics that signified greater personal freedom for women, dancing and flirting in ways that violated contemporary rules about exhibiting sexual availability. No longer isolated, she found a community of people like her, eager to express themselves as consumers, happily declaring their creative ambition, and unafraid to live by their own standards. Disillusionment might follow, but in the middle of the prosperous and free-spirited 1920s, surrounded by the cultural ferment of New York, Lillian found a niche.

Just a year into the job at Boni and Liveright, Lillian met Arthur Kober, whom she married a few months later. Five years older than Lillian and the son of Austro-Hungarian immigrants, Kober grew up in the working-class Bronx where he spent his youth fending off the blows of Italian and Irish immigrant children and developing the sardonic humor of the New York Jew. His family background, so different in class and culture from Lillian's, must have been one source of his appeal to her. Marrying into New York's Jewish immigrant community would provide her the insider place that she lacked. And Kober had the advantage as well of being part of the creative cultural community in which she continued to see herself.

By 1925, working as a theatrical press agent and the author of several
New Yorker
short stories, Kober already knew he wanted to be a playwright. He worked in a heavy Yiddish idiom, using Jewish life in the Bronx as his vehicle for an affectionate humor. And he palled around with a young group of creative entertainers who were yet to make their names. Among them were Lee and Ira Gershwin, Laura and S. J Perelman, Herman Shumlin, Nathanael West, and Louis Kronenberger. These would become Lillian's lifelong friends. Along with them and her husband, she moved into the heart of the entertainment community, adopting the raucous and argumentative style that would come to characterize New York Jews. As she melded into the smart, creative, and culturally ambitious circles that now surrounded her, Lillian found an exciting new world of literary and theatrical arts.

She also found an identity. If she grew up on the edges, on the borders of north and south, of Jew and non-Jew, of rich and not so rich, of love and anger, she found a place that transcended all these borders. Entering adulthood in the twenties, she could celebrate her generation, indulge her sexual passions, associate with a community of creative artists, and strive for her own economic independence in ways unthinkable to her mother's generation. Her sense of what it meant to be an American reflected values gathered from her childhood and interpreted in the light of the experiences of her young womanhood. Nurtured in Sophronia's lessons of honesty, integrity, justice, and decency, she would shape these concepts to her own experience, reacting with anger and frustration when they failed to resonate with others. To her, these concepts remained the heart and soul of American culture and of the life she would construct for herself.

Just a year into the job, Lillian met Arthur Kober. (Photofest)