Imaginary Friends

Acclaim for Nora Ephron’s
IMAGINARY FRIENDS

NORA EPHRON
IMAGINARY FRIENDS

Nora Ephron is the author of
Crazy Salad, Heartburn, Wallflower at the Orgy
, and
Scribble Scribble
. She has received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for
When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood
, and
Sleepless in Seattle
, which she also directed. She lives in New York City with her husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi.

Also by
Nora Ephron

FICTION
Heartburn

ESSAYS
Wallflower at the Orgy
Crazy Salad
Scribble Scribble
Nora Ephron Collected

SCREENPLAYS
Silkwood
(with Alice Arlen)
Heartburn
Cookie
(with Alice Arlen)
When Harry Met Sally
My Blue Heaven
This Is My Life
(with Delia Ephron)
Sleepless in Seattle
(with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch)
Mixed Nuts
(with Delia Ephron)
Michael
(with Jim Quinlan, Pete Dexter, and Delia Ephron)
You’ve Got Mail
(with Delia Ephron)
Hanging Up
(with Delia Ephron)

for Nick

On a January night in 1980, Lillian Hellman was in bed, watching
The Dick Cavett Show
, when Mary McCarthy hurled her famously vicious remark about Hellman into the ether. “Are there any writers you think are overrated?” Cavett asked. McCarthy replied: “The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.…” “What is so dishonest about her?” Cavett asked. “Everything,” McCarthy said. “But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

That remark, and what followed—a $2.25 million lawsuit Hellman filed against McCarthy—brought to a head almost forty-five years of skirmishing between the two women. Some of it is easy to document because it was in print. Mary, writing in
Partisan Review
in 1946, attacked Lillian’s work. Lillian responded in a
Paris Review
interview in 1964. Mary struck again in a
People
magazine interview in 1979. And so forth. But where and exactly how the enmity began is maddeningly elusive. Did the two women meet for the first time at a dinner party in 1936? Perhaps. Did they argue at that dinner about the Spanish civil war and the incredibly brave civil war martyr Andres Nin? Mary McCarthy argued with someone at a dinner party about the Spanish civil war and Andres Nin, because she wrote a short story about a dinner party where a young woman remarkably like Mary McCarthy has an argument with someone about the
Spanish civil war and Andres Nin. Was that someone Lillian Hellman? Or did McCarthy confuse Hellman with another Stalinist, named Leane Zugsmith?

Did their enmity begin not because of politics but for more personal reasons? Perhaps. For it seems that one night in 1936, while Mary McCarthy was living with
Partisan Review
editor Philip Rahv, Lillian Hellman met Rahv and attempted to seduce him. When he returned to the apartment he was sharing with McCarthy, he claimed he hadn’t actually slept with Hellman because he didn’t find her attractive. The incident, McCarthy told one of her biographers, was the only real fight of her relationship with Rahv. Was Rahv telling the truth? McCarthy believed him. Whether she was right to (do you?) is another mystery.

The two women clearly and absolutely met at Sarah Lawrence College in 1948, and they most definitely had a fight there. Was the fight about the incredibly brave Andres Nin, as McCarthy claimed? Did McCarthy spend her life picking fights about the incredibly brave Andres Nin? Did she confuse the fight she’d had at the dinner party years earlier with the fight they had at Sarah Lawrence? There’s no way to know. Years later, when Mary’s biographers went to poet Stephen Spender—who was supposedly there—for the details, he turned out to be entirely confused about the episode. He thought it had taken place at his home. It had actually taken place at the home of Harold Taylor, then president of Sarah Lawrence—and Spender hadn’t been there at all. It seems, in fact, that there were not one but two fights that day: one at Taylor’s, and one later, at Spender’s. Or were there?

I began thinking about writing something about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy a few years ago, when I read two biographies of McCarthy,
Writing Dangerously
by Carol Bright-man, and
Seeing Mary Plain
by Frances Kiernan. I’d never met McCarthy, but I’d known Lillian Hellman. I met her when I was
a journalist, and I have to say that for several years I was under her spell. Lillian was fun, a wonderful hostess, cook, correspondent, and storyteller. It was quite a while before I began to suspect that the fabulous stories she entertained her friends with were, to be polite about it, stories. When she sued McCarthy years afterward, I wasn’t surprised. She was sick by then, and legally blind. And her anger—the anger that was her favorite accessory—had turned wearisome, even to those who were loyal to her.

When I read the biographies of McCarthy, it crossed my mind that there might be something to write about McCarthy and Hellman and their collision. At first I thought of some sort of high-minded television series—six or seven parts, say—that told the story of their parallel, albeit dissimilar, lives. Mary, of course, was an orphan, Catholic, abused. Lillian was an only child, Jewish, spoiled. Mary was beautiful. Lillian was not. Mary became an intellectual and a star in a world that had a pathological distrust not just of commercial success but also of stars. Lillian was the epitome of the commercial playwright, rich and famous. Mary was a Trotskyite, Lillian a Stalinist. (Lillian was what’s known as an unreconstructed Stalinist. As she lay dying, someone I know said to her, “Well, Lillian, what do you think of Joe Stalin now?” She replied, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”) Perhaps most crucial, Mary was a critic, a great critic. Lillian was not a great playwright, but she was a great dramatist. It seemed so extraordinary that these two women—who’d written so much, who’d led such rich and complicated lives, who’d almost never been in the same room, who truly couldn’t stand each other—had ended up, in some terrible way, linked forever.

But every time I thought about this television series—now called something fabulously pretentious (in my imagination), like “Two American Women”—I became tired. The words “Who can I get to write it?” kept crossing my mind. The last
thing I wanted to work on was a long project that would end up seeming like docudrama. And I’d seen quite a lot of dramatizations of Lillian’s life, onstage and in film. She’d been played by Jane Fonda, Elaine Stritch, Linda Lavin, Zoe Caldwell, and Judy Davis. But none of it had really caught Lillian, the Lillian I knew, anyway; and all of it seemed so constricted, even by the loose rules of biography.

And what was to be done about “the facts”—the poor, distressed facts of these women’s lives? In her autobiographical writing, McCarthy was painfully honest. But what, for example, had actually gone on during McCarthy’s terrible marriage to Edmund Wilson? McCarthy spent her life coming up with a succession of excuses for why she married him in the first place, none of them remotely satisfying, apparently even to her. The divorce depositions of McCarthy and Wilson completely contradict each other. Lillian, on the other hand, had no interest whatsoever in the truth; her attitude toward it is probably best summed up by one of her characters in
The Little Foxes
, who says: “God forgives those who invent what they need.” The story of Julia in
Pentimento
, which became the basis of a critically acclaimed movie, was certainly a total invention. And the Julia effect spilled over into a great deal of Lillian’s autobiography—every bit of it became suspect. As Gore Vidal famously said of Hellman and Dashiell Hammett: “Did anyone ever see them together?”

And then one day I was talking to someone about Hellman and McCarthy, and he said, “Could it be a play?” A play? I’d never written a play. I’d always wanted to write one; I’d been an avid theatergoer all my life. I’d always hoped that something would cross my brain that was a play, but what was a play? If a play was six people trapped for arbitrary reasons in a summer house with a lot of French doors, I was out of luck. Years ago I’d attended a program at the Actors Studio that was meant to encourage playwriting. It was interesting, actually: every week
someone would turn up with a play he’d written, actors would perform it, usually at a table read, and then the people in the audience—most of them writers—would attack it. The writer Harold Brodkey was part of the group, and no matter what the play’s subject was, he usually accused the playwright of being anti-Semitic. This process did not seem to me to encourage play-writing, although for a while I thought about writing a play that took place at a table read at the Actors Studio and that included a character not unlike Harold Brodkey. In any case, after a while I stopped going to the Actors Studio and resigned myself to the possibility that my relationship with the theater would always and forever be as a member of the audience.

But Lillian and Mary, a play? A cartoon lightbulb lit up in my head. Of course: a play. I knew where it took place, and I even knew the first line. I could imagine McCarthy and Hellman—not necessarily as friends but at least in conversation. I could write an entire scene about what happened at Sarah Lawrence, and turn it into a scene about how impossible it was to know what happened at Sarah Lawrence. I could write about a subject that has interested me since my days as a magazine journalist: women and what they do to each other. I could write about McCarthy’s love of the truth—which she turned into a religion—and about Hellman’s way with a story, which she turned into a pathology. I could do it, I hoped, without taking sides. (How could you take sides, after all? They were both wrong. And, at the same time, they were both right.) And I could perhaps end up with something that was not the truth, and not the story, but something else. To begin with, a play.

Imaginary Friends
was first produced at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where it opened on September 29, 2002. The production then moved to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, where it was presented by USA Ostar Theatricals and opened on December 12, 2002, with the following cast: