Lillian and Dash (3 page)

Hammett, who retained a natural drawl, provided the baritone voice here, his only line in the scene: “ ‘But I may not live to see you again, Miss Amanda.’ ”

Now Lilly really laid it on—the breath, the accent, the flutter: “ ‘Then, my poor dear boy, I’d suggest you kill as many of those bad old Yankees as you possibly can before you die because you’ll never get to fuck little ole me as long as you live.’ ” Lilly fanned her face furiously at the punch line. Hammett slapped the table and guffawed every time.

The bitter punch line pretty much revealed Lilly’s true attitude about love, an attitude that was formed in her own Southern childhood.

Isaac Marx fled Germany in 1844, nearly twenty years before the American Civil War, and landed quite by chance in the unlikely town of Demopolis, Alabama, a German-Jewish peddler in a most bizarre American setting. Quite remarkably, he became the town’s richest citizen. His sons eventually owned the Demopolis bank. After Reconstruction the Marx family became a formidable Alabama dynasty. Isaac’s daughter Sophie married a respectable man named Newhouse, primarily because this is what an Isaac Marx daughter
was supposed to do. Marrying for love in those circumstances was a preposterous, naive impulse. But for some inexplicable reason Sophie’s own daughter—Lillian’s mother, Julia Newhouse—yielded to that mad impulse.

Not only was Max Hellman a mere New Orleans shoe salesman, he was a Jew of a class now intolerable to the newly patrician Alabama family that had put Isaac’s peddler years so far behind them they had ceased to exist. The worst offender was Sophie, Lillian’s grandmother, who after her daughter Julia’s marriage to Max Hellman never ceased disparaging him in Julia’s and Lillian’s presence. The black-sheep Hellmans along with their daughter were dismissed, and not in any sweet Southern style either, but driven away harshly and with malice. Lillian’s portrayal of the Hubbard family in two of her most successful plays,
The Little Foxes
and
Another Part of the Forest
, historical family dramas set in the South, was her retribution. Lilly called them angry comedies.

The families in these plays are ruled by raw ambition, greed, jealousy, and deceit, all against an absurdly romantic background of the lost aristocratic dream of the Confederacy. This was the world and a social value system Lillian took in at the dinner table as the girl who grew up with the Newhouses, né Marxes, in Demopolis.

Lillian especially loved Max’s sisters, Jenny and Hannah Hellman, who ran the New Orleans boardinghouse where the family lived for long periods of time when Max’s business wasn’t going well and where Lilly learned throughout her
girlhood how the world actually worked for most people. From her mother she got strength of character and independence; from her father even more strength of character, brains, and wit. By all accounts Lillian loved her shoe salesman father enormously, even though she inherited his looks and not those of her exquisite mother. And from her time with the Marx family she derived an absolute disgust of Southern hypocrisy.

In all of Hellman’s plays love comes at a terrible cost. It is most often a form of cruelty, at best a phantom never fully seen and never embraced as anything real or viable. Young lovers may see it vaguely, but when they reach for it they come away with nothing. Disappointment is the important life lesson love has to teach the young in Hellman.

I
COULDN
’
T BELIEVE
he’d never had French toast for breakfast, but he hadn’t. My Aunt Jenny made the best French toast in the world when I was a girl and let me in on the secret, a pinch of cinnamon in the batter and sweet butter well browned in a cast-iron pan. Even though I didn’t have the stale bread, I made French toast for him one morning and he loved it. And that would have been what the morning was remembered for if he hadn’t looked up from his book and said, “Did you know the word
Lesbian
had nothing to do with sexual panky-hanky until only about a hundred years ago?”

He thought stupidities like
panky-hanky
were funny, but no, I didn’t know that. “So what did it mean?”

“Anything pertaining to the Isle of Lesbos, mostly the wine.”

Hammett often began important talks with “Did you know that …” This was to be an important talk.

Who but Hammett would have come across and then spent days reading up on the Drumsheugh trial, a now-forgotten but way-back-when notorious court case that took place in Edinburgh more than two hundred years ago? I was at the stove and did not turn around. It seemed to him that Drumsheugh might be just the subject I was looking for to turn into a drama.

“Gumshoe, you say?”

“Yep, Drumsheugh. It’ll take you exactly where you want to go.”

In a fashionable quarter of Edinburgh, if there could be imagined such a place, two young women—Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods—opened a small, selective school for teenage girls of the town’s elite families, the Drumsheugh Gardens School. The new school had just begun to establish itself as the proper place for a proper education in proper Scotland when one fine day, quite unannounced, carriages began arriving at the door with orders to take the girls away. To take them home immediately and without any explanation to the flabbergasted Mistresses Pirie and Woods.

What had happened, in Hammett’s retelling, was this: One of the students, a particularly unhappy girl, told her influential grandmother, Dame Cumming Gordon, of seeing the two headmistresses engaging in acts of sexual intimacy in their bedroom, not once but repeatedly. Dame Cumming Gordon contacted other parents immediately. Word spread like a virus or as only a vicious sexual rumor can. In two days’ time the two young women were ruined professionally and personally. Their only public recourse was to sue Dame Cumming Gordon for defamation of character. The long trial, whose testimony was reported in newspapers throughout the British Isles and was as lurid and juicy as any scandalmonger could possibly have hoped, was decided in Dame Cumming Gordon’s favor by a judicial vote of four to three. That wasn’t the end of it.

The mistresses appealed the verdict and after a second extended trial won a reversal, forcing Dame Cumming Gordon to pursue the case all the way to the House of Lords, where in 1819, ten years after the alleged misconduct—it was officially termed “illicit carnal knowledge”—the court finally ruled in favor of Miss Pirie and Miss Woods. They were awarded their ten-thousand-pound claim, which yielded them each about one thousand pounds after legal costs. Now the two were ruined financially as well as professionally. There’s no doubt that they loved one another, whether or not they actually made love. The two separated. Each then sought and achieved anonymity in her own fashion.

“What happened to the young women,” Hammett said, “is now called a Scotch verdict. You win but you lose.”

“Like Arbuckle,” I said.

“Different case of Scotch.”

Hammett didn’t do any more selling. He didn’t have to. The Drumsheugh case really did have everything I was looking for. Forbidden sex, or at least the public threat of it to polite society, class conflict, the power of a childish lie—if it was a lie—people’s more-than-willing complicity in the ruin of others. The heart of the matter offered an exploration of love and attraction. Can a really deep friendship, a love in fact, always stay within the bounds society has established? And if it doesn’t? What does that mean? I could handle all that dramatically and still leave the question—Did they or didn’t they?—unresolved. Of course I’d want to make the story contemporary, move it to Boston or Philadelphia, but Jesus, what a temptation to put it in Demopolis, Alabama, and make Dame Gordon my Grandma Sophie.

Hammett’s last word on the subject that morning was to the effect that even when they’re queers, women get screwed. Weren’t the British public schools always rife with homosexual tutors, almost proudly so? Some repressed faggot canes a kid to within an inch of his life and Eton has once again upheld the high standards on which the Empire was built, but let two women slip out of their panties in the dormitories and all hell breaks loose.

If
they slipped out of their panties, I corrected.

I immediately began outlining the play, first in my head and then on paper. When Hammett saw the first decent draft of
The Children’s Hour
five weeks later, he said it was worse than bad because it was half good. I cried and made the mistake of letting him see me do it.

L
ILLIAN, THANK
G
OD
, wasn’t at all like me in that respect. She never said,
Dash, you’re really writing shit
. We both knew I was writing shit when I was writing at all. Studio work those days meant presenting story ideas, stuff I didn’t even have to put on paper. I could walk into a story conference cold and come up with at least six impressive—not necessarily good—ideas right on the spot. That was my true Hollywood talent and it paid all the bills and more so but didn’t impress her in the least. Lilly loved me most when I would go away for a week and come back with pages for her to read. That hadn’t happened for a while.

One night she hid behind her newspaper, a sure sign something was up. She made
mmm
sounds,
tsk-tsks
I was meant to respond to. I refused to take the bait, so she was forced to say, “Speaking of Arbuckle, it says here they’re looking back into the trial transcripts to see if maybe there’s a way to get his kids some money. Civil suit against the prosecutor. Didn’t you work on that case?”

“Nothing big. I just went around collecting affidavits for the defense. I did actually speak with Arbuckle a couple of times. I liked him. I liked him a great deal, as a matter of fact. Can’t think of anyone in Hollywood who ever got screwed worse. But I’m not going to write about it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Lillian put down the paper. “You’ve got notes on the case. I’ve seen them, Dash. Isn’t it time to set things right?”

Actually it wasn’t time to set things right, not even close to time. In fact, it might never be time because in the world there was no “setting things right.” The Hays Office still called the tune as to what could and could not be produced in Hollywood, and the Arbuckle case all but created the Hays Office, made the Legion of Decency crowd seem legit. Why take them on if you didn’t have to?

Truth is, no one in movies was larger or funnier than Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in ’27. Hollywood’s first million-dollar-a-year star. I was back working for Pinkerton that year. The fat man apparently forced himself upon one Virginia Rappe in room 1220 of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, which was, given the times, no irreparable indiscretion. Problem was that the following day, or maybe the day after, I don’t recall, Virginia Rappe died in the hospital of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder.

Arbuckle was indicted first for murder, a charge which was then brought down to manslaughter. He was tried three times—two mistrials and finally an acquittal. But he was
really convicted in the papers by the publisher, William Randolph Hearst, who kept a national frenzy alive with a flow of lurid details for a year, almost none of which were true. Rumor and innuendo not only sold newspapers but ultimately, if repeated and exaggerated, became accepted as truth because most people wanted it to be the truth. So now, even all these years later, people believe Fatty Arbuckle killed Virginia Rappe by cramming a Coca-Cola bottle up her vagina and then crushing her with his three-hundred-pound corpus. That did not happen. But rumor is a tar baby; and the uglier the rumors are, the longer they survive. The big lie always sold papers.

Fatty Arbuckle’s sexual “liaison” with Virginia Rappe was tawdry but financially consensual. Miss Rappe was in terrible health when she made her way up that elevator to room 1220. Doctors I interviewed confirmed that she’d had a very recent abortion and a fairly long history of bladder problems. Any form of sexual activity, they swore in their affidavits, could easily have induced the hemorrhaging that caused her death.

The only potential defense witness on Rappe’s behalf was her friend Bambina Delmont, a woman with a long record of racketeering, fraud, and extortion. Bambina—she was not beautiful but the name alone speaks volumes—never took the stand. Matthew Brady—no, not the photographer, the San Francisco D.A.—pulled every prosecutorial dirty trick in the book to get his celebrity conviction. There is no
doubt that Arbuckle’s kids ought to sue his ass from here to Sacramento.