Broadway Babylon (19 page)

T
HE LONGEST-RUNNING MUSICAL
until
Phantom of the Opera
surpassed it in 2006,
Cats
may also be the most dogmatically disliked musical ever. For every fan, there’s at least one detractor, including many who’ve never seen it. “I identified with every cat on that stage,” purred Rosie O’Donnell, while Dennis Miller barked, “Sitting through
Cats
is as pleasant as listening to two of them fighting or mating at three in the morning.”

Some purr-tinent “Cats” facts and quotes:

P.S. The Off-Broadway
The Fantasticks
(1960) outlasted the “Now and Forever”
Cats
.

I
n 1934, veteran author, Communist Party member, and alcoholic Dashiell Hammett yielded up his final work,
The Thin Man
. The same year, Lillian Hellman, whom he had met in 1930 and would live with until his death in 1961, debuted her first work, the play
The Children’s Hour
. Coincidence? “Like a vampire, Lillian took and took from Dash,” said MGM executive David Lewis. “She really only decided to become a writer, to be serious about it, after meeting him.”

Others also suspected that more than a little of
The Children’s Hour
, or at least its structure, was by way of Hammett, who mentored Hellman in her writing. What was unsuspected at the time was that despite her claim, the play was not an original story. Hellman borrowed much of it from a real-life case in 19th-century Edinburgh, Scotland, concerning two schoolteachers who committed no impropriety but were simply and accurately revealed as lesbian. Such was the bigotry of the place and era that contemporary newspapers wouldn’t even mention what the two longtime companions were “accused” of, unlike the subsequent Oscar Wilde case in London.

In 1983, the scholarly book
Scotch Verdict
brought the facts of the case to light, much to the chagrin of Lillian Hellman, who made no official comment. What she did create, besides updating the story and making one of the women heterosexual with a fiancé, was the play’s stereotypically unhappy ending. “To her everlasting shame,” stated author and psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker, “Hellman invented a viciously moralistic and pandering finale in which the actual lesbian of the two rumored lesbians is so consumed with self-hatred that
she hangs herself.” That ending is repeated in revivals and, more widely, in the 1961 movie version, often on television due to its starring trio of Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine as Martha, and James Garner.

“That ending has vilified women’s feelings for each other,” wrote Dr. Hooker, “and horrified and haunted generations of lesbians, particularly young, impressionable ones. It is a cruel and needless ending,” also untruthful, for in real life the two women did not lose their case, and nobody committed suicide. Unfortunately, the notoriety which accrued to the two victims—rather than to their homophobic victimizers—broke up the female pair.

Although in her play Hellman sternly disapproved of “gossip” about somebody’s being homosexual—whether true or not—in real life she blithely justified her means by her personal ends. An example, cited in William Wright’s
Lillian Hellman
, was her fury when a reporter printed that the director of her 1963 play
My Mother, My Father and Me
had been fired and Hellman was directing in his place. She telephoned the paper in a huff and without denying the story, demanded a retraction. The writer refused, knowing the story was true. Hellman said she’d soon see about that.

The following weekend the reporter visited some gay bars in Manhattan. On Monday the playwright, who’d obviously hired a private detective (shades of Sam Spade!), phoned the journalist to declare that if he didn’t print the retraction she’d inform his boss where he’d been over the weekend. Because the newspaperman was openly gay, the alleged social activist’s threat fell flat.

“The great independent thinker, right? Sorry—image, not reality. Lilly was very much of the period she grew up in,” noted director Mary Hunter Wolf. “Directing was once upon a time thought a very masculine undertaking, supposedly the death of individual femininity.… Hollywood’s two lady directors of note were Dorothy Arzner, an acknowledged Sapphic (tape-interviewed in this author’s
Hollywood Lesbians
), and Ida Lupino, who was forever insisting she didn’t
direct
men, she just made suggestions.

“It was slightly better on Broadway.… Today it seems ridiculous, all the fuss so many of us made. The ladies really did protest too much.” Wolf directed the rumored-to-be sapphic Mary Martin in the well-loved
Peter Pan
.

L
ILLIAN
H
ELLMAN’S MAKEUP
contained more than a bit of self-hate, her outward confidence and aggression notwithstanding. She didn’t identify with or activate for feminist or gay issues, rather choosing the more socially acceptable cause of black civil rights. “Lillian gives the impression of not caring whom she offends,” explained playwright Leonard Spigelgass. “But believe me, she chooses her enemies carefully, and ultimately she does crave public acceptance and admiration.”

Eventually the best-known American woman of letters, and before that the leading US female playwright of her day, Hellman wrote plays that generally haven’t held up well and even in her heyday paled next to those of her leading contemporaries. “She had incredible luck,” opined Spigelgass. “Besides [having] a live-in, honest-to-goodness real writer in the form of Dash Hammett, she had a first play that became a hit due to prurient interest. It wasn’t a gay play per se, so it wasn’t shut down, and its anti-gay touches, certainly that tragic denouement, reassured the status quo who liked to think they were attending a really daring play.”

Spigelgass continued: “[Hellman’s]
The Little Foxes
was a hit insofar as it was a tour de force for Tallulah Bankhead, a big star at the time.” It was also a screen triumph for Bette Davis. “When it gets revived, it’s because it’s a whale of a part for a showy, big-name actress,” as with Elizabeth Taylor in 1981. Hellman did a far less popular sequel (sans Tallulah) to
The Little Foxes
, whose theme was anti-capitalist; and her anti-fascist
Watch on the Rhine
was admirable at the time—and became another film with Bette Davis—but is seldom revived because it’s so dated.

Hellman more than once tried to achieve success and big bucks (despite her Marxist credo) at screenwriting, with generally poor results. Her eagerly awaited original screenplay for
The Chase
(1965) was a major flop in spite of stars like Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Robert Redford.

“The question of how much if any of Lillian’s output was written or rewritten by Hammett will always remain open,” said film producer David Lewis. “I personally suspect he had a minimal involvement, or else her plays would be better … more subtle and better characterized.”

Despite being the country’s ace female playwright, Hellman’s literary and cultural reputation ultimately rested on her four books of memoirs, which came later in life. Those too would become suspect, closer inspection leading to a crumbling of the reputation. “Hellman claimed
The Children’s Hour
was her own invention,” Lewis pointed out. “It was not. She claimed her celebrated books were chronicles of fact. They were not. They were significantly of her own invention, for self-aggrandizement.”

Scoundrel Time
, about the post—World War II political witch hunts, was deemed an instant classic in 1976. It recounted Hellman’s principled stand against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. She famously snorted, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” However, Lillian’s reputation for defying those who would have her name names was based more on what she later claimed she’d done and said than on the facts.

Understandably, she’d been terrified, for she and Hammett were actual communists—not that that was illegal—unlike a majority of the mostly Jewish
and/or gay (sometimes both, like former communist Jerome Robbins) witnesses summoned by the Republican leadership. Hellman had desperately sought not to have to appear before HUAC, and wrote a letter “full of trembling and cringing,” said Leonard Bernstein, who worked with Lillian on
Candide
. “It surprised me, when I finally read it. This was not the proud, defiant, and arrogant missive that she described but no wonder did not reproduce in full” in
Scoundrel Time
and that even abased her Jewish heritage. “She might have imagined she could pacify or fool HUAC … that no one had guessed she was Jewish.”