Lillian and Dash (2 page)

I don’t remember his sitting up on the dais. Couldn’t have been, he had just signed with Warners, but he was up there pretty prominently, after all he was Hammett. As writers you could argue Hemingway and Fitzgerald. For me Hammett clearly had the better of them both. By a mile. And just look at him. Tall, graceful, self-contained, talented, not Jewish, everything I really liked in a man. I had no intention of letting him get away. To be perfectly honest, I was hoping I could get him to read one of my scripts and then maybe … You know what ambitious girls are like in Hollywood. I was young—twenty-four—although surely not a girl. And God was I ambitious. Like now, like ever. Good thing for American letters, our meeting, don’t you think?

I studied him for a long while. He drank from a shallow glass but only a little more than moderately. Conversed a bit but mostly he was casing the joint, as the Op would say, for
potential female suspects was my guess. Going home alone was not in his plans. From time to time a girl would go up to flatter him, flash the goods, ask him to dance. He’d demur. Girls, the guy who invented the ultimate tough guy, the loner dick, is never taking to the dance floor! Banter and wit, yes. Dancing, no. I watched this ritual, observed his every move, his stillness. He looked into his liquor before he drank it. He threw his head back and smiled at the ceiling when a thought pleased him or when a companion said something he liked. He rarely smiled fully with his lips. His eyes registered pleasure. Mostly, though, he tried hard to accommodate himself to being there by holding his greater self apart.

There was, near the toilets at the Grove—if it was the Grove—as I remember, a very comfortable and very private smoking area. The sofas and seats were plush, the foliage papier-mâché, the soft lighting perfect. The setting of choice as far as I was concerned. A moment before he downed his drink and pulled his chair back, I left my table without excuse or apology. Arthur’s eyes were on me, I knew.

There on the sofa—mauve it was, and glad I’d worn the flowered gown—I displayed a lot of leg—I’ve always had good legs—and propped the rest of me up to best advantage. He didn’t show for a while, probably chatting his way here, although it did occur to me he may already have arranged to leave early with some Kewpie doll. Gloves were de rigueur as accessories then, and I slapped them on my knees in time to the Latin music from the ballroom.

I swear I saw a backlit halo on him when he came toward me. This was some beautiful man. If I were writing the scene, it would read like this:

“Please sit down, Mr. Hammett.”

“Have we met?”

“That’s what’s happening right now. Sit down, I have a small bone to pick with you.”

“God. Only a small bone? I’m disappointed. And you would be?” He spoke slowly with a faint drawl.

I adjusted my own drawl to his. “Names aren’t important. But what I’ve got to say might be. I’m a really smart woman and a very close reader who hasn’t the foggiest idea what the fucking plot of
Red Harvest
is all about … that’s what’s important.”

Hammett sat down. If you’ve ever read that miscarriage or seen the movie they finally made of it at Paramount, you’ll know how preposterous the plot is, especially when the goddamned narrator—the Continental Op—cannot even remember if he killed Dinah Brand with an ice pick. I put my hand on Hammett’s knee: “Imagine. Your main character doesn’t even know if he’s a murderer! Come on.”

“The poor man was hopped up. Ever tried gin and laudanum?”

“Every morning with my Corn Flakes. And then you expect us to believe his fingerprints got on the ice pick because he touched it by mistake. Mistake! He’s the goddamned detective! That’s an even worse ‘come on’ … And has
anyone ever totaled up all the murders in that book? I gave up after thirty-five. What the hell are you writing, medieval revenges?”

“That’s exactly what pulp is, my dear. You give ’em gore and then you give ’em a lot more gore.”

“I can do without the patronizing, my dear. I shouldn’t have to remind you, you’re the same guy who wrote a hundred lines this good:
Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick or you get to like it
. So I ask you, Why does that same writer settle for crapola?”

“Oh. Now I get it. You want to reform me. Save me from myself. Make me into a
literary
gent.”

“You are a literary gent who thinks he has to be so damned tough all the time he’s afraid to open his fists.”

“Sweetheart, the world already has too many literary gents and too much
litter-a-toor
. Maybe some other time you can tell me what else is wrong with the story. And what did you say your name was?”

“Dinah Brand, and don’t you dare touch that ice pick.”

“No, tell me.”

“Another thing I don’t get is, you create this incredibly interesting and sexy woman and your Op not only doesn’t shtup her, he never even thinks about shtupping her. And I’m really worried that the same thing might be happening right now.”

“Stoop?”

“Not ‘stoop,’ you dope.
Shtup
. ‘She
Shtups
to Conquer.’ It’s Yiddish, but that’s not the point.”

Eventually Hammett learned lots of Yiddish, but that night we sat in the lounge and talked and drank and talked some more until everyone had left and they finally threw us out. All exit stage left. We went to his place, I think, a real dump as I recall.

E
VEN THOUGH
H
AMMETT
was twelve years older with hair already flecked with gray, the two were compatible and easy with each other from the get-go. Both were children of the South—Hammett from rural Maryland, Lillian from an Alabama and Louisiana childhood before moving north—and their ease with the gentle accents of their youth allowed them to blend comfortably, even when they were teasing each other. Especially when they were teasing each other.

Lillian did not work at Warner Bros. She had just started a job in the script department at Paramount as a reader, but her husband, Arthur Kober, who had published some stories in the
New Yorker
, had already done some script work for Zanuck. A
New Yorker
writer had a cachet with a man like Zanuck. Jack Warner, on the other hand, wouldn’t know the
New Yorker
from the
New Republic
.

Arthur Kober was Lillian’s entrée that night. Although Hammett had indeed sold the rights to
The Maltese Falcon
to Zanuck, he had not yet been paid, and he had not as yet become a studio writer under contract. That was likely to happen soon, which was why he had been invited to the party.

The most important thing that happened at the Brown Derby that night was that Lillian Hellman met Dashiell Hammett and they would know one another, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, for thirty years. The undisputed star of the evening, however, was Darryl F. Zanuck. Yes, he was the genius behind the incredible financial success of the Rin Tin Tin movies. And, yes, young Zanuck had played a major part in
The Jazz Singer
’s astounding success. He spent a good deal of his time at Warners urging the brothers to commit completely to sound. But they did not see the future for sound quite as clearly as he did. They did not—or would not—acknowledge that spoken words required very good writers, that movie music now demanded very good lyricists and composers. How many times had Zanuck told Jack Warner about scrimping on talent, “You get what you pay for.” And how many times had Jack Warner said, “When they need the work, they’ll give you their best for peanuts.”

Darryl Zanuck never thought that way. Even while at Warners, he busted the budget repeatedly to get the best talent. He considered himself a connoisseur who could spot true
talent anywhere and determine exactly how best to employ it. In his first years at Warners, he had Cole Porter and Oscar Hammerstein contribute some wonderful tunes to some very creaky musicals. In short, the Warner brothers were satisfied to make the silents talk. Zanuck intended to make them cry and laugh and shout and sing.

Zanuck knew his relationship with the brothers, especially with Jack, couldn’t last, and although he was supervisor of production at twenty-seven, he had his eyes on bigger things, perhaps at Paramount, perhaps at a brand-new studio he planned to start himself. So all those “guest” invitations his secretary sent out to all sorts of talented people—Hammett and Arthur Kober, to name just two—were bread cast upon the water that would bring Zanuck some very talented people when he made his move.

The
Falcon
wasn’t the first script Hammett had sold to a studio.
Red Harvest
, his first novel, was bought by Paramount the year before, early in 1929. The deal was made before the Crash, his first big movie money, more money than he had ever seen before. But even a year and a half later, when times were bad, Zanuck had made a good offer for the
Falcon
; whatever was happening elsewhere in America, there always seemed to be plenty of cash in Hollywood.

Scriptwriting beat writing for the pulps and their penny a word by a long shot. Even Paramount paid ten times as much for the rights to
Red Harvest
as Alfred Knopf had paid him to invent and write the novel itself. Money, which had long
been his primary need, became in Hollywood Hammett’s primary want.

The Maltese Falcon
had been published by Knopf in February 1930, nine months before Zanuck’s party. Most of the writers in the room—even if they wouldn’t admit it—had read at least parts of it and most of these were secretly jealous of his talent. Hammett knew it was good, the best work he had done so far, almost better than he believed he could ever do, so he thought he had simply gotten lucky with it. A good time, he also believed, to cash in on his luck.

The actual meeting that evening in the Brown Derby occurred as follows. Lillian Hellman approached Dashiell Hammett’s table. She adjusted the single strap on her red gown, leaned in over Frank Fay’s shoulder, and whispered into Hammett’s ear, “
Mr. Spade
,
oh Mr. Spade
,
they tell me that you don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble
.” The breathy words were warm on his ear, the pauses perfect, the girl pretended to be frightened but still playfully sexual.

Hammett didn’t look up but took her chin with firm fingers that climbed up Lillian’s cheeks. His frown was severe, his voice rough. “
Tell me, Miss O’Shaughnessy—if that’s your name—just how much trouble is a reasonable amount?
” Lillian believed him to be the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Hammett could not get over her sexual force and presence.

L
ILLIAN
H
ELLMAN HAD A UNIQUE
, paradoxical, and artistically rich childhood. She was a daughter of the deep Deep South, having spent her earliest years with her grandmother’s wealthy family in Demopolis, Alabama. But her girlhood years were spent in her aunts’—her father’s sisters’—boardinghouse in New Orleans. The contrast in those experiences limned her consciousness. Her formal as well as her political education happened mostly in New York’s Upper West Side during those times of year when her father and mother came north. Growing up Jewish in those various worlds helped give context and texture to Lillian’s creativity. She also chose to be strong.

As the result of such a mishmash of diverse cultural influences, Lillian’s ear for all sorts of speech rhythms and dialects was superb and helped her tremendously as a dramatist. Her reputation in Hollywood and New York as a raconteur preceded her reputation as a playwright. Of all the voices she
could deliver on demand she especially excelled in that helpless female pout and whine of the Southern belle. She performed a flawless Scarlett O’Hara years before there ever was a Scarlett O’Hara. Just for the hell of it, from time to time, and after a drink or two, she occasionally mixed in some Yiddish when studio big shots were her audience. She also did a grumpy Upper West Side Jewish matron to perfection.

Too often, when they were out with friends, Hammett insisted she tell her Captain Beauregard story. She would demur twice, he would insist twice, she’d comply. The performance became somewhat famous in Hollywood.

Lilly told the story in a warm, cooing voice dripping with syrupy Southern innocence: Louis Ferdinand Beauregard, an aristocratic gentleman and captain in the Confederate Army, was madly in love with one of Lilly’s great-great Alabama aunts, Miss Amanda Sweets Stonefeld. Fictitious of course. Captain Beauregard had family background but not much wealth. Even worse, he had the slightest harelip that Miss Amanda could neither abide nor take her eyes off when she was with him. If he asked her to accompany him on a stroll to the edge of the woods, she’d say the sun was too hot or the road too muddy. Her constant refusals reduced the captain to a love-sick puppy. At last he told her his regiment was being sent north to engage the Yankees, so wouldn’t she please consent to walk with him to the gazebo in the garden. He had something of great importance to ask her.

At this point Lilly’s act put even the coyest Scarlett to shame. Fluttering her lashes and fanning a hand before her cheeks, she said breathlessly, “ ‘My word, I do declare, Captain Beauregard, it is simply much too humid for me to take a single step outside today. Perhaps another time would be a bit more more pro-pi-tious, suh.’ ”