Lillian and Dash (30 page)
The talents assembled for the project were remarkable for any studio film, unprecedented for a propaganda piece about the Soviet Union. Besides Milestone and the excellent cinematographer James Wong Howe, the film featured some of Hollywood’s finest actors, most of whom believed in its wartime importance as much as Lillian. The Russian villagers were Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Farley Granger, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, Jane Withers, Ann Harding, and every homey-looking character actor on
the M-G-M lot. The Nazi villain was indeed von Stroheim, whom Hammett called the absolute best of the absolute worst. Aaron Copland signed on for the Russian-sounding music score; and none other than Ira Gershwin wrote the patriotic lyrics … in English of course.
Lillian did not count herself among the luminaries who had hired on. All the others did, however.
The moral and dramatic conflict at the heart of her script is the tension between two doctors—one a Russian civilian, Dr. Pavel Kurin, the other a German officer—over the issue of blood transfusions for wounded German troops. The soldiers are dying of wounds they received from the Russian defenders of the village in which the story is set. The German commandant orders transfusions for his men with blood taken from healthy Russians, including the village children. For Lillian this was the dramatic heart of the conflict, and more importantly the most elemental metaphor she could create.
Goldwyn and Milestone thought this bloody plot device too gruesome for an American audience. Lillian was adamant that the transfusions stay in. She told Goldwyn, “Squeamish about blood, are you? What do they think the war is all about? It’s a fucking bloodbath, for Christ’s sake.” And then she issued an ultimatum: remove the transfusions and she would remove herself. And she would make sure the president heard about it.
The blood transfusions stayed in.
At the plot’s climax, a dangerous transfusion is performed by Dr. von Harden, played by von Stroheim with frightening
civility. The German officer lives but the Russian boy dies. The Russian Dr. Kurin, the avuncular Walter Huston, confronts von Harden. In the doctor-to-doctor confrontation, Lillian delivers her political message:
P
AVEL
K
URIN:
You knew he would die.
V
ON
H
ARDEN:
They took too much blood. I’m sorry for that.
K
URIN:
I’ve heard about you … civilized men who are sorry … men who do the work of Fascists while they pretend to themselves that they are better than the beasts for whom they work … men who do murder while they laugh at those who order them to do it. It is men like you who have sold their people to men like them!
[
Kurin takes out a gun and shoots von Harden at point blank range
.]
K
URIN:
You see, Doctor von Harden, you were wrong about me. I AM a man who kills.
Given the cultural climate created by the war, it was almost impossible for most movie critics to evaluate
The North Star
harshly or as other than what it was, an effective
propaganda film. The Hearst movie critics, however, wanted no part of Rooshkie propaganda. Don McConnell in the
Journal American
ended his review with a warning, one Lillian dismissed without a second thought:
Lillian Hellman’s latest film project,
The North Star
, has been of great benefit to our newly discovered Soviet buddies. It depicts them as peace-loving, noble, and innocent victims tormented by a ruthless aggressor. But wait just a minute here, weren’t those roles reversed just a couple of years ago when it was the Soviet Armies that rolled ruthlessly over innocent civilians in Finland and eastern Poland? And did said Miss Hellman come to the defense of those peaceful peasants then? Not for a moment.
If Miss Hellman were a more scrupulous student of recent history, she would know that yesterday’s Enemy turned today’s Ally is likely to become tomorrow’s Enemy once again. Comrade Hellman would be wise to sing “The Internationale” a bit more softly, if at all, when that tomorrow comes.
C
ORPORAL
H
AMMETT
’
S BUNK
was at the far end of a Quonset hut, near the latrines, and he composed his letter
on military V-mail paper in the dark with the help of his field flashlight:
Dear Lillushka—(Is it still safe to call you by your Soviet diminutive?)
I’m well, after a very rugged journey, but I am, alas, forbidden to reveal its destination. I won’t do that because correspondence to and from this destination will be censored severely. However, if you read “The Widow’s Peak,” you will remember how interesting the correspondence was. Did you read it?
In that early Hammett story, conspirators send each other coded letters. Every time a question is asked it meant the very next sentence contained a clue to some important piece of information. Lillian remembered and could now discover where in the world Hammett was.
The sentence after the question read:
Dear, I miss your cooking most of all, especially the delicious stuffed derma you always made for the Holidays
.
There it was. Lillian had never made stuffed derma in her life and knew immediately that was the clue. To go from
derma
to
kishka
, its Yiddish equivalent, might take a while for some people, but not for Lillian. From
kishka
to the Aleutian
island of Kiska was not a difficult step. Finally, Lillian knew where in this secret military world Hammett was.
She went to the great atlas in the room where Hammett had usually stayed and found a map with commentary. Her finger touched Kiska and she imagined the Hammett she had seen off at Grand Central months before. There was much she wanted to tell him tonight about herself. There was much she wanted to know about him. Helplessness always made her angry. The atlas commentary called the chain of islands part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, an allusion to its volcanic creation, not the ironical fact that the temperature was a maximum of fifty degrees in midsummer and sub-zero most other times. She would begin to knit him a pair of wool socks in the morning. Maybe have Zenia start a pair as well.
It’s a difficult, hopeful time for both of us. We’ll see this through. I like the kids I’m with. They call me Pops—it smacks of an old Blues Man—which of course is what I am: Pops Hammett crooning “Daddy’s Got a Spankin’ Heart”! These kids are mostly about half my age. They see me as a complete enigma, part uncle, part scoutmaster, part priest, part teacher, part fossil. Forty-eight to them makes me one of our country’s Founding Fathers. Since the army hasn’t changed a whit since my last time around, my advice is often sought. I’m going to be important here. It’s a role I sort of like. Maybe when you see me again, you’ll call me Pops too
.
He was writing in a very tight script because the V-mail form was so small. Since he was running out of space, he began to write even smaller. Lillian would need a magnifying glass to decipher it.
A confession. When this show is finally over in a few years I will allow myself to be lauded as a self-sacrificing, patriotic American. (I’ll do my best to see that it is not done posthumously, only because I won’t be able to hear what they say about me.) Patriotism in the Grand Old Flag sense has nothing to do with it. I joined up because it was by far the best option open to me. My writing was crap. The family stories started to dry up. Movie scripts were not going to happen again. A radio script a night, what sort of challenge was that! (I’m telling you what you already know and doing it in the tiniest words possible.) The army could save me from myself: it would insure me, clothe me, house me, feed me, force me to drink 3.2 beer. It would put me back into a world of men, where I’ve always managed well, and allow me to kill Rats indirectly and hopefully directly as well. And the only cost to me is my enforced absence from you. We have been apart before, separated mostly for foolish personal reasons. This separation is completely different, achingly and sorrowfully so, but it must be endured
.
Oh, by the way, I’ve become the company barber. I’m good at it too. Man with the clippers. You’ll be pleased to know I demand payment for my services
.
Well, gal, tell me how things are going in the Ukraine. Oh, I just remembered, I’m going to need, really need, lots of reading material. Send me subscriptions to all the good mags real soon
.
I miss your face. I miss your brains. I miss you. I have always missed you
.
Pops
The last few words barely got on the page.
Alaska Command required a newspaper to help indoctrinate, inform, and entertain the thousands of troops gathering for a likely attack on imperial Japan. Sergeant Hammett—the promotion matched his new assignment—became the editor in chief of
The Adakian
, an eight-sheet publication of fifty thousand copies.
Hammett put together a staff of young men, city kids for the most part with some experience on college newspapers, and quickly went about the task of organizing assignments and setting deadlines, opening production and distribution channels, and above all establishing the standards, the tone, and the point of view of the paper. He edited everything that went to print and wrote about half the paper himself. He even began doing some of the political cartoons, drawing an American eagle that managed to look like FDR, a Stalin-like Kodiak bear, a Hitler rat, and an evil Japanese face on the setting sun. He worked very long hours and was profoundly tired and quietly happy.
Each week after the paper had been put to bed, he drank piss beer with his staff. They begged him to tell Hollywood stories, which he occasionally did only because they wanted them so badly. He told them true and unvarnished; the young soldiers were left open-mouthed and speechless by the debaucheries he described. Hammett never told any stories about himself. Although they were curious, none of his staff ever asked.
The editor of
The Adakian
was often relieved of his military assignments. Some but not all. Hammett was required to qualify on the rifle range every three months. This meant a two-mile march to the rifle range with his Headquarters Company in full gear, then lying prone and hitting the target from as far away as five hundred yards. Most times, either Pops Hammett or a kid from Alabama had the highest score.
Also every three months the company was required to make a four-mile forced march at double time. It became an ordeal for Hammett over the last mile and a half—his lungs betrayed him—but even though he fell behind he always finished, and he was never among the worst stragglers. He did need two days at least to recapture what was left of his strength.
T
HE COMMANDER OF
S
IGNAL
B
ATTALION
, Alaskan Department, was Colonel Orville Avery, an engineering graduate of West Point, whose specialty was telegraphic communications. The battalion’s main mission was the construction of
telegraph lines on all the islands on which the army had deployed troops. And to set up wireless radio stations at all outposts to monitor the Jap Morse communications, which were usually encoded. As a result most of the U.S. troops stationed in the Aleutians dug holes, poured cement, set poles, strung wires, and trained in case of a possible Jap attack to be able to defend their featureless terrain. Hammett had met Colonel Avery on two occasions—once when Avery toured the
Adakian
office and then when Hammett was promoted to tech sergeant. Hammett never heard from his commanding officer about the newspaper, which meant that he either had no complaints or was no longer aware of its existence. Either way, Hammett was satisfied.
It came as a surprise, then, when his company commander had a jeep sent to his Quonset with orders to take Hammett to battalion headquarters for a meeting with Colonel Avery, Colonel’s orders. Hammett was given no sense of the colonel’s intention. He assumed the worst, problems with his left-leaning editorials, drawn from information gleaned from
Commonweal
and
The Nation
, two of the periodicals Lillian had sent. He did not want to lose his newspaper. That’s how he had come to think of it
—his
newspaper.
Avery—glasses, crew cut, red cherubic face—was sitting behind his desk when Sergeant Hammett entered, reported, saluted, and held his salute as Colonel Avery muttered, “At ease, Sergeant.” Five copies of recent
Adakian
s were on his desk.
“These cartoons of yours, Hammett. What in the world were you thinking?”
“Sir?”
“A newspaper is supposed to boost morale, for Christ’s sake.”
“I believe the men think they’re moderately funny, sir.”
“This one, funny? Captain leads his company up a volcano and says, ‘Keep going, men, at least we’ll be able to get warm.’ Can’t you see?”
“Excuse me, see what, sir?”
“It makes the officer look stupid. So do these others. A major talking to a walrus, ‘Seen any Japs come ashore?’ Two generals arguing about how to spell
archipelago
. An officer with a compass asking an Eskimo which way is north. You make us all look like a bunch of prize morons.”