Lillian and Dash (32 page)

An army doesn’t travel on its stomach. It travels on rumors. In our Aleutian army all rumors pointed to a Hokkaido attack in the summer. I clearly remember looking around the
barracks or the mess hall, especially in the LST, looking into the faces of the kids and realizing they could not all survive the attack. I caught myself looking around and trying to imagine which ones would be killed. I blacked out faces arbitrarily—
He doesn’t make it. He does. This one, no. This one, yes. No, yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes, no
. That is how it will be, just that arbitrary, only it will be a capricious god who pushes the blackout button.

Mornings were freezing cold. It was May. I had gotten to the point where I was coming to welcome the goddamned invasion. If I get blacked out, so be it, just as long as I didn’t have to climb down that effing ladder with bleeding hands. We trained vigorously until summer, and then as quickly as it began, training ended.

Russo, who wrote sports for the paper, ran into the Quonset breathless with the news: “Over, it’s almost over.” He gasped and pointed to the shortwave. Boudine found some American news from Anchorage. A superbomb is what they were calling it. An explosion to end all explosions. Not like anything in human history, they said. At 8:15 a.m. Broad daylight. The entire city of Hiroshima destroyed, completely leveled by a single bomb. Most of the population killed instantly. Government officials were calling the weapon an atomic bomb, reported to have the destructive power of one thousand of the biggest bombs in our arsenal. A single bomb. Reports are that the entire horizon was lighted like a second sunrise before a great mushroom cloud filled the sky.

The announcer did not mention specific casualties or the population of Hiroshima, which I knew to be just short of half a million. It was not easy to see them as human beings in the same way I saw the boys gathered around the shortwave. I cared not a whit about them, so it didn’t matter at that moment to me that for the people of Hiroshima there were no individual
yeses
and nos; no lottery for them, they were all blacked out in an instant.

I knew it was possible, theoretically possible, but not now, so suddenly, like this. Used on civilians? This Truman. His decision to make, and the little man made it. I wondered if the great man would have made it. To the little man it was Save American lives and the devil be damned. Of course Churchill had a major hand in this thing. A message loud and clear to Uncle Joe.

When all’s said and done, terrible as this thing is, and the dubious ethics of war aside, this may have been the best way after all. That landing at Hokkaido would have been a fight to the death, far worse for us than Guadalcanal and Saipan and Okinawa combined. It would have been a ring of hell. Russo, Boudine, all the kids on
The Adakian
, even old man Hammett his own self, I wouldn’t have wanted to see a single one of us blacked out. I’ll pass on judgment for now since …

O
THER THAN GOING
to “21,” Lilly and Dash liked to celebrate during the after-war healing and adjustment at Café Society, the club down on Sheridan Square in the Village, especially when the pianist Hazel Scott was playing there. Hammett was absolutely wild about her. For him no one rivaled her technique, her brio; only Art Tatum and Bud Powell came close. And some singer too.

Café Society was classy and intimate and chic, the flavor of a Paris bistro with a touch of Viennese elegance. Anyone who was anyone in New York—or aspired to be anyone—tried very hard to be seen here. Lilly and Dash were regulars. So were Ed Murrow, Martha Graham, Ezio Pinza, Leopold Stokowski, Gypsy Rose Lee, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Fiorello La Guardia and his wife Marie. Such was the clientele of Café Society.

This evening wasn’t really a celebration, although Lillian, after doing her patriotic duty acting as goodwill ambassador
to the Soviet Union, finally did have another play running uptown—
Another Part of the Forest
, that family sequel to
The Little Foxes
—and it was doing good business. Since Hammett had been back in New York for well over a year already, this wasn’t in any way a welcome home party, but once again his writing caught the breeze of a new development in the storytelling industry. The shortage of paper during the war led to the creation of paperback books. His novels and short stories were being released again in the new form for a new generation of readers. There wasn’t much money in it for him, but he didn’t need much money these days. He was being appreciated once again and that warranted this small celebration.

He had been despondent during much of his time back from the war. He spent most of it alone at the cottage in Katonah, where he said he was writing a bit. He was drinking a lot. He also spent more time at Hardscrabble talking with Lilly about new projects—hers. She contemplated another movie for Goldwyn—she liked to call him Goldwine now, in honor of FDR—and a play set in a New Orleans boardinghouse. She thought this idea for a drama too small; Hammett reminded her the world was nothing but a big boardinghouse that badly needed the two Hellman aunts to keep things going.

Almost everything Lillian wrote in those postwar days had a dispirited, melancholy quality she just couldn’t shake. When she had been Kassandra warning about danger, there was energy. When she was herself part of the war or
encouraging others to be brave and unselfish, she was passionate. But somehow after the great victory celebration, exhaustion set in. It lingered still, unshakable.

Hammett was not himself either, at least not his old self. His last three army years, time spent almost exclusively in the world of young men, writing editorials and drawing amateurish cartoons on deadline, even the physical training, had suited him so perfectly that he was lost when thrust back into civilian life. There was an absent quality, a distractedness about him he could no more break out of than Lillian could lose her world-weariness.

But Café Society, especially when Hazel Scott or Pearl Bailey or Billie Holiday, the club regulars, performed, brought out the best in each and both of them for an evening. Toward the end of an evening, after she played a late set, Hazel Scott usually joined them to talk politics and have a drink. Hazel was a civil rights activist before there were civil rights activists. When she went to Hollywood to make some movies, she made it quite clear from the get-go she would never play a maid or even wear an apron.

So she was mostly featured doing a specialty number at the piano in a nightclub while the stars entered and were being shown to their seats. The camera stayed on Hazel for a while and then followed the likes of Don Ameche and Janet Blair or Robert Alda and Joan Leslie to their table. Sometimes Hazel finished up her song, took her applause, and approached the stars to deliver a line or two before moving off camera.

Scott could never be the headliner in Hollywood that she was here in Manhattan. Hollywood wanted to showcase a light-skinned Negro woman with a virtuoso talent in very small doses to make white America sit up and take notice while giving the liberal producers a sense of personal satisfaction. That is how the world saw Hazel Scott until she started organizing other Negro studio performers. She was immediately labeled uppity and was soon after unwelcome in Hollywood. She had just returned to New York.

She finished “Mean to Me,” and the lights came up to appreciative applause.

Hammett stood when Hazel approached. He intended to kiss her cheek. “You folks got a minute?” It was said mostly to Lillian. She pulled out a chair before Lilly could respond. It was early in the evening; she had just finished the second of four sets.

Hammett said, “Jesus, you’re in some form tonight, young lady.” It was true. She had played a Fats Waller medley at top speed with perfect classical piano technique.

“I always play great when I’m furious.”

“Hollywood does that to a girl,” Lillian said to her glass. She was drinking good Scotch. Hammett ordered one for Hazel.

“That’s history, dearie. When RKO told me I’d never work there as long as I lived, I didn’t believe them. I do now. I can’t get a sniff from anyone.”

Lillian: “So, that’s the
furious
?”

“No, now the
furious
is that damn Committee they set up about who’s a real American. I got subpoenaed again.”

Of course they had read about it and thought a Congressional committee investigating who and what was un-American was pretty silly, political posturing, a facial blemish on democracy that would pass soon enough. Hazel Scott had been one of the first performers called to testify. Paul Robeson was another. “You’ve got to see these guys. They’re the same Crackers my mama had to deal with when she toured the South with her band. Scum of the earth, let me tell you, I mean
scum
of the earth.” Except for its chairman, the Committee was overwhelmingly and deeply Southern.

“Wanted to know if I was a Comm-a-nist—they say the word the way they say
Nig-ra
. If any of the people I worked with or any of my friends was Comm-a-nist. Don’t laugh. These are scary men and they got themselves some real power now in this country. This thing has already cost me a small fortune.”

It was 1948 and already HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, a successful stockbroker and Jersey City Republican, had begun calling movie actors, writers, and directors to testify and affirm their loyalty to America under oath. Hollywood was where the publicity was and the Committee stoked up plenty of it. Only Thomas chose to say
Communist
and
Negro
correctly.

“I thought you were all done with Hollywood before this who’s American stuff.”

“Apparently Hollywood wasn’t all done with me. It’s payback time. And like I said, it’s already cost me real bucks.” Scott shook her head, angry and bewildered. “You need to get a good lawyer and you need him for a while. That’s not cheap. Then, three weeks after I testified, I get this bill from whatever you call those guys claiming I owe taxes since ’39. My accountant tells me I can fight them but in the long run it’s better to pay up and make them go away. The Committee’s only the front door. Taxes is the back door. So they got you coming and going. We don’t really stand much of a chance against them.”

“We?” Said in harmony.

“Of course
we
. You don’t think they’re going to stop with a little colored girl who plays piano and sings in a dump like this, do you? They just start with us.”

Lillian said, “But at least you’ve got New York. You can work here till your teeth fall out.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There ain’t no
forever
work anywhere with these guys. Soon lots of people who are working ain’t going to be working no more. I looked into their faces and it scared the hell out of me. I didn’t show it, but they got to me.”

Hammett said, “What are you going to do?”

“I got to testify again next month. Paul too. Their letter says they want to ask me extensively about my associates. ‘My
associates,’ what the hell does that mean? Fortunately, I hear Paris is lovely this time of year.”

Hammett said, “Careful about that. Talk to your lawyer first.”

“Can’t put him in jeopardy. He’s a friend.”

“He’s your
lawyer
. He’s protected.”

“Glad you think so.”

Lillian wanted to know how it felt to testify.

“Dirty. They’re the scum and I felt dirty. They kept throwing the word
subversive
around, so I asked if they were going to investigate the Ku Klux Klan as ‘subversive.’ This Cracker jumps in and tells me, ‘Young lady, the Klan is a venable
—venable
—American institution.’ I said my family could vouch for how
venable
it was. He said right now the threat to this country was the Comm-a-nists, not the Klan, and did I know any of them. These guys want names and believe me, they’re going to get names one way or another.”

There was nothing, Hammett thought, they could do to him; rather, nothing they could do to him that would touch him. His concern was for Lillian. He was right about that. And wrong about their doing nothing to hurt him.

Hazel went back to the piano and announced as the lights dimmed, “Here’s a ballad, ladies and gentlemen, that’s been on my mind a great deal lately. Bing Crosby got himself some credit writing lyrics on this one. I hope he forgives my taking some liberties with the words.”

She gave herself some tempo with her left hand and after exploring a number of possibilities with her right, she drifted into the refrain of “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” Hazel sang:

After a second chorus, she only played the melody. Beautifully.

The term
cold war
had already been minted and was in wide circulation on the nightly news. The homegrown Rats were free to come out and roam. It was the Weasels, as she dubbed them, those in service to the Rats, Lillian despised most. Weasels testified before the Committee, offered up names, made its work run smoother as it rolled over more and more lives, gathering tremendous momentum and no moss. The Weasels offered up Hammett’s name far more often than Lillian’s. She hated them doubly for that.

The Committee was legally authorized—the legality was particularly ironic given what was learned about Nazi legalities at the Nuremberg Trials—“under mandate of Public Law 601” to pursue Communists or Communist sympathizers for the public good. The punishment it meted out was supported by the Smith Act of 1940, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government and punishable by up to twenty years in federal prison.