Playwright, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. After studying at New York and Columbia Universities, she worked in publishing and as a book reviewer and play-reader before attaining her first success with the play, The Children's Hour (1934). Concerned with social, political, and moral issues along with more personal ones, she wrote a number of successful plays including The Little Foxes (1939) and Toys in the Attic (1960). She also wrote many film scripts and adapted the works of others for film and the stage. She published several memoirs, including Scoundrel Time (1976), and she wrote the book for Leonard Bernstein's musical, Candide (1956). For some 30 years she lived with Dashiell Hammett and shared his commitment to radical political causes. Her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1952) resulted in her being blacklisted in Hollywood, and her last years were tainted by a feud with Mary McCarthy and allegations that she had often lied in her memoirs.
Writing
Hellman's most famous plays include The Children's Hour (1934), and Toys in the Attic (1959), in which she displayed a witty and passionate style.
The Oscar-winning film Julia was claimed to be based on the friendship between Hellman and the title character. However, the fact that Hellman and Gardiner had the same lawyer (Wolf Schwabacher), that the lawyer had been privy to Gardiner's memoirs, and that the events in the film conform to those in the memoirs, have led some to conclude that they had been appropriated by Hellman without attribution from Gardiner.
Blacklist and Aftermath
Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952.
In Two Invented Lives: Hellman and Hammett, author Joan Mellen noted that while Hellman had excoriated anti-Communist liberals such as Elia Kazan in her memoirs for directing their energies against Communists rather than against fascists and capitalists, she held a double standard on the subject of free speech when it came to her own critics. Author Diana Trilling publicly accused Hellman of pressuring her publisher, Little Brown, to cancel its contract with Trilling, who had written a collection of essays defending herself and her husband Lionel Trilling against Hellman's charges.
Hellman had shaded the truth on some accounts of her life, including the assertion that she knew nothing about the Moscow Trials in which Stalin had purged the Soviet Communist Party of Part members who were then liquidated. Hellman had actually signed petitions (An Open Letter to American Liberals) applauding the guilty verdict and encouraged others not to cooperate with John Dewey's committee that sought to establish the truth behind Stalin's show trials.
Hellman had also opposed the granting of political asylum to Leon Trotsky by the United States. Mellen continues, "American justice allowed her now to maintain good faith with the tyrant who had, despite his methods, industrialized the 'first socialist state.'"
Hellman's feud with Mary McCarthy formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. McCarthy in turn produced evidence that Hellman had shaded the truth on some accounts of her life, including some of the information that later appeared in Mellen's book.
Hellman died at age 79 from natural causes while litigation was still ongoing, and the suit was dropped by Hellman's executors.
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