Word: hellman
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Dashiell Hammett might be called the principal love of Hellman's busy love life. He is credited with inventing the hard-boiled detective with the dour, daring Continental Op of Red Harvest and Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon. A clear, forceful prose stylist, Hammett was also a loner, a womanizer and a drunk. He had none of Hellman's worldly ambition, and he tailored his behavior to no one. Needless to say, she was crazy about...
Joan Mellen's good idea was to do a double biography of both, Hellman and Hammett (HarperCollins; 572 pages). They were colorful, talented, careless people who lived hard, fought with abandon and traveled impetuously, seeking out their gifted contemporaries in an American movable feast. Both believed that sexual freedom was a natural right. Their passions, personal and professional, could be an opportunity to examine American cultural history from the 1930s to the 1970s--the life of the left and of the theater, which were often related. The trouble is that Mellen's interest in that fascinating world is only perfunctory...
...right. Dissatisfied from the start with her birthright (fancy German Jewish on her mother's side, plain East European on her father's) and her looks (no blond curls or rosebud mouth), Hellman felt she "didn't get anything of what I wanted." She began lying as soon as she could tell a story. One of the first concerned a black woman named Sophronia, who worked for the family briefly during Hellman's babyhood, but was transformed into the main nurturing figure of her life. Later, says Mellen, "an enlarged photograph of Sophronia holding a tiny, impish Lillian...
...slaved over her first hit, The Children's Hour, giving her the plot, goading her to sharpen the language and making her exaggerated gambits more realistic. Meanwhile, his own fiction was languishing; weakened by drink and pulmonary disease, he published only one book, The Thin Man, after he met Hellman...
Worse was to follow. Though Hammett's will makes it clear he wanted half his literary estate to go to his daughter Josephine, she did not inherit anything until 30-odd years after his death in 1961--and well after Hellman's in 1984. Hellman simply expropriated the money. Mellen's theory is that she considered it a posthumous payment on Hammett's part for not having loved her enough...