Word: pentimento
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Hellman titled her second book of memoirs Pentimento, meaning the brush strokes and old images that struggle to emerge from a repainted canvas. You see that a lot in New Orleans: advertisements for defunct brands of beer and coffee poking through the fading paint of old brick buildings. Indeed, it has always been a city of masks and painted faces, with past mysteries and glories lurking faintly visible underneath...
...Like a pentimento, New Orleans has long been a canvas repeatedly repainted. Paint well, my artistic homeboys and girls, and carefully. Preserve the previous layers, and let them guide your brushwork. One false stroke, and the magic could disappear...
...herself as tough, combative and above all principled. Many critics, among them former friends, accused her of having a higher regard for her reputation than for the literal truth: revisionists have presented detailed arguments that Hellman distorted or invented stories in her autobiographies, most notably in the section of Pentimento that was adapted as the movie Julia. Political enemies regarded her as an all but unrepentant Communist, although she denied having formally belonged to the party; to the end (she died in 1984), she prided herself on having been branded a "premature anti-Fascist" and sniped at those she felt...
...public image she had laboriously fashioned for herself. Biographical details had been eliminated, anecdotes shellacked, letters burned--many of them after she had extracted them from their recipients. As America's most prominent woman playwright (The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes) and the author of various memoirs (Pentimento, Scoundrel Time), Hellman wanted the record closed, and on her terms...
Despite Hellman's efforts, her reputation began to ravel in her lifetime, after she sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar on TV. Though the suit died with the antagonists, it gave publicity to the fabrications in Pentimento and Scoundrel Time. From the former comes the story Julia, which casts Hellman as a heroic anti-Nazi in World War II. Jane Fonda played Lillian in the movie (Vanessa Redgrave was Julia). None of the yarn was true, but the author stubbornly maintained its veracity...