One of her earliest political acts was to help unionize the script reading department. Towards the end of her marriage Hellman and Kober divorced in , Hellman began a relationship with novelist Dashiell Hammett that would last 30 years, until his death in She would later write about her relationship with Hammett in her semi-fictional novel, Maybe: A Story Hellman's first produced play was The Children's Hour , about two teachers who are publicly accused of being lesbians by one of their boarding school students.
It was a smash success on Broadway, running for performances, and began Hellman's career of writing about vulnerable individuals in society.
Hellman herself wrote the film adaptation, titled These Three , released in That led her to additional work in Hollywood, including the screenplay for the film noir movie Dead End. It focuses on an Alabama woman who has to fend for herself among greedy, manipulative male relatives. Hellman also wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation starring Bette Davis. Hellman later had a feud with the Broadway lead, actress Tallulah Bankhand, who had agreed to perform the play for a benefit to support Finland, which had been invaded by the USSR in the Winter War.
Hellman refused to give permission for the play to be performed for the benefit. This was not the only time that Hellman blocked her work from being performed for political reasons. For example, Hellman would not allow her plays to be performed in South Africa because of apartheid.
Starting in the late s, Hellman was an outspoken supporter of anti-fascist and anti-Nazi causes, which often put her in league with supporters of the Soviet Union and Communism. She specifically wrote about the rise of Nazism in her play, Watch on the Rhine , which Hammett later adapted for a film. Hellman's views courted controversy in when she refused to sign a contract with Columbia Pictures because it would require her to swear that she had never been a Communist Party member and would not associate with Communists.
Her opportunities in Hollywood withered away, and in she was called before HUAC to testify about being named as a possible member of the Communist Party in the late s. When Hellman appeared before HUAC in May , she refused to respond to any substantive questions except for denying ever being a member of the Communist Party. Many of her Hollywood colleagues "named names" to avoid jail time or being blacklisted, and Hellman was subsequently blacklisted from Hollywood.
Following the breaking of the Hollywood blacklist and the Broadway success of Hellman's T oys in the Attic , in the early s Hellman was honored by a variety of prestigious institutions, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Brandeis University, Yeshiva University, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her renown largely restored, she even returned to screenwriting and wrote the crime film The Chase starring Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Robert Redford.
At the prompting of Hammett, Hellman took her first leap into professional writing with a play about two teachers accused of being lesbians by a privileged student. Overwhelmed by the accusation, one teacher kills herself. The play was an enormous hit on Broadway running for more than seven hundred performances , and brought the young playwright instant recognition.
Primarily an indictment of capitalist motives, it was also a telling story of three individuals, and an investigation of their inner lives. Throughout the s and s she continued to write plays and increase her political activism. Blacklisted in the s for her leftist activism, Hellman continued to write and to speak out against the injustices around her. By the early s, however, Hellman started to move away from drama and concentrated on writing her memoirs. Excited over recent student activism, Hellman began teaching.
Throughout the rest of her life she would teach at a number of colleges, including both Harvard and Yale. That same year she met popular crime writer Dashiell Hammett, with whom she had a tempestuous thirty-year companionship after her divorce from Kober in It was Hammett, many feel, who guided Hellman in both her early literary endeavors and her commitment to leftist politics.
Though completed in , it was never produced. Tallulah Bankhead starred in its initial run on Broadway, while Bette Davis assumed the role of the protagonist in the Oscar-nominated film.
During her key decades as a dramatist, Hellman also continued to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Critics, including some fellow liberals like Diana Trilling, suggested that Hellman often resorted to evasions, omissions, and falsehoods in these works.
Nora Ephron provided her own perspective on the feud in her play Imaginary Friends. She died June 30, , in Tisbury, Massachusetts. She continues to be regarded as one of the most talented and controversial American playwrights of the twentieth century.
Adams, Timothy Dow.
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