Sam Leith Sam Leith

A tough broad

Lillian Hellman may have been a petulant, blinkered fabulist, but her championship of civil liberties during the McCarthy era was admirable

issue 23 June 2012

When the modern reader thinks of Lillian Hellman, if he or she thinks of her at all, the image that presents itself is likely to be of a wizened old doll marooned in a gigantic mink coat, a still bigger hairdo — and wreathed in the smoke emanating not only from a cigarette but from her smouldering pants.

Her enemy Mary McCarthy said in a 1979 television interview that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the” ’. That memorable zinger — and the lawsuit that followed, still ongoing at the time of Hellman’s death — all but did for her reputation. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about the golden age of Hollywood, Tell All, has as a running joke the eye-stretching lies told by Hellman. 

Her reputation as a liar has almost eclipsed her reputation as a playwright. Among the most stinging things McCarthy said in that interview, because true, was that as a writer she ‘belongs to the past’.

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