Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’ wasn’t far off. Navigating through the hall of mirrors that Hellman left behind, trying to sort fact from self-aggrandising fiction, seems to have worked Dorothy Gallagher into a fury. Perhaps this book is her revenge.
One of America’s most successful playwrights, Hellman had her first Broadway hit before she was 30. She was a close friend of Dorothy Parker and her long-term lover was Dashiell Hammett. Ardently left-wing, she was summoned before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee to answer questions about her links with the Communist party. By Gallagher’s reckoning, she was a disloyal friend, a co-dependent writer and an out-and-out Stalinist.
This whistle-stop biography focuses on the controversies of Hellman’s life, and she does not come out well from any of them. In her four volumes of memoirs, she presented herself as a principled, compassionate heroine, but it seems they were only very loosely based on the truth.
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