Pith and Vinegar

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Lillian Hellman will be remembered for her plays The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic. But she seemed to yearn to be remembered for her defiance of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, when it asked her to testify about her Stalinist ties and those of her associates. Throughout her 79 years, especially in the memoirs she wrote during her final two decades, Hellman delighted in presenting 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 had been faithless to the left's cause.

Lillian, William Luce's one-woman play that opened on Broadway last week, is not about this actual Lillian Hellman. Luce, who celebrated Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, culled Hellman's memoirs to put onstage something approximating the way she saw herself. The result is far from objective history. But it works absorbingly as ribald, poignant entertainment. One of the world's great actresses, Zoe Caldwell, enacts the writer's conversations and confessions in a blend of eerily precise impersonation (down to wearing Tea Rose, Hellman's favorite perfume) and voluble, free-spirited performance.

The narrative frame of Lillian is the day in 1961 when Hellman sat in deathwatch near the bedside of her longtime lover, Novelist Dashiell Hammett. Luce's choice of moment is shrewd. Unlike the sequestered Emily Dickinson, Hellman was one of life's winners, blessed with fame, money, affection and what she seemed to seek most, a measure of power. Her childhood disillusioned her. But whose childhood does not? Her adult life was not marred by more than the normal share of grief. Only the ordeal of Hammett's last illness makes her vulnerable enough for an audience to like, despite the verbal savagery that she hurled at almost everyone she knew. The decision to present Hellman in a two-hour monologue provides a further emotional advantage: because her targets are not visible, spectators can savor the pith and vinegar of her language rather than cringe at its impact on the victims.

Caldwell's impeccable timing allows her to glory in the one-liners: "Tallulah [Bankhead] was sitting in a group of people, giving the monologue she always thought was conversation." The actress's voice, which was a surging river in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and a twanging Oriental lyre in Medea, performances that won her Tony Awards in 1968 and 1982, strikes impressively varied notes in Lillian: Caldwell is by turns the childhood Hellman, her mother, her father, her nanny, Hammett and the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Each evocation has a distinctive timbre, inflection and rhythm; each manages to seem independent of Hellman's shaping remembrance. The paramount strength of Caldwell's performance is her capacity to find soft spots in a woman who seemed armed and armored. This Lillian always longs for control but ends, fluttering and mute, knowing that finally she has none. --By William A. Henry III