LOVERS AND SCOUNDRELS

By Martha Duffy

By the time Lillian Hellman died, 12 years ago, she had done all that was humanly possible to shore up the 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.

Dashiell Hammett might be called the principal love of Hellman's busy love life. He is credited with inventing the hard-boiled detective with the dour, daring Continental Op of Red Harvest and Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon. A clear, forceful prose stylist, Hammett was also a loner, a womanizer and a drunk. He had none of Hellman's worldly ambition, and he tailored his behavior to no one. Needless to say, she was crazy about him.

Joan Mellen's good idea was to do a double biography of both, Hellman and Hammett (HarperCollins; 572 pages). They were colorful, talented, careless people who lived hard, fought with abandon and traveled impetuously, seeking out their gifted contemporaries in an American movable feast. Both believed that sexual freedom was a natural right. Their passions, personal and professional, could be an opportunity to examine American cultural history from the 1930s to the 1970s--the life of the left and of the theater, which were often related. The trouble is that Mellen's interest in that fascinating world is only perfunctory, and though she does a conscientious job with the silent, depressive Hammett, she is almost obsessed by the scheming Hellman, and her portrait is grimly negative.

She may be right. Dissatisfied from the start with her birthright (fancy German Jewish on her mother's side, plain East European on her father's) and her looks (no blond curls or rosebud mouth), Hellman felt she "didn't get anything of what I wanted." She began lying as soon as she could tell a story. One of the first concerned a black woman named Sophronia, who worked for the family briefly during Hellman's babyhood, but was transformed into the main nurturing figure of her life. Later, says Mellen, "an enlarged photograph of Sophronia holding a tiny, impish Lillian was to adorn the drawing rooms of Hellman's mature life."

The rest of her talents did not come together so readily. Hammett was crucial to her success. When she began writing plays, he typed them (in those days she was a $15-a-week manuscript reader; he was a famous author). He slaved over her first hit, The Children's Hour, giving her the plot, goading her to sharpen the language and making her exaggerated gambits more realistic. Meanwhile, his own fiction was languishing; weakened by drink and pulmonary disease, he published only one book, The Thin Man, after he met Hellman.

Their relationship was of the can't-live-with-can't-live-without variety. But in the end he was not well rewarded. A communist, he ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and was indicted for refusing to testify. Lily, as he called her, was then a rich writer, but, lest her career be jeopardized, she refused to make his bail, departing, instead, for London and Paris. Why? Reveling in success, and desperate to write the script for an Alexander Korda movie of War and Peace, she was afraid of being branded a leftist.

Worse was to follow. Though Hammett's will makes it clear he wanted half his literary estate to go to his daughter Josephine, she did not inherit anything until 30-odd years after his death in 1961--and well after Hellman's in 1984. Hellman simply expropriated the money. Mellen's theory is that she considered it a posthumous payment on Hammett's part for not having loved her enough.

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.

There is much about Hellman to attack--her lies, her opportunism, her greed. She is big game for a biographer. But Hellman kept her friends--including lovers whom she treated capriciously--over decades, and almost anyone who comments on her speaks of her vitality and her energy. So Mellen's repeated harping on minor points gives her book a rancid quality. Hellman's ugliness, sexual vamping and minor instances of social cowardice are all pounced on and recounted. In her introduction Mellen says that at times, when confronted with a problem, she would ask herself, "What would Lily do?" One thing is certain: she would burn this book.