November 20: On
this day in 1934, Lillian Hellman's first play, The Children's Hour, opened on Broadway. It was an enormous
success, running for twenty-one months and beginning the string of hits—The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, Toys in
the Attic—that made Hellman one of the most popular playwrights in
mid-century American theater. Hellman took her story of a schoolgirl's
malicious, anti-lesbian gossip from real life: in 1809, an Edinburgh court
accepted the claims of a student and found two of her teachers guilty of
"inordinate affection." The school was closed within forty-eight
hours of the girl's allegations, and the teachers never got another job,
although they won the court case on appeal eleven years later. In her play,
Hellman does not spell out the relationship between the teachers, but their
affection was inordinate enough to get the play banned in Chicago, Boston, and
London, and to preclude a possible Pulitzer in that some on the committee
refused to go see it.
It was Hellman's lifetime friend and sometime-partner,
Dashiell Hammett, who suggested she develop the Edinburgh case into a play, and
whom a drunken Hellman called in Hollywood on opening night to share her good
news. Hammett's "secretary" answered her 3 a.m. phone call, whereupon
Hellman flew to Hollywood, smashed the soda fountain in the house Hammett was
renting, and flew back to New York.
But her stage success and her feelings for Hammett had her
back in Hollywood early in 1935 as one of Sam Goldwyn's highest paid
screenwriters. She and Hammett were soon heavily involved in organizing the
Screen Writers Guild and in those other leftist activities which McCarthy would
later find so Un-American. She did not go to prison like Hammett, nor was she
as broken by her blacklisted years as he was, but her response to the HUAC
ultimatums is as famous as his silence: "... to hurt innocent people whom
I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent
and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's
fashions." This was 1952; later that year, in order to spit in the eye of
the gossip-listeners who now would not hire her, she directed a successful revival
of The Children's Hour.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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