Brilliantly tough talk with Roundhouse Lil, whose tobacco croak
comes off the page like a rap on the ears. This volume, the first
to appear about Hellman since her death in 1984, gathers 26
conversations, from the openings of her first plays through major
interviews in Paris Review, Esquire and Rolling Stone to more
recent talks with Dan Rather, Bill Moyers and Marilyn Berger. The
five-part Berger interview is the richest in the collection.
Subjects covered include, in the earlier interviews, Hellman's ties
to the theater and mounting her plays (she never felt "at home" in
the theater or in Hollywood, where she was both a reader for MGM
and later a scriptwriter), dealings with success and failure, her
30-year life with suspense writer Dashiell Hammett, their
disastrous run-in with the McCarthy committee, his and her
alcoholism, her feelings about modern theater and move into
autobiography and reactions to seeing herself depicted by Jane
Fonda in Julia, and her big blowup with Mary McCarthy and suit
against her for defamation of character. Hellman reveals that she
felt most at home during the act of writing, either plays or
autobiographies, but not as a Broadway habitue or Hollywood writer.
Her blacklisting after her appearance before HUAC cost her deeply
and even drove her into taking a job as a department store
salesclerk. Years later, she appeared draped in a mink in
Blackglama ads: "What Becomes a Legend Most?" - and had a good
laugh at herself. Not so funny was a show like Candide (she wrote
its book) slowly folding: "I began intensely to dislike the talk
about money and how one couldn't afford to rehearse another week or
two and how much money had to be raised. . .and I began to feel for
the first time in the theater the pressures that money could bring
on work, and to resent the idea that three years of my life was
going down the drain for money just because money couldn't be
raised to practice more, hold out longer." When her analyst told
her she was an alcoholic, she denied it but then stopped drinking
for six years - though one last drunken evening laid her up for
two-and-a-half days ("[T] hat's the end of that. I'll never do this
again. Age has descended!"). Charged on every page. (Kirkus
Reviews)
This volume includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman,
ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the
Broadway openings of her plays through extended talks with her
which appears in the "Paris Review," "Esquire," and "Rolling
Stone," down to her last interviews in the early 1980s.
In all these interviews, Miss Hellman gives her own account of
her eventful and exciting life, her evaluations and analyses of her
plays and accounts of how and why they came to be written.
Throughout, her views are expressed with the pungency, directness,
honesty, and wit which made Lillian Hellman such a universally
admired and respected figure.
Hellman was seldom far from where the action was. The
controversies in which she was involved are equaled only by the
honors she received. This volume supplements her own memories by
providing her own account of her life as she lived it--rather than
from the vantage of the late 1960s and 1970s when she composed the
memoirs.
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