I Remember Nothing (8 page)

The other day I felt a cold coming on. So I decided to have chicken soup to ward off the cold. Nevertheless, I got the cold. This happens all the time: you think you’re getting a cold; you have chicken soup; you get the cold anyway. So is it possible that chicken soup gives you a cold?

I met Lillian Hellman just before her memoir
Pentimento
was published in 1973. I was working as an editor at
Esquire
and we were publishing two sections from the book, one of them called “Turtle.” It was about Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. I’d never seen any of Lillian Hellman’s plays, and I’d struggled with Hammett’s mysteries, but I read “Turtle” in galleys before we printed it, and I thought it was the most romantic thing ever written. It’s a story about a vicious snapping turtle that Hellman and Hammett kill. They slice its head off and leave it in the kitchen to be made into
soup. It somehow resurrects itself, crawls out the door, and dies in the woods, prompting a long, elliptical, cutthroat debate between Hammett and Hellman about whether the turtle is some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.

I have no excuse for my infatuation with this story. I was not stupid, and I was not particularly young, both of which might be exculpatory. Like many people who read
Pentimento
, it never crossed my mind that the stories in it were fiction, and the dialogue an inadvertent parody of Hammett’s tough-guy style. I thought it was divine. I immediately called
The New York Times Book Review
and asked if I could interview Hellman on the occasion of
Pentimento
’s publication. They said yes.

Hellman was already on her way to her remarkable third act. She’d published
An Unfinished Woman
, a memoir, which had been a best seller and National Book Award winner, and now with
Pentimento
she was on the verge of an even bigger best seller. She turned up on talk shows and charmed the hosts as she puffed on her cigarettes and blew smoke. With her two successful books, she’d eradicated the memory of her last few plays, which had been failures. Eventually the most famous story from
Pentimento
, “Julia,” was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards as Hammett, and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, the brave anti-Nazi spy whom Hellman claimed she’d smuggled $50,000 to in Germany in 1939, in a fur hat. The end of Hellman’s life was a train wreck, but
that came later. I wrote a play about it, but that came even later.

Lillian was sixty-eight when I met her, and by any standard, even of the times, she looked at least ten years older. She had never been a beauty, but once she’d been young; now she was wrinkled and close to blind. She had a whiskey voice. She used a cigarette holder and one of those ashtrays that look like beanbags, with a little metal contraption in the middle for snuffing out the ash. Because she could barely see, the question of whether the perilously ever-lengthening ash would ever make it to the ashtray without landing in her lap and setting her on fire provided added suspense to every minute spent with her.

But in some strange way that you will have to take my word for, she was enormously attractive—vibrant, flirtatious, and intimate.

I went to see her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which sat on a rocky beach near Chilmark. The interview is an embarrassment. I did not ask a tough question, and, by the way, I didn’t have one. I was besotted. She was the woman who had said to the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s patterns.” She had loved the toughest guy there was, and although he had been drunk for almost their entire time together, he loved her back. Now it turned out she had practically stopped Hitler.

In the afternoon after our first interview, I went for
a walk down to Lillian’s beach. I’d been there no more than a few minutes when a man turned up. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was older, gray-haired, fleshy. He asked if I was staying with Lillian. I immediately became nervous. I stood up and made some sort of excuse and walked as quickly as I could over the rocks and back to the house. Lillian was sitting out on the patio in a muumuu.

“How was the beach?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Was anyone else there?”

“A man,” I said.

“Older?” she said. “Fat?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That does it,” she said.

She stood up and took off toward the beach.

A few minutes later she came back. The intruder had vanished. She was in a rage. She was apparently in an ongoing war with the man. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stay off her beach. Goddamn it, she’d told him to stop trying to have conversations with her friends. She would tell him again, if he ever dared to come around and she caught him lurking there. She was furious that he’d disappeared before she’d had the chance to order him away. I couldn’t believe it. She was dying for a fight. She loved confrontation. She was a dramatist and she needed drama. I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.

After my very bad interview with her appeared in
The Times
, Lillian and I became friends. “Friends” is
probably not the right word—I became one of the young people in her life. She wrote me letters all the time, funny letters, mostly typed, and signed Miss Hellman. She sent me recipes. She came to my apartment and I went to hers. It was hard to imagine Lillian had ever been a Communist, I have to say that. I’d grown up knowing a lot of left-wing people in Hollywood who lived well, but there was no trace of the Old Left in Lillian’s apartment at 630 Park Avenue—no Mexican art, for instance, or Ben Shahns; it was furnished in a style that fell somewhere between old WASP and German Jewish—brocade sofas, small tables made of dark wood, oil paintings of the sea, Persian rugs.

She held small dinners for six or eight, and she always had rollicking stories to tell that I now realize were exaggerated, but which at the time were hilarious. She’d had a run-in with a saleswoman one Sunday in the fur department of Bergdorf Goodman. Jason Epstein had set her kitchen on fire making Chinese food. Lillian was fun. She was so much fun. She had a great deep laugh, and she always had a subject for general conversation. “My great-uncle has died,” she said one night at her table, “and the lawyer called to say, ‘He has left you a pleasant sum of money.’ How much money do you think is a pleasant sum of money?” What a game! What a wonderful game! We eventually agreed, after much debate, that $675,000 was our idea of a pleasant sum of money. She said we had guessed it on the nose. Was it true? Was any of it true? Who knows? I listened, enthralled, as she told me how Hammett
had once run off with S. J. Perelman’s wife, how Peter Feibleman (to whom she eventually left her home on the Vineyard) had hurt her feelings by trying to make a date with one of her good friends, how she’d once seen a young woman she thought might be Julia’s daughter. This last episode took place on a cliff, as I recall. Lillian and Dashiell Hammett had been standing on a cliff when a young woman came up to her, touched her arm, and ran away. “I’ve always wondered,” she said. “Because she looked so much like Julia.”

Here is a letter she wrote me about delicatessens, my father, Henry Ephron, and me:

It’s a delightful letter, isn’t it? I have a pile of her letters. When I look through them, it all comes back to me—how much I’d loved the early letters, how charmed I’d been, how flattered, how much less charming they began to seem, how burdensome they became, and then, finally, how boring.

The story of love.

Here was a thing Lillian liked to do: the T.L. Most people nowadays don’t know what a T.L. is, but my mother had taught us the expression, although I can’t imagine why.

T.L. stands for Trade Last, and here’s how it works: you call someone up and tell her you have a T.L. for her. This means you’ve heard a compliment about her—and you will repeat it—but only if she first tells you a compliment
someone has said about you. In other words, you will pass along a compliment, but only if you trade it last.

This, needless to say, is a strange, ungenerous, and seriously narcissistic way to tell someone a nice thing that has been said about them.

“Miss Ephron,” she would say when she called, “it’s Miss Hellman. I have a T.L. for you.”

The first few times this happened, I was happy to play—the air was full of nice things about Lillian. She was the girl of the year. But as time passed, the calls became practically nightmarish. Everything was starting to catch up with her. She’d written another book,
Scoundrel Time
, a self-aggrandizing work about her decision not to testify before HUAC, and followed it with her somewhat problematical decision to pose for a Blackglama mink ad. People were talking about her, but not in any way that gave me something to trade. Not that I was hearing much of it—I was living in Washington, and people in Washington don’t talk about anyone who doesn’t live in Washington, and that’s the truth.

But there she was, on the other end of phone, waiting for me to come up with my end of the T.L. My brain would desperately race trying to think of something I could say, anything. I had to be careful, because I didn’t want to get caught in a lie. And if I made up a story, I had to be sure I was quoting a man, because despite her warmth to me, Lillian didn’t care about nice things women said about her. And I couldn’t say, “I’m in Washington,
no one here is talking about you.” So I would eventually make something up, usually about how much my husband adored her (which was true). But it never really satisfied her. Because what Lillian really wanted to hear, T.L.-wise, was that I’d just spent the evening with someone like Robert Redford (to pick an imaginary episode out of the air) and that he’d confessed that he desperately wanted to sleep with her.

When my marriage ended and I moved back to New York, Lillian was shocked. She couldn’t imagine why I’d left him. She called and asked me to reconsider. She said I ought to forgive him.

Neither my husband nor I had the remotest interest in our getting back together, but Lillian was determined, and she kept pressing me. Can’t you forgive him? I took the moment to slip out of her life.

I told myself that I could never have gone on with the friendship because of the way Lillian had reacted to the divorce.

Then, about a year later, a woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a book about her life as a spy before World War II, and it became clear that Hellman had stolen her story. There was no Julia, and Lillian had never saved Europe with her little fur hat.

I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because Lillian had turned out to be a pathological liar.

Then Lillian sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar.

And I told myself I could never have gone on with
the friendship because I could never respect someone who had turned against the First Amendment.

I actually did. I actually told myself that.

But the truth is that any excuse will do when this sort of romance comes to an end. The details are just details. And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends.

If the younger woman is a writer, she eventually writes something about the older woman.

And then years pass.

And she herself gets older.

And there are moments when she would like to apologize—at least for the way it ended.

And this may be one of them.

A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage.

But Graydon cheerfully persisted, and the restaurant
he opened downtown became a huge success. A year later, he told me he was going to open a second restaurant, this one uptown, in the old location of the Monkey Bar. He said he hoped it would be something like the Ivy in London, which is one of my favorite places, and did I have any suggestions for the menu? I immediately sent a long list. At the top of it was meat loaf. I love meat loaf. It feels like home.

A few months before the restaurant opened, I was invited to a tasting. It included an unusual dish consisting of two thick slabs of meat loaf that had been sautéed slightly and were firm on the outside. This made for a nice combination of squishy and crispy and thus avoided the primary pitfall of meat loaf, which is that it’s so soft and mushy you can polish it off in under a minute. I would not say that this particular meat loaf felt like home exactly, but it was delicious nonetheless. It came covered with a lovely mushroom sauce, which made sense given the crisp exterior. Normally I would take a strong position against mushroom sauce, but this meat loaf seemed to cry out for it, and not in a bad way.