Contentious Minds: The Mary
McCarthy/Lillian Hellman Affair.
By Ben Pleasants &
Jennifer Gundy
WRITER’S COPY FOR TECH RUN THRU
Act one: Scene Two
Laura says:
Cultural
and Scientific Conference for World Peace.
Waldorf Astoria March 27, 1949.
Ladies’ room. Mary enters.
Mary
(Mary
is seated before the mirror putting down a large umbrella, she begins to fix
her hair. Laughs.) All this for what? (Looks at the lines around her eyes.) Spring?
It never comes until April.
Laura
Lillian
rushes in tipsy with cigarette smoked all the way down, hair is wild and makeup
smeared.)
Lily
Goddamn
snake. There you are.
Mary
(Sees
her through the mirror.) You followed me
in here, Miss Hellman? Lillian! (Halfway between a question and an
exclamation.)
Lily
Miss
Hellman will do fine. (Grabs her in the
chair and spins her around.) You bet
your sweet ass I did. (Puts down drink,
holds up umbrella.) Who the hell have
you and your hoards the idea of banging these fucking elephant umbrellas up and
down at the end of the sessions? Dwight
McDonald?
Mary
(Rises
calmly.) I’m afraid I don’t name
names. (Continues primping.) We did have something important to say. The Partisan Review crowd! (Smiles in mirror.) Poor Louis Untermeyer. He was taken aback. (Turns to face her grasping umbrella.) He’s not used to thumping. (She strikes umbrella on the floor close to
Hellman’s feet.) But if it’s names you
want, here are a few: Osip Mandelstam,
disappeared poet, Isaac Babel, murdered novelist, then there’s Boris Pilnyak,
Andrey Platonov. All guilty of (Beat)
potential crimes…Stalin simply (Gestures) erased them…
Lily
(Her
drunkenness makes her wobbly.) I suppose
that’s that critics do. Make things up
to suit their politics. Then smack down
umbrellas on the floor to make sure they are heard. Is that what they taught you at (Not
sure) Wellesley? I thought I recognized the mannered sneer.
Mary
Vassar. No.
They taught me to stand on my own feet without a sneer. To have an opinion. I should think that an educated woman like
yourself who attended…
Lily
NYU…Just
two years…(Incompletion bothers her and she can’t understand why she blurted it
out.)
Mary
…Would
take the contrary view when hearing that exsanguinate, Harvard Professor
Mathiesen, extolling poor Thoreau as a potential supporter of Henry Wallace.
Lily
(Turns
to face her.) The war against Germany is
over. What happened to our truce?
Mary
(Methodically
and without passion.) Yes, the war with
Germany is over and Hitler is dead.
Stalin is not. He continues to
imprison and murder poets and playwrights and novelists and actors and painters
and composers and workers for their beliefs, while you and Hammet and VJ Jerome
speak of him as though he were Jesus Christ instead of the gangster…
Lily
You
sooooooo miss the point. What was the
purpose here today? A cultural and
scientific conference for world peace!
Between East and West! America
and Soviet Union! The two great
powers. Allies. We’re here today so there can be no more
World Wars… Not to smack down umbrellas.
(Does so – then grabs her.) Have
we learned nothing after fifty million deaths?
Mary
(Pushing
her off, but calmly.) Whenever Stalin’s
name comes up, you change the subject.
Don’t break my umbrella; it’s raining… (Aside.) It belonged to Edmund.
Lily
You
heard Dmitri Shostakovich address the conference. The world’s greatest living composer. Did he appear to you to be a pawn of
Stalin? Did he look oily to you?
Laura
(Enters
and looks around.)
Mary
No. He didn’t look too comfortable to me, Miss
Hellman. But then, he’s Russian! Where are the Poles, the Czechs, and
Hungarians at the WORLD conference on culture and science? Too busy jumping out windows, like Jan
Masaryk?
Lily
Haven’t
you heard? It’s in all the papers. The poor man was depressed. Over a failed love affair with an American
novelist. Not you, for a change.
Mary
From
what I’ve read, he landed feet first three yards out from the window he jumped
from his underwear. Masaryk was a formal
man. He never would have jumped out the
window without a suit and tie.
Lily
Poor
Masaryk. Poor, conflicted man. Poor Czechoslovakia!
Laura
(to
herself.) Poor Poland.
Lily
What?
Mary
Here
in America among the intelligentsia, there is hardly a sound about Eastern
Europe.
Lily
Really. Out there in the streets are two thousand protestors
with signs reading REDS BACK TO MOSCOW, PUSH SHOSTAKOVICH OUT THE WINDOW, and
STAMP OUT HARVARD! I can’t be
responsible for Eastern Europe, but if you have ANY evidence that writers here
in America are being persecuted by anyone, by the government, especially by
communists, I’d like to hear about it.
Miss McCarthy!
Mary
Jan
Valtin. OUT OF THE NIGHT. The US Government tried to deport him. You never said a word.
Lily
He
should have been deported. His book was
all lies. He was never part of the
Comintern. The 1 Soviet Police Force!
Mary
And
then there’s Hollywood. The list of
writers they won’t touch. Erased for
their politics. All anti-Stalinists. Koestler and Farrel and John Dos Passos.
Lily
(Laughs.) Hollywood is not guilty of censorship, Miss
McCarthy. Just goot taste. (beat.)
As if book like “Darkness at Noon” could ever be a commercially
successful picture.
Mary
But
I have written proof. From Commissar
Trumbo of the Screen Writier’s Guild when he assured the public in print that
Hollywood had no plans to do Koestler or Valtin or Farrell or John Dos
Passos. Or that book by Krevchankop…
called… (Can’t recall it.)
Laura
I
CHOSE FREEDOM…. (Turns to them both.)
Mary
Thank
you. I CHOSE FREEDOM. And he was murdered right here in the USA!
Lily
Not
by the Screen Writers Guild. (beat as
she calms down._ I believe he died a
suicide.
Mary
Like
Masaryk, while you, Miss Hellman, would hurry back to Hollywood at the height
of the Depression with the other Stalinist playwrights of the New York to
gather up your $500 a week for Louis B. Mayer.
Lily
Samuel
Goldwyn, or do all Jews look alike to you? (beat)
Mary
…
Renting mansions in the pacific Pallisades, drinking cognac at the Ambassador
Hotel, while writing screen plays for the Proletariat. Fred and Ginger as they danced on an ocean
liner off Bora Bora!
Lily
I
never wrote for Fred and Ginger. I was,
a dedicated Marxist. I was in Spain when
you were on your train to Reno. I was on
the Russian Front when you were pulling weeds at Wellfleet. You and your thumping umbrella. Our truce is finished! Eastern Europe should be thankful it has a
friend like Comrade Stalin.
Mary
Hollywood
too. For all the dead in Eastern Europe
killed by silence, I thumped my umbrella!
And I’ve been told you all had wine cellars and underpaid your Negroes!
Lily
(Collapses
into a chair and begins to restore her make-up.) How would you know? You’ve never seen a Negro (Beat) close up.
Mary
I
hope your next play will be a comedy, Miss Hellman, I really do. Your recent morality dramas are more of less
moral-less. (Exits.)
Lily
GODDAM
FUCKING BLUEBLOODS. The first time I
heard that woman speak I should have strangled her! (to audience).
*(Fade
out.)
Almost
in the audience’s lap on both sides of a mirror slips:
(Between
Acts I & II Hellman adds the lines on her cheeks that show age. She works hard to add colour to her cheeks,
but her lips get no lipstick. McCarthy
adds colour to her lips and cheeks, and just a little powder to her nose. Her hair is pulled back in a bun. Mary is in a troubled state thinking of Clem,
who repulsed but may have gotten her pregnant.
Lillian is mournful over the abortion of the child she could have had
with Hammett. We should see in their
faces the fact that the childbearing years are over and their bridges have been
burned. Hellman here is the melody,
while McCarthy is the angry base. She
allows anger only in private.)
Laura
Mary
and Lillian are alone in their dressings rooms, dressing for the theatre. Mary is in a troubled state.
Mary & Lily
So.
The
thought of it
We
shared a disease together.
God
Mother’s
baby
I
look hard…
Fathers
maybe. (Pause.)
As
if it were feces
One
child
To
be flushed away.
Was
just right.
Fetus,
not feces
The
second…
And
dash…
God
What
VD didn’t he have…
It
might have been Clem’s
Still
Just
the thought of it
It
was ours
Suckling
an infant
And
I had to look…
With
that leer of his…
Maybe
That
snicker and his sarcasm…
Five
months…
A
child
With
hooded eyes
His
features and mine combined…
Half
resembling Clem
Not
my only chance
(Pause)
with Philip…
I’ve
flushed others away…
But
then
Men
know nothing about women…
He
never would have wanted any…
Still…
With
him it would have been a thing of
beauty…
I
looked at the face
Maybe
I was close to driving off the
road that night…
The
aloneness of being
It
was
Between
two men…
A
boy…
So
Now
To
hell with babies…
Here
I am at 52…
I
gave birth to books… (To mirror)
Who
would have been
Not
so bad
Holding
him
At
45
As
if
Almost
I
could ever be a mother…
Young…
It’s
bad enough just to be a lover…
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