samo iz real life-a
Dashiell Hammett + Lillian Hellman
Samuel Dashiell Hammett Meets Lillian Florence Hellman Kober
"Who's That Man?"
"If a man has a past that he wants to forget, he can easiest drug his mind against memory through his body, with sensuality if not with narcotics."
—The Dain Curse
"I wanted blond curls and great blue eyes, tiny nose, rosebud mouth . . . you can see that I didn't get any of what I wanted."
—Lillian Hellman
On November 22, 1930, they were both in Hollywood married to other people. She was out for the evening with Lee Gershwin, a queen bee herself, whose house was always filled with people. Outside you could hear the sound of the racket hitting the ball on the tennis courts, inside the shuffling of cards. Every Sunday was open house. Lillian had met Lee in Paris in 1928. Her husband was Ira and her brother-in-law was George. Oscar Levant was often in attendance playing the piano.
Lee and Dotty Parker and Lillian were all twenties women with an appetite for life. They shared an acerbic wit. Lively and fast-talking New York Jewish women, they smoked and they drank, and it didn't matter that they weren't beauties. Keeping up with the men, manipulating always, they demanded sexual freedom and they got it. Pragmatists, they knew how to cut their losses. If getting their way meant lying, they would lie. "That little area in her throat would throb when she was about to lie," Lee observed of Lillian, breaking into peals of laughter. "You always knew when she was lying."
That night of November 22 was producer Darryl Zanuck's party. The Gershwins were his guests at a moviepremiere and their guests were Lillian, a script reader at M-G-M, and her far better-known husband, would-be playwright Arthur Kober, now drawing a weekly salary from Paramount as a scriptwriter.
Lillian Hellman at twenty had already been so resolute and independent a spirit that Kober doubted from the start whether he could hold her. He was short and round and soft-looking, not unlike Lillian's father, Max Hellman—a dark little butterball whose appearance was very Semitic. He had emigrated at the age of three from Austria-Hungary and was more at home in Yiddish than in English. His forte was humor, his style modeled on that of Ring Lardner.
Kober adored young Lillian Hellman; the room lit up for him when she appeared. He was diffident. She knew how to make him feel good about himself. On their first date they went on a carriage ride through Central Park. Lillian wore a new hat. Considering herself a homely woman, she did everything she could to transcend that disadvantage. Beautiful clothes were one important way. In the middle of the ride, Kober seized the hat and threw it into the bushes. Then he leaped out of the carriage, ostensibly to find the hat. Later he told her he only had to urinate. The hat was lost forever.
....
And then the slim, tall man appeared at the door. It was Dashiell Hammett. Kober lost her. Hammett got her. And she got him. Forever.
Edited by luba, 31 October 2004 - 08:13.