Julia

EIGHT WORDS DONE HER IN

“Julia,” one of seven reminiscences in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, is only 38 pages long in paperback yet it’s sweeping and emotional; you feel as if you’re reading a guarded confession. The economically dramatic repentance isn’t centered only on the dangerous travails of anti-Fascist activist Julia, Hellman’s beloved friend since childhood, it’s also a crafty apology about Hellman’s inability to prevent what happened—Julia’s demise at the hands of the Nazis. Because she couldn’t tranquilize her pain, the story took decades to finally appear in print. The memoir became so widely praised there just had to be a movie, and who more esteemed than Fred Zinnemann as sucker? The catch, of course, is this: nothing about the relationship between Hellman and Julia as published is true; she was told the intrepid story of Muriel Gardiner by the lawyer who had both women as clients. The two women never met, and Gardiner died in 1985, eight months after Hellman’s death brought on by years of hard drinking, chain smoking and the mounting stress over her libel lawsuit against Mary McCarthy who, during an appearance on Dick Cavett’s show, claimed everything Hellman wrote was a lie. While there were dissenters other than McCarthy about Hellman’s “memories,” there were equal fronts protecting her by silencing their suspicions, as few wanted to call out a famous author as a puzzling if not pathological liar. The issue isn’t whether writers have prerogatives to alter stories, but, in exercising them, the cardinal rule is to do it without the label of unvarnished truth attached. To disinterested observers, she might have lifted Gardiner’s real heroics to expand the tale of the victim briefly written about at the conclusion of chapter seven in An Unfinished Woman. However, her vociferous insistence minus any proof Julia as longtime friend existed while at the same time publicly, and legally, inveighing against those who were eventually proved right to doubt her would be one literati atrocity too many. (She had previously earned enmity over the loose veracity in Scoundrel Time and for trying to squelch criticism of her in a book by Diana Trilling.) Ironically, it would be the success of Zinnemann’s 1977 Julia, and in it the cheaply planted gossip her friendship with Julia was the basis for The Children’s Hour, essentially about the perils of contagion in lying, that helped ensure her slow and painful undoing. Because Alvin Sargent’s script couldn’t answer questions popping up—see Commentary—the crucifiers armed themselves with fresh allegations, all of which swelled beyond the ability of the author to control them, other than to protest too much and implore us to understand she was protecting the privacy of Julia’s family, fearful they might sue, fearful any remaining Nazis sleeper cells might do them harm, even though her Julia had been deceased since 1938. If lovers of theatre do not doubt her gift as dramatist—rich with skills in plot construction and dialogue and the dare to show Americans as connivers and destroyers (and even at low ebb, as in Toys in the Attic, she’s at the least entertaining)—most clearly she was not a consistently nonprevaricating chronicler of her crusader-idealist life. Like other celebrated American playwrights, she was her own worst melodrama and maybe it’s partly why she smoked so incessantly—she had to puff away the ever-present anger she never fully came to terms with. If lying became an obsessive shield, searing self-examination, as opposed to image renovation, was unthinkable. In the moving memoir She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron, author Richard Cohen is very succinct on Hellman’s self-immolation: “A metastasizing ugliness.” (Years later on Theater Talk, Cavett called Hellman a “basilisk,” with the show providing its definition in a subtitle.)

Can Hellman’s fabrications be divorced from a big movie directed by one of moviedom’s most respected helmsmen and starring Jane Fonda who brings stature to the author? Ignorance of facts will likely swing open receptiveness—some of Julia is moving, some of Douglas Slocombe’s images are like meals for the eyes, and at times the acting and Zinnemann’s tempered class qualify for Academy Award consideration. (Nominated for eleven, the film won three, including best supporting performances by Jason Robards as Dash Hammett and Vanessa Redgrave as barmy Santa Julia and, most embarrassing, Sargent for best adapted screenplay.) Apprised of the facts, the movie’s gaps become evidence of fraud as Hellman’s limited involvement in the making of the film didn’t provide the bridges connecting the fantasy flashback sequences to the realities of her private and political lives. Sargent’s efforts to fortify the shaky foundation must have been torturous and Zinnemann’s master polish can’t glide over the hurdles of seismic emptiness, either—he’s too much of a gentleman to have asked Hellman to fess up—so he instead tries to give her a softened raison d’être she appeared to need. Yet he doesn’t bridle Fonda’s punchy glimpses into Hellman’s hostilities as rages against fashionable injustices. Or prejudices: Hellman was never known to publicly slap anyone for intimating she had a sexual relationship with a woman. There is, though, one scene of Fonda throwing a typewriter out a window Hellman emphatically said never happened and other writers believe it. (Only paramours of writers do that sort of thing.) Nor does the director avoid measured sentimentality: not knowing if Hellman ever cried—except in the boozed dark over Dash’s deteriorating health and approaching death—Fonda’s power as actress can make welling convincing. Even before the ruse of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship was uncovered, Fonda’s scenes of remembrances—their school days together, meeting Julia in Europe, the secretive efforts to smuggle cash, and then Julia’s victimization and aftermath—weren’t heavy with conviction, they didn’t feel right, recalling Hitchcock’s clumsy frights in Torn Curtain, despite Zinnemann pouring on serious élan to make the terra incognita look less empty. Something else doesn’t fully work for Fonda—the smoking: inhaling with furious cautiousness, she’s a long way from getting the Hellman habit of being lip-locked on a fag. (Neither are Judy Davis’s carcinogenics entirely authentic in Kathy Bates’s Dash & Lilly.) Hellman’s use of pentimento to excuse her fraudulent brushstrokes—and heard via Fonda’s narration at the start of the picture—engenders within us the impression her subterfuge may be about the deep regret in not achieving anything close to an idealized friendship, perhaps exempting hers with Dorothy Parker (who’s frivolously dismissed here and receives better treatment in Dash & Lilly). Hellman’s reputation toppled with these eight words: “I trust absolutely what I remember about Julia.”

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com