They had more than spite in common

The lives of Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy are part of the dramatic back story of American political and intellectual thought of the 20th century.

Although they are now posed historically as sworn enemies because of the lawsuit at the end of their lives, they had much in common. Both were self-made women who juggled intense and demanding careers with Big Personal Lives. McCarthy was married four times, including a combustible hitch with Edmund Wilson, the revered essayist and literary journalist, all while making her own way as a critic and writer of daring fiction among the left-wing New York intellectual circle of the 1930s. Hellman began her storied relationship with Dashiell Hammett, the brilliant author of detective fiction, while she was still married to press agent Arthur Kober.

Hellman and McCarthy kindled ardent emotions in almost everyone they knew as well as in each other, although they barely met. Hellman disparagingly referred to McCarthy as that “lady magazine writer.” McCarthy’s salvo on the Dick Cavett show in 1980 was the basis for Hellman’s lawsuit against McCarthy for $2.25 million.

After success as a playwright and screenwriter, Hellman reinvented herself through her memoirs. A story from “Pentimento” about her alleged exploits in the antifacist underground became the 1977 film “Julia.”

McCarthy also wrote three memoirs, the first of which, “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” paved the way for a new genre of confessional memoir writing now very much in vogue. Her Hollywood career was somewhat less successful: One of her early collections of stories was sold to RKO for a pittance, and the film made from her most famous novel, “The Group” by Sidney Lumet, was dismissed by the critics.

McCarthy credited her teachers at Vassar for teaching her to break rules and take risks. She became one of the first women invited into the boys’ club at the Partisan Review, the New York literary journal that chronicled the political Left. A beautiful woman, she was conscious of the impact she made: She remembered how “good-looking” she was marching on Fifth Avenue singing “The Internationale” in a May Day parade or as the best-dressed girl at a Trotskyite cocktail party.

Hellman, after two years at New York University, went to work in publishing and then to Hollywood as a reader for MGM. Soon after, she met Hammett, who urged her to write plays, even suggesting her first subject in “The Children’s Hour.” Her involvement in Communist causes eventually landed her on the blacklist and before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where she submitted her famous letter stating: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

Although no beauty, she also had a turn as a style icon in a famous ad for Blackglama mink.

In their time, no one did “dish” better than Hellman and McCarthy. The biting wits, the famous dinner parties and the difficult demeanors of these Dark Ladies left zealous partisans and poisonous memoirs in their wake. The lawsuit found the wagons circling, with writers and intellectuals impatient to clamber aboard to take sides. Some thought they were just dredging up the battles among the leftists of the ‘30s and ‘40s, but from McCarthy’s point of view, Hellman was the defining example of modern literary charlatanism and personified the downward trajectory of honesty in writing.

Although Hellman died in 1984 before the suit was adjudicated, McCarthy had been punished financially and emotionally. She died five years later.