Make This!: Tallulah Bankhead and Lillian Hellman Season of "Feud"

5 years ago

Communist stage and screen writer Lillian Hellman considered herself "a most casual member" in later years. But in December 1936, her play "Days to Come" closed on Broadway just after seven performances, Communist publications criticized her failure to take sides between the factory owners and its workers instead of representing both sides as valid. She had officially joined the party two years later. Hellman's personal favorite play she had written, "The Little Foxes," opened on February 13, 1939 and this time, it was considered a hit running for 410 performances until February 3rd, 1940. The company then toured for a whole year after.

After the USSR invaded Finland on November 30, 1939, many stars from John Barrymore to Edward G. Robinson offered to assist in Finnish relief. "Foxes"'s lead, Tallulah Bankhead was no exception. She was already vocal in her criticisms against communism and wanted to put on a benefit performance of "The Little Foxes." Her fellow cast members also started to share this benefit with the press without knowing they needed permission from Hellman and director Herman Shumlin. When they found out, they immediately declined there would ever be performance and that "America had no dog in the Soviet-Finnish fight." (Ryskind, Alan. Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters - Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler. 2015)

"Producers are God-damned communists," Bankhead raged to the Harvard Crimson in March 1940, "They get angry about Japan and Germany, but they won't let me put on a benefit show for the Finns. If there's anybody I hate it's a bigot. I know all this publicity stuff makes me look like one, but I'm really sincere about the war that those communist bullies are carrying on against a poor democratic country." "I've adopted Spanish Loyalist orphans and sent money to China, causes for which both Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman were strenuous proponents. They were questions of human suffering and we were glad to play benefits for them . . . . If Spanish refugees, the Chinese dispossessed and German refugees are deserving of aid, why not the Finnish women and children who are suffering privations caused by wanton invasion? Why should [they] become so insular?"

Hellman started telling everyone that she had an interview with the New Yorker claiming that it was Bankhead who refused playing a benefit for the Spanish Loyalists so no Finnish performance was actually required. Both Bankhead and Hellman knew this to be a "brazen invention," Bankhead herself having actually helped Spanish Republicans fighters and their families flee their civil war in 1937. Hellman could only continue to dig her own grave. "I don't believe in that fine, lovable little Republic that everyone gets so weepy about. I've been there and it seems like a little pro-Nazi Republic to me." Bankhead was outraged and called Hellman a moral hypocrite. Hellman and Bankhead never spoke to one another until late 1963.