Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron

INTRODUCTION
    On a January night in 1980, Lillian Hellman was in bed, watching
The Dick Cavett Show
, when Mary McCarthy hurled her famously vicious remark about Hellman into the ether. “Are there any writers you think are overrated?” Cavett asked. McCarthy replied: “The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.…” “What is so dishonest about her?” Cavett asked. “Everything,” McCarthy said. “But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”
    That remark, and what followed—a $2.25 million lawsuit Hellman filed against McCarthy—brought to a head almost forty-five years of skirmishing between the two women. Some of it is easy to document because it was in print. Mary, writing in
Partisan Review
in 1946, attacked Lillian’s work. Lillian responded in a
Paris Review
interview in 1964. Mary struck again in a
People
magazine interview in 1979. And so forth. But where and exactly how the enmity began is maddeningly elusive. Did the two women meet for the first time at a dinner party in 1936? Perhaps. Did they argue at that dinner about the Spanish civil war and the incredibly brave civil war martyr Andres Nin? Mary McCarthy argued with someone at a dinner party about the Spanish civil war and Andres Nin, because she wrote a short story about a dinner party where a young woman remarkably like Mary McCarthy has an argument with someone about theSpanish civil war and Andres Nin. Was that someone Lillian Hellman? Or did McCarthy confuse Hellman with another Stalinist, named Leane Zugsmith?
    Did their enmity begin not because of politics but for more personal reasons? Perhaps. For it seems that one night in 1936, while Mary McCarthy was living with
Partisan Review
editor Philip Rahv, Lillian Hellman met Rahv and attempted to seduce him. When he returned to the apartment he was sharing with McCarthy, he claimed he hadn’t actually slept with Hellman because he didn’t find her attractive. The incident, McCarthy told one of her biographers, was the only real fight of her relationship with Rahv. Was Rahv telling the truth? McCarthy believed him. Whether she was right to (do you?) is another mystery.
    The two women clearly and absolutely met at Sarah Lawrence College in 1948, and they most definitely had a fight there. Was the fight about the incredibly brave Andres Nin, as McCarthy claimed? Did McCarthy spend her life picking fights about the incredibly brave Andres Nin? Did she confuse the fight she’d had at the dinner party years earlier with the fight they had at Sarah Lawrence? There’s no way to know. Years later, when Mary’s biographers went to poet Stephen Spender—who was supposedly there—for the details, he turned out to be entirely confused about the episode. He thought it had taken place at his home. It had actually taken place at the home of Harold Taylor, then president of Sarah Lawrence—and Spender hadn’t been there at all. It seems, in fact, that there were not one but two fights that day: one at Taylor’s, and one later, at Spender’s. Or were there?
    I began thinking about writing something about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy a few years ago, when I read two biographies of McCarthy,
Writing Dangerously
by Carol Bright-man, and
Seeing Mary Plain
by Frances Kiernan. I’d never met McCarthy, but I’d known Lillian Hellman. I met her when I wasa journalist, and I have to say that for several years I was under her spell. Lillian was fun, a wonderful hostess, cook, correspondent, and storyteller. It was quite a while before I began to suspect that the fabulous stories she entertained her friends with were, to be polite about it, stories. When she sued McCarthy years afterward, I wasn’t surprised. She was sick by then, and legally blind. And her anger—the anger that was her favorite accessory—had