Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron Page A

turned wearisome, even to those who were loyal to her.
    When I read the biographies of McCarthy, it crossed my mind that there might be something to write about McCarthy and Hellman and their collision. At first I thought of some sort of high-minded television series—six or seven parts, say—that told the story of their parallel, albeit dissimilar, lives. Mary, of course, was an orphan, Catholic, abused. Lillian was an only child, Jewish, spoiled. Mary was beautiful. Lillian was not. Mary became an intellectual and a star in a world that had a pathological distrust not just of commercial success but also of stars. Lillian was the epitome of the commercial playwright, rich and famous. Mary was a Trotskyite, Lillian a Stalinist. (Lillian was what’s known as an unreconstructed Stalinist. As she lay dying, someone I know said to her, “Well, Lillian, what do you think of Joe Stalin now?” She replied, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”) Perhaps most crucial, Mary was a critic, a great critic. Lillian was not a great playwright, but she was a great dramatist. It seemed so extraordinary that these two women—who’d written so much, who’d led such rich and complicated lives, who’d almost never been in the same room, who truly couldn’t stand each other—had ended up, in some terrible way, linked forever.
    But every time I thought about this television series—now called something fabulously pretentious (in my imagination), like “Two American Women”—I became tired. The words “Who can I get to write it?” kept crossing my mind. The lastthing I wanted to work on was a long project that would end up seeming like docudrama. And I’d seen quite a lot of dramatizations of Lillian’s life, onstage and in film. She’d been played by Jane Fonda, Elaine Stritch, Linda Lavin, Zoe Caldwell, and Judy Davis. But none of it had really caught Lillian, the Lillian I knew, anyway; and all of it seemed so constricted, even by the loose rules of biography.
    And what was to be done about “the facts”—the poor, distressed facts of these women’s lives? In her autobiographical writing, McCarthy was painfully honest. But what, for example, had actually gone on during McCarthy’s terrible marriage to Edmund Wilson? McCarthy spent her life coming up with a succession of excuses for why she married him in the first place, none of them remotely satisfying, apparently even to her. The divorce depositions of McCarthy and Wilson completely contradict each other. Lillian, on the other hand, had no interest whatsoever in the truth; her attitude toward it is probably best summed up by one of her characters in
The Little Foxes
, who says: “God forgives those who invent what they need.” The story of Julia in
Pentimento
, which became the basis of a critically acclaimed movie, was certainly a total invention. And the Julia effect spilled over into a great deal of Lillian’s autobiography—every bit of it became suspect. As Gore Vidal famously said of Hellman and Dashiell Hammett: “Did anyone ever see them together?”
    And then one day I was talking to someone about Hellman and McCarthy, and he said, “Could it be a play?” A play? I’d never written a play. I’d always wanted to write one; I’d been an avid theatergoer all my life. I’d always hoped that something would cross my brain that was a play, but what was a play? If a play was six people trapped for arbitrary reasons in a summer house with a lot of French doors, I was out of luck. Years ago I’d attended a program at the Actors Studio that was meant to encourage playwriting. It was interesting, actually: every weeksomeone would turn up with a play he’d written, actors would perform it, usually at a table read, and then the people in the audience—most of them writers—would attack it. The writer Harold Brodkey was part of the group, and no matter what the play’s subject was, he usually accused the playwright of being anti-Semitic.