Lillian Hellman

...who later was the center of a controversy when challenged about her role in WWII.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Lillian Hellman on Telling On this day in 1934, Lillian Hellman's first play, The Children's Hour, opened on Broadway. It was an enormous success, running for twenty-one months and beginning the string of hits -- The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, Toys in the Attic -- that made Hellman one of the most popular playwrights in mid-century American theater. It was Hellman's lifetime friend and sometime-partner, Dashiell Hammett, who suggested she develop the Edinburgh case into a play, and whom a drunken Hellman called in Hollywood on opening night to share her good news. Hammett's "secretary" answered the phone, and as Hellman tells the story it took her two days to sober or wise up to the fact that Hammett had no secretary, and that the call was made at three a.m. California time. It took her only one day to fly out to Hollywood, smash the soda fountain in the house Hammett was renting, and fly back to New York.