That's a lesson Mahoney found out the hard way, spending her seventeenth summer as a housegirl (maid, valet, chauffeur, personal shopper, cook, answering service, gardener) for the infamous literary figure. On the surface (and if you were to believe a recent, rather nasty review in Vogue) a scathing portrait of Hellman, this captivating true story actually points a finger at both the crotchety old writer AND the bratty, somewhat immature teenager.
"The book isn't really about Lillian at all. Lillian is like the catalyst; what happened that summer was disappointing, but it was also a real turning point for me," Mahoney says. "I was so miserable about things with my family falling apart."
At the time, Mahoney's mother was an alcoholic, partially paralyzed by polio and dealing with the death of her husband. Though loving and charming, she was sometimes incapable of caring for her brood of seven - to the point that her underage children sometimes had to drive themselves and their passed-out mother home from some function.
"I thought 'This Lillian Hellman is so great - she leads an exciting and glamorous life, and she writes about it so well,'" the author says. "I really thought if I could just be around her, maybe some of that would rub off on me. What I learned, though, was that she was really no different from anyone else, including me."
The big problem was that, after caring for her mother and struggling to keep up family appearances for so long, the last thing Mahoney needed was the task of caring for someone else. Yet she got the job not because she needed it (at least not financially), but because she wanted it; a fan of Hellman's work, she simply wrote the author/playwright and availed her services in "any capacity." (There's where that "careful what you wish for" part comes in.)
By turns, one ends up feeling frustration and sympathy for both women. There are certainly times when Hellman comes across as a hairy old bitch. Then again, as Mahoney complains about Hellman's demands (such as remembering to keep Hellman's medications on ice, or even not serving James Taylor tea that's spilled over into his saucer), you can't help but think in fact SHE is the one being unreasonable.
"The experience was so mortifying to me. Not just Lillian, and the fact that she didn't like me - I felt bad about the whole thing," recalls Mahoney, who never again spoke to Hellman. "I had a journal that I couldn't look at. I didn't want to think about it.
"Looking back at it now, twenty years later, I realize neither one of us was really so terrible."
(Shelly Ridenour)
- "A Likely Story: One Story with Lillian Hellman"
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.