A Literary Hoax

From: "Secrets and Lies: The Life of Lillian Hellman"

by Melissa Burdick Harmon, Biography Magazine, June 1999

The Real Julia [p. 92]

In the 1977 film Julia, based on Lillian Hellman's memoir Pentimento, an aristocratic antifascist woman persuades her dear friend, Hellman, to make the dangerous journey to prewar Berlin in order to smuggle in $50,000 for the cause. The movie, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, Jane Fonda as Hellman, and Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammet, was a hit, as was the book that preceded it. And none of it was true.

There was, however, a brave, valiant, and unassuming woman who did what Julia did. Her name was Muriel Gardiner Buttinger. She was heir to the Armour meat-packing fortune, and she had gone to Vienna in 1926 to study psychoanalysis. She was an avowed antifascist, and under the alias "Mary" she both engaged in risky Julia-esque journeys for the underground and contributed a large part of her fortune to their activities. Much of the chillingly dangerous work that Buttinger did involved helping Jews escape from Austria. She herself left Europe only after the invasion of Poland--catching the last possible ship back to America. And she never met Lillian Hellman.

They did, however, have one thing in common. They shared the same lawyer, Wolf Schwabacher, a garrulous man who loved to tell a good story. He almost certainly told Hellman the story of this brave and heroic heiress. Hellman then simply stole it, adorned it with detail about Dorothy Parker and hat boxes and rolls and milk, and made it her own.

From the beginning, friends and critics alike questioned the credibility of Hellman's Julia, saying, for instance, that the underground would hardly have sent such a famous Jewish antifascist on a secret mission, and noting that Hellman had been somewhere else when she claimed to have been heroically sneaking into Germany. Ernest Hemingway's ex-wife Martha Gellhorn did an even more elaborate debunking, disproving most of the contents of "Pentimento".

Someone else noticed the Julia story too. Muriel Gardiner Buttinger wrote Hellman after the publication of Pentimento, politely pointing out the similarities to her own story and that the two women shared the same lawyer. She wondered if Hellman's character "might be a composite of several friends and people she had merely heard about." Hellman did not reply. M.B.H.