Dashiell Hammett's legacy lies not only in his writing, but in his living -- rough, wild and on the edge

dashiell hammett circa 1940 Ran on: 02-06-2005 Top: George Raft, who turned down the Sam Spade role, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, who snubbed the Brigid O'Shaughnessy part. dashiell hammett circa 1940 Ran on: 02-06-2005 Top: George Raft, who turned down the Sam Spade role, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, who snubbed the Brigid O'Shaughnessy part. Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Dashiell Hammett's legacy lies not only in his writing, but in his living -- rough, wild and on the edge 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

He was a dashing, elusive figure who rose from rural working-class roots to become one of the best paid and most celebrated American writers of the 1930s. A free-spending sybarite who nearly drank himself to death before putting down the bottle in '48, he died broke and mostly forgotten in 1961 at the age of 66.

Thirty-three years earlier, he sat at the kitchen table in his Post Street apartment, writing the book that would up the ante for the detective novel. Steeped in the foggy mystery of the sin-loving city on the Pacific edge of the continent, "The Maltese Falcon" made Dashiell Hammett's name. Published on Valentine's Day 75 years ago, it's a signal work of American fiction as revered as "Huckleberry Finn" or "The Sun Also Rises."

The rail-thin man with the white hair and black mustache wrote four of his five novels in San Francisco in the 1920s. But it was Hammett's rough-and- tumble experiences as a private detective before coming here -- consorting with cops and crooks and duplicitous officials, miners, vigilantes and the rich men who pulled the strings -- that shaped the way he and his tough fictional heroes saw the world: It was a corrupt place run by ruthless people, to be navigated with cunning and adherence to one's own ethical code.

The things Hammett saw as a Pinkerton operative also helped make him a Marxist. A distinctly American Marxist. He was an upbeat, patriotic man who enlisted in the Army during both world wars and stuck to the ideals of equality and justice, despite the going-over he got from the government during the commie witch hunts of the early '50s, when he was jailed and blacklisted. Never one to bellyache, he accepted his fate with the steely grace and ironic humor with which he took everything chance had brought him.

He was born Samuel Dashiell Hammett on his father's family farm in Maryland in 1894. His father was an alcoholic womanizer who worked as a watchman, a salesman and at other short-lived occupations. At 14, Hammett dropped out of Baltimore's Polytechnic high to help support the family (both sides of which traced their American lineage back to the 1700s). He worked as a messenger for the B&O Railroad, where he developed a taste for gambling, booze and hookers. Then he got a job as a clerk with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. With his brains and quiet competence, Hammett was promoted and trained in the stealthy trade of the private eye by James Wright, a squat little man on whom he based the Continental Op, the dogged detective of his early stories.

Around 1917, Hammett was sent to Montana, where he infiltrated the ranks of striking copper miners. He and other Pinkertons were apparently offered $5, 000, a bloody fortune at the time, to help kill Frank Little, the Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) leader organizing the miners. Little was lynched from a Butte train trestle without Hammett's help.

It was then, "perhaps at the moment he was asked to murder Frank Little, or perhaps at the moment that he learned that Little had been killed, possibly by other Pinkerton men, Hammett saw that the actions of the guards and the guarded, of the detective and the man he's stalking, are reflexes of the same sensibility, on the fringe where murderers and thieves live," wrote San Francisco novelist Diane Johnson in her rich 1983 Hammett biography.

"He saw that he himself was on the fringe or might be, in his present line of work, and was expected to be, according to a kind of oath of fealty that he and other Pinkerton men took," Johnson continued. "He also learned something of the lives of poor miners, whose wretched strikes the Pinkerton people were hired to prevent, and about the lies of mine owners. Those things were to sit in the back of his mind."

They came to the fore nine years later in San Francisco, as Hammett sat at the typewriter pecking out his first his novel, "Poisonville," a darkly comic tale that drew on his Montana experiences. The title was changed to "Red Harvest" when Knopf published it in '27. The book was serialized in Black Mask, the pulp magazine that had published Hammett's stories since 1923 and serialized "The Maltese Falcon."

Hammett had come here in '21, sick with tuberculosis. The debilitating disease had been diagnosed when he was hospitalized with the deadly Spanish flu while serving stateside in the Army ambulance corps during World War I. After his discharge, he went back to Pinkerton and transferred west to Spokane. But he fell ill again and entered the Public Health Service hospital in Tacoma. He met a nurse there named Josephine Dolan, and they fell in love.

Hammett went off to a San Diego hospital that treated "lungers." He smoked and read -- he'd tackled Kant at 13 and read everything from James and Dostoevsky to books on physics and birdsong -- and caroused in Tijuana. The guys who laid in bed, he said, seemed to die sooner. Josephine wrote saying she was pregnant. He wrote back proposing marriage. They met in San Francisco, got hitched at St. Mary's Cathedral in July of '21 and moved into a little apartment on Eddy Street above a bootlegging operation. In October, Mary, he first of their two daughters, was born.

Hammett briefly resumed his Pinkerton career until he became too sick to spend nights in the frigid fog tailing some mark. One of his last jobs was snooping for the defense in the scandalous case of Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, the actor accused of raping and crushing to death a party girl named Virginia Rapp at the St. Francis (Hammett thought Arbuckle was framed by the district attorney).

He scuffled for work -- the tiny disability pension he got from the Veterans Bureau was the source of a yearslong epistolary battle that fueled his disdain for authority -- before he got an advertising job at Samuels Jewelry. He found a friend in the avuncular Albert Samuels, with whom he lunched at John's Grill and to whom he dedicated "The Dain Curse." A shy man who loosened up after a few snorts of whiskey, Hammett enjoyed the ad game. But the TB acted up again. After he was found unconscious at the Market Street store lying in a pool of blood, he had to quit.

"He was so sick as a young man, he thought he was going to die," says Hammett's younger daughter, Jo, a 78-year-old who lives in the Orange County town of Cypress. "I think his writing saved him."

In 1926, the year Jo was born, a nurse advised Hammett to live apart from Josephine and the kids so as not to infect them. He rented a little house for them in Fairfax and took the ferry over to Marin every Sunday to visit. He found the arrangement conducive to writing and conducting his affairs. He never lived with his family again, but supported them until the money ran out 30 years later, and remained close (the Hammetts were divorced in 1937).

His fortunes on the rise, Hammett said so long to San Francisco in '29. He moved his family to Los Angeles, where his wife had relatives, and left for New York with his mistress, writer Nell Martin, to whom he dedicated his fourth novel, "The Glass Key." Within a year, she was history.

After the success of "The Maltese Falcon," Hammett was lured to Hollywood, where he lived lavishly, hanging out with people like Harpo Marx, Jean Harlow and S.J. Perelman. And, like fellow writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, he became a stellar drunk. He spent most of the '30s alternately living in New York and Hollywood, a loathsome but lucrative place where his books were made into movies and where he wrote screenplays for films like "City Streets" and one of the movies based on what turned out to be his last book, "The Thin Man." He responded to the greed and phoniness of Tinsel Town -- and to the writer's block that stymied his ambition to go beyond the detective genre -- by getting sloshed.

"So I'm a bum -- so what's done of the book looks terrible -- so I'm out here drowning my shame in MGM money for 10 weeks," Hammett wrote in '34 to publisher Alfred Knopf, who was eager for the new novel that never appeared. He blew his money on hotel suites and fine clothes, expensive gifts for his family and lady friends, on favored pastimes like "the races, poker and whores, " as Johnson put it (Hammett was acquainted with the clap and its painful pre- penicillin treatment). He loaned loads of money to people who rarely paid him back.

"My father was generous to a crazy fault," says Jo Hammett, who attributes his reckless ways to his early poverty and illness. "He came from a poor family, and getting all that money was inconceivable. It must've been impossible to handle. Well, he didn't handle it very well. He never planned for the future. Why would he, when he wasn't going to have any?"

He had a long future with Lillian Hellman, whom he met a few months after hitting Hollywood. She was a smart, stylish MGM script reader married to screenwriter Arthur Kober. According to biographer Richard Layman, Hammett and Hellman met at a party at producer Daryl Zanuck's house, left together and remained lifelong companions. They both had other lovers and lived separate lives, but their bond was never broken. She was there till the final curtain and was largely responsible for reviving his reputation -- despite her penchant for stretching the truth and casting herself center stage -- in the years after his death.

Hellman was the model for Nora Charles, the rich, witty heroine of "The Thin Man," an instant hit when it came out in '34. The year before, Hammett suggested Hellman write a play based on a lesbian scandal at a Scottish girls school. It became "The Children's Hour," which made Hellman's name.

Hammett edited many of her plays (and wrote the screenplay for the 1943 movie version of her "Watch on the Rhine"), but couldn't finish the mainstream novels he labored at for decades. A 20,000-word fragment of his autobiographical novel "Tulip" was published posthumously. Johnson, whose early work, particularly her suspense novel "The Shadow Knows," was influenced by Hammett's lean, unmannered prose, found it turgid.

"He wanted to get out of the detective genre and be a more serious literary novelist, and he failed in that," said Johnson, on the phone from her Paris home. "That was a source of great anguish to him."

The booze obviously didn't help. It "turned my father maudlin and sarcastic -- mean," Jo Hammett wrote in her frank and loving memoir, "A Daughter Remembers," recalling her father and sister getting smashed at tony spots like the Stork Club. "I couldn't understand how anyone so funny and kind could turn so awful; why a man who cared so much for his privacy and dignity so much could trash them."

But the good times made up for all that. "He was just so much fun to be with, so full of knowledge, and he looked at everything so amusingly," she said. "He was an intensely private person. No one will ever explain him."

It took everyone by surprise when Hammett, who became a Communist in the '30s and worked for antifascist and civil rights causes, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. He was a skinny, 48-year-old alcoholic with a history of TB. They took him anyway. He spent most of the next three years serving in the frozen isolation of the Aleutian Islands, where he liked the landscape's barren beauty and the regimen of military life. Among other things, he edited an Army newspaper whose staff included a young GI named Bernard Kalb, who later became a TV news correspondent.

"Here was this giant of an author who took a bunch of semiliterate kids and turned them into amateur newsmen," Kalb recalled. He can still picture the quiet gent with the "shock of white hair who must've weighed 35 pounds," lying supine on a table in a cramped Quonset hut, reading a book or cooking up pointed captions to cartoons about life on the North Pacific front. The man they called Sam or Pop sometimes read aloud parts of Hellman's letters from Moscow, where she covered the war for Collier's.

After the war, the Russian allies became the enemy, and Hammett was one of many prominent leftists punished for their politics during the red-baiting hysteria of the late '40s and '50s. He lost his income when radio programs based on his characters were dropped from the air, and his royalties were blocked by a $140,000 tax lien.

Hammett was president of the Civil Rights Congress, which fought against the lynching of blacks and defended Communist Party members charged with violating the Smith Act, the 1940 alien-registration law aimed at people accused of advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.

In 1949, 11 Communist leaders were convicted of violating the Smith Act. They were bailed out by the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund committee, which Hammett chaired. When they lost the final appeal in '51, four of the men jumped bail. Hammett was summoned to federal court, where he refused to testify about them or the bail fund contributors. He believed freedom of speech included the right to silence. On his lawyers' advice, Hammett took the Fifth Amendment. He was found in contempt of court and sentenced to six months in jail.

Hammett did most of his time at the federal pen in Ashland, Ky., where he cleaned toilets and mopped floors, read Gogol and doted over photographs of his first grandchild, Jo's newborn, Ann. His spirit was intact but his health was shot when he came out of jail.

In 1953, Hammett was summoned by the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy to testify before the Senate Committee on Government Operations about books by Communist writers. Nothing came of it. The year before, he'd had to give up his Greenwich Village apartment. He moved to a cottage on the Katonah, N.Y., property of his friends Sam and Helen Rosen, where he lived for five years. It wasn't far from Hellman's Hardscrabble Farm, where Hammett had spent happy times, hunting and fishing as he'd done as a boy. In '55, he had a heart attack.

"I am concentrating on my health. I am learning to be a hypochondriac," he told an English reporter, quoted in Johnson's book, two years later. "I stopped writing because I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style."

The end came in January 1961, when Hammett, who'd been living at Hellman's Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, died at Lenox Hill Hospital. He'd been suffering with lung cancer and emphysema, but as always, kept his pain to himself.

"I can stand anything I've got to stand," says Ned Beaumont, the hero of "The Glass Key." That could've been Hammett's motto, his daughter said. "The idea of somebody snooping around into his life would've made him unhappy," said Jo, whose father was buried at Arlington National Cemetery over the objections of J. Edgar Hoover. But he'd be pleased people still read him.

"He very much wanted to be remembered as an American writer. He was always very proud of his heritage, and it shows in his treatment of the language. Few people have written American speech as well as he did. He and Mark Twain. He's in good company."

SPECIAL EVENTS

The Maltese Falcon: An American Classic at 75: Through March 31, San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St., third floor. Hammett's granddaughter Julie Rivett will discuss the book and its place in American culture 6:30-7:30 p.m. Feb. 24 in the Koret Auditorium at the library.

Large Screen Videos: The library will dedicate the month of March to movies based on Hammett's books and life. The Large Screen Videos series will show "The Thin Man," "The Maltese Falcon," "The Glass Key," "Dashiell Hammett: Detective, Writer" and "Julia" at noon each Thursday in the Koret Auditorium. For more information, call (415) 557-4277 or visit www.sfpl.org.

Hotel Union Square and John's Grill: "The Maltese Falcon" 75th anniversary celebration, with party and look-alike contest. The contest will take place at 5 p.m. on Feb. 17 at Hotel Union Square, followed by a parade down Powell Street to John's Grill at 6:30 p.m. Members of the public dressed as Sam Spade or Brigid O'Shaughnessy are welcome, but some of the festivities are by invitation only. For information, contact Denise at velocitygrl1888@yahoo.com.