What Was the Feud Between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman?

In 1980 The Dick Cavett Show aired an interview with American critic and novelist Mary McCarthy. Cavett asked her to name overrated writers, and on her list was American playwright Lillian Hellman. “Tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer” was McCarthy’s assessment of Hellman. She elaborated: “I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” To Cavett’s and McCarthy’s surprise, this brief yet striking critique soon launched a legal battle that would last for the remainder of Hellman’s life.

Why fight?

McCarthy’s desire to bash Hellman on Cavett’s show probably can’t be boiled down to a single explanation, although several critics and historians suspected that the writers’ opposing political ideologies were partially to blame. Critic Irving Howe wrote that the feud was “not just two old ladies involved in a catfight. The question involved—of one’s attitude toward communism—is probably the central political-cultural-intellectual problem of the 20th century.” Both women were outspoken politically. Hellman held pro-Soviet communist views, whereas McCarthy was a liberal anti-Stalinist.

Their first public interaction brought these opposing beliefs to a head when Hellman and her colleagues published a letter in the pro-Stalin magazine New Masses in May 1938. The letter pleaded with McCarthy’s anti-Stalinist associates to stop writing critically about the trials happening in Moscow that falsely convicted many of Joseph Stalin’s political adversaries. But McCarthy and her cohort were public supporters of Stalin’s chief rival through their work as members of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. Furthermore, the disagreements between Hellman and McCarthy bled into discussions of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Hellman sided with the Republicans, but McCarthy felt that their ideology was too aligned with the Soviet cause.

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Their political differences surfaced once again in 1949, when Hellman was a prominent member of the committee that organized the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York City. McCarthy was a vocal dissenter. The conference aimed to discuss what its name indicates: world peace. Unlike previous peace conferences, however, this one was fronted by Americans, with delegates from the Soviet Union in attendance. Despite the distinction, McCarthy, like the popular press in the U.S. at the time, felt that the conference was still connected to the Soviet cause.

How much these writers’ clashes over communism and the Soviet Union fueled the televised explosion of their feud in 1980 is, ultimately, unclear. McCarthy would ostensibly reject the politics-driven theory, and she even wrote, in a letter to her lawyer in 1980, that her catalytic comments on Cavett were not political, “overtly or covertly.” What is certain is that since the 1930s Hellman and McCarthy had been prominent voices in their shared circle of New York leftist intellectuals—which is why the yearslong lawsuit to follow caused such a stir.

A lawsuit that caused rivers of ink

On February 15, 1980, mere weeks after the Cavett episode aired, Lillian Hellman sued Mary McCarthy, Dick Cavett, and the producer and the broadcaster of The Dick Cavett Show for $2.25 million ($9.2 million in 2025 dollars) for defamation. Hellman argued that McCarthy’s comments had damaged her mentally and professionally and should have been edited out of the interview before broadcasting.

Hellman’s decision to sue was heavily publicized and criticized. A legal battle between the two major American writers promised to be burdensome and to affect their reputations within the literary world. Moreover, it exposed Hellman’s writing to scrutiny, as lawyers studied it for falsehoods. Especially since the publication of her 1973 memoir, Pentimento, and the 1977 film adaptation of one of its chapters, Julia, starring Jane Fonda, Hellman had faced accusations of writing fabrications in her memoirs.

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“I didn’t want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court.”

In May 1984 a judge denied McCarthy’s demand to dismiss the suit and instead concluded that it should proceed to trial. McCarthy defended her comments as statements of opinion regarding a public figure. However, the judge found them potentially defamatory and, surprisingly, denied that Hellman was a public figure. Although Hellman was widely known and read, he asserted that, to qualify as a public figure, she needed to be involved in a “public issue, question, or controversy,” and he determined that she was not. Due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, it was harder than before for plaintiffs deemed public figures to win libel cases, since they had to demonstrate that defendants had made false statements with “actual malice”—that is, either with intention or with a reckless disregard for the truth. Although that precedent remains in place formally, it has faced mounting scrutiny in the 21st century. Also, Cavett was dismissed from the lawsuit, as he had played no role in editing or preparing the episode.

By mid-June 1984 all the remaining defendants had announced their intention to appeal the judge’s decision. Weeks later, on June 30, Hellman died of cardiac arrest. Under New York law, a defamation claim does not survive death, so the case never went to trial. “I didn’t want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that,” McCarthy declared after receiving the Edward MacDowell Medal for her literary career in August 1984. Upon learning that Hellman had received the same award in 1976, McCarthy said, had she known that fact before, she would “probably not” have accepted the medal.

Although it came to an abrupt end, this legal feud sparked debates regarding the balance between freedom of speech and the right to protect one’s reputation. The feud also paved the way in reassessing the veracity of some relationships and events Hellman had depicted in her memoirs, which were ultimately found to contain fabrications.