Lawrence Alexander

Lillian Hellman in Bloomingdale's Lawrence Alexander

It?s 1953. Lillian Hellman is broke, blacklisted by Hollywood studios and television networks. The IRS and the House Un-American Activities Committee are after her. Hammett is in jail. She has no choice but to take a day job under an assumed name in the bedding department at Bloomingdale?s?but when her identity is unmasked and the whistleblower found dead in a sleeper sofa, Hellman becomes the NYPD?s Prime Suspect. Launching her own independent investigation to save her skin, the inspiration for the character of Nora Charles in Hammett?s The Thin Man finds the crime rooted in her own combative days among the literary elites of the turbulent 30s, the seething depravity at the American embassy in the besieged Soviet capital of Moscow, the Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry?s guilds and waterfront labor unions, and the bisexual underbelly of Broadway musicals and Hollywood sound stages. It ensnares the young up-and-coming Foreign Service officer who took her to new heights of ecstasy and despair (and whose career she destroyed), and ultimately brings her to an underground bunker in the middle of Central Park, where the bloody consequences of her radical politics forces her to confront her own heart of darkness. This choice, between principle and conscience, is at the core of Lillian Hellman in Bloomingdale?s?unless, as her detractors maintain to this day, it?s all just another of her melodramatic and self-serving lies.