Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron

best-seller about the McCarthy period. It was called
Scoundrel Time
—
    MARY : —in which you canonized yourself. I lived in Europe with my fourth husband, and I really didn’t think about you much at all. I mention this because people are going to think we spent our lives thinking about each other—
    LILLIAN : We didn’t. Whole years passed when I didn’t think of you at all. You were, after all, gone.
    MARY : I was in Paris.
    LILLIAN : A diplomat’s wife. Passing out cheese puffs for the deputy consul of the Norwegian Embassy.
    MARY : I was madly in love.
    LILLIAN : Always a mistake to fall in love if it means giving up a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City. Always a mistake to choose love over your career—
    MARY : I didn’t give up my career—
    LILLIAN : But you gave up the world you were part of. It was an awful world, worth giving up, but it was the world you’d lived in your entire writing life. While I stayed in the thick of things—
    MARY : And became a celebrity.
    LILLIAN : Well, don’t say it as if you didn’t want a piece of it. You even did a
People
magazine interview. “America’s first lady of letters,” in
People
magazine.
    MARY : I was trying to sell a book.
    LILLIAN : And you took a pop at me in
People
magazine. The interviewer asked you, “What do you have against Lillian Hellman?” Implicitly saying, “Why keep attacking her?” Why did you?
    MARY : Because you were such a fraud.
    LILLIAN : Nonsense. You were just using me to show off your sharp little tongue. It was lucky for you that I stayed as famous as I did, or you’d have to have found someone else to attack. You virtually sharpened your tongue on my reputation. I was your whetstone. I was part of your routine. “What do you have against Lillian Hellman?” And you answered—
    MARY : “Well, I never liked what she writes.”
    LILLIAN : But it turned out you hadn’t seen most of my plays, and you hadn’t read my books, either—
    MARY : I’d read as much of them as I could. I read that silly story in
Pentimento
about the turtle—
    LILLIAN : What was wrong with the story about the turtle?
    MARY : Who could believe a word of it? You and Hammett kill a turtle, you slice its head off, you leave it in the kitchen to be made into soup, and it somehow manages to resurrect itself and crawl away. The next day, when it turns up dead somewhere on your vast property, the two of you have a fantastically elliptical, cutthroat debate over whether the turtle is—correct me if I’m putting words into your mouth here—some sort of amphibious reincarnation of Jesus.
    LILLIAN : Everyone liked that story.
    MARY : Every word of dialogue in it is cocked up, but of course there’s no way to prove it because everyone is dead, including the turtle. You never wrote about anyone until they were dead and were no longer around to correct you—
    LILLIAN : And you never wrote about anyone unless they were alive and you could hurt their feelings. You barely even bothered to change anyone’s name.
    A beat
.
    MARY : We always end up this way—
    LILLIAN : On opposite sides.
    A beat
.
    MARY : And yet—
    LILLIAN : What?
    MARY : We both loved beautiful things—
    LILLIAN : And we weren’t ashamed of it. We both loved cooking—
    MARY : Yes, I always heard you were a wonderful cook—
    LILLIAN : I was.
[Beat.]
You took yourself out of the running. Big mistake.
    MARY : You thought you could feed the beast forever. Even bigger mistake.
    VOICES FROM WINGS : Miss Hellman, Miss Hellman, Miss Hellman—
    LILLIAN : I can’t talk about this right now. I’m late for my interview. Could I have some coffee?
    MARY :
Un café, s’il vous plaît
.
    LILLIAN
is surrounded by interviewers with cameras
. MARY
sits at a table in a Paris café on the other side of the stage and opens a book
. LILLIAN
turns from one interviewer to the next and smiles as she’s bombarded with questions
.
    INTERVIEWER #1: Miss Hellman, tell me about the fig tree—
    INTERVIEWER