During breakfast the next morning, my assistant called. Have you seen the papers? she said. Hellman is suing Mary McCarthy, PBS, and you for two and a quarter million.And me? I replied, in a prepubescent squeak. The other phone rang, and the familiar whiskey-and-cigarettes baritone rasped, Why the hell didn’t you defend me?I guess I never thought of you as defenseless, Lillian, I managed.That’s bullshit. I’m suing the whole damn bunch of you. In that, at least, she proved a woman of her word.I had been to dinner at Lillian’s, and she, too, had been on my show. She was a sharp and entertaining guest—an eager appearer, arriving early, looking as if she’d just stepped out of Elizabeth Arden. No one was neutral about Lillian. She had a famous friendship with Dorothy Parker, yet to Jean Stafford she was Old Scaly Bird.A professional critic talking about a public figure is rarely the stuff of lawsuits. Incredibly, Hellman denied being a public figure, forgetting, perhaps, that she had recently appeared in a national advertising campaign for Blackglama furs, which used only women who were so identifiable that their names were omitted; the copy read What becomes a legend most?