Hemingway and Gellhorn Read online

  HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN

  The Untold Story of Two Writers, Espionage, War, and the Great Depression

  Jerome Tuccille

  Copyright © 2011 by Jerome Tuccille

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of nonfiction. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various people and products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication or use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Photo credits:

  Cover photograph, Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Photograph of author by Wendi Winters

  WinklerMedia Publishing Group, Baltimore, MD

  To Marie, for all the right reasons

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE: HEMINGWAY

  PART TWO: GELLHORN

  PART THREE: UNCIVIL WAR

  PART FOUR: HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN

  PART FIVE: THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE

  HEMINGWAY

  Chapter One

  Ernest Hemingway had been a fresh water fisherman all his life, pulling trout and other fish from the streams and rivers of the Midwest and Europe. When he and Pauline had first visited Key West, Ernest quickly discovered the special challenges of salt water fishing, which required a different set of skills entirely to land the huge, sharp-toothed denizens of the ocean depths. At first he tried his luck casting off bridges east of Key West.

  On a warm sunny day typical of the area when the weather is good, the prosecuting attorney for Monroe County, George Brooks, was waiting for the ferry to take him over from Lower Matecumbe Key. He looked across and spotted a rough-hewn character whom he didn’t recognize dressed in a fish-stained shirt, a long-billed cap, dirty tennis shoes, and wrinkled canvas shorts. The man was casting into the Gulf from the nearby bridge. He was big, scars visible around his right kneecap, and a half-moon scar above his eye. The stranger looked suspicious to the prosecutor’s well-trained eye. He looked more like a bootlegger or a rum-runner than a fisherman. George sauntered over and struck up a conversation with the burly stranger.

  “Stranger to these parts?” George asked casually. “Yeah.”

  “What brought you down here?”

  “Time for a change. I’m a writer. Been living in Paris most

  of the past ten years and figured it was time to leave. This strikes me as a good place to write my books and catch some fish.”

  Ernest introduced himself, but George remained skeptical. He had never heard of the self-proclaimed author or the titles of his books. George would check out his story later. But something about the man’s open demeanor put him at ease. He decided to take the stranger at face value.

  “Do you know anybody with a boat who would be willing to share fishing expenses?” the author asked him.

  “Go down to the Thompson Hardware Store on Caroline Street and ask for Charlie Thompson. He likes to fish as well as any man I know. He’ll take you out. Just tell him George Brooks sent you by.”

  Charlie Thompson was one of the wealthiest men in Key West. The hardware store was only the tip of the iceberg of his family’s business interests. They owned large tracts of land and numerous commercial interests in the heart of town. Charlie was behind the counter when Ernest walked in. The two men took an immediate liking to each other. By the time Ernest left the store, he and Charlie had made arrangements to go out fishing the next afternoon. After Charlie closed up that evening, he walked a few blocks to his home at 1029 Fleming Street.

  “George Brooks sent this guy by,” Charlie said to his wife Lorine. “Says his name’s Hemingway. Says George told him I like to fish and might take him out. Says he’s written a couple of books.”

  * * *

  The next day the two men set off in Charlie’s eighteen-foot powerboat following the channel that cut through Key West Bight into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Stream flowed fast and green and sometimes blue a few miles out in the Gulf off the southern rim of Key West. Ernest was mesmerized by the look and smell of the warm salt water as he and Charlie plowed across its depths. Charlie fixed mackerel for bait, passing the hooks through their mouths, out the gills, slitting the sides and pushing the hooks through the other sides and out, tying their mouths shut on the wire leader, then tying the hooks tight so they couldn’t come out and the bait would troll smoothly without slipping.

  “They’re a funny fish,” Charlie said to Ernest. “They aren’t here until they come. But when they come there’s plenty of them. And they’ve always come. There’s a good stream and we’re going to have a good breeze.”

  “So you think today’s a good day?” Ernest asked. “I hope so.”

  The “funny fish” Charlie was referring to were big tarpon,

  fighting game fish also known as the silver king. Ernest had never seen fish like this up close before. They were truly regal monsters that grew up to eight feet long and weighed in at a hundred pounds or more. They were sleek and powerful-looking at home in their element. What a thrill it would be to hook into one of these creatures and wrestle him aboard. It was a good day, as Charlie suspected. By the time the sun was setting down over the western horizon, Ernest and Charlie had hooked four tarpon and were cruising back to shore. The fish were not the only creatures hooked that day. Ernest was hooked himself—hooked on Key West and game-fishing.

  Charlie and Lorine invited Ernest and Pauline over to their house for dinner a few days later. Ernest brought the Thompsons a couple of gifts—signed copies of his books—to prove he really was a writer of note and not a rum-runner as George Brooks had first suspected. Ernest and Pauline sat down to their first real Key West dinner, prepared by the Thompsons’ Bahamian cook Phoebe. She cooked up black beans and yellow rice with green turtle steaks. The turtle came from one of Charlie’s factories that processed turtle meat from the local waters. As a side dish, Phoebe made a raw conch salad with crusty Cuban bread. After watching Ernest wolf down her food with obvious delight, Phoebe later said, “That mon Hemenway is one fine eater.”

  Ernest and Charlie had hit it off well right from the start, and it was a relief for the men to discover that their wives were equally compatible. Both had been reared in rural Southern communities, Pauline in Piggott, Arkansas, and Lorine in Decatur, Georgia. Pauline had been a fashion writer for Vogue when she met Ernest, and Lorine had worked as a social science teacher before she married Charlie. After dinner the men sipped a couple of scotches before going out for a walk along tree-lined Fleming Street to talk about hunting and fishing.

  The women sat beside each other on the porch discussing interests of their own. They formed a bond that night that would last throughout their lives—although Ernest almost severed it a few years later when he left Pauline for Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious young writer who was destined to become wife number three. Had Pauline known at the time that her husband would find a replacement for her in Key West, she would never have agreed to move there. But it really didn’t matter where they lived; Ernest would have found his third wife somewhere. For better or worse. Mostly worse as it turned out. It was Lorine who helped Pauline find the house on Whitehead Street, which they eventually bought when Ernest said he was serious about making Key West his home.

>   One of the first things Pauline did to Ernest’s great annoyance—and to the extreme discomfort of their many guests— was take down all the ceiling fans and replace them with chandeliers. The chandeliers looked elegant, but they had no utilitarian value when the weather was hot and humid. After removing the fans, Pauline eliminated the time-tested method of circulating the heavy tropical air that poured into Key West homes and gave Ernest one more excuse to trek down to Sloppy Joe’s for some liquid refreshment.

  * * *

  Ernest was already famous by the time he and Pauline moved to Key West. He had finished correcting the galleys for Men Without Women on August 17, 1927, and mailed them the same day from Paris to his editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins. The book was published on October 14, the same month that Pauline discovered she was pregnant with their first child. When things are going well, it seems, they all go well together. Not that the book of stories met with universal approval from the literary mafia, who were waiting with daggers drawn to eviscerate Ernest’s follow-up offering to his novel The Sun Also Rises published a year earlier. Dorothy Parker and the reviewer for Time magazine loved the latest book, but others were less kind. Joseph Wood Krutch, an influential critic of the period, sniffed that Ernest wrote “sordid little catastrophes in the lives of very vulgar people.”

  Virginia Woolf wrote that Ernest was “self-consciously virile,” and his stories were “a little dry and sterile.” None of their barbs could stop the sale of the book, though, which caught on quickly with the same readers who gobbled up The Sun Also Rises. By early December, sales had already topped thirteen thousand copies. But Ernest was stung by the negative reviews nonetheless.

  He wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald saying, “These goddamn reviews are sent to me by my ‘friends,’ any review saying the stuff is a pile of shit I get at least 2000 copies of.”

  Early the next year, Pauline started to pack up for a trip back to the States. Her baby was due in June and she wanted him or her to be born on American soil. Pauline’s family had yet to meet Ernest, and now that his writing career had taken off she was anxious to trot him around back home. It was different than in the beginning when he was penniless, virtually unknown, about to leave his wife for another woman (her), and had little to show for his efforts except some short stories and a first novel in progress. Now she had a real story to tell and a rising literary star to put on exhibit.

  Pauline thought that they could not get out of Paris fast enough. Not only had she inherited Hadley’s husband when she married him, but Pauline inherited his social baggage as well. The list of the walking wounded whom Ernest left scattered over the literary battlefield as a result of his writing included just about everyone he knew. The list was long and impressive: Harold Loeb, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Robert McAlmon, Sherwood Anderson, Lewis Galantiere, Duff Twysden—the roster was endless. Pauline wanted to leave town before Ernest started in on her friends now that he had turned his own into road kill. But before she could get him out of Gay Paree, the roof quite literally fell in on him. The Herald reported the accident in March.

  “Mr. Ernest Hemingway, author who was wounded about the head when a skylight crashed on him at his home Sunday morning, yesterday was recovering, according to officials at the American Hospital at Neuilly. Mr. Hemingway’s wound, which required three stitches inside and six outside, is healing and he was able to pursue his usual life.”

  “I was there shortly after a skylight fell on his head,” said writer Archibald MacLeish, another of Ernest’s benefactors. “I think he’d probably had a good deal to drink and pulled the wrong rope in the can. I was the first one called. Someone dug up a taxi at about half past two in the morning and I went around and picked him up and took him to the hospital. He’d lost a lot of blood by that time so that he babbled a good deal on the way to the hospital. He took a great many stitches with just a local anesthetic and he sat through the whole thing talking to the doctor, telling him the story of his life.”

  The look and smell of his own blood put Ernest back in World War I when a mortar blast turned his right knee into jelly. The war injury left Ernest with a slight limp, and the skylight accident would leave him scarred for many years afterward, but it turned out to be fortuitous in a significant way. For some time now he had been searching for a viable subject for his next novel, and now he had it. Not since he was a youth in the war had he seen so much of his own body flayed open like raw meat on a butcher’s block. The war had been the most telling and traumatic experience of his life to date. Against Pauline’s protests that he should heal first and then get ready for their trip, Ernest sat down and wrote the opening pages of a new novel. He didn’t have his title yet, but it would come to him soon enough. It seemed almost inevitable that he would call it A Farewell to Arms.

  And finally they left—but not immediately to Arkansas where Pauline’s parents were anxiously waiting to greet their daughter and son-in-law. Ernest had always wondered if he could ever live back in the States again after immersing himself in the sights, smells, and wonders of Paris for several years. He had his answer as soon as he cast his eyes on Key West. Ernest and Pauline had gone there to pick up a new Ford given to them by Pauline’s rich Uncle Gus, who managed her trust account.

  Key West was the closest thing to a foreign country that Ernest had seen inside the country of his birth. On the surface the town was shabby and down on its heels at the time. But the flowering jacaranda trees, the explosion of scarlet bougainvillea, yellow cassia, and red-orange flame trees more than made up for the sun- and salt-blasted fishermen’s shacks with weather-dulled paint peeling off like layers of old, parched skin. The local sponge beds were blighted, the cigar factories had been boarded up, and the naval base deactivated. But the local honky-tonk bars were lively and the streets were filled with men who spoke everything from English to Caribbean Creole to Cuban Spanish and chose to ignore the infamous Prohibition laws. Key West was an outlaw town populated by rebels, and the Feds chose to ignore their open rebelliousness for fear of igniting an insurrection by men who would fight to the death to preserve their lifestyle.

  Ernest fell in love with Key West at first sight. When the local inhabitants weren’t drinking they were fishing, and when they weren’t fishing they were drinking. Here was a place where he could write, fish, drink, and live life to the fullest if he ever chose to do so. Key West was made for him. The pregnant Pauline looked around somewhat aghast at first. This was not exactly what she envisioned coming home to. But Ernest was in pig heaven.

  A Farewell to Arms was published at the end of September 1929 and exploded out of the gate. Within a month the book sold thirty-three thousand copies. At the end of the year sales were up to fifty thousand, and on January 8, 1930, Max wrote to Ernest to tell him that sales were up over seventy thousand copies and climbing. The reviews were almost universally euphoric from the leading literary movers and shakers, including Malcolm Cowley, Clifton Fadiman, J.B. Priestley, Arnold Bennett, and countless others. A rave review by Dorothy Parker pushed Ernest over the top, from mere famous author to a legend in his own time—even if some people in Key West had never heard of the author and his books before.

  * * *

  The Gulf Stream sweeps out of the west across the southern rim of the country. It snakes eastward between Cuba and the Florida Keys, running fast and warm from the Gulf of Mexico through the Strait of Florida where it accelerates before turning north in the Atlantic along the eastern rim of the United States. It is a relentless force of nature, powerful and inexorable, in turn peaceful and violent as it flows past the Bahamas and Bermuda. The stream sweeps farther north into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, brushing past Iceland, Greenland, and the British Isles. But it is not those northern islands that people think of when they talk about the Gulf Stream. They think mostly about Key West and Cuba, sometimes Bimini and Dry Tortuga. And it is only Cuba that is truly tropical, sitting big and majestic south of the Tropic of Cancer. But Key West is tropical enough,
dotted with palm trees and surrounded by warm aquamarine water teeming with some of the biggest fish that patrol the ocean depths. Catching those gargantuan creatures requires more than skill. Also required are strength, endurance, and knowledge of how the fish behave and how to outsmart them in one of the most challenging sports dreamed up by man.

  Chapter Two

  Cayo Hueso sits forty-five miles north of the Tropic of Cancer, ninety miles north of Cuba and one hundred and fifty miles south of Miami. Cayo Hueso—Bone Island or Island of Bones. Whose bones the Spanish were referring to when they christened the island Cayo Hueso remains a mystery. Was the island actually covered with bones? If so, whose bones were they? They could have been the remains of the Caloosa Indians who may have buried their dead there. No one knows for sure, but by the 1700s the English translated Cayo Hueso into Key West, and the misnomer has survived the centuries. The local economy had always been marginal, depending on exotic trades like shrimping, fishing, smuggling, and wreck-diving to bring in the money. But by the 1930s even those volatile occupations were gone.

  The land itself that Key West rests on is not exactly terra firma. The firma keeps getting rearranged, reconfigured, or wiped away by hurricanes and tropical storms. In 1846 a monster hurricane blasted the Island of Bones and pushed a pile of sand up along the shoreline, so that a small graveyard that had previously been on the water’s edge was now a few blocks inland. The lighthouse, too, looked as though it had been physically moved and suddenly became the most landlocked lighthouse in the country. The beacon from the lighthouse, located near Ernest’s house, guided him home from his late-night drinking sprees at Sloppy Joe’s.

  “As long as I can see that beacon,” Ernest said, “I’ll always be able to find my way home.”

  Pirates were terrorizing the island in 1822 when an exasperated Spaniard named Juan Salas sold Key West to John Simonton, a businessman from Mobile, Alabama, for two thousand dollars. To celebrate the transfer of the island to an American, Lieutenant Matthew Perry sailed down to raise the American flag over what is now Mallory Square. He declared before a motley crew of sweating sailors and Cuban fisherman that the new U.S. possession had one of the largest deepwater anchorages in the country. Once the military significance of Key West had been established, Navy Commodore David Porter followed Perry’s wake from the mainland with a squadron of ships to wage war against the pirates. Porter’s “Mosquito Fleet,” as the natives were quick to call it, took a bit longer to rid the waters of pirates than Porter had anticipated, but by 1830 he had succeeded in chasing them down to Cuba and east over to Puerto Rico.