Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 2
It didn’t take the locals long to decide that they preferred the pirates to Porter, who seized the locals’ livestock, buildings, and strategic supplies to wage his war. At least they had a fighting chance against the pirates, who made no claims about representing the interests of the federal government. When the government courtmartialed Porter for overstepping his authority, he resigned in a huff and joined the Mexican Navy as Chief of Naval Operations. The Mexicans didn’t like him much either—indeed, General Santa Ana tried to assassinate him twice—so he embarked to Turkey, where he tried to impose his special brand of leadership on the Middle Eastern infidels. Death finally caught up with him in 1843 when he died a bitter old man.
“A retrospect of the history of my life seems a
highly-colored romance, which I should be very loath to live over again,” was the way he assessed his own life.
Half of Key West didn’t even exist until real estate developer William Whitehead surveyed the town and carved it up into tiny plots. Ships’ carpenters built most of the houses on those plots without paying much attention to architectural style or positioning. The result was a jumble of small ramshackle houses sitting alongside paths and alleys that came in off the main roads at odd angles. Ava Moore Parks described the Key West of the period in her book The Forgotten Frontier: “There was nothing else like it; a city crowded on a small island in the middle of nowhere…This was it—civilization began and ended here.”
An anonymous observer summed up Key West as “densely settled, and about as un-American as possible, bearing a strong resemblance to a West Indian town. The houses are of wood, plainly built, and, with few exceptions, painted white. The houses are of all sizes, jumbled up in the oddest way…The interior of each block is filled up with one-story shanties.”
Ernest and other writers found a special charm in the Island of Bones, but Mark Twain was not one of them. Traveling through Key West from Nicaragua in 1867, Twain entered in his diary: “If I have got Key West summed up right, they would receive War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death without a question, call them all by some fancy name and then rope in the survivors and sell them good cigars and brandies at easy prices and horrible dinners at infamous rates. They wouldn’t quarantine anybody; they’d say ‘come’ and say it gladly, if you brought destruction and hell in your wake.”
The famous author’s vision almost came true when a great fire swept across the island on April Fools’ Day 1886. It flared up in the Cuban Patriotic Club on Duval Street and quickly swept across the island. The island’s only fire engine had been shipped to New York City for repairs, so there was nothing to contain the conflagration as it roared down Fleming Street from Whitehead to Bahama. The locals tried to fight the inferno by blowing up houses in its path with gunpowder, but the blaze continued to rage for twelve hours straight, wiping out fifty acres of Key West and dozens of its inhabitants.
Finally it spent its fury and died out on its own. The indomitable locals were not defeated, working around the clock as they cleared out the burnt-out areas. They rebuilt their homes and public buildings quickly. Stubborn to a fault, they replaced what had been incinerated with new houses built of wood. The wealthier among them built new houses larger than the ones they had lost. Key West remained a mostly wooden town, except for a handful of military installations and public facilities made of rusticated stone—concrete blocks formed in a mold. In short order the trees, vines, flowers, and plants grew back, the termites returned and feasted on the wooden porches as they had before, and a casual observer would never know that the look, feel, and pace of the town had gone through a cataclysm just a short time back.
Henry Flagler looked at Key West and formed a different opinion of the place than Mark Twain did. Flagler was a visionary and a businessman first and foremost, and unlike Twain, a successful speculator as well. After the turn of the twentieth century he recognized the value of Key West as a port for goods flowing to and from Cuba and South America. Flagler bought one hundred and thirty-four acres of land on Trumbo Point to serve as a terminus for a railroad connecting the Keys to the mainland. When his engineers informed him that there wasn’t enough dry land to erect the terminus, Flagler characteristically said,
“Then make some.”
Times were good once again on the Island of Bones. And they remained so for a while longer. Key West had become the richest town per capita in the United States in the aftermath of the fire, thanks to its deepwater port that made it a center of trade with Cuba and South America. The fishing, sponge, and cigar industries flourished. But, inevitably it seemed, Key West was destined to be plagued by a new blight—this one economic and more difficult to overcome. Prohibition had destroyed most of the legitimate commercial activity on the island, and the Crash of ’29 drove the final nail into the town’s economic coffin. The jobs fled, the population declined by two-thirds, and per capita income had sunk to the lowest in the nation. Henry Flagler’s train from the mainland chugged through the Keys “carrying nothing, nowhere, for nobody,” as he put it.
* * *
The hard times hit the Island of Bones worse than almost anyplace else in the country. The Island of Bones found itself five million dollars in debt with eighty percent of its twelve thousand inhabitants on welfare. David Sholtz, the governor of Florida, was so distraught that he turned the administration of the town over to the federal government. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded by appointing an autocratic character named Julius F. Stone as the dictator of Key West in all but name. Ernest and Julius detested each other on first sight. They were both cut from the same mold—haughty, egotistical, domineering sons of the Midwest. Ernest hailed from Oak Park, Illinois, and Julius from Columbus, Ohio. It was inconceivable that a town the size of Key West could host two outsized egos like theirs. The problem for Ernest was that Julius had the power, the full force and power of the federal government behind him. Ernest was not the only writer to take a unique disliking to the imperious Mr. Stone. The eminent American poet Robert Frost was equally disenchanted with him.
“Here in Key West,” Frost wrote, “we have a national rehabilitation project running everything. I am dragged by the house-renting clerk before the Rehabilitator in Chief to see if I will do, that is to say, measure up to his idea of what the new citizenry must look like as it thought, felt and acted under God and the President in Washington. The Rehabilitator is a rich young man in shorts with hairy legs named Stone…It is a very, very dead place because it has died several times. It died as a resort of pirates, then as a house of smugglers and wreckers, then as a cigar
manufactury…This town has been nationalized to rescue it from its own speculative excesses. The personal interest of Roosevelt in his second coming has been invoked and both mayor and governor have abdicated till we see what absolute authority can do to restore the prices of the speculators’ graveyard plots and make Key West equal to Miami…[Key West] has a million dollars worth of concrete sidewalks with no houses on them.”
* * *
Ernest was equal parts a man of action and a man of letters. In October 1933, the man of action finally got a chance to act out one of his most cherished fantasies thanks to a twenty-fivethousand-dollar gift from Pauline’s Uncle Gus. Ernest had long dreamed of going to Africa to hunt wild game in the company of his closest friends. But as the Great Depression bit deeper, the list of Ernest’s drinking and shooting companions grew shorter because of a shortage of money. The only ones who could afford to go off with Ernest on such an expensive adventure were Charlie Thompson and, of course, Pauline whose uncle was financing the entire trip in the hope that Ernest would get another major book out of it.
They arrived in Paris on October 26, the day before Ernest’s latest effort, a book of short stories called Winner Take Nothing, was published to mixed reviews. His friends in the literary world found good things to say about the book, but most of the others were negative. Max Perkins wrote to tell Ernest that the reviews were “unsatisfactory and a good m
any are absolutely enraging.” Most thought Ernest was mining old ground while events had moved on and left him in the dust. The New York Times summed up the thoughts of most mainstream reviewers with its comment, “The dialogue is admirable…The way of life is caught and conveyed without a hitch…It is not that the life they portray isn’t worth exploring. But Hemingway has explored it beyond its worth.” A year earlier Ernest had published his book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, which would eventually be regarded as the best book on the sport by a non-Spaniard. But at the time the literary world regarded it as too much effort expended on a trivial subject while the world was slowly starving.
The public saw it differently, however. While the literary intelligentsia wanted Ernest to engage himself more with the political and economic travails of the era, Ernest’s readers were happy to find an escape from the misery that beset them every day. Other books sold fewer than five thousand copies in the throes of the Great Depression, but Ernest’s latest opus pushed above eleven thousand within weeks of publication. Max Perkins wired Ernest that Scribner’s was happy with sales and expected the book to become a long-term success.
Ernest, Pauline, and Charlie sailed from Marseilles on November 22 aboard the General Metzinger bound for Africa. Seventeen days later they arrived in Mombasa, Pauline wearing a pristine white dress, Charlie a white suit and tie, and Ernest a safari shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Pauline and I looked like missionaries,” Charlie said, “while Ernest had the distinct look of a whiskey drummer.” The next day they boarded the Kenya and Uganda Railway bound for Nairobi.
There, in the heart of darkest Africa, they met up with legendary Great White Hunter Philip Percival who had once guided Ernest’s hero Teddy Roosevelt on a safari through the bush. Ernest had followed Teddy’s adventures with great interest as a boy in Illinois, and he had wanted to travel in the great man’s footsteps ever since. Now it was Ernest’s turn to turn the heavy guns on the biggest game of all, the life-threatening game of killing your prey before it kills you. The trip was a great success for Ernest from every standpoint except one—Charlie outhunted him. He bagged his animals before Ernest bagged his, and when they both killed a rhino, Charlie’s measured six inches longer across the horns than Ernest’s did. It was a measure of their affection for each other that their friendship endured. Ernest was competitive to a fault, having attacked his literary rivals with great ferocity, including those who had gone out of their way to help him in the early days when he was having trouble getting published. If Charlie had been a writer, it might have been different. But Ernest shrugged it off, lifted his glass in a toast to Charlie, and they all returned home with more than enough trophies to hang on their walls for the rest of their lives.
On April 11, 1934, a jazz band greeted them in Key West with all the locals turning out to celebrate their arrival. Word of their great African adventure had preceded them, reported in minute detail in the nation’s leading newspapers. Ernest lost no time in getting back to work. The safari had stimulated his creative juices, as Uncle Gus had anticipated, and Ernest started work almost immediately on Green Hills of Africa. Ernest finished the first draft by the end of the year, and Scriber’s brought it out in October 1935. The reviewers were no kinder to his book about big-game hunting than they had been to the bullfighting book and the last book of short stories. Even Ernest’s old buddy F. Scott Fitzgerald weighed in against it, but part of his motivation may have been due to Ernest’s blasting his last effort, Tender is the Night, for having “no true writing” in it. No matter though. Sales were good to say the least. Better than Scott’s and better than Ernest’s other competitors.
And success is the best revenge of all, Ernest thought.
Chapter Three
Ernest was a literary superstar by the time Julius Stone descended on Key West like a provincial governor on the outskirts of the Roman Empire. Julius cast his gaze wide and far across his domain. He took in the abandoned cigar factories, collapsed piers, and dilapidated houses that had clearly seen better days. His hairy legs, as Frost remarked, were very much on display since he introduced Bermuda shorts to an area that preferred fish-stained trousers or cut-off shorts tied around the waist with a length of rope. The Conchs—or native-born locals—made fun of him walking around in public in what looked like “his underwear.” Some took to wearing flowery undershorts themselves, both to spoof him and also to show that they could get away with anything he could. But their taunts were lost on Imperator Stone. Julius was lord and master of all that he surveyed. He had the power as southeastern director of FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and they would all knuckle under his rule if they knew what was good for them. Every state had a FERA administrator with almost absolute authority, and in Florida the man whose word was law was Julius Stone.
“Your city is bankrupt,” he told the locals, “your streets are littered and filthy, your homes are rundown, and your industry is gone.”
Emperor Julius rarely smiled. He stood tall and thin and unyielding. At first he thought of shutting down the island altogether and moving the inhabitants north, perhaps to Tampa, were they might find work in the cigar factories that had relocated there— whether the locals wanted to go or not. That would have been an early American version of the Pol Pot solution in Cambodia a few decades later: ship an entire population off to an area where they might do something useful with their lives. But that seemed too drastic an option, even for the imperious provincial governor.
Finally Julius hit on a solution that he thought would work. There was one solution to the town’s problems, as he saw it, and the ragtag Conchs would have nothing to say about it. The abandoned buildings and houses, the rotting piers, the garbage-strewn streets offended Julius’s Midwestern sensibilities. He would rip down the homes, such as they were, and rebuild the entire island into a tourist Mecca—a new Bermuda in the Gulf Stream. Beyond the blighted wasteland lay dazzling blue-green water teeming with giant fish, some of the most spectacular sunsets on earth, bougainvillea in bloom on the water’s edge, great breezes rustling through stately palm trees. Julius literally drafted the town’s welfare recipients into the Key West Volunteer Group and put them to work. No work, no relief checks for you. He would feed them and give them shelter in return for their stoop labor. Their options were limited. That’s how the pyramids got built, and that’s how Key West would be transformed into a haven for tourists with big boats to tie up in the harbor and pots of legal tender to spend in the island’s restaurants, bars, and hotels.
And so began one of the most far-reaching rehabilitation projects in the nation’s history. Julius looked on as the locals scurried about, so many dung beetles on a putrefying mound of decay. He permitted some of them to retain title to their houses but charged them rent, which they paid with their relief money until the cost of renovating their houses had been paid back. In doing so he overstepped his authority. Nowhere in the federal guidelines did it say that Stone had a right to attach private property and charge the owners rent for it.
“I got away with it because we were so far off no one knew what we were doing,” Julius crowed, giddy with absolute power. “With a scratch of my pen I started this work in Key West, and with a scratch of my pen I can stop it—just like that.”
Over a whirlwind five-month period, from July to December 1935, Julius Stone’s four thousand conscripted minions labored long and hard for a million and a half hours collectively. They fixed up more than two hundred houses; erected cabanas with thatched-roof huts on the beaches; renovated bars, restaurants, and hotels; planted trees along the streets; and put up an aquarium at Mallory Square. And still they were not finished. Their toil was far from over. Stone started a school for maids, enticing the few remaining wealthy dowagers in town to teach the unwashed local girls how to clean, launder, and otherwise serve the needs of the visiting tourists. He drafted unemployed fishermen as fishing guides to teach the moneyed classes how to haul in the giant billfish that lived in th
e blue-green waters. He conscripted out-of-work musicians into a Hospitality Band to greet wealthy tourists arriving by boat and train. He turned the abandoned submarine base into a private yacht basin. And Emperor Julius admonished the visitors themselves about just how long it would take them to fully appreciate his renovated fiefdom.
“To appreciate Key West with its indigenous architecture, its lanes and byways, its friendly people and general picturesqueness, the visitor must spend at least a few days in the city…Unless a visitor is prepared to spend at least three full days here, the Key West Administration would rather he did not come.”
Julius incurred Ernest’s unmitigated fury when he drafted Key West’s most celebrated literary icon into serving as a tourist attraction without checking first with the author. There it was—the Whitehead Street house that belonged to Papa, as he started to call himself even in his thirties, listed number eighteen on a list of fortyeight places tourists should plan to visit on the Island of Bones.
It is not clear what infuriated Papa more: being included on the list in the first place, or being placed so far down on Stone’s roster of attractions. Shouldn’t the Heavyweight Champion of American Writers, the man who had knocked Turgenev, de Maupassant, and Stendhal on their asses in the literary ring, have been number one if he was mentioned at all?