Hemingway and Gellhorn Read online

  “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev,” Ernest had written. “Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”

  Ernest responded with a characteristic curse and a threat to flatten Julius the next time he saw the dictator, and he even took a shot at Julius’s wife: “Anyone would have to be a FERA man to have a wife like that.” In a calmer mood, Ernest had a fence built around his property to keep Julius’s nosy tourists from peering at him in his skivvies as he sauntered at dawn across a catwalk to his second-story office in the adjoining tower. Then again, how many rich tourists got up before dawn to see any writer, even one as famous as Ernest, commuting to his lair to put words on paper?

  The Florida Grower, a newspaper published in Orlando, also had a dark view of Emperor Stone and his efforts in Key West. “FERA rule is the rule of fear,” it claimed. “No American city is more completely ruled by one man than is this small island city.”

  Another newspaper called Julius “the king of a tight little empire…Call it a ‘dictatorship,’ a ‘kingdom within a republic,’ or anything you choose.”

  Most galling to all of Julius’s critics was that his heavyhanded tactics succeeded in creating the tourist Mecca he envisioned. The tourists arrived by boat and train, some by airplane from the mainland. They craved food, drink, shelter, and entertainment to satisfy their desires. The restaurants, bars, hotels, and fishing excursions began to thrive once again. Indeed, many residents turned themselves into entrepreneurs, moving out of their renovated homes to accommodate the invasion and charging exorbitant rents for them. Suddenly, all was well on the Island of Bones while the rest of America struggled to free itself from the relentless stranglehold of the Great Depression. The tourists arrived and saved Key West from drowning under the sea that attacked its shoreline on all sides—figuratively if not literally. The Conchs hated the tourists but had no problem turning their houses over to them in return for sorely needed cash. They despised the tourists but welcomed them as benefactors.

  Chapter Four

  You know how it was early in the morning in Key West back then. The rummies were still asleep on the sidewalk with their backs propped against the building outside Sloppy Joe’s. By the time Ernest walked down from his house, the rummies were mostly gone, except for one or two inside the bar working off their hangovers by sipping slowly from frosted glasses of beer. Ernest had already put in a day’s work on his typewriter, rising around six a.m. and writing for four or five hours before sitting down to a hearty meal. Now it was almost noon and Ernest was ready to have his first drink and go out fishing with his cronies. This had been his pattern since he had moved to Key West with Pauline after spending most of the past ten years in Paris, in the beginning with his first wife Hadley, and then with Pauline after he divorced Hadley.

  “Hey, Hem,” Josie Russell greeted Ernest when he walked in, mopping off a place on the bar near Papa’s favorite spot. “You goin’ out to try your luck today?”

  “Hell yes. A day like this was made for fishing, right? You want to come? I’m going out with Charlie later.”

  “Can’t do it, Hem. I’m legit now. Got to tend to business now that the legal trade is back.”

  Josie Russell had run a speakeasy during Prohibition, then opened up a legal joint on Greene Street that he called Sloppy Joe’s when Prohibition ended. Josie Russell had done a lot of things when booze was illegal in the U.S., running rum from Cuba to the States, carrying human cargo from Cuba—mainly Chinese—who wanted to enter the U.S. illegally, running guns from Key West to Cuba. You name it, Josie had done it. It was better not to know too much about all the things Josie had done during that benighted decade when the government thought it could change human behavior just by making some things illegal.

  Ernest was at the peak of his abilities physically and mentally. An inch or so over six feet tall, his weight was trim at one eighty-five. A neat black mustache and his long dark hair gave him the look of the actor Clark Gable who was two years younger than he was. The writing was going well. The horrors, the deep depression that plagued him and other members of his family from time to time, the dark side of the soul that prompted his father to end his own life with a pistol in 1928, had not tormented Ernest for some time now. They never did when the writing was good, the creative juices were flowing, and he maintained a good balance between his literary life and his love of sport.

  Ernest’s friend and fellow writer, John Dos Passos, had said it best: “Key West is just the place for Ole Hem to dry out his bones.” After the cold, damp Paris winters, Key West was the ideal tonic for him. Even the name of the place resonated well with Ernest. Cayo Hueso, “The Saint Tropez of the Poor,” Ernest had labeled the town when he first set eyes on it.

  * * *

  A neatly dressed American tourist and his half-drunk, overweight wife occupied the stools on Ernest’s left. The man was tall and thin, very tan, with a trimmed blond mustache. She looked like a wrestler and was dressed in shorts that barely contained her thunder thighs. On the other side of them sat a down-at-the-heels Conch drinking coffee laced with Cuban rum. Ernest had seen him before at Sloppy Joe’s and knew him from around town. He was a rough-and-ready character with a foul mouth and a tendency to get in fights after his third or fourth drink. Ernest liked him.

  “Nerts to you,” the lady wrestler said to her husband. “Nerts, double nerts to you.”

  “Don’t mind her,” the tall tourist said to the Conch. “She’s my wife.”

  “Oh nerts to him too,” the fat lady said. “Double nerts to him.”

  “I got to talk to you,” the Conch said to Josie. “Can we talk alone?”

  “Go right ahead and say anything you want,” the lady wrestler said.

  The Conch looked her over long and hard. “Okay, lady. Shut up, you whore,” he said. Then to Josie, “Let’s go in the back, Josie. I got a favor to ask. Hem can talk to the whore a couple minutes.”

  Josie flinched, then waved the Conch off to the back. “Listen,” Josie said. “You can’t call my trade names like that. You can’t call a woman a whore in my joint.”

  “Did you hear what she said to me? ‘Nerts to you,’ she said.”

  “I don’t like them tourists any more than you do. Just don’t call her a whore to her face here, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

  “That man insulted me,” the fat lady said to Ernest when the other two disappeared.

  “He talks like that,” Ernest said. “That’s just his way.”

  “I’ll speak to him when he comes back,” said her husband.

  Ernest chuckled to himself, taking it all in with great amusement. A fat lot of good talking to a Conch about insulting your wife was going to do.

  “Listen here,” the thin man said when the Conch and Josie came back. “What’s the idea of talking to my wife like that?”

  “What’s the lady drinking?” the Conch asked Josie.

  “A Cuba Libre,” Josie said.

  “Figures. Give me a straight whiskey then,” said the Conch.

  The Conch downed his drink in a single gulp and headed toward the street.

  “I should have hit him,” the tall man said. “What do you think, dear?”

  “I wish I was a man,” she said. “He was cute though. I’d like to get to know him better.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” the thin man said. “Everybody here is either insulting or nuts.”

  “This is a strange place,” Ernest said. “They call it Singapore West or the Gibraltar of America. It’s closer to Cuba than it is to Miami. It’s actually three hundred and seventy-five miles south of Cairo, Egypt.”

  “You know, I like you too,” the fat lady said to Ernest. “What’s your name?”

  “I like you too, darling,” Ernest said. “But I’ve got to go out fishing now before my chu
ms leave without me.”

  “Wish I could go with you guys, Hem,” Josie said. “But I got to tend to business now that everything’s legit.”

  * * *

  The wind and rain blew in hard off the water and kicked up a chop at the edge of the shore. The weather was relentless— horizontal rain, shuddering wind, dark gray sky—a terrible tempest blasting the people inching down Duval Street toward the dock at the end of the street. The weather was even worse on the islands farther east, particularly on Windley and Matecumbe Keys where the land was flat, the trees spindly, and the structures unfit to withstand little more than a stiff tropical breeze. The population was sparse throughout the Keys east and north of Key West. They were mostly local Conchs who fished the waters for whatever they could pull out of the sparkling blue depths, and a ragtag contingent of World War I vets living in makeshift camps erected during the Great Depression. No sooner had Julius Stone transformed Key West into his cherished tourist Mecca than FDR sent the vets to the Keys to get them out of the nation’s capital where they were an embarrassment to the federal government.

  The vets had started agitating for a special bonus for their service during the First World War to end all wars. The survivors returned from the blood-stained battlefields of Europe to an America that shunted them aside as the good times rolled on and those who didn’t serve had money to burn in nightclubs and dancehalls across the length and breadth of the nation. The country was too busy enjoying its prosperity during the Roaring ‘20s to pay much attention to battle-scarred men who had fallen between the economic cracks. They were men with limited skills and not enough education to compete with the college grads and skilled laborers who had taken their jobs while they were thousands of miles away, fighting a war no one cared to think about. Everyone, it seemed, was earning enough money to feed their families and enjoy a night out on the town, except for the vets who had put their lives at risk in foreign lands. Four million of them had been displaced. As they raised their voices in protest, Congress prodded itself out of its usual stupor when times are good and voted the vets a retroactive bonus to compensate for the meager one dollar a day they had been paid on active duty.

  President Calvin Coolidge, Silent Cal as he was called, vetoed the bill, saying, “Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.”

  Maybe not, but veterans had been receiving bonuses for their service since the beginning of time. Two thousand years earlier, the Romans rewarded their own returning legions with land grants and gifts of cash. The question of patriotism, whether it is measured in blood or money, is moot when citizens are prospering at home while men who fought for their freedom are out of work and destitute. Congress overrode Silent Cal’s veto in 1924, but then rubbed salt in the vets’ wounds by awarding them a bonus that was not payable until 1945, more than twenty years later. The vets were incensed, and when the Stock Market Crash of 1929 gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s, their mood turned ugly, bordering on the very edge of revolution.

  * * *

  By 1932 more than half of the nation’s outstanding mortgages were in default. Three thousand banks had failed during the past twelve months alone. In May of that year, three hundred angry vets hopped aboard railway cars heading out of Portland, Oregon, heading east across the great American mountains, forests, and plains toward the nation’s capital. Along the way they picked up other vets and sympathizers, unemployed legions of disgruntled workers determined to extract a measure of justice from their elected representatives in Washington. They maintained military discipline on their long journey east, playing reveille every morning, sounding taps at night, shunning panhandling, violence, and extremist rhetoric within their ranks. By June their numbers had grown to fifteen thousand rebels and patriots, including more than one thousand wives and children. The press hopped aboard the bandwagon and published stories about this great “Bonus Expeditionary Force” that was about to invade the very citadel of government.

  The angry legions set up squalid camps along the Anacostia Flats across the river from the Capitol. They built their shelters with materials scavenged from junk piles—rotting lumber, packing boxes, scrap tin—and covered their shacks with roofs of thatched straw. The veterans had one demand: the immediate payment of the bonus Congress had promised them. Their ramshackle camps spilled over to other encampments around the city while the Bonus Army, as the public had now dubbed them, waited patiently for the government to respond.

  Discipline in the camp was good, despite the fears of D.C. residents who spread stories about the “Red Scare” in their midst. The veterans laid out pathways linking their various campsites, dug latrines, and held daily formations to maintain their military discipline. They required newcomers entering the camps to register and prove they were bona fide veterans rather than rabble rousers looking to stir up revolutionary fervor.

  “We’re here for the duration and we’re not going to starve,” said the leader of the vets, Retired Sergeant Walter Waters. “We’re going to keep ourselves a simon-pure veterans’ organization. If the Bonus is paid it will relieve to a large extent the deplorable economic conditions.”

  To help their families survive, battle-hardened young men pummeled each other for nickels in an ongoing boxing marathon. Salvation Army volunteers organized a library inside muddy tents. The faces of hunger and deprivation haunted a wealthy socialite, Evalyn McLean, the owner of the Hope Diamond, to such a degree that she burst into a greasy-spoon diner to demand sandwiches for the vets and their families.

  “I want a thousand, and a thousand packs of cigarettes,” she demanded.

  Roy Wilkins, a reporter who later became the head of the NAACP, walked among the tents and shocked his readers with accounts of “black toes and white toes sticking out side by side.” The veterans had created a truly interracial community at a time when Jim Crow segregation reigned supreme. Tourists flocked in to see the spectacle first-hand, thrilled and mostly sympathetic to the veterans’ plight. Another reporter labeled the tent city a milestone for Western culture, “the first large scale attempt to mimic Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance.”

  J. Edgar Hoover, the young head of the FBI, was less than impressed. He reacted with claims that “misfit radicals were plotting to blow up the White House.” General Douglas MacArthur, the Army chief of staff, viewed the Bonus Army as a “cancerous threat from pacifism and its bedfellow, communism.” MacArthur’s deputy for intelligence called the destitute veterans proof of “objectionable blood in our breed of human beings.” A less-than-sympathetic reporter demanded protection “from the criminal fringe of the invaders.” The Washington Post, owned by Evalyn McLean’s husband, conjured images of “demagogues manipulating servile hordes.” Senator James Lewis of Illinois spurned fellow veterans who came politely to solicit his vote. “Go to hell!” he told them.

  Chapter Five

  More than six thousand vets blanketed Capitol Hill on the night of June 17, 1932, the year before Ernest had left on his safari. A local newspaper described the event as “the tensest day in the capital since the war.” Two days earlier, the House of

  Representatives had passed a bill offering veterans $2.4 million in cash for their 1924 bonus certificates. The debate had been contentious, with one congressman dying of a heart attack during the proceedings. The Senate then commenced its own debate on the bill, whether or not to immediately give the vets their bonus money. Senator Hiram Johnson of California warned colleagues that “it would not be difficult for a real revolution to start in this country.” By dusk the Bonus Army crowded the Capitol grounds awaiting the outcome. When messengers emerged with news that the Senate had defeated the bill, reporters envisioned furious veterans storming the Congress. Waters took his place at the head of the crowd and reported the bad news: The U.S. Senate had voted against the bill 62 to 18. The legions stood mute, crushed into stunned silence.

  “Sing ‘America’ and go back to your billets,” Waters instructed the vets, who began a silent “Dea
th March” that started in front of the Capitol and lasted until July 17, when Congress adjourned.

  On July 28, the federal government ordered the evacuation of the veterans from all government property. As the police moved in, shots rang out and two veterans fell dead with gunshot wounds. At that point President Herbert Hoover ordered the army to clear out the veterans. Even opponents of the bonus bill fumed that stern measures kept backfiring with the public. The public display of haggard old soldiers silently trudging along in their Death March until they dropped only whipped up more support for the veterans. Waters enthralled the press with stories about how he and his wife had been fired from a cannery after serving their country in wartime.

  President Hoover, whose popularity was sagging by the hour in an election year because of the deepening depression, found his patience tested to the limits. Hoover dug his heels in and refused to meet with Waters or anyone else associated with the vets. At the end of July, Hoover sent the current army in to put down the insurrection mounted by the old army—Americans going to war against Americans for the first time since the Civil War. By 4:45 p.m. General MacArthur’s troops were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue below the Capitol. Thousands of Civil Service employees poured out of their cubicles and lined the streets to watch. The veterans cheered, assuming the military display was in their honor. Suddenly MacArthur’s troops turned on them and charged. “Shame, Shame” the spectators cried. Soldiers with fixed bayonets followed, hurling tear gas into the crowd. By nightfall the Bonus Army had retreated across the Anacostia River where Hoover ordered MacArthur to call a stop to the charge.

  But MacArthur refused to be deterred. He continued his assault with tanks, tear gas, and fixed bayonets, flagrantly exceeding his orders to contain the bonus marchers within their mudflats away from public buildings and monuments. “Instead,” wrote historian David M. Kennedy, “MacArthur’s troops proceeded to Anacostia and drove the marchers out of the camp with tear gas.” By early morning all its inhabitants had been routed. Major George Patton relished the mounted charge on the Bonus Army with an almost sexual joy as “sabers rose and fell with a comforting smack,” according to one account. He gleefully sent his cavalry to rout the bewildered inhabitants and torch their flimsy huts in a giant bonfire. Two more veterans died of gunshots, two infants suffocated from gas, and several hundred people fell injured. Nearby hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower reacted more humanely, writing later, “The whole scene was pitiful. The veterans were ragged, ill-fed, and felt themselves badly abused. To suddenly see the whole encampment going up in flames just added to the pity.”