Hemingway and Gellhorn Read online

  “Cut it out,” he said. “Get up off him.”

  “For Christ’s sake! Can’t you mind your own business?” asked the man who had been on top.

  “Leave my buddy alone,” the battered man said. He had blood in his hair, more blood trickling out of his ear and down his face. He squared off as if to throw a punch at the sheriff. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I can take it?”

  “He can take it. Give me a buck,” the man who had been on top said to the sheriff.

  “No.”

  “Go to hell then.” He fastened his eyes on Ernest.

  “What about it, pal?”

  “I’ll buy you a drink,” said Ernest.

  The three of them pushed their way through the crowd up to the bar. Josie was there as he always was, along with Al Skinner, his three-hundred-pound black bartender who doubled as a bouncer. They kept a bat behind the bar just in case the crowd got out of hand inside the joint. Josie said “Skinner was as strong as a mule, could drink like a horse.” He made a good “hatchet man if there was anything or anyone to take care of,” said one of Josie’s regulars.

  Later that night, Ernest wandered alone through the streets. The moon was high in the night sky with the stars twinkling sharply. The trees were dark shapes against the sky as Ernest passed frame houses with narrow yards, faint lights escaping through shuttered windows. He headed back home past unpaved alleys with double rows of houses; Cuban bolito houses with open doors where you could see rough men gambling inside; the pressed-stone Catholic church with sharp, ugly triangles for steeples; the black-domed convent; a filling station; a closed sandwich shop alongside an empty lot that had once been a miniature golf course; a pool parlor; and a barber shop. Pauline would be waiting for him in bed when he got home, awake, unhappy with his drinking and his late-night hours, but nonetheless patient with him and his routine that didn’t include her.

  But Ernest was not thinking about Pauline at the moment. He was thinking about other women, including the gorgeous Jane Mason with whom he had a heated affair two years earlier. Jane Mason—a blonde goddess with a body to match her face. Jane not only collected the books of well-known writers. She collected the writers themselves.

  “You reek of that woman!” Pauline had shrieked at him when he returned from one of his trysts with her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t deny it, you liar! You phony! You change your women like you change your politics. Whatever suits you at the time.”

  Women had thrown themselves at him right from the beginning. He was big and handsome, and he was now a famous writer too. Hadn’t Pauline set her sights on him when he was still a penurious young writer in Paris married to Hadley? His affair with Jane Mason had taken place near his favorite fishing haunt in the waters off Havana. When he was not with Pauline, his usual companion on the trips across to Cuba was the luscious Jane with her wavy blonde hair and curvaceous body. When they were not on Ernest’s boat, they shared a room at the Ambos Mundos hotel in the heart of Havana.

  “Jane Mason not only drank a bit but was one of the wildest, hairiest, most drinking, wenching, sexy superwomen in the world when she was in her twenties, thirties, and early forties,” a friend of Ernest who preferred to remain anonymous described her. “She was proud of being the model for the Macomber woman in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’” one of Ernest’s best-known short stories.

  “She was in love with Ernest at various times,” said another friend.

  Her face was a study in white and gold, and her husband Grant, a top executive with Pan American, regarded her as an invaluable business asset. They lived part of the time in a Cuban mansion set high up on the hills above the Jaimanitas Golf Course. Their parties were legendary, attracting the wealthiest members of the Anglo-Cuban community and celebrities from around the globe. Grant was well aware of his wife’s attraction to other men, as well as her numerous infidelities, and was said to pardon them as long as she let him watch once in a while. Ernest regarded him as nothing but a “wealthy twerp” who ignored her when she seriously injured herself a couple of times, once in a car accident, and another time during an attempted suicide leap from the balcony of their home in Cuba.

  Beautiful and athletic, she loved to fish and hunt with Ernest and his cronies and held her own with all of them. But she wanted to be remembered for something more than her physical allure. The inscription she wrote for her tombstone summed up her own selfimage better than anything else written about her: “Talents too many, not enough of any.”

  Chapter Seven

  Every other Friday was fight night on the Island of Bones. They staged the matches in an arena on the corner of Thomas and Petronia Streets that also doubled as a whorehouse. Ernest liked to sample the trade, referee the fights, and occasionally get in the ring himself and mix it up with the boxers when the matches were over. A few hundred boxing fans usually showed up, paying a buck and a quarter for general admission and three dollars for ringside seats. The fighters got a cut of the purse that amounted to twenty-five or thirty dollars apiece. Most of the fighters were professionals, aging guys on their way down and young ones on their way up.

  “Hemingway looked like an ordinary hippie,” James “Iron Baby” Roberts told Sports Illustrated years later. At the time he met Ernest, Roberts was a teenage light-heavyweight. “I always tell people that it was the first time I saw a hippie, because he used to dress that way. He had a long beard, and he needed a haircut, and he was wearing shorts and an old shirt, just like a common person. You’d never have guessed that he was the big writer he was. He carried right on like ordinary people. That’s the way he lived here.”

  One Friday night Ernest refereed a bout between a black fighter named Alfred “Black Pie” Colebrooks and a Cuban who went by the name Joe Mills. In Colebrooks’s corner was his handler, a lightweight boxer called “Shine,” whose ring name was Kermit “Battling Geech” Forbes. It was clear from the first bell that Colebrooks was outclassed. Mills charged across the ring and belted Colebrooks onto the canvas. Black Pie got up, and Mills knocked him down again. After the eighth knockdown, with Black Pie gamely struggling to his feet, Shine threw in the towel, signaling the fight was over. His fighter had taken enough punishment.

  Ernest picked up the towel and threw it back. He figured as long as a fighter was game, he had a right to keep on trying until he couldn’t fight any longer. Shine tossed the towel back at Ernest, and once again it flew back into the corner. After Ernest had thrown the towel back the third time, Shine lost his cool. He charged into the ring and took a swing at Ernest, who stood a foot taller than the corner man. The blow fell short, and Ernest grabbed Shine’s ears and shook him back and forth until a local cop ran into the ring and pulled Shine away.

  “No, don’t arrest him,” Ernest told the cop. “Anytime a man’s got guts enough to take a punch at me, he’s all right.”

  Shine later said that he didn’t know who Ernest was. “I thought he was some bum trying to pick up a dollar” refereeing fights.

  The next day Ernest invited Shine over to his house to spar with him in a ring he set up in his backyard. “He had two speedpunching bags and one heavy bag and three kinds of gloves—eight, ten, and sixteen ounces,” said Shine. “At one time or another, all the local fighters sparred with him at fifty cents a round.”

  “We all took it easy on Mr. Ernest,” Iron Baby, the light heavyweight, recalled. “We’d go about three or four rounds with him. I was the only one he was kind of leery of, on account of my weight.” The light heavyweights came in at about one seventy-five compared with Ernest’s one eighty-five when he was in shape. As he got older, Ernest tipped the scales at over two hundred pounds most of the time, sometimes ballooning up to two-fifty. “We were pretty young then, and Hemingway was older than us, but he’d give us a tussle.”

  “He liked to box and so did I,” said novelist Harry Sylvester. “I think we both had glorified notions of what we were. He w
as still very badly slowed down by his World War I war wounds. But he gave off a great feeling of energy. You got the feeling—an intelligent bear is here.”

  Iron Baby went on to become a ranking light heavyweight, while Shine was a ranking lightweight in the Army. “The average person in Key West didn’t believe in this segregation stuff with black and white,” said Iron Baby. “We all lived next door to each other. We didn’t know anything about white sections and black sections. I was raised with white guys. Hemingway was friendly with black people. But the whole town was that way.”

  * * *

  From the deck of Pilar, and from the balcony of their room in the Ambos Mundos, they could hear the big guns in the distance. Cuba was in turmoil throughout the 1930s as the revolution to topple Gerardo Machado y Morales became more deadly. Machado had been the youngest Cuban general in the war of independence that ended with the U.S. occupation in 1898, when he was twenty-seven. During the occupation he was mayor of Santa Clara, the town where he was born. Shortly after taking office, a mysterious fire incinerated the records of his criminal past; before the war, and before the Americans arrived, Machado and his father had served time as cattle robbers. The three fingers remaining on his left hand bore testimony to a life devoted to butchery—butchery in a meat shop in his home town, and in the way he dispatched his political enemies.

  Machado ran a losing race for governor of Las Villas but then went on to serve in various posts in the government of Jose Miguel Gomez. He was also a businessman who ran a sugar mill and an electricity company that controlled most of Havana’s utilities. He married his cousin and had three daughters with her. In 1924 he ran successfully for president, defeating Mario G. Menocal and becoming the fifth democratically elected Cuban president.

  In the beginning, Machado was popular with his countrymen. He adopted a nationalistic agenda, imposing heavy taxes on American investments in his nation. At the same time, he began the construction of a seven-hundred-mile central highway and promoted investments in tourism, industry, and mining. His balancing act worked—in the beginning at least—as he combined a support for U.S. interests while defending the idea of Cuban sovereignty. Wilfredo Fernandez, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, paid Machado the ultimate compliment, saying Machado’s programs were so “full of patriotism” that to oppose them would be “unpatriotic.” But the honeymoon quickly ended. In the late 1920s the Cuban economy took a nosedive, opposition to Machado’s policies gained traction, and his instincts as the butcher he once was resurfaced. Those who criticized him felt the full brunt of his arrogance and brutality.

  By April 1928, university students demonstrated against his “dictatorial tendencies.” Machado responded in typical fashion, ordering the University Council made up of teachers and administrators to convene disciplinary tribunals and expel the student leaders. Using a combination of threats and bribes, Machado positioned himself as the only candidate of the only legal political parties he allowed to operate: the Liberal, Conservative, and Popular parties, all of which he controlled with a steel grip. He had Cuba’s constitution amended to permit a six-year term, which he won in November 1928 as an unopposed candidate.

  And then Machado orchestrated the murders of his most vocal opponents. Exiled student leader Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated in Mexico in 1929. Others were

  dispatched in quick order. Machado’s main critics met secretly to consolidate their forces. Opposition to Machado and his policies grew rapidly as the economy deteriorated and the price of sugar— Cuba’s main commodity—plunged. Machado reacted with even harsher, more violent measures than before. His secret police, the Porra, served as a Death Squad, relentlessly pursuing and killing Machado’s main opponents. Once more his opponents regrouped. Student groups, organized labor, and middle class professionals armed themselves in 1931 and staged an open revolt. Machado had nothing but contempt for their efforts and announced that he would stay in office until May 20, 1935, “not a minute more or a minute less.”

  “By the end of 1932,” wrote Jules R. Benjamin in The

  Hispanic American Historical Review , “the militant response of the Cuban proletariat to both the depression and the dictatorship had become one of the major threats to the regime.” The U.S. took a stand in favor of political reform in Cuba, trumpeting the New Deal shaping up under FDR as the ideal model for Cuba. A year later, Cuba was in a state of all-out war. President Roosevelt sent Ambassador Sumner Welles to Cuba to monitor conditions on the island-nation. In July 1933 Welles insisted that Machado reinstate the constitution that he threw out two years earlier or face the full wrath and fury of the United States. Machado was as disdainful of FDR and his minions as he was of his home-grown opponents. “The reestablishment of the guarantees is a prerogative of the President of Cuba and will be done when the President considers it necessary,” he said.

  Revolution burst out across the length and breadth of the country, with the guns booming in the distance as Ernest and his “mob,” as he called them, fished for giant blue marlin in the waters off Havana. The end for Machado was more clearly in view. His coalition of thugs fell apart, and he began to look for an opportunity to leave his country under conditions favorable to himself. In typical fashion, the U.S. negotiated a deal with Machado amounting to a payoff if he agreed to leave the country under safe passage to Miami. Machado accepted the bribe and allowed the U.S. to install a new provisional president, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, as his temporary successor. As soon as Welles left the scene, proclaiming that all was well in Cuba once more, the guns began to boom again in the hills around Havana. An army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista was not as taken with the U.S. puppet president as Sumner Wells was. Batista led a revolution of his own, one that would go down in history as the “Revolt of the Sergeants.”

  And so, in its inimitable and predictable fashion, U.S. intervention on the turbulent island just ninety miles off America’s southernmost shore ushered in a new dictatorship. This one was led by an ex-sergeant named Batista, who imposed his own reign of terror for the next twenty-five years, until a bearded communist named Fidel Castro knocked him out of the catbird seat. Batista was a quick study; in no time at all he learned how to do business with American interests in his country. He allowed the Mafia to run the Havana gambling casinos and American corporations to control the country’s sugar monopoly, while lining his own pockets at the same time.

  * * *

  The big guns were silent now. No longer could Ernest hear them as his crew fired up Pilar for the return trip to Key West. The revolution in Cuba was over, and the fishing was done for the season. Ernest was a student of war, having served in Italy during World War I and covering other conflicts as a journalist. What was going on in Cuba intrigued him at the time, but not enough to keep him there any longer. A bigger conflict was boiling over in Spain, a revolution in the making that would occupy a larger canvas. It was a revolution that would involve all of Europe and the U.S. over the next few years. The Cuban revolution by comparison was a tempest in a teapot as far as the world at large was concerned. It was a provincial matter, an event of interest only to Cubans and the giant nation that viewed Cuba as its playground—a playground with opportunities for American corporations to make some money.

  For the moment, it was time for Ernest to go home and get back to work, back to the manuscript that had been sitting on his desk waiting idly for him for a long time now, for far too long while he enjoyed his pleasures in Cuba.

  PART TWO

  GELLHORN

  Chapter Eight

  She was tall and blonde with long sensuous legs that seemed to begin just under her armpits. For as long as she could remember she had wanted to be a writer. And the writer she admired most, the one whom she tried not to imitate too closely lest he overshadow her own creative efforts, was the most successful and famous writer of his generation. His photograph had adorned her dormitory wall in college. Indeed, she was not the only student of literature who had pinned a pictu
re of Ernest on her wall, who had quoted frequently from his work, who read every one of his books as soon as they came out and admitted that her writing style had been affected by his. She was not the only one seduced by the clarity and economy of his prose, every line of which rejected the cant and stylized rhetoric of writers who had come before him. But Martha Gellhorn may well have been the most talented.

  Martha Gellhorn was a daughter of the Midwest, born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 8, 1908. Her father was a half-Jewish gynecologist named George Gellhorn, and her mother was a halfJewish suffragette whose birth name was Edna Fischel. They were Ethical Humanists who put those principles to work in their own home. One of Martha’s earliest memories was sitting around the dining room table with black folks from town. The Gellhorns were one of the few white families in St. Louis who regularly hosted black people in their home at 4366 McPherson Avenue, comfortably located on a wide shady street, and reached out to them in other ways. Both of Martha’s parents were way over on the political left and believed in progressive education and social equality for everyone. George, in particular, was a physical fitness buff who pushed Martha and her siblings to exercise regularly and eat sparingly.

  After graduating from the John Burroughs School, Martha enrolled in her mother’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr in Philadelphia. But college life was not for her. At the end of her junior year she announced that “a college degree would only qualify me for precisely the kind of job I would never want.” The picture of Ernest on her dormitory wall reminded her every day of her true calling, her obsession to become a writer.

  “I’ll get something, somehow,” she told her mother. “And I’ll use it as a stepping stone to get a job abroad. Oh Gosh! How I ache to get over there.”