Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 6

  After quitting Bryn Mawr, she landed a less-than-romantic job as a reporter for the Albany Times Union, covering the police beat including the local morgue with cold, stiff corpses laid out on slabs. “I found myself growing cold and shaking,” she said. “I wanted to scream that it was all too ghoulish to be true.” When Martha was not writing about the recently departed with their “grey, marcelled bobs” and “narrow shoulders,” she was fighting off the advances of the hard-drinking city editor who had taken a fancy to her long slender legs and elegant good looks. One of her fellow reporters observed the newspaper’s only female reporter with a good measure of amusement and nicknamed her the “blonde peril” because of the effect she had on men.

  She put her time in Albany to good use, turning the stories she covered into fiction that she would eventually use in her novels. Her mother, who had disapproved of her decision to abandon college for a life of letters, took pity on Martha and sent her enough money for a train ticket to New York City. Edna understood that New York would be simply a way station for her daughter before she found a way to support herself in Europe, but she decided not to stand in Martha’s way.

  * * *

  Martha landed in Paris in the spring of 1930, just as Ernest was departing the City of Lights with his second wife to make a new life for himself in Key West. She had devoured all his short stories, his first major novel The Sun Also Rises about life in Paris and the bullfights in Spain, and A Farewell to Arms, which came out to great acclaim the previous fall and was scheduled to become a movie starring Gary Cooper. Martha was enraptured by Ernest’s vivid, yet economical descriptions of European life, and she was determined to experience it all firsthand. But first she needed a job. The seventyfive dollars she had squirreled away in her suitcase would not last very long. Other than that and a few changes of clothes, she had her typewriter and her gritty, plucky determination to succeed in her chosen career.

  She showed up early one morning at the offices of the New York Times and asked to speak to the bureau chief. The gentleman, startled to hear that some cheeky young woman had shown up without an appointment demanding to see him, came out to find out what her visit was all about. He took in her tall good looks, cloaked in a tweed skirt, her old college coat, and her unfashionable brogues, and asked her what she wanted.

  “I’m highly experienced,” she said, citing her time on the Albany newspaper and two articles she had written for the New Republic. “I can start work immediately as a foreign correspondent.”

  The editor was at first taken aback by her aggressive approach, but he then burst out laughing when he realized that her effrontery was nothing more than a cover for her naïveté. His amusement quickly turned to pity. For one thing, the venerable newspaper only hired reporters with far more experience than she had. And second, no major publication employed women as journalists. When she told him where she was living, he informed her that her hotel was a maison de passage, a brothel, which accounted for the low rate she was paying. The proprietor no doubt hoped to entice her to become one of his “girls” for hire. The editor suggested that she move out immediately and look for something on the Left Bank, where she might also find employment as an assistant in a beauty shop. Martha found a room in a building on the Rue de l’Universite that cost only six dollars a week. There were flowers in a vase in the hall and a grand piano for romantic young men to play pieces by Chopin and other masters. She was the only female in the place, which was well-known as a refuge for homosexual men. But no matter. It was better than living in a whorehouse, and she felt safe there.

  Martha did indeed find a berth in a beauty salon, which lasted about two weeks before she landed a job writing advertising copy for a bubble bath product. Finally, when she thought she could stand her plight no longer, United Press International agreed to give her a shot transcribing stories sent in by far-flung reporters scattered around the globe. She jumped at the opportunity. “I want to go everywhere and see everything and I meant to write my way.”

  * * *

  Martha was picky about the men she got involved with. She liked tall men, intelligent men, men who were not intimidated by strong women with minds of their own. She hooked up with a young American lawyer named Campbell Beckett who had an adventurous streak equal to hers. Campbell was a friend of the French military governor of Tunisia and his countess wife, who invited the lawyer to visit them in their house in Tunis. He asked Martha if she would like to come along with him, and she accepted. It was only later that she realized what a spectacle she made of herself. There she was in the old Arabic part of the city, attending formal functions with the only clothes she had brought with her—a pair of sneakers and a housedress adorned with purple flowers and ruffles. She drank too much one evening and passed out in her bathtub, oblivious to being carried naked from the tub to her bedroom by two Senegalese man servants.

  The countess was “horrified by the brazen unworldliness of the arrangement,” Martha wrote later, “and had catalogued me as a girl who would come to a deservedly bad end.”

  Shortly after returning to Paris, a South American business tycoon with ties to her employer escorted her home from a company function one evening in a taxi, where he made an unwanted pass at her. Martha was indignant enough to complain to her immediate boss, who was further down in the pecking order at UPI. The next day she was fired. “No money. Jobs hard to get. What the hell,” she wrote. With the little money she had managed to save, she moved down to the Mediterranean coast to see for herself the fishing villages, sandy coves, and umbrella pines described by Ernest in one of his books. She found herself exhilarated by the spicy air scented with wild herbs. It was a place for siestas and making love, as the writer Colette had described it. Martha found cheap

  accommodations in a pension along the coast, sat down at her typewriter, and waited for inspiration to strike her.

  And she waited. Then she waited some more. The inspiration she sought failed to materialize. So she went for a long hike, high up the pass leading into Andorra until she could walk no longer. The badly fitting boots that she hoped would serve her well throughout the twelve-hour climb over the pass resulted in blisters and swollen ankles. At the same time a red rash appeared across her chest, convincing Martha that she had contracted syphilis—perhaps a byproduct of her sojourn in Tunisia. Twenty-one years old, nearly destitute, and now panicked over the sprawling stamp of venereal disease emblazoned on her breasts, Martha went to a clinic in Marseilles where she waited in a long line with French and Arab longshoremen to see the doctor. The doctor took one look at her flaming chest and burst out laughing. Her visit was for nothing, he informed her. She did not have syphilis. She had prickly heat.

  Chapter Nine

  The next man who entered Martha’s life—the life of the “blonde peril” who was living up to that soubriquet with unintended exuberance—would play a critical role there for the next few years. In the journal she had begun to keep, she noted the key events that took place from the time she first set foot in Paris. In July 1930 she wrote, “July 14 (circa): met Bertrand.”

  Bertrand de Jouvenal was one of France’s most successful young journalists, the son of a father who was a politician and magazine editor and a socialite mother who ran a salon. Bertrand was half-Jewish like Martha and Roman Catholic on the other side of his family. At twenty-six he was five years older than she and he tilted toward the left side of the political spectrum, an area where Martha felt most comfortable. Bertrand was also married to a woman twelve years older than him named Marcelle. At sixteen years of age, he had been famously seduced by Colette, his father’s second wife who was forty-six at the time. Bertrand’s birth mother had inadvertently set up the tryst by asking her son to convince his father to let her retain the name de Jouvenal after their divorce. Monsieur de Jouvenal had insisted that she drop it since he found her political activism an embarrassing impediment to his career. Colette was home when Bertrand arrived and his father was off on some last-minute business.
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  Colette was “small, stocky, quick,” the sixteen-year-old observed. Her high forehead and almond-shaped eyes, accentuated with thick lines of antimony sulfide, conveyed a look of power rather than age. At the time she was at the peak of her literary fame. The boy never got to see his father that day, but he did get to know his stepmother a bit more intimately than he had ever anticipated. She was decidedly overweight, so much so that she refused to let him see her naked, but she was brimming with sexuality. Bertrand submitted to her immediately, without a moment’s hesitation. After the seduction, she grew quite fond of him, calling him her “little leopard” and a “great whippet of a boy.”

  When Martha met Bertrand she was taken in by his slim body, his fine features, his high prominent cheekbones, and his startling eyes that shone with green or gray intensity, depending on the quality of the light. For his part, Bertrand was mesmerized by the tall blonde American with legs that just went on and on. He kept “staring at me,” Gellhorn wrote later, “reaching for me, almost maddening me with his love.” He kissed her “like a starved man with food.”

  “You deliciously overturn everything that you lay hands on,” he wrote to her, “while I force myself, small-mindedly, to rearrange things that look to me untidy.”

  Martha tried to escape from Bertrand’s intensity at first, but she couldn’t put him out of her mind for very long. He left his wife, he told Martha, to spend more time with her. They traveled together to Mussolini’s Italy so he could report on the political situation there and she could work on her fiction. “My beloved, I am so happy,” he wrote when he was away on assignment. “We have such a marvelous life—your work—my work—our car—our Sundays—our nights—our friends—we’re independent—we’re free—we’re proud—we’re young—we’re in love—we stand out from all others…Oh my love.” Martha was his “rabbit” and Bertrand was her “Smuf.”

  But the real world intruded on their idyllic life together. Under fascism, Italy’s economy was in tatters. Unemployment soared, food became scarce as little children scrounged for tomatoes, bread, and olive oil wherever they could find them. And Bertrand’s love for Martha began to weigh on her. She found his love to be a “wild will to possess” her. She was truly fond of him, perhaps even in love herself, but she had no interest in being tied down to one man by marriage. To make matters even more complicated, Bertrand’s wife announced that she was pregnant and begged him to return, and Martha also got pregnant as the year drew to a close. “I was stuck with a lot of maddening emotional problems which I did not want,” she wrote later. “I began to feel like a plaything of destiny which made me at once gloomy, angry, and confused.” Not knowing what to do, to have an abortion or not to have an abortion, Martha was close to despair. She felt “in every way trapped.”

  She had to get free of the trap, which meant freeing herself from the man who had entrapped her. Her family in St. Louis would be furious with her and her predicament, she knew, but she saw no other alternative except to return home and face her father’s wrath. When he set eyes on her after her lengthy absence, Dr. Gellhorn told Martha that she was nothing but “selfish scum.” And Bertrand? The man was beneath contempt. It was just as well that Bertrand had not accompanied Martha to America. Doctor Gellhorn might have thrashed the Frenchman on sight, despite his pacifist convictions. He sent his pregnant daughter off to see a colleague of his in Chicago, a man who could be trusted to abort in the safest way possible this child from hell inhabiting Martha’s womb.

  * * *

  She worked on her writing, starting a novel and selling stories to the Post-Dispatch so that she could once again save up enough money to leave St. Louis and the stultifying middle-class existence that entrapped her there. She traveled by train through the west, observing and writing about an America that struck her as “vast, beautiful, and empty.” She made stops in Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, California, dipped south into Mexico, interviewed union leaders, other writers, and boxers including Jack Dempsey for her newspaper stories, which served as material for her novels. Men fell in love with her along the way, some of whom she took a brief interest in, but most of whose advances she deflected. In rejecting a would-be suitor, Martha was fond of quoting Ernest who wrote in A Farewell to Arms, “You’re brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave.” She longed for more and more travel, a “need of the far lands” as the “only thing besides writing which is worth the sweat.”

  But Bertrand would not go away. He had lived in Paris since her abrupt departure, publishing a biography of Emile Zola in the spring of 1931 and contributing to several left-wing magazines. All the while he missed his “rabbit” until he could no longer stand being separated from her. Bertrand crossed the Atlantic, ostensibly to cover the Great Depression in the U.S. for the French magazines, but mostly to be close to the woman he loved in her own country. In September 1931 Martha met him as he debarked from the Ile de France in New York City, eager to see if she could rekindle the affection she felt for him the year before. They bought a beat-up Dodge jalopy for twenty-five dollars and set off on a trip through rural America to observe the impact the Great Depression was having on her fellow citizens. As it turned out, the two lovers saw a bit more than they bargained for.

  Their Dodge broke down along a godforsaken road in the boondocks outside Columbia, Mississippi. They waited beside the car in the pitch black night, smoking cigarettes furiously for several hours in an unsuccessful attempt to chase away swarms of hungry mosquitoes. Finally a pickup truck appeared out of the darkness. The driver slowed down, then brought his vehicle to a stop. A local redneck who was visibly drunk stared at them through his open window, sizing up this elegant blonde and skinny Frenchman who might as well have descended from a distant planet. In his unintelligible accent, the driver offered them a lift. Wearily they accepted, wondering what kind of special hell they had gotten themselves into.

  As they climbed aboard, the driver informed them that he was on his way to take part in the lynching of a nineteen-year-old black boy accused of raping a white woman in her fifties. Martha and Bertrand sat stone-still beside the driver as he chugged down the road and came to a stop in a field beneath some trees. A crowd had gathered there, and the driver got out to help the others slip a noose around the black boy’s neck. Martha and Bertrand tried not to watch as the crowd pulled the rope taut across a thick tree limb. But it was impossible not to watch, any more than they could keep their eyes averted from a freak show in the circus. From the corner of their eyes they could see the boy swinging from the end of the rope, the boy and tree silhouetted against the star-lit sky. When it was over the driver came back and told them God’s will had been done. That little nigger would never rape another white woman again. They drove on in silence.

  “We did not speak to each other,” Martha wrote later. “I have a memory of trying not to be sick and trying not to believe any of this. We had heard children’s voices too.”

  Chapter Ten

  The lovers took a sojourn from each other in California, Bertrand attending to business of his own in Hollywood while Martha traveled north to Carmel to work on her novel. The absence suited Martha more than it did Bertrand, who wrote to her every day describing the pain he was in. For her part, she felt guilty about not missing him more. “You’ve given me everything,” she wrote from her rented two-room cottage overlooking the ocean, “and I’ve given you in exchange faint, grudging thanks, so little warmth. My dear, forgive me.” She even encouraged him to have an affair. “Please be a conqueror for a bit; forget me. I’m a shit face.”

  Bertrand could stand Martha’s coldness no longer. His career had suffered since his departure from France, and his love for her had clearly become one-sided. In April 1932 he returned to Paris, where his wife Marcelle frantically waited for him. Unlike Martha, she had decided to keep her baby rather than abort it, and she hoped the cute blond boy she had given birth to would entice Bertrand to become a more steadfast husband and father. Marcelle refused to divorce him on any
account, refused to make it easier for him to leave her for good. But his mind was elsewhere.

  “I want you,” he wrote Martha. “Find out for yourself whether you want me. I think you do.” She hoped to find some solace in St. Louis, but her father was as unyielding as ever. “There are two kinds of women,” he told her, “and you’re the other kind.” Well, if that was the case, Martha reasoned, she might as well enjoy her role of being the other kind of woman. Rejected once more by her father, she turned back to Bertrand. “Ah my beloved,” she wrote him. “I’ve missed you so…I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  And so she went back once again to the man she had all but told to take a hike the last time they were together. Her emotional swings back and forth from coolness and indifference to romantic infatuation with the same man were positively breathtaking. One envisions her coming and going with reckless speed, passing herself in transit from one emotional extreme to the other. More cynical folks might see a measure of opportunism in her behavior, but who could blame a talented and attractive young woman doing what she had to do to survive in a man’s profession set against the backdrop of a man’s world at the time?

  Bertrand was there to greet her when she stepped off the boat in Le Havre in July 1932, with plans to take her to Germany to cover the Reichstag elections. But the Martha who debarked was literally a pale and gaunt version of the woman he last saw. She looked ill, as indeed she was. At first Bertrand thought she had come down with tuberculosis, but a German doctor diagnosed her condition as an ear infection that she likely had contracted aboard ship. After he lanced her abscess and gave her morphine, she told Bertrand that the doctor had all but tortured her. He was undoubtedly a Nazi, she told Bertrand. “I am terribly tired. I would like to die.” The medicine she prescribed for herself was to leave Bertrand behind yet again, this time in Germany, and travel south to France—to Hemingway country along the coast—where she stayed by herself for several months. Bertrand was exasperated, beside himself with longing and grief. “I can’t live a monk’s life,” he wrote to her, ignoring the fact that he had a doting wife and children at home. “I shall be driven to leading a dissolute life, to taking a succession of mistresses. This displeases me.”