Hemingway and Gellhorn Read online

  Jane Mason became Helene Bradley in the novel, deliciously described by Ernest as a tall lovely blonde who collected writers, painters, and big-game hunters as sexual trophies, along with their works. One of Ernest’s characters refers to the real-life author as “the big slob.” Ernest wrote an especially vivid scene showing Helene’s husband walking in while Jane was making love to the writer who goes limp in mid-performance. Helene flies into a rage, denouncing the writer for being a coward since her husband didn’t care as long as he was allowed to watch. Josie Russell took a turn as Freddy who owned Freddy’s Bar, a popular watering hole in Key West. Other pals of Ernest quickly recognized themselves in their fictional counterparts, some of them less flattering than they would have liked.

  Martha was delighted when Ernest offered to read her own work in progress. He was the master, and honest advice coming from him was invaluable. Don’t over-think what you’re writing, he told her. Get on with it, take some risks, and have the courage to toss it out and start over when you don’t like it. Just go with your gut and don’t intellectualize what you feel inside.

  Finally, Martha had to leave. She had come to Key West with a goal in mind, and now that she had achieved it she had to return to the real world and let her adventure play out whichever way it would. Ernest made it easy for her. He was more than smitten; he had fallen halfway in love during the past couple of weeks. Martha hitched a ride with someone who was driving up through the Keys on Saturday, January 9, 1937, and Ernest told her to wait for him in Miami where he would join her the next day. He had a friend there, a former heavyweight boxer named Tom Heeney, who had once fought Gene Tunney for the heavyweight championship and lost. Damon Runyon called the New Zealandborn Heeney “the Hard Rock from Down Under.” After retiring from the ring, Heeney opened a bar and restaurant in Miami and sometimes went out fishing with Ernest on his trips to Key West.

  Ernest told Pauline that he wanted to see Heeney before heading up to New York City to take care of some business with his publisher. Pauline knew Martha had just left town, and Ernest’s lame excuse put Pauline’s bullshit detector on full marital alert. He boarded the Pan Am seaplane the next afternoon and landed in Miami in time to have dinner with Martha in Heeney’s joint on Sunday night. Over steaks and drinks they planned their next move together. Martha wanted to go to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, and she intended to go to New York to line up an assignment there. Ernest had been thinking more and more about the war in Spain lately, sorting out his own feelings about which side he favored. He was getting bored with life in Key West and needed a change of pace. He loved Spain more than any country except his own, and he thought it would be a good thing to go back and see for himself what was happening there.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ernest and Martha traveled together as far as Jacksonville, at which point Martha boarded a bus for St. Louis and Ernest got on a train to New York City. Martha was clever enough to send Pauline a thank-you letter for her hospitality in Key West. Pauline was less than reassured, however, particularly when Martha referred to Ernest as “Ernestino” and said his books were “pretty hot stuff.” She continued, “What I am trying to tell you in my halting way is that you are a fine girl and it was good of you not to mind my becoming a fixture, like a kudu head, in your home.” The deception was transparent to a bright woman like Pauline, who had befriended Ernest’s first wife Hadley while luring him into her own bed. She didn’t want to admit it, but Pauline had a nagging feeling that Martha might be pulling her own version of a “Pauline” on her. Pauline knew Ernest as well as anyone on earth. Hadn’t she been coping with his series of extramarital infatuations almost from the day they were married?

  Pauline’s fears would have boiled over into outright fury had she been privy to the letters Martha sent Ernest from St. Louis. “Please don’t disappear…Hemingstein, I am very very fond of you,” she wrote, addressing him by one of the many nicknames she found so endearing.

  Martha continued to work on her book in her bedroom on the third floor of her childhood home, setting a personal goal of ten pages a day regardless of whether the writing was going well or not. She was the first one to become disillusioned by her latest effort, feeling it was getting bogged down, going nowhere, and she complained about her predicament in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. “You do get yourself into a state of jitters,” Eleanor wrote back. “Mr. Hemingway is right. I think you lose the flow of thought by too much rewriting.” When Martha’s old boyfriend, Allen Grover, told her that her manuscript read more like a political tract than a novel, Martha decided to throw in the towel and abandon it. After a few weeks, she had had enough of St. Louis. She missed her Hemingstein far too much and was badly in need of a dose of his jolly good cheer and optimism. And Ernestino missed his Martha. His letters and phone calls had become more and more frantic, sometimes several in a day, as he nearly begged her to join him in the Big Apple.

  * * *

  New York City was a whirlwind, spinning with far more intensity than Martha expected. Aside from his writing, Ernest did very little that didn’t include a coterie of rogues who enjoyed life as much as he did. He wined and dined every night in the Stork Club or “21” with friends and fellow roustabouts, visited Max Perkins, went to the fights to see the heavyweights, and generally immersed himself in boisterous good times and daytime visits to museums and art galleries. His celebrity had grown to movie star proportions, and the press followed his every move, with the flashbulbs popping every time he ventured outside his hotel room. He also found time to help push Martha’s career along, showing one of her short stories to Max who arranged for its publication in Scribner’s magazine.

  Martha’s time with Ernest in New York was “very dashing— and vulgar,” she wrote, thrilling to every minute of it. Wasn’t she there in the spotlight with him, basking in the glow of his charisma? “He was intoxicating just to be with,” said poet and novelist Stephen Spender. “He was exciting. He was a self-dramatizer, but he was very isolated within his own legend. What was rather surprising to me was that people, Martha Gellhorn particularly, were playing up to him. She talked Hemingwayese to him all the time, calling him ‘Hem’ and ‘Hemingstein,’ One of the most unfortunate things about Hemingway is that he invented a style which practically everyone imitated.”

  “No one who ever met Hemingway ever forgot him,” Biographer Michael Reynolds wrote.

  Martha hoped to land an assignment to cover the Spanish Civil War for a major magazine or newspaper, but when none was forthcoming she settled for a role as a stringer for Collier’s. In effect, she was a free lancer writing on speculation; if she sent them anything interesting from the war zone, they might agree to publish it. As if that development were not frustrating enough, Martha was short of money to finance her trip abroad. The only way she could raise enough for her passage was to write an article for Vogue about the “Beauty Problems of the Middle-Aged Woman.” The topic was a world removed from what was going on in Spain and the rest of Europe. But Martha had little choice but to swallow her pride and write the article—developing a skin rash in the process after trying out an “anti-aging” ointment at her editor’s insistence.

  “I shall be a great writer and stick to misery, which is my province,” she told a friend, “and limit my reforming to the spirit and the hell with the flesh.”

  To a friend of Edna’s in St. Louis, Martha wrote, “I am going to Spain with the boys. I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.”

  Actually, she did know very well who one of the boys was, none other than the writer she had traveled to Key West to meet a short while before. Ernest, too, was all fired up to get back to the country he loved, which was being ripped apart by violence, bloodshed, and atrocities on both sides of the broad political divide. The North American Newspaper Alliance, known as NANA, was only too happy to sign him up as a correspondent. Martha knew which side of the political divide she stood on, but Ernest was still reserving judgment. Until
now, all he had to go on were the unfiltered views of others, which were never reliable enough for him; he needed to see what was going on with his own eyes. As much as he had written about war in the past, he was a gut-level isolationist who once said, “Your own country is the only county worth fighting for.”

  Martha stayed in New York, finishing up her article for Vogue and acquiring the documents she needed for the trip to the war zone, and Ernest returned to Key West to face an anxious Pauline who was starting to feel abandoned by her errant husband. He was leaving for Spain to cover the war, he told her. He intended to write anti-war journalism, he said, to keep America out of the conflict. Pauline said she wanted to go with him, but Ernest was adamant about going alone. It was too dangerous over there for any woman, he said, blithely ignoring the fact that Martha would be joining him. Martha had already sent him a letter saying that she hoped they were “on the same ark when the real deluge begins.” In an odd letter to his in-laws, Ernest penned what amounted to a farewell note of sorts.

  “I’m very grateful to you for providing Pauline who’s made me happier than I’ve ever been before.” The finality of that remark was lost on the Pfeiffers at the time, but in Ernest’s mind it appeared that he had already decided his marriage was over.

  In a painful missive to Ernest’s editor, who had visited them several times in Key West, Pauline revealed her mounting trepidations. She was writing him from “the Widow’s Peak,” she said. “I am told that when I was a very young baby I could be left alone on a chair and would never fall off. I seem to be still on it.”

  Nothing she said or did could ever deter Ernest from going wherever and doing whatever he wanted once his mind was made up. This time was no different. Ernest was going to Spain and she was not going with him. Instead, she went on a trip to Mexico City with some friends from Key West. The trip did not offer much in the way of solace, but it was the best Pauline could do. Ernest had given her much pain over the years—as well as a lot of love, cheer, and comfort during the best of times—but this time she could feel her heart breaking inside her breast.

  PART THREE

  UNCIVIL WAR

  Chapter Fifteen

  The luxurious French liner the Paris left New York Harbor on February 27, 1937, with America’s most-celebrated literary star aboard it. Max Perkins was there to see him off, the moment captured in a blaze of flashbulbs by an army of photographers and journalists. Traveling with Ernest were two companions, Sidney Franklin, a flamboyant American bullfighter from Brooklyn, New York—“buoyantly mindless,” as some described him—and Evan Shipman, a compulsive gambler who found time to write poetry when he wasn’t handicapping horses. Both were perfect Ernest acolytes. They were amusing company for the author who surrounded himself with fun-loving friends, and they were excellent gofers who could do everything from whipping up a good meal to procuring contraband when the circumstances demanded. Noticeably absent out of a sense of discretion was Martha; she would follow her Hemingstein on a different liner shortly afterward.

  The Paris docked in Le Havre on March 6, and Ernest registered at the posh Hotel Dinard in Paris on March 10. His two traveling companions stayed at a lesser establishment nearby since Ernest was footing the bill for all of them. A few days after he settled into Paris, Ernest met with filmmaker Joris Ivens, a communist who was directing a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, which would eventually be called The Spanish Earth. Ivens hoped to enlist Ernest in the anti-fascist cause, but the author was still reserving judgment until he had a chance to observe conditions in Spain firsthand.

  “I first met Hemingway in the Deux Magots Cafe in Paris,”

  Ivens recalled, “and asked him what he intended to do in Spain. He said, ‘Report the truth about it—that every war is bad.’ I said, ‘All right, come.’” On Sunday, March 14, Ernest caught the night train to Toulouse with Ivens, and from there the two men flew Air France into Valencia, the provisional capital of Republican Spain.

  What happened next is open to interpretation. According to Martha, when she arrived in Paris she was surprised and more than a bit miffed to discover that Ernest had left for Spain without leaving a note for her with instructions on where to meet him. She was no stranger to foreign travel, however, although it was getting increasingly harder to obtain the necessary documentation to cross the border into Spain as the war continued. But Martha was nothing if not resourceful. Dressed in gray flannel trousers and a light windbreaker, carrying a backpack and a duffel bag full of canned food, with the equivalent of only fifty American dollars to her name, she took the train south to the Spanish border. She continued across the mountain pass partway on foot into Spain, and then caught another train headed for Barcelona.

  “At seven the snow was falling like petals. By eight the trees were of glass and the fields were white and the snow blew flat over the land,” she wrote in a style that was more reminiscent of Ernest than anybody else.

  She made it into Barcelona on March 24. Martha observed that the city looked “like an oil boom town.” Everywhere there were soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders, including multitudes of American and British youngsters going off to fight in the war, “looking like hell, and very happy and intense and busy and friendly.” After two days in Barcelona, she hitched a ride on a truck that was carrying ammunition to Valencia. There she ran into Ernest’s buddy and amanuensis, the buoyant Sidney Franklin. Sidney was traveling to Madrid in a car supplied by the Spanish government, and he told Martha that he was bringing provisions to Ernest’s headquarters in Madrid—as though Ernest were a general directing the war from his perch above the action in the streets below. Martha was happy enough to finally be hooking up with her itinerant boyfriend that she consented to share the car not only with Sidney, but with a cornucopia of Spanish hams, coffee, butter, marmalade, oranges, grapefruits, and whiskey, all piled up in the back seat and strapped to the roof.

  Ernest, at that moment, was entertaining an armada of adoring reporters, photographers, army officers, and prostitutes— “whores de combat,” as he called them—in the basement of a makeshift restaurant near his hotel. They were eating dinner on long wooden planks set up like tables. “One of these days a nice girl whom I know very well,” Ernest said, laughing, “a blonde with blue eyes and whose legs start at her shoulders will come here.”

  Martha made a lasting impression on the group when she walked in. “She was just as Hemingway had described her,” said Joris Ivens, adding. “She was a good, conscientious reporter, and she learned from Hemingway the clean, cool work of a good journalist.”

  Ernest looked up as soon as Martha entered the restaurant. “I knew you’d get here, Daughter,” he said, “because I fixed it so you could.” He had started calling all women his age and younger “Daughter” a few years earlier. He had had one son with Hadley and two with Pauline and had always wanted a daughter, which would never come to pass. Martha, of course, was still young enough to have a child of her own, but she was not precisely attuned to being a fulltime mom.

  The remark about fixing it so she could get to Spain would stay with Martha for the rest of her life. Their romance had barely gotten started, yet here he was boasting about how he had arranged for her to join him in Madrid after she had risked her life getting there on her own. It was the type of comment that Martha would find infuriating as their relationship intensified. But at the time she was inclined to dismiss it as “one of the foibles of genius,” Ernest’s way of twisting the truth into a “self-congratulatory end.”

  That’s Martha’s story.

  Sidney Franklin, however, always claimed that Ernest left him behind to meet Martha in Paris, give her money, and help her across the border every step of the way. That has more of the ring of truth to it for the simple reason that it seems unlikely that Ernest would have left his latest paramour in the lurch to fend for herself. Hadn’t he practically abandoned Pauline to follow Martha to Miami and insisted that she join him in New York? The other


  correspondents in Spain remember Martha as always well-dressed in the latest styles, looking as though she had just stepped off the cover of Vogue. They joked that she had a knack for dressing in tailored slacks in the midst of a warzone. That’s something she could only have done with Ernest’s largess, since she had yet to earn a dime writing articles for Collier’s.

  What is certain is that Martha and Sidney Franklin detested each other on sight, and she repeatedly denied his version of what happened after she arrived in Paris. She regarded Sidney as just one of Ernest’s flunkies—and, by extension, her own. In her later years she was so bitter about being regarded as little more than Ernest’s Third Wife that she refused to be interviewed if his name was mentioned. It appears likely that she invented her own version of the truth—as Ernest constantly did—to establish her independence from him.

  * * *

  By the time Martha and Ernest joined up in Madrid, the Spanish Civil War had been going on for close to a year. It officially broke out on July 17, 1936, when a claque of army generals attempted a coup d’état against Spain’s democratically elected coalition government. Paramount among the generals was Francisco Franco, whose forces were an amalgam of nationalists that included monarchists or Carlists, fascists or falangists, Spanish, Algerian, Irish, German, and Italian soldiers of fortune. The unwieldy government coalition comprised a diverse group of anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, syndicalists, various strains of socialists, and a ragtag contingent of international brigades fleshed out by volunteers from all over Europe and North America. Further complicating this ideological stew were a mix of separatists from Cataluna, Navarra, and Galicia, who wanted independence from Spain and self-rule for their own regions. Then there were trade and student unions that splintered into a mind-numbing array of more than forty different factions, each promoting its own political agenda.