Hemingway in Love

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  FOR MY WIFE

  Pamplona, Spain, 1954: Ernest and Hotchner at El Choko bar during La Feria de San Fermín.

  All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Preface

  Fifty years ago, a few years after Ernest Hemingway’s death, I wrote Papa Hemingway, an account of our thirteen years of adventures and misadventures. For those who may not have read it in Papa, I am again referring to the spring of 1948, when I was dispatched to Havana on the ridiculous mission of asking Hemingway to write an article on “The Future of Literature.” I was with the magazine Cosmopolitan, then a literary magazine, before its defoliation by Helen Gurley Brown, and the editor was planning an issue on the future of everything: Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture, Henry Ford II on automobiles, Picasso on art, and, as I said, Hemingway on literature.

  Of course, no writer knows the future of literature beyond what he’ll write the next morning, if that, but there I was, checking into the Hotel Nacional for the express purpose of knocking on Hemingway’s door and asking him to read his literary tea leaves for good old Cosmo. I had tried to avoid this obnoxious assignment, but I was on a “go do it or else” basis, and I could not afford an “or else” as I had been but six months on the job, the only one I had been able to land after dissipating my air force severance pay with a frivolous year in Paris.

  As a compromise I took the coward’s way out and wrote Hemingway a note, asking him to please send me a brief refusal, which would be very helpful to The Future of Hotchner.

  Instead of a note, I received a phone call the next morning from Hemingway, who proposed five o’clock drinks at his favorite Havana bar, the Floridita. He arrived precisely on time, an overpowering presence, not in height, for he was only an inch or so over six feet, but in impact. Everyone in the place responded to his entrance.

  The two frozen daiquiris the barman placed in front of us were in conical glasses big enough to hold long-stemmed roses.

  “Papa Doblas,” Ernest said, “the ultimate achievement of the daiquiri maker’s art.” He conversed with insight and rough humor about famous writers, the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were there for spring training, actors, prizefighters, Hollywood phonies, fish, politicians, everything but “The Future of Literature.” He left abruptly after our fourth or fifth daiquiri—I lost count—but I was able to retain in the rum mist of my head that he was going to pick me up at six o’clock the next morning and take me on a tour around the Morro Castle waters in his boat, the Pilar. When I got back to the hotel, despite the unsteadiness of my pen, I was able to make some notes of our conversation on a sheet of the hotel’s stationery. For all the time I knew him, I made a habit of scribbling entries about what had been said and done on any given day. Later on, I augmented these notes with conversations recorded on my Midgetape, a minuscule device the size of my hand, whose tapes allowed ninety minutes of recording time. Ernest and I sometimes corresponded by using them. Although the tapes disintegrated soon after use, I found them helpful.

  * * *

  Steering from topside controls, Ernest took the Pilar several hours up the coast. On the way back, we hooked what he referred to as a “stunted marlin,” but to me it looked like an unstunted whale. He strapped me into the catch chair and handed me the big heavy rod and reel that had the marlin on the other end. I had never caught anything bigger than a ten-pound bass out of a rowboat and I probably would have had a tough struggle, perhaps even losing the marlin, but Ernest guided me every step of the way, from when to pull up to set the hook to when to bring him in to be taken. The thrill of having reeled in this monster was muted, however, when Ernest and his mate, Gregorio Fuentes, unhooked the marlin and set him free.

  “We just might have a new syndicat des pecheurs,” he said jokingly, “Hotchner and Hemingway, Marlin Purveyors.” That took the sting out of not having my picture taken on the dock with the marlin, stunted or not, hanging by its tail beside me.

  Over the ensuing years, I would observe Ernest’s gentle patience with young people like myself innumerable times. He interacted with them easily. In my case, for example, although I had had military training in firearms, I was a flop at wing shooting, but Ernest patiently led me to proficiency in jump-shooting mallards soaring from canals at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, and cock pheasants breaking from the cornfields. The more our friendship grew, the more I realized that the stories that had circulated about his gruff, pugnacious personality were a myth invented by people who didn’t know him but judged him by the subjects he wrote about. He would stand up to any transgressor, yes, but I never saw him as the aggressor.

  * * *

  When we returned from the boat to the Nacional and were saying good-bye in front of the hotel, Ernest said, mentioning it for the first time, “The fact is, I do not know a damn thing about the future of anything.”

  I assured him it was a dumb request.

  He asked what they were paying, and when I said ten thousand dollars, he said well, that was enough to perk up The Future of Something, perhaps a short story, and that we should stay in touch.

  We did for the next eight months, culminating in his informing me that he was at work on a novel, which I eventually edited for the magazine. In the process, I accompanied Ernest and his wife, Mary, to Paris and Venice to corroborate the details of certain sections of the novel, Across the River and into the Trees, and that was the beginning of our friendship, which over the years took us adventuring to his favorite haunts: hunting for pheasant, wild duck, and Hungarian partridge in Ketchum; bullfighting in Madrid, Málaga, Zaragoza, and the mano a mano competitions of the great matadors Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín; deep-sea fishing for marlin; jai alai matches in Havana; the Auteuil steeplechases in Paris; the World Series and championship prizefights in New York, to name a few.

  But looking back on those years, there was one event that seriously interrupted our adventuring: the consecutive plane crashes that Ernest suffered in the African jungle. He had been subjected to a near-death experience in the second of those crashes; that experience upended him, and he was determined to tell me about a painful period in his life that he had never discussed but that he wanted me to know about in case he never got around to telling about it.

  Over the following years, while we traveled, he relived the agony of that period in Paris when he was writing The Sun Also Rises and at the same time enduring the harrowing experience of being in love with two women simultaneously, an experience that would haunt him to his grave.

  Some of these intimate revelations were contained in my original Papa Hemingway manuscript, but when, before publication, the publisher, Random House, submitted the script pro forma to their lawyers for vetting, the lawyers put the script through their cautious legal wringer, and as a result, those people involved who were still living had to be stricken. In questioning me about the people depicted, the lawy
ers even went so far as to require proof that F. Scott Fitzgerald, twenty years dead, was indeed gone.

  I also had a personal reason for agreeing to withhold Ernest’s reflections at that time. Mary Hemingway was a good, devoted friend, and I felt that learning what Ernest had to say about his first two wives might hurt her feelings, and so would be best kept from her.

  These passing years have filtered away all those who were involved during that period. I retained the excised portions of my Papa manuscript and have now added considerably more from my original notes, plus material I gleaned back then from my Midgetapes before they disintegrated. And I still have a strong recall of what occurred and what was said during that fateful time in my life.

  I can still hear Ernest’s distinct manner of speech. He kept no journals or notes, but his retention of conversation was phenomenal. Not only could he conjure up long past exchanges but he could mimic the cadence and style of his contemporaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, and other Paris regulars. This incredible ability is exhibited in the dialogue in his novels and short stories. I can personally attest to this skill, since in The Dangerous Summer he perfectly re-created a conversation with me, written long after the bullfight event at which the conversation took place.

  I once asked him if he kept journals or notes of any kind to supplement his memory. He said, “No, always made things stick. Never kept notes or a journal. Just push the recall button and there it is. If it isn’t there, it wasn’t worth keeping.”

  I should add a couple of caveats to that observation. The “recall button” that Ernest pushed to release what he told me during our trips, about a sensitive period in his life, are set forth as relayed to me, with no attempt on my part to correct or alter anything in his recall of people and events of the distant past; although in some instances Ernest may have romanticized or exaggerated or misplaced some things, I regarded these incidental blemishes as part and parcel of who he was. For example, when Ernest referred to Murphy’s studio, where he lived after his separation from Hadley, he said it was on the sixth floor. Others who knew Murphy have put the studio on the fifth floor, but in such instances, Ernest’s recollections prevail.

  My other caveat is that I am by no means a dispassionate participant in the telling of Ernest’s story. Over the years, those times Ernest and I were together were no ordinary times for me. He was indeed Papa. I was always aware of his importance, the importance of what he said and did. While my itinerant notes, based on tapes that have long since disintegrated, have aided and abetted my recollections, I have largely relied on my own recall and my own filter in writing this book.

  * * *

  I have lived with Ernest’s personal story for a long time. This is not buried memory dredged up. The story he recounted over the course of our travels was entrusted to me with a purpose. I have held that story in trust for these many years, and now I feel it is my fiduciary obligation to Ernest to finally release it from my memory.

  Churriana, Spain, 1959: Ernest and his wife, Mary, huddled over his presents at his sixtieth birthday party.

  PART ONE

  A Room at St. Mary’s Hospital

  In the beginning of June 1961, on my way back to New York from Hollywood, I took a flight that stopped in Minneapolis. From there, I rented a car and drove ninety miles to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. For the second time, my close friend—Ernest Hemingway—was a patient in its psychiatric section, under the care of doctors from the nearby Mayo Clinic. I had previously visited him there during his first confinement, on my way to Hollywood several weeks earlier.

  For the past six weeks, Ernest had not been allowed to make or receive phone calls or to have visitors, not even his wife, Mary, while he was undergoing a series of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) treatments. Now, during a respite before continuing with another series of ECTs, his Mayo Clinic doctors permitted him to phone me and arrange for a visit.

  The Mayo Clinic itself had no hospital facilities; an affiliation existed, however, with Rochester’s St. Mary’s Hospital, run by an energetic order of nuns, who allowed the clinic’s doctors to treat patients they hospitalized there.

  Back then, electric shock was brutally administered, the electric current projected into the patient’s brain without benefit of an anesthetic, a piece of wood clenched between his teeth as he writhed in torturous pain. The Mayo doctors had diagnosed Ernest as suffering from a depressive persecutory condition and had prescribed the ECTs in an attempt to diminish it.

  There had been many conjectural explanations at the time for his downturn: that he had terminal cancer or money problems; that he had quarreled with Mary. None was true. As his intimate friends knew, he had been suffering from depression and paranoia for the past year of his life, but the roots of this suffering had not been uncovered, if, indeed, they ever would be. I had tried to reason with him, attempting to help him overcome some of his destructive phobias, but the little progress we made turned out to be deceptively temporary. I had also tried to get him away from his destructive environment by arranging an extensive tour of all those fishing places around the world he had always coveted, but on the eve of departure, he backed off. And when Mary urged him to see a psychiatrist, he said hell no, he already had a psychiatrist, his Corona typewriter.

  * * *

  Ernest and I saw each other often during the thirteen years of our friendship. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials, theater, and movies. We shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba, Mexico, and Spain. The summer before the onset of his delusions, Ernest and I had enjoyed a glorious bullfighting tour of the many cities in Spain where the mano a mano competitions between Spain’s reigning matadors—the brothers-in-law Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín—were staged (the deadly mano a mano combat between two competing matadors instead of the usual three). In one of those cities, Cuidad Real, Antonio dressed me in one of his matador get-ups, assigned “El Pecas” (The Freckled One) as my name, and Ernest induced me to go into the bullring as sobre-saliente (a third matador who fights the bull only if the two matadors on the bill are gored and disabled) for these great matadors, while he posed as my manager. As sobre-saliente, I had to make one obligatory pass for the crowd, but Ernest told me to stick close to Antonio, who helped me bring it off by imperceptibly enticing the bull to charge him.

  Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

  In July of 1959, we had celebrated Ernest’s sixtieth birthday in Churriana, a village in the hills above Málaga, with a wonderful party that lasted two days. Mary Hemingway, who was Ernest’s fourth wife, pulled out all the stops on this one. She felt that Ernest’s previous birthdays, because of his lack of cooperation, had always been observed with a pause rather than a celebration, and she was determined to make up for all the lost parties with this one. She succeeded.

  There was champagne from Paris, Chinese food from London, bacalao à la Vizcaína (a Basque-style codfish stew) from Madrid, a shooting booth from a traveling carnival, a fireworks expert from Valencia (the citadel of fireworks), flamenco dancers from Málaga, and musicians from Torremolinos. Celebrants came from all over and included the Maharajah of Jaipur with his maharani and son; the Maharajah of Cooch Behar with his maharani; Gen. C. P. “Buck” Lanham from Washington, D.C. (he commanded the troops in the Hürtgen Forest battle, which Ernest joined ex officio, in World War II); Ambassador and Mrs. David Bruce, who flew down from Bonn; various Madrid notables; and many of Ernest’s old Paris pals.

  Ernest thoroughly enjoyed himself. At the shooting booth, he used a decrepit old rifle to shoot cigarette butts from the lips of both the Maharajah of Cooch Behar and Antonio Ordóñez, Spain’s numero uno matador. He led a conga line around the grounds and delighted in opening his mound of presents and holding them up for all to see.

  The highlight of the party occurred when the firecracker wizard from Valencia fired a salvo of giant rockets, which landed in the top of a royal palm tree near the h
ouse and set the treetop on fire. The Málaga fire department was alerted, and the hook and ladder that arrived was straight out of a Mack Sennett comedy, as were the firemen. They scaled the tree and extinguished the blaze, and then Ernest immediately assimilated them into the party. For the rest of the night, Ernest wore the fire chief’s metal hat; Antonio appropriated the fire engine and raced around the grounds, with Ernest beside him and the siren blaring.

  The end of that summer was the last of the good times.

  Over the following year, I witnessed rather abrupt and puzzling changes in Ernest’s demeanor: his tortured inability to condense The Dangerous Summer for Life magazine; for the first time since he lived there, not participating in the annual pheasant shoot near his home in Ketchum, Idaho; his sudden insistence that fields he had always hunted were now off-limits. As his paranoia deepened, he became convinced that his car and house were being bugged by the FBI and that IRS agents were auditing his bank account.

  On my last visit to Ketchum, Mary, Ernest, and I went to dinner the night before I left. Halfway through the meal, Ernest, who seemed to be enjoying himself, suddenly grew tense and whispered that we had to leave the restaurant immediately. Mary asked what was wrong.

  “Those two FBI agents at the bar, that’s what’s wrong.”

  Later that night, Mary pulled me aside. She was terribly distraught. Ernest spent hours every day with the manuscript of his Paris pieces, trying to write but unable to do more than turn its pages. He often spoke of destroying himself and would sometimes stand at the gun rack holding one of his guns and staring out the window. After much prodding, his Ketchum doctor induced him to enter, under an assumed name, the psychiatric section of St. Mary’s, where his Mayo doctors performed a series of ECTs.