Ernesto

  Mary and George Brown drove out to meet them, smiling and waving at Hemingway, despondent and gray, at Idlewild Airport. Fretting about Valerie’s Irish passport, Ernest was sure that he would be interrogated by the authorities.22 In the little Sixty-Second Street apartment Mary had been fixing up, he seemed out of place: outwardly polite, yet adrift in its rooms, distracted, lost in a quagmire of hidden difficulties within, and afraid to communicate them.

  When his wife tried to take him to the Central Park Zoo to get some air, he was afraid to leave the apartment. “Somebody’s waiting out there,” he said. Summoned by Mary, Dr. George Saviers once again travelled a great distance to meet the Hemingways in their hour of need. When his wife lost patience with her husband’s paranoia, he “retreated into silence.”

  With the assistance of George Brown in New York, Bea Guck in Chicago, and Dr. George Saviers ushering the couple back to the Shoshone station platform, the Hemingways and their luggage made their way west to Ketchum. Briefing Dr. Saviers on his kidney trouble and blood pressure, Hemingway installed himself at his writing table that looked upon the Big Wood River Valley. His “spirits seemed to rally,” said Mary. “He was remembering more and more of Paris when he was an ebullient young man there, and getting words on paper.” Betty Bell, local champion skier and efficient secretary, assisted him every step of the way.23

  Alas, Papa’s demons, “doubts, suspicions, and unreasonable fears” would not leave him alone. When two men in topcoats came out of a restaurant, Ernest was certain that they were government men “tailing me out here already.” When a windstorm blew a cottonwood tree across the river near their home, he was wrought with worry: “Anybody could get over here from there.” His wife tried to convince him that they were surrounded by friends who wished them well, but she could no longer break through. To reassure his numerous financial worries, Mary had the vice president of their bank phone and tell them how much they were ahead financially in hard, irrefutable numbers, while Ernest listened in on the other line scribbling the numbers on a notepad and not believing a single number he heard. They were hiding something, he insisted; they were covering something up. What reason could they possibly have to cover something up, Papa? “I don’t know,” said Ernest digging in, “but I know.”24

  When they discovered Hoover’s investigation into Ernest’s connection with Communism, with Cuba, and with Fidel Castro, when they understood that they were tapping his phones and following him around, his loved ones would have to come to terms with the influence of FBI surveillance on Ernest’s mental health. Hotchner later realized that he had “regretfully misjudged” his friend’s fears of the organization and the subsequent treatment that used electric shock therapy to eradicate delusions that were actually facts.25

  When Dr. Saviers suggested that he check into the Menninger Clinic, Ernest protested that “they’ll say I’m losing my marbles,” but the thirty-nine sessions of electric shock treatment were already causing him to do just that.26 They finally decided to check Hemingway into the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was strapped down to receive numerous electroconvulsive shock treatments as traumatic as his previous concussions, leaving him shattered, unable to write, never the same again. Moods became unpredictable, despondent, or paranoid, worsening from week to week. The treatments alleviated his depression for a time but wiped out the author’s ability to create, stripping him of all purpose in the new year.

  In early 1961—as the United States threatened to invade Cuba and Castro responded with a military parade of Soviet-made rocket launchers, artillery, tanks, antiaircraft, and anti-tank guns—the press revealed that Ernest Hemingway had been in the Mayo Clinic receiving treatment: “The white-bearded, 61-year-old novelist is in St. Mary’s hospital in Rochester for ‘medical treatment’ ” a brief statement from the clinic said. A clinic spokesman would not reveal the nature of Hemingway’s illness nor say how long he had been under the care of doctors at the diagnostic center. But it was unofficially reported that Hemingway’s ailment was not considered serious.”27 On the door of his room Ernest had hung a bizarre sign: “FORMER WRITER ENGAGED IN PREPARATION OF SCHEDULED FULL-SCALE NEWS CONFERENCE AS PROMISED IN THE P-D BY OUR SPOKESMAN. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY TO OBTAIN PHOTOGRAPHS OR CONFIRMATION OF TREATMENT GIVEN EXCLUSIVELY TO THE P-D.”28

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  —

  When photographs from round two of The Dangerous Summer appeared unflattering to a rapidly deteriorating Ernest, the writer accused Life of betraying the bullfighters and exposing him as a “double-crosser” and a fool. Asked to write something for President Kennedy’s inauguration, he sat for several hours before a blank page, and unable to compose a single sentence, he broke down. “It just won’t come anymore,” he told Hotchner and wept.29

  The Kennedys telegrammed Hemingway to invite him to the inauguration, and he responded the following day to express gratitude for the invitation and to apologize for not being able to attend due to his health. At the ceremony, Kennedy asked, “Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?…My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”30 After watching the speech on the television with his wife, Hemingway wrote the president a thank-you letter: “[Dear Mr. President] Watching the inauguration from Rochester there was the happiness and the hope and the pride how beautifully we thought Mrs. Kennedy was and then how deeply moving the inaugural address was. Watching on the screen I was sure our President would stand any of the heat to come as he had taken the cold of that day.”31

  Released from the Mayo Clinic, Ernest returned to Ketchum on January 22. There, he saw Gary Cooper, who had once played leading roles in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, but who was now dying of cancer. They had been friends now for twenty years: “Coop is a fine man; as honest and straight and friendly and unspoiled as he looks. If you made up a character like Coop, nobody would believe it. He’s just too good to be true.”32 It was the last time they would see each other before Coop died in May.

  Getting on track, Ernest wrote Harry Brague at Scribner’s on February 6, 1961, with the page count of each of the eighteen chapters of his Paris memoirs. Figuring the average number of words with and without conversation, he crunched numbers and applied complex operations of long division to deduce that he had about 42,000 to 45,000 words. He said he was still working on the nineteenth chapter and his title by making his usual long list, but something was wrong with all the titles on his list, specifically because Paris was generally cliché and wrecked as a subject.

  Not wanting “to bitch,” but imagining Brague might appreciate a “situation report,” Hemingway allowed: Estranged from Cuba, he did not have access to his library, good food, or a secretary, though Mary had been interviewing candidates according to her criteria.33 At a minimum for “title-ing,” he needed a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse and a Bible (King James Version): “This is the minimum and there is nothing here.” The letter shows the extent that Ernest’s displacement from the Finca Vigía disrupted his routine, affected his mental stability, and impeded his writing at this moment when his health was on a sharp decline.

  That spring, on the Caribbean island that Ernest increasingly missed, the United States launched two airstrikes that knocked out 27 percent of the Cuban air force in anticipation of an amphibious and airborne landing, now known as the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. Made wise to the operation both by loose lips in Miami and the KGB, Castro was ready to receive and personally led the counteroffensive with Soviet T-34 and IS-2 tanks, SU-100 tank destroyers, 122 and 105 mm howitzers, B-26 bombers, Hawker Sea Fury fighters, and T-33 jets.

  The Cuban foreign minister, Raúl Roa, who had refused the offer to defect to the United States just days before, denounced the American attacks to the United Nations, and President Kennedy
responded, “On that unhappy island, as in so many other arenas of the contest for freedom, the news has grown worse instead of better. I have emphasized before that this was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator. While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way.”34 When it became clear that the ground operation was destined for failure while the whole world watched, the fledgling president opted not to proceed with a second sortie of air support.

  The repelled attack made the United States, and President Kennedy, look weak, and it solidified Castro’s alliance with the USSR and the cohesion of his new country. Spurred by the monumental failure of the operation, Kennedy sought to step up assassination attempts to topple Castro. For Ernest Hemingway, the failure of the Bay of Pigs perhaps signified the loss of his beloved Finca, the place where he had felt most at home. As an American, he was not likely to be regarded any longer as a friend.

  On April 21, Mary awoke and found her husband “in front of the vestibule of the house with his shotgun, two shells and a note he had written me. For an hour I talked to him—courage, his bravery, faith, love—managed to delay any decisive action until George [Saviers] arrived, perceived the situation and managed to take Papa to the Sun Valley hospital where they put him to bed and gave him sedatives.”35 Convincing George Saviers that he had to return to the house on April 24, Hemingway again grabbed his rifle and had to be subdued by his hunting buddy Don Anderson and George Saviers, who escorted him by plane to Rochester, Minnesota. When the plane stopped to refuel in Rapid City, South Dakota, Ernest ran off, looking in parked cars for ways to kill himself and attempting to walk into a moving propeller of a plane, but the motor cut off just in the nick of time. On April 26, the newspapers reported, “Hemingway Back at Mayo Clinic…A spokesman said the Nobel Prize–winning author was in satisfactory condition but that ‘rest and quiet are absolutely essential.’”36

  Though he was obviously dangerous to himself, Ernest’s friends and family found flashes of hope in the old intellect, such as his cocksure challenge to psychiatrists: pick any sentence of The Old Man and the Sea at random and try to rewrite it in fewer words. It was impossible. Having used considerable charm to play the part of a patient in recovery, Hemingway diluted the objective judgment of his doctors at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Rome soon recommended him for release to his wife, who had come for a visit and had been “dumbfounded to see Ernest there, dressed in his street clothes, grinning like a Cheshire cat,” appearing upbeat and ready to go.37 No sooner had he arrived in Ketchum than he began to pursue his demise like a determined hunter stepping intently through the grim woods of his darkening mind.

  When Hotchner visited his friend in June after a fresh round of electroshock therapy, he had not improved. “Very gently,” Hotchner asked him why he wanted to kill himself. The man who had faced charging rhinos, howling hurricanes, and the terrifying “nada” of an empty page every dawn of his life interrogated: “What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?” How could he say that, protested Hotchner, when he had already written as beautiful a book about Paris as anybody could have ever hoped to write. Hemingway responded that he had written the best of it before and now could not finish it. Well, Hotchner advised, why not retire, or just relax. He’d earned it, hadn’t he?

  “Retire?” scoffed Hemingway. A writer could not retire like a baseball player or a prizefighter when his legs or reflexes were shot. Everywhere he went people would ask him what he was working on.

  To hell with those people, said Hotchner; after all, he never cared what they said about him.

  “What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them.” He then turned on Hotchner, attacking him and accusing him of being in on it, conspiring with “the Feds,” merely pumping him for information that would later be used against him. It was the last time that they would see each other. Hemingway without writing was not Hemingway, but a man stripped of all identity and determined to die.38

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  Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, the author rose as full of intention as on any day of his writing life, drew his favorite shotgun from his storage room in Ketchum, Idaho, and took it to the entrance of his home. Timing his death to occur at precisely 7:00 a.m., he pressed the double barrels to his forehead and ended his own life.

  When his wife of fifteen years heard the shot, she came rushing in and, distraught, insisted for several months that it had been an accident. Enamored with an idol, perplexed by his act, and advancing a career, Emmett Watson, the minor reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who had tapped Papa’s views on Castro, now returned for another scoop, speaking with the officers cordoning the crime scene and becoming the first to “break the story” that it had not been an accident, but a suicide, despite his widow’s insistence that he had unintentionally shot himself while cleaning his weapon.39

  “I’ll let the Maestro end this,” wrote Arnold Gingrich, editor, in Esquire, then allowed Hemingway’s almost forgotten former writer-in-training, Arnold Samuelson, to contribute a few lines in memoriam, for they seemed to be exceptionally well written. Marrying and buying a ranch in Robert Lee in west-central Texas, Samuelson sank into domestic oblivion, incessantly tortured by the heavy expectations created by a summer spent in the presence of a literary god.40 Samuelson had never once forgotten his time with Hemingway and just after the writer’s death had written Gingrich to express his grief in writing: “Ernest lived as long as he could. His last act was the most deliberate of his life. He had never written about his own suffering. He said it all without words in the language any man can understand.”41

  Among the countless tributes to Hemingway after his death, the Cuban painter Antonio Gattorno remembered in an interview for the New Bedford Standard Times in Acushnet, Massachusetts, “He was just like a brother. His loss to me is the same as if I had lost a brother.”

  Several analysts have subsequently speculated that Hemingway’s strange and sudden decline (much like several family members who exhibited many of the same symptoms) might well have been a genetic disease known as hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron results in a rapid mental and physical deterioration.42 Many readers and loved ones were unaware that he had lost his mind, suffering for a year with dementia from concussions, genetics, and electroshock treatment, before finally taking matters into his own hands.

  CHAPTER 16

  Finca Vigía Becomes the Finca Vigía Museum (1960–Present)

  Nineteen days after the shotgun blast that resonated across the world, Cuban Revolution leader Fidel Castro appeared at the North American writer’s estate to drink in the ambiance, to pay his respects, to stroke his beard, to ponder the scene, to smoke a habano, and to take accounts. There, Castro would find René Villarreal, guarding the home of his former employer from would-be interlopers, a loyal employee who would not quit his post. “Do you know who I am?” asked Fidel Castro with a smirk when he saw Villarreal, who had lived there for most of his life.

  “Yes, of course. Fidel Castro, accompanied by his officers.”

  “Where can I find René Villarreal?”

  “I am René Villarreal.”

  “Calm down, there is no need to be nervous. You’re the man the newspapers say lived next to Ernest Hemingway since childhood? Su hombre de confianza…his right-hand man. Can we come in and talk? We would like to see how he lived.”1 Upon parting, Fidel suggested that Villarreal should consider curating a museum dedicated to his former employer. Uncertain about the offer and about Castro, Hemingway’s majordomo said nothing.

  Not yet completely accepting that her husband’s death had been intentional, Mrs. Hemingway had been
busying herself with the project of organizing his estate. One of her first priorities was to return to Cuba to recover the unfinished manuscripts of The Garden of Eden, A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Dangerous Summer, and True at First Light, and to salvage all else in the house that she believed was valuable and could be safely transported to the United States, without unduly alerting the revolutionary administration, which was nationalizing property more zealously than ever.

  Following Papa’s instructions, his fourth wife and “his last secretary” reduced to ashes in a barrel of flames all the letters he had written in anger and not mailed.2 He had marked the letters “burn in case of death” and tied them with a string. Now the two ladies carried out the ritual of tossing them into the fire along with bales of rotting magazines that he had kept for many years. After a month of collecting, burning, and resolving debts, Mary, aware that Castro admired her husband and his work, and eager for his support, invited El Comandante one day in August of 1961 to coffee at the Finca Vigía, and put the servants at attention in a double-rowed receiving line. His ego flattered, he took another VIP tour of the house.

  Mary told Castro that it was her intention to donate the Finca Vigía. Though Fidel was pleased, he told her that she could take whatever she wanted and that he would always keep a place for her to stay at the Finca in the guest house. She asked Castro for his assistance in securing authorization from customs to transport some of her personal belongings to the United States, including valuable Impressionist paintings from Paris. When she had tried to get that clearance for herself, she had been blocked by corrosive bureaucrats.

  His regard softening, he nodded, then suggested, “Why don’t you stay here with us in Cuba?”3 “Oh, señor, that would be interesting. But there is much work to be done about the estate, and it cannot be done here.” Pledging his support to Mrs. Hemingway, Fidel continued to look about the room, fascinated by Hemingway’s hunting trophies, particularly the heads of the African animals. When Castro looked up to admire the weapons on the wall, Mary offered him her husband’s .256 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, and although Fidel thanked her, he responded that he preferred that the gun become part of a Finca Vigía museum that would honor her husband as a longtime resident writer of their land.