Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  In the meantime she’d also published a novel, a quasi-autobiographical chick-lit bildungsroman about three college girls looking for sex and the meaning of life but instead finding disillusion and the clap. Originally she’d intended to call it Nothing Ever Happens, with a nod to a line from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—“nothing ever happens to the brave”; but by the time it was published she’d settled on What Mad Pursuit, swapping Hemingway for Keats. The novel wasn’t well reviewed, nor did it sell, and her father hated it. Martha was crushed, to her own surprise. “It has meant more to me than I would have believed, that my book is a failure,” she wrote to de Jouvenel. Determined to get it right—to “write great heavy swooping things [that] throw terror and glory into the mind”—she’d begun another project, a linked series of fictional portraits of the Depression’s victims, among them a labor organizer, a preteen child prostitute, and a grandmother on relief, called The Trouble I’ve Seen. It was this book for which Wells had procured her an English publisher, and its appearance, first in London and later in New York and Paris, was greeted with admiring press, including several mentions in Eleanor Roosevelt’s widely read syndicated column, “My Day.” Even her father approved; unfortunately, soon after reading the manuscript he died suddenly, of heart failure following surgery, in January 1936.

  Martha had been living in New York, trying to get a staff job at Time magazine, submitting ideas for pieces about Europe to The New Yorker, and carrying on an affair with a Time writer named Allen Grover, who like de Jouvenal was married and showed no inclination to leave his wife. When her father died, and neither Time nor The New Yorker offered her employment, she decided to cut her losses and run. During her romance with Bertrand she’d toyed with the outlines of a novel about the French and German pacifists they knew—the young internationalists in both countries who were determined not to repeat the holocaust of World War I, no matter the provocation; maybe now was a good time to return to Europe to make a start on it.

  In London she cadged an invitation to stay in Wells’s beautiful house in Regent’s Park, which she intended to use as a base in between her evenings out with the young men she seemed to collect on her travels. Fortunately, whatever his amorous fantasies about her, Wells was safely enmeshed in a long affair with Moura Budberg, Maxim Gorky’s former mistress, and during her visit seemed content to behave more like a mentor than a paramour. He told her he believed in her talent but felt it needed discipline, and he surprised her by insisting not only that she rise at eight to breakfast with him, but that she buckle down to work for several hours afterward, as he did.

  Martha was annoyed—that kind of regimen wasn’t for her, she sniffed, “not then or ever”—so she decided to get back at him by beating him at his own game. One morning, after the breakfast table had been cleared, she went out into the garden with her little portable typewriter and started tapping away. Before lunchtime she had dashed off a short, pungent piece called “Justice at Night,” an account of what happened when she and a companion (Bertrand de Jouvenel, although she called him “Joe” in the piece) were witnesses to the lynching of a seventeen-year-old black sharecropper outside of Columbia, Mississippi, not far from the Louisiana border. Like The Trouble I’ve Seen, “Justice at Night” displayed the sharp eye for precise detail and the clear, cool, seemingly neutral reportorial voice Gellhorn had developed in her short journalistic career, a voice that made the lurid narrative all the more shocking by contrast. Wells loved the piece and thought it should be published immediately, so Martha sent it to her London agent, who in turn sold it to The Spectator for fifty dollars; in the United States, Reader’s Digest bought the rights and it would later be reprinted by another U.S. periodical, The Living Age. She’d certainly shown Wells what she could do if she set her mind to it.

  There was only one thing wrong with this success story, however: Martha hadn’t actually seen the atrocity she wrote about so vividly. She hadn’t heard the victim “making a terrible sound, like a dog whimpering”; she hadn’t smelled the kerosene with which the onlookers doused the body of the hanged man, nor the sizzling flames nor the burning flesh. In fact, although she and Bertrand had indeed taken a road trip through the Cotton Belt on their way to California in 1931, they’d never come within miles of a lynching. But Martha had spent time in the poor backcountry South; she’d driven those dusty roads, talked to those angry white farmers and downtrodden black sharecroppers; in North Carolina, when she was working for FERA, she’d once got a lift from a truck driver who said he was on his way home from “a necktie party”—the slang term for stringing up a black man without benefit of the law. Sometime later she’d met a man whose son had been lynched. It was just a little step, wasn’t it, from there to writing about this fictional incident as if it had really happened? In any case, Martha didn’t give the matter a second thought: once she had the Spectator’s check, she left for Paris to begin research for her proposed pacifist novel.

  She arrived on a continent much changed from the place she’d left two years before. Germany had become an increasingly bellicose and anti-Semitic dictatorship whose ruler, Adolf Hitler, had illegally sent troops in March to occupy the Rhineland, the buffer area along France’s northeastern border that had been set aside as a demilitarized zone by postwar treaty. Some of the idealistic pacifists who had formed part of her and Bertrand’s set, such as the novelist Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, had now veered politically to the right, saying that the only real enemies of peace were the Communists and the Jews. Even Bertrand himself managed to look like an apologist for the Nazis when, trying to promote the rapprochement with Germany that he felt might ensure peace, he published an interview with Hitler in which the Führer said that he loved France, despite what he’d written in Mein Kampf about its being “the mortal enemy of our nation.”

  In the meantime, the Depression had caught up to France in earnest; the streets of Paris were full of the unemployed and the homeless; and armed fascist hooligans, some in uniform, were increasingly preying on anyone whose politics, ethnicity, or appearance they didn’t like. In fact, they had nearly killed the Socialist leader Léon Blum—a professorial-looking former theater critic, and a Jew—in the days before the general elections, dragging him from his car and beating him half to death. In the end, however, Blum’s Popular Front coalition had been victorious, and the new government proceeded to give workers the right to organize, the right to strike, and the right to a forty-hour workweek with two weeks of paid vacation every year. The right-wing daily Le Temps complained that Blum had ushered in “the dictatorship of the proletariat” but the very best, most expensive restaurants were still so full they had to turn people away; although the newly legitimized strikes disrupted the collections at most of the couture houses, Martha’s beloved Schiaparelli had a triumphant season, accessorizing many of her ensembles with a Phrygian cap modeled on the one worn by the Revolutionaries of the 1790s.

  Martha herself wasted no time in buying a smart new wardrobe and a paletteful of fashionable face paint; but she found the atmosphere in Paris “vile.” There were too many “gloomy rich” people complaining that guests at the strike-torn Hotel Crillon, or the Ritz or the George-V, had to make their own beds. Weary of privileged self-pity, she decamped for Germany, where she began research for her novel in archives in Stuttgart and Munich. Germany, however, seemed more poisonous than Paris, “a foreign caricature of itself,” full of uniforms and salutes. Signs everywhere announced “Juden verboten”—a slap in the face to Martha, both of whose parents were half Jewish; in Stuttgart she saw uniformed Nazis jeering at an elderly (probably Jewish) couple who had been forced to scrub paving stones and watched the mousy librarian cringe in terror before the boorish young “brownshirt” who had recently been appointed her superior. The newspapers were full of belligerent hate speech, which reached a crescendo with the first bulletins about fighting in Spain—the result, the papers said, of mob rule by “Red Swine Dogs.” Disgusted, Martha decided she couldn�
��t stay in Germany any longer, or even in Europe.

  “Europe is finished for me,” she would write to Allen Grover. “A lot of things are finished”—her old life among le Tout-Paris; the casual affairs with men who gave her “company, laughter, movement” but not passion; even, maybe, her pacifism, and her pacifist novel. She had intended to spend time touring the Great War killing fields in France and Flanders, but now she would go home to St. Louis, where she’d spend the long, dark winter keeping her widowed mother company. St. Louis was a good place for waiting. She wasn’t sure what would happen next, but she was confident something would. For despite all the strangeness and anxiety she’d encountered in France and Germany—the feeling that the War to End War might be followed by the War to End Europe—the trip had done her good, she felt. It had given her a chance to exhale and relax. Now, she told Grover, she was ready to “start all over.”

  July 1936: Paris

  On Sunday, July 12, a young man with a camera hanging from his shoulder got off the train from Paris in Verdun, on the Meuse River 130 miles northeast of the capital. Of medium height, with a shock of dark hair, black eyebrows, and the face of a gypsy, he was somewhat shabbily dressed, in an old leather jacket and much-worn shoes. His French was fluent, but his accent hinted at somewhere in Middle Europe—not surprisingly, since he’d been born in Budapest twenty-two years before, as Endre Erno Friedmann. That wasn’t the name on the press card he carried in the pocket of the weather-beaten jacket, though; there he was listed as André Friedmann. But for the past few months he’d been calling himself Robert Capa.

  Luckily, Capa’s camera wasn’t in the pawnshop, as it often was when he needed cash, because today he had an assignment from one of the smaller Paris agencies to photograph an event that all the European newspapers and magazines would want to cover: the peace demonstration taking place outside Verdun, where for eleven months in 1916 German and French troops had fought the longest and costliest battles of the Great War. Nearly 300,000 men had died there: 13,000 of them were buried beneath the white crosses that dotted the green grass of the French military cemetery, with the remains of a further 130,000, all unidentifiable, contained in an ossuary nearby. Now, on a gray, chilly July day twenty years after the battle, more than seventy thousand “Peace Pilgrims,” veterans and noncombatants from fourteen countries—including a phalanx of Germans marching under a flag bearing a huge swastika and throwing the Nazi salute—were gathering to honor the dead and to pledge that their sacrifice would not be repeated.

  There were occasional spatters of rain as an honor guard of three wounded veterans carried the ceremonial torch, which had been lit in Paris from the eternal flame beneath the Arc de Triomphe, to the Douaumont ossuary. Capa caught them with his Leica: three unsmiling middle-aged men in carefully brushed dark suits, each wearing a beret against the chill, two of them blinded, gripping their canes, their free hands touching the torchbearer’s shoulders for guidance. They had been Capa’s age when they lost their sight.

  As dusk began to fall, Capa followed the crowd of Peace Pilgrims into the floodlit cemetery, where each former combatant took his place behind one of the white crosses that marked the graves. Click, click, click went Capa’s camera as each veteran laid a single flower on the mound before him. A trumpet called from the ossuary, and was answered by the boom of a cannon. Then silence, followed by a second cannon salute. From the loudspeakers at the corners of the cemetery came the order to cease fire, doubly poignant on this occasion. Into the echoing stillness a child’s voice spoke: For the peace of the world. And the assembled thousands swore aloud, each in their own language, to ensure the peace for which the dead had made the ultimate sacrifice.

  When Capa at last headed back to Paris he knew he had some good pictures in his camera; he knew, too, that the odds were stacked against the promises the Peace Pilgrims had just made so solemnly. He’d seen enough of the world to figure out what was coming: he might be only twenty-two, but he was already a political refugee twice over. As a teenager in Budapest—son of a spendthrift carriage-trade dressmaker and his hardworking wife—he’d gotten involved in avant-garde and antifascist circles, joining in demonstrations against Admiral Miklós Horthy’s iron-fisted and anti-Semitic regime; shortly before he passed his final examinations he’d made the mistake of being seen talking to a known Communist Party recruiter. That night Horthy’s secret police picked him up and took him for “questioning” to headquarters, where his interrogator, an officer with a taste for Beethoven, whistled the Fifth Symphony while beating him up in time to the music. In an act of teenage bravado he’d laughed at his tormentor, after which two thugs knocked him senseless and threw him into a cell; the next morning, since there was no hard evidence against him, they’d turned him loose with orders to leave the country as soon as possible.

  So he’d gone to Berlin, whose Weimar-era adventurousness had only just begun to be tainted by encroaching Nazi brutality, and enrolled in journalism classes at the Hochschule für Politik, where all the young bohemians went; but hard times put an end to the allowance he’d been receiving from his parents, and he had to drop out of school. Hungry, homeless, desperate for money, he talked himself into a job as a darkroom assistant at Dephot, one of the agencies that had sprung up to supply the new illustrated magazines and newspaper supplements that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. His good eye and his eagerness earned him a few small assignments, and then came a big break: Sent to cover a Copenhagen speech by the exiled Russian leader Leon Trotsky, he smuggled his flashless little Leica into the lecture hall, where bulky box cameras, which might have concealed a gun, were prohibited, and captured Trotsky at the podium at point-blank range. Der Welt Spiegel gave his dramatic pictures a full page—with a credit—but his triumph was short-lived. Three months later, Adolf Hitler, riding a tide of anti-Semitic nationalism, was appointed chancellor of Germany; a month after that, the new government suspended all civil liberties, banned publications “unfriendly” to the National Socialists—the Nazis—and started rounding up Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, and Jews. Berlin, already unsettled, was now unsafe, and André Friedmann was on the run again.

  Like many other refugees from Nazism, he ended up in Paris; despite the French economic downturn, it was still the place where everything was happening—art, theater, literature, philosophy, fashion, le jazz hot. As an émigré, however, he couldn’t get a regular job when so many Frenchmen were out of work, so he subsisted on a variety of short-term, low-paying gigs, cadging meals or money or cigarettes from acquaintances, shoplifting the occasional loaf of bread or tin of sardines, or making do with sugar dissolved in water, a trick he’d learned in his lean times in Berlin. That was when the Crédit Municipal pawnshop came in handy—he used to say he’d left his camera “chez ma tante”; when the money from his “aunt,” the pawnbroker, ran out he’d simply slip out of whatever cheap Left Bank hotel room he’d been calling home for the past few months (chronically behind on the rent, but with such charming excuses to the proprietor) and leave his few belongings behind, never to return.

  Despite his poverty, he was proud; even if he had to ask for a handout he did it as if it didn’t matter whether he got it or not. “Why work at little things that bring no money?” he’d say, scornfully. “Wait for the big things, the big moment you can sell.” When he did make money there would be drinks for everyone at the Dôme, at the crossroads of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail—La Coupole, just down the street, was too expensive; or dinner at La Diamenterie, the Middle Eastern restaurant on the rue Lafayette. For by this time he had a group of pals, copains, that included the refugee Pole David Szymin, a chess-playing staff photographer for the Communist weekly paper Regards, whom everyone called Chim; his own boyhood friend from Budapest, Geza Korvin Karpathi; and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the son of a prosperous Normandy textile merchant, who’d started out to be a painter before being seduced by photography.

  Then, one day, there was Gerda, or Gerta, as she
spelled it then: a petite green-eyed girl with artfully arched eyebrows and hennaed hair cut short like a boy’s and a sharp little face—“like a fox that is going to play a trick on you,” said a friend of his later. He’d met her through her roommate, a German secretary named Ruth Cerf, whom he’d asked to pose for some advertising photos he was shooting. Cerf, put off by his scruffy appearance—I’m not going anywhere alone with this guy, she told herself; he looks like a tramp—had brought Gerda with her as a chaperone; to Cerf’s surprise, the chaperone and the scruffy photographer hit it off immediately.

  They had nothing, and everything, in common. Like him, she was Jewish—but her father, a Pole named Heinrich Pohorylle, was a prosperous egg merchant in Stuttgart, not an improvident Hungarian dressmaker. She’d been expensively educated, following gymnasium with a fancy Swiss finishing school, where she learned French, English, and the art of making influential friends; then business college, where she took Spanish and typing. Smart, vivacious, ambitious, and chic—as a teenager she’d always worn high heels to her classes, even when on a field trip to Lake Constance—she was already skilled at keeping several men on a string simultaneously. While still in school she’d become engaged to a wealthy thirty-five-year-old cotton trader, then disengaged when she got involved with a charismatic Marxist medical student, Georg Kuritzkes, a member of the German Socialist Workers’ Party, or SAP (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei). Kuritzkes introduced her to his crowd of committed young SAP activists, among them a strong-jawed youth named Herbert Frahm, who would later change his name to Willy Brandt; and one of the SAP boys—another medical student, Willi Chardack—also fell for her. “I just have to wiggle my little finger to have five or six guys after me,” she wrote to a friend, amusedly. “I’m continually amazed that it’s possible to be in love with two men at the same time—but I’d be an idiot to wonder why.”