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

by Vaill, Amanda

  The little group went down the stairs into the crowded, clattering, smoke-filled room, where the talk was all about new concentrations of fascist Italian troops to the north and east of Madrid, near Guadalajara; and where one of Karpathi’s new acquaintances, a young Canadian named Ted Allan, looked up from the unidentifiable plat du jour and saw Gerda, and Capa, for the first time. Allan was twenty-one, a dark, curly-headed youth who had volunteered for the International Brigades but had been drafted away from combat to be the political commissar of the mobile blood transfusion unit whose work Geza Karpathi was filming. He was also a romantic and deeply impressionable young man, and his first sight of the two photographers, their cameras around their necks, still dusty from their drive to Madrid, struck him forcibly. Capa, “black eyed, handsome,” and “already famous,” seemed impossibly glamorous to Allan, who was also an aspiring journalist, writing for Canadian leftist newspapers and broadcasting over the Madrid radio; but it was Gerda, with her short blond hair and bewitching smile, who took his breath away.

  Karpathi made the introductions—to Allan, and to his commanding officer, the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, who was also lunching at the canteen. Allan held on to Gerda’s hand a fraction too long, then dropped it in confusion. Capa “couldn’t say shit or sheets” in English, he discovered, but French served as a common language for the few pleasantries they exchanged before Karpathi, Gerda, and Capa moved away. Allan turned to Bethune. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he asked, cocking his head in Gerda’s direction. “A delicious thoracic creation,” commented Bethune; to which Allan replied, “Yum yum.”

  If Gerda saw the glance that passed between them—she rarely failed to notice the effect she had on men—she nonetheless had more important things on her mind just at the moment. She had yet to try out her new Leica, and Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar had arranged for her and Capa to be shown around the new warren of trenches, fortifications, and tunnels that the Loyalists had built in the Parque del Oeste south of University City—just across the river from the four thousand wild acres of the Casa de Campo. Before they even got there, however, they passed a little parade of reinforcements marching through the streets toward the defenses, led by a ragtag band of drums and bugles, while their officers took the clenched-fist salute. She and Capa each photographed the scene, but Gerda hadn’t quite got used to framing her pictures in the Leica’s viewfinder, and although her compositions were strong she cut most of her images off at the bottom.

  Madrid’s front-line trenches were the pride and joy of their commandant, Colonel Antonio Ortega, who in addition to his military duties was also president of the Madrid Club de Fútbol (the team had dropped the monarchist “Real” from its name at the beginning of the Republic, and continued to play occasional matches in Chamartin Stadium). When Capa and Gerda had been ushered through the tunnel from Ortega’s headquarters to the fortifications they found that their host kept his fiefdom neater than a locker room: the ground was swept, the damp earth was held back by walls made out of doors salvaged from the ruined houses along the Paseo de Rosales just behind the line, and some of the fortified areas were furnished with wicker porch furniture in which the soldiers sat and read, or played chess, or even shaved when they weren’t busy returning fire to the other side. There didn’t seem to be much action: just riflemen jamming their guns into position between sandbags so they could be fired more quickly, officers squinting through gun slits and relaying information on enemy movements over field telephones, engineers hacking out new tunnels with their pickaxes, men standing around blowing on their hands to keep warm, waiting for something to happen. The photographers shot their pictures anyway. Years later, Capa would explain that such quotidian images “showed how dreary and unspectacular fighting actually is”; what he hoped was that if one of the soldiers saw them ten years later he’d be able to say, “That’s how it was.”

  And then he and Gerda saw the bear. Enormous, black, with rounded haunches and small neat ears set close to its furry head, it was crouched on a slab of rock just behind the shoulder of one of the soldiers, rifling through the soldier’s rucksack. Had it come from the wilderness of the Casa de Campo across the river? Was it wild? A half-tamed mascot, an embodiment of the Junta’s antifascist Oso de Madrid poster? Or some darker omen? The soldiers seemed oblivious to its presence, but both Capa and Gerda, who were facing it, clicked their shutters almost involuntarily; if they hadn’t they might have wondered if it had been an apparition. Because in the next second it was gone.

  * * *

  Barea and Ilsa went to see the trenches, too—if they were going to send foreign journalists there, Barea reasoned, they should know what they’d be looking at. Ortega treated them to a fancy lunch with lots of drinking and singing, then to a tour of the earthworks. It was a sunny day with the promise of spring: buds on the ravaged trees, warmth implicit in the breeze from the river, and only the occasional pfft of a stray bullet to remind you of where you were. The soldiers, mostly broad-shouldered Basques and Asturians, were jokey and confident. The war seemed like just something to laugh at; what could go wrong with the sun on your back and these big, easygoing men between you and the enemy?

  Then Ortega wanted to show off his new mortar, a kind of catapult that silently hurled its payload into the rebel lines. When the first shell detonated with a roar, the front erupted in rifle and machine-gun fire. The jokes were over.

  February–March 1937: New York

  There was no sign outside the “21” Club, a former speakeasy on East Fifty-second Street wedged in between the jazz joints that punctuated the block, but it was set off by the spiky wrought-iron fence that ran the length of its brownstone façade, and by the tiny statue of a jockey, dressed in the racing colors of one of the restaurant’s patrons, Jay Van Urk, that stood by its door. If you knew what you were looking for, you could find it. And on this February afternoon Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and other members of the Contemporary Historians filmmaking corporation made their way without difficulty to 21 East Fifty-second Street, past the plainclothes doorman (another relic of “21’s” speakeasy days), and into the dim, wood-paneled lobby bar. They didn’t stop there, though, or go on into the dining room, where the regulars sat on red leather banquettes under a ceiling hung with big boys’ toys—model airplanes, model ships, model cars; instead they headed upstairs, to a long table in one of the private rooms, to talk about their new film, The Spanish Earth.

  MacLeish, the corporation’s president, had good news for them all: the Spanish double bill Spain in Flames, which had opened at the end of January, was bringing in revenue, and donations for the new film were running ahead of expectations. Gerald Murphy, the Broadway producer Herman Shumlin, the philanthropist Margaret De Silver, several anonymous donors, and a number of organizations had all given more than $500 apiece. Joris Ivens was already in Spain filming, and would have preliminary reels ready to screen by the end of the month. And Hemingway and Dos Passos would each be going to Spain shortly to work with him. Hemingway had just arrived from Key West and would be sailing at the end of the month; and as an editor for Fortune, MacLeish had arranged to commission a series of articles about Spain from Dos Passos that would pay for him to travel there as well.

  Now the Historians could talk about exactly what shape they wanted this new film to take—and that’s when the first hints of discord crept in. Dos Passos, who had spent long periods living in and traveling through Spain starting in 1916, had written widely on Spanish literature and culture, and had been contracted for a book on Spain’s Second Republic, wanted it to be a portrait of Spain in transition—to make clear what the aims and stakes of the people were, and how the war affected them. Hemingway’s experiences of Spain had centered on the bullring, which he celebrated as the locus of “one of the simplest things of all, and the most fundamental”: “violent death.” What he called the “tragedy” of the corrida was for him the mirror of, and in a world at peace a substitute for, death in war.
So it was only natural that his interest in this film was to make it about war and death, full of scenes of battle and destruction. That’s what would galvanize the American public.

  Before this disagreement could get ugly—because when Hemingway was crossed things could sometimes get very ugly indeed—the meeting was adjourned. Some of the participants, Dos Passos and Hemingway among them, went downstairs for dinner, where they were joined by Katy Dos Passos and, to everyone’s surprise but Hemingway’s, Martha Gellhorn, elegantly got up in an orange dress that brought out the reddish lights in her tawny hair. Hemingway told everyone that Martha had just arrived in New York and was going to Spain as a correspondent for Collier’s as soon as she got all her papers in order. Dos Passos and Katy, who were devoted to Pauline Hemingway and could see exactly what was going on, were not impressed. During dinner Martha revealed that since Collier’s wasn’t actually sending her to Spain (they were just writing her a letter she could use for accreditation), she was paying for her trip with the proceeds of an assignment from Vogue that involved her trying out a skin-exfoliation treatment for older women—pretty funny, since she was only twenty-eight! Hemingway recited stories about his African safari: everyone at the table except Martha had heard them before, but she was the one Hemingway was telling them for, and she was “goggle-eyed,” Dos Passos noticed. The party broke up early.

  On the twenty-seventh, Hemingway boarded the American Line’s steamer Paris, bound for Le Havre. He was accompanied by Sidney Franklin, looking even paler and more hollow-eyed than usual, who was going to Spain to act as Hemingway’s go-between and factotum, and the writer Evan Shipman, a friend from Hemingway’s expat Paris days, who had volunteered to deliver one of the ambulances Hemingway had donated to the Loyalists. Martha was not in evidence. A swarm of newspapermen streamed into Hemingway’s stateroom to take down his thoughts on his impending journey, and he was happy to oblige: he was going to Spain, he said, to cover the “new style war” being fought there, a war “where there is no such thing as a non-combatant,” a war that “come[s] right smack into everybody’s home and drip[s] blood all over the carpet.” He hoped that if his dispatches gave American audiences “fear-knots tied into their guts,” it would keep America out of “the next war.” Not that he’d be concentrating only on military matters: he also wanted to write about “the little people, the waiters and taxi drivers and the fellow who fixes your shoes.” And he and Sidney Franklin would find time for their favorite Spanish pastime: Franklin would be facing the bulls in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and a few other cities, and Hemingway would be cheering him from the stands. “A little thing like a war isn’t going to stop bullfighting in Spain,” Franklin opined. If any fascist bombers did threaten the corrida, added Hemingway, he and Franklin had a strategy all figured out: “We’re going to take along a bottle of Scotch and drink plenty.”

  The Paris’s whistle blew—all ashore that’s going ashore!—and the newsmen snapped their notebooks shut and departed; shortly afterward the liner slipped out of her berth and steamed down the Hudson River into New York Harbor. In his stateroom, surrounded by telegrams and bon voyage baskets, Hemingway, too, had pulled up anchor. A few weeks before, writing to his conservative Catholic in-laws to justify his forthcoming trip, he’d scribbled a postscript down the right margin of the letter. “I’m very grateful to you both,” it said, “for providing Pauline who’s made me happier than I’ve ever been.” The past tense sounded valedictory in more ways than one.

  As Hemingway was steaming across the Atlantic, John Dos Passos—having convinced the State Department that he and Hemingway were not, contrary to a persistent press rumor, traveling to Spain as combatants—was getting his passport renewed. He was now free to sail with Katy on the Berengaria on March 18. Dos Passos had an additional purpose, beyond the Spanish film and his Fortune articles, for making the trip. His friend and translator, José Robles Pazos, whom he’d first met traveling in Spain in 1916, had apparently been arrested in Valencia and had disappeared into the political prison system. Robles had been working in Madrid as an interpreter for the Russian general Gorev, and then in Valencia for the War Ministry, when the extralegal police picked him up; Dos Passos hoped he might find out what had happened to him, and if necessary intervene to get him freed.

  Just before he and Katy were due to depart, they went to dinner in Brooklyn Heights with Dos’s fellow Contemporary Historians board member Margaret De Silver and her lover, the Italian anarchist journalist Carlo Tresca. When they arrived Tresca was teaching De Silver’s African American cook how to make scaloppine like his mother used to; but he paused in his ministrations to admonish Dos Passos. He should leave Katy behind in Paris, Tresca said, and he should be very, very careful in Spain—not just about what he did but about whom he saw and what he believed of what they told him. “They gonna make a monkey out of you, a beeg monkey,” he warned. “If the communists don’t like a man in Spain, right away, they shoot him.”

  March 1937: Paris/Pyrenees

  It was a cold, wet spring in Paris, with late snow and heavy rain that swelled the Seine to overflowing. The weather matched the city’s prevailing mood: Premier Léon Blum’s Popular Front government, plagued by deficits, had placed promised reforms on hold—“a phase of prudent consolidation,” is how the premier put it—and both the haves and the have-nots were surly and disillusioned. The left was outraged by the book of the moment, André Gide’s Retour de l’U.R.S.S., in which the high priest of French Marxism recounted how he’d gone to Russia and had been shocked to discover bad food, ugly consumer products, public ignorance and inertia, artistic repression, and a Stalinist cult of personality in a place where, he’d previously believed, “Utopia was in process of becoming reality.” The right was stung by a new production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Théâtre de l’Atelier that had the title character made up to look like Colonel François de la Rocque, head of the proto-fascist Croix de Feu organization. The bipartisan sourness was only slightly mitigated by the spectacle of Josephine Baker, still shaking her naked bottom at the Folies-Bergère, and by Maurice Chevalier’s show at the Casino de Paris, in which the straw-hatted entertainer cheerfully proclaimed, night after night, “Y’a d’la joie!”

  Arriving in Paris in the first rainy week of March, however, Robert Capa had reason to feel as joyful as Chevalier sounded. He had money and Ce Soir’s new contract in his pocket, and he was shopping for space for the studio he and Gerda wanted to set up. On the rue Froidevaux, just opposite the Cimetière de Montparnasse, he found what he was looking for: a 600-square-foot third-floor atelier in a recently remodeled five-story building at number 37. It had double-height windows all along one side of its lofty main room, and a spiral staircase leading to a narrow balcony, off of which was a little kitchen, so you could live in the studio as well as work. There were famous neighbors, past and present: Kertesz had lived in the building, as had Amedeo Modigliani, and Marcel Duchamp, and Hemingway had stayed in Gerald Murphy’s loft a few doors away at number 69 before his marriage to Pauline. The studio was even perfectly situated for access to Capa’s preferred watering holes—all you had to do was cross the street and walk along the tree-lined avenue that bisected the cemetery and you’d soon find yourself at Le Dôme or La Coupole.

  He took a lease on it, hired Imre Weisz—a childhood friend from Budapest whom everyone called Csiki—to be the darkroom manager and another Hungarian émigré, Taci Czigany, to assist him, put in a telephone, and had stationery and a stamp made for his prints: “Atelier Robert Capa.” And he permitted himself to dream, just a little, of the life he and Gerda could make here as partners—in every sense of the word. He wanted very much to persuade her to marry him; but he wasn’t sure she would accept. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be able to see her until she returned to Paris, or he got a formal assignment that would send him to Spain. Unlike Gerda, who had a passport, he was a stateless person; he could get special clearance to travel, but only with sponsorship. Infuriatingly,
Ce Soir didn’t seem overeager to assign him a Spanish story—maybe they thought one photographer in Spain was enough—and instead they sent him to shoot the opening of the Salon des Indépendents, a costume ball at the Cirque d’Hiver, an agricultural fair, a parade of the Laurel and Hardy fan club. All Capa could do was collect his paycheck and hope something would come up that would allow him back across the border again.

  * * *

  On the other side of the Montparnasse cemetery, at the posh Hotel Dinard in the Sixth Arrondissement, Ernest Hemingway was assembling his forces for Spain. His friend the Associated Press reporter Lester Ziffren, who’d been in Madrid all the autumn and was now in Chicago nursing a case of whooping cough, had told him to bring plenty of canned goods with him (Ziff’s guts had suffered mightily from the alkaline diet of potatoes and beans) as well as warm clothes and as much currency as he could carry. So Hemingway had sent Sidney Franklin—who was staying in more modest lodgings in the rue St. Benoit—to buy tinned hams, prawns, pâté, bouillon cubes, and Nescafé, which Evan Shipman would transport to Spain in one of the ambulances he was delivering. Meanwhile, he himself telephoned everyone from the American ambassador to the State Department in Washington to the Spanish ambassador to France, Luis Araquistáin, trying to persuade them that Franklin, who still needed a visa to enter Spain, was “a bona-fide newsman” and not a would-be combatant in a war America had pledged to stay out of. When time hung heavy on their hands, Franklin would get out his bullfighting gear—the stockings, breeches, cape, sword, and embroidered “suit of lights”—and Hemingway would pretend to be a bull, waggling his hands over his ears and charging at Franklin as the matador called out “Toro—huh—toro” and practiced passes with his cape.