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

by Vaill, Amanda

  By the time Hemingway finished, the audience was on its feet in the stifling hall, whistling and stamping. One of those beating his hands together was Prudencio de Pereda, standing in a balcony to watch his hero “lap up the warm acceptance.” It was, de Pereda thought, “the speech of the meeting. The audience had come for Ernest; he was there for them.” Instead of basking in the acclaim, however, Hemingway turned and dashed into the wings and then (noted Dawn Powell) “went over to the Stork Club followed by a pack of foxes.”

  The following afternoon Martha had her turn on the podium, at a closed session of the congress at the New School for Social Research, where she, too, played the truth card. “A writer must be a man of action now,” she declared. “If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, it will last.” She added, apparently without irony: “the writers who are now in Spain … were just brave, intelligent people doing an essential job in war … completely unaware of themselves.”

  After Martha’s speech Hemingway flew back to Bimini; but he managed to find time beforehand to see Scott Fitzgerald, newly sober, who had just taken a job as a screenwriter for MGM and was making a stopover in New York on his way to Los Angeles. “I wish we could meet more often,” said the man who had introduced Hemingway to his publisher and suggested the ending for his most successful novel: “I don’t feel I know you at all.”

  In truth, Fitzgerald’s old friend was changing. Down at Cat Cay, where he planned to finish the promised draft of his new book, Hemingway had come to the conclusion that perhaps this new novel shouldn’t appear on its own. Plaiting its disparate strands together had already been proving almost impossible, and now his other commitments would leave him little time to accomplish its ambitious design. What if he scaled it way back, to novella size almost, cutting out the Cuban revolution, most of the literary gossip, and some of the innuendos about real people that Arnold Gingrich had so many problems with? And what if he made this streamlined version the centerpiece of a collection? He’d include the two long stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” his New Masses piece about the drowned veterans, excerpts from his NANA dispatches, the story “Horns of the Bull,” about a poor Madrid waiter who dreams of being a matador, and the speech he had just given in Carnegie Hall. That’s what the crowds that had cheered him were waiting for: a book that would speak to his position as a public intellectual, a man of action who knew there were worse things than war. In keeping with his new engagé persona, he could call it The Various Arms, or Return to the Wars. Or maybe To Have and Have Not.

  * * *

  Back in New York, Martha Gellhorn and Joris Ivens were busy. “I am now Joris’s finger-woman and secretary,” Martha wrote Hemingway in mid-June, appropriating gangster lingo (finger man) for someone who targets unreliables for mob hits. New footage had come from John Ferno, and Ivens was editing it; she, meanwhile, was trying to set up benefit showings of The Spanish Earth in New York and Hollywood and talking to RKO about distribution. She’d pulled the biggest string she had by going to lunch at the White House and asking Mrs. Roosevelt to invite her, Hemingway, and Ivens to screen The Spanish Earth for the president. And, the finger-woman added gleefully, “Joris has had a dandy meeting with our pals Archie and Dos and it must have been something. These Communists are sinister folk and very very canny. The upshot is that he [Ivens] is President of the affair, and Dos has poison ivy.” Or, as she put it in a cable confirming the news, “Rotfront [red front] working like mad.”

  MacLeish did indeed tell Hemingway that he’d been persuaded Ivens was the “real” president of Contemporary Historians, so he was ceding the group’s leadership to him and resigning forthwith, taking the role of vice president instead. And Ivens, eager to press his advantage, asked Hemingway, as an influential board member, to “send back that sheet of paper about Cont. Historians, that you agree that I am the president.” But this was one move that Hemingway, who had lent—not contributed—$1,000 of his own money to the organization and was eager to have it repaid promptly, seemed reluctant to make. Ivens’s lack of legal and business experience might be a problem, he cabled MacLeish, not to mention his foreign citizenship, and it would be “unwise” for him to take over the running of an American charitable organization. Without Hemingway’s support, Ivens’s attempted putsch failed.

  Undaunted by this, however, Ivens was working almost round the clock on The Spanish Earth. In a CBS screening room and sound studio at the Preview Theatre, in the Studebaker Building at the north end of Times Square, he and Helene Van Dongen were editing the film with the help of Martha and Prudencio de Pereda, who had volunteered to write a draft screenplay for nothing. Ivens and Van Dongen cut and spliced the footage shot in Spain into a rough narrative that set the viewer down into the Spanish landscape and then into the village of Fuentidueña, establishing the viewer’s identification with its proud, tough, honest citizens. Only then was the war introduced, literally as a kind of distant thunder, a rumbling on the soundtrack, followed by voice-over: The villagers say, “Our guns.”

  Although there was considerable coverage of air raids and the fighting in University City, and the complicity of Italian and German troops in the Nationalist cause was acknowledged, the filmmakers portrayed the war less as a complex political, social, and military struggle than as an effort by the common folk to prevent the rebels from taking the road that ran through Fuentidueña from Valencia to Madrid. Simplicity, Ivens always said, is what works. So the bloody, weeks-long, deadlocked battle of the Jarama was condensed into a quick victorious fight for “the Arganda bridge,” which seemingly concluded just as the villagers finished their irrigation project: the film’s final moments would alternate footage of triumphant Loyalist soldiers, waving their fists from trucks bearing them down the newly secured road, and images of water gushing forth into the parched Spanish earth—an image that had immediate and poignant resonance for an America still struggling with the devastation of the Dust Bowl.

  The filmmakers used a variety of devices to make the war seem direct and simple. Maps of the conflict were repeatedly flashed on the screen, but they didn’t show all of Spain, where the rebel zone now comprised two-thirds of the country—they focused only on the Loyalist-controlled area around Madrid, and Fuentidueña and Arganda were highlighted. To connect the conflict at the front with the village, a fictional letter from “Julián,” the young miliciano from Fuentidueña whom Dos Passos had discovered, was shown onscreen right after footage of fighting at University City. Dear Papa, the letter read. We’re taking advantage of a few days of calm; soon I can spend a few days in the village. Tell Mama. The same shot was repeated, a reel later, just before a scene in which a soldier returned to the bosom of his family in the village. They’d never been able to find “Julián” at the front, but it didn’t matter: the made-up letter made it seem as if he’d been there, and was now coming home.

  Actual chronology and context also didn’t matter: film was cut and pasted into the narrative Ivens and Van Dongen wanted to tell, no matter when it was shot, who had shot it (some material came from preexisting documentaries by other filmmakers), or when the events it depicted had happened. Ivens and Ferno had got extraordinary footage during the bombing at Morata, the sniping at University City, and the fighting at the Jarama front, but not all the film had the same drama. Sometimes sound was needed to enhance it, or to make it “show” something other than what was actually on the film. Martha (as she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt) helped the filmmakers produce the rattle of bullets with her fingernails on a screen, and the whine of incoming shells with “a football bladder and an air hose”; the roar of bombs was achieved with a recording of earthquake sounds from a film called San Francisco, which they ran backward. Once they’d recorded these sound effects, all they had to do was add a hailstorm of “machine-guns” to a shot of soldiers walking unmolested across a field, or the crash of “shells” and “bomb
s” to footage of tanks maneuvering on a hillside and presto!: you had soldiers and tanks under fire in the midst of battle.

  While the filmmakers were busy with this work, bad news came from the actual war zone. On June 11, the Twelfth International Brigade’s General Lukács had been killed, and Gustav Regler almost fatally wounded, near Huesca, in Aragon, during a government offensive meant to draw Nationalist fire away from Bilbao; and the next day Werner Heilbrun, the Twelfth Brigade’s medical officer, had been machine-gunned by a Nationalist plane near the Pyrenees. Although Ivens and Martha had both been pressuring Hemingway to come to New York and get busy on the text for the voice-over narration, he’d stayed in Bimini trying to keep Pauline happy, work on his novel, and fish; but now two men he admired were dead, and another was clinging to life in a Spanish hospital. When men fight for the freedom of their country and those men are your friends … On June 20, to Pauline’s irritation, he flew from Bimini to New York and came straight to the editing room.

  Prudencio de Pereda had already written a Hemingwayesque first draft of a considerable portion of the narration script, but Ivens was finding it too metaphorical; Hemingway himself went at it with a pencil and tightened and toughened it. Ivens still wasn’t happy—“don’t write about what you see, don’t repeat the image,” he said; and at first his editorial markings stung Hemingway’s always touchy sense of amour-propre. “You God-damned Dutchman,” he shouted, “how dare you correct my text?” But he quickly climbed down and produced what was required. He had to—they were on an insanely tight deadline.

  Archie MacLeish had arranged to have the narration recorded by Orson Welles, the wunderkind actor-director who’d just defied a government lockout to stage a production of Marc Blitzstein’s Brechtian prolabor operetta, The Cradle Will Rock; but Hemingway wasn’t thrilled by the idea, especially when the twenty-two-year-old Welles arrived at the screening room on June 22 with his own script suggestions. “You effeminate boys of the theatre, what do you know about real war?” Hemingway sneered. The six-foot, nearly 200-pound Welles rose to the bait: “Mister Hemingway, how strong you are and how big you are,” he fluted sarcastically (and incongruously), all but flapping his wrists. Hemingway picked up a chair and swung it at him, and in a flash the two of them were squaring off before the screen. “It was something marvelous,” Welles would remember later, his account possibly heightened by hindsight: “two guys like us in front of these images representing people in the act of struggling and dying…!” The confrontation ended with the two of them sharing a bottle of whiskey, and Welles recorded the voice-over.

  June 1937: Segovia Front/Madrid

  The Navacerrada Pass lies about 6,200 feet above sea level in the Sierra de Guadarrama, forty miles or so from Madrid, on the road to Segovia. It is high country, and even in June the air is cool during the long daytimes and cold at night. Although positions on the peaks give a clear view of the valley, the mountains are thickly forested with pines and holm oaks that provide excellent cover for your opponents, so it can be a difficult place to fight. But at the end of May, in an effort to pull the Nationalists away from the Bilbao front by making a drive on Segovia, government troops under the pseudonymous General Walter—the Pole Karol Swieczerski—were trying to do just that. On May 30 they had started an attack on La Granja de San Ildefonso, the old summer palace of the Spanish kings, in the valley on the other side of the pass; despite being mistakenly bombed by their own aircraft and ordered into battle without proper support, they’d still managed to get positions on the mountain called Cabeza Grande, overlooking the Segovia road, and now they were struggling to hold on to them. Which is where they were when Robert Capa and Gerda Taro arrived from Madrid to cover the offensive.

  In the short layover he’d had in Paris after Bilbao, Capa had maneuvered a significant career change. Fed up with Ce Soir’s assignments and restrictions, he’d gone after a much bigger prospect, Time Inc., the American-based media empire of Henry Luce, which had recently started a Vu-style large-format weekly called Life, as well as a series of newsreels, to be screened before the feature in movie theaters, under the title “The March of Time.” These films—which always ended with the orotund voice-over pronouncement “Time marches on”—combined actual news footage with reenactments or dramatizations, sometimes using professional actors rather than the real participants, in a process Luce himself called “fakery in allegiance to the truth.” True or fake, the series had won an Academy Award earlier in the spring for having “revolutionized” the newsreel medium, while Life had surged from an opening circulation of 380,000 copies to more than a million. Clearly, Time Inc. was the place to be if you had ambitions in photojournalism. And Capa had persuaded Richard de Rochemont, Time Inc.’s man in Europe, to send him to Spain both to film footage for “The March of Time” and to take pictures for Life. He still had to give Ce Soir first look at his work for the French market, but what was that compared with the American audience these new arrangements would open for him?

  Within days of getting his safe-conduct from the Spanish Embassy on May 26 he’d flown to meet Gerda in Valencia, and the two of them had gone on to Madrid, where Gerda used her connections to get them to the Segovia front. Polish by birth herself, she’d made friends with General Walter and his Polish adjutant, Alexander Szurek, the last time she’d been in Madrid; Walter in particular was charmed by her unexpected combination of youth, beauty, and bravery, and seemingly couldn’t refuse her anything. It was easy for her to wangle an invitation for her and her “husband” (as Walter and Szurek considered them) to join the troops at Walter’s headquarters.

  The two photographers arrived as the men were making camp—lashing logs to the trees to make canopies, covering them with bracken for shelter and camouflage, building a cookfire to heat their rations—and Gerda photographed them while Capa circled around with Time Inc.’s Eyemo, trying to film the scene for “The March of Time.” The general insisted that Capa and Gerda eat their meal with him, and demanded that a tablecloth be brought for his visitors even though they had no forks and knives, and had to pull apart the chicken they were eating with their fingers. After dinner Capa and Gerda handed out cigarettes, which were hard to get in Spain since tobacco imports to the country had been halted, and everybody lit up. A soldier wrapped in a blanket against the chill sadly cradled a puppy in his arms, one of the pets the men kept with them as mascots; the little dog had died, and the men dug a grave for it and hid the place with branches. Then they all curled up in their sleeping bags for the night.

  The next morning, June 1, the rebel commander, José Varela, launched a counterattack against the government forces, seeking to dislodge them from the sierra and drive them back toward Madrid. The detachment Gerda and Capa were with broke camp and scrambled into position, seeking cover behind boulders and under thickets; the two photographers were close behind them, Gerda with the Leica and Capa with the Eyemo, both of them shooting as they ran through the woods, unable to take the time to focus. Enemy fire ricocheted off Gerda’s camera: “better there than in my heart,” she cracked, and hurried on. Soon the forest stillness was shattered by the rumble of tanks, the whine of bullets and artillery shells, and the roar of orderlies’ motorcycles; and as Nationalist bombers and fighter planes screamed over the hillsides the Loyalist lines broke. In a matter of hours they were on the run, but not before an infuriated Walter—who suspected any laggards of being fifth columnists—ordered “the machine-gunning of all who pull back … and the beating of stragglers.” Gerda and Capa, now shooting still photos with his Contax, were left to capture images of wounded men, bloody stretchers, and lifeless bodies left behind in the agony of retreat. By the next day it was clear that the offensive had failed; and the Nationalists resumed their assault on Bilbao.

  Discouraged, their camera bags full of film bearing witness to chaos and defeat, Capa and Gerda fell back to Madrid. There the shelling was worse than ever, but what good did it do to photograph that? They’d already taken rolls and
rolls of blasted buildings and weeping women, and after a while magazines and their readers are numbed to images of destruction. Instead they took pictures and shot footage of workers at a munitions factory, soldiers (many of whom were illiterate) being taught to read and write, dinamiteros lobbing grenades from slingshots at fascist street fighters in Carabanchel, defensive workers sandbagging the “French Bridge” across the Manzanares—which had inspired a verse of the antifascist song “Los Cuatros Generales”—and General Miaja strolling in the Alianza garden. Then came word of the offensive at Huesca, another effort to distract the rebels from Bilbao; and almost immediately afterward the report of Lukács’s death and Regler’s injury. Heartsick at the loss of their friends, Gerda and Capa packed up their gear and headed for Valencia, where Lukács would receive a state funeral on June 16.

  A week later Bilbao fell to the rebels.

  * * *

  Barea heard the news about Bilbao from the correspondents at the press office, who’d been told by their home offices that the city had fallen; they’d been ordered to find out what people in Madrid were saying about it, but the censors wouldn’t allow any reports about Bilbao to be transmitted. As frustrating as Barea found the situation, it wasn’t his problem anymore—Ilsa and the blond Canadian censor, Pat, who had been sent from Valencia by Constancia de la Mora, were handling the day-to-day business of the press office, and Barea had been sidelined, in part by Connie de la Mora’s mistrust, in part by his own recent mental and physical fragility.

  Some days previously, however, he’d discovered that no one was in charge of the government’s short-wave station EAQ—Who cares about foreign propaganda broadcasts, the bureaucrats said, and refused to pay the broadcasters—and he’d seen an opportunity like the one he’d seized at the censorship in November. He’d persuaded General Miaja, who seemed more than usually distracted just now, to fund the station, and (since nobody else wanted to do it) to appoint him commissioner of broadcasting as well as chief radio censor. And now, when foreign correspondents were telling him news that his own government refused to release, he decided to use his new office for the purpose.