Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  To make matters worse, Ordóñez had begun keeping risqué company: a year after The Sun Also Rises was released, he married Consuelo de los Reyes, a half-Gypsy flamenco dancer. Her Gypsy mother came to live with the couple, and reportedly brought along an appetite for entertainments that went on night and day. Critics were quick to draw a connection between Ordóñez’s decline and his raucous new home environment.

  Ordóñez did not, however, succumb to Hemingway’s summary judgment that he was finished. In 1932, the year Death in the Afternoon appeared, he actually had a resurgence in both popularity and passion, or afición; he performed so admirably in a bullfight that fall that the crowd “forgave him everything.” He was awarded his bull’s ears and carried out of the ring on his fans’ shoulders—just like in the old days.

  Years later, Hemingway exalted another member of the Ordóñez clan on paper: Cayetano’s bullfighter son Antonio. In The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway described in reverential detail how Antonio improved on Cayetano’s “absolute technical perfection.” He recounted a conversation in which a wounded Antonio lies on a bed after a fight and implores Hemingway: “Tell me. Am I as good as my father?”

  “I told him that he was better than his father and I told him how good his father was,” Hemingway wrote.

  By this time Antonio was too good to compete even against his contemporaries; rather, he was, as Hemingway put it, in a competition with history.

  His father, Cayetano, by contrast, had long been out of the public eye. Unlike the real-life inspirations behind the other characters in The Sun Also Rises, Ordóñez might have been better served if his Sun avatar, Pedro Romero, had soldiered on as his sole representation to posterity. Unfortunately, other competing portraits were painted. One was especially devastating. In 1955 a young American student named Sam Adams, then studying at the University of Madrid, was asked by the owner of his pension if he would mind sharing his bedroom with an older man who was down on his luck. The student reluctantly agreed. A repellent old drunk who referred to himself as Niño de la Palma soon arrived to occupy the room’s second bed. When Adams realized that he was in the presence of a onetime Hemingway hero, he carefully observed his new roommate and later published a Sports Illustrated account of their three weeks together.

  By this time, the man Hemingway described in The Sun Also Rises as “the best-looking boy I have ever seen” had degenerated into a balding, pockmarked mess: purple lines spattered his nose; his mouth sported swollen gums and two yellow front teeth. According to Adams, Ordóñez drank heavily and would wake up his roommate nightly with the sound of “almost unhuman retching.” His now illustrious offspring, he claimed, paid him to stay away.

  “I’m just an old drunk and my family are all high society now and live where there are trees, while I stay in this whore of a pension in this whore of a town,” he reportedly told Adams.

  Ordóñez also talked about Hemingway. His appearance in The Sun Also Rises had apparently been a great honor to him.

  “He wrote about me in a book once,” he informed Adams. “In this book Ernesto called me Pedro Romero after Spain’s greatest matador . . . [A]nd it all occurs at the Feria de San Fermín in Pamplona and I make love to the English woman.”

  He was predictably less enthusiastic about Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon portrait of him. “What does this American writer know about being afraid and alone out there with the bull and sometimes having to find your nerve again to please the animals in the expensive seats in the shade so they’ll give you contracts for another season? What does Don Ernesto Hemingway have to say about that?”

  “What fear I had,” he added wistfully. “What magnificent fear. Sometimes I shook so bad I could hardly control my legs.”

  He died six years later on October 30, 1961, at the age of fifty-seven.

  Ernest Hemingway (Jake Barnes)

  Following the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway published during his lifetime four more novels, a novella, several collections of short stories, and many works of nonfiction, including two books. As a reporter, he covered the Spanish civil war—an experience that greatly informed his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls—and later World War II; other assignments over the years took him from Africa to China. (F. Scott Fitzgerald had been accurate in his prediction that for each major Hemingway book, there would be a new woman at his side: For Whom was dedicated to war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who became Hemingway’s third wife in 1940; his novella The Old Man and the Sea was written during his fourth marriage, to Mary Welsh Hemingway.)

  Although he was prolific, his career seemed to be veering into twilight in the 1940s. His 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees—first serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine that year—was widely regarded as a failure at the time; critics felt that Hemingway had become a parody of himself. Some took the opportunity to parody the unintentional parody. The New Yorker’s E. B. White wrote a story called “Across the Street and into the Grill” sending up the book: “‘Schrafft’s is a good place and we’re having fun and I love you,’ Pirnie said. He took another swallow of the 1926, and it was a good and careful swallow. ‘The stockroom men were very brave,’ he said, ‘but it is a position where it is extremely difficult to stay alive.’” (“Parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer,” Hemingway privately grumbled.)

  If the role of earnest, poor, and unpublished young writer hadn’t suited him back in the 1920s, neither did he care for the part of passé aging champion. In 1952 he staged his comeback with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Although he had been mulling the subject matter for years, he wrote the book in a mere eight weeks, recalling the fervor with which he had written The Sun Also Rises decades earlier. Advance sales of the American edition reached fifty thousand copies, and when Life magazine published Old Man in its entirety that September, the magazine sold over 5 million copies in the first forty-eight hours alone.

  H. R. Stoneback, president of the Hemingway Society, remembers how the story resonated around the country and across all demographics. While traveling that September, he had stopped at a West Virginia truck stop. Behind the counter stood a waitress, bent over a copy of Life. A truck driver hollered for more coffee. “She says, ‘Shut up and listen,’” Stoneback recalls. “And in the middle of the night, in this truck stop, she starts reading The Old Man and the Sea.” A truck driver unplugged a blaring jukebox by ripping its cord out of the wall so everyone could hear better. At that moment, Stoneback realized how pervasive Hemingway’s influence and allure were. As with The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s high-low formula had held fast once again.

  Hemingway seemed almost taken aback by the story’s instant success. “This five million (or however many it is) readers at a time is spooky,” he wrote to Scribner’s editor Wallace Meyer. “It is very bad for a man to read so much shit pleasing or not about himself.”

  The book won the Pulitzer Prize the following year; by 1954, Hemingway’s stature was beyond dispute. That year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

  Hemingway did not attend the awards ceremony but sent a characteristically brief speech to be read for him. “A true writer,” he wrote, “should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”

  Seven years later, after struggling with depression, Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun at his Ketchum, Idaho, home. At first, the death was not reported as a suicide. Hemingway’s fourth wife—now his widow—Mary, issued the following statement to the press: “Mr. Hemingway accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning at 7:30 a.m. No time has been set for the funeral services, which will be private.” She had not been “consciously lying,” she later recalled. “It was months before I could face the reality.”

  In th
e final years of his life, the Paris of Hemingway’s youth had been on his mind again. He had been working on what he called his “Paris sketches”—a series of stories about his life there in the 1920s and the people he had known. In 1964 they would be published posthumously in book form as A Moveable Feast, a title suggested by A. E. Hotchner to Mary Hemingway. Hotchner had been sitting with Hemingway at the bar of La Closerie des Lilas in 1950 when Hemingway told him, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

  He was happy while working on the Paris manuscript, according to Valerie Hemingway, who, as Hemingway’s assistant in fall 1959, accompanied him around Paris as he fact-checked the book. They revisited the sites that he was bringing to life in the manuscript’s pages. Once again he drank at the Closerie and the Dôme and the Select, where Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley had caroused on paper. They revisited the apartments where he had lived with Hadley, but they did not go inside, Valerie says, because Hemingway wanted to preserve the frozen-in-time images of these places he had in his mind. Standing in front of his old building on rue du Cardinal Lemoine, he recounted stories about the long-gone ground-floor bal musette and those early years in that cold, tiny flat without plumbing.

  “He shrugged off the lack of bathrooms and other inconveniences,” Valerie recalls. “This [was] where they were happiest. He still had tremendous affection for the place. This building represented the beginning of everything.”

  Hotchner says that he talked with Hemingway about those Paris years and the people who had dwelled in the world of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway spoke about Fitzgerald with great affection, although in A Moveable Feast he would depict Fitzgerald as a jejune mediocrity and drunken basket case. Gertrude Stein received less than a rave review: her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had been “full of lies,” Hemingway asserted. Plus, she always exaggerated her role as den mother to all of the young writers who flocked to the city. And Harold Loeb’s affair with Duff Twysden, Hemingway went on, had “ruined poor Loeb for the rest of his life.”

  If Hemingway felt remorse about the anguish that The Sun Also Rises may have caused Loeb, Twysden, and the others, he appears to have kept it to himself.

  “I once asked him: so, if you had it to do over, would you have been softer?” Hotchner recalled.

  “Oh, hell no,” Hemingway replied.

  Acknowledgments

  Like the novel this book documents, Everybody Behaves Badly has been an ensemble production, and I am grateful to the many people who helped me realize this group portrait.

  My debt to my editor, Eamon Dolan, is so great that it requires top billing. From my first meeting with him, he challenged and advanced my thinking on the material, and later patiently helped me chisel this book out of a 1,400-page outline. He makes streamlining into a high art, and delivers often brutal edits with such a gallant, humorous bedside manner that I rarely despaired of losing all of that hard-earned material. And like Hemingway, Eamon has a genius for making complicated subjects accessible and enjoyable. I could not have asked for a more incisive collaborator nor a truer stalwart.

  My gratitude to Charles Scribner III and Valerie Hemingway runs just as deep. Both devoted hours of their time to this project, and I cannot adequately express my appreciation for their patience, knowledge, insights, encouragement—and above all, their friendship. My profound thanks also to Patrick Hemingway for his two wonderful, spirited interviews, and to his wife, Carol, for paving the way for these talks and tolerating my follow-up queries. Angela Hemingway Charles was also very generous in releasing to me the recordings of the Hadley Hemingway interviews conducted by Alice Hunt Sokoloff. In addition, I am grateful to the Hemingway Society presidents—past and present—who lent their support to this book, including James Meredith, H. R. “Stoney” Stoneback, and Allen Josephs.

  Other descendants of the principal figures in this book granted interviews and gave me access to family files and photographs, and their knowledge greatly informed my work. Heartfelt thanks to John Sanders, Jenny Phillips, Frank Phillips, Eleanor Lanahan, Anah Pytte, Susan Sandberg, Keith Sandberg, Roger Loeb, Barbara Loeb Kennedy, Karole Vail, Donald Ogden Stewart Jr., Daneet Steffens, Laura Donnelly, Robin Rowan Clark, and Noel Osheroff. I am also very grateful to Hemingway’s friends A. E. Hotchner, Nancy Dryer, and Joseph Dryer for welcoming me into their homes; they spent hours discussing their memories of Hemingway and helping me understand the nuances of his complex character. Kendall Conrad, Barnaby Conrad II, Winston Conrad, and Maria Cooper Janis also generously shared insightful memories and anecdotes of their families’ experiences with Hemingway.

  I also thank the biographers and scholars who helped guide me through various aspects of this story, including A. Scott Berg, Gioia Diliberto, Scott Donaldson, Lois Gordon, Ruth Hawkins, Lois Palken Rudnick, and Calvin Tomkins. Sandra Spanier was especially supportive and generously gave me early access to the not-yet-released third volume of Hemingway’s letters, many of which were previously unpublished.

  Many knowledgeable editors and writers also generously spoke with me about the workings of the historical New York publishing scene and the colorful luminaries within that world, including Nelson Aldrich, Roger Angell, Jay Fielden, Lewis Lapham, Nicholas Lemann, and Nan Talese. Adam Gopnik, Lorin Stein, and Gay Talese made themselves repeatedly available to me and helped me make further inroads in the community, and for that I am profoundly grateful. My thanks also to Hamish Bowles and Valerie Steele for their insights into the world of 1920s fashion and fashion publications. Robert Evans spoke with me at length about the making of the 1957 film The Sun Also Rises; Julian Fellowes kindly shared a wealth of information with me about the interwar British aristocracy. They have all of my appreciation.

  Research for this book required many hours in the Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections division, which houses the archives of pioneering Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, the Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, the Sylvia Beach Papers, the Patrick Hemingway Papers, the Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, and more. I am deeply indebted to Don C. Skemer and the Princeton team, including Gabriel Swift, Sandra Calabrese, Brianna Cregle, AnnaLee Pauls, and Christa Cleeton, for their help, enthusiasm, and kindness to me during my months at the university. I am equally grateful to Susan Wrynn of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, who tolerated my ubiquitous presence since the earliest days of my research. Others on the JFK team who provided great and deeply appreciated support include Stacey Chandler, Abigail Malangone, Amna Abdus-Salaam, Melissa Taing, Laurie Austin, Aubrey Butts, Maryrose Grossman, and Kyla Ryan. My thanks also to Ingrid Lennon-Pressey and Stephen R. Young of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Susan Halpert at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The New York Public Library played an important role as well by giving me access to rare first editions of Hemingway’s earliest works and other related material; I am especially grateful to Isaac Gerwitz and Joshua McKeon of the Berg Collection and to Amy Geduldig for their help. John Pollack at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, which house the Horace Liveright Papers, also delved into that archive on my behalf.

  Several people were crucial to expanding my understanding of the final years of Lady Duff Twysden. Matt Kuhn and Fred Kline helped handle the Clinton King estate and successfully found material remainders of Duff Twysden’s life for me; William Butler led me to important correspondence within the Santa Fe community about the Kings’ existence there. Chris Webster and Gerald Rodriguez also have my thanks for providing details of Twysden’s last days and death.

  Dozens of other people lent crucial support in various ways, and I am grateful to each of them, including Nan Graham, Brant Rumble, and Roz Lippel of Scribner’s; Case Kerns of the Harvard University Department of English; Luisa Gilardenghi Stewart; Sanford J. Smoller; Ian von
Franckenstein; Michael Katakis; Yessenia Santos; Lore Monig of the New York City Club Taurino; Jeffrey Lyons; Anthony Ahern and Allan Cramer; my original team of editors at Vanity Fair, including Punch Hutton, Katherine Stirling, Lenora Jane Estes, and Cat Buckley; Mark Rozzo; Jay Fielden and Ben Howe of Town & Country, who sent me on a tour of Hemingway’s Paris—in April, no less; Lili Rosenkranz; Lilah Ramzi; Sadie Stein; Claire Fentress, Tucker Morgan, and Anna Heyward of the Paris Review; Alexa Cassanos; Susan Morrison; Cressida Leyshon; Jeannie Rhodes; Fabio Bertoni; Shelley Wanger; Ben Adler; Elizabeth Frank; Marilyn Sarason; Carol Cheney; the Manchester Historical Society; Rebecca Potance at the New Mexico Museum of Art; Joan Livingston of Taos News; Maggie Van Ostrand; Libby Willis of the Oakhurst Neighborhood Association; Stefan Rak and Bill Ray of the Coffee House Club; Sara Racine and Abigail Dennis of The Madisonian; Richard Layman and Giesela Lubecke of Layman Poupard Publishing, LLC; Sam Farrell of the WGBH Educational Foundation; Giles Tremlett of The Economist; Joy Day of the Twin Bridges Historical Association; Dawn Youngblood, Tarrant County archivist in Fort Worth; Gail Stanislow of the Brandywine Museum; Amanda Davis and Sheryl Woodruff of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation; Jennifer Joel of International Creative Management; Paul Morris of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation; Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Dorothy Parker Society; Vivian Shipley; Patricia Adams; Craig Tenney of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.; Anna Bond and Rachel Ewen of Cambridge University Press; Eric Sandberg; Michael Sandberg; Anders Pytte; Mimi Levitt; Ray Chipault; Holly Van Buren of New York City’s Film Forum; Chip Lorenger of the Horton Bay General Store; Jeff Sanderson; Alex Bier; Jill Quasha; Julia Masnik; Marianne Merola; Dave Miller; David Meeker; Karaugh Brown; Brooke Geahan; Ashley Wick; Dora Militaru; Emily Arden Wells; Tenzing Choky; Karen Seo; Claiborne Swanson Frank; Sarah Rosenberg; Oberto Gili; Frances McCarthy; Jenna Blum; Judy Blum; and Rick and Monica Macek.