Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Corrupt, as in general moral deviance, not corrupt in the narrower sense he’d employed it in “A Simple Enquiry.” Hemingway’s son wasn’t a homosexual, and he knew this. His sister-in-law was an open lesbian, yes, and it’s also true that his ex-wife had drifted by now into some lesbian relationships of her own (including one with the poet Elizabeth Bishop), and that he generally knew about these, or suspected as much, or had heard talk about such. But if you’re newly married, as Gigi was; if you have a child on the way, as Gigi did; if you go into a ladies’ room of an LA movie theater in drag, as Gigi did, thus willing to risk arrest and public shame and damage to your family’s decent name, then aren’t you damn well “corrupt”? Not that the lashing-out man writing to his father-figure publisher spelled out any details of the corruption. He just used the code word. “[A]nd the story was sordid and bad” is the way he put it.

  Once again, Hemingway was trying in any way he could to fling blame from him, scapegoat others: a lifelong pattern. But he had to have known in his bones that not all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten his complicit hand.

  “NECROTIC”

  Ernest with his sons, Havana, June 1945. On back: “Pigeon Hunting Club, Cazodores del Carro.”

  WE DON’T KNOW the name of the movie theater he entered. We don’t know the day it happened (although Saturday night, September 29, seems probable). We don’t know who called the cops, or what police substation they took Gigi to, and whether they carted the kid in drag directly downtown to the central jail. We do know they held him through the rest of that weekend, while his distressed mother flew in from San Francisco, and while he awaited a scheduled hearing on Monday afternoon, October 1. But records of that hearing, if there was one, as well as any record of the arrest itself, have disappeared. What may have happened is that, once word had come that his mother had died on an operating table overnight, the authorities let him go. And records eventually got tossed.

  Gigi and his wife of five months were living in a one-bedroom concrete-and-stucco apartment two blocks in from the Lincoln Highway, in the seaside community of Venice. The unit was part of a complex of two-story, look-alike postwar pastel housing spreading itself over eight or ten LA acres. Their flat was about a half-mile walk to the beach. But neither Gigi nor his wife, the former Shirley Jane Rhodes—who was even younger than he was, who was descended from Cherokee Indians on her mother’s side (which gave her stunning high cheekbones), who’d worked a bit as a Powers agency model, who is said to have held a recent job taking tickets at an LA movie house—would have much free time to go to the ocean. They were both holding down sixty-five-dollar-a-week jobs at Douglas Aircraft in nearby Santa Monica, and in addition Gigi was enrolled in a night class or two at UCLA Extension. (The two are said to have met on campus.) There had to have been pressures beyond the pressures of a new marriage between teenagers.

  He was six weeks shy of twenty and an expectant father. He’d quit college back east, just one more hardheaded and ill-advised and impulsive thing he’d done. The quitting, as noted earlier, was at the end of his freshman year, from a college only a few blocks from the naval academy, where Walter Houk had finished up four years before.

  What else to say of him? He was getting a hundred bucks in the mail every month from his father as part of Hemingway’s divorce agreement with Pauline. He’d become a semi-disillusioned believer in the gospel of L. Ron Hubbard; it’s what had gotten him out of college and to the coast in the first place—Hubbard and the pseudopsychiatry of Dianetics. The year before, he’d been so certain that Hubbard’s claims about “auditing” your unconscious were going to rid him of the compulsion he despised and yet curiously craved. (All his life he would talk about the cross-dressing having this strange calming effect on his nerves, even as it was thrilling him.) At about the time Gigi had come to swallow Dianetics whole, Hubbard had come up with this crazed idea about Benzedrine, vitamins, and glutamic acid: the “Guk” treatment. It was a chemical way of auditing yourself, without the need of a partner. You self-administered huge amounts of vitamins every two hours for twenty-four hours. Might Gigi have been high on the Guk on the night he entered the unknown movie house? It’s only one more of the unknowns.

  From Papa: “In 1951, when my father was fifty-two and I was nineteen, I got into some trouble on the West Coast for taking a mind-stimulating drug before such things had become fashionable.” This is how he speaks of it (three times) in that beautiful, slender, distorting, omitting book—“the trouble.” The troubles. In relating the story of his mother’s death, he never mentions the movie theater, or the cross-dressing, or the arrest.

  Some fifteen months before, in the early summer of 1950, right after quitting school, Gigi had enrolled as a student-researcher at the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There were six Hubbard foundations in America, and the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners was trying hard to shut down that branch first, perhaps as a lead for the rest of the country. Gigi knew that prophets aren’t understood in their own time. On July 15, 1950, he’d written to his father from Elizabeth: “Dianetics has proven high blood pressure to be psychosomatic in origin and can cure it. That buzzing in your ears … has been proven to be the result of pain received while you were inside your mother’s womb.” Five months later, on December 7, 1950, still in Elizabeth, Gigi wrote to say that his current girlfriend’s dad, a high official in Hubbard’s empire, wished to come to Cuba to visit Hemingway to explain firsthand about Dianetics. Hemingway answered his son’s letter one week later—which was the day, December 14, when a third secretary from the American Embassy drove out to the finca with his new girl to meet her part-time employer for the first time. “Dear Gig: Thanks for the letter.… The Dianetics king never sent the book so I bought one, but Miss Nita borrowed it and it is still outside of the joint. So have not been able to practice jumping back into the womb.”

  In early January 1951, right after Gigi had come back from a Christmas visit to the finca with his New Jersey girlfriend (to whom Hemingway took instant dislike), Hubbard had summoned him and another student-researcher in Elizabeth and told them to pack all his personal possessions—Hubbard’s, that is—into Hubbard’s black limousine and to leave for LA as soon as possible. The New Jersey authorities had begun proceedings against the Elizabeth office for practicing medicine without a license. Gigi and his partner flew across the country in the overstuffed car.

  He soon broke up with his Hubbard girlfriend, got classified 1-A for the draft, enrolled in night classes, began dating Shirley Jane Rhodes, impregnated her, married her before a JP (on April 29), and informed his father of the news after the fact. It was just the “logical thing to do if we are going to have a child,” Gigi wrote in a letter on the day following the marriage. She was such a beautiful girl, “one of the most beautiful women I have ever met (really!). Mother was crazy about her and so was Aunt Jinny, although I am afraid that this may not be of much comfort to you.” The same day, April 30, 1951, Hemingway had wired from Havana: HAVE RECEIVED NO LETTERS FROM YOU SINCE YOU LEFT HERE IN JANUARY STOP GIVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONSENT NOR APPROVAL TO YOUR MARRIAGE WITHOUT FULL DETAILS AND OPPORTUNITY TO CHECK STOP LOVE PAPA. But it was too late.

  He and Jane, working at Douglas, living at 1056 Doreen Place, unit 4, with a high-walled patio off the front of their unit, drove an old beater. Sometimes he’d put on his wife’s girdle, ruby his nails with her polish, strut behind that high wall. Was it “her” movie theater he walked into on that Saturday night? Gigi’s first wife, who had a tragic history, is dead; we’ll never know.

  Pauline had recently returned to California from a quick trip to Key West, which was still her principal place of residence. For years she’d been coming to California, both Northern and Southern. She preferred San Francisco and often had leased apartments there for stays of several months, or else lodged with old family friends, the McEvoys. She’d known Jay McEvoy, a wealthy art dealer, since the 1930s. On the weekend of her death, just before sh
e got the news about Gigi, Pauline had been staying with unmarried Jay McEvoy and his sister in their big house on Russian Hill. She was planning a trip to New York. She thought she might go down to Los Angeles first to see her sister, Jinny, with whom she’d been staying on and off for the last two months. She seemed in high spirits, although it’s true she’d been complaining of headaches and poundings of the heart and a general feeling of anxiety. Soon she intended to go for a full checkup at Mayo Clinic.

  Jinny Pfeiffer and her longtime lover, Laura Archera, lived in a beautiful home high in the Hollywood Hills, on a hairpin curve, practically beneath the famous HOLLYWOOD sign. (To yank the story out of time: Not quite five years from this tragic 1951 moment, Archera—a onetime concert violinist who’d been born in Italy, a professional film-cutter and producer of documentary films, a lay psychotherapist, a breeder of poodles, an investigator of LSD—would marry widower and novelist Aldous Huxley in a drive-up wedding chapel in Yuma, Arizona. It would mostly be a marriage of convenience and companionship for the famous author of Brave New World. From the mid-fifties on, Jinny and Laura and Aldous would all more or less live together, each caring for the one as much as the other. At the end of Huxley’s life—he’d die of cancer in November 1963, on the day of John F. Kennedy’s death, and toward the end Laura would be injecting him with LSD and reading to him from the works of Timothy Leary—they’d literally be living together, these three, because their separate but nearby houses on Deronda Drive had earlier burned to the ground, and afterward these three, plus Jinny’s two adopted children, would have moved into Jinny’s new rented home on Mulholland Drive. Jinny herself would die of cancer, in 1973, and afterward Laura Huxley would take in and raise Jinny’s granddaughter, Karen Pfeiffer. I once spent part of a pleasant afternoon with Karen Pfeiffer, who lives in the San Fernando Valley, and who’s in her thirties, and who’s a New Age woman, and whose explanation of everything you’ve read in this parenthesis made utter California sense.)

  Sometime on that Sunday, September 30, probably before noon, Pauline received a call telling her that her son was in jail, and the basic reason why. Was it Gigi himself who put in the call to his mom? It seems so, but again there is so much in his memoir that’s either elliptical or false. From Papa: “My mother … did not seem at all alarmed by my predicament but thought my father should be notified. When I said that it would be simpler if papa were not brought in she said, yes … a lot of things would be simpler if you had only one parent. But she wasn’t really at all upset. I can remember this as clearly as if it were yesterday.” Predicament. Put it in code.

  Pauline apparently sent Hemingway a cable sometime that Sunday (I’ve never been able to find it) to the effect that their son had been arrested, and that the circumstances were messy, and that she was flying down to gather more of the facts and to try to get him out of jail and to keep the story from the papers. She’d be in touch from Jinny’s house at nine that evening, her time. This basic chronology is in Hemingway’s first letter to Charlie Scribner of October 2. What can be said for certain is that the story got kept out of the papers. And that Pauline didn’t succeed in getting him sprung—her son was in jail when she died. There would be another way to look at this: she did get him sprung, but she had to die for it first.

  Despite what Gigi writes in his memoir, Pauline was very upset as she flew south. Jinny met her at the airport that Sunday afternoon. Pauline told her she wasn’t feeling well, that she had a sharp pain in her stomach. They drove to Deronda. Pauline made phone calls to lawyers and others. Laura came home from a swim at the house of one of her film producers. Laura and Jinny fixed a dinner for Pauline, but she couldn’t eat. She went upstairs to bed. The pain in her abdomen grew worse. Jinny and Laura called a doctor who said she might have to be taken to the hospital. Did Pauline force herself from bed at nine to make the call to Havana that she had promised in the earlier wire? Many years later, when she was almost eighty-seven, Laura Huxley would remember some of these details in an interview with Professor Ruth Hawkins of Arkansas State University, a Pfeiffer family scholar to whom I am much indebted. Laura would say there were several Hemingway calls that night. He was the one who placed the calls. Whether that’s true seems far less important than the fact that Pauline felt sick even before she got on the phone. And what did Hemingway, in full lashing-out mode, say to his weakened wife? To repeat Gigi’s words: “My aunt, who hated my father’s guts and who certainly couldn’t be considered an unbiased witness, said the conversation had started out calmly enough. But soon Mother was shouting into the phone and sobbing uncontrollably.”

  Sympathetic and kind, according to Hemingway, in his letter to Scribner the next day, which was the day after he’d spit in Mary Hemingway’s face. A year later, he’d say in a letter to Archie and Ada MacLeish: “It was a terrible thing having Pauline die that suddenly. I had talked with her, both very lovingly, an hour before she died on the coast.” (It wasn’t an hour before she died.)

  Sometime after midnight, the house came awake with Pauline’s screaming. Jinny and Laura got her dressed and into the car. St. Vincent’s Hospital, at Third and Alvarado Streets, on the edge of downtown LA, was a good half hour away—in daylight. Tearing down those hairpin curves from the Hollywood Hills in the dark must have been terrifying. St. Vincent’s was run by the Daughters of Charity, and the sisters themselves worked as RNs on the floors. The Catholicity of the place had to have given comfort.

  Once they’d gotten her into the hospital, and in the hands of the emergency room staff, Jinny and Laura decided not to stay. Jinny wasn’t feeling well herself. So Laura drove her back to the house on Deronda, and they went to bed.

  Henry Randall Thomas was an attending surgeon at St. Vincent’s. He and his fellow physicians did regular sleepover shifts at the hospital, and this was one of his nights. In four days he’d turn thirty-six—so he was twenty years younger than Pauline. He was lean and soft-spoken, with residues of a calming southern accent. He was a man who enjoyed literature. He’d grown up in an Alabama family of nine and had studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship and had surgical training at Mayo. He was a native of Montgomery, and had graduated from Sidney Lanier High School, which is where Zelda Fitzgerald had graduated fourteen years ahead of him. Did the name “Hemingway” on the medical chart register in any way that night as he and his surgical team worked furiously to stanch a hemorrhage from an unknown origin?

  His medical office, where he saw patients on a nonemergency basis, was a couple of blocks from St. Vincent’s. He’d only recently located to 630 South Bonnie Brae, on the corner of Bonnie Brae and Wilshire Boulevard, from an office a little farther down, at 1930 Wilshire. The reason for noting such an inconsequential fact here is because, the next day, on the second, when he was filling in, in his own handwriting, Pauline’s certificate of death, he started to write down in box 23d the wrong address for his office. He wrote “1930 W”—and then drew a line through it and wrote “630 S. Bonnie Brae St.” Was his mind still reeling from his failure, even as another reeling mind, half a continent away, was trying, that same day, in two letters, to push it all away?

  From Papa: “I can imagine the wild frustration of the surgeons as they searched for a bleeding point in the abdomen, where Mother had originally felt the pain.” Those are a fellow doctor’s words.

  It was apparently Dr. Thomas himself, at four o’clock, who awoke Jinny and Laura to tell them Pauline had died of shock on the operating-room table. They’d tried everything. (Virtually every Hemingway account lists 4:00 a.m. as the time of death. She died at three. It’s on the certificate.)

  The body was taken to Pierce Brothers Funeral Home on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. The mortuary was across the street from Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery. In daylight, Jinny put in the calls to family members. (To repeat: she cabled Hemingway at 9:00 a.m., her time.) From Papa: “But Aunt Jinny told me nothing of the details of the phone conversation the next morning [he is ref
erring to the Sunday night call at 9:00 p.m. with Hemingway], just that Mother was dead.… My mother’s face looked unbelievably white at the funeral, and I remember thinking through sobs what a barbarous ritual Anglo-Saxon burial is.” But there wasn’t a funeral, per se. Gigi has to be referring to the viewing, which was private, in the parlor of Pierce Brothers.

  The next day, October 2, on page 20, the Los Angeles Times ran a small story under this headline: “Hemingway’s Second Wife Dies In Hospital.”

  The Wednesday funeral was a brief graveside ceremony, casket closed. There were five mourners—Gigi, his aunt, his aunt’s partner, Jay McEvoy, and Garfield Merner, who was a first cousin of Pauline and Jinny’s. Patrick Hemingway was in Africa and it wasn’t possible for him to get home fast enough. Did a priest say prayers? Pierce Brothers in those days had on call a cleric from the archdiocese who made it his personal act of mercy to offer prayers (a little bit out of the eye of the archbishop) at the secular burials of Catholics, especially Catholic out-of-towners, whose families might have had few other options. A burial Mass in a local Catholic church was out of the question: Pauline was a divorced Catholic. Jinny badly wanted to rest Pauline in a Catholic cemetery, but there was no chance of that, either, and so the path of least resistance was chosen: the nondenominational cemetery across the street. The plot cost the family $350. And a stone? It’s a hard and strange fact that, all these years later, there is still no marker of any kind at Pauline Hemingway’s grave. She’s there, anonymously, at what is now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, two rows in from the pavement, down from Nelson Eddy Way, under a spongy piece of ground, alongside the modest markers of Lydia Bemmels and Leiland Irish, in almost the literal shade of Paramount Studio’s main lot, just a few yards from a man-made lake with a fountain, not far from the tombs and stones and marble mausoleums of Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks (both junior and senior) and Bugsy Siegel and Rudolph Valentino and Fay Wray and Peter Lorre and Cecil B. DeMille and Jayne Mansfield and Johnny Ramone of the Ramones—to cite only ten.