Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  Mario, who had been waiting all this time in the Lancia and who had a previously expressed hatred for Germans as a result of certain Nazi brutalities visited upon his family, was obviously pleased when Ernest said, as the Germans got into the back with me, "We have to make the Prado before closing, Mario, so don't spare the horses." This meant that for the first time Mario could take the wraps off the Lancia and show us why he placed so well in the fast Mille Miglia.

  The road to Madrid is narrow, twisting, high in the middle with trenches at the sides, in need of repair, and busy with horses and ox-drawn carts and motorbikes. Mario put the needle at one hundred fifteen kilometers and kept it there, carts, bikes or high water. I had a newspaper, which I pretended to read with what I hoped was nonchalance, and Ernest kept saying to the reporters, "Well, no other questions? . . . That all you want to know?" Out of the corner of my eye I watched their green, petrified faces as Mario darted between and around and virtually over the steady stream of slow-mov-ing objects that cluttered the road. He double-shifted screaming tires around hairpin curves, and we pulled up in front of the Prado in nineteen minutes instead of the usual thirty-two. The two Germans had to be virtually helped from the car. They mumbled their thanks through frozen lips and wobbled off. Ernest shook Mario's hand and would have presented him with a trophy if he had one. "Mark it down," Ernest said to me as we mounted the Prado steps, "as The Day Honest Ernie Struck Back."

  Ernest loved the Prado. He entered it as he entered cathedrals. Great art had always been an enormous force in his life (he said he learned everything he knew about describing landscapes, for example, from studying Cezanne and Monet and Gauguin in the Luxembourg Museum). The Prado contained the paintings which Ernest admired beyond all others.

  When Ernest went to a museum, it was never to look at the pictures in general but only at particular canvases. Sometimes he would go to look at one picture, and then leave. He would walk across an entire room of Titians, not looking at any except the one he wanted to see, and then he would stand in front of that one picture, absorbed in it, looking at it for as long as his emotions demanded. On one occasion I was with him in the Accademia di Belle Arti when he stood in front of Veronese's "The Feast in the House of Levi" for twenty minutes. Another time, we went to the impressionist museum in Paris, to look at a Cezanne. Ernest said it had been his life's ambition to write as good as that picture. "Haven't made it yet," he said, "but getting closer all the time."

  His knowledge of the artists he respected and of their works came from his prodigious reading, his natural eye for form and color, his familiarity with the people and the places painted, and, in the case of artists like Miro, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris, Masson and Monet, who had been his contemporaries and acquaintances, his insight into their personalities, their drives and their philosophy of living. Ernest always tried to locate the heart of a painting, what he called "the pure emotion," the real thing the artist set out to achieve; and he identified with the difficulty of the artist's task, for he felt that as a writer he had the same struggle to achieve the same pure emotion, with the difference, however, that "artists have all those great colors, while I have to do it on the typewriter or with my pencil in black and white."

  That day in the Prado he took me to see certain paintings by Bosch, Botticelli, Velasquez, El Greco, and Goya, with particular emphasis on Goya's huge portrait of the royal family of Charles IV. "Is it not a masterpiece of loathing?" Ernest asked. "Look how he has painted his spittle into every face. Can you imagine that he had such genius that he could fulfill this commission and please the King, who, because of his fatuousness, could not see how Goya had stamped him for all the world to see. Goya believed in movement, in his own cojones, and in everything he ever experienced and felt. You don't look at Goya if you want neutrality."

  As we were leaving, Ernest asked me if I wanted to see the girl whom he had loved longer than any other woman in his life. He led me away from the main hall and into a small room where his girl waited inconspicuously: Andrea del Sarto's "Portrait of a Woman." He stood back for a moment while I approached her; then he came up beside me. His mouth was slightly smiling and his eyes were proud. He breathed in deeply, and as the sigh escaped he said, "My beauty." He stood transfixed, so lost in his reverie for this girl of the sixteenth century that a Prado guard had to tap him on the arm and tell him twice that the museum was closing.

  Mary and I stayed in the bar of the Palace Hotel while Ernest kept his appointment with Dr. Madinoveitia. I had never seen her so concerned about Ernest. She felt that drink had become something for him that it had never been before and she did not know how to cope with it.

  "I try to hold him down, but no matter how tactful I am, Papa resents it as nagging and, as you know, he can't stand policing up. So, if anything, that aggravates the drinking and we wind up quarreling, which I hate, but what can I do? Not say anything? How can you stand by silently while someone you love is destroying himself? The things that used to sustain him—working, reading, planning, writing and receiving letters— they are fading away. He doesn't even have people around to lean on him and bring him their problems—Papa always liked that. Now there's just his problems and his hurts and a day-after-day Black-Ass."

  On my way to the airport we picked up Ernest at the doctor's. As usual, he had saved work discussion for the last moment; he asked about two of his stories, "The Undefeated," which I was in the process of dramatizing, and "The Battler," which had just been performed on NBC's "Playwrights '56." He listened with interest as I told him about The Battler. It is a ten-page short story which I had converted into an hour play, and James Dean was to have played the lead—a pathetic, punch-drunk ex-champion. A relatively unknown young actor named Paul Newman had been cast in the secondary role of Nick Adams. But a week or so before rehearsals were scheduled to start, Dean was killed in his sports car, and we were forced to fill the part by risking young Newman in the lead. He performed valiantly in the tough, complicated character role, the show was a success, and the day after the telecast M.-G.-M. gave Newman the lead in the prize-fight movie Somebody Up There Likes Me, thus making a star of him.

  I asked Ernest if he would like to see the script of The Undefeated when it was finished, and he said no, he'd rather continue trusting me until I made a serious mistake.

  At the airport he came to the ticket counter with me, and while we waited for the check-in clerk he said, "Just had some pretty tough news. Besides liver situation, which we know about, tests showed inflamed heart vein, so Madinoveitia has lowered what's left of the boom; I flunked all the tests and he's put me on a strict food diet with no more than one glass of wine per meal and five ounces of whiskey per day, and no, repeat, no screwing. Would you say that's a bulletin designed to resurrect a former cheerful?"

  The following year, 1957, was a dismal time for Ernest. In March he cut off all drinking except for two glasses of wine with his evening meal. By disciplining himself severely, he was able to get his weight down to two hundred, reduce his cholesterol count from a deadly four twenty-eight to a normal two hundred four, and improve his blood pressure considerably.

  But it was certainly not the kind of life he enjoyed. Also, his children were having some problems and he was very concerned about them; he was trying to bury himself in work but having very little fun in the process and not traveling at all and not even getting out on his boat much. But it was a year of convalescence that he owed himself, and it made much more of a contribution to his well-being than he realized at the time. What made it particularly difficult was that all his life Ernest had relied on taking a drink to cheer himself up no matter how bad things were, but now one of the very things that was bedevilling him was a physical condition that precluded drinking.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ketchum ♦ 1958

  In the fall of 1958, Ernest decided to go back to the American Far West, where he had not been for over a decade. The place he chose was Ketchum, Idaho, a tiny hamlet of 746 residents, l
ocated in the foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains, one mile from the Sun Valley ski resort.

  Ernest once skied at Sun Valley, but he had given it up years back when his aluminum kneecap could not take it any more; now he had rented a furnished cabin from a family named Geiss, intending to tramp the lovely, familiar mountainsides in quest of local game. Since local game consisted of doves, Hungarian partridges, pheasant, mallards, wild geese, hare, deer and bear, he knew there would be plenty to keep him occupied. And he had friends in Ketchum he had known for thirty years.

  By November of that year I was at work on the teleplay of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Ernest suggested that I come out to case his new country and discuss certain aspects of the dramatization about which I had queried him. Also, he said he had an important new project that he didn't want to discuss on the phone.

  It was easier to go to Hong Kong than Ketchum. You flew to Chicago, where you waited for the Portland Rose, the one and only decent train that went, once a day, in the direction of Ketchum. The oddity about Sun Valley is that although it was created out of whole mountain cloth by the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, it is situated ninety miles away from the nearest railroad station, which is in the town of Shoshone. And the way you traveled those ninety miles was either by Sun Valley limousine, which only operated during the skiing season, December to March, or by taxi (thirty-six dollars), of which there was only one and that one was not readily available during the hunting season because its owner preferred being behind a gun to being behind the wheel.

  Luckily the taxi and its owner were just returning from a turkey shoot when I arrived. It was a cold ride through snowcapped country to Ketchum, which is a picture town cradled in a Sawtooth crease. I checked into a room Ernest had reserved for me at the Edelweiss Motel, a few minutes' walk from the Geiss cabin, which was a pleasant-looking chalet with split-log facing; the attached garage contained a bower of close-hanging ducks and pheasants.

  Ernest saw me coming up the path and came out to greet me. He was wearing knee-high laced leather boots, Western pants, a sleeveless goatskin jacket over a plaid Viyella shirt, and he looked wonderful. Inside, there were flaming birch logs in a six-foot fireplace, a corner packed with guns, ammo, gun cases and game bags, hunting clothes on wall pegs, bearskin floor throws, elk heads, a rack of wine, magazine and book mounds, the smell of game stew slowly bubbling, and two kittens roughhousing on the sofa; three days anywhere, and Ernest made it look as if he had lived there for years.

  I couldn't believe his metamorphosis. He had become taut, the slack was gone, the smile back, his eyes were clear, the old timbre was in his voice, and ten years had left his face. He was alive with enthusiasm and plans. He took me out to the garage to inspect his feathered trophies; he told me about the hunting he had arranged for us; he bestowed high praise on Mary for the splendid way she had been shooting, then cooking that which they shot; he was anxious for me to meet his friends; he took me into his bedroom to read a "beauty chapter" he had written that morning. It was indeed a beauty chapter, a poetic account of his early Paris days with Hadley.

  On his last trip to Paris, Ernest had discovered an old trunk in the cellar of the Ritz. It contained notebooks in which he had written about those Paris days of the Twenties, and he asked me what I thought of a book of sketches like the one I had just read. I was strongly enthusiastic. He said Mary was too.

  In the days that followed, Ernest worked every morning and hunted almost every afternoon. I had shot target and skeet but never open-field game, and Ernest, as always, delighted in teaching me his techniques and secrets.

  Sometimes we went out alone, but usually Mary and some friends such as Bud Purdy, the rancher, Chuck Atkinson, the owner of the Ketchum market, a young Sim Valley doctor, whom I shall call Vernon Lord, and whose specialty, of course, was fractures, and old Taylor Williams, once one of the West's greatest hunters, would come along. When we shot on Bud Purdy's vast ranch, he would go up in his plane beforehand and scout the canals, noting those where the ducks were, and on those days we knew we'd come back with mallards' heads flopping out of our bulging game bags.

  When we went to Picabo country for pheasant, Ernest studied the terrain and deployed us, using hand signals to communicate as if we were a patrol behind enemy lines. Outside of Hailey one day he spotted the dry remnants of a corn field, which he staked out with infinite care, for we had no dogs, stationing us at the corners and sending us in a few minutes apart. The maneuver forced any unseen ground-hugging pheasants toward the center, and when our forces finally converged, not aware of the hidden birds, they suddenly burst upward, a rising curtain of pheasants; we all shot doubles, and Ernest reloaded and dropped a second pair that had circled around and passed over.

  Ernest had a few strict rules: guns in the car must never be loaded; guns being carried through or over fences must be broken at the breech; a bird, when spotted, must never be pointed at or the bird will be spooked and never bagged.

  One afternoon Ernest spotted a big snowy owl sitting high in a tree and he shot it in the wing. He picked it up and inspected the damage. "Have to be careful holding owl," he said. "Once held an owl the wrong way and it grabbed my stomach with both talons and wouldn't let go. Very mean characters."

  In his garage Ernest established headquarters for the owl. He set up a box for him, which he lined and covered with his hunting clothes, and fitted a cane into the box for a perch. From that moment on, Owl became the autocrat of the house. At the outset there was deep concern about his eating; Ernest trapped mice every night so he'd have a fresh breakfast, and at noon he was given duck heads and rabbit heads because Ernest said he needed feathers and fur for roughage. When Owl began to polish off his morning mouse and thus establish himself as a captive eater, Ernest then shifted his concern to whether Owl would eliminate satisfactorily. "Eating's one thing, crapping's another," Ernest observed. It was only after there were significant droppings for proof, and a slight flurry of doubt was dispelled over whether Owl was drinking water, that Ernest began to relax about him. Mary wanted to give him a name, Hammerstein I think it was, but everyone just called him Owl.

  I asked Ernest why he had shot him. "Plan to train him. Maybe make him think he's a falcon," he said.

  Owl, because of his noted wisdom, became the household arbiter. There was, for instance, the beginning of a quarrel one evening between Mary and Ernest over whether a piece of elk's liver she was about to cook was fresh. Everyone smelled it but the vote was inconclusive, with Mary vigorously affirmative and Ernest vehemently negative. Ernest pulled out his Swiss officer's escape knife, cut off a piece of the liver and carried it out and offered it to Owl. Owl wouldn't touch it. "Owl knows better than us what's fresh," Ernest said, and the liver was given to the cats.

  Owl and Ernest became great pals. Ernest talked him into sitting on his hand, and only once in a while did Owl get crabby and try to take a chunk out of a finger. Whenever we returned to the cabin from anywhere, Ernest went in to see

  Owl before he went into the house. Of course, all the game that had been hanging in the garage had to be taken out once Owl's wing started to heal and he could move around.

  Ernest seemed content with the eating and drinking routines he had imposed on himself. He drank a glass of wine at lunch, a moderate amount for dinner, and kept his evening Scotch down to two drinks. His favorite lunch was a glass of red wine and a sandwich of peanut butter and raw onion. For the first time since I had known him he went out freely to other people's houses for dinner, for they were all good friends who let him make his own drinks and whose simple Ketchum food he could trust. He always brought the wine, which he selected from his stock of good but relatively inexpensive bottles. "I gave up expensive wines for Lent of 1947," Ernest once explained, "and never took it up again. Also gave up smoking long before that because cigarette smoke is the nose's worst enemy and how can you enjoy a good wine that you cannot truly smell?"

  Evenings that he didn't go out, Mary, who was an imaginativ
e and light-fingered cook, would prepare ducks or partridge or venison in a variety of ways; afterward Ernest would read for a few hours or, if he felt like it, he'd sit in front of the big fire and talk about the old days out West. "There was this Easterner who came to me one day and asked me to help him shoot a grizzly. 'It's all my wife wants; night and day she's after me, and since we were just married I'd like to please her.' Hell, I say, the grizzly is the hardest of all bears to shoot, the toughest and the smartest. I haven't shot a grizzly in eight years.

  "Well, I am out with this husband and wife one day, and we are stalking a moose for food when there's a sound in the brush and three grizzlies uncover. They are gargantuan sons-of-bitches. I tell the wife to get behind me because we have no time to try to get to cover. The husband, who is some distance away, has already covered and is out of the action. Now, a grizzly will drop when hit right but he will usually recover and charge and won't drop again until he's dead. That's what makes them so damn dangerous. The nearest grizzly, an eight-hundred-pounder, takes one look at us and charges straight on. I drop him with a neck shot and then, as he starts the get-up, I drill him in the shoulder for keeps.

  "The second grizzly charges as I am reloading and I empty both shells into him practically point-blank. He is dead on arrival. Now the third grizzly, who has cased the fate of his buddies and wants no part of it, turns and starts up the hill and I have to peg him four times before I put him away for good. The new wife emerges from the shadow of my behind and she says to me, 'My mouth is dry. Please cover me while I go to the stream to get a drink.' That's all she ever says about the whole episode. And they want to know if Margot Macomber was drawn from real life!"

  On Sunday afternoons Ernest and I watched pro football on television and shot skeet in back of the house during half time. Friday nights, Ernest played host to a half dozen of his male friends who would arrive to watch the fights. Ernest was the bookmaker, quoting odds, covering all bets, marking them down carefully in a small ruled notebook. During the fight he would discuss the punches, or lack of them, being displayed, and he was particularly discerning about in-fighting. On the occasion when Gene Fullmer fought Spider Webb, Ernest was caustic about Webb's performance and at one point exclaimed, "There! He finally threw his one-punch combination." He was very solicitous about keeping his guests' glasses filled, and after the fight, food was served and the talk was good—the same convivial atmosphere Ernest created with the group that regularly convened in his finca in Cuba.