That description was kind compared with comments made about the famous actor by other journalists in Madrid. George Seldes was overwhelmed at first by Flynn and his wife, French actress Lili Damita. Seldes thought they were “two of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen.” Flynn impressed him with his claim that he had “a million dollars which I’ve raised among the friends of republican Spain in Hollywood. We’re going to build a hospital and buy ambulances for the republicans.” But shortly afterward, Seldes discovered that Flynn’s million dollars was a myth, a way for Flynn to get himself in front of the cameras while he pontificated about the loyalist cause.
“He was a goddamned liar!” Seldes exploded. “I’ve met three sons-of-bitches in my life. One was Mussolini, the second was D’Annunzio who betrayed Duse [a reference to Italian poet and fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio and his betrayal of Italian actress Eleanora Duse], and the third is Errol Flynn for his betrayal of the Spanish Republic to make publicity for himself for a Hollywood movie.”
Ernest took Flynn out to the frontlines outside of Madrid and sized him up immediately as a “triple phony” as he watched Flynn quiver in his boots at the first rattle of machinegun fire. After having his picture taken for publicity photos, Flynn asked Ernest, “Do you know the address of a good, clean whorehouse?” Ernest just looked at Flynn as he vanished from the battlefront and headed back to safety. He left Madrid in a flash and flew to the relative calm of Barcelona. The cameras were waiting for him there as well, and Flynn preened before them showing off some scratches on his face coated with mercurochrome, claiming he had been shot in the frontline trenches. The New York Daily News took the bait and ran the story with a headline saying, “Errol Flynn Killed at the Spanish Front”—which a later edition amended to “wounded” at the front. Flynn biographer Charles Higham claimed, with considerable documentation to back him up, that Flynn was actually in Spain as a spy for the Nazis.
Chapter Nineteen
Martha had yet to write an article for Collier’s, limiting herself so far to taking notes and keeping a diary. Ernest told her she was ready to submit her first dispatch, but Martha insisted that she knew nothing about war or military matters, only about the lives of ordinary people in the streets—daily life.
“Not everyone’s daily life,” Ernest told her. The look in his eyes was all the encouragement she needed.
She went to work immediately, writing about the courage of civilians who live ordinary lives in the midst of paralyzing fear, with the lives of those they know and love being destroyed every day. Her prose was spare and a little less Hemingwayesque. She was beginning to find her own stride, her own voice, as she wrote: “An old woman, with a shawl around her shoulders, holding a terrified thin boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.”
She sent the piece to Collier’s, which published it a few months later. Encouraged by that early success, she wrote another article for the magazine, which accepted it and put her name on the masthead. Then the New Yorker accepted two additional articles in short order. Martha was on a roll. No longer was she a mere student being tutored by her favorite author—and now her lover. She was Martha Gellhorn, published novelist and war correspondent in her own right. Between articles she wrote in her diary.
“I like writing. In the end it is the only thing which does not bore or dismay me, or fill me with doubt. It is the only thing I know absolutely and irrevocably to be good in itself, no matter what the result.”
And no one was prouder of her than Ernest, the master himself.
Ernest and Martha were both well aware of the atrocities committed on the republican side of the conflict as well as by the nationalists. Ernest would soon begin to work on a play set in the Florida Hotel, The Fifth Column, which depicted the torture of a rebel spy captured by the republicans. In his later novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest’s main character, Robert Jordan, laments the atrocities committed by both sides. George Seldes was euphoric in his praise of Ernest and his courage, describing him with glowing accolades.
“As for Hemingway’s reportage from Spain, it was not only truthful, it was a brave thing to do at a time when Spain was being red-baited to death. As for physical courage, I tell you his daily or almost daily visits to the wrecked building in no man’s land he used as an observation post were an exhibition of courage. From there he could see both the republicans as well as the Franco trenches opposite. But Hem and Herbert Matthews climbed out into no man’s land almost every day and lay on their stomachs on the floor near a smashed second-floor window to watch the fighting. And Franco shelled everything, including this hideout.”
Martha had also grown concerned about some of the communists she ran into in Madrid and on the front. She admitted in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt that she found some of the communists supporting the republicans to be “sinister folk and very, very canny.” But she chose to report the rebel atrocities in detail while ignoring those committed by the side she supported. The major flaw in Martha’s reporting throughout her life was her tendency to leave out what she knew to be true—“all that objectivity shit”—in order to uphold a greater good as she saw it.
But Ernest was less than forthright with Dos when it came to the Robles affair. Dos was still hunting for his friend Pepe in an attempt to find out for himself what kind of trouble he was in. Josie Herbst had told Ernest about Robles’ summary execution by his own government, but Ernest withheld the information from Dos for some reason—perhaps out of envy over Dos’s cover story in Time. Ernest had been ignoring Dos, as everyone seemed to be doing since Dos arrived in Spain. So Dos decided to seek out his old buddy in the hope that Ernest could shed some light on the subject. Sidney Franklin ushered Dos into room 108 at the Florida Hotel, Ernest’s well-stocked lair. Ernest was lying on the bed with a glass of wine in his hand.
“How much grub did you bring?” Ernest asked gruffly, taking Dos by surprise. No hello, no how do you do, just a blunt question.
Dos admitted that he had overlooked stocking up on food because he had other things on his mind.
“Then how do you expect to eat?” Ernest asked. “Martha! He hasn’t brought a goddamned thing!”
Martha stepped into the room from the one adjoining it, the one with most of their provisions. She was royally decked out in a silver fox coat that she had picked up at the local market. Martha had disliked Dos from the moment they met. She disdained him almost as much as she did Josie Herbst—disdained all of Ernest’s friends from the past, particularly the ones who had been friendly with Pauline.
“We might have known,” she said.
Ernest softened a notch and poured Dos some wine from his bottle. Martha sat down in the chair and stared mirthlessly at Dos. “To the happy pair,” Dos toasted them, not bothering to hide the sarcasm. At that point, Dos brought up the subject of Pepe Robles. Ernest rose from the bed and walked over to face Dos—to intimidate him, as it were, with his towering presence.
“What are you worrying about, Dos?” he asked. “Your professor friend’s disappearance? Think nothing of it. People disappear every day.”
Dos started to protest, but Ernest cut him off with a brutal attack. “Don’t put your damned mouth into this Robles business! The Fifth Column is everywhere! Suppose your friend took a powder and joined the other side?”
“That could not be!” Dos shot back. “I’ve known the man for years. He’s absolutely straight. Nobody forced him to give up a perfectly good job to come over to help his country.”
Martha joined in with a cutting blow of her own. “People have different ideas about how to help their country. Your inquiries have already caused us embarrassment.”
“You’ve got a typical A
merican liberal attitude,” said Ernest—Ernest the newborn revolutionary, the realist who reveled in the opportunity to teach his former friend a thing or two about war and politics. Dos bristled and glared at both of them. Two birds of a feather, he thought. There was nothing more to say to either of them. Dos had come to the end of the line. The atrocities committed by both sides in this war were equally repugnant. Dos’s eyes were open now. He couldn’t believe how far Ernest had swung to the left, even as he himself had grown more neutral. What the republicans did to Pepe was the last straw for him, the deal-breaker. He stared at Ernest who just glowered back at him.
“That was the end of it for us,” Dos wrote afterward.
* * *
In the late spring of 1937, the communists under orders from Stalin moved to cement their control over the republican government by purging the non-communist elements from its ranks. They momentarily abandoned hostilities against Franco’s nationalists and directed them instead on the anarchists and separatists within the republican government, conducting witch hunts for heretics. What a religious ring that had to it! The communists had replaced God and Church with their own version of what the State should be—omnipotent, omniscient, drunk with absolute power. The communists spared no efforts in their search for traitors to Marxist orthodoxy. George Orwell described in detail the kangaroo trials, the summary executions, the torture, and the bloodletting in Homage to Catalonia.
Ernest and Martha decided to return to the United States by way of Paris as the worst of this internecine violence was just getting started. They stopped at Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore owned by Sylvia Beach who had been such a staunch supporter of Ernest during his early years when he was still unknown and striving to get published. Ernest and poet Stephen Spender had agreed to give readings from their respective works on May 12 before an overflow crowd as a favor to Sylvia. Ernest disliked public speaking. His throat tended to constrict and give his words a nasal quality, but he had always loved Sylvia and remained loyal to her for her support when he needed it most. Ernest got up to read from his novel in progress, To Have and Have Not, the story set during the Great Depression in Key West featuring thinly disguised portraits of Sloppy Joe Russell and other colorful locals. He was visibly nervous in the beginning, delivering his lines in a monotone. But then the excitement of his own words began to inspire him, and he grew more relaxed.
“His voice had lost the monotonous pitch, his mouth and half-moon mustache twitched even more,” the Herald Tribune reported the next day. “He began to put expression into the clean, terse phrases…The picture of him which must have been taken some twelve years ago, when he was twenty-seven and very handsome, could be seen on the wall behind.”
Ernest’s old idol, James Joyce, was there to hear him read. Joyce was now an old and frail-looking fifty-five. His eyeglasses were thicker than ever. He would be dead a mere four years later.
Ernest took the boat-train to the coast, where he boarded the Normandiefor the trip back to the United States. Martha would follow shortly afterward on a different liner and wait for him in New York while Ernest traveled south. Ernest had to face Pauline when he got back to Key West, and he wanted to face her alone. It was not going to be easy. In his own mind at least, his marriage was over. He wired Pauline that he would be arriving in New York on May 18 and would head straightaway down to Key West. Pauline wired back that it would be so good to see him again. She adopted a chatty tone, telling him about household matters, about the children, about how much she missed him while he was away. But Ernest could read the desperation between the lines.
This homecoming was not going to be easy.
Chapter Twenty
Ernest looked different to Pauline than he did a few months earlier. He had put on some weight and appeared a bit bloated from too much alcohol. Pauline could always tell when Ernest had been drinking too much—or more than usual. And he was not the kind, devoted husband she hoped to see on his return. He was gruff, strangely discontent, his darker moods more pronounced. Ernest did not like what Pauline had done to the property in his absence. For one thing, she had a brick wall built around the perimeter to give them more privacy from the crowds of tourists visiting Key West in growing numbers. Ernest disliked the tourists straining their necks on the sidewalk out front, but he didn’t like the feeling of being fenced in. But worst of all, Pauline had installed a large salt-water swimming pool in the yard. She knew how much Ernest loved to swim, and she thought the swimming pool would be an inducement for him to stay home now and finish his novel. But when Ernest found out Pauline had spent twenty thousand dollars on it—two and a half times the cost of the house—he exploded. He flipped a penny at her and said,
“You’ve spent all my other money. You might as well take my last cent too.”
Pauline saved the penny and had it cemented into the yard beside the pool, where it remains in full view today.
On May 5, 1937, Sloppy Joe Russell moved his bar to a building he bought on Duval Street for twenty-five hundred dollars when his landlord raised the rent one dollar a week at 428 Greene Street. The new place was one of the first stops Ernest made after his return. Josie Russell was in fine form, and so was Skinner dominating his perch behind the bar. Ernest went into the men’s room to relieve himself, and when he came out he asked Josie what he had done with the old urinal.
“It’s in the back,” Josie said, “with other stuff I can’t use anymore. Why?”
“Can I have it?”
Josie looked at him as though he were crazy. “Take it if you want. I was gonna toss it out.”
“I’ve pissed enough money down that thing,” Ernest said. “I feel like I own it now.”
Pauline was speechless when Ernest brought it home. When Ernest was off on another one of his adventures, Pauline had it scrubbed out thoroughly, turned over backside down, and filled with plants and flowers in an attempt to hide its original purpose. That, too, remains in the backyard today near the site of the old pool.
Early in the morning of May 26, Ernest departed in the Pilar on a fishing trip to Bimini with a couple of friends on board. Pauline flew over from Miami with their sons, Patrick and Gregory, for a few glorious days of hauling in fish and basking in the sun. While Ernest was in Bimini avoiding the subject of their disintegrating marriage in his conversations with Pauline, Martha was having lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., on May 28. During their lunch, Martha asked if President and Mrs. Roosevelt would be interested in seeing The Spanish Earth when Ernest and Joris Ivens completed the film. If so, they would all be happy to come to Washington to show it to them.
“Martha Gellhorn seems to have come back with a deep conviction that the Spanish people are a glorious people and something is happening in Spain which may mean much to the rest of the world,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column.
Joris worked on the film in New York and Ernest divided his time between his novel and the text for the film. The narration was supposed to be delivered by an up-and-coming actor named Orson Welles, who would become famous a year later with his radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and a few years after that with his starring role in Citizen Kane. But after listening to Orson’s voice-over, Ernest was dissatisfied and agreed to narrate it himself.
“Orson Wells was supposed to do it,” Ernest told movie director John Huston a few years later.
“Orson, eh,” said Huston. “And why didn’t he do it?”
“Well, John,” Ernest answered, clearing his throat. “Every time Orson said the world infantry it sounded like a cocksucker swallowing.”
Ernest left Pauline and the boys in their rented house on Bimini and flew up to New York on June 4 to speak before the American Writers Conference in Carnegie Hall. He arrived just in time to see an excerpt from the film that Joris prepared for the occasion in front of a packed house. When it was over, Ernest stepped to the podium and thrilled to the thunderous applause of thirty-five hundred of his fellow
writers. He appeared composed as he delivered his carefully crafted attack on the fascist menace threatening to embrace the world.
“Fascism is a lie told by bullies,” he said. “It is condemned to literary sterility. When it is past, it will have no history except the bloody history of murder that is well known…But there is now and there will be from now on for a long time war for any writer to go to who wants to study it. It looks as though we are in for many years of undeclared wars.”
His prescient remarks resonated well with most of the audience. But reporter Dawn Powell had a bit of fun with the proceedings in her write-up, saying that “about ten-thirty all the foreign correspondents marched on each one with his private blonde led by Ernest and Miss Gellhorn, who had been thru hell in Spain and came shivering on in a silver fox chin-up.” As for Ernest’s speech, Powell wrote that “Ernest gave a good speech” saying “that war was pretty nice and a lot better than sitting around in a hot hall and writers ought to all go to war and get killed and if they didn’t they were a big sissy. Then he went over to the Stork Club, followed by a pack of foxes.”
Spanish journalist Prudencia de Pareda was a bit kinder, writing, “Yes, there was some awkwardness, both vocal and physical—but he faced and beat them both. The audience had come for Ernest; he was there for them. He lapped up the warm acceptance.”
Ernest met with Max Perkins to discuss his novel, and then returned to Pauline and the boys in Bimini to work some more on the book, which he promised to deliver in July. He told his wife that he intended to go back to Spain in the fall—again without her. Then he left her fretting in the sun and flew back to New York—to Joris, to Max, and most of all to Martha—on June 20, in time to get the film ready for a private showing before the president and Eleanor. The White House screening was set for July 8. Ernest, Martha, and Joris flew to Washington from Newark, New Jersey. On the way down, Martha warned them that the quality of the food and drink served up by the Roosevelts had deteriorated considerably over the years. It was now indescribably bad. The men laughed it off, believing she had to be exaggerating. Ernest was amply warned, but he was nevertheless in shock when he experienced the Roosevelts’ hospitality first-hand.
Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 12