Hemingway and Gellhorn

by Jerome Tuccille

  Before they left the country, Ernest and Martha flew to California with a stopover in Hollywood to discuss the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Berman, who would be playing the female lead. They listened to famed movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille give his views on the film industry at a banquet, and then they traveled north to San Francisco where they boarded the Matsonia en route to Honolulu. It was a decrepit old vessel, creaking noisily with every roll of the ocean in extremely high seas. The two of them spent much of their time drinking in their cabin while they rocked and rolled across the Pacific. Martha was motivated to make the journey, spurred on by a need to keep her journalism career moving ahead, but Ernest was in a foul mood when they docked in Hawaii. The claque of reporters who awaited their arrival annoyed the hell out of him, and the garlands of flowers draped around his neck by local dignitaries and hula dancers were the final straw threatening to break the camel’s— or the elephant’s—back.

  Ernest was snarling, “grinning like a wolf with bared fangs,” Martha noted mischievously as the photographers snapped their photos. “The next son of a bitch that touches me, I am going to cool him,” he whispered to Martha.

  They were forced to endure an afternoon with Ernest’s aunt, who insisted on giving them unwanted advice during a tedious lunch. And they had to put up with a banquet thrown in their honor by the “King and Queen” of the island, complete with a torch-lit pageant at which Ernest and Martha both got piss-eyed drunk in an effort to get through the festivities with their sanity intact. Finally, mercifully it seemed, they were able to escape on a Pan Am flying boat bound for Guam.

  “Those big Pan Am flying boats were marvelous,” Martha wrote later. “We flew all day in roomy comfort, eating and drinking like pigs, visiting the captain, listening to our fellow travelers, dozing, reading, and in the late afternoon the plane landed on the water at an island. The passengers had time for a swim, a shower, a dinner, and slept in beds.”

  Ernest hadn’t wanted to go on the trip in the first place, but Guam seemed like a welcome reprieve after the forced jocularity of Hawaii.

  * * *

  Hong Kong was a different city in 1941 than it is today. It was a ramshackle tumble of wooden buildings; narrow streets crammed with rickshaws, bicycles, and people; no skyscrapers; a single bank; and a handful of larger homes higher up on the base of Victoria Peak where the rich folks lived. Martha was horrified by “the sheer numbers, the density of bodies. There was no space to breathe. Why do they have to spit so much?” she wondered. “You can’t put your foot down without stepping on a big slimy gob. And everything stinks of sweat and good old night soil.” The night soil was a euphemism for the buckets of human shit that were emptied out every night and spread around for fertilizer. Ernest, however, was delighted. This was life in the raw, a grand human experience such as he had experienced in his early days covering wars in remote regions of the globe.

  Ernest had a natural gift for picking up foreign languages. He was proficient if not fluent in Spanish, French, and Italian, and now he attuned his ear to the local patois—an amalgam of Pidgin English, Chinese, and other exotic strains. Martha saw a side to him that she hadn’t discovered before. He made himself at home in whatever element he found himself. She was stunned that he was actually carrying on basic conversations in this alien tongue within days of their arrival. His great gift was observing speech and behavior patterns, absorbing them into his persona, and then writing about them truthfully, beautifully, and creatively. Martha was appalled by the human suffering she encountered; Ernest examined it with a clinical detachment.

  They checked into the Hong Kong Hotel on Pedder Street, one of the only presentable hotels downtown, an ancient structure with paddle fans on the ceiling, an antique toilet, and a spacious lounge in the lobby that looked as though it had been ripped from the pages of a Somerset Maugham novel. Ernest set up his headquarters there, commandeering a padded leather chair where he began to hold court the day they arrived. Martha once again observed her husband in wonderment, marveling at his talent for sucking into his orbit an unsavory crowd of locals and other mysterious types.

  “In the twinkling of an eye,” Martha wrote, her husband had “collected a mixed, jovial entourage.”

  He sat there in the middle of the claque, drinking, telling jokes, and listening to the improbable stories of Chinese businessmen, racketeers, taxi drivers, cops and other civil servants, and a rough-looking character from Chicago named Morris “TwoGun” Cohen, who claimed to be working as a hit man for a Hong Kong mobster and looked the part. Martha dismissed his routine at first as another example of Ernest “loafing” while she ached to be out in the countryside, observing peasant life on the farms. What she realized soon enough was that Ernest wasn’t loafing at all; he was working—learning about life in China from the mouths of people who knew it more intimately than anyone else.

  Martha sat in on some of these marathon talking and drinking sessions for as long as she could stand them, but she was odd-woman-out in an all-male club and she felt uncomfortable in the group. In any event, it was clearly not her style. She told Ernest that she wanted to travel into the interior to observe conditions there firsthand. But Ernest had no inclination to abandon the camaraderie of his rogue’s gallery of chums. He laughed and said to the group, “Martha is going off to take the pulse of the nation.” The men laughed out loud with Ernest. Martha left in a snit and made arrangements to go off on her own. When Ernest started to light firecrackers in their small hotel room, she knew it was time to leave.

  The chief—the only—means of air transportation in primitive, wartime China was via the China National Aviation Company. CNAC consisted of two DC3s and three DC2s, rickety old aircraft with metal seats thinly draped with canvas and a toilet behind a green curtain that required no flush mechanism; there was a hole in the floor that allowed human fertilizer (night soil) to drop willy-nilly onto the ground—or onto whomever was standing in the wrong place on the ground. Ernest later said that China was a vast “shit-filled country.”

  CNAC’s schedule was haphazard at best. The planes took off when there were enough people and cargo to transport, and whenever one of the airline’s few qualified pilots was available. Martha was lucky. She booked a ride on one of the DC2s that took off at four-thirty in the morning with seven Chinese passengers and her. The pilots preferred to fly in pitch darkness and foul weather to avoid Japanese antiaircraft guns that were positioned to blast CNAC planes out of the sky. Martha sat white-knuckled in her hard, uncomfortable seat as the American pilot named Roy rose sharply to avoid the Peak, which was all but invisible against the ebony sky. Indeed, the only illumination came from shell bursts around the plane as it flew over Japanese lines.

  They landed safely five-and-a-half hours later in Chungking, later spelled Chongqing, the largest city in southwest China valuable for its strategic position as a large Yangtze River port. The airstrip they landed on was located on a narrow island beneath more towering cliffs, and it was notorious for being submerged under as much as sixty feet of water at least two months a year. At other times, the water level rose and fell unpredictably, sometimes flooding the airstrip without warning. The other passengers departed quickly and disappeared into the city, a gray stretch of rubble at the top of the cliff. Martha and the American pilot ate a meager breakfast of rice and tea. She regarded the young man with curiosity, but she learned that it was better not to ask what adventurous Americans and Brits were doing in this horrific warzone when they could be enjoying the comforts of home. Then they took off again, the two of them and a new load of Chinese passengers. The plane passed over a few grim villages and isolated farms, flying just high enough to clear mountain tops before dipping low into valleys while Roy checked out conditions on the ground.

  “I go where I’m looking,” he explained perfunctorily to Martha. She gathered that the route he took was a random adventure in itself; he was obviously looking out for Japanese artillery encampmen
ts along the way and was prepared to fly around them if he had to. A few hours later Roy spotted the next stop on their itinerary, Kunming, through a thick haze that all but obliterated the ground.

  “Yep,” he said without further elaboration. Deftly, he dove down sharply through the yellow smog that had been thrown up by Japanese bombs earlier in the day, and touched down on a runway marked with white oil drums and pockmarked with bomb craters. Kunming was a provisional headquarters for the nationalists, with an underground network of tunnels lined with offices and barracks in the event that Chungking fell to the Japanese.

  Martha was freezing cold and miserable by this time. She felt as though she had been flying for eternity through an icy wasteland with a roughneck for a pilot, who literally held her life in his fingertips at the controls. But she still had not reached her final destination. Again Roy lifted Martha and yet a new troop of passengers up from the ground as he expertly rose above mountains and dived into valleys, ever on the lookout for enemy encampments. Frozen to the bone, Martha finally landed in Lashio, Burma— today’s Myanmar—sixteen hours and fifteen hundred miles after she had left Hong Kong. It was the adventure of a lifetime just reaching her destination. For Roy it was all in a day’s work. He and his fellow pilots made the run regularly every week.

  Lashio was important because of its location at the end of the Burma Road, which was nothing less than an engineering miracle. Everything passed over this mountainous route—oil, weapons, food, other supplies needed to sustain the Chinese war effort. The road snaked through the Himalayas at staggering heights and carved its way through rock at steep inclines that slowed traffic to no more than twenty miles an hour. Snow and ice covered the solid rock surface most of the long Chinese winter. Huge boulders littered the road, loosened from the high mountain walls by both gravity and regular bombing raids by Japanese aircraft. Yet, no sooner had the enemy planes abandoned the skies after their bombing sorties than teams of Chinese construction crews scurried across the rock surface to repair the wreckage. It was a dance repeated over and over almost daily.

  The Chinese had virtually no defenses to ward off the Japanese attacks except for their indefatigable patience and long history of survival. Two hundred thousand Chinese laborers had built the serpentine road covering more than seven hundred miles across China to its terminus in Burma, and they were not about to let a few Japanese bombs undermine their superhuman effort. The Burma Road was critical to China’s struggle against Japan, and it was a transportation link to the outside world that was a major source of interest to Ernest’s contacts in Washington.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Martha’s rest stop in Lashio consisted of a wooden shack with iron cots and a hot shower—heaven itself after her grueling journey. But Lashio would not be home for long. At one-thirty in the afternoon, after they got word that a couple of dozen Japanese planes had completed their bombing run over Kunming, Roy and Martha took off again for the provisional capital. Kunming “was a big walled city,” Martha wrote, “entered by a great carved painted gate. The houses were made of timber or mud brick, with curving eaves. The Japanese claimed to have destroyed it but, as they destroyed, the Chinese residents repaired. Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.”

  A few days later Martha was back in Hong Kong after “flying in what looked like béchamel sauce for hours.” She found Ernest where she had left him, holding court in the lobby of their hotel and drinking with his motley cast of buddies. While Martha had been away, he had written to Edna to reassure her that her daughter was all right, “treating the men like brothers and the women like dogs.” Martha resented that description when she heard about it later, but by then Ernest’s embellishments of the facts were the least of the problems that had erupted between them. Martha complained to Ernest and his entourage about the plight of the masses drowsing away in opium dens, cavorting in brothels, breaking their backs in labor fit only for beasts, children forced to do slave labor in dimly lit factories, all of them half starved to death with sometimes only a small ration of rice and tea to sustain them through the day. But she blamed the people themselves as well as the masters who abused them, and Ernest responded by telling his friends that “Martha loves humanity but can’t stand people.” The men laughed along with Ernest, but his pithy accuracy in summing up her political bent bothered her more than his humor at her expense.

  “The trouble with you, Martha,” Ernest told her, “is that you think everybody is exactly like you. What you can’t stand, they can’t stand. What’s hell for you has to be hell for them. How do you know what they feel about their lives? If it was as bad as you think, they’d kill themselves instead of having more kids and setting off firecrackers.”

  To mollify his wife, Ernest moved her into a newer hotel in the countryside near Repulse Bay away from all the poverty. The hotel was surrounded by flowering English gardens and decorated inside with chintz. Waiters served pink gins to the guests inside the compound that was insulated from the constant spitting and stench of sweat and night soil that offended Martha’s sensibilities. Ernest once again surrounded himself with a new group of drinking companions, but Martha was less dismissive after she realized the true nature of his so-called “socializing.” While she had been away, Ernest had expanded his circle beyond the likes of Two Gun Cohen and the assortment of Chinese racketeers and businessmen. He had also cultivated the friendship of U.S. Rubber Company executive Carl Blum; New Zealand industrialist Rewi Alley; head of British intelligence Major Charles Boxer; historian Emily Hahn; aviation expert W. Langhorne Bond; Argentine diplomat Ramon Lavalle; U.S. Consul General Addison Southard; and other China hands who had valuable information to share about military and political conditions in China.

  Southard, in particular, was astonished at how quickly Ernest grasped what it took others years to learn for themselves. After picking all their brains, Ernest formulated a comprehensive view of the military dynamics at work throughout the country. Ernest reported in his dispatches to Washington that it was “seemingly inevitable” that the Japanese would invade Southeast Asia some time in 1941. They would not attack in summer or early autumn, he predicted, since that was typhoon season. He dismissed other months as unlikely and stated that December was the only month that made military sense to him. His forecast was spot on. It landed on Morgenthau’s desk and, by extension, on the desk of Harry Dexter White. Ernest had no way of knowing at the time—nor did Southard or anyone else in government for that matter—that White was a Soviet spy who would later be accused of espionage.

  * * *

  Now that he had extracted all the intelligence his friends had to offer during their marathon bull sessions, Ernest was as anxious as Martha to head into the interior and observe firsthand what was happening on the ground. Two-Gun Cohen proved to be more than the buffoon that Martha had originally taken him for. Through his contacts, he had arranged for them to meet Mrs. Sun Yat-Sen, the widow of the early leader of the Chinese republican movement. She was one of the three powerful and glamorous Soong sisters and was willing to introduce Ernest and Martha to her sister May-Ling Soong and her husband, none other than the Generalissimo himself, Chiang Kai-Shek. The third sister was married to millionaire premier H.H. Kung. Through a combination of beauty, marriages to powerful men, plus their own sizable inheritances, the three sisters wielded significant power behind the scenes.

  This was what Ernest had been hoping to accomplish from the start: a chance to size up Chiang for himself and report his impressions back to Washington. Martha’s main goal was to write about the squalor she found as accurately as possible. In an article for Collier’s entitled “Time Bomb in Hong Kong,” Martha described the gut-wrenching, widespread poverty and the wide gap that existed between the small rich elite and the great mass of peasants. She resented Chiang and his wife before she met them and was prepared not to be taken in by their reputed charm and hospitality.


  Ernest and Martha loaded up on supplies of flea and lice powder, boiled water, mosquito nets, and enough whiskey to carry them through the next phase of their journey—or so Ernest thought. On the night of March 24, 1941, they stood on the tarmac amid gale force winds waiting for a flight out of Hong Kong. The wind delayed their departure until eleven in the morning, when they lifted off the ground through a seemingly impenetrable fogbank. They flew over Japanese lines and landed on a small landing strip in Namyung during a torrential downpour, where they were greeted by two Chinese escorts named Mr. Ma and Mr. Ho.

  “Mr. Ma was all round; round specs, round nose, round cheeks, round, permanently smiling,” wrote Martha, who instantly disliked the man and distrusted what she perceived to be his phony amiability.

  For the next twelve days, Ernest, Martha, and their escorts traveled south down the North River by boat, then mounted horses and rode to the front where they witnessed heavy fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops. In essence they were camping out in horrendous conditions, with nothing more than tattered mosquito nets to keep the bug-swarms at bay, and a bowl of dirty water when they could find it to brush their teeth and wash up. Martha was driven close to the verge of insanity by the omnipresent filth.