Hemingway and Gellhorn

by Jerome Tuccille

  Martha, on the other hand, had developed her own momentum. She had finished a book of short stories and taken her title from, of all places, a letter written to her by Pauline. “The heart of another is a dark forest,” Pauline had stated in her letter, and Martha simply lifted the first part of that sentence for her book title, The Heart of Another. When Ernest saw it, he told Martha that Pauline had gotten the quote from Dostoyevsky or Turgenev, but the actual source was Willa Cather. Thanks to Ernest, Martha’s new opus was published by his long-time publisher, Scribner’s. He generously told Max Perkins that her latest effort was her most adult book so far, and he mocked her former publisher, Duell, Sloane and Pearce, by saying they should be known as “Dull, Slum and Pus.” Ernest took Martha’s photo for the dust jacket, which Martha said made her look “Isadora Duncanish,” with a mane of “wild hair and an expression of combined bewilderment and sunstroke.”

  Beneath it all, however, Martha was growing bored with life in Cuba. She wanted to get back to Europe and cover the war for Collier’s. Ernest seemed content to spend his days fishing from the Pilar, and Martha put on her game face, accompanying him on his long days trolling for marlin in the Gulf Stream off Cuba. Ernest wrote Max Perkins that “it was good to have both a loving wife and a sporting companion,” but Martha was finding it harder to disguise her restlessness. “I find in myself a total inability to retain interest,” she wrote to her former lover Allen Grover. “Right now it all sorta stinks.” She was delighted when Ernest left ahead of her on their fall outing in Sun Valley. About his absence, she told the poet Hortense Flexner, one of her confidantes, “by Christ, how I enjoy it!”

  But in her exasperation, she recognized more than she cared to see about her husband in herself. “I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead,” she wrote to Hortense. She believed that she and Ernest were a little bit afraid of each other. They each knew that “the other is the most violent person either one knows, and knowing something about violence we are always mutually alarmed at the potentialities of the other.”

  Their relationship was beginning to sound more like one of Ernest’s boxing matches than like a marriage made in heaven.

  * * *

  Martha had also become bored with the endless rounds of drinking, hunting, fishing, and hiking with the celebrity crowd in Sun Valley. She found the place to be “holy hell,” filled with streams of vapid conversations with mindless actors. Harriman’s resort was “the west in an ornamental sanitary package.” Referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to Max Perkins, Martha wrote that “Hollywood ruined Scott, unless he was terribly dead before.” Ernest loved being the center of attention and he lapped up the incessant compliments like a cat at a bowl of milk. Film director Robert Capa immortalized Ernest’s every move with his camera, and film agent Leland Hayward and his wife, actress Margaret Sullavan, fawned over him like star-struck movie fans themselves. Martha felt more and more like an outsider in their midst.

  Her book was published in October and received the mixed reviews that Martha had grown accustomed to by now. It would have been bad enough if the critics judged her work on its own merits. But hardly any of them failed to comment that her stories were heavily influenced by her husband. He apparently had cast a “Svengali spell” over her work, according to the New Republic, which often deteriorated from merely “aping” Ernest into the swamp of outright “mush.” Martha was incensed by that assessment more than any other. She was in serious danger of becoming a footnote in Ernest’s life—a fear she expressed at the beginning of their relationship. She was being subsumed by his outsized fame. It did not help that Ernest wanted Martha to publish her new book under the name Martha Hemingway, further clouding her identity. She resisted him on this, although she did agree to copyright the book as Martha Gellhorn Hemingway. Ernest told her to ignore the critics; she was not writing for them. Just do your work and to hell with them. He wrote to Charles Scribner that “Martha is fine and very beautiful and happy.”

  But Martha was not fine and she was not happy. She was miserable in fact. Her only solace was Ernest’s sons, whom she had come to love as though they were her own. She longed to be back on her own again, reporting on the war in Europe, working as a journalist, which she felt was her true calling. Ernest’s sloppiness was also getting to her. She wished he would bathe and change his clothes more often. He exuded an odor of whiskey and manly sweat that she found increasingly off-putting. If her life with Ernest continued as it was much longer, she was going to scream or have a nervous breakdown. Martha needed to get away at least for a little while.

  The Japanese attacked when Ernest said they would, in December 1941. But it was not an attack on Southeast Asia that drew the U.S. into the war. Rather, it was a sneak bombing raid on the American military base in Pearl Harbor on December 7. “We’ll probably get [the war] for a Christmas present,” Ernest said before the attack. “Or maybe wake up New Year’s morning with an unshakable hangover.”

  As the U.S. prepared for war, Martha was more anxious to get over to the European theater as a war correspondent. But again she ran into the familiar problem of Collier’s’ and other major publications’ reluctance to hire women in that capacity. The U.S. military itself did not want women covering the action, which meant she would have trouble gaining access to the battlezones. Martha could go as a freelancer, if she wished, and file dispatches with no guarantee of publication. She would have to cover her own expenses. Whether or not her work saw the light of day depended on the quality of the reportage turned in by the men on the scene—her main competition. Martha would have to compete with the best staff reporters from Time and the major newspapers to get her work in print. She would have to beat the best of the best at their own game.

  Salvation of sorts came in the form of an offer from her editor at Collier’s to report on the presence of German U-boats in the Gulf Stream. Enemy submarines were attacking oil tankers in the area with impunity. The world’s largest oil refinery was located on Aruba, and early in the morning of February 16, 1942, U-boats sent seven tankers to the bottom of the sea and bombarded the refinery without suffering so much as a scratch on their hulls. The situation had grown critical; without a steady flow of oil from the refinery, the American and allied war effort would be crippled. Nineteen vessels went down in flames in February, nineteen more were blasted to smithereens in March, eleven more in April, and a staggering total of thirty-eight were obliterated in May alone. Twice as many oil tankers had been sunk in the Caribbean as were destroyed in the North Atlantic passage to Europe. Nearly three hundred ships would be lost by the end of the year. Drastic steps needed to be taken to remedy the situation.

  The drastic remedy came in what amounted to a letter of marque and reprisal, allowing private boats to attack, destroy, and capture enemy ships at sea. Anyone owning a seaworthy vessel approved by the government could, in effect, function as a privateer in the war effort against the Axis powers. An Associated Press release on June 27 spelled out the details:

  “In a move to put a great fleet of small boats into the war against submarines off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the navy called today for all owners of seagoing craft to volunteer the services of themselves and their vessels…Boats found to be qualified will be equipped with radio, armament and suitable anti-submarine devices as rapidly as possible.”

  There were only three routes available for U-boats to enter the waters off Cuba, all of them narrow and treacherous. One was through the Straits of Florida, another through the Old Bahama Channel off the northeast coast of Cuba, and the third through the Yucatan Channel off Cuba’s southwest coast. Ernest was more than game to take up the challenge. The “general” was happy to expand his areas of military expertise to include the rank of “admiral.” Martha, too, was eager to report on U-boat activity in the Gulf Stream while her husband engaged in a useful war effort instead of returning to his indolent existence on the island. If she couldn’t report on the ground war in Europe, she could at least write about t
he Axis threat not far from home.

  Martha got up to speed reading everything she could find on naval warfare, submarine tactics and strategy, weaponry, and the location of small islands in the region. She was ecstatic. “I am in a state of bliss,” she wrote to Bill Davis, a friend of Ernest. “I love the life of the wandering journalist very much.” In her journal she entered, “If you have no part in the world, no matter how diseased the world is, you are dead. It is not enough to earn your living, do no actual harm to anyone, tell no lies…It is okay. It is not dirty. But it is dead. I want to be part of what happens to everyone.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Documents released for the first time in 2010 revealed that Ernest’s experiences as a privateer in service to the U.S. government were more than a quixotic effort to stop the sinking of Allied ships by German U-boats—at least at first. Through his contacts in Washington, he was given a stipend of five hundred dollars a month to establish what amounted to a spy ring in Cuba. Ernest, in his magnetic fashion, quickly assembled a rogue’s gallery of spies and combatants made up of dockworkers, gamblers, a Catholic priest, an Olympic athlete, and a few gunrunners—a makeshift entourage he dubbed the “Crook Factory” or “Crook Shop” on different occasions.

  Ernest and his crew left on patrol every day in the Pilar, which was outfitted by the government with machineguns, grenades, satchel charges, and other equipment that was hardly a serious threat to the firepower of the U-boats. Nevertheless, Ernest’s plan was to come upon a submarine just as it was surfacing, lob grenades into the open hatches, and shoot those who tried to escape when they were most vulnerable. The Pilar plied the waters around Cuba ostensibly as a fishing boat offering itself as bait for German submariners hoping to confiscate food and useful supplies. For hours each day in the open water, they picked up radio

  conversations in German, hoping to gain vital intelligence information to turn over to Washington. Martha, meanwhile, went off on her own assignment for Collier’s, happy to leave the men to their own devices. Ernest knew U-boats were in the area from listening in on their radio traffic, and he heard about the damage they inflicted on oil tankers almost daily. But—perhaps luckily for him and his cohorts—they failed to engage any in combat. Before long he and his men got bored. Among the supplies they had stocked on the Pilar were innumerable bottles of whiskey, rum, and wine. Before long, the sorties across the Gulf Stream turned into drunken bouts of drinking and dining on the spicy Cuban food served up by Ernest’s chief cook and bottle washer, Gregorio Fuentes. When the men emptied their bottles, they tossed them overboard and used them for target practice.

  Ernest’s exploits in the Gulf Stream with his reckless ensemble grew to legendary proportions and reached the ears of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover in Washington. Hoover was an odd mixture of puritanical martinet and closet sexual adventurer, who was not a fan of Ernest’s over-the-top lifestyle to begin with. Hoover distrusted his motivation and his earlier sympathies for the republicans in Spain. He knew that Ernest had no love for the Bureau, referring to some of its agents as “members of the Gestapo.” Reports of wild parties and the boozing sessions aboard the Pilar did not go down well with Hoover. Almost from the beginning, Hoover pleaded with the president without much success to shut down Ernest’s operation. But the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden, was an ally of the author and valued his intelligence reports as well as Ernest’s capacity for alcohol.

  “He could consume an astonishing amount of liquor—any kind of liquor—without appearing to feel it,” Braden wrote. “I don’t know how many cocktails we had before dinner; but Ernest didn’t take cocktails, he took absinthe drip. During the dinner we had red and white wine, followed by champagne…Afterward I had highballs, but Ernest went back to his absinthe drip. And he remained cold sober.”

  Ernest continued to serve his country in a critical region, searching for U-boats, preparing to take them on in combat at great risk to himself, his boat, and the men aboard it, all the while downing prodigious quantities of alcohol during the patriotic adventures at sea.

  When Martha returned from her own travels throughout the area on an assignment that took her to exotic places like St. Barthelemy and Virgin Gorda between St. Thomas and Antigua, she came back to a husband who was up to his usual childish antics, as far as she was concerned. Ernest struck her as a grownup boy using the war to drink and cavort with his coterie of misfits instead of seriously engaging in the effort to defeat the Nazis. Their fights grew nastier and more intense, and Martha could not wait to get away again on her work for the magazine. Ernest wrote her love letters while she was away, telling her of life at the Finca, giving her news about the boys, and supplying anecdotes about their growing legion of cats. But after Martha wrote to him, complaining about the confinement of Cuba, Ernest responded with a letter containing humor laced with acid.

  “Boy can you hit,” he wrote. “Do you know where the heart of another lives?” That was an obvious dig at her ripping off Pauline to get a title for one of her books. “Boy how my hero can hit cuando no hay enemigo and who you are giving it to loves you like a fucking dope.”

  It was not all bad between Ernest and Martha. She did love their home on the island; it was her discovery and creature after all. And she still loved the man she had idolized since she was a very young woman. There was enough volatility in their relationship to mesmerize a woman like Martha who craved excitement and adventure above all else. But there was competition as well. She could never hope to equal let alone surpass his reputation. She still felt like one of his students, a role the reviewers would never let her forget. And there was a lazy side to Ernest that she had never seen before. He had attempted no serious writing since his last book came out—a major drawback for a man given to hedonism and sensuality as he was. Martha couldn’t wait to get back to him when she was away, and she couldn’t get away fast enough after a couple of weeks of seeing him again.

  * * *

  On June 26, Ernest’s sons descended on Cuba to celebrate Patrick’s fourteenth birthday. Jack or Bumby, Ernest’s firstborn with Hadley, was now eighteen, and the middle son, Gregory, was eleven. They all had schoolboy crushes on the thirty-three-year-old Martha who was more like an older playmate than a stepmother— Bumby’s second stepmother after Pauline. The boys were in awe of this lovely blonde woman’s vocabulary, which included the word fuckin every third sentence or so. And they also loved life at the Finca Vigia, the lush growth that threatened to overtake the property, and the collection of animal life that abounded inside and out. In addition to their father’s cats, a tribe that seemed to multiply almost daily, the Finca was home to several dogs, ducks, roosters, and armies of tarantulas, centipedes, scorpions, and assorted ants and insects that feasted on wood, paper, linen, silk, and bread. Ernest placed cans of kerosene throughout the house in a neverending war against the invaders, which added a pungency to the perfumed floral aromas drifting in through the windows.

  Bumby was especially taken with “an enormously old ceiba tree…with its large, high-reaching roots extending from the bulbous trunk like sinuous flying buttresses of smooth, gray bark. Many orchid plants live on its trunk and among its broad branches,” he wrote. Gregory was mesmerized by the green vegetation, the variegated flowers, and the view of Havana lit up at night from the hills above the city. Martha, too, enjoyed summer with the boys, swimming in the pool each day, playing tennis with Ernest and his sons in the afternoons, and drinking in the bars along the Havana waterfront at night. But beneath it all, she felt frustrated and restless.

  “During that terrible year, 1942, I lived in the sun, safe and comfortable and hating it,” she wrote. She told Eleanor Roosevelt that she was growing tired of her role as the de facto den mother and housekeeper who kept the house from falling down around everyone’s head. Ernest didn’t mind living among clutter and chaos, but it was driving Martha closer to the edge. Visitors arrived unannounced at all hours, welcomed by Ernest who craved the camaraderie of his
fellow spies and roustabouts, the Basque jai alai players who drove up from Havana to drink Papa’s liquor and party with the author, and assorted riffraff from God knew where that had gravitated into the magnetic pull of Ernest’s orbit. Martha never stopped marveling at her husband’s ability to gather around him legions of cronies wherever he went, but it was wearing out the little patience she had left. She no longer had any privacy or any sense of identity in this all-male world. She needed to get out among some kindred spirits.

  “When she was away she longed for him,” one biographer wrote. “When she was home she found it difficult to put up with his exasperating habits…When nothing changed she boiled up with frustration and knew only one way out, to get away for a while.”

  In October, Martha told Ernest that she needed a break. She left Cuba on a trip to New York City, where she checked in at the Lombardy Hotel and had dinner with friends. She wrote Ernest that she wished they could be together, “alone for a while,” and he replied that he loved her “because your feet are so long and because they get cold and because I can take good care of you when you are sick also because you are the most beautiful woman I have ever known.”

  From New York, Martha headed down to Washington to visit Eleanor Roosevelt. Martha was chilled by the cold, damp autumn air after the heat of Cuba. She promptly came down with a cold and retreated to the Lincoln bedroom on the second floor of the White House—a bedroom that a later president would immortalize by charging guests exorbitant rates to sleep there. Another prominent visitor during Martha’s stay, Alexander Woollcott, the fat acerbic critic and member of the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker and others, couldn’t wait to get inside the Lincoln bedroom after Martha left. As Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West, the room was dear to him “because it had more recently been occupied by Martha Gellhorn.” It was the closest he would ever get to actually fucking Ernest’s wife.