While Martha was away, Ernest and his crew got the closest they ever would to engaging a German sub in combat. In November they spotted a large vessel towing a smaller boat spouting smoke as it headed eastward toward Cuba. The Pilar closed the distance between them, keeping the alien crafts under surveillance for the better part of an hour. As they neared the two ships, they could see that the smaller boat was a submarine being towed into port by a Spanish warship, the Marques de Comillas. Once the Pilar was observed, the Spanish ship veered away at top speed leaving Ernest’s boat in its wake. Ernest reported the sighting to the American Naval Attaché in Havana, who noted that “the observers, two reliable Americans and four Cubans, state they were within five hundred yards of the boat in question when the incident occurred.”
When Martha returned to Cuba, she incited Ernest’s wrath by taking some of his tomcats into Havana to have them spayed while he was off on one of his submarine hunts. He would rather have shot them than have them neutered, he screamed at Martha. He hated “wimmies,” he told her, “because it was a wommy who sent them off to have their balls cut off.”
Life in Cuba was no more agreeable for Martha than it was before she left. She put up with it for a few weeks and then told Ernest that she was leaving for St. Louis to spend the holidays with her mother who was alone now that her children were scattered all over. Ernest remained in Cuba in the company of his man-swarm buddies and his sons, who came to visit periodically. No sooner were they apart than Ernest and Martha began to miss each other terribly again. She had always vacillated with her lovers over the years, desiring their company when they were apart and struggling to free herself of their embrace when they were together. It was no different with Ernest.
She wrote to him, calling him her “darling house-broken cobra (cobra because no one knew where it would strike next)…Take care of yourself beloved and the childies and the animalies…and I will be home quick as a winklet.”
Unable to realize her dream of going to the war in Europe as a correspondent, Martha started to work on a new novel while she was in St. Louis. The words flowed freely, encouraging her to write to Max Perkins that it was “the first time that I have ever written all the time with pleasure…I had three weeks on it and they were almost like a beautiful drunk, they were so happy…I always used to see E so tired but so happy when he was writing, and I was usually just tired and doubting.”
Encouraged by Ernest, Martha continued to work on her book in Cuba in a furious burst of creative energy. Ernest was delighted with her progress and became impatient with her periodic spells of self-doubt. He frowned when she told him “I wish we could stop it all now, the prestige, the possessions, the position, the knowledge, the victory. And by a miracle, return together under the arch at Milan, you so brash in your motorcycle sidecar and I badly dressed, fierce, loving.” Just believe in what you’re doing and get on with your work, he told her.
It was good between them while the writing was going well, but when her insecurity returned, their arguments grew more frequent and nasty. Why can’t you bathe and wear clean clothes once in a while, she wanted to know. Why are you so obsessive about cleanliness, he asked her. There were no logical answers to those questions. Ernest’s other wives and girlfriends had found his grooming, or lack of it, somewhat endearing. Martha, on the other hand, was a stickler for cleanliness and style as she had demonstrated even in the midst of war. They had different perspectives, exacerbated all the more by their mutual frustrations. They needed and were dependent on each other for different reasons. But the divide was widening between them. They pulled apart for a while, then drew closer again. But each new rift was broader than the last one. It appeared all but inevitable that the breach and the insults and the wounds would eventually become too severe for either of them to overcome.
Chapter Thirty-two
Despite Hoover’s dislike of Ernest, the Pilar continued its sub patrols through the spring and summer of 1943. FBI minions in Cuba reported that “the American 38 foot motor boat PILAR, black hull and green deck, was operating eastward along the north coast of Cuba on a scientific mission and identifies itself on aircraft approach by an American flag during the day and flashing ‘V’ at night.”
When Ernest was out to sea, the mail-boat arrived once a week with new chapters of Martha’s novel for him to scrutinize. Ernest stayed up late at night in his cabin illuminated by an oil lamp, making corrections on her manuscript before shipping them back to Cuba with the next mail delivery. As much as Martha wanted to be free of Ernest and go off on her own, she still depended on him for the confidence she needed to fulfill her goals as a writer. A later generation of psychobabblers would have labeled their marriage a codependency, with each one enabling the other to cling to their relationship past the point where it was healthy and productive.
In early June, the U-boat activity in the channels leading into the Gulf intensified. The government authorized the Pilar to step up its own operations in the myriad keys near the Cuban coast—Cayo Frances, Cayo Chico, Cayo Magano Grande, and others. Ernest christened this latest phase of his sub-hunting duties “Operation Friendless,” in honor of one of his favorite cats at the Finca. For the next few weeks he and his crew searched the waters and trekked across small islands dotting the Gulf looking for fugitivos and enemigos. Martha put her weeks alone at the Finca to good use, working away on her novel and finishing it with none of Ernest’s drinking buddies around to distract her. After forty days of patrolling the sea without spotting any enemy subs, the men aboard the Pilar grew more and more belligerent. The supplies of beer, rum, and gin were running low and Ernest had all he could do to keep order on his boat. It was time to go home. Mr. Scrooby needed some attention from Martha. When he dreamed one night that he had made love to a Polar bear with Martha’s face, he knew it was time to head back to shore.
Ernest needed a new engine for the Pilar after the punishing weeks at sea, and his men rushed off to the nearest bars to get roaring drunk and find other people to fight. It wasn’t long before Martha’s reverie was dashed by a new round of parties at the Finca now that Ernest was back. Ernesto has returned, the word spread immediately across Havana. Once again the hordes came visiting in droves as Papa Ernesto hosted a pig roast on his property, complete with enough beer, wine, rum, whiskey, and gin to float an armada of seaworthy vessels. The ostensible occasion was Ernest’s forty-fourth birthday coming up in July, but in reality he would have found another reason—any reason—to celebrate with the best and worst citizens Havana had to offer. A drunken priest blessed the enormous pig roasting over the banked coals, and the jai alai players started to toss balls and other objects around at one another’s heads. After one of them beaned another with a hard roll, Papa rose to his feet before a fight could break out and declared,
“On my birthday you can’t throw rolls until dessert. No hast’el postre!”
Martha put up with all of it as long as she could. Finally, a reprieve came in the form of the break she had been looking for all her life. Collier’s asked her if she would be willing to go to England, where the military rules were more relaxed, as a foreign correspondent. Martha could barely contain her excitement. Her novel was finished and now she could go away and pursue her craft with no entanglements—no entanglements except for Ernest and their life together in Cuba. When she told Ernest about her plans, he flew into a rage. Why did she want to run off to war? Why couldn’t she stay put and develop her talent as a novelist? Why wasn’t being his wife enough for her? Ernest’s sons, who had come down for the summer, observed his third marriage disintegrating before their eyes, this time with no other woman involved. They also saw him visibly drunk for the first time.
“Papa would be just drunk out of his mind,” Gregory recalled later, “but able to do it because [the chauffer] would drive the car home. He’d have all these drinks at the Floridita, just unbelievable drinking.”
Martha asked Ernest to give up the sub patrols and go to England with her. All
he had to do was put out the word that he was available, and he would have his choice of assignments from any magazine or newspaper he wanted. They all would be delighted to have his byline on their front pages. But Ernest dug his heels in. He loved his life in Cuba and had had enough of writing journalism after covering wars all over the globe. He wanted to get back to his fiction again, although he had been in a writing slump since For Whom the Bell Tolls came out three years earlier. Still, he had to get back in writing shape, cut back on the drinking a bit, and start a new novel. Ernest and Martha were both adamant about their plans. Martha was going to England regardless of what anyone said, and Ernest wasn’t going to let his wife dictate his own course of action. Neither one would give in.
* * *
Martha left Cuba on September 20, 1943, and headed for New York where she had to jump through a few bureaucratic hoops to get her documentation in order. While she waited for her papers to clear, she saw the film version of A Farewell to Arms and a preview of For Whom the Bell Tolls, both movies starring Gary Cooper. Once again she tried to entice Ernest to join her and share the war experience with her.
“I am sad,” she wrote Ernest. “Only there isn’t anything final, is there? This is just a short trip and we are both coming back from our short trips to our lovely home. And then we’ll write books and see the autumns together and walk around the corn fields waiting for the pheasants.”
Ernest wanted to be out on the water again searching for Uboats, but he was devastated to learn that the government was pulling the plug on all the submarine patrols in the area. He spent his time mostly alone, with “thirteen cats, five dogs, fighting cocks, and pigeons” keeping him company, drinking heavily, and brooding about his errant wife. Martha wrote constantly, telling him that everyone in New York was asking about him and wondering why he didn’t go over with her to write about the war.
“I have to live my way,” she wrote, “or there would not be any me to love you with. You really wouldn’t want me if I built a fine big stone wall around the Finca and sat inside.” A week later her tone changed and she admitted that she found their life in Cuba “remote and somehow awful.”
That’s not what Ernest wanted to hear. He wanted his wife back with him in Cuba. But she would not return. His loneliness turned into anger. His mood grew darker and took a vengeful turn. In the past when anyone crossed him, Ernest did more than just get even; he went after them on a search and destroy mission. Now Martha had become his enemy. She had turned against him. He would find a way to make her pay for that.
PART FIVE
THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEM
Chapter Thirty-three
Martha looked in the bathroom mirror in the Berkshire Hotel and saw the first signs of aging on her face. She had a fleshy face, the kind that got jowly and led to chipmunk cheeks with the passage of time. She was shocked. Her father had been right—up to a point. She had talent. But she had been using her good looks as currency over the years, trading them for relationships with successful men who could help advance her career.
It had not been smooth sailing for Martha who bided her time in New York for longer than she anticipated, delayed by bureaucratic snafus. She corrected the page proofs of her novel, finally titled Liana, while she waited. She fumed when she saw a pre-publication notice of her novel, referring to the author only as “the wife of Ernest Hemingway.” No matter how far she roamed, and how distinctive her own work would become, she couldn’t slip out from under Ernest’s all-embracing shadow. She fretted about every passing day when nothing seemed to be happening and worried about the face that stared back at her from the mirror. Her doubts returned and her self-confidence waned without Ernest by her side to bolster her ego.
“You belong to me,” she wrote to him. “Some time the war will be over. We have a good wide life ahead of us. And I will try to be beautiful when I am old, and if I can’t do that I will try to be good. I love you very much.”
She made her first attempt at preserving her youthful good looks by embarking on a round of beauty treatments that included facials, vitamin injections, dental visits to fix her receding gums, hair appointments, and a rigorous exercise program. She shopped for the latest fashions since she wanted to look her best when she arrived in battle-scarred London. She had been the best-tailored correspondent in Spain during the Civil War, and she would present herself in the best light in London as well.
Martha’s clearance to travel to wartime London came through in late October, and she boarded a Pan Am Clipper on a journey that took twelve days in all, with stops along the way in Bermuda and Portugal. Martha had not seen London in five years, and the city she arrived in looked far different than the metropolis she remembered. Many of the landmarks she was familiar with had been cratered from German bombardment, and the skyline was altered beyond recognition by jagged concrete structures where stolid stone buildings had once reigned supreme. Everyone was in uniform: nurses with dark cloaks and red linings, young soldiers with berets and the blue trimmings of their parachute regiments, American GIs in their distinctive camouflage battle gear. Martha was impressed by the stoic civilians who had endured months of relentless bomb raids; “Nothing becomes them like a catastrophe,” she wrote later. “Slowness, understatement, complacency change into endurance, a refusal to panic, and pride, the begetter of selfdiscipline.”
Martha moved into a flat in London’s West End but started complaining immediately about the living conditions, particularly the layer of concrete dust that had assumed a constant presence in the air for as long as the bombing continued. Wartime conditions only intensified her fastidious nature, but she knew better than to write to Ernest about her queasiness, knowing that he would make fun of her and ask her the same question he had asked in China: who wanted to go there anyway? Instead she wrote to him about the reception she had received as his wife, flattering his ego by saying she profited “from the glory and power of his name.” In an effort to smooth things with him, she wrote that she was “the very ordinary wife of an extraordinary man.” She even proposed that he come over and write a series of articles about the war, knowing that they might overshadow her own efforts. But Ernest did not bite. He wrote to his son Patrick that his wife was a “selfish and ambitious” woman. To Max Perkins he confided that he hadn’t “done a damn thing I wanted to do now for well over two years, except shoot live pigeons occasionally.” Martha, he wrote, “does exactly what she wants to do willfully as any spoiled child. And always for the noblest motives.”
Liana turned out to be Martha’s most successful novel to date, quickly selling out its first printing of twenty-seven thousand copies and hitting the major bestseller lists. The reviewers referred to her by her own name, one saying that she had “come artistically of age.” Ernest was less than pleased by a review that claimed she handled her characters with more restraint and subtlety than her husband did. She was his creature after all, and as much as he wanted her to succeed on her own merits, he also wanted to be acknowledged as the mentor who made her what she had become. Martha’s newfound success made Ernest even more irritable than he already was, more anxious to take revenge than he was before she left.
* * *
Martha returned to Cuba after an absence of five months, only to find the Finca in a slovenly state with empty booze bottles strewn everywhere and her husband in a dark, menacing mood. Nothing she could say or do could mollify him. Ernest’s behavior toward Martha bordered on madness. His own son Gregory said later that his father “changed into a different person” during this period, more paranoid and more abusive than he had ever seen him. It was as though Ernest’s inner demons had been set loose, with the dark depressive side of his nature erupting unrestrained to the surface.
“Ernest began at once to rave at me,” Martha said later. “He woke me when I was trying to sleep to bully, snarl, mock—my crime really was to have been at war when he had not, but that was not how he put it. I was supposedly insane, I only wanted excitement and danger, I
had no responsibility to anyone. I was selfish beyond belief…I put it to him that I was going back, whether he came or not.”
“I was a fool to come back from Europe, and I knew it,” Martha wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt.
No sooner had Martha left Ernest stewing by himself in Cuba than he left for New York to exact his revenge. If he couldn’t keep his wife at home in his bed with him, he would see to it that her means of escape was blocked at the next turn. Ernest could have had his pick of any publication in the country. They all would have been ecstatic to sign the most celebrated writer in the world as their war correspondent. But Ernest went directly to Collier’s and offered his exclusive services to Martha’s editor, in effect giving him the choice of keeping Martha on the payroll and passing up the literary coup of a lifetime, or making the wife a stringer and hiring her famous husband. The editor did what he had to do; the alternative would have been a one-way ticket to the unemployment line for him.
Martha was paralyzed by Ernest’s knockout punch. Again she turned to Eleanor Roosevelt for solace. “The way it looks, I am going to lose out on the thing I most care about seeing or writing of in the world, and maybe in my whole life,” she wrote to the First Lady.
Others thought Martha got no less than she deserved. Ernest’s friend, the writer Winston Guest, regarded her as a “tough, mercenary bitch. She explained to me that she picked Ernest because of his ability as a writer and possible remuneration from books,” he said.
Martha defended herself, saying it was all “rubbish. I loved him as long as I could and when I lost all respect for him as a man— not as a writer—I said so and withdrew and that was that.”
Ernest and Martha had become two strong-willed combatants at this stage of their marriage. Neither was prepared to give an inch, both were determined to get their own way whatever the cost to the other. The writers who lived and gathered in New York in the days before Ernest left for the warfront remembered him as huge, tipping the scales somewhere around two-twenty, sporting a full pepperand-salt beard. Despite his bloated size, he was full of energy and spitfire. He ran into the novelist John O’Hara in Costello’s bar one night and bet him ten bucks that he could break O’Hara’s supposedly unbreakable blackthorn walking stick in half. O’Hara, three sheets to the wind himself, took Ernest up on the challenge, then looked on horrified as Ernest draped a couple of napkins over his head, placed the club on top of the napkins, and snapped it in two pieces. Another writer, Dawn Powell, said she was “exhausted” by Ernest’s immense gusto. He was “someone who gives out more in six hours than most people do in a lifetime. He leaves you groggy.”
Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 20