Hemingway and Gellhorn

by Jerome Tuccille

  * * *

  During the first week in July Ernest shaved his beard off, leaving just his bushy black mustache intact. At the same time, the doctors removed the bandages from Ernest’s head, revealing a pepper-and-salt stubble where the hair was growing back. The effect lent him the appearance of a scruffy barroom brawler, which was not too far off the mark from what he was. He next headed back to France, where he joined the 22nd Infantry Regiment under the command of Colonel Charles “Buck” Lanham, with whom Ernest would develop a tight friendship that would last throughout most of his life. Buck left Ernest pretty much on his own, valuing Ernest’s triple-threat role as a journalist, a combatant, and a gatherer of intelligence.

  Ernest took off from the coast of France in a Jeep with his driver, Private Archie “Red” Pelkey, behind the steering wheel. The back of the vehicle was loaded with rifles and hand grenades. Ernest had a .45 caliber pistol strapped to his side and his cherished Zeiss field glasses strung around his neck. The Germans had retreated inland, but there were still pockets of stiff resistance as close as ten miles from the coast. As Red began the drive eastward from the coast of Normandy, Ernest studied the road maps that he had lifted from a dead German infantryman. Along the way Ernest spotted an abandoned German motorcycle and sidecar, which still had the key in the ignition. Ernest got out of the Jeep and started up the motorcycle, with Red following behind him in the Jeep. When they came across a chateau, Ernest got out and retrieved a couple of hand grenades from the Jeep. Then he and Red each lobbed one through an open window. One by one a troop of German soldiers came marching out with their hands held high. A report in Reuters captured the moment in an amusing snippet: “The private, with Mr. Hemingway, tossed hand grenades into the house and six of Hitler’s supermen piled out and surrendered to Hemingway.”

  Red guarded their half-starved prisoners, who had no inclination to escape, while Ernest stormed inside. Keeping his priorities straight, Ernest went immediately into the wine cellar and emerged minutes later, his arms laden with the precious spoils of war: bottles of the finest fruit of the grape that France had to offer. Among them were a 1915 Chateau Lafite, a 1929 Chateauneuf du Pape, and a 1915 Rudesheimer. That night Ernest shared his booty with a crew of appreciative journalists and soldiers who caught up with them at the chateau.

  “I recall Hemingway with a captured set of Nazi binoculars around his neck and a captured Nazi map case slung over his shoulder,” said John Carlisle. “He was in his mid-forties then but already had gray in his hair…Hemingway found the wine cellar and picked out the best wine. He was absolutely fearless, as though war didn’t bother him one bit.”

  “He made me laugh more deeply than anyone else I’d known,” recalled Time correspondent William Walton. “He had such a sense of the ridiculous, and when he got a reaction he’d play on that same theme and carry it further, which made for great conversations. And there was a big streak of the ham in him.”

  In early August, Buck Lanham rendezvoused with Ernest and invited him to a party his staff was throwing at the command post to celebrate Buck’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Ernest said he couldn’t come without giving Buck an explanation of why not. During the festivities a Nazi shell landed on the post and killed a few of Buck’s men and slightly injured the Colonel. He told Ernest about the attack the next day, and Ernest explained to him that “the reason I didn’t go is because the place had the stink of death about it.” It was a line he had lifted directly from the pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Ernest’s main character based on himself smelled the stink of death in the bloody battlefields of Spain.

  The incident spooked Buck more than he let on at the time. A second precognitive event involving Ernest occurred a month later as Buck was preparing his first attack in the Battle of Huertgen Forest, which would turn out to be one of the bloodiest and longestrunning infantry battles the U.S. army had ever fought. He told Ernest that he was going to relieve an officer under his command because he didn’t have confidence in his leadership abilities.

  “You won’t have to relieve him,” Ernest said. “He’s going to be killed.”

  Buck was truly rattled after that remark. Moments later, he returned to his command post where his executive officer told him that a German shell had penetrated a narrow space between the logs of a dugout and killed the man he wanted to replace.

  “That shook me,” Buck remembered. “Hemingway would hate me to call it a ‘premonition’ and I’m ambivalent about it. I’m open-minded about ESP. If you live long enough you see many things you can’t account for. Hemingway hated such talk. I don’t know what he really believed. He veered back and forth between believing in nothing and in being a half-assed Catholic.”

  “He was very superstitious,” Walton agreed. “He always said, ‘I’m going to play everything, prayer, rabbit’s foot, touching wood three times. We need all the help we can get.’”

  Buck was an atheist, as Ernest professed to be whenever he grew weary of pretending he was a Catholic. But Ernest was also a gambler, uncertain of the outcome and looking to play the odds. He was surely familiar with Blaise Pascal’s wager that it was better to believe in God, since if He existed you gained everything, whereas if He did not exist and you believed you lost nothing except for a few temporal pleasures. If you did not believe and He existed you risked losing everything including your soul. In Ernest’s case, he hedged his bets and enjoyed his temporal pleasures at the same time.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Martha looked inside the cover of Collier’s and took pride in seeing her name displayed on the masthead next to Ernest’s as the magazine’s “invasion correspondent.” She wrote a letter to her mother saying she was as “happy as a goat” and Ernest was alive and well, without going into details about the worsening state of her marriage. Her only complaint was that women correspondents were “treated too much like violets.” Martha was aching to get back to France, to the action, but she still lacked military clearance because of her unauthorized crossing to Normandy on the hospital ship. Once again she was forced to rely on her female charms, this time with well-placed officers whom she seduced into letting her ride with them and their regiments to the warfront. She was forthright enough to admit that a man in her position would have had “far fewer doors” opened for him. Then again, a man wouldn’t have had to resort to subterfuge to get to the war in the first place.

  Martha traveled south into Italy and hooked up with the 8th Army, which was marching north after having liberated Rome. She delighted in the “huge hodgepodge” of ethnic groups from such farflung countries as New Zealand, South Africa, India, Basutoland, Poland, and Canada. Martha hitched a ride in their armored carriers as they plowed onward through Umbria, encountering scattered German resistance along the way. “Shells coming over,” she wrote in her diary, “whistling over like great birds. All danger hidden (big mines looking like carpenters’ tool chests) blue sea and sky…Happy regiment—main feature. Soldiers all so independent.” The summer weather was perfect as she swam in the warm blue ocean with the men, hunted for ducks and geese, and foraged for wine, wine, and more wine in abandoned cellars across the Italian countryside. Her experiences provided great material for the articles she sent across the ocean to Collier’s.

  “There they all stood,” she wrote about a church service in a small Italian village, “the officers and the men, friends and partners, each one with his long journey behind him and each one with the long uncertain journey ahead.”

  In August Martha was in Florence around the same time that Ernest was liberating armloads of wine from damp, dark cellars in France. War raged in the streets, from doorway to doorway, from street corner to street corner, as German forces fought desperately to hang on to every square foot of land they still occupied and ward off their all-but-inevitable defeat. She stayed in a house with an elderly American while “outgoing shells whistled over the house like insane freight cars.” In her diary she noted, “Ponte Vecchio all damage…Man
killed going out to buy vegetables. The people of Florence could weep for the destruction of their city. So drab & soiled in war. Uffizi Gallery w. hole showing ceiling damage.”

  She met the U.S. army major while surveying damage on the Ponte Vecchio one evening. He was only twenty-six, ten years younger than Martha, but he was “tall and beautiful and funny” as they made love in the deserted Hotel Excelsior amid the clamor of mortar and machinegun fire in the streets outside. Afterward, she joined a Canadian regiment bound eastward through Tuscany toward the Adriatic coast to attack a remaining German stronghold. It was a memorable battle as she described it in Collier’s, “a jigsaw puzzle of fighting men, bewildered terrified civilians, noise, smells, jokes, pain, fear, unfinished conversations and high explosives.” She was especially concerned about the young men who would be killed “now when the end of the war was at last in sight.”

  At the end of August, she was riding northward through France in a Jeep that rolled over an embankment, flinging her out and breaking one of her ribs. Now she was the one injured in a car wreck as she continued gamely northbound toward Paris. Once again she would find out that Ernest had gotten there first. And not just Ernest. He had installed a young journalist named Mary Welsh in room 86 at the Ritz Hotel, the room right next to his.

  * * *

  Ernest watched the German artillery shells bursting all around him on his march away from the coast toward Paris. Buck remembered Ernest “standing poised as always on the balls of his feet. Like a fighter. Like a great cat. Easy. Relaxed. Absorbed. Intent. Watchful. Missing nothing.”

  Ernest told Red Pelkey that their goal was to get to Paris as soon as possible without taking too many chances with German mortar shells that thundered through the air directly overhead. The advice was sound and serious. His words were not those of a man who was looking for a quick end to his life on earth, notwithstanding his recurring bouts with suicidal thoughts. Red did his best behind the wheel of the Jeep, but no one could see the shell whistling down on them before it rocked the ground just yards from Ernest’s motorcycle and sidecar. The blast upended the vehicle and propelled Ernest into a drainage ditch alongside the road. One report claimed that the shell had missed Ernest by only three yards, while Robert Capa, who was riding close behind snapping vivid photos of the action, said it landed maybe ten yards away. Three or ten, it was too close for comfort. Ernest lay in the ditch for more than two hours with Red beside him, while German machinegun fire ripped into the embankment, driving dirt into their faces every time Ernest raised his head to see what was going on. Reinforcements arrived in time to send the Germans into retreat so the Allied forces could continue their slow, perilous push toward Paris.

  Ernest and his troops took command of the Hotel de la Mere in the rocky, tidal island of Mont-St.-Michel near the Normandy coast. Nazi officers had occupied the premises before abandoning it just a few days before Ernest arrived. He turned his gruff charm on the hotel’s proprietors, who were happy to have their establishment liberated from the autocratic Nazis. Ernest took charge immediately, securing abundant rooms for himself, the soldiers, and his fellow journalists.

  “He chose the wine, decided on menus,” said Charles Collingwood. “He had great force of personality and a gift for organization.

  John Carlisle thought that Ernest was “one of the happiest men I ever knew” at this stage of his life. He was “a guy with a great zest for life who enjoyed every minute of it.”

  But William Randolph Hearst, Jr., resented Ernest’s celebrity status. “He was only a reporter the same as us, but he thought he was the Second Coming and acted like it.” Hearst was in the minority in his assessment of Ernest, and his comments may have been colored by the stain of sour grapes. There is no question that Ernest was more than “only a reporter” like the rest of his colleagues. He carried in his pocket a letter from OSS directing military units to “provide Mr. Ernest Hemingway with small arms, grenades, or other captured articles he desires.” Ernest was also a French intelligence operative who “was fighting with the Resistance before the liberation of Chartres.” According to OSS documents, Ernest fought “during the liberation battle, at the site of a mass grave while the fires were still burning and the last Germans

  surrendering.” Ernest was popular with the Maquis, the rural guerrilla bands of the French Resistance.

  By the middle of August, just before Martha arrived in Paris to discover that Ernest had made it there before she did, Ernest and the Allied forces had fought their way into Rambouillet less than thirty miles southwest of Paris. Ernest met up with Colonel David Bruce, the head of OSS in France, who found Ernest ensconced in two rooms on the second floor of the Hotel du Grand Veneur. Ernest was acting as the de facto general of the Allied campaign to take Paris by storm. He and his men were in total control of the site, which was still surrounded by an armada of German tanks looking to reoccupy the town at the first opportunity. Ernest’s rooms were the nerve center of the operation, the headquarters of the Allied push into Paris. French officers reported to Ernest regularly with intelligence about German movements in the area.

  “There, in his shirtsleeves, he gave audience to intelligence couriers, refugees from Paris, and deserters from the German army,” said Colonel Bruce. “Army gear littered the floor, revolvers of every nationality were heaped carelessly on the bed. The bathtub was filled with hand grenades and the basin with brandy bottles, while under the bed was a cache of army ration whiskey.”

  “Hemingway was carrying a gun, a sidearm, and he shouldn’t have been,” sniffed William Randolph Hearst, Jr.

  Andy Rooney was there as well. “Hemingway had taken over this little hotel in Rambouillet,” he remembered. “It had about thirty or forty rooms. And he was working with the French Maquis and had stored hundreds of guns and other weapons in a lot of these rooms.”

  “He discovered a barroom in this little town,” said John Carlisle. “The guys in there spoke French; we didn’t know who the hell they were. Finally, he told us it was the Maquis. These guys would come in there and make their secret reports, and this is where Hemingway hung out until they went out again on missions. He spoke excellent French and the French people loved him. The Americans respected him, but lots of the French, I found, adored him.”

  “He had done a pretty good intelligence job,” said Andy Rooney, “using maps to locate German gun positions. He had also organized French Resistance in this hotel and they were conducting their own little war…We started out for Paris on August 24…I was over by a farmhouse behind a stone wall, all alone, sort of nervous because all of the rest of the guys are in tanks and I’ve parked my Jeep. And I see this figure moving down behind the stone wall. I’m nervous because I think he may be a German. And it turns out to be Hemingway, alone. So the two of us crouched there behind the stone wall for more than an hour. He talked about where the German gun positions were and what he’d been doing. It was a strange experience for me, and I was impressed.”

  And then they reached Paris. “Hemingway was following close behind my Jeep,” said Hans L. Trefousse, who interrogated German prisoners and reported on what they said in English and French. “We crossed the Seine and entered Paris at Porte de St. Cloud. As we entered Paris together the cheering crowds were overwhelming. Liberation Day was a tremendous experience. While the French cheered, I said to some of them, ‘There’s a very famous American writer right behind me, Ernest Hemingway.’”

  Ernest lost no time in heading directly to the Ritz on the Place Vendome, a hotel he had grown familiar with during his many years in Paris. He entered the premises in the company of a woman—an eccentric Spanish beauty whose name was neither Martha nor Mary. Ernest had met Elena years earlier during one of his trips to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and he had been conducting an off-again, on-again romance with her whenever he was in Europe. The hotel’s owner treated Ernest and his entourage to several rounds of martinis and a celebratory dinner. Outside the hotel the streets resounded with the so
unds of gunfire, as every Frenchman with a rifle or sidearm was firing it into the air.

  “Papa was barefoot,” said John Carlisle, “and wearing a pair of khaki pants, and walking up and down the room with a goodlooking gal dressed in a khaki outfit. She had a German Luger stuck in her belt, a bandolier of bullets around her, and a Free Forces of the Interior badge on her arm. Papa said to me, ‘Pour yourself a shot of cognac.’ I had a hangover so I poured a big shot. He said, ‘For God’s sake don’t drink it all.’”

  After dinner, Ernest and Elena began to argue in Spanish, their voices growing more heated and louder with each exchange. “What the hell is going on?” Carlisle asked. Ernest stood directly in front of him, looked him squarely in the eye, and said, “A woman never knows when it’s over.”

  It was certainly over when Mary arrived in Paris and headed to the Ritz at Ernest’s invitation. He put her up in the room adjoining his own, exactly where Martha found them shortly afterward.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Martha made her presence known immediately, even as she went out of her way to avoid her husband and the snide remarks he directed to his comrades in arms and fellow journalists loud enough for her to hear them. She understood that he was irate and his ego was wounded. He was not a man accustomed to having women leave him, not even temporarily so they could go off and pursue their own interests apart from his control. At the same time she was not about to jettison her newly found identity for the sake of saving her marriage—assuming that saving it was possible after all the damage that had been done. Neither one would cave in to the other in their battle of wills. They had come to an impasse and the bell was tolling loudly.

  Martha spent most of her time writing about the last phase of the war and shipped her articles to Collier’s, which was eager to put her reflections into print alongside Ernest’s dispatches. She experienced a brief moment of schadenfreude when she overheard Ernest telling his new paramour Mary that she was built “like a spider.” In his more affectionate moods, Ernest called Mary his “little pickle” or his “small friend.” He told her over and over that he wanted to marry her. Mary would learn soon enough, Martha reasoned, what it was like to be consumed by his overwhelming passions. Ernest saw it differently, of course. He wrote to Martha’s mother about her daughter’s “silly inhumanity,” complaining that she “loves to leave people. It is the bad scene that she plays best.” To his firstborn son Bumby, Ernest wrote that he would trade Martha for “two non beautiful wives I might occasionally have the pleasure of going to bed with.”