Hemingway and Gellhorn

by Jerome Tuccille

  Ernest left Paris in late August in a convoy with Red Pelkey at the wheel of his Jeep, en route to join Buck’s 22nd Infantry regiment for the push into Germany. The well-armed convoy of two cars, two Jeeps, and a motorcycle wandered through minefields all the way, exchanging gunfire with the enemy but arriving in Belgium unscathed. Buck came across Ernest in a farmhouse in Buchet, eating nonchalantly and taking notes for an article for Collier’s with German shells exploding all around them.

  “Another shell came through the wall,” Buck remembered. “I told him to put on his goddamned tin hat. He wouldn’t so I took mine off. We argued about the whole thing but he went on eating. He reverted to his favorite theory that you were as safe in one place as another as far as artillery fire was concerned unless you were being shot at personally. I pointed out that was precisely what was being done.”

  When the Allies took Brussels on September 4, 1944, Martha took advantage of the opportunity to follow the path the troops had taken and report on the celebrations taking place throughout Belgium. She traveled from Brussels to Antwerp, where she delighted in seeing German prisoners locked up in cages at the zoo. Her only regret was that the Allies had removed the lions first rather than leave them in there to feast on the spoils of war. The prisoners were separated into four cages: one for officers, another for enlisted men, the third for Allied collaborators, and the fourth for women who had prostituted themselves to the Nazis. Next Martha went to Holland, driving through Arnhem and Nijmegen, observing the bomb-gutted towns that looked as though they had been “abandoned years ago following an earthquake or a flood.”

  After several weeks touring through the formerly Nazioccupied land, Martha returned to Paris where she found Ernest once again holding court at the Ritz in the midst of an adoring circle of soldiers, reporters—and a movie star. German beauty Marlene Dietrich had taken up residence there as well, and Martha couldn’t help but notice that she and Ernest acted like teenagers in the first thrall of puppy love. Ernest affectionately called her “my Kraut” as Mary smoldered beside them. Yes, it was now Mary’s turn to endure Ernest’s meteorological swings in moods and affections. Martha couldn’t deal with them any longer, nor could he with hers.

  Martha was surprised when Ernest invited her to join him and his group for dinner. The evening started off cordially enough, but as the night moved along, borne aloft on a gathering cloud of alcohol fumes, Ernest’s mood grew ugly. Without warning, he began to berate her in front of the others until, one by one, they peeled away into the night. Finally, there was no one left at the table except for Ernest and Martha. She couldn’t take it any longer, she told him. He could go off and marry whomever he wanted at the moment—the cute American journalist who looked like a spider, a gorgeous movie star, or a guerrilla fighter from the hills of Spain with a string of bullets around her neck. She didn’t care. She wanted a divorce. Ernest continued his verbal assault and Martha yelled back, each itemizing the other’s faults ad infinitum. Eventually he wore her down, reducing her to tears. She pushed her chair back and flew away from the table, leaving Ernest there to continue ranting in an empty dining room.

  Later that night, Martha exposed her soul in a letter to Allen Grover, one of her most sympathetic confidants along with Eleanor Roosevelt. “Who shall I talk to and who will tell me why I am doing what I am doing? If God has any benevolence for me he will spare me further horrid errors of the heart, when one tries to make permanence. I wish only to be unmarried; it seems neater. I am so free that the atom cannot be freer, I am free like nothing quite bearable.”

  To her mother, Martha admitted that her marriage to Ernest was doomed. “I simply never want to hear his name mentioned again,” she wrote. “The past is dead and has become ugly; I shall try to forget it all entirely, and blot it out as with amnesia.”

  Ernest turned increasingly to Mary, professing his love and asking her to marry him. But she was having misgivings of her own. She admitted that her marriage to Noel Monks was all but over, but she told Ernest that she was feeling crushed by his overwhelming ardor. Mary wrote him a letter saying that she sometimes had to get away from his “domination because you are so big and you absorb me so that I lose myself, wanting only the soft easy business of flattery and admiration and gaiety that matters not.” Beneath it all was a gnawing feeling that his passion for her contained a sharp edge of revenge—revenge against the wife who caused him so much grief.

  Ernest was more hurt than he wanted to admit by the collapse of his third marriage. “Funny how it should take one war to start a woman in your damn heart and another to finish her,” he wrote to Max Perkins.

  * * *

  The war may have finished their marriage, but the war was not done with either Ernest or Martha. At the end of September, Ernest was jolted by the news that some members of the journalist community were filing charges against him for being an armed combatant, which was a violation of the role of journalists spelled out by the third Geneva Convention. Ernest was furious and blamed the “liars” and “phonies” of the press who were jealous of his celebrity status that gave him access denied to them. On October 3, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force ordered Ernest to report to the Inspector General of the Third Army in Nancy to respond to the charges. Fortunately for Ernest, his friends in high places jumped to his defense. Officers on General George Patton’s staff told Ernest to deny all the charges at the Inquiry, the first step before a Court Martial. European OSS chief David Bruce would be in attendance as a witness.

  Sitting before his inquisitors, Ernest answered the questions as he had been instructed to. Did he carry weapons and engage in combat?

  “I offered my services to him in any way in which I might be useful,” Ernest said, nodding in Colonel Bruce’s direction, “providing that my actions did not violate the Geneva Convention or that any of them should in any way prejudice my fellow war correspondents.”

  Questioned further about his specific actions, Ernest replied that he “served only in an advisory capacity to Colonel Bruce. I did not command troops nor give orders but only transmitted orders.”

  What about accounts from various witnesses that Ernest had stripped off his correspondent’s insignia, served as a colonel in the French Resistance, and occupied a room filled with mines, grenades, and war maps?

  Ernest admitted that he removed the insignia by taking off his jacket and appearing in shirtsleeves, but only because it was hot. As far as his rank of colonel was concerned, Ernest said “It was the same way that citizens of the state of Kentucky are sometimes addressed as colonel without it implying any military rank.” The weapons in his hotel room were stored there by the Maquis who were under the orders of Allied commanders.

  “Were there mines in your room?”

  “There were no mines in my room. I would greatly prefer not to have mines in my room at any time.” Ernest was growing playful, warming to the charade.

  War maps?

  “I always travel with maps because I like to know where I am and where I am going.”

  “Are you saying that you never fought with the men?”

  “I didn’t fight with the men,” Ernest stated emphatically. Later, after the proceedings were over and he was exonerated of all charges, Ernest laughed and denied that he had lied about his activities. “Why would I fight with the men,” he said with a smile, “since I never had anything against them?”

  * * *

  While Ernest was in Nancy being questioned by the military tribunal, Martha headed to the ancient town of Soissons in northern France, situated alongside the Aisne River. The 82nd Airborne Division had taken heavy casualties in ferocious combat with German holdouts in the region, and Martha wanted to report on the aftermath of the battle and assist in any way she could. The weather had grown worse with an early winter setting in. Snow drove in from the north in a blinding swirl, the plasma for blood transfusions froze solid overnight, troops froze to death in their foxholes, and sodden blankets they used to stay
warm became hardened, useless boards in the frigid air. Martha found a room in an abandoned house with no heat or running water. She went out on night patrols with a group of sergeants and their men, taking notes, following the soldiers making their rounds in the woods outside the village. That’s where the military police found her and asked to see her military pass and accreditation. Martha had nothing to show them.

  The MPs escorted Martha to General James Gavin’s tent, which served as the 82nd’s regional headquarters. Martha expected at least a dressing-down from the general, but she was more terrified than anything else of being deported back to the States, effectively ending her career as a war correspondent without proper press credentials. General Gavin was a year older than Martha at thirtyseven, the youngest divisional commander in the U.S. army. He was tall, slim, physically fit, and strikingly handsome. Martha entered the tent and faced his stare directly. His eyes moved over the cheeky blonde reporter who somehow managed to look glamorous and attractive in the midst of a battlezone. Martha later said his eyes emitted an intensity that was almost a physical shock. She felt an electrical charge running through her. The animal magnetism between them was a palpable presence. Martha knew immediately that she would not be sent back home. Gavin asked her for address in Paris instead. He laughed and told her that she would make a good guerrilla fighter with her talent for living on the edge the way she did. Martha wrote down the name of the hotel where she was staying in Paris, and then left with the General’s blessing. She knew she would be seeing him again. At least she hoped she would.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  James Maurice “Jumping Jim” Gavin was the stuff legends are made of. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 22, 1907, with the name James Nally Ryan, he never knew who his real parents were. His mother may have been an Irish immigrant named Katherine Ryan, and his father was either James Nally or another Irishman named Thomas Ryan. So the name that appeared on his birth certificate was little more than an educated guess on the part of hospital officials. When Jim was about two years old, he was placed in the Convent of Mercy orphanage in Brooklyn, where he remained until he was adopted in 1909 by Martin and Mary Gavin, a coal mining family from Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. The Gavins had a tough time putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, so Jim had to go to work when he was only twelve to help support the family.

  Faced with the prospect of becoming a coal miner like his adopted father, Jim decided to run away from home. On his seventeenth birthday on March 22, 1924, he took the night train to New York and sent a telegram to his parents saying everything was all right with him, to prevent them from reporting him missing to the police. He immediately went to see a U.S. Army recruiting officer, who told him that he needed parental approval to join the army since he was under eighteen. Knowing that his father wanted him back home in the coal mine with him, Jim told the recruiter he was an orphan. He enlisted on April 1, 1924, and was sent to Panama.

  His rise through the ranks was nothing less than meteoric. He read books about military history in the base library and was promoted to Corporal within six months. Despite his lack of a formal education, he lied about his age and was admitted to West Point. He was a natural athlete who boxed at the academy and made a bad marriage to a woman who bore a daughter they named Barbara after he graduated. Following a stint in Fort Benning, Georgia, he was posted to the Philippines, where he grew alarmed about his country’s inability to counter Japan’s plans for expansion throughout the region. Jim was promoted quickly to Captain and began training at the Airborne School in Fort Benning in July 1941. His next command was as Commanding Officer of C Company of the newly established 503rd Parachute Infantry Battalion. On October 16, 1941, he was promoted to Major and wrote a manual about airborne tactics, using information he had gleaned from the Russians and Germans about paratroopers and glider troops. His military career escalated dramatically as American entry into the war drew nearer. He made Colonel as the commanding officer of the 505thParachute Infantry Regiment in August 1942, and built the unit from the ground up. He led the troops under his command on long marches and training sessions, and promoted the concept of being the “the first out of the airplane door and the last in the chow line.”

  In February 1943, the 82nd Airborne Division was selected for the Allied Invasion of Europe and played a major part in Mission Boston on D-Day. Jim’s role in the invasion of Normandy was dramatized by Cornelius Ryan in his book The Longest Day. In the movie made later Jim was portrayed by Robert Ryan, and then again by Ryan O’Neal in A Bridge Too Far. It was startling how the name Ryan was so prominent in his life; perhaps Ryan was his real father after all. Promoted afterward to Lieutenant General, Jim earned the moniker “The Jumping General,” or more informally “Jumping Jim,” from his men because of his practice of parachuting out of aircraft with his combat troops.

  By the time Martha set eyes on Jumping Jim in his tent, the tall, lanky, handsome General was already a legend in military circles.

  * * *

  Ernest breathed a sigh of relief after being exonerated of all charges leveled against him and then made plans to meet up with Buck—as an armed combatant—during one of the last campaigns of the war for them. Observers could not help but notice that Ernest and Buck made for an odd couple in every way imaginable. What drew the two men together so closely? They looked like Laurel and Hardy as they shambled beside each other, Ernest tall and large, Buck short and wiry. But beneath the surface they were more alike than could be immediately discerned. Buck was the field commander that Ernest would have been had he not been a writer; Ernest was the famous author that Buck, who wrote poetry, would like to have been. They respected and loved each other like brothers.

  “We told each other about our childhoods, our parents, our dreams, our hopes, our education, our women, our friends, our enemies, our triumphs and our disasters,” Buck wrote later. “It was one of those rare occasions when two human beings suddenly find themselves in complete rapport and their separate worlds meet and merge.”

  When Buck rallied his troops by yelling, “Let’s go get these Krauts! Let’s kill these chickenshits! Let’s get up over this hill now and get the place taken!” Ernest was the first one over the hill with him.

  As the war wound down, Ernest immediately started to think about life back home. He wanted to return to Cuba, and he wanted Mary to join him there. He wrote to her about that “old whore, Death” that he faced every day. He told her what their life together at the Finca would be like, both of them writing in the morning, fishing on his boat in the afternoon, entertaining guests, enjoying the sights, smells, and tastes of Havana at night. Mary was beginning to succumb to his passions, tossing aside her reservations, embracing the idea of an idyllic existence in a tropical setting with the man she had come to love.

  “I am your woman my dearest Only One for as long as you’ll have me,” she wrote back, “and I will try to make that forever.”

  Mary was hooked, and Ernest once again felt the glow of having a woman beside him who would share his bed, his home, his life with his sons, and not try to run off to war to write about things she didn’t need to see. He also started to think seriously about starting a new book after so much time had elapsed since his last one. It would be about the war of course. “I will just take my small piece of a tiny part of it,” he wrote to Mary, “and buttress it with the forgotten sometimes punchy knowledge and the new will work the mess so the old magic will work—and then we will have the book, a day at a time.”

  With thoughts of Cuba and Mary very much on his mind, Ernest almost did not make it back from the battlefield alive. On a damp, chilly day in the German woods, Ernest heard a familiar sound overhead, one he remembered clearly from his days in Spain. Ernest listened for a moment and recognized the familiar hum of the aircraft engine supplied by the Germans to Franco’s forces years earlier. He yelled out, “Oh God! Jump!” His driver Red Pelkey, fellow correspondent Bill Walton, and Ernest leaped out of the
Jeep just as the plane swooped low and stitched the vehicle with a deadly round of machinegun fire. The three of them lay in a ditch as the aircraft returned for an encore. It was a close encounter, with the old whore death failing to claim them by only a split second. Ernest knew it was time to go home, soon, before his luck, prayers, and the magic of his rabbit’s foot ran out.

  * * *

  Jumping Jim tracked Martha down on his third visit to Paris. He had come calling every time his duties on the battlefield permitted, only to find that she was off to Italy, to Spain, to other parts of Europe digging up stories for Collier’s. But the third time was the charm. He presented himself at the Hotel Lincoln and found her in this time. Their first meeting since their encounter on the battlefield did not go smoothly. Jumping Jim was used to having his way with women, many of whom wilted under his mesmerizing gaze. Martha was clearly taken with him as well, but she was not a pushover for any man. She was not about to be grabbed “like a package and pushed into bed,” she said later. She turned him down, setting the dashing General back on his heels. They talked instead, getting to know and respect each other first. Then they went to bed “on a basis of high mutual esteem.” When they weren’t making love, they sat together in bed playing hand after hand of gin rummy and telling each other about their lives and interests.