Ernesto Page 25

  With greater assurance in her position, Mary made a few requests of her own. In her opinion, there were several home improvements that needed to be made (water storage gutters, a cathouse, bigger windows, and better storage for ice). Of importance was his hiring a carpenter so that she could replace pieces that belonged to Martha Gellhorn. Keeping him company in her absence, Buck and Pete Lanham visited the Finca Vigía. Also, while she was away, and to please her upon her return with divorce in hand, Ernest put the staff to work on the improvements his fiancée had ordered. After a joyous return and day of fishing, flourishes, and frozen daiquiris, she and Ernest conducted a top-level conference on programs and projects, and it was determined that Mary’s role would be to do the shopping for their food, check the servants’ expenditures, supervise the gardeners, but most importantly, keep Ernest’s privacy “absolutely intact” when he worked each day “and let nobody get at him.”18

  Once Mary had settled in, Ernest took her for an unsettling luncheon at the Floridita bar and restaurant with his longtime occasional girlfriend and friend Leopoldina Rodriguez, the Cuban courtesan. In her memoirs, Mary recalled that, having seated them, Ernest drifted back to the bar, and Leopoldina said, “You can’t appreciate what a wonderful man he is. Simpático y generoso.”

  “No, but I’ll try.”

  “Everybody loves him. Todo el mundo.”

  “That’s a lot of people.”

  “Everybody hopes you will be good and sweet to him. Everybody.”

  “That’s nice of them.”19

  Their “catty dialogue” shows the competitive energy produced when Mary and Leopoldina and Ernest were in the room. In it, both women underline their sophistication through the proclamations of their familiarity with French weather—“‘No, not as hot as Paris.’ ‘No. Not as hot as Paris’”20 In Islands in the Stream Ernest also seems to depict Leopoldina’s worldliness when the character Lil employs “au fond,” a French term unknown to most Cubans, but known to Leopoldina since she had travelled to France.21

  * * *

  —

  When James Gavin had been given command of US forces in Berlin in August 1945, Martha Gellhorn joined him there, living in a room on base while covering events in Germany like the Nuremberg trials. She had now become, by her own admission, “la fille du regiment.”22 But learning of Gavin’s affair with “that cobra, Marlene Dietrich,” Martha departed for the Pacific theater, far from him and other males who prefer “tarts” to women of grit and integrity. “MARTHA GELLHORN SUED FOR DIVORCE,” printed the newspapers in Saint Louis on November 22, 1945—the day after their fifth wedding anniversary.23 For expediency’s sake, Ernest had filed it in Cuba where both were still residents, and just in time for Christmas, it came through on December 21 when Martha read in Time magazine that her divorce had been granted by Cuban courts.24

  Earlier that year, Mary had written a letter to her former editors at Time to inquire if her old job was still available. Their erratic and volatile relationship caused Mary to waver concerning her decision to marry and to list the reasons why she might leave in her diary: “I wish the hell I were out of here and running my own household and my own life—with no dictatorship…This is like being a high-priced whore.”25 On the other hand, there was the villa she commanded, the position beside America’s famed writer, and her feelings for him. When her Time editors responded and asked if she planned to pursue her earlier inquiry, she telegraphed back: “With much nostalgia for Time…I [am] nonetheless eager [to] continue current career of loafer fisherwoman housewife…so strike me off the rolls.”26

  After signing an agreement in the morning in a Cuban lawyer’s office concerning property rights written in a language she barely understood, seeming to entitle her to “almost nothing” (not even the little antique engagement ring purchased for herself shortly before their wedding day in a Havana shop), Mary accompanied her husband, joking of “drinking hemlock,” to the ceremony and to a reception in Vedado where they would toast the union with Ernest’s two youngest sons and two dozen friends. “The bride wore a dark scowl,” observed Ernest, and she replied that she felt “more like a middle-aged sparring partner than a bride.”27 She was thirty-seven, and Ernest was forty-six years old.

  After toasts and countertoasts, all lost themselves in an “increasingly spirited few hours,” but returning home Mary and Ernest entangled themselves in an argument in “some misunderstanding of a phrase and a sudden surfacing of underground tensions” that became a “furious earthquake of incrimination and abuse,” before Ernest retreated into a deep sleep.28 In the morning, all was forgiven when Ernest awakened as cheerful and refreshed as ever, and seeing the bags half-packed, he suggested that they never get married again.

  Shortly after their wedding, Mary got pregnant; since they had met in London, they had often fantasized about having a daughter, whom Mary fancied calling Bridget, or “Birdie,” for Ernest had no girls.

  Throughout the spring, Ernest was working hard on a story about the sea. It was emerging organically, and he was allowing it to come. When seventeen-year-old René Villarreal realized that the unexpected exit of the majordomo, Justo, was a golden opportunity, he suddenly became very nervous. René had been running errands for the author ever since he was a boy. “Papa and I spoke about this while we were swimming. I’d feel very happy if you took the majordomo position, but Papa thinks you’re very young and doesn’t want to give you too much responsibility too soon,” Mary told him. “Don’t worry, I can give you some pointers.”29 Recently, the Finca Vigía had become home figuratively as well as literally to “Hemingway’s Cuban son,” whom the author trained to box and nicknamed “Kid Vigía.”30

  During a trial period, René excelled by demonstrating his table-setting, champagne-bucket-icing, and martini-mixing skills; by assuming a boxing stance and ducking when Papa threw a punch; by defending the house from invaders while the Hemingways were away; and during impromptu cat-and-mouse games between the trees at night when Papa, who sent him to lock the front gate, pretended to be an intruder, but in a white-glowing guayabera, failed to sneak up on the boy; so it was decided that René would be the new majordomo—a position he would hold for fourteen years.

  Papa called him into his office. “This check is for you. From now on you earn a man’s wages,” Papa said smiling and looking into the boy’s eyes. “Congratulations, René. I expect you will never let me down. It’s settled then.”31 With René’s help, Mary would be able to see to every detail so that her husband could focus completely on his writing and realize his full potential. Before he left for Ketchum, Idaho, that summer, he had amassed nearly one thousand pages of his Sea book that he was now calling Islands in the Stream.32 On July 27, Gertrude Stein died of cancer at seventy-two years of age, and Alice Toklas subsequently paid for a tomb for her in division 94 of Père Lachaise cemetery in the city of Paris where she had resided for forty-three years; the New York Times article reporting her death mentioned Hemingway as an important author who had been influenced by her work.33

  In anticipation of their upcoming trip, Mary was ignoring Dr. Cuco’s orders to cut down on exercise, swimming daily at the Finca Vigía pool, and putting herself into the best shape of her life so that she could dazzle during a grand tour of the West. It would be her last months for a long while in that nimble body, she mused with bittersweet joy for the life inside of her and with eagerness to discover “God’s country,” beside her husband as he hunted wild animals, and while dining afterward in new dresses confectioned by her village dressmaker from San Francisco de Paula: Joséfa really had to hurry so that her dresses would be finished in time.

  Loading up the Lincoln at the Havana docks, they crossed the Gulf Stream and drove “out West” from Miami to Sun Valley Lodge in Ketchum, Idaho, via New Orleans. In New Orleans, they stayed in the French Quarter on Royal Street at a regal hotel of “frayed glories,” the Monteleone, lunched extravagantly at Galatoires, and strolled by antique shops, where Ernest spotted a sq
uare-cut Brazilian diamond ring.34 After he purchased it, slid it on her finger, and avowed, “With this ring I pledge my troth,” Mary giggled with delight, hugged him, and kissed him behind the counter.

  Leaving behind the world of waiters and jackets in black ties, Mrs. Mary Hemingway and her husband “slummed it” in short-order diners and dilapidated motels along the weather-beaten roads of postwar America, and checking into the Mission Motor Court, they bedded down for the evening in Casper, Wyoming, on August 18. In the middle of a dream about the glorious sport of Indian “pig-sticking,” which someone in London had told her about, where riders on horseback stabbed wild hogs with beribboned lances, she joined a boisterous hunt but was gored, and writhing on the ground, she began to bleed and to scream.35 Bloodcurdling screams real and imagined shot her husband out of bed to scour the town for a doctor, only to find that the only one was on a fishing trip hours away. When the ambulance finally arrived, Mary, who was in debilitating pain, was lifted onto a stretcher. Eight or ten hours later, Mary remembered the operating table, her husband’s voice beside her, and his rubber-gloved hand milking plasma into her arm. She had suffered a miscarriage during a tubular pregnancy that had caused the tube to burst.

  In the morning, Mary awoke, peering through the window of her oxygen tent, and found her husband reading calmly on the other side. Learning from doctors and nurses that he had saved her life, she thanked the angels that he had been with her in her time of trouble, for it seemed that he alone could have saved her, though she had lost the baby. In a letter to Buck Lanham, Ernest explained how he had used surgical skills learned from his father to keep her alive when her tube had burst.36

  Leaving Mary under the care of devoted nurses in the hospital, Ernest hunted and fished in the prairies, hills, and streams with his three sons. When Mary recovered, she joined the boys in Ketchum. In tribute to the author and to promote their film, Mark Hellinger put on a director’s cut premiere at Sun Valley Theater of his “film noir” version of “The Killers.” Of all the films produced from Hemingway’s literary works, it was the most redeeming, and he told Hellinger so.37 In December, the Hemingways met with son Patrick, Buck and “Pete” Lanham, and others in New York City, staying at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel for business, then on Gardiners Island, at the eastern tip of Long Island, for hunting, before returning home to Havana. In an interview with the New York Herald, he would declare that he had twelve hundred pages of a manuscript written and would need another nine months to finish it. In Cuba for the holidays, Mary pleaded with her husband to allow her to build a tower whose ground floor would be designated as a cat living area and whose upper floor could be a space for Ernest to write and for them to enjoy the sunsets. Giving ground to make her happy, he agreed.

  In Key West, Patrick Hemingway suffered a car accident resulting in an undiagnosed concussion. Under duress in Havana preparing for college board examinations, he had a nervous breakdown, sleeping on the lawn after the accident and insulting the staff at the Finca. When the boy collapsed in April 1947, his father stopped writing his Sea book on page 997 to administer twenty-four-hour care and recruited Roberto Herrera Sotolongo, Juan Duñabeitia, and René Villarreal working in shifts to help him. In a fever, Patrick referred to Mary as “Tin Kid,” which soon after became the name of the fishing auxiliary boat that his father ordered made for his fourth bride. In the stupor of his illness, Patrick shouted “Black Priest” at Don Andrés when he appeared in his black robes (a name that also stuck thereafter), called René Villarreal his “African brother,” and spoke to him only in Spanish.38 Even Pauline flew down to the Finca Vigía to see and care for her son, whose condition improved under the watchful care of doctors Cuco Kohly and José Luis Herrera Sotolongo, Hemingway’s personal physicians and dear friends.

  In the United States, Mary had been attending to her own father, who was battling prostate cancer, but she soon returned to find Ernest’s second wife in her home. When Pauline stayed throughout the summer, Ernest’s second and fourth wives unexpectedly became close friends, and for this Ernest seemed relieved. This unusual situation would nourish Ernest’s creative energies and provide inspiration for his fiction, particularly the ménage à trois in the one-thousand-page manuscript he could not return to.39

  During that same month, May 1947, the ambassador contacted Ernest Hemingway to inform him that the US Army was awarding him a Bronze Star. During a small ceremony at the US embassy on June 14 including a handful of his closest friends, the medal was pinned onto the author’s chest to recognize him for acts of valor as a combat correspondent during World War II.40

  The tacit implication was that he had gone “above and beyond” what would have been generally expected from a journalist, crimes for which his name had already been cleared. Roberto Herrera Sotolongo was present at the ceremony. When Hemingway received the medal, he told Sotolongo that he had invited him not only because he was his friend but also because he felt that as a member of the sub-hunting crew aboard the Pilar he deserved to share in the recognition. Receiving the medal, he protested that members of his crew should have also received awards.

  Three days after being recognized for his wartime accomplishments, Ernest’s “most trusted friend” and editor, Max Perkins, died suddenly of pneumonia.41 Recent years having brought the loss of mentors and friends, like Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Perkins, Ernest’s weight increased noticeably that summer, and he complained frequently of headaches, a buzzing in his ears, and memory loss. Marital ails continued as his relationship with his fourth wife became increasingly defined by conflict and disillusionment. The joy of the summer was to receive his sons who would be reunited with the Cuban family of Oscar and René Villarreal—handsome photographs depict the boys all sitting on the Capitolio steps sharply dressed and nearly all grown up. Juan the driver would drive them all over the city and out to the country streams to fish for trout and of course to Cojímar and to the hunting club.

  The Hemingways pose for a family portrait beside their home in Oak Park, Illinois. The back row from left to right: father Clarence, mother Grace, Ernest, sister Ursula, sister Madelaine (“Sunny”), and sister Marcelline. The front row from left to right: sister Carol and brother Leicester. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Hemingway walks on crutches at a hospital in Milan after his wounding at the Italian Front. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Ernest, Hadley, and son “Bumby” (Jack) ski in Schruns, Switzerland. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Ernest and Pauline Pfeiffer horsing around on their patio in Key West. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Painter Antonio Gattorno and his wife, Lillian, aboard the Pilar with Ernest Hemingway. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Jane Mason marvels at Hemingway’s first mate, Carlos Gutierrez, pictured in a rare moment of repose. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Ernest and Martha Gellhorn toast each other at the Stork Club in Manhattan. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

  Papa stands with his arms around his sons at the Cerro Hunters Club in Boyeros, Cuba. From left to right: Patrick, Jack, Ernest, and Gregory. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston and Finca Vigía Collection)

  Leopoldina Rodríguez and Ernest Hemingway drinking daiquiris at El Floridita Bar. (Courtesy of the Fernando G. Campoamor Collection)

  Juan the driver and Mary Hemingway in her yellow Chrysler convertible. (Courtesy of Finca Vigía Collection)

  Ernest consults with marlin-fishing experts, Anselmo Herna
ndez and Gregorio Fuentes, during the filming of The Old Man and the Sea. (Courtesy of Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston and Finca Vigía Collection)

  Adriana Ivancich and Ernest at the Finca Vigía before a party in honor of his Venetian guests. (Courtesy of Finca Vigía Collection)

  Hemingway’s writing tower and Finca Vigía residence. (Photo by the author)

  Ernest shares a happy moment at the Finca Vigía with Cuban writer Fernando G. Campoamor. (Courtesy of Finca Vigía Collection)

  At a luncheon sponsored by Hatuey Brewery, an ecstatic Hemingway celebrates with close friends. At this event, he donated his Nobel Prize medal to the Virgen del Cobre to underline his debt to the Cuban people. Numbered in the back row are 1) organizer and host, Fernando G. Campoamor; 2) admired boxer, “Kid Tunero”; 3) famed entertainer, “Bola de Nieve” (Snowball). (Courtesy of Finca Vigía Collection)