Beautiful Exiles Page 10

But there were his sons.

  And I’d done that before: I’d accepted Bertrand’s proposal, and when his wife had refused a divorce, I’d been “Madame de Jouvenel” anyway. Bertrand meant it—I believe that to this day—but I learned my lesson but good from that love affair: a man who makes a promise he can’t keep is just a man doing what men do, while a woman who accepts him is the worst kind of selfish scum.

  I tucked my selfish-slimed heart back behind my bony ribs, and I said, “But there isn’t a writer in this world who wouldn’t swap places with you and your five hundred dollars per cabled story.” Then, before he could turn the conversation, I set into the piece in front of us: a bit about the bombing of Madrid and the politics of the situation that was all news dispatch and nothing of the heart wrenching he’d written about Raven. The one thing that would distract Ernest from this marriage proposal he couldn’t offer, even if I wanted to accept it, was criticism of his writing.

  “This sentence,” I said, and I read out a particularly good one. “Is it really as true as five minutes ago?” Undermining a line he was proud to have written and using his own favorite phrase to question it.

  “Hell, Marty, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

  He poured himself one whiskey after another as he berated me: How dare I question this? How dare I suggest I might know better than him about his own words? How dare I have an opinion about Spain that didn’t line up square as the Lord’s cross with his? His anger had nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with my spoiling his illusion of himself as a man who loved so passionately that he could set his whole life aside for a woman. He was angry that I’d backhanded his inane proposal, and he needed to off-load his anger without denting his pride, and my critique of his writing was the fighter I’d put into the ring for him to pulverize.

  Paris, France

  MAY 1937

  “I’ve never read in public,” Ernest told me. “What should I read?”

  We were at the hotel in Paris, where we’d taken separate rooms for discretion’s sake, but spent our days and nights together.

  “Whatever you want to read, you silly Bongie,” I assured him. “Don’t you know you’re Ernest Hemingway?”

  It was rather adorable, really, how nervous the prospect of reading in public made him, his inability to face the possibility that even one person in the audience might fail to be moved by his words—although, of course, he wouldn’t admit that. He couldn’t say no to Sylvia Beach, though. When he’d lived in Paris as a young, unpublished writer, unable even to manage the small fee she charged to borrow books, she’d let him take for free any book he wanted, allowing him the self-education in literature he badly needed. Sylvia Beach supported writers: she kept a bunk on the upper floor of Shakespeare and Company, where you could sleep if you couldn’t afford accommodations elsewhere, and a piano around which writers gathered to drink and smoke and talk. So the evening of the reading, we slipped from the wet Paris streets into the warm light of the bookshop on rue de l’Odéon, where Sylvia had arranged a joint reading with a poet, thinking that might put Ernest at ease. The chairs were already filled, with a spillover crowd standing about the store.

  As Ernest hugged Sylvia the way he hugged old friends, or lady friends, anyway, the anticipatory chatter settled into expectant quiet. He sat at the table set up for him and laid the opening pages from his Cuban rumrunner manuscript before him. Sylvia said a few very kind words of introduction for a writer who, she said, needed none. Ernest looked up through his steel-rimmed glasses at the sellout crowd. I wondered if he saw Ulysses author James Joyce take a seat Sylvia Beach had reserved for him, in the back row.

  “I don’t know whether I can do this,” Ernest admitted to the crowd.

  Warm laughter. I’m not sure anyone believed him. He was Ernest Hemingway, after all. But his glasses were already fogging with flop sweat.

  He read the opening paragraph slowly, in such a monotone that the old goober dread bubbled up in me. His protagonist was barely in the café in which the smuggler thugs would try to recruit him to run contraband when Ernest had to stop to wipe his glasses.

  Several in the audience coughed into the quiet, but that might have been on account of the damp spring air.

  He replaced his glasses and, gaze fixed on the manuscript, resumed reading.

  After he finished reading the first page, he stopped to wipe his glasses again. My heart was aching for him. No one coughed this time, though.

  Ernest replaced his glasses and looked out over the crowd.

  “You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said.

  The crowd chuckled. Somehow, he still had their attention. Maybe it was the fascination of watching a great artist impale himself on the sword of their opinion or the specter of imminent collapse, or maybe it was the story, or maybe it was some of each. We do root for those we see struggling against their demons that so often resemble our own.

  Ernest set the first sheet of paper aside and began to read from the second, his voice stronger now. He even looked up at the crowd now and then.

  He was halfway down that second page—his rumrunner protagonist was telling the thugs he couldn’t risk running contraband, that he made a living with his boat—before he was reading with actual expression. The thugs assured his protagonist that, with the to-be-ill-gotten gains, he could buy a new boat. The protagonist responded that he couldn’t buy anything if he was in jail.

  The audience chuckled at this last. Ernest looked up at them and grinned.

  By the time the guns came out in the middle of the first chapter, Ernest was reading truly wonderfully, to a crowd awaiting every word. He read all the way through to the end of chapter four. When he finished—to great applause—Joyce nodded his respect, and got up and left.

  Ernest sailed home the next day to Pauline and the boys, to fishing while he ought to have been finishing the novel he’d promised Max would be done months ago. I followed on the Lafayette to New York, arriving on May 23 to a throng of reporters at the docks wanting the scoop on what I’d seen in Spain—which was that the Republicans would win simply because they had an unlimited supply of guts. I stayed in New York to sort out a deal with William Morrow; the publishers wanted me to write a book to do for the Spanish what The Trouble I’ve Seen had done for the poor in America. I was intent, too, on convincing Mrs. Roosevelt to support bringing five hundred Basque children to safety in the United States, orphans with no hope of safety or security in Spain thanks to the Fascists and their German bombs. And I wrote her about Ernest’s film, The Spanish Earth.

  Ernest flew up to New York in June for the Congress of American Writers, at which we were both to speak about the march toward war. He picked me up on his way to Carnegie Hall, looking less healthy for his relaxing time in Bimini than he had for all the hard days in Spain. It was the dread of public speaking, I supposed, or the airplane booze he’d downed to ward off the collywobbles. Carnegie Hall held a lot more seats than Sylvia Beach’s little Paris bookshop. Thirty-five hundred writers had crammed into them, with a thousand more outside the doors.

  Ernest, whose glasses were fogged with sweat again, started slowly, his voice growing increasingly high-pitched, almost trembly, as he called for everyone to write truly, to write so that readers would feel themselves in the stories, to write only about whatever they believed to be the thing we ought most to care about. It was something, him so nervous and still giving everyone what for the way a preacher might. And the applause was wracking, everyone popping up despite the heat, stomping their feet and whistling and cheering as if Ernest were Babe Ruth returned to play for the Yankees.

  I stayed after Ernest flew back to Bimini, to help with the editing of The Spanish Earth at the Columbia Broadcasting laboratories in the Studebaker Building on Times Square, where I was charged with the most important work: When we needed something to make the sound of a shell whistling, I made it happen with a deflated football and an air hose. My fingernails snapped against a screen for
the rattle of bullets, not exactly Ernest’s racrong carong carong, but surprisingly convincing. I snapped more frantically to simulate machine-gun fire.

  I spent most of my time, though, sorting out how to get attention for the film, starting with Mrs. Roosevelt. She’d written that a mutual friend had been deeply moved by my speech at the writers’ congress. When I felt discouraged, she admonished me, I should remember that we never know where the seeds of our own enthusiasm will find loamy soil. I replied extolling the moving details of The Spanish Earth: the plight of the Republicans fighting Fascism in Spain illuminated through the plight of a tiny village on a key supply road outside Madrid. It really was lovely stuff, the parallels and contrasts: The village fields were plowed by the peasants for food, while the Madrid streets were plowed by Fascist bombs. Where water ran in the fields, blood ran in the streets.

  Hemingway returned only after we got the news from Spain that his German writer friend Gustav Regler had been seriously wounded and his Hungarian writer friend Máté Zalka killed while Ernest had sat in the sun with a big glass of his wife’s good whiskey. There was no doing anything right for him after that. The film now had to be perfect; it had to rally American and European support for the Republicans, and it had to do it awfully damned quickly, which meant doing it Ernest’s way and the rest of us be damned. When Joris Ivens kept insisting Ernest simplify the film’s story—focus on the nobility keeping the land for leisure when it might feed starving peasants—Hemingway called the director a “little piss.” “I’m the goddamned writer,” Ernest told him, “and the writing is the story, and if you don’t think I can tell a story better than you can, well then, you can go fuck yourself.”

  Ernest was less than thrilled with the plan to have Orson Welles do the narration too. “What the hell does a swishy theater kid know about war?” he groused.

  Of course everyone knew who Orson Welles was. The actor wasn’t a kid, even if he was only twenty-two, and he wasn’t swishy either: he was six feet tall and two hundred pounds of solid, with the steamy good looks of the young Hemingway that had hung on my dorm room wall. Orson Welles had defied a government lockout to produce a prolabor operetta, and he was making two thousand dollars a week between radio and theater. The kid was smart, and the kid was damned good-looking, and the kid was a big success already, at half Ernest’s age.

  We were rolling the film in a darkened screening room—just enough light to be able to see the scripts so we could read along, there being no voice-over yet—when someone said, “Is it really necessary to say this here? Wouldn’t it be better to just see the footage?”

  Ernest, beside me, mumbled, “Some damned faggot who runs an art theater trying to tell me how to present war.” He stood, his oversized shadow blotting out much of the film, which rolled on with silent images of soldiers dying in Spain playing on his body.

  “Bug, don’t be a fool,” I said.

  He stomped toward the kid.

  The kid stood, his shadow casting onto the screen too, the images flickering across his tall frame as he took a half step back.

  Ernest put his face right in the kid’s space, and repeated, “What does a faggot like you know about war? Huh?”

  The kid flapped his wrists, a gesture more dramatic in his shadow on the screen. “Oh, Mr. Hemingway,” he shot back, “you’re so big and strong, and you have so much hair on your chest.”

  Even I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. The damned bit was funny as hell as it played out in the shadow on the screen.

  Ernest picked up a chair—a chair, for pity’s sake—and swung it at the kid.

  That bit wasn’t funny, but we all laughed—nervous laughter now—as Ernest, thank heavens, missed his mark.

  The kid swung back at Ernest. He missed too, but that didn’t stop either of them from trying again.

  These two big bullheaded lugs charged at each other, their shadows casting across the projected images from Spain, where real men were fighting a real fight and dying for a cause.

  Someone jumped up and raised the lights, so that the film and the shadows faded.

  “Welles, you asshole,” Ernest said, but he said it with a real laugh, and Orson Welles laughed too. Someone found a bottle of whiskey and some glasses, and we all got drunk together, Ernest toasting Spain and Gustav Regler and Máté Zalka, and even Welles. Ernest was never good at forgiving himself, but he was pretty good at forgiving anyone who would share a bottle of booze with him. He would forgive anyone who would support the causa and toast the memory of writers who were braver than he would ever be.

  The White House, Washington, DC

  JULY 1937

  Ernest was in Bimini when the First Lady invited me to bring our little film to the White House: a screening for the president to be followed by a small VIP dinner July 8, which she couldn’t have known was the day Ernest had been wounded in the Great War. The president, she wrote, would be pleased if Mr. Ernest Hemingway and Mr. Joris Ivens would accompany me.

  Ernest flew to New York to make sure the film was just so before Joris Ivens and he and I—“trench buddies,” I’d taken to calling us—headed with our film cans for the Newark airport. We checked in, and I dragged them to the airport buffet, where I ordered us each a fat turkey sandwich.

  “The good Lord could be coming down to pass judgment,” Ernest said, “and Marty would greet him with a spoon in her mouth.”

  I said between bites that, unless someone shot the whole White House kitchen staff, the food would be revolting. When they looked dubious, I offered to eat all three sandwiches myself.

  “Dishwater soup, that will be the best of it,” I said. “I thought I’d never again eat soup after I moved out.”

  “After you moved out? Of the White House, Stooge?”

  It hadn’t seemed so extraordinary to me that I had lived at the White House with the Roosevelts; things never do when you’re young and don’t know anything different, and it happened in such a roundabout way. I’d come back from Europe in late 1934 and talked myself into a job with Harry Hopkins at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration—seventy-five dollars a week plus a five-dollar per diem for food and hotels to snoop around the country. I was so outraged about the wretched treatment of the unemployed, though, that after a couple months I went back to Washington to quit, meaning to write an exposé. Hopkins refused to accept my resignation before I spoke with Mrs. Roosevelt, who, it turned out, had been reading my reports. She knew Matie on account of my mother’s work for suffrage that had left me ostracized in the school lunchroom, so I supposed the name “Gellhorn” had caught her attention, although the First Lady’s support for women journalists was by then already legend.

  Mrs. Roosevelt arranged for me to talk to the president—over dishwater soup and chalk-dust veal. She seated me beside him at the far end of the dinner table, then shouted down to him, “Franklin, talk to that girl. She says all the unemployed have pellagra and syphilis.”

  “Which of course stopped the conversation,” I told Ernest and Joris, and I took another bite of my turkey sandwich. “I’d be more help to the unemployed if I stuck to my job, Mrs. R. assured me, so I did, until I was fired—well, that’s a whole other story—at which point the First Lady, worried I’d have nothing to live on, invited me to come live with her.”

  I thought it was quite champion, to be honest. I stayed with them for a few months, until a friend offered a quieter place where I could write my book.

  “The president will have an opinion on the film, Bug,” I said. “You’ll listen politely, won’t you? He is the president, and the point is to have the president screen the film, to have the press reporting that. When he offers suggestions, just remind yourself that he isn’t a filmmaker, he’s just the president of the United States.”

  Ernest picked up one of the sandwiches and eyed it warily.

  “I’ve brought along my mustache and dark glasses, by the way,” I said. “If you try to retire to the drawing room before we’ve hashed out the film, I
’m as good with a cigar as anyone.”

  It was something to arrive at the White House with Ernest and our film that might rally the country to the fact that Spain was the last stop against Hitler taking all of Europe. Mrs. Roosevelt greeted me with a hug and a kiss. I introduced my trench buddies, and the president got a chuckle out of that.

  Ernest settled from nervous into happy and nervous. He’d never been to the White House.

  We handed the film over to the camera operator and, with two dozen other guests, made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the upright, round-backed chairs of the curtain-walled White House movie room.

  Even as the lights were being brought back up, the First Lady whispered to me that she’d never believed all this State Department propaganda trying to paint the duly elected government in Spain as communist. The president excused himself for a few minutes as the rest of us made our way from the theater to the dining room: a Japanese gang conducting military exercises outside Beijing had had some mishap with a soldier, which led, in the way these things do, to mobilization for all-out war, and now the Japanese had taken a bridge the Chinese weren’t keen to let them have.

  The president rejoined us not long after we were seated at a single long table, with Ernest and Joris Ivens at his end and Mrs. Roosevelt and I at the other, and everyone else in between. After the first spoonful of soup, I mouthed to Ernest, “Dishwater,” and he managed a nervous smile.

  “The question,” the president said, “is whether your film goes far enough in allowing the audience to understand the Spanish conflict.”

  I attended my soup and admired the new china Mrs. Roosevelt had ordered: white rimmed with forty-eight gilt stars set in a band of blue and lined with gilt roses and, in the midnight position, a gilt eagle with tricolor breastplate and olive branch. The president’s words were something to consider. So often when you know a thing well, you can’t see what others might fail to understand. You can’t imagine that viewers, confused by the Catholic Church supporting Franco, might not see that he’s the devil. You can’t imagine anyone could prefer the admittedly more attractive and rich Fascists to the bedraggled but noble peasant Republicans.