Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “Brett died in New Mexico,” he told his friend A. E. Hotchner years later. “Call her Lady Duff Twysden, if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett.”

  All of “Brett’s” pallbearers had been her former lovers, he went on; one of these gentlemen slipped while holding the coffin, which then crashed to the ground and cracked open. (In reality, Duff was cremated, and no funeral was held.) When Hotchner repeated the ghoulish story in his 1966 book Papa Hemingway, it created a minor sensation and added another ignoble chapter to the already notorious fictionalized life story of Lady Duff Twysden.

  “Who knows if [the funeral story] is true or not?” Hotchner recently said. “What’s the difference? I was presenting a portrait of Hemingway saying these things.”

  Clinton King died in 1979. The remnants of his estate included none of Duff’s art, correspondence, or other personal effects. Therefore, after her death, she was remembered largely through the recollections of others—and faced perpetuity as the fading shadow behind Lady Brett Ashley.

  Harold Loeb (Robert Cohn)

  When The Sun Also Rises was released, Harold Loeb had been living in the south of France with a young Dutch woman. They decided to marry, although Loeb severed their brief union after discovering that she was having an affair with an officer of the French Foreign Legion. She did, however, manage before the divorce to dispose of some of Loeb’s memorabilia from the Duff Twysden affair: he remembered her flinging a youthful photograph of Twysden out of a ship’s porthole.

  Loeb remained in Paris until he completed his third novel, Tumbling Mustard, released by Horace Liveright in 1929. When he returned to the States, he swapped the literary life for a career as a government economist. Before turning his attention entirely to the world of commerce, however, Loeb wrote a never-published novel, whose early chapters were set in mid-1920s Paris and featured an expat writer character that may have been inspired by Hemingway. The book’s title: Leaf of Twisted Olive. From then on, his subject matter changed considerably: Loeb’s later works bore titles such as Life in a Technocracy and “Report on the National Survey on Potential Product Capacity.” Soon there was a third wife, two more children, and a house in Connecticut; his pastimes included “gardening with a passion” and making successful stock market investments.

  Yet Loeb was never able to escape the shadow of Robert Cohn. Among his descendants, opinions are divided about the extent to which his portrayal in The Sun Also Rises and his permanent link to Hemingway affected him in the decades that followed. One of his daughters, Susan Sandberg, feels that “it gave him importance, in a way, and a focus”; a niece, Barbara Loeb Kennedy, thinks that Loeb was pleased by the attention the Hemingway relationship brought him, despite the deeply unflattering nature of the Cohn portrait.

  But Loeb’s other daughter, Anah Pytte, believes that her father would have preferred to bury the past, but the world would not let him. The manuscript of Loeb’s 1959 memoir, The Way It Was, originally featured more material about his own early life and illustrious family background, Pytte maintains, but “the publisher’s interest was in Hemingway,” and the book ended up “revolving around that incident.” She recalls that “people were always looking him up because of the connection, so he couldn’t totally leave it behind.”

  Loeb did help keep that connection to Hemingway alive through his writings and interviews about the Sun Also Rises period and what he publicly dubbed “Hemingway’s bitterness.” As late as the 1950s, he implied that there was still something of a rivalry or unspoken dialogue between the two men. For instance, Loeb maintained that Hemingway had kept a copy of The Way It Was open on his desk when writing A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s. (Hemingway’s assistant from 1959 until 1961, Valerie Hemingway, calls this allegation “absolutely untrue.”)

  Despite the persistent presence of the Sun Also Rises saga, Loeb’s final years were content, says his niece. By then he had a fourth wife, with whom he lived in a custom-built glass-walled house in Weston, Connecticut. Plus, “he always had a mistress,” says his daughter Susan Sandberg, adding that sometimes wife and mistress both occasionally graced the same lunch table at the Connecticut house.

  In early 1974, Loeb, his wife, and Sandberg were vacationing in Marrakech, Morocco. The family checked into the plush La Mamounia hotel and spent their time shopping and swimming in the hotel’s pool. On January 20, Loeb’s heart suddenly “gave out,” recalls Sandberg, who was with her father when he died. He was buried in a local cemetery. At least two of his obituaries linked him to Robert Cohn, thus further cementing Loeb’s legacy with the portrait. Hemingway had “savaged Mr. Loeb in ‘The Sun Also Rises,’” the New York Times reminded its readers, adding that the Loeb-as-Cohn character had been depicted as a “wealthy Jewish hanger-on and social climber.”

  That said, Loeb had—by outward appearances—mellowed admirably about the whole situation in later years; he had been “carrying off his role as a patriarch from the twenties with stylish aplomb.” Five decades later, Loeb was still being cast as an official ambassador from the Lost Generation.

  Kitty Cannell (Frances Clyne)

  Kitty Cannell remained in Paris longer than Hemingway, Twysden, or Loeb. She eventually married again, this time to the French surrealist playwright and poet Roger Vitrac; the marriage did not last.

  In the early 1930s, Cannell became a Paris-based fashion reporter for the New York Times; she also contributed to The New Yorker and various French publications.

  She remained in the city during the Second World War as an “enemy-alien parolee under police surveillance.” During that time, she was arrested twice by the Gestapo and released, and was not allowed to leave the city for four years. It was, she recalled, a survival-of-the-fittest existence: the pillars of her daily wartime experience were “cold, hunger, dirt, restrictions, depressions, bombardments and boredom”—a far cry from the joyous vitriol of the Dôme-and-Dingo days.

  To combat depression during one of the blacker periods, when she had just been “tipped off by the French Police” that she was “probably going to be arrested for the third time,” Cannell began to write a memoir of her childhood. Its title—Jam Yesterday: Gay, Insouciant Reminiscences of the Late Nineties of a Happy Childhood Spent Shuttling Between Canada and the U.S.A.—seemed a not-so-distant cousin to the meandering Victorian fare spoofed by Donald Ogden Stewart and Hemingway. She was eventually allowed to leave Paris in 1944, coming first to New York and later settling in Boston.

  Cannell quickly began the next chapter of her life as a mistress of all trades. She was, by all accounts, professionally fabulous; one publicity photo circulated by her agency features Cannell coiled in a lengthy fur stole. Among her various postwar professional adventures were pinch-hitting for radio gossip commentator Walter Winchell when he was on vacation, directing publicity for the Brooklyn Museum, penning ballet critiques for the Christian Science Monitor, and commentating on couture shows. She also became a presence on the television and radio circuit: her management agency billed her areas of expertise as “everything from Timeless glamor to prison experiences.”

  Her publicity material did not, however, list her as an expert on early Hemingway, although Cannell habitually made herself available to biographers to discuss the events of 1920s Paris and the Sun Also Rises period in general. Despite her exciting life “A.S.,” she continued to be annoyed by her appearance in The Sun Also Rises as Frances Clyne; Hemingway’s ascent and growing reputation as a heroic man of letters and admirable lifestyle irritated her. Like Harold Loeb, she eventually published an essay attempting to puncture the legend surrounding the now heavily romanticized Lost Generation era: her sarcastically titled “Scenes with a Hero” depicted Hemingway as volatile, backstabbing, and self-obsessed.

  She died exactly four months after Harold Loeb, on May 19, 1974.

  Donald Ogden Stewart (Bill Gorton)

  For years in Hollywood, Donald Stewart’s lucky streak continued unabated. Half a decade after
The Sun Also Rises was released, he was nominated for his first Oscar for best writing and original story behind the film Laughter; in 1941 he won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Philadelphia Story.

  And then he went “in one quick step from being the highest-paid writer in Hollywood to a man without a job,” as his friend Katharine Hepburn pithily put it.

  This swift demotion came courtesy of the anticommunist blacklisting that targeted countless Hollywood luminaries in the 1940s and 1950s. By Stewart’s own admission, during his early years in Los Angeles, he had little interest in Bolsheviks or communism and instead served the gods of humor. Yet he soon became an outspoken advocate for civil liberties. “It was said that when President Franklin D. Roosevelt got up in the morning, he ordered orange juice, coffee and his first 10 telegrams of protest from Donald Stewart,” reported the New York Times after Stewart’s death. In the 1930s, he served as president of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and as president of the League of American Writers, which endeavored to involve writers in combating the menace of Nazism and fascism. He was also a member of the Communist Party briefly during the 1930s.

  “By 1950 I was officially on the Black List,” he recalled in his memoir. He was pressured to confess to having been “‘duped’ into assuming a left-wing position in [his] political and personal philosophy” and clear himself by submitting the names of other “dupees.” Instead, Stewart and his second wife—the writer Ella Winter, whom he had met at a political rally—went into exile in 1951 and settled in London. “Ella and I decided that we might have a go at corrupting some other country than the United States,” he wrote, “so we piled our subversive thoughts and our evening clothes into the car and started to explore un-American countries such as France and Italy and England.”

  Once considered “one of the great wits of the late 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s; the creator of laughter and delight in movies, plays, books, and high society,” Stewart drifted out of the public spotlight. Tastes changed while he was stranded far from his professional community; by the 1970s, he realized that his particular and once highly compensated brand of humor belonged to another generation. “In the old days I didn’t have to worry,” he said in a 1971 interview. “I remember my secretary in Hollywood—it was in her contract that she had to laugh at my jokes.”

  According to Stewart’s granddaughter Daneet Steffens, he was not embittered by his exile and disappearance from center stage. “He didn’t sit around and feel sorry for himself,” she says, although Stewart’s son Donald Ogden Stewart Jr. says that he was plagued by a sense of failure at the end of his life. Stewart and his wife entertained a great deal, including large Sunday lunches attended by everyone from Katharine Hepburn and other Hollywood legends to the local family doctor. “Their friends stayed with them into old age,” Steffens says.

  Even though Stewart’s later friendships included countless luminaries from Hollywood’s creative elite, Hemingway was still very much on Stewart’s mind as he wrote his 1975 memoir, By a Stroke of Luck! The men had been out of each other’s lives for years; Hemingway had been dead more than a decade. Even at this point, Stewart still refused to grant The Sun Also Rises the artistic stature that others accorded it. “He would say, ‘That’s exactly what happened . . . it was like a photograph,’” recalls his son. “He just didn’t think Hemingway had the gift. He wasn’t Archibald MacLeish. He thought [Joseph] Conrad had it; he though F. Scott Fitzgerald had it. But not Hemingway.”

  Stewart remained upset at Hemingway until the end of his life—not just because of the vicious poem Hemingway had penned about Stewart’s dear friend Dorothy Parker, but also because he felt that Hemingway had used him yet again as literary fodder decades after The Sun Also Rises debuted. When he first read Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not, one of the characters startled him: John Hollis, described as a highly paid sellout of a Hollywood director with affected communist sympathies. He was certain that Hemingway had based Hollis on him. Even worse, Stewart’s wife, Beatrice, seemed to him to be making an appearance as Dorothy Hollis, a sultry character depicted as cheating on her husband with a wealthy man.

  The John Hollis cameo was fleeting, but it “was a terrible affront to him,” says Stewart’s son. The send-up may have stemmed from more than a decade-old grudge: Stewart felt that Hemingway was likely also punishing him for having gone to Hollywood—something that Hemingway would hold against F. Scott Fitzgerald as well. “Selling out was one thing you didn’t do,” says Donald Stewart Jr. “[Not] to Hollywood, to your wife, to drink, to life.”

  “Not,” he adds, “if you were a friend of Hemingway’s.”

  It was further evidence of “the curious bitter streak” the elder Stewart had detected in Hemingway and his writings. Hemingway had felt, he contended, a need to destroy the love that his greatest friends had for him—and in the end, Stewart maintained, there was “no one left for Hemingway to obliterate but himself.”

  Donald Ogden Stewart died in England on August 2, 1980, of complications following a heart attack. He was eighty-five.

  Pat Guthrie (Mike Campbell)

  Most of the information about the fate of Pat Guthrie comes via Jimmie “the Barman” Charters, who remained close with him in the years following the release of The Sun Also Rises.

  According to Charters’s account, Guthrie’s life spiraled into a nightmare. He apparently split up with Lorna Lindsley, the wealthy American woman who had supposedly kept him a romantic hostage with her dollars. Accordingly, his financial situation took a turn for the worse. He cut a bad check to a Paris hotel; when the police tried to hunt him down, Guthrie’s wealthy mother intervened and had him shipped off to South Africa, or, as Charters put it, “‘to the colonies,’ which English families always think a magic cure for black sheep.” Once in Cape Town, he invented some sort of scheme involving a nonexistent farm and sold shares in the fictitious enterprise to friends. His activities triggered an investigation, and Guthrie once again gave authorities the slip, this time escaping to England.

  He was eventually permitted to return to France: his mother had “arranged things in Paris through the English ambassador.” Guthrie resumed his dissolute routine. Besides Charters, his primary company was a taxi driver friend who managed Guthrie’s meager finances and a female companion with an affection for narcotics. One evening, having popped a few unspecified pills, he was deposited at a café by his taxi driver friend. Guthrie poured Veronal—a barbiturate—into a cup of soup and slipped into a coma. Because he had not paid for the soup, he was taken not to a hospital but rather to a police station, where officers left him unconscious on a cement floor. Eventually he was taken to a hospital, where he died on May 24, 1932, at the age of thirty-six.

  Charters deemed it an accidental overdose, but word went around the colony that Guthrie had committed suicide. His funeral was sparsely attended. “So few people came to the funeral of this man who had been so popular,” Charters later recalled, “not even the American girl for whom he had given up Brett [Duff Twysden]!”

  Following Guthrie’s death, his now elderly mother materialized in Paris. Determined to salvage as much of her son’s legacy as possible, she made the rounds and paid off his debts. She soon approached Charters and offered to make reparations.

  “I felt like waiving the debt as a token of good friendship and in respect to the memory of her beloved son,” he stated, but Guthrie’s mother insisted on giving him a substantial check. Charters relented. The two had a drink together and “parted company [as] good friends.”

  Bill Smith (Bill Gorton)

  Bill Smith got into the literary spirit during his 1925 sojourn in Paris and Pamplona; after returning to the United States with Harold Loeb, he worked on his own short stories. He eventually abandoned his creative endeavors and went to work for Loeb as a government writer. Over the years he worked for several branches of the government and wrote speeches for Harry Truman on labor topics. He eventually married another Loeb employee; the couple h
ad no children.

  In the late 1960s, an interviewer caught up with Smith, who was then living with his wife in a ranch house in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Although his wife, Marion, insisted that Hemingway was “a genius about hate as much as he was about writing,” Smith gave a lengthy and affectionate interview about Hemingway, still calling him “Wemedge,” a nickname left over from their shared boyhood. Over the years, as Hemingway’s circle of friends and associates had grown to include movie stars, generals, and presidents, the two men had fallen out of touch. Was this the result of hard feelings? asked the interviewer.

  It wasn’t so much “a falling out as a falling apart,” Smith explained. “We simply lived a long way apart and that always causes a drift of some kind . . . Wemedge was batting about all over the world.”

  How had Smith’s feelings about The Sun Also Rises evolved? the interviewer asked. Did it still seem accurate to him?

  Sun was not his favorite Hemingway book, Smith admitted. That honor probably went to A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls. As for the accuracy of The Sun Also Rises, he went on—well, the novel had just been Hemingway’s take on the events during that summer of 1925.

  “Every one of us would write a different book,” he mused. “None would jibe exactly. That is only natural. The thing about Hemingway’s account is that it caught a mood better than anyone else could.”

  Smith died in March 1972.

  Cayetano Ordóñez (Pedro Romero)

  Cayetano Ordóñez, “El Niño de la Palma,” had impressed Hemingway as the potential savior of bullfighting during the mid-1920s, but in 1932 the author declared that the real-life Pedro Romero had lost his stuff. He had been gored badly a few years earlier, and “that was the end of him.” After that, Ordóñez “could hardly look at a bull . . . [H]is fright as he had to go in to kill was painful to see,” wrote Hemingway of his former hero in Death in the Afternoon. The season after this fateful goring, Ordóñez landed an avalanche of contracts and then gave the public “the most shameful season any matador had ever had up until that year in bullfighting,” Hemingway reported. No other bullfighter in recent years had raised hopes higher or proved a graver disappointment.