Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  In the postwar economy, Howard E. was making large plans for his little company. “War Plant Builds Pleasure Boats” was the headline in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in May 1919, six months after the armistice had been signed. Under the headline was a nice one-column feature on the boatyard. Not even two months later, Wheeler had suddenly gone into receivership. The founder made an arrangement with his creditors, though, and stayed in business; part of his brilliance. In 1921, there was a terrible fire. He had no insurance. But since he had nowhere to go but on, he borrowed money, mortgaged whatever else he had, convinced an acquaintance to stake him.

  For the next several years, the Wheeler company—essentially the Wheeler family—built and sold rowboats and small sea skiffs. In 1924, the yard exhibited its first boat in a national motorboat show—a twenty-foot launch. By 1928, the yard at the foot of Cropsey was producing and selling between fifty and sixty pleasure boats a year. Its name was growing in the field. By 1930: seventy-five boats. The business was always short of working capital, but this fact didn’t hurt its reputation in the industry. By 1938, Wheeler was producing the fattest sales catalog in the national boating industry. By 1939, the company’s production and sale of motor cruisers in the thirty-eight-foot range was said to number 225 boats.

  Another war was looming. There were more trips to Washington, DC, by the builder (and the builder’s sons) to secure contracts: picket boats, cutters, minesweepers, rescue tugs. To satisfy the banks, whose officers had made large loans for the construction of the Whitestone yard, a new company was formed—Wheeler Shipbuilding Corporation. Soon admirals were journeying from the capital to both plants to present pennants and to read telegrams of congratulation from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The Wheeler women, black-gloved, wearing huge corsages, exploded bottles of champagne at the bows of the new boats—and these pictures get prominent display in the Eagle and the Herald Tribune. There were black-tie dinner-dances attended by military brass. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appeared at christenings, jawing with the old man—Howard E. was now in his seventies—on flag-draped podiums in the middle of the yard, making speeches that defied syntax and went out live over WNYC.

  But if you live by fat government contracts, you can die by them, too. What happens when the war is won and six thousand people are on the payroll and your federal contracts are shutting off like water from a spigot? Wheeler tried to seize the postwar public’s imagination with a sleek new pleasure craft called the Sunlounge. Howard E. opened a showroom right around the corner from the Waldorf, an expensive dare. Other boat companies were doing it, too. Think of plate-glass showrooms on Park Avenue with gleaming yachts inside and people on the sidewalk staring at them with bewildered expressions: it’s a New Yorker cartoon. For the launch of the boat that would save the company, Wheeler brought in B-list movie stars and Broadway folk and local broadcast personalities. A fifteen-minute program on April 24, 1946, went out over the local affiliate of the American Broadcasting Company, WJZ. Reading a transcript of this old radio show—a copy is in Wes Wheeler’s basement in Stamford, Connecticut—you can sense the great giddiness of a country returning to leisure. You can also sense how Wheeler had bet the ranch.

  Good evening, everyone, this is Gene Kirby, speaking to you from the after cockpit or deck of the magnificent new Wheeler Sunlounge, as beautiful a boat as I’ve ever been aboard or seen.… We are in the beautiful new showroom of the Wheeler Shipbuilding Corporation, here at Park Avenue and 46th Street, 241 Park Avenue, to be exact, taking part in the gala ceremonies attending the first postwar showing of the new Wheeler Sunlounge Cruiser, in which I am standing. It’s been an exciting afternoon here, with stars of the entertainment, sports and boating world, dropping in to be thrilled by this spectacle of the forty-foot boat on Park Avenue. We’re gonna have many of these celebrities talk with us on this broadcast during the next thirteen minutes or so.… I could go on talking about this Wheeler Sunlounge for hours, but I don’t believe words could really do it justice. Let me just say it’s the dream of anyone from a small boy to the Ancient Mariner.

  The Sunlounge didn’t work. From court documents: “About December 13, 1946, Wheeler Shipbuilding, by its president, Wesley, filed a petition under Chapter XI of the Bankruptcy Act in which petition it admitted that it was unable to pay its debts.” The Cropsey Avenue property had been sold by then. Family members had to be hauled into tax court for alleged “deficiencies in income taxes determined for the calendar years 1946 and 1947” (quoting again from legal documents). The reports of these legal problems made the papers. In the end, the Wheeler family, individually, collectively, corporately, lost to the government and the banks and nearly everyone else. And still they somehow managed to stay in the boat business, or some of the family did.

  After the 1946 failure, several of the sons had reincorporated and taken over the property of Dawn Cruisers. There were new display ads in the papers to the effect that Wheeler boats were up and running once again at the foot of Patterson Avenue, Clason Point, the Bronx. But toward the late fifties, into the early sixties, the numbers on the books seemed desperate once more. Family members had quit the business, the eldest son was dead, others were no longer on speaking terms. There had been charges of embezzlement in the civil war that had broken out in the churchgoing and close-knit Methodist family. And yet, if you were reading the papers in this period, you’d form an impression distinctly otherwise. On the second to last day of the 1959 motorboat show, by then being convened annually at the New York Coliseum, the Times wrote:

  [T]he National Motor Boat Show, is drawing to a close at the Coliseum.… The three Wheelers [sic] brothers, Wesley, Eugene and Robert, who are manning the annual display of the Clason Point, the Bronx, concern with their octogenarian father, Howard [Howard E. was shortly to be ninety], reported sales this week of $1,181,000. This comprised firm orders for one 43-footer at $70,000, three 34-footers at $23,000 each, one 37-footer at $30,000, and forty orders from dealers for spring deliveries.

  Within two and a half years, the company was dead, at least in terms of involvement by any Wheeler family members. “In a year that has seen two other boat-manufacturing companies acquire new ownership, still a third boat-building firm has changed hands,” the Times wrote on August 26, 1961. “The famous Wheeler Yacht Company, now on Clason Point, Bronx, on Patterson Avenue and formerly with yards on Coney Island Creek and during World War II in Whitestone, has been taken over by the Rimbach family of Flushing, Queens.” Wheeler had been seized for debt by a father-son firm of certified public accountants with German connections. The new owners said that they intended to keep the marquee name. Howard E. didn’t live to see this final insult. He’d died in Florida, five months earlier, on March 23, 1961. But in some sense he had to have known it was all behind him, the wooden, watery dream obsessing him since 1910.

  Howard E. died three months before Hemingway died. He is said to have suffered a short final illness, a quick reversal that seems in perfect keeping with his life and the history of his company. The salesman-builder-dreamer-visionary, who’d made it into his ninety-third year, was survived by twenty-one grandchildren and thirty great-grandchildren. In his last years, with his physical health still strong, the emotionally distraught patriarch, only semi-involved with the business, still possessed of his flaring brows and untamed hair and pork-chop sideburns, all of it gone shock white, had tried to distract himself by building a house on a canal in Fort Lauderdale. He’d go to the ocean and sit fully clad on the sand in a porkpie hat and a dress shirt and a tie with miniature Wheeler flags on it. In the same season that some landlubberly CPAs in Queens were getting ready to dispossess the progenitor’s business, another distraught man, in Idaho, absent of both physical and mental health, stared at his shotgun. I wonder if Hemingway even knew Howard Wheeler’s name.

  There’s a Bruce Springsteen song called “Atlantic City” with this line: “Well now everything dies, baby that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” So
I can report this happy fact: a Wheeler rising yet again. A great-grandson of Howard E.’s, Wesley Wheeler, who is Wes Wheeler’s son, and so has pleasure boats in his blood, has sought to remake Wheeler Yacht Company on a small scale at a shipyard in North Carolina.

  He was a world-class pack rat and kept all kinds of pieces of paper, uncounted numbers of which have passed down to posterity. These receipts and tickets and bills of sale—from trains, steamship lines, hotels, hardware stores, laundries, bullfights, barbershops, taxidermists, automobile dealerships, heavyweight championship bouts, rod-and-reel outfitters—along with his letters, Western Union telegrams, journals, fishing logs, and list-makings on the front and back of envelopes, translate to manna from heaven for anyone trying to grasp a life. And yet at other times, Ernest Hemingway has a canny way of disappearing from sight, like Houdini doing a trunk trick. Documentation for a significant moment, event, incident, or day just goes missing. Maybe he’s having a great horse laugh about it now from wherever he is.

  The sad fact is we know next to nothing about the day he went to Cropsey Avenue. I am convinced the date was Thursday, April 5, no matter that others have fixed it as April 4. (You can consult the endnotes for my argument.) Did he and Pauline flag down the first taxi they saw outside Scribners? What time of day—early afternoon? What was the route to Brooklyn? How long did they stay at the boatyard, and with whom did they shake hands there, and what did they do afterward, when they’d motored back into the city? (There had to have been magnums of champagne involved.) Biographer Carlos Baker, in his 1969 pioneering study, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, has him coming back to his hotel “in a state of rapture”—and who’d want to disagree?

  What we do have are some excited Hemingway descriptions of the boat in letters to friends and business associates in the days and weeks and months afterward, and two documents from the company. The first is a postdated purchase order, the second a bill of sale (which shows the date that the balance was paid off, in Key West, on the day after the boat had arrived). The purchase order, dated April 18, 1934, states the price (which ended up changing by a modest amount, reflected in the subsequent bill of sale); provides a description of Pilar’s power plant; gives an anticipated delivery date (which wasn’t far off from the actual delivery date); and lists the agreed-on modifications and alterations to “one 38-foot twin cabin Playmate cruiser.” This one-page document on legal-size paper tells us nothing, though, about the emotional texture of that day in Brooklyn. That you have to make up almost entirely in your mind.

  STATES OF RAPTURE

  At sea, that first or second summer

  I HAVE NO PROOF that the boat-owner-to-be, with Gingrich’s wad in his pocket, took the elevator (or maybe the stairs) from Max Perkins’s fifth-floor office down to the street and grabbed the first taxi he saw. Maybe he went to his hotel and changed into different clothes. Maybe he went straight to his bank and deposited the check. Maybe he and Pauline, feeling flush, had an expensive lunch on Esquire. But what I picture (guided by the maps and hunches of the reference assistants at the Brooklyn Public Library) is that at some soon-after point a cabbie conveyed husband and wife over the Manhattan Bridge, got onto Flatbush Avenue, negotiated around Prospect Park, connected to Ocean Parkway, and then followed that down through the spine of the borough before turning back west and taking several side streets over to Cropsey and then to Cropsey’s foot.

  Was the old man waiting to greet them when they arrived? He must have been. He loved taking people through, making personal introductions, the more so if they were somebodies. Wouldn’t they have hit it right off, the monarch of literature, the purveyor of pleasure boats, both sharing the name Ernest?

  As noted, the purchase order has the date April 18 on it, but surely that’s the date the document was typed up and mailed to Hemingway in Key West for his executing signature. This piece of paper was the formal sealing of the bargain that had been made two weeks before in person at the shipyard. The modifications Hemingway ordered for Pilar at Wheeler raised the cost by $455 from the $7,000 catalog price that he had fixed in his mind and had been contemplating since Africa. But Hemingway wouldn’t know the “final” price (it wasn’t) until he received the purchase order in the mail.

  ORDER

  For: One 38-foot twin cabin Playmate cruiser

  Power: One Chrysler Crown reduction gear engine, and trolling motor (see below)

  Equipment: Complete as per catalogue.

  Special Details:

  * Gas tanks to be four 75-gallon galv.

  * Two copper lined fish boxes to be built in after deck

  * Sheer for approximately 10′ from transom to be lowered about 12″

  * A live fish well to be installed in boat with proper valves for filling and emptying

  * A settee to be built on portside similar to one now on starboard side

  * Hull to be painted black

  * A 4-cylinder Lycoming straight drive engine to be installed for trolling purposes. This motor to be installed as a unit entirely independent of main power plant, and all controls and instruments are to be at steering position

  * Name to be “Pilar” of Key West

  * Builder to furnish shipping cradle, pay for insurance, and deliver to purchaser complete afloat at Miami, Florida, for the amount set forth below.

  The amount “set forth below” was $7,455. That figure would grow to $7,495 after the purchaser decided—apparently after he’d studied the specs some more at home—that he wanted part of Pilar’s cockpit to be enclosed with copper screens. This was the final price, and it got reflected on the bill of sale, a one-page document dated May 5, 1934, and executed with a company signature in Key West on May 12, 1934, after the balance was paid, and following the two-day shakedown cruise from Miami.

  The bill of sale helps establish the chronology of events. The purchase order of April 18 stated the terms at “$3,000.00 with order.” This suggests Hemingway had turned over Gingrich’s money—or at least his own bank check—on the day he and Pauline went to the factory and put in the order. (I couldn’t find a paper trail.) It’s possible Hemingway could have sent the down payment after he put in the order. But that doesn’t seem like it would have been sound business practice on Wheeler’s part, nor does it seem in keeping with what I know about Hemingway. He liked to pay as he went.

  The estimated delivery date was “About two weeks. Subject to steamer sailings.” That turned out to be reasonably accurate: by April 18, when the document was typed up and mailed to Florida, the builders at Wheeler had been at work on Hemingway’s boat for approximately two weeks; in three more weeks, she’d arrive in Miami.

  Roughly seven weeks after the day he went to Cropsey—and roughly two weeks after Pilar was in his possession—on May 25, 1934, Hemingway, wrote a letter to Gingrich succinctly describing what he’d just acquired: “The boat is marvelous. Wheeler, 38 footer, cut down to my design. 75 horse Chrysler and a 40 h. Lycoming. Low stern for fishing. Fish well, 300 gal gas tanks. 100 gal water. Sleeps six in cabin and two in cockpit. Can turn on its own tail burns less than three gals an hour trolling and four at cruising speed with the big engine. Will do sixteen with the two motors. The little one will do five hooked up.”

  He wrote that at the beginning of his first summer with Pilar. Toward the end of that fishing season, on September 27, Hemingway described his boat again in a letter to his old boxing and painting and fishing pal from Paris days, Mike Strater:

  This boat is a marvel for fishing. Takes any sea comfortably and can turn on her tail to chase a fish. Can literally turn in her own length. Comfortable to live on board, big galley, five big beds, damned roomy and a wonderful fishing machine. With the reduction gear on the big motor we can troll ten hours a day on less than twenty gallons and can speed up to do sixteen miles when we need to head a fish. Had two of those major chairs made here for 23 bucks apiece.

  He wrote that from the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Cuba, on stationery monogrammed with “Atlantic Refining
Company of Cuba.” He started the letter, “Dear Mike. This note paper doesn’t mean old hem has sold out to the oil boys.… Just picked it up in the hall.”

  The man in a rapture came back into Manhattan from Brooklyn. Pauline left for home by rail. For the next several days Hemingway made the rounds of in-laws and close friends and, one wouldn’t doubt, New York saloons. He saw the Murphys. He saw Waldo Peirce and Sydney Franklin. (The first was a painter and outdoorsman; the second an American bullfighter from Brooklyn, son of a Flatbush cop, whom Hemingway had celebrated and profiled in Death in the Afternoon.)

  That Friday night, the sixth, he went to Uncle Gus Pfeiffer’s apartment and showed a roomful of guests three reels of home movies from the safari. Sometime that weekend, he saw Edwin Balmer, the editor of Redbook magazine. Balmer, a native Chicagoan, fifteen years older, had gone out of his way a decade and a half before to try to help twenty-year-old Hemingway get published. Hemingway was the famous man now, and the veteran editor was the one with awe in his eye and eagerness in his voice, hoping to snare some new piece of Hemingway fiction. Hemingway hadn’t forgotten Balmer’s earlier kindness, when he was so raw, back in Illinois and up in Michigan. “I am too grateful to you for the trouble you took with me when my stuff was worthless and for encouragement and good advice you gave me,” Hemingway wrote from Key West, four months after they’d met in New York, addressing him still as “Mr. Balmer.”