Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  These worries. Keep it in code. And yet the caring—undeniably.

  When Gigi was let out, in mid-October, Hemingway flew over to Miami to meet him and they drove down to Key West in a rented car, stopping at various bridges to look at the sea. So far as anyone seems to know, this is the last time they were ever physically together. Two months later, Gigi was back in the same hospital.

  A couple of months later, he got this letter from his father: “Times are really rough now and going to be much rougher.… When I have to worry about you I can’t write. It knocks everything out of my head and this is the time I have to work or else.… Have been lashing myself to work for so long under difficulties, bad financial problems, no chance to get out on the boat for nearly two months with this godawful weather.” The letter’s date is February 4, 1958. The black-sheep son was still two and a half years from starting medical school (Gigi got admitted to the class of 1959 at the University of Miami School of Medicine, but dropped out almost immediately); two and a half years from reading his mother’s autopsy; two and a half years from writing a letter in his bad penmanship to his wrecked father that said, no, it couldn’t have been me, it was you.

  In July 1968, seven years after the Idaho suicide, four years from finishing med school, a thirty-six-year-old bipolar doctor, who’d become a doctor, in spite of everything, took his daughter, Lorian, on a fishing trip to Bimini. Gigi was now the father of five children, by three women. He was also a medical resident in anesthesiology. (He wouldn’t finish this residency, at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, as he hadn’t completed an earlier orthopedic fellowship in Boston.) Gigi’s wife now was Valerie Danby-Smith, from Ireland, who’d been raised in a convent boarding school. He’d met and picked her up (literally, in a borrowed station wagon) at his father’s funeral. For a brief time, Valerie had worked as his father’s last secretary and fantasy love projection. (Hemingway met her in Spain, in 1959, when she was nineteen.) She’d soon be giving birth to Gigi’s sixth child.

  Actually, Gigi had married this third wife twice by this time—first in Mexico City, in September 1966, when he wasn’t yet unmarried from his second wife, Alice, who, a few months before, in March 1966, had given birth to Gigi’s fourth child. (His name is Patrick Hemingway.) Gigi had taken care of these complications, and had married Valerie again, in Miami, in November of the succeeding year, that is, 1967, with a champagne toast at Uncle Les’s house in Miami Beach.

  Has that confused you? At almost any point where you try to pick up Gigi’s story, its zigs and zags will drive you nuts.

  The fishing story isn’t confusing at all. It amounts to a chapter in Lorian Hemingway’s Walk on Water, a slim, beautiful book about all kinds of angling and all kinds of legacies. Lorian is Gigi’s first child, another writer in the family, like her younger half brother, John. She’s a small woman with dark-socketed eyes, an old soul, older than her years, who has lived a life of pain, much of it self-rendered. Walk was published in 1998, three years before Gigi died. The two never got to spend very much time together. Of Gigi and his lifelong gender tortures, Lorian writes: “The truth is, I never had a clue until my mother told me that he sometimes wore her girdle and painted his nails a bright, clean red. Not until, say, the change of life had become a foregone thing. I’ve seen pictures. He looks like Ethel Merman. Around Mother’s Day, in the Hallmark section, I am tortured. There are no greeting cards that read, ‘Thinking of you fondly, transvestite Dad.’ Or, ‘On your special day, Whatsit.’ ” That would sound mean if you didn’t understand how much hurt it’s filtered through.

  Lorian was sixteen when her dad took her over to the speck of sand and coral that his own dad had conquered in the thirties aboard Pilar. Lorian hadn’t seen Gigi in more than ten years. Still, she wished to think of him as a father. She needed a real father: in tenth grade, she’d been expelled twice. Against her mother’s advice, she’d located Gigi, wrote to him, got back in the mail a plane ticket to Miami. On the way to the Bahamas, they stared out the scratched windows of the Grumman Goose at the twenty shades of blue, trying to think of things to say. “Marlin,” Gigi told Lorian. “We are going for the great blue marlin. Four hundred pounds, five hundred pounds, six hundred pounds in these waters. Monsters, huge, their bills like swords, their girth massive. You hook into one and they walk on water.”

  They chartered a boat from Captain Bob Smith, famous Bimini guide. Out of sight of Gigi, Captain Bob made a gagging reflex with his finger: he was telling Lorian that her dad always got sick on boats.

  “ ‘You say he never catches fish,’ I asked, feeling vaguely ashamed.

  “ ‘No fish, mon, sure. I tell you right.’ ”

  Except that this time they hooked into a monster. “The rod butt was wedged securely in the gimbal on the belt around my father’s waist, his left hand white knuckle as it clutched the grip on the butt.… I looked at my father, at the pure fear that washed his face.… The panic in his eyes, the strong need to not screw up, was all over him like a rash. I could even smell it on him.”

  The fish dived and Gigi didn’t slack to him. The line snapped.

  “My father looked broken. There is no other word for it. He sat crumpled in the chair, folded in on himself, his face an odd off-white, and I couldn’t help myself. I reached out, touching my fingertips lightly to his forehead.”

  Lorian said, “Sorry, Greg.”

  Her dad: “You’re a pretty girl.” He reached over and drew his fingers along the side of her cheek. “A very pretty girl. Call me ‘Father,’ would you?” In a minute Gigi got sick over the side. As he pulled himself up, Lorian saw the nail polish, “a slash of it on two cracked and dirty nails … a red bright as the inside of the marlin’s hooked jaw.”

  The chapter ends: “The next time I saw him was twenty years later, in a photo, a glossy eight-by-ten, and in that picture he is a woman, a stocky, bowlegged brute of a woman but a woman nonetheless. His hair is frosted in a bouffant style, his nose bobbed and straightened, and he grins to show two even rows of capped teeth.”

  The saddest line in Lorian’s sad, beautiful book appears several pages before: “How did it feel, exactly, to keep losing?”

  In the late sixties and into the back half of the seventies, Gigi lived mainly in New York City with his third family. These years amounted to something like stability—not that there weren’t hospitalizations, and shock treatments, and much self-medication (lithium was the new hope, although he tended not to self-prescribe it), and crazed sprees in the women’s department at Saks Fifth Avenue. (The pattern was to wear the stuff once, stuff it in a Dumpster. The pattern was also to take from his wife’s closet, return the things stinking of cheap perfume and caked around their stretched-out necks—if they were dresses—with dime store makeup.)

  He held a string of jobs that bored him, working as a part-time in-house physician at corporations like Standard Oil, General Motors, and McGraw-Hill publishers. He took his kids on Saturday mornings to a playground in Central Park called Little Egypt. He wrote Papa, not without alienating editors and switching publishing houses and offending many others, including his uncle Les, who’d helped raise several of his children, and who’d agreed to help out in some of the writing of the memoir, but who’d ended up getting stiffed for any fee or percentage of the royalties. (They went to court but then settled and didn’t speak again.) Still, the book must have brought to him all he dreamed of: toasts from Norman Mailer at Elaine’s restaurant, cover of The New York Times Book Review, alternate selection at the Book-of-the-Month Club. It was almost as if he were beating the subject of the damn book, not that the feeling could last.

  It was also in this period that Gigi began talking out loud about the possibility of turning himself surgically into a woman. The esteemed British travel writer James Morris had altered himself sexually in Morocco in 1972. If James could become Jan, why couldn’t Gigi become Gloria? “If I had a sex change, could we still be friends? Could we continue living together as girlfriends, going
out to lunch, shopping and to the beauty parlor? Wouldn’t it be fun?” Gigi said one night to his wife, after the kids were in bed in the family’s two-bedroom apartment on East Eighty-seventh Street. Valerie Hemingway has told this story, and so many others, in her brave Hemingway family memoir, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, which, like Strange Tribe, got unjustly ignored when it appeared in 2004. Her directness and unpretentiousness and honesty are what move the reader, and yet, having said that, it also needs to be said that, in 2002, when Rolling Stone magazine did a long piece on Gigi (“The Good Son”), publishing it close to the first anniversary of his death, Valerie Hemingway was quoted as saying, “He was a very smart, very with-it, all-together person. And we had a lot of fun together. I never, ever saw him cross-dressed.” Was the embarrassment over her husband’s life too much to own up to, at least initially, at least in the pages of Rolling Stone, in the way the embarrassment and horror of what Ernest Hemingway did on that Sunday morning in Ketchum was too much for his wife to admit to, at least in the immediate aftermath? At the close of Running with the Bulls, having quietly told so many Gigi stories, Valerie says, “[H]e suffered far more than anyone I have ever known.” She would have been including in that statement Gigi’s father.

  Montana is a very large part of the Gigi Hemingway story. It’s where he lived on and off for the last quarter century of his life, where so much hope and hard work and honest doctorly trying came to dust.

  In the summer of 1976, when he was forty-four, and on the heels of his literary triumph, Gigi secured his first Montana medical job. His brother Pat lived in Bozeman; Jack was one state over, in Ketchum. Under that big tent of western sky, near his siblings, he hoped to save himself. He worked as a general practitioner in the old fur-trading town of Fort Benton. It was a good job, but after a year or so he walked off.

  By the late seventies, with Valerie and the kids still living in New York, Gigi had signed on as a country doctor in Jordan, Montana. This was his best moment in medicine, and he made the moment last for almost five years, until the spring of 1983. The town, in the far eastern part of the state, had a population of six hundred; the county, fifteen hundred. Garfield County’s four-bed hospital, with its adjoining nursing home, was said to be the remotest hospital in the lower forty-eight. Gigi, with his ratty little red Subaru hatchback, was the sole MD in an area a little smaller than Connecticut. He seized on the work and the place and the life. When I was writing the pieces for The Washington Post, four years after Gigi had lost his practice in Jordan, I spoke on the telephone to about a dozen Garfield Countians. What they wished to remember was all the good, even though they told me eventually of some of the bad. “I’ll tell you what, you never saw a guy work like this,” John Fitzgerald, the town pharmacist, said. “Everything from headaches to delivering babies. Hell, the next nearest town from here is Miles City, and that’s eighty-three miles away. He was a little rusty when he first came here—I don’t think he’d practiced in a while—but, boy, did he work. He rode in the ambulance, he stayed up all night with sick old women. He never once tried to dine out on his name.”

  Gigi lived in a county-provided ratty trailer a block or two from the hospital, which was located in the center of town. Ratty because of the way he kept it. He’d pile up TV dinners and half-eaten pizzas on the floor by the couch, stub out half-smoked cigarettes on the wall and let them fall where they wanted to fall. Forget about making the bed, which always seemed askew of its frame. Forget about flushing the toilet, as long as it was just his pee. But there he was by eight the next day over at the hospital, with his lab coat and stethoscope and amazing energy: Doc, as everybody knew him. Doc Hemingway loved to arm-wrestle townsmen over the counter at the admissions desk—not somebody sick, but maybe a cowboy half his own age who’d brought in his ill wife or young child. Almost always, you could take him. “That’s the funny part,” John Fitzgerald told me. “This muscular little fireplug guy, who thought he was tough, was easy to take. And yet I think Greg was trying to become a man out here again in Jordan. He’d give you twenty-four hours straight, if you had to have it.” Fitzgerald, twelve years younger than Gigi, his closest friend, who’d consult with him on the phone three or four times a day, didn’t tell me about the arm wrestling in our 1987 conversations. He said it a few months ago, as I write. It was twenty-odd years onward from the last time we’d spoken, and Fitzgerald was still the county’s only pharmacist, and Gigi had been dead for almost a decade. The Jordan Drug Company was closing down—Fitzgerald and his wife were about to retire. Jordan’s population was less than three hundred; the county’s below twelve hundred. The high school had forty-four kids—and a six-man football team.

  I also got back in touch with several of the county nurses with whom I’d talked before—they were still there. Jana Olson was getting set to leave Montana, to go over toward Oregon and semi-retirement. Last time, she’d said, “We were doing all we could to try and understand Doctor Hemingway. He had a lot invested here.” This time, in and amid the still-tender mercies, Olson began remembering something else: Gigi’s need to keep his patients alive. “I’ve thought a lot about this,” Olson said. “It was something way beyond. Doc just wouldn’t let people die. Elderly people who needed to be allowed to die. Their veins so fragile. He’d demand another IV. They’d be so edematous. It was like water under their skin. I’d say to myself, ‘Why are we doing this IV antibiotic on someone who should be allowed to die?’ There was this one woman—her third vein blew. I told him I wouldn’t try again. He’d just come in. He grabbed her chart. He screamed at me, ‘We’re keeping this woman alive, do you hear me?’ ”

  I told Olson about Pauline. The line fell quiet.

  Valerie and the family came west on July 4, 1980—Gigi’s pleading had finally paid off. (Their youngest child, Vanessa Hemingway, whose name he’d already tried on a time or two, in his trailer, along with the corsets and girdles, was ten.) But the family didn’t settle in Jordan, rather in Bozeman, 320 miles to the east. Bozeman was a city, with a university. He and Valerie bought a house on Bridger Canyon Road, up by Bridger Bowl, in the ski basin. The plan was for Gigi to go back and forth every other weekend. He had worked hard to get everything in place before the family arrived: horses for the kids, camping equipment, ski equipment, fishing gear, rubber rafts for river running, a snowmobile. He’d gotten the snowmobile secondhand from John Fitzgerald, who tried to help him wedge it into the back of his hatchback. They roped it in and let a quarter of it stick out the back. Just as he was leaving town, it started to snow—heavily. Gigi pulled his ski cap down over his ears, turned the heater up full blast, and drove the six hours to Bozeman with a near blizzard filling up the back of his car. Years before, when he was a med student, trying to make it back to Miami from Bimini in a hurricane on a Sunday afternoon in his fifteen-foot open skiff with its two twin Johnson outboards, he’d been warned by the locals not to go. He went anyway—gunning the Johnsons like a madman, trying simultaneously to bale out the skiff with a bucket.

  For the next several years, things went along, sort of. From Running with the Bulls: “The weekends passed. Sometimes Greg came home, sometimes not. He always arrived late and it was clear he had stopped at a motel on the way to indulge his habit. He became increasingly careless, arriving with obvious lipstick stains, eye makeup, ears bloody from self-piercing, traces of nail polish. During the weekends he was distant and quarrelsome or weepy and apologetic.” Okay, but how exhausted must he have been: 640 miles, round-trip, by car, every other weekend, and all that doctoring—to a Connecticut-size county—in between?

  There were two bars in Jordan. The Hell Creek was the cowboy bar. It was the “uptown” drinking establishment. You could make a movie there—cane chairs with swirled backs, big mirrors behind the bar, polished old dark wood to lean your elbows on and order up. Into the Hell Creek one Friday night came Doc in drag. He had on a blond wig and heels. His unshaven face was smudged with makeup. He ordered a drink. He took
out a little coin purse. There wasn’t enough money in the purse, so he pulled up his dress and fished out a bill from inside his pantyhose. On Monday he was on the job. “That was the thing,” Fitzgerald said. “Everyone knew; no one said a word. We needed him here; hell, we loved him here. He worked so hard. Too much damage to this man.”

  One day Gigi called the hospital administrator a “cocksucker” and chased him upstairs. One day he got one of the nurses by the neck, pinning her on the wall, holding her up by the V fold of her scrubs. “Don’t you ever question my authority,” he yelled. One weekend—it was spring of 1983—he didn’t come home. The telephone rang on Bridger Canyon Road. The police department in Ketchum was calling. With his wife’s identification, Gigi had gone into Sun Valley boutiques and tried on women’s clothes, smearing them with lipstick and makeup before he came out of the dressing stall. He’d ruined $1,000 of merchandise.

  The newest mania—already in full swing—was winning the Boston Marathon that April. The country doc from Montana began telling anyone who’d listen he was going to make history by winning the Boston Marathon at age fifty-one. “He’d run twenty miles in the wind around here,” John Fitzgerald recalled. “He sent away and got every map there was of the course layout. He’d sit with me for hours and go over the route. I think he had the whole course memorized—a thirty-one percent grade here, a wide turn there. He had to win that damn race—or place very high.”

  To this day, people in Jordan and Bozeman believe he competed, but Valerie Hemingway says in Bulls that he never flew to Boston, didn’t check into his reserved room at the Copley Plaza, but rather hid out somewhere else. He’d arranged for a leave of absence from the county commissioners and the hospital administrator, and he stayed away far past his leave. John Fitzgerald got a call maybe two weeks after the race. Listen, John, I fought hard, but couldn’t finish. Listen, John, need a favor—would you go down to the hospital and make up some story about why I’m not back? Fitzgerald said he wouldn’t do that. Gigi slammed down the phone. A week later, he drove into town, stopped at the drugstore, went to his trailer, threw some things together, and drove out of town on the same day.