He came back once, maybe a year and a half later. He was living in Missoula by then, in another medical job. He’d served Valerie with divorce papers. (The divorce would drag on for three and a half years—until October 1987.) Into the pharmacy one summer day tottered this wide, short figure wearing a cockeyed wig and a fire-engine-red two-piece suit and matching high heels. No female in the historical memory of Garfield County had ever shown up downtown in a red suit on a summer’s day. The person sat down at the old 1937 soda fountain, asked for a Coke. Fitzgerald: “I was down the way filling prescriptions. None of us knew what to say. We pretended not to know it was him. I guess it was our embarrassment. He had the Greg voice. He made the ugliest woman you ever saw. I think he wanted us to recognize him. I think I see now we weren’t giving him the one thing he wanted most—to be recognized, to be addressed as Greg. We did not do this.” Gigi finished his Coke, got up, and left.
So he was in Missoula, home of the University of Montana, with a writer or would-be writer under every rock, sleeping in his car, living in an upper room in an alley off Spruce Street, or booking himself for weeks at a time into room 102 at the Thunderbird Motel. For the rest of his life, Gigi would make this room and this motel, with its big red western neon welcoming sign, one of his safe havens. Years later, after his sex change, he’d come back to 102 during his recovery and say to the motel owner, Thelma Baker (to whom he’d once proposed), “Thelma, you’re my only friend.”
He moved into a two-level apartment just out of Missoula, on Rattlesnake Creek. His bedroom window looked out on the rushing stream, which supported populations of cutthroats and rainbows. On the other side of the creek was a narrow little park with benches, and he’d go across just before dark and sit and look at the water. In late June 1985, his second child, John, who was in his mid-twenties and had been living in Italy, came to visit. Gigi left him a key beneath the doormat. John opened the door to rank odors, broken furniture, gouges in the walls. Gigi was working as a doctor over in Deer Lodge—although not for long.
One morning, Gigi, who’d been out all night, stuck his head in the apartment. From Strange Tribe: “Greg was wearing a blond wig, a knee-length, cream-colored sequined dress, and matching high-heeled shoes. His cherry-red lipstick was smudged, and he reminded me of a four-year-old who’s decided to play with his mother’s cosmetics.” This was the first time John had witnessed his father in women’s clothing. Gigi went up to his room and put on khakis and a polo shirt and they went out to pancakes at the Four B’s restaurant. The father tried to explain to his son about his lifelong need to wear nylons and dresses and makeup.*
Not long after, John and Gigi drove up to Canada to pick up John’s girlfriend, Ornella (who today is John’s wife and mother of his two children). On the way down to Missoula, Gigi began flirting with Ornella. He plucked her flowers from the roadside and handed them over like a smitten boy. Back at the apartment there was an ugly scene. This was Friday, July 12, 1985. Gigi banged out of the place and stayed out all night. At dawn, drunk or high or both, he tried to invade a woman’s aerobics class at the Missoula Athletic Club—in bare feet and a sports bra and red hot-pants. Later that morning he showed up at the Four B’s, and when they wouldn’t serve him because he was in drag, he kicked out the glass in the front door. (He was wearing shoes by then.) The manager called the cops, but Gigi beat it in his car over to East Missoula, where he stood at a pay phone outside a liquor store and called up a writer named William Kittredge. “Bill,” he said, in an oddly dignified voice, “I need a keeper. Might you be that person?” Kittredge wasn’t, but he helped out with some money and a cheap motel room. But Gigi was too agitated. About midnight he came back to the apartment on Rattlesnake Creek and fell into his water bed, and early on Sunday the police were at the door to arrest him. He went without incident, with a sad little wave at his son and his son’s girlfriend. On Monday, John was in the courtroom when his father shuffled in wearing an orange jumpsuit. Gigi wrote furious notes, which he kept trying to hand over to the court. Municipal Judge Wallace Clark, who knew Gigi and liked him and was an old military type, sentenced him to six months. A day or so later, Gigi put in a collect call to Larry Howell, the police reporter for the local paper, the Missoulian. He told Howell that the only reason he’d pleaded guilty was because he thought the judge would be lenient. He said he’d been dressed as a woman when he kicked out the door of the Four B’s because he was the son of Ernest Hemingway and was doing research for a novel. He told the reporter to go over to the public library and take out a copy of Papa, and to look at his jacket photograph, and then to come to the jail to talk to him. Howell did this and wrote a small story with this headline: “Hemingway Lands in Jail.” Two weeks later, Gigi got released to the custody of a psychologist at a clinic in Butte, where he dodged treatment. But word was out now in wider ways. His story was making the papers, at least locally.
Nine months later, on April 9, 1986, this Missoulian headline: “Hemingway Jailed on Criminal Mischief Charges.” The story, by the same reporter, told how Gigi had kicked in another door and thrown a rock through a window while dressed as a woman. The manager of the Rancho Motel said Gigi had been making sexual advances toward two employees. The police report said he was writing himself prescriptions and was drunk. They transferred him to the psychiatric wing of St. James Hospital in Butte. After this—not immediately—he’d lose his license to practice medicine in the state. After this, he’d request permission to enter a sanitarium in Atlanta for addicted doctors. According to Valerie Hemingway, when the plane landed in Atlanta, Gigi walked up to a ticket desk and got a flight to Miami, which is where he mainly stayed for the next few years. Through the efforts of a pal with whom he’d been in med school, and who was now director of a pharmacological department at the University of Miami, Gigi got a chance to reenter his profession. He told anyone who’d listen he was going to reapply himself and work doubly hard. He studied intensely for the Florida boards. And then one day he didn’t show up at Jackson Memorial Hospital. It was the last medical try. After this you could find him hanging out in an up-from-hippie Coconut Grove alehouse called the Taurus; or sleeping in Peacock Park down by the waterfront with its whipping sailboat flags; or sitting all day in the woody little library across from the park, reading fiction, biography, newspapers—anything that hit the line of vision.
In early summer 1987, there was a family wedding in south Florida. Much of the extended Hemingway clan came. Gigi wasn’t invited, not that anyone knew where he was, exactly. He was within a causeway or so. And it was right in here, with me knowing practically none of this, just as I was getting set to leave Ketchum and fly back east to try to write a story for my newspaper with a hole in its middle, that the phone in my motel room rang. I remember one of the first things he said, that next evening, when I got into that dark Coconut Grove house with those scary Haitian masks hanging down from the ceiling. It was about fishing. It was about water. He said, “I was down in the Keys the other day. I went bonefishing out in the flats. I used a crab. You put a pole in a holder and then you doze off and then the line jerks you awake.”
Telescoping the next fourteen years in a life that’s too often been misreported, sensationalized, circus-freaked; telescoping them, in order to tell more closely the last several weeks.
In 1988, Gigi had a breast implant. This was the first surgical feint. But he still tended to dress as a man far more often than as a woman. He liked Lacoste polo shirts, and to see that bulge on the left side of his chest, behind the green alligator, was disconcerting for friends and dates and strangers alike. (A woman he was dating told him he was trying to be two ideas at once, which was more or less true.) Three years after the implant, in February 1991, a busty, brassy Florida blond named Ida Mae Galliher followed Gigi into the ladies room of the Taurus, on the edge of downtown Coconut Grove. Galliher, who knew how to drink and swear, and who was ten years younger and a head taller than Gigi, drove a Mercedes convertible. She talked a passab
le game at literature and politics and real estate. “You look like a Hemingway,” she’d told him, as they primped before the mirror in the bathroom. Twenty-one months later, on November 21, 1992, they were married. Fifty guests came to the garden of Gigi’s boyhood home, and sat on white chairs, while cats wandered in and out the many doors of 907 Whitehead and rubbed up against stockings or pant legs. His old boyhood home had been a museum since the early 1960s, a National Historic Landmark since 1968.
Money? That night in Coconut Grove, I had asked Gigi about the fact that Hemingway had disinherited his children, but that a negotiation had eventually been reached over the will and with Mary Hemingway. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about money. But I had been able to find out that royalties from foreign book sales currently being shared by the three sons almost always came to at least $120,000 annually for each, except that Gigi’s part was under the control of a court-appointed conservator.
In August 1994, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers looked up Gigi out west with one of Gigi’s sons. A decade earlier, Meyers had interviewed Gigi and Valerie for his work in progress. Gigi had recently bought a house on Airport Road in Ennis, Montana. He and his fourth wife were in the midst of a divorce, and he’d trashed the new place almost before he’d moved in. “Are you still fucking my wife?” Gigi asked, trying to punch Meyers in the stomach. Gigi offered his guest a beer and sat across the table from him, jabbing the opener in his direction. Meyers described the encounter in a 1999 piece for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Wrote Meyers: “Transposing his own fantasies onto his father, he claimed that Hemingway couldn’t sleep at night because he dreamed he was a woman.… I tried to look suitably pious as we drove off, but our calm was soon shattered as Gregory, reckless as ever, chased us in his car, forced us off the narrow dirt road and passed us in a cloud of dust at high speed.”
Late that year, Gigi checked into Dr. Stanley Biber’s sex-change clinic in Trinidad, Colorado. Over the next few months, into early 1995, he underwent the series of operations that provided him a woman’s sexual organs. (The surgery is said to have cost $20,000, paid in cash.) His divorce from Ida became final in 1995. He came back to the Thunderbird in Missoula, where his friend Thelma Baker, who’d once been a nurse, looked after him. Gigi’s son, Edward, who was living in Bozeman, also came to help with the care. (He’d left the clinic too early and was experiencing hemorrhaging.) Gigi’s son, Pat, and Pat’s girlfriend came to Missoula and knocked on the door of 102. Gigi, feeling better, was swinging in and out of identities, talking to his boy in a growl about where the beer was, turning to Pat’s girl and speaking in a trilling voice about makeup and how to cross your legs. Weekly, bundles of women’s clothing bought over the QVC channel would arrive at his doorstep.
In the summer of 1995, Gigi, sixty-three years old, attended the First International Hemingway Colloquium in Havana. He came dressed as a man. The conferees found him warm, charming, and witty. One day he and some of the scholars went out to see the finca, and walking up the drive, he stopped, overcome. Later, when he met up with some of his old ball mates from Estrellas de Gigi, he wept again. “We were just boys,” he said.
Five months later, on December 14, back in Florida, staying with his ex-wife at the home they’d purchased the first time around at 3558 Royal Palm Avenue in the Grove, Gigi climbed early one morning onto a city bus. He was in black culottes, nylons, pumps, and a wig. He made sexual advances to the driver. He harassed a female rider. He told the driver that if he turned around one more time, he’d break his jaw. The driver pulled into an Amoco gas station on Southwest Twenty-Fourth Street and called the cops. It wasn’t yet 8:00 a.m. “Let me show you that I’m a woman,” he yelled at the officers. “Are you going to make me put down my skirt? You can get hurt that way.” It took three policemen to subdue him. (They hit him in the shin with an ASP baton, but not before he’d gotten one of them in the groin with the spike of his high heel and had put another on the ground with a bloody mouth.) They booked him as John Doe; later, he told them to put down Gloria Hemingway. He was charged with aggravated battery to a police officer, resisting arrest with violence, and simple assault. He got out on a six-thousand-dollar bond. In Strange Tribe, John Hemingway says that his kid brother, Pat, was in Miami close to the time of Gigi’s court date (which had been set for April 16, 1996). Gigi got his son to meet him at an old Coral Gables motel. From Tribe: “My brother drove over there with a brown paper bag full of the things Greg had asked for.… When Greg finally came out of his room, Pat saw him walk around the block twice.… Patrick said that he was wearing a dress and wasn’t exactly inconspicuous as he tottered along in his high heels.… [I]t was his intention to flee the state. He didn’t want to go to jail and was starting to panic.”
A bit ahead of the court date, on March 26, the police had been called at 3:30 in the afternoon to the wooden-gated house on Royal Palm Avenue. Ida—who had said to friends that she had allowed Gigi back in because he had nowhere else to go, and, anyway, they still loved each other—told the officers that Gigi had stolen her car, had returned, had thrown a glass of Coke at her head, had declared, “I’ll see you dead.” What’s astonishing in these incidents is how he kept managing not to serve real time.
That July, in Herb Caen’s Monday gossip column, in the San Francisco Chronicle, there were the usual three dozen or so banalities for the morning transit riders, including this item: “The youngest son of one of the most macho American writers has just had the complete sex change operation and I guess that’s showing Ol’ Hairy Chest.”
Still, there were moments of the old calm and decency. On July 4, 1999, the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center opened in Piggott, Arkansas. Gregory and Ida Hemingway were the guests of honor; they’d gotten remarried, before a judge, two years earlier, in Washington State. Gigi wore a suit and cut the ribbon at the ceremony. It was 102 in the shade. He went over to the parlor of his aged aunt Matilda, who was Pauline’s sister-in-law, and sat holding her hand. And yet, three weeks later, in Oak Park, at a party marking the one hundredth birthday of his father, Gigi was a wreck. His two brothers had come for the celebration. “I can’t go in there,” he said to an organizer, sitting on a step, crying. Inside, the crowd was singing, “Happy Birthday, Dear Ernest.”
Six months later, in January 2000, he and his wife showed up in Bimini for another Hemingway conference. He was fine, if distant, company. There were no crackpot ravings or schemes for winning a Nobel Prize in science. He went out fishing with several of the scholars. The sessions were held in the same little white clapboard Wesley Methodist chapel his father used to slip into, after a day on Pilar, to watch light shaft across the wooden pews. Mostly, Gigi sat by himself up front, in a white guayabera. He was very round now. He had a bad left hip and clogged arteries and high blood pressure. There was something waxy and not quite real about his features. But you could have studied him from behind and almost convinced yourself: it’s him. The other him.
*At an international Hemingway conference in Kansas City in 2008, John Hemingway and I met and became friends. We talked of the Missoula incidents and others like it. John was almost forty-eight and lived in Montreal with his wife and two children. Tribe had come out the year before. I asked why he wrote the book, but I knew why—the answer was implicit on nearly every page. He said, “It made me angry that a lot of people thought of my father as some kind of circus freak. As if there was no explanation or logic for all his torments. As a son, who loved him, even though I’d gone years without talking to him, I found this personally insulting. See, there was a time when I was blaming my father for everything bad that had ever happened in my life.” John wore jeans and sneakers and carried a knapsack. He was short and compact and muscled. The Hemingway grin was there. He spoke in a softly charged voice. If he was emotionally generous, he was also self-protective. He’d jump backward as he spoke. He’d say something, and then the quick little hop back. It was like a fighter, feinting. I asked if he got together muc
h with his seven siblings. “No, no,” he said, laughing. I asked about the order of Gigi’s kids. He answered slowly, needing to think it through. Lorian was first; he was second. He tabbed on his fingers: Maria, Patrick, Sean, Edward, Vanessa—and Brendan, who was out of the order, because he was Valerie’s son by the Irish author Brendan Behan. “Yeah, that’s all of us,” he said, pleased.
It’s the last photograph, so far as I know, ever taken of Ernest Hemingway’s youngest son while he was still alive: a police mug shot, recorded, along with a right thumbprint, at about 1:05 p.m. on Wednesday, September 26, 2001, Gigi’s last day as a free man (well, he was free only for part of that morning, until his 12:15 p.m. arrest), five days before his heart went into cardiac arrest on a cement floor.
If you knew nothing of his life, would you ever guess, from looking at this picture? I’m not talking about his surgical alterations but about his apparent devil-may-careness. Why does he appear so … untroubled? This can’t be somebody living his life in deep shame. It’s just some middle-aged, or maybe late-middle-aged, semi-androgynous guy with beach-boy hair and a toothy smile and what looks like a reddened nose and a gaze going straight at the lens. (That choker necklace was bought in a Key West trinket shop a few years earlier.)
That’s a white hospital gown bunched around his shoulders.
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