Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  "I should get through to him," Ernest said, staying with the polar bear, "but I haven't talked bear talk for some time and I may be rusty." The keeper smiled. Ernest edged in close to the bars. He began to speak to the bear in a soft, musical voice totally unlike his gorilla language, and the bear stopped pacing. Ernest kept on talking, and the words, or I should say sounds, were unlike any I had ever heard. The bear backed up a little and grunted, and then it sat on its haunches and, looking straight at Ernest, it began to make a series of noises through its nose, which made it sound like an elderly gentleman with severe catarrh.

  "I'll be goddamned!" the keeper said.

  Ernest smiled at the bear and walked away, and the bear stared after him, bewildered. "It's Indian talk," Ernest said. "I'm part Indian. Bears like me. Always have."

  Although Ernest liked to watch movies in his living room in Cuba, the only ones he went to see in New York were those based upon his books and stories, and then he went in a spirit of self-imposed duress. For days before taking the plunge, he would talk about his onerous duty of going to see such a movie and would circle the project as a hunter circles his quarry before moving in for the kill. He made his decision on A Farewell to Arms following lunch at Le Veau d'Or one day, after expostulating for three days on why he was going "to give it a miss." This was the David O. Selznick remake that starred Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson. Ernest lasted thirty-five minutes. Afterward we walked along Forty-ninth Street and up Fifth Avenue in silence. Finally Ernest said, "You know, Hotch, you write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer."

  We saw The Sun Also Rises the day before the start of the 1957 World Series, for which Ernest had made a special trip. When Mary asked him how he liked it, he said, "Any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy."

  The only movie that Ernest himself had anything to do with was The Old Man and the Sea. He edited the script and then spent weeks with a camera crew off the coast of Peru, catching large marlins that never got hooked at the right hour for the Technicolor cameras; so like all movie marlins, they wound up being sponge-rubber fish in a Culver City tank. Ernest sat through all of that movie, numb. "Spencer Tracy looked like a fat, very rich actor playing a fisherman," was his only comment.

  When in New York, Ernest made a point of seeing the television plays I had dramatized from his stories or novels. I would arrange for them to be shown at CBS on a closed-circuit set. Of all the shows, the one that he liked best, and the one I always declared to win with, was called "The World of Nick Adams," an episodic drama that I had based upon seven of the Nick Adams stories. It was brilliantly directed by Robert Mulligan; and after Ernest had seen it and the viewing-room lights came up, he said, "Well, Hotch, you got it on the screen as good as I got it on paper." That was the best compliment I ever received about anything. It was my good fortune that he never wanted to see "The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio," which was a disaster from beginning to end. He liked most of the three-hour For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I did for two successive Playhouse 90s with Jason Robards, Maria Schell, Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton playing the leads; he thought, however, I should have included more material favorable to the Nationalist cause. "But you got the spirit of the people, with their tempers and their true unwashed smells, and that's what counts. You see the cinema version? The big love scene between Coops and Ingrid and he didn't take off his coat. That's one hell of a way for a guy to make love, with his coat on—in a sleeping bag. And Ingrid, in her tailored dress and all those pretty curls—she was strictly Elizabeth Arden out of Abercrombie and Fitch."

  Ernest's attitude toward New York shopping was the same as his attitude toward movie-going; he circled for days and then finally made the distasteful plunge. In no area was his innate shyness more pronounced than in a store. The mere sight of sales counters and salespeople caused him to break out in a sweat, and he either bought the first thing they showed him or bolted before they got the merchandise off the racks. The one exception to this shopping syndrome was Abercrombie & Fitch, especially its gun department and shoe department. But even at Abercrombie's a salesman in the clothing department would have been well advised to hold Ernest by the sleeve while turning his back to get a trench coat off the rack.

  Actually, Ernest's attire was very restricted and, in a manner of speaking, constituted a uniform; the leather vests, the knitted tan skullcap, the gott mit uns leather belt which had been appropriated from a dead Nazi and was religiously worn with all raiment (it was too wide for the loops of any of his pants, but he wore it anyway outside the loops). He owned one decent jacket, made for him in Hong Kong, two pairs of pants, one pair of shoes and no underwear. I was with him when he went into Mark Cross on Fifth Avenue to buy a bag. The salesman showed him one that held ten suits and cost three hundred dollars. "Can afford the bag," Ernest told him, "but can't afford to buy nine suits."

  But getting back to that October day in 1949 when Ernest checked into the Sherry-Netherland with his Across the River manuscript. On the morning of that day Herbert Mayes (who had succeeded our friend Arthur Gordon as editor of Cosmo) called me into his office and said that eighty-five thousand dollars was so exorbitant as to be beyond reason and I was to tell Mr. Hemingway that, and offer fifty thousand instead. I refused. As far as I was concerned, a solid deal had been made and I was not going to carry the weasel. I offered, however, to bring Mayes and Ernest together so that Mayes could tell Ernest himself. But Mayes decided, with considerable rancor, to let the price stand, and I was dispatched to the Sherry-Netherland to get the manuscript.

  Ernest's suite was well attended when I got there. In the center of the sitting room was a round table on which rested two silver ice buckets, each containing a bottle of Perrier-Jouet, a huge blue tin of beluga caviar, a salver of toast, a bowl of finely chopped onions, a bowl of lemon slices, a salver of smoked salmon and a thin vase containing two yellow tea roses. Around the table were Marlene Dietrich, Mary Hemingway, Jigee Viertel, Charles Scribner, Sr., and George Brown. Off to one side, with a stenographer's pad in her lap, sat Lillian Ross of The New Yorker. Jigee Viertel, formerly Budd Schulberg's wife, at that time married to Peter Viertel, had known the Hemingways for some time and was booked to cross on the lie de France with them. George Brown was one of Ernest's oldest and best friends; the genesis of their friendship was George's demised Brown's Gymnasium, once the hangout of the boxing elite. Ernest always said that George knew more about prize fighting than all the New York managers and trainers put together. Lillian Ross, in her corner, was taking rapid shorthand notes for a profile of Ernest she was doing for The New Yorker. ("It was a shorter hand than any of us knew," Ernest was to say a few months later.)

  Ernest introduced me to his guests and suggested that later on we all go to "21" for dinner. He said that "21" first qualified as his alma mater back in the Twenties at a time when he was living in a little room at the Brevoort. He was behind in his rent and had not eaten solidly for a week when Jack Kriendler, co-owner of "21", eased him into a posh party that was being given on the second floor of the speak-easy. During the course of the evening Ernest was introduced to an Italian girl who he said was the most beautiful girl—face and body— he had ever seen, before or since, any country, any time. "She had that pure Renaissance beauty, black hair straight, eyes round at the bottoms, Botticelli skin, breasts of Venus Rising. After the joint closed and everyone started to leave, she and I took our drinks into the kitchen. Jack said it was okay, since there were two or three hours of cleaning up to be done downstairs. So we talked and drank and suddenly we were making love there in the kitchen and never has a promise been better fulfilled. By now it was five in the morning, and she said we'd better be leaving, but we got only as far as the stairway—you know that landing as you come up the stairs of Twenty-One? That's as far as we got and then we were making love again, on the landing, and it was like being at sea in the most tempestu
ous storm that ever boiled up; you think you'll go under with the rises and falls, but ride it out, knowing you are close to solving the mystery of the deep.

  "She would not let me take her home, but when I awoke the next day in my Brevoort squirrel cage, my first thought was to find her again. As I put on my jacket, I noticed green sticking out of the pocket—three hundred-dollar bills. I hurried back to Twenty-One, but as I came in, Jack pulled me to one side. 'Listen, Ernie,' he said, 'you better lay low for a while. I should have warned you—that was Legs Diamond's girl, and he's due back in town at five o'clock.'"

  We made reservations at "21" and then Ernest led me into the bedroom, where he opened his old, battered leather briefcase and took out the manuscript of the book. "Christ, I wish you were coming along," he said. "This is going to be a jolly autumn. One of my Venice girls has written she is coming to Paris. It will be necessary to maneuver and if you were there with the proofs, we could always go into conference. And when we weren't in conference with the proofs, we could be in conference at Auteuil. Georges could keep track of the form—not this George, Georges the Ritz barman. You know him? Well, he's very classy on form and we could do the field work and I would brain and watch what happens and we could set up a bank and work out of that. Hell, the more I think of it, the more depressed I get that we'll be off on this absolutely jolly autumn and there you'll be behind a desk on Eighth Avenue, and a Hearst desk at that." He pulled at his mustache thoughtfully.

  "Well, Papa," I said, "like Mr. James Durante says, 'It's the conditions that prevail.'"

  "Conditions are what you make them, boy. Now here's what we do." He picked up the manuscript and removed a sheaf of pages from the end of it. "Now you take this to your editor and tell him that it's all there except for the last few chapters, which I'm taking with me because they need more polishing."

  When I handed the manuscript to Herbert Mayes and told him that, he practically leaped out of his chair. "The last few chapters! My God, you know how unreliable he is! The way he drinks! There we'll be, going to press with the third installment and we won't have the ending! You'll have to go with him! Keep after him! Don't let him out of your sight! We must have these chapters by the first of January!"

  When I went back to the Sherry-Netherland later that evening, Ernest was sitting in an armchair, wearing a white tennis visor and reading a book. As I walked into the room, without looking up he said: "When are you leaving?"

  Chapter Three

  Paris ♦ 1950

  Ernest and Mary stayed in their favorite room on the Vendome side of the Ritz. Jigee had a room two down from them, but I, out of a sense of bizarre nostalgia, stayed at the Hotel Opal, a small, cheerless establishment on Rue Tronchet, where I had been briefly quartered during the war, and whose intense discomfort had not registered at the time. They had traveled on the lie de France and I had gone by air a few days later, so we arrived simultaneously. Ernest was delighted to discover that the fall steeplechase meet at Auteuil—the emerald race track in the heart of the Bois de Boulogne—was to start the following day, and he suggested that we do something he had always wanted to do but never had—attend every day of an entire meet. "You get a wonderful rhythm," he said, "like playing ball every day, and you get to know the track so they can't fool you. There's a beauty restaurant at the top, hung right over the track, where you can eat good and watch them as though you were riding in the race. They bring you the cote jaune with the changing odds three times for each race, and you can bet right there, no rushing up and down to the bet cages with your unsettled food jiggling. It's too easy, but wonderful for scouting a race." We each contributed a sum of money to form what Ernest called The Hemhotch Syndicate, with the understanding that we would maintain the syndicate's capital at its inception level. (In later years, when our activities became more diversified, Ernest had us formally incorporated in New Jersey as Hemhotch, Ltd.) To commemorate this liaison and to conform to the European custom of carrying calling cards in one's billfold, we had the following card struck off in a neat, smug type:

  Mr. Ernest Hemingway & Mr. A. E. Hotchner, Esquires announce the formation of a partnership, Hemhotch, Ltd. dedicated to the Pursuit of the Steeplechase, the Bulls, the Wild Duck, and the Female Fandango.

  But that fall in Paris we were at the simpler partnership level of a racing syndicate. Our routine for Auteuil was to convene in the Little Bar of the Ritz every race day at noon, and while Bertin, the maestro of that boite, made us his nonpareil Bloody Marys, we would study the form sheets and make our selections. Sometimes Georges or Bertin or one of the other barmen in the big bar would put some money on our mounts and we would bet it for them. Bertin was an indefatigable student of the track, more occult than scientific, and on one occasion he handed Ernest a list of eight horses which he had brained out as winners of the eight races on the card that day. Ernest studied the list and said, "Okay, tell you what I'll do, Bertin—I'll bet ten thousand francs on each and we'll split the winnings." All of Bertin's horses ran out of the money, but when we returned that day Ernest gave Bertin five thousand francs. "One of your horses got scratched," he told him, "and we saved the loss."

  I do not expect ever to duplicate the pleasure of those Paris steeplechase days. The Degas horses and jockeys against a Renoir landscape; Ernest's silver flask, engraved "From Mary with Love" and containing splendidly aged Calvados; the boisterous excitement of booting home a winner, the glasses zeroed on the moving point, the insistent admonitions to the jockey; the quiet intimacy of Ernest's nostalgia. "You know, Hotch, one of the things I liked best in life was to wake early in the morning with the birds singing and the windows open and the sound of horses jumping." We were sitting on the top steps of the grandstand, the weather damp, Ernest wrapped in his big trench coat, a knitted tan skullcap on his head, his beard close-cropped. We had eaten lunch at the Course restaurant: Belon oysters, omelette with ham and fine herbs, cooked endives, Pont-l'Eveque cheese and cold Sancerre wine. We were not betting the seventh race and Ernest was leaning forward, a pair of rented binoculars swinging from his neck, watching the horses slowly serpentine onto the track from the paddock. "When I was young here," he said, "I was the only outsider who was allowed into the private training grounds at Acheres, outside of Maisons-Laffitte, and Chantilly. They let me clock the workouts—almost no one but owners were allowed to operate a stopwatch—and it gave me a big jump on my bets. That's how I came to know about Epinard. A trainer named J. Patrick, an expatriate American who had been a friend of mine since the time we were both kids in the Italian army, told me that Gene Leigh had a colt that might be the horse of the century. Those were Patrick's words, 'the horse of the century.' He said, 'Ernie, he's the son of Badajoz-Epine Blanche, by Rockminster, and nothing like him has been seen in France since the days of Gladiateur and La Grande Ecurie. So take my advice-beg, borrow or steal all the cash you can get your hands on and get it down on this two-year-old for the first start. After that there'll never be odds again. But that first start, before they know that name, get down on him.'

  "It was my 'complete poverty' period—I didn't even have milk money for Bumby, but I followed Patrick's advice. I hit everyone for cash. I even borrowed a thousand francs from my barber. I accosted strangers. There wasn't a sou in Paris that hadn't been nailed down that I didn't solicit; so I was really 'on' Epinard when he started in the Prix Yacoulef at Deauville for his debut. His price was fifty-nine to ten. He won in a breeze, and I was able to support myself for six or eight months on the winnings. Patrick introduced me to many insiders of the top French race-set of that time. Frank O'Neill, Frank Keogh, Jim Winkfield, Sam Bush and the truly great steeplechase rider Georges Parfremont."

  "How can you remember their names after all these years?" I asked. "Have you seen them since?"

  "No. I have always made things stick that I wanted to stick. I've never kept notes or a journal. I just push the recall button and there it is. If it isn't there, it wasn't worth keeping. Take Parfremont. I can see
him as plainly as I see you, and hear him as I heard him the last time he spoke to me. It was Parfremont who scored the first French victory in the Liverpool Grand National astride James Hennessey's Lutteur III. That's one of the toughest steeple courses in the world and Georges had seen it for the first time the day before the race. He told me how the English trainers had taken him around and shown him the big jumps, and he repeated to me what he had told them: 'The size of the obstacle is nothing—the only danger in steeplechasing is the pace.' Poor Georges. It was his own prophecy. He was killed at the final hedge in a cheap race at Enghien, a hedge that was barely three feet high.

  "The old Enghien—the antique, rustic, conniving Enghien before they rebuilt the stands in pesage and pelouse and all that unfriendly concrete—that was my all-time-favorite track. It had a relaxed, unbuttoned atmosphere. One of the last times I went there—I remember it was with Evan Shipman, who was a professional handicapper as well as a writer, and Harold Stearns, who was 'Peter Pickum' for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune at the time—Harold and Evan were relying on form and drew a blank on the day's card. I hit six winners out of eight. Harold was rather testy about my wins and asked me for the secret of my success. 'It was easy,' I told him. 'I went down to the paddock between races, and I smelled them.' The truth is, where horses are concerned the nose will triumph over science and reason every time."

  Ernest stood up and turned and watched the people crowding to the bet windows. "Listen to their heels on the wet pavement," he said. "It's all so beautiful in this misty light. Mr. Degas could have painted it and gotten the light so that it would be truer on his canvas than what we now see. That is what the artist must do. On canvas or on printed page he must capture the thing so truly that its magnification will endure. That is the difference between journalism and literature. There is very little literature. Much less than we think."