Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  I read it that evening. Mary was absolutely right; it was a compact, exciting adventure, set in the Bahamas during World War II, that involved hunting down the escaped Nazi crew of a sunken U-boat. It was in fact a fictionalized account of what might have happened to Ernest (Thomas Hudson in the book) and his Pilar crew if they had picked up the trail of a U-boat in 1943. It has not yet been published, but undoubtedly will be.

  When I told Ernest my reaction, he said he guessed he had better reread the manuscript. After Honor had read it to him, he said, uncertainly, "Some things I ought to do to it. Maybe after the Paris book, if I can still see enough to write."

  I tried to discourage Ernest from going to the airport with me; he was terribly debilitated from the heat and his own pressures, but he insisted. "Transport out is heavy and tricky these days," he said, "and I want to be sure you're okay." We had been able to get a reservation only because one of Ernest's Cuban friends was an executive with the airline. Castro had cut down outgoing flights to two a day, and there were a lot more people than that who wanted out.

  In the car Ernest turned to me and said, "Hotch, I've been up all night worrying. I wasn't going to say anything because a deal's a deal and you've already done so damn much for me, but it's something I couldn't live with."

  "Well, if it's anything I can possibly do . . ."

  "This deal with Life. I know it's all set and legally I'm bound to it, but Christ! How did I ever sign on like that? I'll sell out three issues for them for less than I got for the one issue that had The Old Man and the Sea in it. You see, it started to be one thing and then became another and then another and I boxed myself into a corner. But this will be a year of heavy taxes and I don't know where it's coming from. I don't want to borrow from Scribner's; I don't like borrowing there now that old Charlie is gone, but this forty thousand figures to be all I earn in i960. And now I've got to go back to Spain to work on the piece some more so that I can cable them something to update it, and that will eat up a lot more dough."

  He was so anguished that against my honest judgment, which was that Ernest had firmly committed himself to terms, I found myself saying, "Well, why don't I talk to Ed Thompson when I get back?"

  "Promise him first look at the Paris book. With some good Paris pictures it might be a good entry for them."

  "How much more do you want, Papa?"

  "If I could get seventy-five, I could put forty in the tax account and have thirty-five to live on."

  I happened to know that Ernest's annual income from royalties on his former books was around a hundred thousand dollars, that he had large holdings of stocks and bonds, most of which he had bought twenty or thirty years ago, and that his tax account was stocked beyond any possible demands his income could make on it, but I respected his pretense that he had to live each year on what he earned that year. In the precarious world of free lance, it is a highly desirable attitude, albeit a rather unrealistic one when the writer has reached the eminence that Ernest had attained. It was probably a holdover from his hungry times.

  The airport building was choked with people. The crowd in front of the ticket counter was so thick I had to use my best New York subway maneuvers to clear a path for us. At the counter we found out the bad news: Castro had issued an order that morning canceling all flights to the United States until further notice. It was an act of reprisal for a new requirement that all Cuban aircraft refueling in the United States pay cash on delivery.

  We fought our way back out of the mob, and Ernest led me to an office in the terminal building where one could charter flights. The man there was an old friend who knew Ernest back in the early Thirties when he ran contraband rum into Key West. Ernest and he had a short discussion in low voices, and then the man picked up my bag and said to meet him in ten minutes on the airfield ramp on the other side of his office.

  While we were waiting out the ten minutes, Ernest gave me the pad of lined paper on which he had been making his Dangerous Summer notes. "I did some final work on the cutting," he said. "You can read it on the way back. You know your way out of Key West, don't you?"

  "Sure."

  Ernest's pal flew me to Key West in a Cessna, without benefit of Havana customs. I hired a car in Key West and drove along the magnificent highway that stretches across the water and the keys to Miami, where I eventually got a seat on a jet to New York. I took out the pad Ernest had given me. It was crammed with page numbers and directions, some of them countermanding a few cuts he had previously approved and suggesting cuts in their stead, but most of them simply detailing cuts we had already made, with explanations about them. These latter notations covered fifteen pages of the note pad and seemed to have been written mainly as private explanations to himself.

  Ernest and Mary arrived in New York on Friday, July 13th. In the intervening week I had had lunch with Ed Thompson and, after warning him to get fortified with a double Old Grand-dad, had told him the bad news. If ever a decoration is awarded for bravery under editorial fire, I recommend Ed Thompson as its first recipient. He drained the last of his Older Granddad, ordered another, expelled a short sigh and said, "Well, there is only one Ernest Hemingway and I guess there is some merit in what he says. Tell me gently."

  I said a hundred thousand dollars and we agreed upon ninety thousand with rights to Life's Spanish edition thrown in for an additional ten thousand.

  Almost every day after I left Havana, Ernest had called me to discuss the dilemma of which book to publish first, and I finally suggested that it might be a good idea to get his publisher's opinion. I set up a meeting at Ernest's Sixty-second Street apartment on the afternoon he arrived, and I had also arranged an appointment for Ernest with the Chief of Opthal-mology at New York's biggest hospital. He was reputedly the country's foremost specialist and he had a Park Avenue office where he saw a few private patients. He had told me on the phone that keratitis sicca was a rare and serious condition that not only caused blindness but was, in most cases, fatal.

  Charles Scribner, Jr., arrived at the apartment with one of his editors, L. Harry Brague, Jr. They took the uncut manuscript of The Dangerous Summer, along with two copies of all the Paris sketches, and said they would be there Monday morning to discuss which should be published first.

  We also heard from Alfred Barr that arrangements were being made for a representative from The Museum of Modern Art to go to the finca and crate Miro's "Farm" preparatory to flying it up to New York.

  I had hoped that with the favorable resolution of the Life money and the Miro painting, and with the burden of the publishing dilemma temporarily shifted, Ernest would relax a bit and enjoy some of his New York places, but he said gloomily, "How can I go into Toots' without drinking, or the Old Seidel-burg, or Sherm's joint or anywhere else?" Mary cooked for us and we ate most of our meals in the apartment; Ernest drank only Sancerre wine, in moderation.

  He mostly discussed The Dangerous Summer, worrying about whether he had been completely fair to Luis Miguel, fearing that Miguel would be offended, worrying about how the Spaniards would react to his criticism of their great hero, Manolete, worrying about whether he would harm Antonio by describing his arrest and the scandale of his pics, worrying, worrying, worrying.

  I did manage to get his mind off The Dangerous Summer for a short while with a new offer which had come from movie producer Jerry Wald at Twentieth Century-Fox: the studio wanted to buy the seven short stories that had been used in my teleplay The World of Nick Adams, add three more, and make a movie of it. They were offering a hundred thousand dollars for the stories. This infuriated Ernest. "Christ, that's what they paid for one story! 'Snows of Kilimanjaro,' they paid that, and for 'My Old Man.'"

  I pointed out that the stories involved here were very fragmentary, that many of them had already been seen on television, and that they were getting the rights to do only one movie. "Once yosu set a price in Hollywood, you can't back down," Ernest said definitively. "They can have the ten stories for nine hundred thousand."

/>   On Monday morning Charles Scribner, Jr., and Harry Brague, Jr., returned. Charles Scribner, Jr., said that both works were simply wonderful; he thought that The Dangerous Summer should be published first so as to capitalize on the Life publication. He also thought that not too much time should elapse between the summer it happened and the publication. Harry Brague, Jr., said he had not read all The Dangerous Summer but that on the basis of what he had read, he agreed with his boss. Ernest smiled and said that was fine, for he inclined toward that decision himself. I was shocked to realize that it was the first time I had seen Ernest smile since I went down to Cuba.

  After they departed he said, "Guess they like product. Maybe won't have to close down machine for repairs after all. Let's go over and have a dish at Toots' to remind ourselves how good Mary's cooking really is."

  Ernest enjoyed his lunch at Shor's. He had a couple of drinks, cracked rough jokes with Toots, as always, and exchanged pleasantries with Leonard Lyons and sports columnist Jimmy Cannon, who was also a long-time friend. We walked back to the apartment, Ernest stopping to inspect windows along the way. "It's good to be back on the town," he said. I felt hugely relieved at his resurgence of spirit; unfortunately it was shortlived.

  We were barely in the door when the telephone rang. It was easy to follow the conversation from Ernest's end of it. Charles Scribner, Jr., had had another conference with Harry Brague, Jr., who had finished The Dangerous Summer during his lunch hour, and they now had decided to reverse themselves and recommend that the Paris sketches be published first.

  "Well, I sent off a lot of cables for bullfight pictures and a hell of a lot of other stuff," Ernest said testily. He listened and then said: "I don't say it isn't good thinking, Charles, but it isn't very constructive to mount one offensive in the morning and then mount another in the afternoon with the same troops in the opposite direction . . . No, hell, if you and Harry see it that way, I'll go along with it."

  Ernest ate no dinner that evening. He got into bed early with all the New York papers and a pile of magazines he had bought on our way home from Shor's. He also had a note pad and pencil, and when I left he was writing in that.

  The following morning we went to the eye specialist, and Ernest was there for almost two hours. He had brought with him a large manila file folder that contained reports, records and test results from the Havana ophthalmologists who had been treating him. Part of the two hours was spent sitting in the waiting room while various drops that had been put into his eyes did their work. Ernest was very impressed with the doctor, who he said was wizard, and even more impressed with his equipment, which, he said, made the Cuban stuff look like it had been left behind by Louis Pasteur.

  When we departed the nurse handed Ernest a prescription, but he did not say anything about the results of the examination until we were almost back at the apartment. "Turned out pretty good," he said matter-of-factly. "Haven't got the dire crud diagnosed by Cuban medicos. Just need stronger glasses."

  Ernest never mentioned his eye trouble again; nor was I aware that after that he had any further trouble reading. And to my knowledge he never used the prescription for stronger glasses.

  That afternoon while Mary was out shopping, the telephone rang, and when I picked it up, the voice sounded familiar— from out of the past—but it was so slurred and incoherent that it took me a few moments to place it. It was Jigee. She had been out of our lives a long time. Ernest got on the extension and we had a three-way conversation; Jigee had trouble forming her words and often didn't complete her sentences. She was calling long distance but was evasive about telling us just where she was. She wanted to know how long Ernest and I planned to be in New York, for she was thinking of coming there, she said, since she hadn't seen us for so long; Ernest told her he was sorry as hell not to be able to see her but that he was leaving in a day or two for Spain.

  After we hung up, Ernest couldn't say anything. I had known about Jigee's drinking for a long time, but it had come as a shock to Ernest. Finally he said, "I'm the son-of-a-bitch who gave her her first drink. You remember that Scotch sour that day at the Ritz?"

  "Now, Papa, if it hadn't been you it would have been someone else."

  "Maybe, but I was the one and I could kick my brains out for that!"

  "Papa, you can take the rap for a lot of things, but not for that. Whatever we are we are—does it matter who turns it on?"

  "It matters to me! It goddamn well matters to me!" He walked over to the windows and for a long time watched the pigeons strutting along the rain spouts.

  Charles Scribner, Jr., and Harry Brague, Jr., came to lunch at Ernest's place the following day and apologized for upsetting him with their change of mind. They then said that they had arrived at an absolutely final and irrevocable decision, which was that they were right in the first place and that The Dangerous Summer should be published just as soon as possible.

  Ernest calmly said that he would take their third change of mind under advisement and that's how it was left.

  Ernest had planned to leave the following day for Spain but it took him three more days to get organized. He wrote many lists: some lists detailed chores he had to perform before leaving, some he left with me as reminders of various things we had discussed, and I think he left still other lists for Mary. An item on one of my lists was "Re 20th offer, will settle for $750,000." I had never been aware, before my last trip to Havana, that he had ever before made lists like these. His highly organized and retentive mind was all the list he had ever needed; all I could think was that quite suddenly he didn't trust it any more.

  I had not planned on going abroad that fall but after I mid-wifed the last of The Dangerous Summer installments Ernest, who was in Madrid, became unnaturally anxious to get to an immediate agreement with Twentieth Century-Fox on the Nick Adams stories. It was enigmatic that after assiduously discouraging movie projects all of his life Ernest should suddenly be so solicitous about them.

  I arrived in Madrid the evening of October 2nd, looking forward to a happy reunion with Ernest's mob (now reduced to Bill, Annie, Honor and Antonio) and the kind of fun we had had the summer before. I checked into the Suecia and went to Ernest's suite. The door was open. Annie and Honor were seated side by side on a sofa, talking and drinking wine from a bottle of rosado that rested in a silver cooler on the table, and Bill, who saw me first, was packing photographs into a small suitcase. Worry hung in the room like black crepe.

  As Bill came toward the door to greet me, Ernest emerged from the bedroom. He was wearing his old woolen bathrobe, secured by his gott mit uns belt, with a sweater underneath the robe, his elkskin slippers, and a white tennis visor that was pulled far down over his eyes. Annie had risen and I was crossing the room to give her a welcome hug, but Ernest stepped in front of her and said rather accusingly, "Been sweating you out since nine thirty-four this morning."

  "I got routed into Barcelona and had to fight my way out of there."

  "Barcelona? You had me plenty worried. Thought you had gone down in the drink. Couldn't get any gen from the goddamn Spanish airline. Figured they were covering up."

  "We were really sort of in mourning," Annie said. "Ernest was so worried it was already reality for me. Now, of course," she said reproachfully, "I'll have to get drunk."

  "My state of mourning got me half-drunk already," Honor said.

  "I have some Scotch in our room," Bill said, and he started out.

  "And what am I supposed to do while you all are having drinks?" Ernest asked in a cutting voice. "Hit myself over the head?"

  No one said anything. There was an awkward silence. Then Bill went back to packing the photos. "How was Antonio?" I asked.

  Ernest had gone to stand in the doorway, and I didn't think he was going to answer. "He was super in Ronda," he said, finally, coming back into the room. "The fights in Tarifa were blown out by a near hurricane, and they almost called off Jerez de la Frontera because of the high wind, but the civil governor said fight or jail so they
fought. Antonio was wonderful with his final bull. Then Salamanca two days, bulls worthless, Antonio very good, and we saw the new boy, Camino, twice." He came very close to me and looked into my eyes piercingly. "Have you seen the Lifes? Did you see those pictures? I'll bet all hell has broken loose."

  "About what? As far as I could tell . . ."

  "About what? The way Life crossed us up on the pictures in the second issue. That's what!" (Life had run eight photographs of Antonio and Luis Miguel in action to demonstrate the various basic passes used in bullfighting.) "After me working literally weeks for them to get wonderful pictures, fair to both boys, showing things at their best and okayed by Life's Paris man, Will Lang, after arguments—after all that, they used the most inferior of the okayed pictures and one of Miguel that they took last year in Bayonne . . ."

  "Which one?"

  "The one labeled pase ayudado—he\, that's the kind of picture photographers use to blackmail bullfighters. After all the hours and days of checking and rechecking . . ."

  "But wasn't that photo okayed by you?"

  "No, of course not! I'm the laughingstock of anyone who knows anything about bullfighting and has seen the piece. I'm regarded as the crook and double-crosser of all time. Didn't that photo knock you down when you saw it?"

  "Frankly, Papa, no. But I don't have your knowledge about »

  "Didn't Mary say something?"

  "It seemed all right to her, too."

  "Then you weren't looking. Neither of you. Just like Bill. Why don't you use your goddamn eyes? Well, I can tell you when I saw that page of pictures, it made me feel worse than any kind of wound or disaster. I guaranteed the pictures would be accurate and good and show both men at their best, and instead that picture is malicious. To be made both an all-time fool and a double-crosser! There is nothing to explain, as Antonio and Miguel know how carefully I went over the pictures, and the hours put in. Nobody had a copy to show me at Salamanca though the Time-Life people had seen it. If they had only shown it to me, I could have made some explanation to Antonio and tried to have him make Miguel understand. Never felt so completely sunk. Head was getting in good shape and