In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  The question was rhetorical, but the literal answer is because that’s where the wives, sisters, and daughters of men worthy of commanding the narrative have always resided. But Martha insisted on being the protagonist of her own story, responsible for her own accomplishments, disasters, and triumphs. This made her difficult: independent, disconcertingly intrepid (no damsel in distress, she), and whatever is the opposite of self-sacrificing. I read Travels With Myself in my tiny room off the Boulevard Raspail (the kind with a bathroom at the end of the hall with a light on a timer, forcing you to pee quickly). From the first sentence I was hooked: “I was seized by the idea of this book while sitting on a rotten little beach at the western tip of Crete, flanked by a waterlogged shower and a rusted potty.” It was news to me that you could be this snotty about the world in a travel memoir. Martha never referred to Hemingway by name; she referred to him as UC, or “unwilling companion.” UC called her Gellhorn.

  Martha’s career spanned six decades. The author of five novels, 14 novellas, and two collections of short stories as well as the memoir, she was also a formidable journalist, having reported on every major war in the 20th century. The Face of War, her 1959 collection of wartime journalism, is a modern classic hailed by the New York Times as “a brilliant anti-war book that is as fresh as if written for this morning.” In the late 1930s Martha wrote dozens of dispatches for Collier’s magazine. In a squib on popular contributors, it was noted that she was “blond, tall, dashing—she comes pretty close to living up to Hollywood’s idea of what a big-league woman reporter should be.” In the campy 2012 HBO film Hemingway & Gellhorn, Nicole Kidman portrayed her as a force of nature with a gleam in her eye, wearing a snazzy pair of palazzo pants.

  Martha was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1908. Her father, George, was a doctor; her mother, Edna, was an enthusiastic supporter of social causes. Little Martha cut her teeth on protests, rallies, and demonstrations for justice. She was made aware at a young age of just how unfair life could be, and it instilled in her a deep, lifelong hatred of politicians and power brokers. From the time she was a girl, Martha Gellhorn would never go along to get along.

  Martha attended snooty Bryn Mawr (she was a year behind Katharine Hepburn) but dropped out in 1927 to work as a crime reporter. She knew she wanted to be a writer, and didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t just get on with it. One presumes her parents were either on board with this or indifferent; there is no evidence of any awkward Gellhorn family meetings where Martha was encouraged to stay in school or face a future in retail. In 1930 she sallied forth to Paris, worked odd jobs, and had a proper French love affair. She then returned to St. Louis to write a novel, What Mad Pursuit, about a reporter who goes to Paris and has a proper French love affair.

  The Great Depression hit its stride in 1932, when unemployment reached 25 percent. The stock market may have crashed in 1929, but it took a few years for the country to really fall apart: for unemployed fathers to start drinking, stealing, and beating their wives. For children to begin suffering in earnest, not only from malnutrition, but also from the diseases malnutrition wrought.

  In 1933, the newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). He dispatched a troupe of 16 journalists that included Martha to collect data and file classified reports on how, exactly, the country was suffering (the better to assist FERA in administering its relief).

  I want to pause for a moment to reflect on the common sense of this project, the thoughtfulness. Roosevelt wanted to act as quickly and efficiently as possible—and so he dispatched a bunch of professionals to gather facts and report back, allowing him to offer relief where relief was needed most. That today this would be considered a radical approach probably has Martha spinning in her grave.

  At 25, she was the youngest journalist in the pack.

  Martha’s first assignment was the mill towns of New England and the Carolinas. She had an aptitude for the work and cared almost nothing about discomfort. She packed the completely inappropriate clothes hanging in her closet: a brown Schiaparelli suit with a Chinese collar and dainty French shoes (recall, please, that she was just back from Paris). She would talk to anyone willing to talk to her, obsessed with bearing witness. At night in her hotel room, she would type up her reports: precise, detail-driven accounts of the lives of regular people who suffered the folly of the wealthy and powerful.

  She would live in a state of barely suppressed anger for the rest of her life. The most difficult women are the angry ones. The ones who refuse to “let it go,” think happy thoughts, or eat their feelings. For reasons I will never understand, men are given a free pass when it comes to anger. But women are expected to figure out a way of disposing of theirs, as though it were a dirty diaper.

  Martha spent most of her professional life infuriated about the stupendous injustices of the world, but she channeled that rage into her writing. And we would do well to follow her lead. Don’t waste time trying to change your anger into something that makes you likable; you will only wind up disliking yourself. Write your rage, paint it, film it, dance it, lyricize it, poeticize it. You don’t have to be good, just honest.

  THREE OR SO YEARS LATER, in 1936, Martha met Hemingway at one of his favorite bars: Sloppy Joe’s in the Florida Keys. He bought her a drink and revealed that he was off to cover the Spanish Civil War for a newspaper syndicate, the North American Newspaper Alliance.

  Fresh from having published The Trouble I’ve Seen, a collection of four novellas based on her work for FERA, Martha thought that was a fine idea. She snagged an assignment from Collier’s and, with a knapsack on her back and 50 bucks in her pocket, off she went. She ran into Hem at the Hotel Florida in Madrid. They proceeded to report from the front lines, drink a lot, carouse a lot, and fall in love.

  Nothing appeals to me more than the idea of heading out into the world with a knapsack and 50 bucks. Have I ever done anything as remotely badass? Two summers ago I went to the South of France for a month with only a carry-on and a debit card.*1

  The simple fact is that Martha was free: tormented by her obsessions, but not weighed down by the soul-sucking monotony generally thought to be the province of women. She was the rare female who would rather duck mortar fire than sigh and submit to a lifetime full of Saturdays ironing sheets (which was something women spent an astounding amount of time doing in her day). Even when it came to packing her knapsack and taking off to one of the spots she wrote about in Travels With Myself and Another—Cuba, Haiti, St. Thomas, and Kenya—I don’t think she spent a second pondering whether she should have sprung for a new bathing suit or fretted over the degree of SPF in her sunscreen.

  The dead glamour of Martha’s approach to living has bewitched me for my entire adult life. Once, when she went to cover something or other going on in the Caribbean, she packed only two white linen dresses and a copy of Proust. This is so cool, and so exactly how I’d like to live, except for reality: I look terrible in white, have a love-hate relationship with linen, and would be woman overboard in about 12 minutes if Proust was all I had to read.

  Martha was free, in part, because she was drawn to the world of men in action. She was addicted to going and doing. Women stay home and tend the home fires; men go, and men do. That was Martha’s idea of a good time. She adored drinking, smoking, and talking shop. She was brave in the way a man was brave. She wasn’t afraid of getting shot, blown up, or crushed amid the rubble. This is possibly a little mental, but she would rather be afraid than bored. Which did not make her a happy housewife and homemaker. Or a good one, either.

  Three more years later, in 1939, Hemingway divorced his second wife, Pauline, to marry Martha. She was 32 years old; he was 40. He bought a ramshackle house in Cuba, Finca Vigía, 10 miles east of Havana. They were happy for a while, but Martha kept being seduced by the wider world. Long after the marriage was over, in 1959, she confessed in a letter to her friend Leonard Ber
nstein, “I have never been more bored in my life than during the long, long months when we lived alone in Cuba. I thought I would die of boredom. But it was very good for me. I wrote more with him than ever before or since in my life, and read more. There were no distractions; I lived beside him and entirely and completely alone, as never before or since.”

  Hemingway wanted Martha to stay home and take care of him, little woman style. And really, who can blame him? Hadley and Pauline, his first two wives, had devoted themselves to his comfort and to supporting his writing. Martha wasn’t like that. She didn’t do well in captivity.

  It pains me that my favorite Martha Gellhorn story is one that involves Hemingway. (The poor woman can’t get a break from even her most devoted readers.)

  The beginning of the end came in the spring of 1944; the two of them were at home at La Finca. The United States had entered World War II, and the only thing Martha wanted was to be on the front lines covering it. Hemingway wanted her to stay home and be a deferential wife. They fought. He accused her of being selfish, a “pretentious bitch.” She called him a drunk and a pathetic liar.*2

  Getting to the front in Europe would not be a simple matter. Journalists needed to be accredited by a news agency to gain access. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. military forbade women from embedding with troops. The multipurpose excuse for this was trotted out with regularity: no bathroom facilities. Permission denied.

  This obstacle was no big deal for Martha. She was the queen of workarounds, and knew she could figure out a way to get where she needed to be. She rang up Collier’s to confirm her credentials, but her editor hemmed and hawed. She was confused, until Hemingway announced he had called the magazine, her magazine, played the celebrity card, and snatched her accreditation out from under her nose. Every magazine could send only one reporter, so Martha was out of luck.

  Hem took off for New York, where he grabbed a seaplane bound for London. Martha, undeterred (and probably so spitting mad she was determined to make him pay), coaxed a friend into calling in a favor and getting her a berth on a Norwegian freighter transporting explosives. The crossing took 20 days. She was the only passenger. The captain and crew spoke no English, and for reasons that were unclear, drinking and smoking were not allowed on board. Martha passed the time reading D. H. Lawrence, stewing over her marriage, and writing letters to friends. “He [Hemingway] is a good man, which is vitally important,” she observed. “He is however bad for me, sadly enough—or maybe wrong for me is the word; and I am wrong for him.”

  Hemingway was already in London, and the moveable feast was in full swing. Any day the Allies would launch an invasion on a stretch of beach in Normandy, France. About 600 journalists and photographers had descended on London, waiting for the moment when they would be summoned to take their spot with the deploying troops.

  Meanwhile, coming home one night from a party, Hemingway had been in a car wreck and smacked his head on the windshield. The deep gash on his forehead required 57 stitches and a few days of observation in the hospital. Martha, hearing the news, rushed to his bedside, only to find him drunk and carousing with some other journalists—including Mary Welsh, a sweet-faced midwestern blonde married to one of the reporters for Time, who would go on to become Hemingway’s fourth wife. Martha was infuriated by her husband’s ridiculousness, and also, I imagine, annoyed that like most famous men he was never held accountable for his high jinks.

  With no accreditation, Martha had no way to get to France. On June 6, 1944, minutes after hearing the announcement of the D-Day invasion on the radio, she headed to South Devon, on the coast of England, to see if she could find a way across the channel.

  Listen, how is it that men still haven’t learned they underestimate women at their own peril? Martha spied a hospital ship, a big red cross painted on the bow. She approached the guard checking papers at the bottom of the gangplank, and said, “My magazine is writing a story about nurses.” He waved her on, didn’t even ask to see documentation. Can you imagine what the soldier thought? Oh, a silly woman writing about nurses.

  Martha stowed away in a bathroom. When the ship arrived on Omaha Beach, thousands of troops were already wading through the tide toward shore. It was the biggest seaborne invasion in history, taking place in broad daylight. Planes roared overhead. Giant minesweepers worked the beach, detonating mines. The troops making landfall were easy targets for Germans in their sandy foxholes. Before the end of the day, 9,000 Allied troops would be wounded or dead. Martha disguised herself as a stretcher bearer, though actually, there was no need for a disguise. In the chaos, any able hands were welcome hands. The beach was a hellscape of smoke, eardrum-busting noise, and the smells of gunpowder and burned flesh.

  Martha was the first woman on the beach at Normandy. When the hospital ship returned to London, its 400-plus bunks groaning with wounded, she immediately was arrested for entering France illegally. They didn’t know what to do with her, so they sent her to a nurses’ training school. She easily escaped. She wrote a long piece about the landing, focusing as she always did on the human stories. Hemingway, for his part, never left the transport ship, and never made it to shore. This didn’t stop him from writing a braggy first-person account about his role in calming nervous young soldiers. Even though Collier’s had awarded her accreditation to her more famous husband, they were happy to run her scoop. The magazine ran both pieces in the same issue. Of course, Hemingway was on the cover.

  In 1945, nine years after they’d first hooked up, Hemingway and Martha divorced. She was the only wife who’d ever done the leaving, and Hemingway was furious. It’s possible that Hemingway loved her like no other—which of course meant that when it went bad, he hated her like no other. He indulged in some public name-calling, insisting she was “the product of a beautician” and “a career bulldozer.” She was very private, and also silent on the matter of the marriage. She hated being thought of as an appendage to Hemingway, and the less said the better.

  Martha went on to cover conflicts in Israel, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and would never live in the United States again. She made homes in France, Italy, Mexico, and Kenya, before settling in England. Men—there were a few. Also, another husband. She didn’t care much about romance, and even less about marriage, which she found to be excruciatingly dull. She once referred to herself as “the worst bed partner in five continents.”

  She wasn’t completely without familial instincts, however; after the war she adopted a toddler, Sandro, from Italy. She re-christened him George Alexander, but she continued to call him Sandy, raising him as a single mom. Motherhood was exhausting and perplexing for Martha—a nice way of saying she pretty much sucked at it. For in the end, Martha was a loner. “Difficulty” is always in the eye of the beholder. Usually, it’s just a woman being her complicated self.

  Even into her 80s, Martha was cantankerous—and still, always eager to get herself to some far-flung front line. “If you have no part of the world, no matter how diseased the world is, you are dead,” she once wrote in her diary. She was a woman determined to bear witness to every god-awful thing the world has to offer. This included her own complex nature. Martha Gellhorn was complicated and imperfect. But refused to pretend she was anything else.

  *1So, no.

  *2Not inaccurate.

  CHAPTER 10

  SHONDA RHIMES

  Unstoppable

  AT THE BEGINNING of her 2016 TED talk, TV show runner extraordinaire Shonda Rhimes had this to say about the current state of her workload: “Three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. The budget for one episode of network television can be anywhere from three to six million dollars. Let’s just say five. A new episode made every nine days, times four shows—so every nine days, that’s 20 million dollars’ worth of television. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 16 episodes going on at all times. That’s 350 m
illion dollars a season. My television shows are back to back to back on Thursday night. Around the world, my shows air in 256 territories in 67 languages for an audience of 30 million people.”

  Just reading those stats makes me tremble with anxiety. In Shonda’s TED talk, she refers to herself matter-of-factly as a titan, as she should. When she says she owns Thursday nights on ABC, that’s not hyperbole: The woman created Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and executive produces The Catch. Her shows seem to run forever. My personal favorite, Grey’s Anatomy, has been around so long that in an early season, one episode pivoted around that newfangled phone thing, texting.*1

  Shonda Rhimes sits at the pinnacle of TV-land achievement. And yet she sees no reason to rest on her laurels, or refrain from gobbling up the time slots, the production money, the producing credits, the Emmys, and probably one day soon, Oscars. Her disinclination to take it easy, go off and eat pray love, distract herself with a disastrous affair, or launch a lifestyle website trafficking in fancy yoga mats makes her difficult. Her ambition is a perpetual-motion machine, by which I mean she’s as enterprising as any man. Like the famous female characters she breathes life into, she keeps smacking open life’s piñata and grabbing all the candy she can get her hands on. She seems perfectly nice about it. But the woman is unstoppable, and an unstoppable woman—especially one who already owns an entire night of network TV—is a difficult one.