Papa Hemingway (5 page)

Ernest was always uneasy in New York and liked being there less than in any other city he frequented. Mary loved it, and I suspect that he came as often as he did as a favor to her. He did not like theater, opera or ballet, and although he liked to listen to music he rarely, to my knowledge, attended a concert or any other musical presentation, longhair or jazz. He would only go to a prize fight that paired really good boys, and sometimes he made a special trip for a first-rate championship fight. Otherwise not. He avidly followed professional football on television when he was in the States (there was no

United States television in Cuba), but he did not go to the games. He loved baseball and would go to any game; and occasionally he came to New York just to see a World Series.

The only bars Ernest liked were Toots Shor's, the Old Seidel-burg, and Tim Costello's. I asked him about the story I had heard of the time that he got into a dispute with John O'Hara about their respective hardnesses of head, the dispute having been put to an abrupt end by Ernest's taking a shillelagh which Costello kept behind the bar, raising it up with an end in each hand, and cracking it neatly in two over his own head. I asked Ernest whether the story was apocryphal. He laughed. "Good story not to deny," he answered.

One of the few things about New York that Ernest unreservedly enjoyed was the visits of the Ringling Brothers Circus. He felt that circus animals were not like other animals, that they were more intelligent and, because of their constant working alliance with man, had much more highly developed personalities.

The first time I went to the circus with him, he was so eager to see the animals he went to Madison Square Garden an hour before the doors were scheduled to open. We went around to a side entrance on Fiftieth Street and Ernest banged on the door until an attendant appeared. He tried to turn us away but Ernest had a card signed by his old friend John Ringling North, which stated that the bearer was to be admitted to the circus any time, any place. We went below, as he always did before the circus began, and made a tour of the cages. Emest became fascinated with the gorilla; although the keeper was nervous as hell and warned him not to stand too close, Ernest wanted to make friends with the animal. He stood close to the cage and talked to the gorilla in a staccato cadence and kept talking, and finally the gorilla, who appeared to be listening, was so moved he picked up his plate of carrots and dumped it on top of his head; then he started to whimper; sure signs, the keeper said, of his affection.

By now, all the keepers had assembled around Ernest, anxious that he try a few words with their charges, but he said that the only wild animal with whom he had any true talking rapport was the bear, whereupon the bear keeper cleared a path for him.

Ernest stopped in front of the polar-bear cage and closely watched its occupant swing back and forth across the small area. "He's very nasty, Mr. Hemingway," the bear keeper said. "I think you're better off talking to this brown bear, who has a good sense of humor."

"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 tempestuous 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!"