Ernest Hemingway's Last Penny
Ernest Hemingway didn’t hate his mother, but he said some mean things about her.
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He claimed that the money she spent on a summer cottage for herself could have been used to send him to college instead. He once told a friend that if his mother was a bird and flew in a straight line, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot at her. After his father’s suicide, Hemingway wrote, “My mother is an all time all American bitch and she would make a pack mule shoot himself; let alone poor bloody father.”
Family Relationship Tip Number Two Hundred Fifty Seven: do not let Ernest Hemingway write your Mother’s Day cards.
Part of this may have been posturing. Once Hemingway became associated with masculine pursuits like warfare, hunting, bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, binge drinking, and womanizing, a close relationship with his mother would have compromised his credibility as a big scary man. And he was a bit put off at the widespread suspicion that his mother was a lesbian.
Ernest’s mother Grace was the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Oak Park, Illinois. She debuted as an opera contralto at Madison Square Garden and was offered a contract with the Metropolitan Opera. She turned it down and left New York in 1896 to go back home and marry Clarence Hemingway. Ernest was born three years later.
Grace didn’t give up music for domesticity. Servants were hired to care for the children, and her husband did most of the cooking and a lot of the housework. Grace took in voice students and soon made more money than her husband ($1000 a month compared to his $50). This was Ernest’s first exposure to role reversals in marriage, which became an important part of his later life. ??
Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, was a supportive and nurturing motherly type. But the other three wives were independent women with careers of their own. His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, worked for the magazines Vanity Fair and Vogue in Paris, which is where she and Ernest started the affair that broke up his first marriage. His third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was a writer and journalist who was known as one of the great war correspondents of the twentieth century. She met Ernest in 1936 in Key West, which is where she and Ernest started the affair that broke up his second marriage. His fourth wife, Mary Welsh, was a journalist for the London Daily Express. She met Ernest in 1944 while covering the Second World War, which is where she and Ernest started the affair that broke up his third marriage.
A certain pattern starts to emerge here: Ernest Hemingway was fond of independent, self-assured, career women like his mother.
He also seemed to enjoy getting sued for divorce on grounds of adultery.
Hemingway was a complicated guy.
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“An unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, comes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently, and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.”
This isn’t the start of an Ernest Hemingway novel. It’s the start of Hemingway’s second marriage.
Pauline Pfeiffer met Ernest in Paris in 1925 and the two grew close. Hemingway, his first wife Hadley, and Pauline became friends, but before long it became clear to Hadley that her husband was having an affair with her friend. Her insecurity caused her to tolerate their relationship, but she eventually told her husband to separate from Pauline for a hundred days to see if their passion would abate. “The entire problem belongs to you two,” Hadley wrote her husband during this time. “I am not responsible for your future welfare—it is in your hands.” She asked for a divorce before the hundred days was up.
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“I am a son of a bitch,” Hemingway wrote. Being in love with two women at the same time tormented him. “You love both and you lie and hate it,” he wrote. “And it destroys you and every day is more dangerous and you work harder and when you come out from your work you know what is happening is impossible, but you live day to day as in a war.” When he went to Hadley’s apartment to collect his things, he sat down and cried. As he was writing notes for a book later that year, he wrote in the margins eight times, “I hope Hadley understands.” He was so grateful to her for agreeing to their divorce he gave her all the royalties from his novel The Sun Also Rises.
Pauline learned from her predecessor’s mistakes. She put her new husband first in all things, leaving their children with caretakers so she and Ernest could travel together. As became a pattern, whenever Hemingway left a woman, he needed a change of scenery. After his divorce from Hadley, with his new wife’s wealth, he and Pauline moved to Key West, where he spent the most productive years of his writing career. He also christened the legendary Sloppy Joe’s Bar and got a drink named after him—a concoction of white rum, lime juice, grapefruit, and maraschino cherries called a ‘Papa Doble.’ A three hundred pound bartender named Skinner got Hemingway to deviate from his usual big scary man drink of `scotch and soda. ?
Pauline’s family money came in handy when it was time to buy a house. They found a two-story home on Whitehead Street in Key West—the first house Ernest had ever owned. He could have afforded the house (barely) on his writing income, but not the $30,000 in renovations. Pauline picked up the tab for that.
Hemingway was off covering the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent (and starting an affair with future third wife Martha Gellhorn) in 1937. The two had met in Key West the year before, and Pauline, knowing her husband like she did—and having a clear sense of history repeating itself, only with her playing the role of jilted spouse this time—suspected what the two of them were up to.
Pauline tore out her husband’s backyard boxing ring and built a massive in-ground swimming pool--24 feet wide and 60 feet long, with a 5-foot shallow end and a 10-foot deep end, all dug by hand through solid coral. There wasn’t enough water to fill it (nearly eighty-one thousand gallons was needed), so it was necessary to drill down to the salt water table to get enough water. It was the only pool within a hundred miles, and cost over $20,000 to build ($365,000 in 2020 dollars).
On a visit home, Hemingway was stunned by the cost overruns involved in pool construction. Pauline was likely unrepentant, suspecting what her philandering husband had been up to. Hemingway took a penny and flung it at her. It bounced off her shoulder and landed in the bottom of the pool.
“Pauline, you’ve spent all but my last penny,” Hemingway told her. “So you might as well have that.”
Pauline had the penny encased in plastic and mounted in the floor of the pool, where visitors to Hemingway’s Key West home can see it to this day.
But the costs kept coming. The pool had to be drained, cleaned, and refilled as often as every three days, using salt water pumps.
Philandering proved quite expensive for Ernest Hemingway: his first wife took the royalties for The Sun Also Rises, and his second wife took a couple years of his writing income to build a pool, then saddled him with the ongoing costs of its maintenance.
He would have been lucky to have gotten out of it for just a penny.
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