They called him Papa. They called him Ernie and Hem and E-H and things that cannot be printed here.
Ernest Hemingway was a big man with big appetites – blustery, tough, hard on himself, harder on his friends, and hardest of all on the women who loved him. Of these there were many: a distraught mother, astounded sisters, four wives – the first three sorely aggrieved and greatly embittered – and lord-only-knows-how-many casual relationships in between.
He was a war hero, shot up while rescuing wounded in 1916. He was a Bohemian, a member of “The Lost Generation,” a bizarre subculture of shell-shocked and disgruntled poets, painters, jazz singers, models and writers who hung out and drank and fornicated in Paris while the Twenties Roared.
He loved bull-fighting, fist-fighting, dangerous game, brave fish, and whores and liquor and fine guns. He would go on to win both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and would ultimately be remembered as a giant of American literature – a man who would write only what he knew and did it so his words would lay fine and true upon the page. A man who boated marlin and sharks and giant tuna and shot lions and elephants and Cape buffalo – and finally himself – when he could no longer live up to his own expectations.
In early spring of 1935 Ernest Hemingway was about to write another chapter in the great book of his own life, a chapter little known or appreciated but enormously important to lovers of great sporting literature.
On April 7, Ernest Hemingway, at the wheel of his new sport-fisherman, blew into Bimini – burned by sun and wind, clad in a ripped khaki shirt, frayed pants stained with grease and fish blood.
He was far from famous in those days, just another pick-and-shovel writer, 36 years old, too much work, too much liquor, too many women, in hock to his ears. Yes, he had just come back from an African safari. Yes, he had four books out – two true, two nearly so, and a non-fiction piece written but not yet sold, plus a string of publishing credits in major magazines. Yes, people shook his hand and grinned, calling him a great new writer.
But he was broke, Or nearly so. In 1935, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the book that would write his ticket, was five years and a Spanish Civil War away. Hemingway had one ex-wife, a soon-to-be-ex-wife, three growing boys and a habit of spending money freely. He needed a boat and – money or not – ordered one custom built from a Brooklyn boatyard, paying for it by pawning articles he had not yet written to the editor of Esquire magazine.
Pilar was a fishing machine, adequate for waters that had produced 14 of the then-standing 21 saltwater records. Thirty-eight feet, twin screws, comfortable for six, a flying bridge sturdy enough for fighting big fish and with an insulated box for an astounding 2,700 pounds of ice, Pilar had a cruising range of 350 miles and could make 16 knots on a flat sea. It cost $7,500, delivered to the dock at Key West.
And Bimini? The Bahamian island was another world, a scant 50 miles from Miami. A tattered, lethargic and impoverished settlement atop an ancient sea mount on the edge of the singing Gulf Stream, where waters turn from yellow to bottle green to royal blue as the depths plunge to more than a mile less than 500 yards offshore. Journalist John Dos Passos, down to fish with Hemingway for giant tuna, pegged the place perfectly: “ . . . a wharf and some native shacks under the coconut palms and a store with some kind of a barroom attached where we drank rum in the evenings.”
Dos Passos may have been looking at the island, but Hemingway looked to the sea. In Islands in the Stream, published after his death, he noted, “the water of the stream was usually dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach.”
Things were a bit less idyllic aboard Pilar. First trip out, Dos Passos had a dolphin hooked up when the sharks moved in. In those days, ten years before Otto Henze perfected the famous Penn star drag, rods were of spring steel or bamboo, line was either cotton or linen, and landing a big fish was chancy at best, especially in warm, shark-infested waters. Hemingway snagged a huge mako attracted to Dos Passos’ dolphin. He cranked it up to the boat and, pitching and rolling on the slippery deck, attempted to dispatch it with a Colt .22 automatic pistol. Two shots later, the gaff broke in a wild and bloody melee and Hemingway, combat veteran and lion hunter, shot himself once in each leg. Dos Passos cut loose his dolphin and ran for the first aid kit. Back in Bimini, a doctor poured on iodine, pulled out the most convenient fragments of bullet and bone, then closed the wounds with sailmaker’s stitches.
Gimping and humiliated, Hemingway did battle with another shark pack a month later, in a blinding rain squall, eventually boating a giant tuna that was little more than head, tail and backbone by the time he winched it from the bloody, churning sea.
Though the weather had driven most boats to harbor, another yacht remained to watch the fracas. It was the Moana, skippered by high-rolling sportsman William B. Leeds. Leeds – when it was all over – took Hemingway and his drenched crew aboard for consolatory cocktails. Leeds had his own shark potion – a .45 Thompson sub-machine gun. Hemingway saw it, wanted it, got it, though the details, like the evening, are a bit fuzzy. Dos Passos recalled seeing Hemingway at sunrise, sleeping off the rum, the Thompson cradled lovingly in his arms.
Patrick Hemingway, the youngest of three sons, remembers the Thompson well. “My father would pull a big shark up alongside and stitch him end to end, one big hole every six or eight inches.”
Deadly on sharks, the Thompson was hard on friendships as well. Mike Strater, a painter friend from the glory days in Paris, had what might have been a world record blue marlin on the line when Hemingway rattled revenge at a school of menacing sharks. Strater, president of the Maine Tuna Club and no stranger to big fish, claimed blood from wounded sharks provoked others into a frenzied attack upon his marlin. Patrick Hemingway, remembering his father telling the tale, disagrees. “This wasn’t the North Atlantic where you could spend all day fighting a big fish. You had to get him aboard right away. Mike Strater broke under the pressure. Mentally and physically, he was unable to land that fish. My father never forgave him for that.”
Sixteen years later, Hemingway vs. the Sharks would see print in The Old Man and the Sea, which would win him the Pulitzer Prize. But the damage was done. The two men never spoke again.
On better days, after fighting two or three fish and overcome with sun, rum and testosterone, Hemingway would turn his attention from fish to men. He would lay down $250 and challenge all comers to three, three-minute rounds in a ring chalked upon the timbers of Weech’s Bimini Dock. Hemingway’s right arm, muscled from continuously cranking on reel handles, made sure no one ever collected. Soon something of a local ritual, stories of Hemingway’s bare-fisted bouts with conch-pickers, stevedores, captains and deckhands were picked up by dockside idlers, translated into lilting Caribbean rhyme in songs still sung on the island today.
Not only the songs survive. The sad, cracked and peeling pictures of all this are nailed to the wall in The Compleat Angler, a bistro along the Bimini waterfront, in an ante-room proudly billed “The Hemingway Museum.” There is a well-stocked bar, as befitting, rooms upstairs as needed, and lovely island girls occasionally stopping by to inquire about the weary and sunburned sport fisherman’s social life.
The pictures are mute and stunning – Pilar trolling; Hemingway, fists up before an adoring crowd; Hemingway, steely eyed along the Thompson sights; Hemingway, with the remains of Mike Strater’s fish and that fatally wounded friendship, invisible but quite real, vanishing into thin air.
The first spring he went to Bimini, Hemingway was finishing The Green Hills of Africa, the tales of his first safari. In its introduction, he wrote about what he loved: “ . . . to stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe, and believe again, to care about fishes and the different winds, the changes of the seasons, to see what happens, to be out in boats, to sit in the saddle, to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear the rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I really want.” The man who knew where to get what he wanted, who maybe discovered that the wanting and searching were all there really was.
Down the beach west of the Compleat Angler, Morris Bowleg, dockmaster at Weech’s for 20 years, knows many things. He shepherds visitors to the customs office, knows the ins and outs of foreign boat registration, technicalities of the non-resident fishing license allowing six reels per boat for only $25. Bowleg also knows about Bahamian bush medicine, cures for scorpion bite, reef burn or a broken heart. Born too late, Bowleg never saw Hemingway fight, but he knows the stories. The dock has been rebuilt a couple of times, he says, so there is little cause to break off a splinter or to get down and kiss the wood, as some have. For emphasis, he stamps upon planking suffering from gull droppings and tropical sun. “He did not box on this deck, mon.”
Inside at the till, second generation marina owner Ellie Weech cackles at the tales coming down from her father. “Many have tried to drink this island dry. Ernest Hemingway was the only one to have actually done it. Mighty thirsty by the time the mail boat brought more.”
To leave, to come back . . . find what I really want.” In 1935 Ernest Hemingway caught one more big fish in those royal blue waters, a mako just a dozen pounds shy of a world’s record. Then, he put Pilar on the beach for bottom cleaning, and with one engine showing the strain from continuous trolling, set out for Key West. There, he would brood away the hurricane season, while war clouds gathered over Spain.
The following spring, Hemingway tried Cuba for marlin. It was not a good trip. Fish were scarce and Pilar’s engine continued to give him trouble. He was heading back to Bimini, young Patrick aboard as cabin boy, when it finally played out. A Miami boatyard diagnosed a cracked block, worked around the clock for two days to replace it. Then just after midnight on June 2, 1936, father and son set out again for Bimini in a howling gale.
It was a rough crossing. Northerly winds were galling the Gulf Stream into mountainous waves. Sweating, alternately praying and cursing, Hemingway fought the wheel and steered obliquely into the seas, running northwest until daylight, then northeast until the Bahamas lay along the horizon like a long green smudge. It was an accomplishment equal to landing the biggest fish, amplified by the responsibility of having young Patrick aboard.
Deep in the rolling sea, the fish were running and Bimini Harbor was crowded with boats waiting out the storm. When the weather cleared, Hemingway went fishing, eventually hooking an 11-foot, 500-plus-pound tuna. The fight lasted seven hours and Hemingway lost ten pounds as the big fish pulled Pilar from Gun Cay to the Isaac Islands, some 35 miles up the Gulf Stream. When it was over and the fish aboard, dehydrated and exhausted, Hemingway attempted to revive himself with beer and whiskey.
Results were predictable. When Pilar pulled into Bimini long after sunset, he was stretched out in the cabin, nearly comatose. A casual remark from a member of the crowd gathered to admire the fish that “tuna are easy” brought him around quick enough. Hemingway came boiling out of the cabin, ready for another bout on Weech’s dock. “Where’s the son-of-a-bitch who says it’s easy!” Mortified to find the careless comment came from a yachtsman twice his age, Hemingway turned his fury to the fish, pummeling it like a punching bag.
In February Hemingway left to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He was gone less than 50 days, and endured shelling, siege and sniper fire, dispatching articles from the front via telephone and radio. Out of the smoke, dirt and blood would come For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of an American volunteer who loved to fish wild rivers, but died after blowing up a bridge over one.
Hemingway came back to Bimini in April 1937 to fish once more and to work on the book that made him famous. He wrote each morning, fished each afternoon. The Gulf Stream swung close to shore that year, and the Bahamians were catching dolphin from the shore with hand-lines. Just offshore, Hemingway caught tuna, lots of tuna.
And then came WWII. Hemingway and Pilar were in Havana. German U-boats were prowling Caribbean waters, and Hemingway, more prosperous from his new book royalties, fitted Pilar with a machine gun, radio and a case of hand grenades, hoping to somehow close with a surfaced submarine, clear the decks with gunfire, then dump grenades down open hatches. Thankfully for the world of literature, such an unlikely encounter never occurred.
After unsuccessfully chasing one U-boat, Hemingway gave up fishing for submarines and joined a covey of combat correspondents going ashore at Normandy. He made war the way he fished and fought and lived – with guts and gusto and a good right arm. After being targeted by German artillery, Hemingway led a group of French partisans on a foray against the enemy, which captured one outpost, but earned him official censure for violating his supposed non-combatant status as a journalist.
Hemingway claimed to be the first American into liberated Paris. There is a story, perhaps true, of him grabbing a rifle and picking off a sniper that had the audacity to interrupt his libations at a sidewalk cafe. History says advance units found him holed up with his partisans in a swank hotel, filthy from weeks in the field, cleaning machine guns, writing stories and drinking large amounts of champagne.
But this all came later, later than those glorious days upon sunny islands and cerulean-blue water, later than those pictures slowly fading upon that Bimini barroom wall. Later, when one man fished as the world lurched and teetered toward war.
Way up in Idaho’s Sawtooths, the day comes creeping on the wind. The aspens rattle and the stars fade as the first light hits the great jumble of peaks and tells you how this place got its name. The wind ghosts up the mountain and whispers stories to those with ear and heart to hear. Stories of the Ancient Ones, the Sheep Eaters. Stories of the cavalry and miners and cowpokes and swindlers and bums and magnates. And finally the story of a man who loved this place, then came back here to die.
Ernest Hemingway. We love his work and puzzle over the man, this great and tainted genius. When we know the story, our puzzling ferments and ages like good wine, and it becomes smoky and sweet with an aftertaste like the morning wind in the Idaho hills.
No ordinary man and certainly no ordinary story. There’s the greatest writer of the last century and wanderings across the continents with gun and rod, and it begins in 1951 just outside Havana in a ramshackle stone mansion on a hill overlooking the sea.
Locals call it la Finca Vigia, the view farm. Little wonder. Below is the surging Caribbean, breaking upon a labyrinth of coral. Beyond is the Gulf Stream, home to trophy billfish and tuna and dolphin and great toothy wahoo.
Behind the house is a sunny patio and a swimming pool, where Ernest Hemingway swims laps while a woman reads a magazine and sips her gin and tonic. Ernest Hemingway is lately famous and very prosperous from The Old Man and the Sea, the book about a Cuban fisherman and a big fish that sold 50,000 copies in its first three weeks and is still selling 1,500 copies a day.
The woman is Mary Welsh Hemingway, a fine sliver of the Scandinavian gene pool from far northern Minnesota. She is tall, blonde, gutsy, formerly a war correspondent for Time and Life magazines. It’s her third marriage, his fourth.
Mary sighs, proclaims her boredom. Ernest Hemingway breaks his stroke and stands to catch his breath. “Let’s hunt birds in Idaho,” he says.
Ernest Hemingway was a man of his word. He could coolly squeeze the trigger before charging African game. He could fight a blue marlin four times his weight for a full day with a flask of rum but without a jigger of complaint. He could hike and ski and wingshoot and drink and box to put most men to shame. But with women, he was a little shaky.
Which was why Ernest Hemingway knew Idaho. He went there in 1939, when he was between wives and looking for a place to hole up and write. Sun Valley is where Averell Harriman, president of the Union Pacific, built a ski resort to boost wintertime ticket sales on his railroad. As a publicity ploy, Harriman invited the rich and famous, threw in free rooms and sumptuous meals, then used the celebrities names in various advertising blitzes. Ingrid Bergman came, so did Robert Taylor and Clark Gable.
Harriman set Hemingway up in Room 206 where he wrote mornings and ventured forth to hunt and fish in the afternoons. Between times, he posed for publicity pictures. The man behind the lens was Lloyd “Pappy” Arnold, a serious outdoorsman who introduced Hemingway to another hunter, resort publicist Gene Van Guilder, and to Taylor “Beartracks” Williams, the area’s best-known guide.
Pheasants cackled in the hills and mallards dipped into the backwaters of Silver Creek and the Big Wood River. Gene, Beartracks, Pappy and Papa Hemingway, as he increasingly called himself, went after them at every opportunity. Hunting ducks one Sunday morning, Gene Van Guilder was killed by a blast from a mishandled shotgun. Hemingway, abed and nursing a hangover, was spared watching his friend die. He delivered the eulogy, reading at the windy gravesite words he had typed the night before. “ . . . best of all he loved the fall. The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods. Leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills, the high blue windless skies. Now he will be part of them forever.”
Hemingway returned to la Finca Vigia to work on For Whom the Bell Tolls, but in the fall of 1941 he was back in Idaho. Beartracks Williams introduced him to the Old Timer, known by no other name, who hauled Arnold and Williams and Hemingway to his bug-infested shack in the Pashsimeroi Valley – Shoshone for “water and the one place of trees.” There, around the campfire, the men heard the Old Timer’s stories, tales of Custer’s death at the Greasy Grass, and the Wagonbox fight, where 67 woodcutters faced down 2,000 Sioux.
The men chased antelope for two days without success. The third day out, they spooked a herd up into a blind canyon. There was only one way out and Hemingway saw it, ran for it, first on horse, later on foot, clambering over rocks while clutching his battered Springfield .30-06. He made it just in time. “They came streaming over the hump,” he later wrote. “I picked the biggest buck and swung ahead of him and squeezed gently and the bullet broke his neck.” Arnold saw it all and told the story for years.
But high society was calling. Down the mountain at Sun Valley, Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor were waiting to talk to him about the movie potential for For Whom the Bell Tolls, which had sold a half-million copies. And then there were the bars, the heated pools and roulette wheels.
After declining an invitation to speak at a book convention in New York City, Hemingway took off in the other direction. On December 4th, he was gazing into the depths of the Grand Canyon. When news of Pearl Harbor reached him, Ernest Hemingway, wounded in the first war, went to war again, first chasing German submarines in the Caribbean aboard his beloved Pilar, then covering the Normandy invasion, finally winning a Bronze Star as a leader of a troop of French partisans who fought their way into Paris considerably ahead of the U.S. Army.
After the war, there was la Finca again. He was far offshore, fishing the Gulf Stream when the radio crackled with the news he had won the Pulitzer Prize. Hollywood was calling by the time he got to shore. He celebrated by buying a yellow Plymouth convertible and planning a trip to Africa. He had been there 20 years before and his book, The Green Hills of Africa, had been a modest success. Now he had the money and the time and he was going back.
And now there was Mary Welsh Hemingway, his fourth, last and best wife. The first leg of the African trip took them to hotels and bars in Key West, New York and Paris, and then on to hotels and bars and bullfights in Spain. In Mombasa they were met by Phillip Percival, who had begun his career guiding Teddy Roosevelt in 1909 and served Hemingway equally as well in 1933. They struggled uphill to Kenya, some 6,000 feet above the sea.
There at Percival’s farm, the campfires were blazing. Awaiting them were four trucks and 22 Wakamba tribesmen who would tote six tents, 700 pounds of food, two dozen cases of whiskey, double rifles, double shotguns and .22s for taking camp meat.
The Salengai River “. . . was a green and pleasant country,” he wrote, “with hills below the forest that grew thick on the sides of the mountain, and it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the thick timber on the mountain . . . and it was there by the forest edge that we waited for the rhino to come out.”
But by odd coincidence, the first rhino came looking for him. A Kenyan warden stopped them on the road. A poacher had wounded a rhino, now sorely aggrieved and eager to trample the next person he met. Would Bwana like a crack at him?
Indeed, Bwana would. He uncased his Westley Richards .577 double, popped two rounds into the chambers, slipped a few more into his pockets and took up the trail. The beast charged and Hemingway got off two shots, the nearest from 12 yards. The rhino careened off into the dust and gathering gloom. Hemingway spent a restless night, but in the morning the trackers found the beast, the bullet holes where Hemingway wanted.
Now they had their first trophy and lion were next. They shot two zebras, hauled the carcasses to likely spots and set up baits. The local Masai heard the shooting and drifted into camp, greeting the hunters and their Wakamba crew by striking the ground with the butts of their long home-forged spears and saying, “Jambo, Jambo.” The taciturn and unflinchable Masai were much amused when Hemingway began plugging holes in half dollars and shooting cigarettes from their hands with his .22. Impressed, they disclosed the real reason for the visit. Lions had been killing their cattle. Would Bwana care to thin them out?
Once again, Ernest Hemingway was happy to oblige. A week later he took a poke at a big male in the half-light of dawn. Through they heard the bullet whock home, there was no roar and little blood, and the lion vanished into the brush. Percival joined the posse to root him out. A long harrowing hour and four shots later, the lion was dead, though Hemingway did not kill it.
Hoping for magic and a change of luck, Hemingway cut a sliver from the cat’s backstrap, ate it raw. The Masai set up a great wail. Though they would open a cow’s veins and lap blood like vampires, a white man eating lion flesh was too much for their sensibilities.
Whatever luck Hemingway had hoped would follow that bloody snack did not materialize. A week later he missed a Cape buffalo in the Kimana River swamp, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. He switched to his worn and trusty Springfield –
the same rifle that took the running antelope and made three dozen one-shot kills on his first safari – and bagged a zebra and a gerenuk. But then he started missing again. Mary shot a kudu at 245 yards with a 6.5 Mannlicher, but Hemingway’s bad luck continued. He fell out of the Land Rover, battering his head and throwing out a shoulder.
But life offers compensations, as Teddy Roosevelt noted in 1909 when he went on safari instead of moving into the White House. A half-century later, another one of Percival’s clients set out to prove it once again. Hemingway – as fine a wingshot as ever – took lesser bustards and francolin and guinea fowl and sandgrouse almost daily.
Hemingway’s work with the rogue rhino and the cattle-killing lion earned him the status of honorary Kenyan warden, with powers of investigation and arrest. He toured the countryside, responding to elephant raids on cornfields, and lion and hyena predation on donkeys and cattle. He knocked a leopard out of a tree and went after it on his belly with a Winchester pump-gun, shooting at close range until “the roaring stopped.” Look magazine ran a picture of the bearded Bwana and old Chui, the spotted one.
And then there was Debba, the winsome Wakamba girl from the nearby shamba. Hemingway, typically outrageous, mentioned his lustful thoughts to Mary, who wryly suggested old M’windi give Debba a bath first. Hemingway waited until Mary flew up to Nairobi to do some shopping. She came back to find her bed broken, and the Greatest Living Writer in the English Language practicing with a spear and running about in shorts dyed various shades of Masai gray, pink and ochre.
Hemingway’s run of bad luck only got worse. On January 21, 1954, he and Mary boarded a Cessna 180 at West Nairobi airport for sightseeing and photography above the White Nile and the Great Rift Escarpment. Three days later while circling low over a spectacular waterfall, the pilot clipped a telegraph cable, severing the radio antenna and most of the rudder. They made it another three miles before plowing into the thorn trees.
The pilot was jostled but otherwise unhurt. Hemingway had a mild concussion, another injured shoulder and Mary was in shock. The trio struggled up a hill, built a fire and were spotted by a river streamer the following day. By then, news had flashed around the world that Ernest Hemingway was missing somewhere in Uganda and presumed dead.
The steamer deposited them at Lake Albert, where they boarded a decrepit De Havilland bi-plane bound for the hospital at Entebbe. They never made it off the ground. Mary and the pilot shinnied out a tiny shattered window. While flames licked toward the fuel tanks, Hemingway rammed and kicked and butted his way through a jammed side door.
He was alive, but badly hurt. He was bruised and burned, but worst of all, his fractured skull was leaking blood and cerebral fluid. And it was still 140 miles to the hospital, two days by potholed and rutted Ugandan roads. Halfway there, they stopped for food and drink, and sympathetic bar patrons poured gin into Hemingway’s open head wound, proclaiming the superiority of Ugandan bush medicine and predicting a speedy recovery.
But it was not to be. Ernest Hemingway, suddenly old at 54, was never quite the same. He suffered flashes of black anger and irrational outbursts. And there were deep and recurring depressions, delusions of both grandeur and persecution. After briefly recuperating in Nairobi, where he claimed he was treating his burns with lion fat and fishing on the Indian Ocean, Hemingway returned to Europe. There he consorted – as best as he was able – with an old but very young lover, the lovely Adriana Ivancich, whom he had bedded years before in Cuba.
Eventually Hemingway made it back to la Finca Vigia, where he fished with Ava Gardner, Hollywood’s hottest that year, after hours trolling her around the Havana nightspots, provoking a minor frenzy among young Latino night-lifers.
Mary remembered the early morning of October 28, 1954. She had slept alone, which was her custom, when her husband crawled in alongside and woke her with a throaty whisper. “I’ve won the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The Swedish thing,” he murmured.
Ernest Hemingway had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But the black mood that had settled upon him was taking its toll. “I’m thinking of telling them to shove it.” But he reconsidered. “Hell, it’s $35,000. A man can have a lot of fun with $35,000.”
And he did. Hemingway went back to Idaho, though by then he was too famous and Sun Valley too touristy, so he moved to the defunct mining town of Ketchum.
The high-country climate suited Hemingway, who was finally limbering up after his two plane crashes so he could swing on a bird once again. The Hemingways shot mallards and pintails, chukars, pheasants and sage grouse. They even chanced another airplane ride, that took them far up into the mountains – in a howling snowstorm – to hunt mule deer.
Up in Idaho, they still talk about those days. Patti Struthers, now in Albuquerque, was a teenager who remembers a big man with a charisma that filled every room he walked into. Still, she was afraid of him.
“There was something about him that I did not like.” Was it sex? Maybe so. “He spent some time with one of my girlfriends,” Struthers says. “She seemed to be all right with it, but it gave me the creeps.” Complex as always, Hemingway taught Patti’s mother how to handle a shotgun.
At 81, Margaret Struthers’ recollections are still vivid. “It was a double sixteen he had bought for his boys. We went out to the range and I got good enough to kill ducks we flushed from the irrigation ditches. Ernie would lay out a plan and we’d crawl on ’em. Nobody dared stand and shoot till he gave the word.” And despite his legendary penchant for alcohol and recklessness, Margaret Struthers remembers a man who brooked no drinking until the limit was filled, the guns unloaded and cased. “He was very careful about that.”
Hemingway and Margaret’s brother, Bud Purdy, tried to introduce live pigeon shooting to Idaho, a sport Hemingway enjoyed in Cuba. The lack of sufficient pigeons proved no obstacle. The men used magpies, a bird rated by local ranchers as somewhere between a crow and a buzzard. There was a ten-cent bounty on them in those days, and Hemingway figured it would pay for the shells. Bud Purdy engineered the traps, which looked like giant lobster pots and often netted a hundred or more birds when baited with a sheep carcass. “We’d send the kids in to sack ’em up,” Purdy recollects. “They didn’t mind too much.”
The magpies were released from a gunnysack, one bird at a time. “There was a shooter and a backer at each side,” Bud says. “The backers couldn’t fire until the shooter got off two rounds.” Hemingway and Purdy were often joined by Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart and once even by the Shah of Iran. Hemingway usually won and one year was presented with a Magpie Trophy that proudly sat on the desk in his Ketchum home.
Meanwhile, there was trouble back in Cuba. Batista had fled and Castro and his band of bearded revolutionaries were in Havana and the first “Yanqui go home” graffiti was appearing on the city’s walls. La Finca was in bad shape. The Hemingways went back, ordered maintenance and repairs. That chore finished, it was time for fishing. Hemingway and other international sportfishermen organized a billfish tournament and invited Fidel Castro as a sign of good will. Castro won, though Hemingway, watching through binoculars, thought he saw one of Castro’s security goons at the reel, a flagrant violation of the rules. Nevertheless, in the absence of irrefutable proof, he had to present Castro with the trophy. Hemingway, who loathed any sort of phoniness, left Cuba for the last time.
On November 30, 1960, one George Seviers was admitted into the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota, for treatment of high blood pressure. Seviers had been flown in from Ketchum, and while refueling at Rapid City, he had attempted to walk into a whirling propeller. Seviers was also being treated for chronic depression. But it was a ruse to throw off the press. The real George Seviers was a medical doctor and still at home in Ketchum. The man in the Mayo Clinic was his patient, Ernest Hemingway.
His doctors ordered electroshock therapy, where a patient is strapped down and jolted with near-fatal charges. Hemingway seemed to respond well, and after a few weeks, was following his doctor home for meals, drinks and trapshooting. But electroshock therapy has one great and debilitating side-effect – the loss of memory. Hemingway wept when he could not remember the name of the swamp where he had missed that Cape buffalo back in 1953.
Then came a final indignity.
Hemingway had been invited to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, but was too ill to attend. The President had sent a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, asking for a line or two and an autograph. Hemingway stared at the page for most of the afternoon. The man who had written a dozen books and perhaps a thousand shorter pieces, the man who had won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, could not think of a single line for the President of the United States.
Back in Ketchum on July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway rose early. He padded to his gun cabinet, chose his pigeon grade W & C Scott gun, put the barrels to his forehead and snatched both triggers.
He was buried in Ketchum’s cemetery. His epitaph on a memorial erected by his Idaho friends was the one he had written for Gene Van Guilder back in 1939. “Best of all he loved the fall. The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods. Leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills, the high blue windless skies. Now he will be part of them forever.”
But the question haunts us still. How could he do it? He had fame, boats, cars, guns, women, whiskey, the best shooting and fishing on earth. How could this man who had repeatedly foiled death in war and love and sport do this to himself?
Hell, how could he do this to us?
Out in the Sawtooths, the day ends early as the sun slips behind the jumbled peaks. A coyote howls as the last of the light ricochets off the tallest mountains. The shade creeps, then rushes, and the lonesome sky deepens from blue to purple to violet to beyond human sight. The first pinprick stars glimmer and the valley cools and the wind eases back down the slopes, rattling the aspens like Ezekiel’s dry bones. Ezekiel’s bones prophesized, but the aspen do not and the question remains on the wind.
And you turn from this place and you think he was old and sick and could no longer do what he lived and loved to do. And he did it with a fine 20-bore. He did it in style.
Maybe that’s answer enough.
This article originally appeared in the 30th Anniversary Issue of Sporting Classics magazine. All rights reserved.