Free Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson Page A

lifelong, high-maintenance, oval-faced American beauty who, for a time, back in the early thirties, when she was still youthful and blond and high-strung and high-sexed and wed to an old Yale clubman and high executive of Pan American Airways in Cuba, was Hemingway’s wild-assed drinking partner and fishing companion and, probably, his lover. (No one’s ever been able to establish this as an indisputable fact, although many Hemingway chroniclers have assumed it for fact.) “Ernest was a meat fisherman,” Gingrich would write in “Horsing Them in with Hemingway.” For a true sportsman, that’s about the unkindest cut of all. By then, the famous editor seemed to take special delight in the posthumous decline of Hemingway’s literary fortunes.
    But not in 1933 and 1934 and 1935, when his magazine was trying to get traction and badly needed Hemingway’s name on its covers. Gingrich, a native midwesterner still in his late twenties, of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, a collector of first editions, had met Hemingway at a rare-book shop in New York City called The House of Books in January 1933. Ever since, the young editor had been doing whatever he possibly could do to stay on Hemingway’s good side and to get him to write for the magazine. The first issue of
Esquire
, on stands in late August 1933, with that fishing contribution by Hemingway, had sold one hundred thousand copies at fifty cents apiece. All told through the years, he’d publish twenty-five essays and six stories in Gingrich’s magazine—“letters,” he and the editor decided to call his fishing and hunting reports. After Hemingway’s suicide, Gingrich wrote in his editor’s column:
    It is not too much to say that, at the very earliest point, he was [
Esquire
’s] principal asset.… We were going around New York with a checkbook, calling on writers and artists all and sundry, trying to make them believe that we were actually going to come out with a luxury magazine, “devoted to the art of living and the new leisure,” at the very moment when the banks had just reopened.… [O]ur gentlemen’s agreement with Hemingway was that we would pay him twice as much as we paid anybody else, and that, while we hoped to pay more, if and as the magazine succeeded, we were still honor-bound to preserve that ratio. Such was the stature of the man that even then (Spring of ’33), nobody objected.
    Gingrich was exaggerating—or more likely remembering wrong—when he said he had paid Hemingway twice as much as anybody else in the beginning, although it’s true that F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, all of whom were early and famous contributors, had to get in line behind both Hemingway’s pay and ego. Gingrich had also promised not to tamper with so much as a comma of Hemingway’s copy.
    In the letter mailed from France on the twenty-fourth, a hook had been set.
I want to buy a boat that costs $7,000 and have only $3500. Once I get the boat am set
. On April 3, 1934, the big-boned 210-pounder in suit and tie popping quotes at Pier 57 beside the small and zebra-suited woman couldn’t know for certain his hook-setting had worked. Couldn’t know that the magazine editor in Illinois had fairly hopped to it and already mailedhim, in care of Scribners, a nine-page, handwritten, semi-sycophantic letter that began: “The enclosed, or attached, represents a couple of blood vessels. You’ll have to scratch another $500 somehow, and then we all stand up and call you skipper.” (A week later, after he was home in Key West, Hemingway wrote to Gingrich and said, “Thanks for raising the 3G.… You were a good guy to send the money.”) Hemingway wouldn’t know his hook-setting had worked until he’d opened an envelope at his publishing house. The letter and the check, written on April 2 in Chicago and posted