Hemingway & Gellhorn: War and Love

by Loren Coleman ©2012


As soon as the new HBO film, Philip Kaufman's Hemingway & Gellhorn began, I knew I was visually going to enjoy this experience.

Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, 1940.

To view this television movie, which did not seem like a small screen offering, is to travel back in time, in grays, sepias, and midcentury mosaics. The movie manifests itself as a sensory marvel.


Today's media are fixated on talking about the blindingly passionate nude scenes between Ernest Hemingway (played by Clive Owen) and Martha Gellhorn (played by Nicole Kidman). Sure, it happens as bombs go off all around them in her Madrid bed, during the Spanish Civil War. Yes, those are great minutes, to view, to take in for their pure energy, irony, and humor. But there was something else that captured my attention from the beginning, which almost sounds like one of the carefully placed clichés you hear throughout this film. Hemingway & Gellhorn demonstrates a remarkable appreciation of the minor minutia that enhanced the canvas capturing the lives of these two romantic figures.


What I remember seeing first was the incredible detail given to the eyes of the aged Martha Gellhorn. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot, as I've seen in aged writers I've known. I was surprised but somewhat expected that.  What I focussed on immediately after noticing the eyes themselves was what I saw when Kidman's eyelids naturally flicked closed for a microsecond, opened, and then would do it again, a few moments later. There was a reddish line of broken blood vessels at the edge of the lid, near the lashes. It wasn't ghoulishly overdone, as if someone had gone overboard with make-up on Kidman's elderly character. Instead, it appeared totally natural and set the stage for me to view and absorb this film, seriously. It was done on a subliminal level that appeared, literally, to counterbalance the supraliminal stimuli of Hemingway's usually overbearing life story.


The film was peppered with those kinds of moments for me.


Seeing Hemingway standing while typing or hearing him constantly calling Martha Gellhorn, "Gellhorn," were the glue that binds this film to an era. They lived in the 1940s, and that was the way it was then. Hemingway & Gellhorn painted that picture well. Another vivid image I literally loved and jumped out of my seat as I viewed it was the brief ones of the huge murals on the walls in Cuba. The war scenes were gritty; the drinking was heavy; the lovemaking was realistic. The concentration sequences were visually disturbing. I was shocked that even though I had seen Dachau images often, I found myself turning away from this horror when viewed through Gellhorn's eyes. These are the finely crafted seemingly small elements that added an unconscious richness to this movie that may only sink in during the coming days.

There is a scene that stands out for me. I will forever recall it as so pure, so true, and so real between this film's Gellhorn and Hemingway. It is the one where they are left sitting in the Chinese cave, after the fighters have rushed out, leaving the two alone. The interchange was intensively electric, distancing, combative, tender, and merging, so much so, that it was familiar. I've lived those moments, as a writer, with women I've loved, and Kidman, Owen, and Kaufman really got it.


I learned a great deal from the movie about Gellhorn that I never knew before. I aquired more about Hemingway's linkages and connections, which I had overlooked. The film should open the world's eyes to the greatness that lived in Martha Gellhorn. 


I was constantly startled, as I watched the film, about the lacuna in my knowledge about this amazing woman. (While I'm a minor Hemingway historian, I never grew to know Gellhorn in the way this film was able to flesh her out for me. I have researched and discussed the Hemingway family history of depression, suicide, and copycat behavior. It is something that is sometimes called the "Hemingway Curse." I've appeared in documentary programming discussing it, most significantly on the September 27, 1996, episode of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries, which dealt with Ernest's granddaughter Margaux's then-recent Santa Monica suicide. I also wrote about the so-called "curse" in my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect.) How had I missed Gellhorn? Thank you, HBO.


Of course, there is one other defining event, for me, that the movie decided, perhaps correctly, to leave out. Martha Gellhorn, who never wished to be a mere footnote to Hemingway, left this world the same way Hemingway did, up to a point. Gellhorn, 89, died by suicide from a drug overdose, on the day after Valentine's Day in 1998, in London. Valentine's Day is a hard day for passionate lovers and emotional ex-lovers. She was nearly blind and had been battling cancer. Less than 20 months previously, Margaux Hemingway had died by suicide by drug overdose, her body being found the day before the 35th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide. His impact on others was great. In life and death.


If we learn of Gellhorn's legacy by way of this movie, and understand her death differently than Hemingway's, we shall honor her new-found memory properly.


Slow down. Take the time. Watch Hemingway & Gellhorn. It is playing all Spring on HBO.

Hemingway & Gellhorn

Directed by Philip Kaufman; written by Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner; Peter Kaufman, Trish Hoffman, James Gandolfini, Alexandra Ryan and Barbara Turner, executive producers.

Starring: Nicole Kidman (Martha Gellhorn), Clive Owen (Ernest Hemingway), David Strathairn (John Dos Passos), Rodrigo Santoro (Paco Zarra), Molly Parker (Pauline Hemingway), Parker Posey (Mary Welsh Hemingway), Santiago Cabrera (Robert Capa), Lars Ulrich (Joris Ivens), Peter Coyote (Maxwell Perkins), Joan Chen (Madam Chiang Kai-shek), Saverio Guerra (Sidney Franklin) and Tony Shalhoub (Mikhail Koltsov).

Hemingway Curse

What is the Hemingway Curse?


Following is an excerpt from The Copycat Effect:

The copycat effect even affects celebrity families. Learned behavior and the modeling power of the copycat effect may be a stronger link than even biological predeterminism. The so-called "Hemingway Curse" is one such example. Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway wrote literary masterpieces. His father and two siblings died by suicide, and the rumors of a Hemingway Curse has become an urban legend. 

One allegorical story is told of Hemingway's mother baking a cake for him on his 21st birthday, and putting the gun his father used to kill himself in the middle of the cake. The story was repeated in Time Magazine. But other sources note that Hemingway's father died by suicide by gunshot when Hemingway was 26, and it was Hemingway who asked for the gun his father had used from his brother. 

Hemingway, nevertheless, decided to use the same basic method, death by shotgun, and killed himself on July 2, 1961. His granddaughter actress and singer Margaux Hemingway was only 41 years old when she died by suicide near the anniversary of her grandfather's suicide 35 years earlier. She was found on July 1, 1996, having overdosed on prescription drugs. Ernest and Margaux Hemingway are both interred in the same Ketchum Cemetery at Ketchum, Idaho. 

Her sister, Mariel Hemingway was interviewed by CNN News reporter Connie Chung on January 17, 2003. When Chung asked Mariel Hemingway about the "Hemingway Curse," she responded: "I just think that it's an easy way for the media to go -- it's just such a hook, the Hemingway curse and suicide and this, that, and the other thing. That's not my life." 

The copycat effect may even play a role in the so-called "Paradise Syndrome." Reuters reporter Rachel Noeman explained the term in a 1996 news story: "They inherit celebrity names, appear to have it all and live apparently gilded lives, but what may at first seem like paradise can end in pain or even tragedy." 

Noeman was reporting on the suicide death of Amschel Rothschild, 41-year-old chairman of Rothschild Asset Management and great-great-great-grandson of Nathan Meyer Rothschild -- who established in 1804 the merchant bank in the City of London that still bears his name. He hanged himself in a Paris hotel room ten days after Margaux Hemingway, who also was 41, was found dead. 

Noeman was making the link between the two, in terms of the "Paradise Syndrome." While the modeling of a suicide on those most like the suicide victim is most often discussed in terms of people basing their suicide on that of a celebrity, descendants of celebrities may actually be the most vulnerable for the copycat effect. Amschel Rothschild’s widow Anita Rothschild repeated what is often said in the wake of such deaths, that it was “totally unexpected,” and the family was "shocked and devastated."

Robert Roper wrote in Obit Magazine in 2011 of the risk factors leading to Ernest Hemingway's suicide, putting the final act in the broader context of the famed writer's six major brain traumas (resulting in concussions?), his alcoholism, the prescription drugs, and some questionable mental health treatments (including electroconvulsive therapy).

Roper very directly talked about Hemingway's dance with suicide:

He often talked about suicide.  The times just after finishing a book were some of the worst for him.  Even in his robust roaring 20s, world-famous as an author already, he talked often about having night terrors, about feeling “contemptible,” about being afraid he was losing control – “you lie all night half funny in the head and pray and pray and pray you won’t go crazy.”  In a love letter to the woman who would become his second wife, he wrote, “I think all the time I want to die.”  A love letter!  The inner Hemingway was agonized, was ever on the cross.

Roper also extends the number of people directly related to Ernest who died by suicide:

In 1928 his father had killed himself.  Hemingway’s mother sent him the revolver that his father had used – it was a Smith & Wesson his grandfather had carried in the Civil War.  Hemingway was said to cherish the gun but to have been deeply disturbed by his mother’s gesture.
* * *
Of his five brothers and sisters, three died by their own hand, a fourth probably also.  One of his sons, Gregory, was drug-addicted and deeply troubled and died in jail.  One of his granddaughters, Margaux Hemingway, the actress, also was an addict and an early suicide.

Therefore, looking at those in Ernest Hemingway's orbit, who did die by suicide?


Ernest Hemingway: born July 21, 1899,  339 N. Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois; 61, died by suicide by W. & C. Scott & Son shotgun, July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho.

Directly related to Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hall (Ernest's grandfather): attempted suicide with a Civil War-era .32 caliber pistol but lived because his son-in-law, Clarence, Ernest's father, had removed the bullets.

Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (Ernest's father): born September 4, 1871, Oak Park, Illinois; 57, died by suicide by his own father's Civil War Smith and Wesson .32 revolver, December 6, 1928, Oak Park, Illinois.

Ursula Hemingway Jepson (Ernest's sister): born April 29, 1902; died by suicide by drug overdose, October 30, 1966.

Leicester Hemingway (Ernest's brother): born April 1, 1915, Oak Park, Illinois; 67, died by suicide by a borrowed .22 pistol, September 13, 1982, Miami Beach, Florida. 

Which ones of Ernest's other siblings (Madalaine, Marceline, Carol) died by suicide? 

Margeux Hemingway (Ernest's granddaughter): born February 16, 1955, Portland, Oregon; 41, died by suicide by drug overdose of phenobarbital, July 1, 1996, Santa Monica, California.

Others

Ernest's first wife, Hadley Richardson's father James Richardson, Jr., died by suicide in 1903.
Julius Mordecai Pincas, known as Pascin (pronounced pass-keen), Jules Pascin, or the "Prince of Montparnasse," born on March 31, 1885, in Bulgaria, was strongly identified with the Modernist movement and the artistic circles of Montparnasse - and Hemingway who features him in A Moveable Feast; died by suicide from cutting wrists and hanging, at age 45, on June 5, 1930, at Montmartre, Paris, France.

Ernest's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, died by suicide by drug overdose on February 15, 1998, in London.


There are others. I just haven't discovered or been made aware of them yet.


For a review of the 2012 movie Hemingway & Gellhorn, click here.

by Loren Coleman ©2004, 2007, 2012.