Hemingway's Boat (8 page)

As in the automotive business, the so-called new models from a boatbuilder, along with their advertising wares, began to appear in the fall of the previous model year. That is, boats for the 1934 season were being readied by the major shipyards in the late summer and all through the autumn of 1933, and this is also when the new catalogs were mailed out to prospective customers and when ads began to show up in the press. The big event every year for showcasing new boats—and for taking orders—was the National Motor Boat Show, held in January at Grand Central Palace in New York. This is when the shipyards from across the country unveiled their beauties in the flesh, seeking to outdo one another with flashy exhibit spaces and giveaway trinkets and walk-through models. Sometimes chastely sexy girls were there to greet buyers on the foredeck. In other words, the New York boat show was just like a big car show, except that the motoring dreams were on water instead of the open road. Since he was in Africa, Hemingway was going to miss by roughly two months the gaudy 1934 show at which the Wheeler firm was one of the starring concerns.

Many American boat makers in the thirties were just trying to hang on, no matter the impression they were giving to would-be customers. By mid-Depression, some companies were down to a handful of employees. And their new models were often pretty much the old models—using the same hulls from prior years, but with different manufacturing numbers.

The 1934 Playmates—how Hemingway must have loathed the name—ranged
in size from twenty-eight to forty-six feet. The company produced mainly stock boats rather than custom-made craft, although if you were sufficiently well-heeled, the boatyard at the foot of Cropsey Avenue was glad to do custom work, starting either from absolute scratch or, more characteristically, from a stock Wheeler hull and constructing upward to your specifications. Mostly, though, Wheeler was known to yachting enthusiasts as a “production shipyard.” The company had a reputation for good woodwork, inside and out, especially in its cabinetry. Its “brightwork” (what you see on the exterior) was known to be very solid, if not spectacular. Still, when you said “Wheeler,” you tended to think of look-alike boats. To pure yachting snobs, for whom the Depression would have been an inconvenience, that term, “stock boat,” no less than the term “production shipyard,” would have had an odor.

And yet it's also true that the designers and old-school Scandinavian master shipwrights at Wheeler would produce some famed original boats in these years—a sixty-nine-footer, for instance, for a financier named Charles S. Payson, so that he might hydroplane to his office on Wall Street. These craft were known in the yachting world as “streamline commuters” or simply “commuters.” Payson's custom Wheeler came out the year after
Pilar
and was christened
Saga
, with photographs of her in the boating journals, knifing the water with her V-12 Packards, this legend underneath: “Streamlining in Mahogany.” Charlie Payson, known to be impeccable with his money, was married to the former Joan Whitney, and Joan was the sister of Jock Whitney, and Jock and Joan were the only children of Helen Hay Whitney and Payne Whitney, fabulously rich Americans and devotees of the sporting life. In the thirties, Jock Whitney and his spouse, and Charles Payson and his spouse, lived next to each other on Long Island's Gold Coast. It sounds so tight and clubby and Gatsbyesque, although apparently things were competitive, too, in a sporting way.
Saga
is said to have come about in the first place out of Payson's need to outrun Jock Whitney's mahogany commuter,
Aphrodite
. The brothers-in-law wished to race toward their money in the city, and whoever got there first could make more.

If you went past forty-six feet in length for your Wheeler watery dream, you were really talking about a yacht, not a motor cruiser. So technically speaking, Ernest Hemingway never owned a yacht, even though that phrase is often thrown around in connection with the history of his boat. The 1934 Wheeler catalog on the stock thirty-eight-foot cabin cruisers said:

The '34 catalog offered an endorsement from Vincent Astor himself. He'd recently bought a Wheeler thirty-eight. He was the son of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, robber baron supreme. Vincent Astor could have afforded any kind of yacht or yacht maker he wanted. And he came to Brooklyn for a Wheeler—well, not literally. The hull of his
Little Nourmahal
was white and she was a little more upright as she churned the water, but still: Astor's custom Wheeler looked remarkably similar to the production Wheeler that, in about six months, was going to come off the wooden ways at Cropsey Avenue, with her five-character Spanish name lettered neatly in white on her dark stern.

On March 24, in Paris, four days before boarding an ocean liner with the same name (it's the day he punches the vase of tulips at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company), Hemingway wrote to Arnold Gingrich at
Esquire
. Much of the letter was taken up with instructions regarding his next contribution to the magazine, which would be about the safari. “You may also use the photo of me and lion,” he wrote. “But
under no circumstances
run this picture with the group of pictures or any single picture of
live lions. It would be very bad taste and give people the impression that we photographed lions and then shot them.” Further on:

The letter of the twenty-fourth had a postscript: “Please acknowlege pictures to Scribners and mark letter PLEASE HOLD. Will be there in about a week or 8 days.” He had addressed the envelope: “Arnold gingritch Esq.” (Inside, in the greeting, he had used the same spelling and lowercase
g
.) Hemingway's spelling, not least the spelling of people's names, was often erratic, and sometimes had a kind of deliberate facetiousness about it, but it seemed to take him a particularly long while to get this one down, even though Gingrich had been his acquaintance for a little more than a year. It would be a good while before Gingrich, like so many others, would begin to register his public contempt for Hemingway. Years later, for
Playboy
, he'd write a biting memoir called “Horsing Them in with Hemingway.” By then Gingrich was not only a legendary American magazine editor, he was a world-class fly-fisherman. He was also the fourth husband of Jane Mason, 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:

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 mailed
him, 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 the next day via air mail, were there waiting, on either April 4 or April 5, in Max Perkins's office, when the biggest horse in the Scribners stable went to visit his editor at 597 Fifth Avenue. And immediately afterward, a jubilant man, suppressing his demons, with dough in hand, spouse on arm, glorying in his life, in his luck, in the new possibilities of the physical world, taxied to Brooklyn, to buy his boat.

Several weeks later, while
Pilar
was still being outfitted and altered to her owner's wishes, some official documents were filled out and signed and sent to the Department of Commerce, in its Bureau of Navigation, in Washington, DC: the master carpenter's certificate, the certificate of admeasurement, the application for registration. If you went to the right archive, you could pore over the originals of these papers, like this document, certificate No. 1261, dated April 23, 1934, with its unconscious poetry of form:

Six days afterward, in its Sunday sports pages, in a roundup of boating news,
The New York Times
ran a twelve-line item: “Back from writing about picadors in Spain and ambulance drivers in Italy, Ernest Hemingway, who has gone to his home at Key West, has taken up motorboating and last week bought a 42-foot cruiser at the Wheeler shipyard in Brooklyn. White
paint is now being burned off to comply with Hemingway's preference for a black hull and the boat will be shipped to a Southern port for delivery at Key West.” The twelve lines contained only four or five errors of fact, which, considering the oceans of misinformation already attending this coveted life, wasn't half bad.