A War Reporter's Private Life

WHEN MARTHA GELLHORN met her future husband, Ernest Hemingway, at a Key West bar called Sloppy Joe's, she sealed her fate to be forever linked with -- and often overshadowed by -- the legendary novelist. But Gellhorn's life was in many ways more revolutionary than her husband's. As one of America's most lauded war reporters --unprecedented for a woman in the 1930s -- her job was to travel to the most dangerous hot spots in the world. She chased ambulances through civil-war-torn Spain, holed up in Helsinki during the Soviet bombing raids and rode clandestine supply flights along Burma Road when Britain was fortifying China against the Japanese. And she did it with style -- a striking young blonde with intense eyes and movie-star legs, she was witty, acutely intelligent and fiercely ambitious. To use a phrase from her era, she could drink with the guys.

Gellhorn's biographer Caroline Moorehead (herself a well-traveled human rights journalist and former NBCC finalist) recently compiled a volume from Gellhorn's letters that reveal an unexpected dimension to the St. Louis-born foreign correspondent: a soft side. Speaking by phone from her home in England, Moorehead describes the discoveries she made when she began sifting through the voluminous correspondence of the first female reporter to enter Dachau.

Q: Martha Gellhorn is known an independent woman ahead of her time. Were you surprised to discover she was also desperate to be in love?

A: Absolutely. I suppose I was expecting more about her reporting. But I have to wonder: is this the truth? The funny thing about letters, sometimes they represent the true person, but sometimes it is the person as they see themselves. If you could put those two things together, you might have a very true portrait. But every process has its own distortions. First you have to go from her mind to her deciding to write a letter, then her deciding to send the letter, then her deciding to keep the letter, and then me deciding to print it from a batch of thousands.

Q: This is a big book. Did you have to weed much out?

A: I should think I used about ten percent.

Q: As you say, these letters give us a clear picture of how Gellhorn saw herself -- sometimes awkward, full of self-doubt. What kind of impression did she make on people?

A: She was funny, very funny, with a sort of droll, very dry, slightly self-mocking sense of humor -- slightly more English than American, She loved talking. What she really liked to do in life was to sit back with a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other, and talk and talk about all sorts of things. But she also liked being on her own. She could be imperious. She was quite frightening, she really made you think she was interested in what you had to say -- that's why she became the confidante of so many, particularly the young. She didn't actually want to tell them what was going on in her life. She wanted to listen.

Q: She knew quite a few glamorous people. One letter written while she was living in Italy describes her waiting for Robert Capa and Ingrid Bergman to come over for drinks. Were journalists considered part of the smart set back then?

A: In part, she was really born to this world. Her mother was in with everybody -- she had been to Bryn Mawr, she was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Martha went to Bryn Mawr, and she left and went to Paris, where she moved around a lot. In Paris in the '30s, there was a group of very good-looking, ambitious writers and models living and working there. At every step, those were the people she met -- of course a lot of them were not famous then. [New York Times correspondent] Herbert Matthews was there. Leonard Bernstein was a struggling young composer. She was terrific. She was funny, she was clever. She was not at all afraid. She was very dashing. She was a natural star.

Q: But she was not a Bohemian, especially about sex.

A: No, she has a thing about cleanliness. One of her problems with Hemingway was he was always fairly scruffy and unkempt. Her flat was perfectly neat and perfectly clean. Was she short of puritanical about sex? I really don’t know -- what were the '30s really like about sex? Do we know? I think some people were quite free and easy, as much as now. It seems to me that particular set lived hard, drank a great deal and all went to a bed with each other.

Q: You see some of that in her fiction.

A: In the really proper sense, I don't think she was really a fiction writer. She didn't have that great transferring power, that alchemy. She was more passionate about reality and life. She just slightly changed the names and places. That story in "The Weather in Africa," there was one in there about a woman in Africa on her own, who runs over and kills a small child. That's what she did [in real life]! And that happens again and again. It always sort of surprising, it's slightly grotesque. Open any one of the volumes and two-thirds of the story will be what happened to her.

Q: How much did people think of her during her lifetime as the third Mrs. Hemingway?

A: People thought of her that way a lot, and it made her very, very angry. If someone had the temerity or foolishness to bring it up, she would just get up and leave the room. She used to say, "I was with him for eight years, and married for four. I've lived a lot of other lives." I was telling someone recently I've written about Martha Gellhorn, and it seemed to draw a blank. I said, 'She was a writer and a war correspondent.' Then, with huge reluctance, I said, 'She was also married to Ernest Hemingway,' and the person said, 'Ah, of course.' And I could just see Martha sending a rope down from above.

Q: It seemed like she vacillated from finding men useful and then deciding they were useless after all.

A: She was the most in love with David Gurewitsch [who she had an affair with], and I think she was the most decent to him. To what extent she loved any of the others in her life, I don't know. There's a bit in a letter quite near to the end, somebody comes around to drinks she rather fancies, and he's obviously made some sort of pass at her. She thinks he is going to come back, but of course he doesn't. It is rather agonizing reading about this from afar. Mark you, I think her long relationship with Lawrence Rockefeller was very nice – when she says all those things about being only the cream in his coffee. I think it was nice and it lasted to the very end.

Q: Gellhorn kept up a correspondence with so many of the lights of her day – Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Sybil Bedford, Jacqueline Kennedy. Who do you think had the greatest influence on her?

A: Her mother is immediately the person who comes to mind. The sad thing is, we would have had a stronger sense of that if she had kept those letters [she burned a great many toward the end of her life]. She wrote to her mother two or three times a week.

Q: That's interesting, because the impression one gets of her in these letters is that she was one of the guys.

A: I think she always felt that way. One of my favorite quotes comes from a letter she sent to a family friend as she was going to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. "Me, I am going to Spain with the boys. I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them." She wasn't interested in scoops, and I absolutely believe her – for instance, when she goes into Dachau, she made no effort to be the first. She took her time. But she knew she wanted to get in there.

Q: You've worked as a human rights reporter. Did you meet her this way?

A: No, I was not one of her chaps – a term which counted woman as well as men. I saw her as my mother’s daughter. When my mother died, I suppose we would have a drink, once or twice a year. She had high standards, she pigeon-holed people. My hole in her life was sort of human rights: every now and then I would get a call about Brazil or some such place, and I would come over and talk.

Q: Has her macho swagger, her antiquated terminology, made it hard to embrace her as a feminist role model?

A: I think round here [in England], she is certainly a role model for women journalists. Somewhere in the letters she says she is not interested in feminism, she never noticed life being any different after the movement. I think she took her attitude somewhat for granted, and she was quite bored with discussing it, when she could be off doing something exciting somewhere. She reported, and she was a woman on the war front. In the '30s she did stand out, she went to places that many male reporters couldn’t even reach.

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