Hawks on Hawks

21. Ernest Hemingway

116 21 Ernest Hemingway A couple of years ago you were going to direct a film about the friendship of Hemingway and Robert Capa, the news photographer. Are you still working on that? Well, I tell you, when you make a picture about real people, and their names are used, you have more trouble . . . in making Sergeant York we had to get twenty releases—every member of his squad in the Army, his lieutenant, his captain, his major, anybody that we mentioned we had to get releases. I think the story of getting the releases, where we found the various people and how we paid them off, was almost better than Sergeant York. I’m too goddam lazy, and I’ve got to have too much fun to run around getting releases. The head of one of the big companies, who wants me to make it, I told him I’d make the story if he’d get the releases. He said, “I didn’t know it was that much trouble.” You’ve got Hemingway’s family to contend with, his ex-wives—oh, Christ! So for the moment it’s stymied. I don’t know whether to do it or not. I don’t know who the hell to do it with. It must be George C. Scott. World War II was an interesting period in Hemingway’s life. From reading about it, it seems he was a little unbalanced. He was doing a lot of bizarre things, getting into the war even though he was a correspondent, blowing up pillboxes . . . I wouldn’t say it was in that period; he had done that all his life. What the hell, he was mixed up in the Spanish War long before that. I remember one funny thing—Capa went over with the first wave that went through the water at Omaha beachhead. He made those marvelous pictures of everything shaking. Ernest got over by flying over three or four days later. He got mixed up in some way, and Capa found him shot in the leg or something. Capa left him for about three hours and went on to get his camera so he could get a picture of Ernest’s leg. Ernest Hemingway 117 What kind of a guy was Capa? He was ebullient. He was a great photographer. He was Hungarian. He was crazy as a bedbug. You see, the story of one man gets kind of boring , but the story of a friendship is something that lets you make better scenes. Capa was going out in Paris with a very good-looking Eurasian model, but he had a hell of a time every time he visited her place because the girl had a great big boxer dog that didn’t like Capa. Ernest came over, and after a few drinks he told Capa he had a sleeping pill that was a suppository . So Ernest poked it in the dog. Capa got brave and stayed, and he woke up in the morning, and the dog was going “Grrr” right in his face. And I remember Hemingway’s new wife [Mary Welsh] one time stopping Capa from throwing knives at Ernest when Ernest was standing with his arms out in front of a door and both were drunk. And all kinds of crazy things they used to do. Nobody else can do ’em, they don’t know the things, because I’ve seen them happen. Would it be a comedy? Well, I don’t know. Especially in the last ten or twelve years, every time I can get some comedy into a scene, I’ll do it. You can call it a comedy if you want to. It isn’t an outright comedy, but I would much rather tell these things than something serious. Hemingway was . . . we were good friends. He interested me. Strange guy. To Have and Have Not doesn’t have much to do with Hemingway’s novel. There wasn’t anything in the picture that was in the book. Hemingway and I were fishing down in Key West, and I was trying to get him to write for movies. He said, “No, I’m top where I am. I don’t want to go out to Hollywood. I don’t like it. And I wouldn’t know what to do.” I said, “You don’t have to come to Hollywood. We can go fishing or hunting. We can meet here, Sun Valley, Africa, any place you...