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Looking for Hemingway
By TONY CASTRO, Columnist 10.MAY.06
In
the fall of 1975, when my wife decided she wanted a divorce, I moved
into a quaint, though dilapidated cottage in an obscure rain forest
corner of River Oaks where the only amenity was being awakened every
morning by a raccoon rummaging through our kitchen.
The address
was 8 Ashbury Place, and it belonged to a struggling novelist named
Peter Heiney, who through his connections at Women’s Wear Daily was
forever entertaining young debutantes with double last names and
lineages to names in Texas history books.
I was too depressed
with self-loathing, pity and half-baked plans about moving to Paris in
search of Hemingway or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of personal
oblivion. To his credit, Peter didn’t try to dissuade me and instead
indulged my delusion. His previous roommate who had inhabited my
bedroom, he enlightened me, had once sat on Hemingway’s lap in some
grand villa in Spain. His parents had been wealthy American expatriates
who entertained Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner and the group that followed
Hemingway when he was there for the running of the bulls.
"His
name is Teo Davis," said Peter. "He was educated in Cambridge, married
a contessa who later divorced him, and he moved in here with me."
"So where is he now?" Yes, I wanted to know, where do mended broken-hearts go when they haven’t shot their brains out.
"Teo? Teo’s now in Hollywood. He’s out there writing screenplays."
Having
just seen Sunset Boulevard for the first time in my life, and with the
image of slain screenwriter Joe Gillis in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool
in my head, this was not what I wanted to hear.
Teo Davis,
though, would remain indelibly on my mind, if for no other reason than
that he had left behind notebooks and parts of an unfinished novel. The
most interesting of his notes were in Spanish: References to "Papa" and
"Hotch" and "Malaga." His handwriting was so bad, however, that making
sense of his ramblings proved to be an exercise in fiction and
futility.
One afternoon, I actually found a library in Houston
and checked out several biographies of Hemingway. To my surprise, what
Peter had said was true. Bill and Annie Davis were rich, beautiful
people in Malaga who, though they did not know Hemingway very well, had
invited him and his fourth wife Mary to stay with them in 1959 at their
elegant estate called La Consula. Their house was filled with a lot of
servants and cars, and they were parents of a son and daughter. One of
the biographies even mentioned Hemingway playing in the mornings with
young Timoteo.
Peter didn’t seem to know much more. "To be honest," he said. "I thought he might have been making it all up."
Fifteen
years passed. Instead of Paris, I decided to go to Spain. I don’t know
whether I was searching for Hemingway or for Timoteo. I found neither.
I wound up in Los Angeles. One day I finally sobered up. I was still
alive, writing for a TV cop show with an office overlooking Sunset
Boulevard. Peter had been right. When you’ve been to hell and back, you
go on to Hollywood to make things up.
I moved into an old
Spanish villa apartment on Kings Road whose claim to fame was that F.
Scott Fitzgerald had once lived there. I would soon learn that in
Hollywood someone famous has always lived where someone not so famous
now lives. It’s like reverse reincarnation: you were always someone
famous in a past life. One day when we were in a story meeting at my
office, a guy popped in the door looking like he had seen better days.
He was there to paint our offices, but he was the most unusual looking
painter you will ever find. He was wearing a rumpled, navy Armani
blazer, soiled linen slacks that none of us could afford, and a slight
English accent that was both unexpected and intimidating.
"I’m your painter," he informed us like some waiter at LeDome, "and my name is Teo."
I
don’t believe Teo ever finished painting the office. He spent most days
chain-smoking Camels on our terrace overlooking the Sunset strip while
we watched young actresses walking their composites and headshots to
the agency across the street. Teo would regale us with reminiscences
that, on the one hand, seemed implausible considering he was not even
ten when Hemingway had spent two months under the same roof.
But
who was to argue with a man from Eton. Peter had had it wrong. Teo had
been educated at Eton, not Cambridge, but he had married a countessa
who had broken his heart. He also had vivid memories of the year
Hemingway had visited. Hemingway had met Teo’s father in Mexico some
years earlier, before Teo was born and when the author was still
married to his third wife Martha.
Bill Davis’ given name was
actually Nathan, an American of enormous wealth although Teo wasn’t
certain how he had made his money. Or, if he knew, he never said. His
father was a quiet, laid-back, balding man with a self-effacing sense
of humor who was the complete opposite of Hemingway. He didn’t intrude
on his famous guest, who at times treated his host almost like a
servant. Hemingway called Bill Davis "Negro," using the Spanish
pronunciation, possibly because he had thick lips and swarthy features.
Davis accepted it as a term of endearing friendship and enjoyed
playing chauffeur for Hemingway. Bill Davis loved to drive cars and in
Mexico was driving a taxi cab, for inexplicable reasons, when he met
Hemingway. Valerie Hemingway, who also was a guest of the Davis family
and later married Ernest’s youngest son Gregory, would recall that
Davis "let the Hemingways use the house as if it were their own house.
He didn't do the big thing of ‘I'm the host, I'm hosting the
Hemingways.’ He really took a back seat, and his wife Annie was just
the most delightful person, just a wonderful, warm person."
"We
called him Papa — everyone did," said Teo. "He was like a big teddy
bear who was larger than life. When he was there, life revolved around
him. Being around ten at the time, and a bit on the precocious side, I
knew who Ernest Hemingway was — that he was an author of some
importance — but just how important he was is something that I wouldn’t
even begin to comprehend until years later."
Teo recalled that
the day the Hemingways arrived at the La Consula, which was actually in
the countryside west of Malaga, his mother had their cook make turkey
sandwiches that his father had taken with him as a snack for the guests
on their drive back from the port of Algeciras across from Gibraltar.
The
Hemingways’ arrival at the estate had signaled a flurry of activity by
the servants. Ernest and Mary had brought 21 pieces of luggage, and Teo
remembered that for a few moments the entry of the estate had resembled
a busy hotel lobby with servants acting as porters. The Hemingways were
pleasantly surprised by what they saw. The Davis’ nineteenth century
mansion rose gracefully behind twin iron gates. The doors alone were
over fifteen feet high and were made of heavy carved oak. Outside the
rich vegetation that included palm and acacia trees, pines, lilies and
vines reminded the Hemingways of their finca in Cuba.
Hemingway
did not sleep well and usually was awake before dawn, Teo recalled.
Often he would find Hemingway at daybreak working at the stand-up desk
on a veranda overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Malaga, the birthplace
of Pablo Picasso, is Spain’s second largest seaport, and La Consula
offered a panoramic view of the historic Andalusian landscape.
Hemingway
was almost religious in his morning ritual of writing. He began work
each morning around 6 a..m. and finished by 10 a.m. Later, Teo was to
learn that in those first ten days at La Consula, Hemingway roughed out
the preface for a new school edition of his short stories. But
Hemingway had gone to Spain on assignment for Life magazine which had
contracted with him to write a short article about the series of mano a
mano bullfights between Antonio Ordonez and Louis Miguel Dominguin, two
of Spain’s greatest matadors.
From the Davis estate, Hemingway
spent the summer travelling with the bullfighters to gather material
for the article. At La Consula, however, Hemingway’s article quickly
grew to some 120,000 words. Tortured over trying to shorten his work,
Hemingway asked his friend Hotchner to help edit the piece. Eventually
they cut the article to 65,000 words, which Life published as "The
Dangerous Summer" in three installments in 1960. It would be the last
work that Hemingway would see published in his lifetime.
For
little Teo, the experience would forever influence his life. He became
a writer because of Hemingway, whose few moments of fatherly-like
attention lavished on Teo affected him enormously.
Some
mornings, Teo’s childish squealing as Papa chased him down the long
halls of the estate awakened the other guests, who delighted in seeing
Hemingway’s increasingly grumpy demeanor soften, even if only for a few
fleeting moments. For Teo, these were much-needed displays of emotion
that were sadly missing from his relationship with his parents. Neither
Bill nor Annie Davis were affectionate with their children, and Teo
would lament that "I cannot recall my parents ever telling me they
loved me."
Mary Hemingway would later write in her memoirs
that the Davises had indeed been unusual people. Annie Davis, she said,
was "an American who had lived abroad so long she seemed to us
European." The Davises also did not permit a telephone or radios in
their home, so their only means of communicating with the outside world
was by mail or telegram.
Nonetheless, La Consula was filled
with commotion the two months that the Hemingways were guests. Teo
recalled that life on the estate during that period centered around
Papa. He loved Fats Waller, and the Davises always had Fats Waller
songs blaring from their loudspeakers by the pool. Hemingway’s favorite
was "Your Feets Too Big." He did not really sing in tune but instead
loved to encourage other people to perform.
Often the
commotion was simply the departure and return of Hemingway and his
cadre of friends and bullfight aficionados. With Bill Davis at the
wheel, Papa was on the road often, following that seaon’s bullfights.
At various times, the group chasing after the bulls with Hemingway
included Noel Coward, Lauren Bacall, Beverly Bentley who would later
marry Norman Mailer.
That summer, Hemingway turned 60, and
little Timoteo was awestruck by the extravagant birthday party his
parents hosted on July 21. Mary Hemingway summoned guests from all over
the world and arranged the party with fireworks, champagne from Paris,
Chinese food from London, Spanish musicians and flamenco dancers.
When
a fireworks display set a palm tree on fire, the local hook and ladder
company — led by bullfighter Antonio Ordonez, join the party. Hemingway
enjoyed himself immensely, but the celebration produced some
indications that all was not well with him. Among them was a nasty
flash of ill temper directed at his frontline friend from World War II,
General Charles Trueman "Buck" Lanham. Having come from Washington,
D.C., for the party, he left Spain certain that Hemingway was an
extremely troubled man.
To all but a few, Hemingway's public
persona had become almost a self-parody. A child could be excused for
not seeing it. Most in Hemingway’s entourage, however, either excused
it or refused to see it. Teo took it all in, delighted with the
bafoonish Hemingway acting out fits of anger, rage and neurosis as if
in a cartoon.
In a year, Hemingway would be dead.
"I
remember learning that he had died," Teo recalled, "but I don’t think
it was until later that I learned how he had died. I don’t know if it
matters. He had lived a long, rich life and obviously, from his point
of view, it had reached its end."
Today, in a sense, there is
still a bit of that irrepressible Hemingway spirit in the young boy who
once looked up to him in that enormous villa in Spain. The boy, in
fact, has now become a man just a few years younger than Hemingway had
been when he visited La Consula.
"I’ve been looking for
Hemingway for so long," says Teo, "for a sense of who he really was,
that at times I feel as if I’ve almost become Hemingway. Does that make
sense?"
To an entire generation, of course, it does.
Tony Castro can be reached at tcastro@laindependent.com.
Tony Castro Archives
 
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17.MAY.06 WeHo to Antonio: Hold your horses
17.MAY.06 Give us this day, our daily bread
10.MAY.06 Looking for Hemingway
26.APR.06 Political 'vision' or political Waterloo?
05.APR.06 Young gods: Immortality and youth
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