Cuba, as a matter of fact, is where I saw him the second time.
When you met him that first time, how did you get along with him politically? Did you know he’d been involved in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side?
Except for that brief anticommunist phase of mine in Hollywood, I’ve never been a political person. I’ve only voted twice in my life, and that was for Franklin Roosevelt, and it was a long time ago. I’ve always made sure that I had members of both parties on my payroll, so that no matter who won, Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft didn’t lose.
During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, I was involved in my flights and designing airplanes and I was about as apolitical as you could get. Moreover, from what I could gather, politics was never Ernest’s major interest, either. Strictly secondary. I’ve always had the feeling he went to Spain because there was a war on and he wanted to see men in action. That turned him on. Naturally his sympathies were with the Loyalists rather than with the Fascist side, because he was that kind of man. He had a sense of justice and a love for common people.
But he also had an obsession with death and how men faced it. He asked me a great many questions in later years about my accidents, how I had felt about them, and I answered to the best of my ability. He was the only man I ever knew who was almost as banged up physically – broken bones, and wounds – as I was. I often wondered if he ever used that stuff I told him in any of his books, or whether there’s some unpublished novel of his that has quotes from me or some incident from my life in it, because later on his questions were endless, about how I felt in the various crashes, and how I felt when a plane was in trouble. Danger made him feel like a bigger person. That’s why he liked that ride in the B-25 so much.
Anyway, nine years later, in 1954, I was in Florida, where I had planned to build my own jet aircraft factory. I was already thinking of a short take-off and landing jet – the STOL – combined with an element of vertical take-off, what’s now called a VTOL. I was looking ahead to the future and intended to sell the first twenty-five planes to TWA – that is, to myself. Del Webb and I got together on it, but it fell through. And on the spur of the moment, that time in Palm Beach – I knew Ernest was in Cuba – I hopped over from Miami to Havana on a commercial flight.
First I went to the Floridita, that famous bar downtown, because I knew he spent a lot of time there, but he wasn’t there. It was empty at that hour of the afternoon.
So I took a taxi out to the finca. I didn’t remember the name of the finca, didn’t even know it was called a finca then. I just said to the cab driver, ‘Hemingway,’ and he said, ‘Ah, Papa!’
I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want Papa. I want Hemingway.’
He said, ‘Sí, sí, Papa, Papa!’ By then we were halfway there, and Papa turned out to be Ernest.
I was let in without any ceremony. The maid at the door didn’t even ask my name. Ernest was sitting around the pool half-naked with a few other people, and I hadn’t had time to change. I was still wearing a business suit. I had taken my tie off, stuffed it in my pocket. I walked up and Ernest was sitting there with his pot belly hanging out, and he peered at me over his glasses.
The first thing he said was, ‘Don’t stand there with the sun behind your back. I can’t make you out, and that makes me nervous. Move around this way.’
I did as I was told, so he could see me. He looked at me with a grim expression – like, ‘What’s this?’ And then suddenly his face broke into a big beautiful smile, and he said, ‘Goddamnit, Tom, it’s great to see you!’
I felt wonderful, that he’d recognized me after all those years and welcomed me so warmly.
Ernest had that quality of welcoming, which is so rare. The house was full of people, apart from his family. There was his wife – at least some little woman running around that I thought was his wife. And some adoring blonde girl, who as I recall, the wife didn’t like very much, no doubt because Ernest was humping her. A bunch of servants, too, and some children, his own and others. And some college kids from the United States. They’d come down there and thrust themselves upon him with their manuscripts, expecting that he’d help get them published. He read their work with great patience, and I remember that when one of them left he asked Ernest for money because he didn’t have the fare back home, and Ernest gave it to him. That’s the kind of man he was.
Did you keep masquerading as Tom Garden?
I was afraid to tell him my real name. It was such a good relationship that I didn’t want to run that risk. We sat around the house and just talked. Ernest wanted to know what I’d been doing all these years, and I made up a few stories that paralleled my life. The events may have been different but the general content was the same, so that I wasn’t lying to him in any meaningful way. I stayed almost the entire first day at his finca, and then he drove me back to my hotel in Havana, the Nacional.
The next day I was out there again with him, and on the third day we went fishing. I had taken Ernest up in my plane, and now he wanted to take me out on the fishing boat, to show me his specialty. I was not a sportsman; I played golf but I never went hunting, and I seldom fished anymore. I didn’t really know what to expect.
There were a couple of Cuban helpers, one who was steering and one serving drinks. Ernest knew by then that I didn’t drink, so he had a bottle of milk along in the ice chest for me. I think he drank tequila or daiquiris, and he had a couple of thermoses full of them, and each time he’d take a belt he’d say to his barman helper, ‘Get out the milk for Señor Jardin.’ And then he would crack up laughing. It broke him up, that I drank milk.
I was taken aback to begin with, when about fifteen minutes after we left the dock, there was Ernest at the helm of the boat, wearing a jock strap. Nothing else.
The fishing was poor. Ernest said it was the fault of the tankers that had been torpedoed there by German subs during the war: the garbage that had spewed out of them had killed off most of the big game fish. And he grumbled, and then it got hot, and he said his jock strap was itching, and he peeled it off.
He said, ‘Come on, Tom, you’re going to get prickly heat. Take off your clothes.’
I checked over in my mind what I remembered of Ernest’s sexual habits, and I figured it was safe enough, so I peeled down to my skivvies. I’ve always been a little shy about being naked with other men, or women for that matter. Many times when I used to play golf, in the locker rooms all the men would shower together, and I waited till they were out of there before I would shower. Crept into a corner of the locker room when I had to change my clothes. I’m sure it harks back to my childhood, being tall and awkward, but I could never put my finger on the exact reason.
After a while Ernest said, ‘Let’s go for a swim. Bareass, Tom.’
I peeled off my skivvies and we dove over the side into the Gulf, which was perfectly flat and beautifully blue. That was an extraordinary experience for me, because we were grown men – I was forty-eight years old, and Ernest was somewhat older – and there we were in the water, naked, and Ernest started playing games. He would dive under the water and come up under me and tip me over by the ankles. One of us had to be a shark and the other had to be a killer whale, or a swordfish, and we would fight. Yell, shout, warn each other – ‘Watch out, whale, here I come!’ Splash around like children.
And it was marvelous. It was a broiling hot day and we were two middle-aged men splashing around like kids in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.
It gave me a curious view of Ernest. I saw something in him which I now know is a common element in many great men: the capacity to play, to remain in some respects childlike until they’re too old to do it. I haven’t got that capacity, sad to say – never did. It’s a naturalness that men have when they’re not ashamed of themselves and of what’s buried inside of them.