Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (2 page)

“Me?” I know the Bruces had told him that I was their new friend and that we were planning a cruise through the Keys and the nearby Ten Thousand Islands together. But warpath!

As Toby moved off to his other guests, I leaned back against the back wall of the patio to ponder the mystery. But not for long.

A bull-chested, ruddy-faced man of fifty—barefoot, wearing shorts that looked as if they had been ripped violently from worn blue jeans and a fishing shirt open almost to the navel—shouldered through the crowd and set himself in front of me, feet spread in a fighter’s stance, head thrust forward until our faces were not more than a foot apart. He hadn’t been stinting on the Metusalem.

The first words out of his mouth were short, sharp jabs. “So you’re Schulberg? The book writer?”

“I’ve written a few books.”

Now the hard right: “What do you know about prizefighting—for Christ’s sweet sake?”

I retreated to a characteristic I don’t admire but often find myself adopting when under attack: apparent humility with a nasty edge. “Maybe I don’t know too much about boxing. I’ve just followed it all my life.”

His bare chest pushing against me forced a backward step. Then he looked me in the eye and spat out a name, punctuating it with a little shove. “Billy Papke?”

I stared at him. How do you answer that one? In anger or passivity? Choose the latter. My answer came in robot-mono-tone:

“Billy Papke was the only middleweight who ever knocked out Stanley Ketchel. That gave him the middleweight championship. Then Ketchel knocked him out. When they fought again, Ketchel won in twenty rounds. After Ketchel was murdered, Papke was champion again. I think he killed himself in California about ten years ago.” Monotone, monotone, I cautioned myself. “Papke was famous.”

There was absolutely no reaction. Not a flicker. Just “Leo Houck?” and the little shove for punctuation.

“Same weight division. Same period. Fought everybody. Papke, Harry Greb, Gene Tunney. For years he’s been the boxing coach at Penn State.” That I happened to know because my screenwriting friends, the Epstein twins, had been on his team.

Still no reaction. Nothing. The fistic catechism went on. I could feel my back almost brushing against the wall now. I felt like a fighter bulled into a corner, taking punches. I wondered how long I could take it, or should.

“Pinkey Mitchell?”

Pinkey Mitchell! Did I know Pinkey Mitchell? Now he was moving into
my
generation. “Pinkey Mitchell was the brother
of Richie Mitchell, who fought Benny Leonard for the lightweight title. My father took me to the Garden but they wouldn’t let me in. I was only seven. Five years later I saw Mushy Callahan, our local favorite in L.A., take the junior welterweight championship from Pinkey. I saw Pinkey Mitchell. When he came out to fight Mushy, he was a big fighter from the East. He was famous. In fact, when Mushy won he gave me the gloves from the fight. I hung them in a place of honor on the wall above my bed.”

No reaction. It had settled into a kind of war of attrition. I wasn’t going to lose my temper if I could help it—and “Papa” wasn’t about to quit.

“Pete Latzo?” This shove took me right to the wall. I could feel my shoulders against it. I was being bulled out of the patio. The famous bare chest was pressed against mine, pushing me back.

Pete Latzo? A little like asking Alfred Kazin if he had ever heard of Jack London. But I took a deep breath and began:

“Pete Latzo took the welterweight championship from Mickey Walker. The great Mickey Walker, Ernest [I knew he hated that name but I couldn’t get my mouth around “Papa” and so never knew what to call him]. You’re asking me famous fighters. Pete Latzo is famous. Anybody who knows anything about boxing knows Pete Latzo.” And then, finally, in exasperation, I threw a combination of my own:

“Pete Latzo comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania. And, if you’d like to get in touch with him, he’s still there. He’s an organizer for the Teamsters Union.”

And I gave
him
a little shove. I despise physical fighting—“Leave it to the pros,” I’ve always said—but it seemed as if our “moment of truth” had come.

I set my feet, braced for attack or to throw a punch, fantasizing a surprise left hook to the somewhat rum-swollen gut. At the same time, there was ambivalence: a flash replay of Ernest’s tangle with radical writer Max Eastman in the office of their editor, Max Perkins, at Scribner’s. A messy contribution to the public image of “Papa” that he claimed to resent but too often managed to encourage.

Suddenly, as if reading my mind, he wheeled and lurched back through the gathering to the bar and the kitchen behind it. I leaned back against the wall, seething. I was relieved that we hadn’t come to blows, yet I had an impulse to follow him, spin him around, punch the arrogant bully face. Then I thought of getting out, heading for Sloppy Joe’s. Or would he corner me there? “Joe is
my
friend. Joe’s is
my
place. What do you know about Sloppy Joe’s, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

I was still leaning against the wall when Toby came back with a refill of the Metusalem.

“Papa’s in the kitchen. He says he likes you.”

I tried to swallow back the rage and keep my voice steady. Having “Papa” here and a lot of old Key West friends to see him was a big thing for the Bruces, and they didn’t deserve a mess.

“Tell ‘Papa’ I admire him. But from now on I plan to admire him from afar.” I took a deep breath. “As far away as I can get.”

Toby felt bad. We were both his friends and friendship was Toby’s thing.

“Papa’s had a bug up his ass all day. A lot of pressure. Pauline being here—and Mary. But he’s good people. He wants you to come in and have a drink with him.”

“Toby, I’ll read ’im. I’ll read anything he writes. But he asked me a lot of dumb questions that hurt my feelings. I think it’s better if we stay away from each other.”

Toby went back to the kitchen to deliver this message. I kept on leaning against the back wall of the patio, still seething and nursing the rum.

A few minutes later Toby was back. “Look, mon, Papa really feels bad. He asked me to tell you again, he
likes
you. He wants to make it up to you. Like to take you fishing in the morning.”

But I had heard about “Papa’s” fishing expeditions. If someone hooked the first fish, he was teed off. And God help you if you boated the biggest. I liked deep-sea fishing, loved to be out
on the water. But it wasn’t life-and-death with me, as everything was with “ Papa.”

“Tell him thanks but I’d just as soon get my own boat. I c’n take the family. More relaxing.”

“All right, mon.” I had never heard Toby argue with anyone. It wasn’t subservience but instinctive respect for other people’s ways of seeing things. Unlike friend “Papa,” who was a highbrow with lowbrow affectations, Toby was a genuine lowbrow with unspoken and unspoiled sensitivity. As I got to know them both better, I began to feel that Toby was the man Ernest truly wanted to be. I could understand why “Papa” liked him so much. It wasn’t simply because Toby hero-worshiped him, although it seemed to me that the need for such worship had already begun to poison the Hemingway well.

A few days later the Hemingways left town, and Key West settled down again. But Toby and Betty were still convinced that “Papa” and I were meant to be friends, and that in time they would bring us together. “You two guys would like one another,” they kept insisting, urging me to give him another chance. I began to feel that maybe I was being the difficult one, that he had apologized in his own proud way and that perhaps I should be a little more forgiving.

The following winter I happened to be at the Bruces’ when a phone call came in from “Papa” in Cuba, and when they told him I was there he asked them to put me on the phone. He was warm and friendly. He asked me if I was writing and I said yes, working on another book, and he said he was working on a book, too, a new novel and he couldn’t tell yet whether it was any good. He didn’t ask me what mine was about and I didn’t ask him about his. He said Toby had told him we had been tarpon fishing and that I had caught one large enough to mount and he urged me to try the waters around Cay Sal, between Key West and Cuba, one of his favorite fishing grounds. He sounded the way the Bruces described him. Couldn’t have been nicer.

A year later my book was finished—it was called
The
Disenchanted
—and this time, for the winter respite, we decided to move on from Key West to Cuba. Toby steered us to “Papa’s Hotel,” the Ambos Mundos, and told us to be sure to call “Papa,” who (the Bruces assured me) would like to invite us out to the Finca Vigia for lunch.

At the front desk of the old Spanish-Colonial hotel—the kind I took to immediately, with its faded tiles and worn mahogany—the clerk said there was a message from Don Ernesto. Frankly, I was pleased, in a good mood about the success of my book and more than ready for a truce. But the message from El Papa was: When I arrived, he wanted it clearly understood that I was
not
to call him. The clerk passed this on to me in a world-weary monotone. I had the feeling he was accustomed to handling these negative invitations from El Maestro.

I made some phone calls to learn the nature of my sins. From Arthur Mizener, who had written the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald; from Harvey Breit of the
New York Times Book Review,
another friend of Ernest’s and mine who had made it his mission to bring us together; finally, from Toby himself, who got it straight from “Papa,” I discovered what it was I had done to him this time.
The Disenchanted
drew in good part on my ill-fated cross-country trip from Hollywood to Hanover, New Hampshire, with Scott Fitzgerald to write a movie with him about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. My central character—the tormented, fading novelist scrambling for movie money so he could shore up his literary reputation—had been based on all the “failed priests” (as Scott had called them) who had worked for my father, the producer B. P. Schulberg. I had known them well—Herman Mankiewicz, Vincent Lawrence, John V. A. Weaver, Edwin Justus Mayer—all of them desperate for that “second chance.” Still, I would not argue that Scott Fitzgerald and my Manley Halliday were brothers.

And that, it seemed, was my problem, or was it Ernest’s? Scott Fitzgerald was “Papa’s” friend. Scott and Zelda belonged
to “Papa.” “Papa” was outraged that I would dare invade his territory. In his not so humble opinion, both Mizener and I were “gravediggers,” disturbing the bones of his old friend, who should be allowed to rest in dignity and peace. “Papa” had already fired off furious letters to Mizener and Breit protesting my invasion of Scott’s privacy. Oh yes, I could hear the voice of our literary god bellowing down from his
finca:
“What the hell do you know about Scott Fitzgerald, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

And I could see him pushing his hard belly against me and trying to bull me up against the wall. And hear myself trying to hold my temper as I recited my own knowledge of Scott—no, maybe not so deep as Ernest’s—but that ordeal at Winter Carnival had brought us together, and when we got back to California we had visited back and forth and had remained friends.

In the autumn of what was to be his last year on this earth, he had volunteered to write what turned out to be a rave notice of
Sammy
for the book jacket and, just a few weeks before the end, in his modest flat off Sunset Boulevard, he had written a touching inscription in my first edition of his
Tender Is the Night
and had shown me the opening chapters of
The Last Tycoon.

No, “Papa,” maybe I didn’t know your Scott Fitzgerald from the opening bell, but I had seen him go a couple of rounds, a name fighter from the East who had blown his title, like Pinkey Mitchell. Actually, I had been struck by Scott’s generosity, his interest in and sympathy for young writers. Even with his back against the wall, practically pushed through the wall, he had gone out of his way for “Pep” (Nathanael) West, as he had for me and, some twenty years earlier, for Ernest himself. Gratitude was not an easy emotion for “Papa,” and so, when I’d had an opportunity to look through Scott’s papers at Princeton, I had been surprised to find canceled checks from Scott to Ernest for $100 each, quite a lot of them from the young, hot author of
This Side of Paradise
to the young, still undiscovered Hemingway. Not only that, but an appeal from Ernest to Scott to help him leave his “Jew publishers” (Covici-Friede) for Scott’s
far more prestigious Scribner’s. As the record shows, Scott did intercede for Ernest with Scribner’s, which would publish him to the end of his career. “Gratitude” would be expressed only in the reverse English of “Papa’s” mean-spirited postmortem on Scott in
A Moveable Feast.

But that was years later, and this was now at the Ambos Mundos. I was beginning to feel like Charlie Chaplin in
City Lights
with its classic running gag: Whenever the big, rich heavy is drunk, he loves Charlie and insists he come home with him as his guest. But when his fat host wakes up in the morning, now sober, and sees Charlie, he says, “Who is this bum?” and throws him out. It happens all through the picture, and gets funnier every time. But this thing with “Papa” didn’t strike me as all that funny.

Toby took it so seriously that he actually flew over from Key West to see if he could patch things up. “Papa’s kinda in a bad way right now,” he tried to explain. “The new book
[Across the River and Into the Trees]
is taking a beating. The worst of it is critics are trying to tell Papa he’s washed up, that this book is gonna finish him. They think he’s run out of gas and beginning to repeat himself. So it’s a tough time for him. And then, when he saw your book doing so well and on a subject he feels belongs to him—well, I still think he should be big about it and ask you up, but that’s the way he gets sometimes. He’s feelin’ lower’n the belly of a rattlesnake that just slipped off the sidewalk into the gutter. But I still think, if you really got to know him, and he got to know you …”