Cupid in Madrid: The Lovers of Hotel Florida (I)

War and romance have been staples of literature since Paris kidnapped Helen of Troy, but it’s not common for a nonfiction book to offer the stuff of which romantic fiction is made. In Hotel Florida, Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War, Amanda Vaill describes three couples living their love upon a background of violence and political strife. It is not a history book, it is not a memoir, according to the author it is “a reconstruction.” She reconstructs three romantic tales bound together by the same historical and geographical setting in which they develop.

Amanda Vaill (the author of Everybody Was So Young) presents the reader with an unusual Spanish Civil War yarn. It does not pretend to be a history book, nor is the conflict the focus of her narrative. She narrows her subject to the adventures of six people who, at some point or another, resided at the Hotel Florida in La Gran Via, in Madrid, between the years 1936-1938.

These residents were Arturo Barea, not yet a famed writer, but head of the Republican Press Censorship Office and his deputy Ilse Kulcsar, the woman that would become his lifelong companion. The second couple consisted of would-be-legend photographer Robert Capa, and his equally legendary lover and colleague, Gerda Taro. The last actors on this stage are the omnipresent Ernest Hemingway, and his soon- to-be third wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. As I turned the pages, and this book is indeed a page-turner, I realized how much I knew about the Hemingway couple, how little I knew about Capa and Taro, and how fascinating Barea and his Ilse were. I was glad to know all their stories from birth onward. One thing about Amanda Vaill, using diaries, letters, and interviews, she painstakingly details the life of each character prior, during, and after the Spanish conflict.

Arturo Barea, the only Spaniard in the group, came from a lower middle-class family. Orphaned at an early age, and thanks to his well-to-do uncle, he got to know a better life, had access to a fine education and nursed dreams of becoming an engineer and a novelist. His uncle’s death cut short his dreams. Proud as only a Spaniard can be, Barea resented his new bank clerk job. He walked out of it in the most strident manner, and set up a patent business, hoping it would provide the social mobility he craved for.

Arturo Barea

Despite his socialist views, Barea had Señorito habits that never abandoned him. By 1936, his business was doing well, and he could keep his wife Aurelia, and their children, in a first-rate apartment. Alas! not in the upper-class neighborhood his Aurelia would approved of. Neither would she have approved that her husband was also keeping, and bedding Maria, his secretary (had she known about it).

The war placed Arturo Barea into the role of the Spanish Republic’s official censor, and in charge of the foreign press office. It was a good job. One that granted him privileges, and helped him meet important and interesting people that were drawn to the Spanish struggle. Among them, Barea would meet the love of his life. Ilse Pollack hailed from a Jewish middle-class Viennese family. By 1922, the time she married Leopold Kulcsar, Ilse had been an exchange student in Scandinavia, was fluent in six languages and had embraced communism while majoring in political sciences at Vienna University.

Ilse Pollack, laater Kulcsar, later Barea.

The Kulcsar quit the Communist Party in 1924, joining the more moderate Social Democrats. But even that militancy made the couple clash with Chancellor Dollfuss’ regime. In 1934, the Kulcsar moved to Czechoslovakia where they edited a leftist paper. The Spanish Civil War gave Ilse a chance to do something useful, but also to drift away from a husband she no longer cared for. Little did she know that her post in Madrid would change her life and bring her face to face with her true love.

Barea’s and Kulcksar love story proves how opposites attract but equally different were the next romantic partners. Capa and Taro are now myths. In 1936 they were anything but, even those names were in the future. They shared nothing in common except their idealism, an Eastern European Jewish background and the fact they were penniless exiles in Paris. Even photography, which would be Taro’s ticket to fame, was something she had yet to try.

Born Gerta Polyher, she came from a family of wealthy Galician Jews that had settled in Stuttgart when she was a little girl. She had attended finishing school, mastered several foreign languages, and trained as a secretary. She could have married a wealthy man, but instead she chose to take an active part in politics. After a stint in a Nazi jail, Gerta moved to Paris where she led a life of squalor with no official papers and doing menial secretarial work to make ends meet.  In this bleak stage of her life, she was not exactly excited to serve as chaperone for Ruth, her roommate, and the scruffy- looking Hungarian the latter was dating.

Gerda Taro

Indeed, Endre Friedmann was no prospect for any girl. He dressed like a tramp, was used to a glass of sugared water in lieu of meals, and his Leica spent more time at the pawnshop than in his hands. Yet he possessed a boyish candor that made him look younger than his twenty-two years.  Endre had been his mother’s darling. Perhaps that accounted for him being self-assured without cockiness, and for his easygoing approach to people. He charmed women and made friends easily. Vaill constantly refers to him running, in Paris or Madrid, into former classmates or childhood chums, all willing to embrace his friendship again.

The Friedmann family had lost its fortune in the 1929 crash.  Endre, then sixteen, had taken to the streets and had become involved in anti-Horthy resistance. After an arrest and a beating by the police, he was thrown out of Hungary. He had gone to Berlin and majored in journalism at the Deutsche Hoschschule für Politik (German School of Politics). It was in those last days of the Weimar Republic, that Endre took up photography, his real vocation. The advent of Nazism propelled the photographer to Paris and to Gerta Polyher. It was not too long before he realized that he had fallen for this saucy little blonde.

Robert Capa in Paris, 1934

Gerta was considered pretty, sensual and shrewd. Some compared her with a fox. She was sexually liberated, took care of herself and was incredible modern in the sense that she did not believe in exclusive relationships or that a woman should be monogamous. This shocked and excited the future Robert Capa. She felt protective of this funny looking boy, recognized his talent and took him under her wing. They moved into a flat so Endre would get proper food and stop wasting money eating in cafés. She taught him how to dress, shave, and comb his hair. He got her involved in photography.

Soon they realized that Gerta, pretty, educated and possessing her own brand of chic, sold more photographs than her lover. She could move among the Haute Monde and wanted Endre to follow suit. Together, they came up with a great scheme: the invention of “Robert Capa,” a famous American photographer. It was Robert Capa who got a generously paid Spanish assignment. Endre would wear this more Aryan pseudonym (“Capa” means shark in Hungarian) until his death. Gerta also changed her name to the more exotic “Gerda Taro” and eventually would sell her Spanish photographs as “Taro Photographs.”

Capa-Taro

Finally, we get to Gellhorn and Hemingway. The winter of 1936 found “Papa” Hemingway in Florida, sunk deep in an existential crisis. He had settled down to a life of luxury, spending summers hunting in Wyoming and winters fishing in Key West, all paid by Pauline, the second Mrs. Hemingway. And yet, Hem was restless. Struggling with the writing of To Have and Have Not, unhappy with the reviews of Death in the Afternoon, his latest novel, he needed a change.  War and a blonde he would meet over Christmas, would provide such change.

Hemingway in Key West, 1936

Since college, Martha Gellhorn had obsessed over Hemingway, keeping his picture on her dorm’s wall. Her hero-worship was finally rewarded with their random encounter at a Key West bar named “Sloppy Joe’s.” They had things in common. Both came from affluent Midwestern homes. Hem hailed from Illinois, Martha from Missouri. His father was a doctor, her father was a Jewish German gynecologist. They had both lived abroad, and were both writers. Although Martha fitted into the profile Papa liked— beautiful, refined and intellectually savvy— she was different from his other wives and lovers.

Martha’s mother, Edna, had been a suffragette and was still heavily involved in politics. She was a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, a friendship her daughter would inherit. Edna had instilled in Martha a love for activism and a penchant for independence, but she had also tremendously cossetted her only daughter. Gellhorn grew up with a sense of entitlement that would turn her into a contradictory, complex woman, and play a major part in her charm.

Martha Gellhorn around the time she met "Papa"

Martha dropped out of Bryn Mawr before graduation, convinced that to write and report she just needed to travel, see and live. After a stint of journalism in her hometown of St. Louis, she moved to Paris. In France, she was to acquire two tastes that would define her forever: A need to have affairs with brilliant, yet very married men, and a love for beautiful clothing, perfumes and furs. Through three countries and two continents, Amanda Vaill takes us shopping with Gellhorn. By the time the book is over, we can safely label Martha a “shopaholic.”

In 1930, Martha suffered her first disappointment. Her chick lit novel What Mad Pursuit did poorly in the market. Critics hated it, and worse, Dr. Gellhorn didn’t like it. He also disapproved of his daughter’s lifestyle.  “There are two kinds of women in the world,” he told her, “and you are the other kind.”  Hurt, Martha decided to return to the States and do something useful. Through the Roosevelts, she got involved with Harry Hopkins’ Federal Emergency Relief, and travelled throughout the country covering the life of those most affected by the Great Depression. In partnership with Dorothea Lange, she made history in photojournalism. Martha‘s efforts crystallized in four novellas published under the title The Troubles I Have Seen. Critics raved over the book and compared the author to Gellhorn’s idol, Ernest Hemingway.

Nicole Kidman and Clive Owern at "Sloppy Joe's" in  HBO's "Hemingway and Gellhorn."

This was the baggage, Martha Gellhorn carried with her to that fateful encounter in “Sloppy Joe’s.” She revered the novelist, but did not fall for the man. Shocked by Hem’s unkempt appearance, she thought he looked “dirty.” Hem, been Hem, went wild about her long legs and dreamt of spreading them, but Martha Gellhorn, who married twice and had a string of lovers, was never into sex. That would have to wait for Madrid and Hotel Florida.

In the interim, the veteran writer and the novice author spent ten days in Miami, mostly talking about their mutual crafts. Pauline Hemingway was not crazy about their friendship, but it seemed so innocent, she couldn’t complain. Martha wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, about her new relationship. Although, in her letters she does sound like a starry-eyed schoolgirl, she was not in love with her new mentor, no more than she had been with H.G. Wells, her previous literary tutor, at whose house she had recently stayed in London.

In early 1937, Martha Gellhorn wrote to a friend: “I’m going to Spain with the boys. I don’t know who the boys are, but I’m going with them.” One of the boys certainly was Ernest Hemingway. He was going to cover the Spanish war, he was in lust with Gellhorn, he wanted her along. However, he was not planning to upset his marriage and wife, so they kept up appearances and traveled separately.

Chaperoned by fabled Brooklyn bullfighter, Sydney Franklin, Gellhorn arrived in Paris with a ten piece-luggage. She left the matador to look after her suitcases, and bearing a knapsack, a duffel bag stuffed with food cans, and a Collier’s letter  certifying her as a bona fide journalist, she crossed the border into Spain. After two trains and a ride in a government car, she checked in at the Hotel Florida’s front desk. Hemingway was already registered there.

Martha and "the boys"(Hem, Capa and Joris Ivens) in HBO's "Hemingway and Gellhorn."

Two weeks after Martha’s arrival at the Florida, after a day at the front and a night of heavy drinking, she and Hemingway became lovers. She wrote to her mother “I think he loves me,” but it would take her a year to fall in love with Papa. So, like the romances of Barea and Kulcksar and Capa and Taro, Hemingway and Gellhorn’s passion was fostered by the Spanish Civil War.

Books and films tell us that Martha Gellhorn was a devoted journalist who found her call under Franco’s bombs. Amanda Vaill gives us a different version. The weeks, prior to her first night of love with Hemingway, Martha spent at the beauty parlor, shopping, and (according to her own words) gaining weight. How could she gain weight in a city where half of the population was on the verge of starvation?

As we learn from the book, nobody starved at Hotel Florida. Foreign journalists always had food available (Hemingway kept his own well-stocked pantry) and alcohol ran plenty.  Vaill offers us a surrealistic perspective of Madrid at war. Her protagonists share drinks at the Florida’s bar, lunch at the basement of Hotel Gran Via where black market American cigarettes could be obtained at an exorbitant price, or go to parties (usually hosted by the Soviets, the new Madrileño aristocracy) where whisky and vodka flow freely.

Stacey Keach living La Vida Loca in war-torn Madrid, in "Hemingway."

The book juggles images of death, carnage and hunger with the luxurious life led by journalists at the Florida, and other ritzy joints. The oddity of these love affairs is that they evolve between two worlds which grants them an aura of fantasy. It’s what made Hotel Florida so close to a historical romance.  I keep visualizing it on a screen whether as a film or miniseries.

In my next blogs, I’ll continue exploring the book and its characters. Following Vaill’s narratives we’ll see how the Spanish Republica died from the inside, and how death will split Capa and Gerda, while Spain and the conflict will push the other couples to marriage and commitment. We will learn how political upheaval within the Spanish government will affect our protagonists.

It’s no accident that Amanda Vaill included the word “Truth” in her title. She chronicles how Hemingway and the photographers handled such truth, and how truth forced Barea to choose between his country and the woman he loved. You’ll see how romance brought out the best of Barea and Capa, and the worst in Gellhorn-Hemingway, and how death would split the most idealistic couple in this fantastic book that reads like romantic fiction but it’s based on true bygone events.