Biography: War reporter, model and wife of Hemingway, this is the no-holds-barred Martha Gellhorn, writes Lara Marlowe.
What an extraordinary life was Martha Gellhorn's! As a struggling journalist in 1930s Paris, the doctor's daughter from St Louis, Missouri modelled haute couture for Chanel and Schiaparelli. Her affair with Bertrand de Jouvenel, the aristocratic stepson and former lover of the writer, Colette, introduced Gellhorn to the political and literary elite of 1930s France. In 1934, she returned to the US, where she chronicled the misery of the Great Depression in her first book, The Trouble I've Seen, whose title was taken from a Negro spiritual. At the age of 26, Gellhorn became a close friend to Eleanor Roosevelt, and henceforward treated the Roosevelt White House like her own private bed and breakfast.
During the same period, Gellhorn met the British writer, H.G. Wells, who was 43 years older and a head shorter than her. Wells claimed they were lovers; Gellhorn denied it. Caroline Moorehead, in this outstanding biography, lets both have their say, but does not make a definitive judgement. It is, she notes, Gellhorn's word against Wells's.
Gellhorn's chance encounter with Ernest Hemingway in a bar in Key West, Florida in 1936 would shape her life as nothing else did. With her usual eye for detail, Gellhorn described the famous writer as a "large, dirty man in untidy, somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt". Hemingway was still married to his second wife, Pauline, but encouraged Gellhorn to follow him to the Spanish Civil War, which she did the following spring, paying her boat ticket by writing an article for Vogue magazine on the 'Beauty Problems of the Middle-Aged Woman'.
"Funny how it should take one war to start a woman in your damn heart and another to finish her," Hemingway mused years later to his editor. Gellhorn's relationship with Hemingway began in the Hotel Florida in Madrid and ended bitterly in the midst of the liberation of Paris in 1944.
"I hate to lose anyone who can look so lovely and who we taught to shoot and write so well," Hemingway wrote to a son from a previous marriage.
Gellhorn so feared going down in history as "one of Hemingway's ex-wives" that for the rest of her life she lashed out at anyone who dared mention his name. Yet the intensity of their relationship and the magnitude of the events they witnessed make the 200 pages devoted to this period the most fascinating part of Moorehead's book.
Not that Gellhorn's life ended when her divorce from Hemingway became final in December 1945. In the meantime, she carried on an affair with Gen James Gavin, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and the post-war commander of US forces in Berlin. He wanted to marry Gellhorn, but she could not imagine life as an army wife and used his fling with Marlene Dietrich as a pretext for ending their idyll. Though she always claimed she did not enjoy sex, Gellhorn consumed an inordinate number of lovers over the following decades. Almost all of them were married, but that didn't seem to bother her any more than her repeated abortions.
"You have a fine time at wars and love them maybe or happiest at them," Hemingway wrote to Gellhorn as both waited out the beginning of the second World War in Cuba. And it was true, Gellhorn shone brightest in wars. After covering the Normandy landings, the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg trial, her middle years were wasted, moving restlessly from Mexico to Italy to England and Africa. She remarried, divorced, adopted an Italian boy and wrote cheap romances she called "bilgers" to survive financially.
It took the Vietnam War, and her own rage at the folly of US leaders, to resuscitate the old Martha. Aged 58, she obtained a commission from the Manchester Guardian and headed for Saigon. Instead of following military operations like other journalists, Gellhorn concentrated on hospitals, refugee camps and orphanages. She described how napalm - jellied petrol - stuck to the skin of children and continued burning. "And then there's white phosphorus too and it's worse because it goes on gnawing at flesh like rat's teeth, gnawing at the bone," she wrote.
Gellhorn's descriptions of how the US was maiming and killing the children of Vietnam were so effective that, to her chagrin, the US-backed South Vietnamese government banned her from returning. She constantly vacillated between reportage and fiction, but continued working as a journalist almost to the end of her life, travelling to Brazil at the age of 86 to report her last article, about the murders of street children. In 1998, in her 90th year, almost blind and suffering from cancer of the ovary and liver, she quietly committed suicide in her London apartment. In old age, she had become the grande dame of the London journalistic and literary set, forging friendships with Nicholas Shakespeare, Victoria Glendinning, John Simpson and Jon Snow.
Caroline Moorehead's parents were close to Gellhorn. Though Moorehead often found the ageing journalist intimidating, she sometimes attended Gellhorn's Knightsbridge salon. Now Moorehead has written a highly readable, no-holds-barred biography, condemning Gellhorn's and Hemingway's hypocrisy in ignoring atrocities committed by the Republican side in Spain, and their blindness to the brutality and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese nationalists. She recounts Gellhorn's racist contempt for Arabs and naive adoration of Israel, her cruelty to her adopted son, Sandy, and to friends who bored her.
Yet Gellhorn often got it right; about appeasement at the end of the 1930s, McCarthyism in the US in the 1950s, and the Vietnam war. She joked that after her death she wanted a bench in Kew Gardens in her name with the words "underrated writer". Her insecurity about her own writing never left her. Gellhorn knew she was a fine journalist, but lamented the absence of "magic". Hemingway, she noted jealously, had "magic". Perhaps unjustly, his curse during one of their drunken quarrels in Cuba has more or less come true. "I'll show you, you conceited bitch," Hemingway shouted. "They'll be reading my stuff long after the worms have finished with you."
Lara Marlowe is a Paris-based foreign correspondent for The Irish Times
Martha Gellhorn: A Life. By Caroline Moorehead, Chatto & Windus, 550pp. £20