Posted on 10/05/2001 6:58:56 AM PDT by dighton
GREGORY HEMINGWAY, who has died aged 69, was the youngest son of the writer Ernest Hemingway; a champion game shot as a boy, he later became estranged from his father, wrestled with his sexual identity and spent his last five days in the women's section of a prison in Miami.
Gregory Hancock Hemingway was born at Kansas City on November 12 1931, the son of Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway senior recalled his new son as being built like the Battling Siki, the West African fighter - all shoulders, long arms, big feet. "Very black hair. Solemn pan," he wrote. "Hope the bastard has a talent for business."
As a boy, Gregory - or "Gigi" as he was nicknamed - passed his mornings trying not to interrupt his father while he wrote and his afternoons accompanying him fishing and hunting. He and his brother Patrick were used as retrievers, but they also learned to shoot. At 10, Gregory tied for first place in a pigeon-shooting contest in Havana.
His parents' marriage had begun to drift apart after he was born, a fact Ernest Hemingway put down to Pauline's caesarian operations, her doctors' orders that she no longer conceive and the fact that as a practising Catholic, she refused contraceptives.
When Hemingway began an affair with Martha Gellhorn, his relationship with Gregory's mother descended into bitter fights: Gregory would remember doors slamming, his mother running from the bedroom crying - "the usual 'amicable' divorce", as he put it.
The couple divorced in November 1940, two weeks before Hemingway married Martha Gellhorn. The boys remained with their mother, but spent vacations with their father and stepmother - whom they admired - usually fishing and hunting. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, the boys also joined their father aboard his improvised submarine-hunting boat Pilar.
While Gregory was not outwardly troubled by the divorce, his father saw in his youngest son "the biggest dark side in the family except me". Though a good student at Canterbury School in Connecticut, Gregory dropped out after his freshman year at St John's College, Annapolis, refused psychotherapy, joined the cult of dianetics and experimented with drugs.
Father-son relations broke down when Papa Hemingway ridiculed one of Gregory's girlfriends. In 1951, Gregory moved to California. In the space of a month he became a mechanic, married his first wife Jane - against his father's wishes - was arrested in Los Angeles for drugs and learned of the death of his mother. When in February 1952 Gregory took his wife to meet his father, Hemingway senior blamed his son's behaviour for Pauline's death. Father and son never met again.
Although Ernest Hemingway promptly cut off his son's $100-a-month allowance, Gregory inherited a fortune from his mother, which he quickly spent on safaris in Africa, killing 18 elephants in one month.
During the remainder of the 1950s, he was discharged from the US Army, drank heavily and could not hold down a job. He hunted in Kenya for several years, had four children from two failed marriages, wrote abusive letters to his father, and received electric shock treatment. Although he qualified as doctor, he subsequently lost his medical licence due to alcoholism.
After Ernest Hemingway shot himself in 1961, Gregory recalled in his memoir Papa: A Personal Memoir (1976) how he "never got over a sense of responsibility for my father's death". At the same time, though, he admitted to profound relief: "I couldn't disappoint him, couldn't hurt him any more."
All the while, Gregory Hemingway had been struggling with his sexual identity. In her harrowing memoir Walk on Water, his daughter Lorian recalled how she had "fished with my father just once, before I knew he liked to dress in women's clothes . . . I never had a clue until my mother told me that he sometimes wore her girdle and painted his nails a bright, clean red. Not until, say, the change of life had become a foregone thing. I've seen pictures. He looks like Ethel Merman."
In later years, Hemingway collaborated with his brothers in creating Hemingway Ltd in 1999, to market the family name as "an up-scale lifestyle accessory brand". Their first venture was to put the Hemingway name on a line of expensive shotguns.
But his problems did not diminish. According to Miami-Dade court records, he was arrested in 1996 on an aggravated assault charge, and in 1995 on a charge of battery on an officer.
Five days before he died, Hemingway was arrested on Key Biscayne, after a park ranger reported a pedestrian with no clothes on. Hemingway had a dress and high heels in his hands, but was not violent towards the arresting officer, who recalled him as "a very, very nice guy." Believing that he had had a sex change operation, the jailers classified him as a woman.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.
NeverGore
A boy named Gigi. Riiiiiiiiiight.
I feel sorry for the guy. RIP.
To read this article you would think he never did anything responsible in his life.
Medical school is a long arduous road that takes ambition and dedication. There has to be more to this man than is relayed in this article.
My sympathies go out to you and everyone that cared about him. I've know tourtued souls in my life that couldn't be what they wanted no matter how hard they tried. It's an aspect of the human condition that is nothing short of tragic.
This is the part that made no sense to me. The guy had no clothes on. What's the rest of the story, here?
Before someone excoriates me for perhaps confusing "fine person" with one who killed 18 elephants in one month, I am aghast at such an atrocious act. I love hp target shooting, and live animals - and want them to stay that way!
I appreciate the sentient comments. There, but for the Grace of God and/or the capricious,often vicious, inflictions of Nature, go I - and we. Best wishes to all.
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