When 21, Martha escaped Bryn Mawr to join the throngs of Americans searching for Hemingway’s Paris from his first masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. Arriving alone with a typewriter, two suitcases and $75, she supported herself with odd jobs, wrote her first novel What Mad Pursuits and had a scandalous love affair with Bernard de Jouvenel, a 26 year old political journalist famous for his first affair at age 16 with his stepmother Colette who wrote about it in her wildly popular book “Cheri” (soon to be released as a film staring Michelle Pfeiffer).
Heart-weary and not much wiser, Martha returned to the States and took a job investigating the effectiveness of relief programs during the Depression. When she was fired for inciting a riot in Idaho, Martha holed up in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House as a guest of Eleanor Roosevelt, her mother’s dear friend. There she wrote the critically-acclaimed The Troubles I’ve Seen published the summer before meeting Hemingway.
That year her adored father died and in November she visited his Jewish brothers in Nazi Germany where she became a rabid anti-fascist. During her “tumultuously-entertaining” years with Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn changed from the “popped out and jumpy girl” and frustrated fiction writer who traveled to Key West to meet her literary hero. She became a determined woman and one of the most respected war correspondents on the planet.
Martha Gellhorn reported on more Wars in the 20th Century than any other correspondent, man or woman. She was the first to denounce the War in Vietnam and the only correspondent blacklisted from that Country. For her 12th and final War, she reported on the “disappearings” of thousands of dissidents in El Salvador. She was 76 years old. She died in 1998.
“There was a glamour about Martha Gellhorn, the glamour of black & white movies. She was one ballsy Dame.”
