Martha Gellhorn, journalist, individualist and elegant blonde, met Ernest Hemingway at a Key West bar called Sloppy Joe's. He was bulky in his "odiferous Basque shorts". She was wearing a black dress and high heels. Two big celebs in a small town. His books had been her models. She said so. He had seen her face on the dustjacket of her novel, The Trouble I've Seen. All afternoon and evening, they drank Papa Dobles, two-and-a-half jiggers of white Bacardi rum, juice of two fresh limes, swirled in a rusty electric blender. It sounds like a Hollywood "meet-cute". The Bacall and Bogart versions were merely re-makes. She seems to have thought she had found the partner her nerve deserved. Hemingway was hooked.
He was also married and off to cover the Spanish Civil War. She decided to join the fight and him (perhaps not in that order), this time with a rucksack and $50, a letter of introduction from Col- lier's magazine, and a notion that the "correct response to a war against fascism was simply to be present on the right side". She thought war correspondents reported the battlefield, and was surprised, but willing, when one suggested that a description of ordinary life in besieged Madrid was worth sending home.
Collier's printed the piece, put her name on their masthead, and there she was, a war correspondent and Hemingway's lover - and under his patronage, eating his tinned supplies and sharing his mattress on the road, yet still stubbornly independent. Her reports from Spain were more candid than his. The ration portion of dried salted cod weighed as heavily as the shells. She did not have to pretend to be an authority.
Martha Gellhorn, who died last Sunday at the age of 89, grew up in St Louis, Missouri, where her suffragette mother and doctor father raised her to confidence and campaigning. As a child, she had freedoms her peers did not; she roamed the city alone on the streetcars, looking in on lives unlike her own. "One bends one's one twig and it stays bent," she drawled long after.
She was briefly collegiate at Bryn Mawr; she was a cub reporter surviving on a diet of doughnuts. Then at 21, in 1930, her life began with a steerage-class passage to Europe, £75 and a suitcase. She went to Paris to become a foreign or, better still, a roving correspondent. Just like that.
Even for a girl who looked, as she once remarked, like the cartoon character Betty Boop - all batted eyelashes - and had limitless insouciance, it did not happen quite like that. Gellhorn sold any old writing she could and got a "very high-class education - standing room at ground level to watch history as it happened".
Her learning process involved European poverty and politics and an affair, later a short marriage with the radical journalist Bertrand de Jouvenal, who, as a youth, had been the lover of a middle-aged Colette. She innocently took a room in a bawdyhouse and knowingly bought absurd Parisian couture cheap at the end of the season. She was also introduced to her first Nazis, "scrubbed and parrot-brained". They didn't teach a girl any of that at Bryn Mawr.
The process also covered returning to - and crossing - America, walking in on an oil boom and on the great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, who was failing to film in Mexico, and writing her first novel. It took her on to the payroll of the Federal Relief Agency, for which she filed reports on the lives of the forgotten poor, which read like epic captions for Depression photographers: she was sacked for inspiring local revolutions.
It allowed her the naivety to cadge room and board from H.G. Wells in London, where she wrote a vivid eye-witness account of a southern lynching she later admitted that she had never seen; and to accept the offer of President Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor - her mother's campaigning friend - to stay in the White House, which was pretty homey then. She put up there in Abraham Lincoln's bedroom and was fed regular meals during an awkward patch, when her furious moral righteousness made her otherwise unemployable.
There she finished The Trouble I've Seen, fiction based on her underclass investigations. It was published in 1936, with her portrait, blonde and elegant, on its dust jacket: this was a titillating combination and a success. She was immediately celebrated, but fled the hoopla by holidaying in Florida, where she met Hemingway, and later absconded with him to cover the Spanish Civil War.
One editor at Collier's appreciated and trusted her copy and, for eight years after that, she could go where she wanted and write what she saw. "I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war." The British, unprepared for total war; the Czechoslovak army walking home after the German land-grab; the Finns democratic but frozen, fighting the Russians; the Chinese, in hunger and filth, out-enduring the Japanese invaders. Her base was a house outside Havana, which she had redesigned for Hemingway and herself. They married and settled in. They worked on fiction. But Gellhorn wanted to be in on the war at last breaking out in Europe, and a crazy Caribbean sea-hunt for Uboats (with a resulting, unpublished, extremely funny piece) was not enough. She was drinking daiquiris in a bar on the Mexican border when the newspaper boy hawked her the edition reporting Pearl Harbour.
Hemingway was having a fine time with his sporting Cuban buddies chasing phantom Nazi subs. He had already done global conflict. Gellhorn failed to persuade him to engage with the world at war a second time around. The marriage fractured. She reached London and followed the action in Europe and North Africa as closely as she could with, or usually without, official permission, and with directions from friends in useful places. She advanced recklessly up through Italy with the Allies. Hemingway's telegram to her there read: "Are you a war correspondent or my wife in bed?"
This time, he eventually came after her. Their rivalry was not friendly any more. She seems to have been Hemingway's personal bullshit-detector, especially when she coldly watched him holding court in a London hospital after a drunken accident. Gellhorn stowed away on a D-Day hospital ship and went ashore at Normandy. Hemingway crossed the Channel as officially as possible, but did not land.
In a hotel in free Paris, Gellhorn was advised by her old buddy, the photographer Robert Capa, to demand a divorce. She did, then loosely attached herself to the 82nd Airborne through the bitter 1944-45 winter of the Battle of the Bulge, and also to its leader, the heroic Gen James Gavin. She was present when the chaotic mass of the Russian army swarmed up to the other Allies. She was in newlyliberated Dachau, at the apex of her anger, when peace was declared.
What the inmates told her there - that it had been useless to protest or weep about what happened to them - was the antithesis of all she had believed in; she mistrusted Germany ever after. Her St Louis ancestry included both immigrant Germans and Jews.
About all of these places and people she wrote simply. An American prose style of Shaker plainness was laboured at by many of her contemporaries, but to Gellhorn it seems to have come naturally. She spoke that way. She believed real reporters did not take notes, but knew instinctively what remained forever important - trivia, the tone of the times. This might include a GI toasting himself a frontline cheese sandwich from K rations, or a Dutch slave labourer, recently freed, buying tulips in the ruins of a German city.
It seldom included any utterance, or even mention, of a politician. "All politicians are bores and liars and fakes. I talk to people," she said. To read her dispatches (collected as The Face Of War and The View From The Ground) is to be granted instant access to where she was, whenever it was.
The business in peace was to settle down. As a woman divorced on the grounds of abandonment, Gellhorn made some random gestures to pacification. These included acquiring a decrepit property in London, returning to Washington - only to find herself in solo outrage against McCarthyism - trying fiction and playwriting, and adopting a 15month-old Italian orphan, Sandy. She brought him up, supporting their life together in cheap places such as Mexico by journalism and writing potboilers for women's magazines - novellas differing from her own taste in their happy endings. And from her own life too, for Gen Gavin of the 82nd Airborne had married a nice young girl.
Gellhorn's next love, David Gurewitsch (a protege of Mrs Roosevelt) could barely cope with her. She was courted by Tom Matthews, a recently-retired editor of Time magazine, with a Mount Rushmore profile and a sound mind, and they married. But he wanted an urbane life in Britain, and she missed the excitement, and even more the whole-soul engagement, of the fight against fascism. "I am a loner. I am not a team player," she said once - she could certainly be unsociable, abrupt and grand - and "The ideal is to live five blocks away from a man who makes you laugh and is wrapped up in his work". The marriage petered out after nine years.
And so, by the 1960s, she was wandering again, observing more of the 50-plus countries of her travels. She knew a lot about how people respond to place, especially when they respond by misbehaving: in that honestly funny book Travels With Myself And Another, she confessed how she misbehaved herself, how she was revolted by stench in west Africa and daunted by dengue fever going up river by canoe. She repeatedly fell in love with countries, "affairs" which led her to hang curtains in impossible shacks. Her long-lasting final devotion was to a cottage on the Welsh borders, which had demanding vegetables in the garden.
Her association with Collier's had lapsed with her editor's death in the 1940s: thereafter, she had often to give herself assignments, and pay her own expenses, to satisfy her curiosity. For one long period, she had a writer's block; for another, there was an editorial block against her copy - she was no longer a sexy novelty nor yet venerable, and the robustness of her New Deal attitude was out of fashion. Nevertheless, with help - which she remembered as rather minimal - from the Guardian, she reached Vietnam in 1966 to report the war (of which she was ashamed) that confirmed America as a colonial power.
Her long perspective eventually became valued again, when she returned to Madrid at the time of Franco's death, or to Castro's Cuba, where she saw, in the splendour of the full-grown trees now filling the garden of her old home, "the years of my life made real". At 80, she took off to inquire into the US invasion of Panama, supple of spine and mind, stroppy as ever. Granta took her up as a Sibyl; its editors and writers longed to have lived as she had done.
Gellhorn stayed flexible - except, notably, in her attitude to Israeli-Palestinian relations; she saw Israel always as the defiant David of its founding battles. She planned to go snorkelling with Paul Theroux well into her 80s. When surgery on her eyes went awry, she had the doctor professionally cursed by a Malagasy medicine man.
She dined with the BBC's John Simpson on his way to Bosnia. She saw off the East-West nuclear confrontation she most feared. By the time she died on Sunday, she had become part of the century's image bank. And to the end, this fierce pacifist reported drinking pitchers of red wine, or iced Scotch, with the children and the grandchildren of fighters she had known.