Sticks and Stones

It’s likely tough living with a legit genius. I have known a few truly gifted wordsmiths in my day. They were honestly all just a little bit nuts.

I’m a professional writer. I have the CV to prove it. However, I’m a mechanic, not an artist. I just like to tell stories. It’s not like I am in any real danger of earning a Pulitzer for my collected GunCrank columns.

That’s likely a good thing. I enjoy the best of both worlds. I get paid to write about stuff I like to do, but I’m not all weird and freaky about it. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast — amazing literary luminary that he was — came with a fair amount of emotional baggage. That was a package deal.

The Man

Papa Hemingway has been universally extolled as a paragon of American manliness. He served as an ambulance driver during World War I and was badly wounded in 1918. These sordid experiences formed the basis for “A Farewell to Arms.” In 1937, he got neck-deep in the Spanish Civil War. That led to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

During World War II, Hemingway conned his way into both the D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris … as a civilian. He was in two airplane crashes and was a legendary hunter and fisherman. In all, he published 28 books. But in addition to all of that great stuff, he was also a hard-drinking wild man who was legendarily tough to live with. The blowback from that extended throughout his family.

Daddy Issues

Ernest Hemingway was married four times. His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was the mother of his two youngest sons, Patrick and Greg. Patrick attended Harvard and worked as a professional big game hunter, operating his own safari business in Tanzania for over a decade. He died in Bozeman, Montana, in 2025 at age 97. Greg, however, had a somewhat rougher time of it.

Greg struggled with gender issues from a very young age. If you think I am going to dive too deeply into that thorny space here, you have lost your mind. However, as regards pronouns, cut me some slack. Greg Hemingway never quite figured that bit out, either.

Greg went by “Gig” or “Gigi” as a child. He was an exceptional athlete and an accomplished marksman. However, starting about age 12, Greg began wearing his stepmother’s clothes.

When Ernest discovered this, he was rendered apoplectic. After one particularly fulminant exchange on the subject, the esteemed novelist calmed down and told his son, “Gigi, we come from a strange tribe, you and I.” However, his confrontation with Greg’s mother, Pauline, did not end quite so well.

In 1951, at age 19, Greg was arrested attempting to enter a woman’s restroom in a Los Angeles movie theater while wearing female clothing. Ernest and Pauline were divorced at the time, but this revelation resulted in a most extraordinary dustup over the phone. Over the course of an hour, he vigorously berated Pauline, accusing her of being somehow responsible for Greg’s behavior. These accusations stung. The poor, unfortunate woman fell over dead the following day at age 56. Though she was later found to have had an undiagnosed adrenal tumor that might have played a role, her demise was attributed to an acute state of shock stemming from that livid telephonic trouncing.

Details

Greg served briefly in the military and later attended the University of Miami School of Medicine. He eventually underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1994 and took the name Gloria. However, he/she never found peace.

Greg Hemingway was married to four different women and fathered eight children. He carried a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder and voluntarily underwent electroshock therapy in an effort to treat it. When things were at their rockiest with his father, Greg retreated to Africa to shoot elephants. Of this time, he said, “I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic.”

As Gloria, she penned a brutal letter to her father accusing him of having killed Pauline, something Ernest had accused her of doing as well. The following year, the esteemed novelist took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 61 years old.

Dysfunction On Display

There was clearly a genetic component to this sordid stuff. Five of Ernest’s immediate relatives committed suicide, including his father, brother, and two sisters. His granddaughter Margaux was a successful actress in her own right until she killed herself in 1996. This ignoble mess has been cumulatively referred to as the “Hemingway Curse.”

Gloria vacillated between gender roles while sinking ever deeper into drug abuse and alcoholism. She tried to obtain a license as a professional hunter in Africa but was denied due to her chemical dependency. She wrote a bestseller about her relationship with her father titled “Papa: A Personal Memoir.”

Gloria eventually died in 2001 at the age of 69 of cardiovascular disease while in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center. She was incarcerated for indecent exposure and resisting arrest at the time. Buried next to Ernest in Ketchum, Idaho, the gravestone reads, “Dr. Gregory Hancock Hemingway 1931–2001.” It was a tragic end for a family of exceptional wordsmiths.

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