Martha Gellhorn

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The History Chicks – Martha Gellhorn

Host(s): Becca and Syd
Podcast: The History Chicks: A Women’s History Podcast (QCODE)
Episode Air Date: December 23, 2025
Subject: Martha Gellhorn
Duration (ad-free estimate): ~2 hours

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Overview

This episode delves deep into the extraordinary life of Martha Gellhorn—one of the 20th century’s preeminent war correspondents. With trademark wit, careful research, and conversational warmth, Becca and Syd trace Gellhorn’s trajectory from her progressive upbringing, through her fearless globetrotting journalism, to her tumultuous personal life and lasting legacy. The hosts blend biography, major historical events, personal anecdotes, and critical analysis, always keeping the focus on “herstory”—and setting Martha’s achievements well above her overshadowing relationship with Ernest Hemingway.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting Martha Gellhorn in Context

• Birth & Family: Born 1908, St. Louis, Missouri, to George and Edna Gellhorn—both well-educated, worldly, and progressive.
• Upbringing: Emphasis on social justice, equality, and civic duty. Edna was a prominent suffragist and activist (08:04–11:15).
• Formative Experiences: Acculturated to activism (her mother took her to the “Golden Lane” suffrage protest as a child), intellectual inquiry, and a disdain for societal conventions and bigotry (12:58).

2. Early Education and Influences

• Educational Trail: Attended Mary Institute, then Bryn Mawr College—which bored her; she soon decamped to look for work in journalism (20:58–22:12).
• Early Writing Ambitions: Corresponded with Carl Sandburg, who offered her formative encouragement (“If you must be a writer, you will be.”—16:53).
• Early Travels: Spent formative time in Europe, absorbing different ways of life and shaping her appetite for independence (19:15–20:58).

3. Launching a Journalism Career

• First Jobs: At the Albany Times Union—male-dominated newsroom, assigned “women’s pages” but also police blotter, facing rampant harassment (25:47–26:23).
• Restlessness: Quick returns home were always met with explosions of frustration and renewed escape impulses (27:54–29:01).

4. Becoming a Worldly Reporter

• Paris Move (1930): With two suitcases and $75, she set out for Paris, writing fashion articles and hustling for bylines (29:01–33:27).
• Adventures: Observed and absorbed the rise of fascism in Europe, modeled for Chanel and Schiaparelli, mixed with famous writers, and reported human-interest stories from Mexico to the American South.

5. Breaking Through: The New Deal Years

• New Deal Assignment: Worked for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) under FDR, reporting on conditions of ordinary Americans suffering the Great Depression (37:00–42:20).
• Style & Impact: Focused on the dignity and struggles of everyday people; her reporting would lay the foundation for her later work.
• Notable Quote: “It is hard to believe these conditions exist in a civilized country.” (39:02)

6. Writing Success & White House Connection

• The Trouble I’ve Seen: Acclaimed 1936 book of four short stories inspired by her FERA travels, lauded for its humanism and plain style (44:43).
• White House Residency: Invited by Eleanor Roosevelt, Martha stayed in the White House, assisting with Eleanor’s column and writing (42:42–44:22).
• Relationship with H.G. Wells: Their relationship remained ambiguous—possibly an affair or “massive flirtation” (46:11–46:59).

7. The Hemingway Years

• Meeting Hemingway: They met in Key West’s Sloppy Joe’s bar—her first impression: “large, dirty man...” (51:15).
• Spanish Civil War: Hemingway’s connections enabled her access to front lines; she focused her reporting on civilians, not strategy (55:53–56:17).
• Distinct Approach: “She wrote about a little kid that she saw.” (55:59); Hemingway wrote about himself—contrast in perspectives.
• D-Day, Normandy: Barred from official credentials (while Hemingway secured hers), Martha snuck into Normandy disguised as a stretcher-bearer, becoming one of the first journalists—and the only woman—to land at Omaha Beach (82:00–83:03).
  • Quote: “She made a point...to interview wounded soldiers from the beach and record their conversations. She wanted to show the human face of the war.” (84:03)

8. Post-War Achievements and Turmoil

• After WWII: Covered the liberation of concentration camps, the Nuremberg Trials, and reported from multiple war zones and troubled countries right into old age (86:06–88:52).
• Legacy & Frustrations: Survived Hemingway’s toxicity, rejected being a “footnote” to a man, and kept her focus on the voice and fate of common people (88:52–91:20).
  • Quote: “Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?” (88:52)

9. Later Years: Continued Reporting, Personal Struggles, and Adoption

• Adoption: At age 42, adopted her son Sandy from an Italian orphanage after seeing the devastating plight of children postwar (92:59–94:26).
• Life in Mexico, Europe, Africa: Led a peripatetic life, blending raising Sandy with more international reporting (94:44–95:56).
• Changing Sympathy in Reporting: Notably unsympathetic to Palestinian refugees, a complex break from her usual identification with the oppressed, possibly linked to family history and prior traumas (97:42–98:22).

10. The Final Act: Gellhorn’s Enduring Impact

• Vietnam and Beyond: Reported on Vietnam War in her late 50s and 60s—highlighting the suffering of children—her accounts contributed to the antiwar movement’s intensification (104:44–107:09).
• Later Life: Health declined; relationship with her son was fraught; coped with losing her mother, Edna (107:09–109:25).
• Reflections on History: Repeatedly identified “patterns” in history—atrocities and the persistence of human suffering—and the duty of bearing witness (111:25, throughout).
  • Quote: “It seemed to me personally that it was my job to get things on the record in the hopes that at some point or other somebody couldn't lie about it.” (131:46)

11. The Very End

• Final Reporting: Covered the US invasion of Panama in her 80s (!) (115:45–116:27).
• Euthanasia: Facing age and decline, Gellhorn ended her own life by suicide at 89 (119:37).
• Legacy: The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism established (120:28); honored with a USPS stamp (121:56).
• Narrative Arc: The episode concludes with the hosts reaffirming Gellhorn’s untamable spirit, adventure, and focus on the fate of ordinary people—highlighting her significance independent of Hemingway’s shadow (122:56–123:20).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Becca on the Gellhorn family rules: “People are people. No guest is ever to be called by anything other than their name. Nothing identifying about them is necessary.” (11:54)
• Sandburg to young Martha: “If you must be a writer, you will be.” (16:53)
• Papa Gellhorn to Martha (critiquing her writing ambition): “Then why the devil don’t you [write], instead of capitalizing on your yellow hair and spicy conversation?” (44:22)
• H.G. Wells’s introduction to The Trouble I’ve Seen: “There’s no propaganda in this book...yet I do not think it will be easy to read it and not feel a new strength of resolve to work for a reorganization of human life...” (45:13)
• Syd on Martha’s war writing style: “Laying things out in plain language and letting the reader perhaps rather draw their own conclusions.” (45:13)
• Martha (after arriving in Paris): “This is now my show, my life. I am now running my show.” (29:22)
• Becca on Hemingway and Gellhorn’s dynamic: “She made this charming house out in Cuba for them to live in...She loved to write outside, not wearing any clothes.” (71:27)
• After Normandy landings: “She had a convenient and complete disregard for authority figures, which came in very handy. She had no respect for them.” (84:38)
• On Hemingway's pettiness: “Guess who talked his way into being sent...Ernest Hemingway...And then he refused to help her...” (80:20–81:09)
• Gellhorn on Dachau: “It’s as if I walked into Dachau and there fell over a cliff and suffered a lifelong concussion without recognizing it. I know I have never again felt that lovely, easy, lively hope in life...” (86:58)
• Reflection on being overshadowed: “Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?” (88:52)
• Martha (final word): “It seemed to me personally that it was my job to get things on the record in the hopes that at some point or other somebody couldn't lie about it.” (131:46)

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Important Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro and 30-second Martha Gellhorn elevator pitch: 00:01–00:45
• Activism-rich family background: 03:23–11:15
• Golden Lane suffrage protest: 08:36
• Early journalism and Paris move: 22:12–29:01
• FERA and Depression coverage: 37:00–42:20
• White House with Eleanor Roosevelt: 42:42
• Writing The Trouble I’ve Seen: 44:22–45:13
• Meeting Hemingway: 51:15
• Spanish Civil War and reporting philosophy: 55:53–59:58
• D-Day invasion, Normandy: 82:00–84:03
• Liberation of concentration camps, Dachau: 86:06
• Vietnam reporting: 104:44–107:09
• Adoption of Sandy: 92:59
• Final years, legacy, and passing: 116:27–122:56
• Martha’s “mission as a journalist” (closing quote): 131:46

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Books & Further Resources (as recommended)

• Caroline Moorhead, Martha Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life – recommended comprehensive biography
• Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another – memoir, accessible and humorous
• The Face of War – acclaimed collection of her war reporting, updated through the 1980s
• The Trouble I’ve Seen – fictionalized sketches of Depression-era America, based on FERA work
• Hemingway & Gellhorn (Film, with Nicole Kidman as Gellhorn)
• Gellhorn’s letters collections (Somerville and Moorhead)
• Documentaries & interviews (notably, a late-life interview with Leonard Bernstein)
• Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (no longer active as of 2021)
• Primary source: original Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post articles (digitized online)

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Tone & Language

• Conversational, witty, empathetic, at times irreverent.
• Unapologetically “herstorical”; Gellhorn’s relationships explored as context, not as her defining feature.
• Frequent asides about research, historical method, and contemporary relevance.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This summary delivers a thorough roadmap of Martha Gellhorn’s remarkable life—her upbringing in a family of reformers, her refusal to play by gendered rules, her visual and vivid chronicling of war with a focus on ordinary people, her complicated love life, her struggles and insecurities, and her lasting impact on journalism and women’s history. Vivid stories, direct quotes, and the hosts’ lively commentary bring Gellhorn to life—offering inspiration (and a reality check) for anyone interested in the cost and the courage of bearing witness.

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Recommended as both a biography of Martha Gellhorn and a study in the art—and the risks—of telling the truth.

Transcript

[Becca]

Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

[Syd]

And here's your 30 second summary. Martha Gellhorn was one of the most influential war correspondents of the 20th century. Over the course of a 60 year career, she reported from nearly every major global conflict. The Spanish Civil war, World War II, Vietnam and more. In her work, she focused a compassionate eye on the lives of the ordinary people caught in turmo beyond their control. And this made her coverage uniquely powerful. Her bravery and determination made her a legend. The end. Let's talk about Martha Gellhorn.

[Becca]

But first let's drop her into history. In 1930, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow met hostess. Twinkies were invented and the first Mickey Mouse comic appeared. Colonel Harland Sanders opened his very first restaurant. Steve Sanders Court and Cafe adler Planetarium, the U.S. s first planetarium and the very nearby Shedd Aquarium, both opened in Chicago. Pilot Amy Johnson became the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. The tallest man made structure, the Chrysler Building opened, only to lose that title a year later to the Empire State Building. Clarence Birdseye was granted a patent for flash frozen foods. Buzz Aldrin, Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward, Clint Eastwood, George Soros and Warren Buffett were not only all born, but they are all still alive as of this recording. Authors D.H. lawrence and Arthur Conan Doyle, former US President William Howard Taft, labor organizer Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, all died. And in 1930, with two suitcases, one typewriter and 75 bucks cash, Martha Gellhorn headed to Paris.

[Syd]

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri on November 8, 1908, the third child and only daughter of the four children of George Gellhorn and Edna Fischl Gellhorn. Papa had come to the United States as a young man from Prussia, so he must be my people, not with a bag and a dream. He was a fully qualified doctor. He had taken years of postgraduate work, so he came fully qualified to make some money in the new country. He signed up as a ship's doctor, though, in order to see the world. He was a connoisseur of wine, an exuberant singer who loved and knew about music. He bore the scars of having been a member of his university's dueling club. To which I say, sir, where was your helmet? That is what you get. So he was a tall, well dressed, intelligent professional, the well traveled man when he arrived in St. Louis to settle down when he was 31 and the Midwest was a draw for a lot of Germanic immigrants. St. Louis was no exception. About 20% of the city had a German background at the time. His mentor, a Dr. Washington Fischel, helped him set up his new practice. Papa was a rare specimen at the turn of the century, a doctor who specialized in obstetrics and gynecology.

[Becca]

And Dr. Fischl had a daughter named Edna. Edna was from St. Louis, although two generations back her family had immigrated to the US from Chechnya and settled in the South. But the Civil War pretty much bankrupt them and they headed up the river to St. Louis. Her parents were actually pretty progressive for the time. Her mother's name was Martha Ellis Fishel and she was a reformer. She helped to establish women's clubs. She wrote an educational curriculum for a settlement house. We talked about those in the Jane Addams podcast. And later that curriculum was Adapted by the St. Louis School System. She was ahead of her time. Edna's parents helped found the ethical Society of St. Louis. It's a non theistic community. They're humanists. They set up a church community with no religious doctrine. They believed that humans, according to the current American Humanist site, quote, using human efforts to meet human needs and wants in this world. So they believed in their fellow man. One famous historical person who was a humanist was Thomas Paine, Mr. Common Sense himself. He had said, my country is the world and my religion is to do good. I love that.

[Syd]

Well, I mean, both of Edna's parents stressed the importance of philanthropy, the importance of improving the lives of the less fortunate than yourself. Always give back. That's what you have to contribute to, to the world. I love that so much. Now, Mama Edna got a good education. In fact, she was the high school student body president and enrolled in Bryn Mawr University where she was a natural leader. And she was elected lifetime president of the class of 1900.

[Becca]

When George came to St. Louis and found a mentor in Dr. Fishel, he also found Dr. Fishel's daughter. She had just graduated from Bryn Mawr and it really was a love match. I know you might call things that, but this one I think it absolutely was.

[Syd]

He describes the first moment he saw her. He looked at the stairs and a strawberry blonde angel was descending the stairs with the light behind her illuminating her hair like a halo. And I'm like, that is a classic definition of, as they say in Four Weddings and a Funeral, fun de bo.

[Becca]

Indeed, indeed.

[Syd]

And she felt the same way. You know what, he's intelligent, he's worldly, he's funny, and, and he's adventurous. Her mother was like, he has no manners. He eats with his hands, he eats hot dogs in the opera box. Like, we can't have this in the family. And Mama said to her mother, but he will never be boring. Well, that's foreshadowing of their daughter's personality, don't you think?

[Becca]

Oh, no.

[Syd]

Don't you think, like, the most important thing?

[Becca]

Yeah, yeah. And you know what I mean. I'm a big fan of nurture in this particular situation because she learned a lot from both of her parents.

[Syd]

They took her through life. Mama and Papa were both half Jewish, which is likely why Papa left Europe. Although in America, it doesn't seem to have been a factor in their reception in the city at all.

[Becca]

He was a few years older than her, and when they married, he was 33, she was 25.

[Syd]

Both, of course, had progressive, egalitarian views. They placed great importance on these factors as they constructed their new life together. And they were pretty well off. Papa had one of the first cars in St. Louis. They lived in a 3,000 square foot house in a genteel neighborhood, which is still there.

[Becca]

Yes, it's a stately brick with a front porch.

[Syd]

Isn't it funny? I was thinking about this because I was talking about Sarah Rector, which is, like, based a lot in Kansas City. And I would just get in my car and just drive over there based on records I found in the old newspapers. And, like, people live in that house and probably have no idea. There's a house down here by me that Amelia Earhart lived in in high school. I bet those people have no idea. The history just surrounds you. Anyway, as the children began to come along, they passed their high expectations of concern for their fellow man and woman on to their family. For example, guests of color were often invited to their dinner table. Papa treated African American patients and white patients in his obstetrics practice. And when Martha was only two, Mama began her serious work towards women's suffrage. She was a founding member of the Missouri Suffrage league and the St. Louis suffrage league. Honestly, Mama probably deserves a show of her own. I mean.

[Becca]

Oh, I know. I. No argument. Absolutely no argument there. I mean, she was involved in so many progressive causes. Food banks, clinics for underprivileged families. She was getting her fingers into divorce law and child labor causes. She. Even when there came for a vote in one of her women's groups whether they should allow black members, they voted against it. So she dropped out. And she wouldn't join any other groups that did not allow black members.

[Syd]

Such was her involvement in the particular work of suffrage. When our Martha was Around seven years old, Mama brought her daughter to a memorable and visually striking protest called the Golden Lane. The opening day of the Democratic National Convention. Seven thousand women wearing yellow sashes and carrying yellow parasols lined Locust street, the route to the St. Louis Coliseum. And Martha was one of the two little girls who stood at the end of the line representing, quote, future voters of America. The protesters of the Golden Lane were demanding that the Democratic Party that was about to meet inside this building add into its platform language endorsing suffrage for women, quote, upon the same terms as men, which they did, by the way. Also, where do you get 7,000 yellow parasols? Where is what I would like to know.

[Becca]

I know. Even if you're making them, that's a lot.

[Syd]

I mean that is some planning. That is some mental load. Yeah.

[Becca]

Maybe everybody had to get their own. I don't know.

[Syd]

In the interest of clarity, since otherwise we're going to be jumping around. Mama's other causes included screening milk for tuberculosis, the sale of wrapped bread to improve hygiene, free health clinics. All of those involved Papa because you know, he's the doctor. Factory smoke regulations. So she was into the environment.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

Also she was the regional director of food rationing programs During World War I, the National Municipal League that focused on election reform and city management, and the American association of University Women who focus on gaining opportunities for women graduates. And last but not least, when r. Martha was 8, Mama was a co founder of the League of Women Voters. She'd been invited to become its first president, but ultimately led the St. Louis chapter. You know who invited her to be the first president? Carrie Chapman Catt.

[Becca]

Oh yes, I did know that. As a matter of fact, Edna had to pass on working on a National Post 19th Amendment organization with Carrie Chapman Catt because she had so much to do back home in St. Louis. But she was a really high profile suffragist at the time and just involved in so many causes.

[Syd]

So you see, there was a high bar for civic engagement and the example she was setting specifically for her daughter, but for her sons as well. Martha was enrolled in the Mary Institute, the only one of the children. That was because she had three brothers. Yeah, it's actually still there, but now it's co ed.

[Becca]

Yes, it merged with a boys school to become the St. Louis County Day School.

[Syd]

Didn't Jasmine Crockett go to the Mary Institute?

[Becca]

I don't know.

[Syd]

We'll have to fact check that.

[Becca]

Maybe because they merged in 1992. So she would have been school age around then. Right. Interesting. Go Rams. Is all I'm going to say.

[Syd]

Okay. As a little girl, I'm sorry to say this, I just. Other little girls, mothers would tell their daughters not to be friends with her. I know her mom was what they called turbulent, like an activist, and they didn't want their daughters, you know, drinking that water.

[Becca]

Yes. But I think she had such a healthy family life in the Gellhorn house that maybe that sort of made up for it, and it certainly made her independent. But the Gellhorns had, like, rules in the house and like rule number one was people are people. No guest is ever to be called by anything other than their name. You know, nothing identifying about them is necessary. You know, the religion, their. Their gender, their race, nothing. They'd have family dinners and Papa would pay a penny to whatever kid made him laugh the loudest. He wasn't a fan of, of traditional female clothing, which isn't good. It probably gave her a little bit less popularity points with all those girls. But she had to wear old fashioned, you know, clunky, healthy shoes and boots, so her toes had wiggle room. And actually, just a few years later, he discouraged her from wearing a bra, which again, probably made her a little bit of a outcast among the prissy girls of St. Louis.

[Syd]

Oh, dear Papa, well, he's the doctor. He wanted exercise for his children, even his daughter, unusually, the family went, were into tennis and skating and family walks. And I wonder if they live today. I bet their family would be one of those ones that get up and do that turkey trot race the morning of Thanksgiving and then a little game of football afterwards. Yeah, that was. Yeah.

[Becca]

I kind of grew up in a family a little bit like that. We had. We cross country skied as a family. Is that weird? I don't know. Like in our. On our property, we live. I lived on a big acreage and we just cross country skied. And I was like, downhill skiing looks so fun. My parents were like, no, this is great out in nature. Like, oh, it's hard.

[Syd]

I came from a Trivial Pursuit family. We were sitting on our booties with a blanket and a dog on our lap. That said, though, Mama had her own adventures and she made, actually made sure to take her daughter on these adventures as she got into her tween years. They would have what they called picnic, sad Saturdays where they would pack a little basket of goodies and their books and they would go out to Crevecore Lake and sit under a tree and hang out together. I'd love to Jet and I Used to do that. We called it Field Trip Saturdays. That was a lot more rambunctious than that. But. But yeah, we used to. We used to do that.

[Becca]

Papa was so involved in the family and he had these very progressive views that when he got a view of Martha's middle grade biology textbook and he noticed that the human anatomy sections showed everything down to the belly button and then it was like a Barbie doll, just blank. And he's like, this is not good. I do not want this. At that point, Papa and Mama threw their energies and their dollars into opening a new co educational liberal arts school that still exists. It's called the John Burroughs School. It was named after naturalist and conservationist John Burroughs, who had only died two years before the school was opened. So made sense that they would name him after someone with these progressive ideas. The school offered a lot of curriculums that others considered radical. Again, co education. Gasp. Equal treatment of all the students. And there was a focus on the outdoors, you know, in nature, getting the kids outside. And even to this day, the school is still there. They have a camp in the Ozarks that was donated by an alum, and they have programs for their students where they go out into the wilderness of the Ozarks.

[Syd]

I also think they focused on active learning, which is very Montessori, unusual for a high school. There's not actually that many of them. Curiosity was encouraged. How to think rather than what to think, with another emphasis on community service. So we should all have such a school. It was not an inexpensive school then. It's $38,000 a year now. Martha got involved in debate club, the drama society. She started contributing to the school paper. She was able to ride the streetcar to school. It was actually almost an hour each way. But her parents gave her and her slightly younger brother early independence. They set off on the streetcar across the town to go to school.

[Becca]

Martha, at this point, she knew she had an interest in writing, so she sent some of her poems to a Pulitzer Prize writer. I, I didn't write his name down.

[Syd]

There was the poet Carl Sandburg. I think the most. The most famous thing I know of his is, is that little poem. The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

[Becca]

But he wrote her back. He said, if you must be a writer, you will be. She's sending him this poetry that was kind of, I don't know, dark, I think, for her age. She had written an essay about this time and said that the world is a Quote, hypocritical hole blackened by lies and deceit.

[Syd]

I'm very sorry she didn't have the cure available to her.

[Becca]

No, I'm like, I wrote that down. I wrote, she was emo before emo was cool. I know, I know.

[Syd]

Well, also, unfortunately for her emoness, Martha grew up tall, blonde and striking, which doesn't fit the emo aesthetic necessarily. No, she was clever and bold, perhaps too blunt for the young swains of St. Louis. Papa laid down the law even tighter with his daughter with regard to fashion. You know, hemlines were creeping up, undergarments were getting more flimsy. He was not very happy with the direction the modesty was going. My own grandma about this age used to hide a lipstick in a tree at the end of the block because her papa was the same way. I think I've told this story before, but this sounds exactly like my great grandpa. This is my grandma's story, not Martha's. Her dad wouldn't let her get a bob, but my grandma took the scissors that her mother used to cut chicken legs off with, you know, like big behemoth scissors. And she had her friend put her hand around her hair and just cut it off above her hand. And then the friend freaked out, threw the scissors and the hair in the bushes and ran home screaming. And I'm like, yep, you're gonna get in trouble. And my grandma's point is, well, it's off. And now someone's gonna have to take me downtown to fix it. That's right. So there you go. You can always overcome the dad's fashion thing.

[Becca]

And their mothers did that and her, their grandmothers did the same thing. So I don't want to hear it. Yeah, no kidding. Again, not a traditional father. Papa took 17 year old emo Martha, you know, wearing her aloof teen attitude and her 12 year old brother Alfred to show them where he grew up in Germany. She was 17 and she was kind of mopey and too cool for school, but she said that she, quote, mooned around looking at everything, but not inquiring as to what I might be seeing. Hmm.

[Syd]

Poor papa was just incensed that his two ungrateful children were not absorbing the culture of Germany. And I'm like, dude, do you kind of lower your expectations? She did actually like this trip when she was allowed to go somewhere by herself. She looked around at the way that Europeans lived, and she wrote, life was light and quick, interesting, and all roads led somewhere good. And then she also wrote later how very odd that one bends one's own twig and it stays bent. Who could have foreseen the permanent effect of childhood journeys on streetcars and a wander of the streets of Germany? She recognized early that her early interest in just piecing out and taking off on her own started very early. I come from a reading and learning childhood. I bent my twig in that direction, lurking around the adult section of the library, hiding under the study, Carol, you know, that kind of thing. I'm actually interested to know if you're listening to this, if anyone out there had a childhood inclination that you notice has a very strong relationship to whatever you do today, I would be so interested to hear about it.

[Becca]

Oh, absolutely. I read everything like cereal boxes, you know, first thing in the morning. And there was words on it. We were reading it, oh, what's the ingredients in this shampoo? You know, in the shower kind of thing. And I used to walk around just when nobody was around and just like narrate my day, like out loud, not even in my head, and edit that too, you know, it's like, oh, no, I don't want to say that. I mean, it took a long time, but yeah, I think it reflects my current life.

[Syd]

Well. Martha graduated at 17 and headed off after a bit of a false start. She muffed the first time she took the test. Yeah, I don't think she took it very seriously. But eventually she went off to mama's alma mater, Bryn Mawr, just outside of Philadelphia. And college life unfortunately just did not take. She complained of boredom, of not being challenged, not to put too fine a point on it, to being prepared for a life she didn't want. Papa was a piece of work right now. You know what he wrote her one time? Blondes never do work except under compulsion.

[Becca]

What?

[Syd]

He also said, you need to start thinking about someone other than yourself. Well, there you go. It should be known not for nothing, that both older brothers had also a thorny relationship with Papa with the privilege of masculinity. Each had decamped to seek their own fortunes and had peaced out in a way that sort of wasn't available to their sister. At least not yet. But. So Dad's perfectionism is coming out here. His high expectations for people are oppressive. Perhaps that's what Martha planned to do, too. During her junior year, Martha wrote to newspapers all over the country looking for a job. Job. And she found a six month internship at a New York paper.

[Becca]

And so just before her 18th birthday, Martha hopped on a train and went towards her future.

[Syd]

Well, here I am. I'm on my quest, my ongoing quest to reduce my dependence on mindless scrolling. So what I've decided to do is replace my junk food reels on cat behavior and a guy playing music for animals and all that stuff with the quality material of Masterclass. Masterclass is a site where you can learn from the best to become your best. You get thousands of bite sized lessons across 13 categories. You can find something that fits your life and really fits the busiest of schedules.

[Becca]

I have been forcing myself to take a lunch break and I sit at my desk and that's when I open up Masterclass and I watch it while I eat my sandwich. The one that I really love, I know I talked about this before, was Amy Poehler's. Her session is called Prepare to be Unprepared. And basically she uses the rules of improv as life lessons and a way to accomplish anything in any life.

[Syd]

One of the rules of improv is yes. And so saying yes and then adding on is a fundamental principle of improv and life according to Amy Poehler. And how hilarious that that would come up because the thing I'm listening to is a screenwriting class held by Shonda Rhimes, who once upon a time also had a book called the Year of Yes, in which she said yes to everything, even though it made her uncomfortable and it changed her life in radical ways. So those two classes put together would make a mighty inspirational program.

[Becca]

Definitely. And you know what? It would also make a really lovely gift. It's kind of one of those things that somebody might not get for themselves. But there's something in Masterclass for everyone.

[Syd]

88% of surveyed members feel that Masterclass has made a positive impact on their lives. See for yourself why. One Masterclass member said, this is by far the best money I've spent in a long while.

[Becca]

Masterclass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes for as much as up to 50% off. So head on over to masterclass.com historychicks for the current offer.

[Syd]

That's up to 50% [e-mail] historychicks masterclass.com historychicks.

[Becca]

Martha knew that her parents wanted her to stay in school. So she was so independent. I was so impressed with that at such a young age. You know, she went and got those jobs. She wrote to her mother and she said she was going to be a journalist. She wanted to be a journalist. And she said, quote, I'll get something somehow and I'll use it as a stepping stone to get a job abroad. Oh, gosh, how I ache to get over there. It's a real malady. Okay, so she's a little dramatic.

[Syd]

Well, yeah. And you were over there. Oh, yeah. We didn't mention that earlier. She, as a wealthy daughter, had gone several times to Europe with a sort of grand tour with chaperones and other young ladies. So I think she wanted to get.

[Becca]

Back to that independent life in Europe.

[Syd]

So she's not a novice at Europe, and she really did have something to look forward to there. Well, what her internship led to was a reporting job at the Albany Times Union. And of course, they gave her the women's pages, club news, weddings and recipes. But also. And I'm wondering, is this hazing likely the police blotter? Many's the time she'd find herself confronting scenes of chaos and blood. You know, she'd go out from the morgue and throw up in the newsroom. As you can imagine, it was sexual harassment, graduate level.

[Becca]

Yeah, she was the only female reporter in there.

[Syd]

She held her own and filed her stories and got grudging respect. I don't like this adaptation, by the way. It happens in commercial kitchens, too. The only lady slowly becomes one of the boys. Well, they started to call her the, quote, Blonde Peril. And a friend of her father's Tattletal, told. What's the past tense of that, spilled the beans on her circumstances, and there was enormous pressure for her to move back home. Everyone with a college student might recognize what happened next. She did come home. There was a honeymoon period where it was cozy and everyone got along. There were nice dinners, and there was a conversation. And then, I'm sorry to say, one day, Martha just exploded on her mother. Your life is boring. St. Louis is hell. Why is everyone so conventional? I'm suffocating. All I want to do is get away from you. I hate everything my family has ruined me, et cetera. And I'm like, what on earth? There's this phenomenon when you're little and I'm talking little kids go to school where they hold it together all day, and then they get home and they unload, and the mom in the pickup line, and because that's the place they feel safe. But as an adult, go get yourself a scoop of ice cream, go for a walk, have a shot of bourbon. Do not unleash on your mother. You needed to have grown out of that a little bit, especially when there was no catastrophe. You know what I mean?

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

So on the outside, her mother just said, what are your plans then? And on the inside, Mama was deeply, deeply hurt. So much so that her father, it seems like, never fully forgave Martha for hurting her mother like this. He held that grudge so long, he never even said goodbye. He came to the train station and was a stoic man. I mean, Chris Graham doesn't stand for me being treated unfairly either. And papa was a lot. But I'll give him that loyalty to his wife.

[Becca]

I think that one time my. One of my brothers got in the most trouble for disrespecting my mom and got in the most trouble with my dad. You do not talk. And my husband did the same thing to my kids if they got a little mouthy towards me.

[Syd]

So, you know, parenting is so hard. Parenting an adult is so hard, especially when they're not behaving like one. You have to be the bigger person and you have to accept that worry is now a friend on your shoulder, I guess. Yeah, well, Mama gave her some money, saw her to the train station. Then Martha bartered some work for passage on a ship to Europe.

[Becca]

Again, so independent. She's like, I will write about you, Holland line about your great experience. Just if you can get me to Paris. At the crack of 1930, she famously got on that ocean liner with two suitcases, a typewriter, 75 bucks, and arrived in Paris.

[Syd]

My goodness, she was exuberant. This is now my show, my life. I am now running my show. She filled almost a year with traveling. She would bully people into letting her write for them. Sending Paris fashion articles back home to St. Louis. Woo. Taking restaurant jobs to make rent like we all do in our twenties. Falling in love, in particular, with a married man. And she observed everyone. She fell in with experienced journalists in Geneva like you do, covering the League of Nations, which was the predecessor to the United nations. And she arranged to write articles about this for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Being immersed in this worldly, intelligent group finally gave her, I think, one of those moments in youth where you realize, oh, hey, I don't know everything. After her year of traveling about, she had a brief, uncomfortable stopover at home before she was just really forced to take off again by just sheer uncomfortability of being under the roof of her parents again. She got a train pass and a deal with a newspaper and wrote human interest stories all up and down the line, Illinois to Mexico. She wrote stories about oil boom towns, bullfighters, celebrities and the person on the street. Characters, of course, she preferred. She had a hatred for what we might now call suburbia, but she just called conventionality proper life. She had a tendency to run Away from whatever she loved, she said, and she saw that early. She ran away from her parents at every chance she got. She was brave, and she was full of daring. She got into Mexico by saying she was engaged to the Mexican ambassador's son. I mean, here's the thing. Yes, she ran in some good circles, but the Mexican ambassador was the father in law of Charles Lindbergh, so he was pretty famous. So I think she got that information because there's no Internet straight from the newspapers. And she looked the part, I guess.

[Becca]

Hooray.

[Syd]

Pre Internet.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

Her looks and her nerve acted as hall passes, I would say, her whole life. Yeah. She got a lot accomplished by just pretending and being confident.

[Becca]

Yeah. Well, as a journalist, she knew she had to live life, and this is a great way for her to do that. She's getting paid, like, 25 bucks an article for a Sunday magazine, which at the time is like, you know, 350 bucks an article. But they paid for her travel, and she got to write, and she got to experience the world, you know, good, bad, ugly. She got to experience, you know, talking her way into things. And for a bit, her French paramour. I don't. He's married. His wife is not gonna divorce him, but he comes over and hangs out with her and travels with her for a while. At one point, their car broke down in Mississippi, and they were picked up by a guy in a truck who said he had a stop to make before he got them to town. And that stop was at a lynching. They stayed in the truck, silent, but afterwards she said, we did not speak to each other. I have a memory of trying not to be s. And trying not to believe any of this. That's a terrible sight of the United States to see.

[Syd]

She did write her memoirs of that story in the 30s, but she didn't actually publish that story until much, much later.

[Becca]

And all along the way, she's starting novels. She's a journalist, but she has this desire to take her life experiences and turn them into novels. So she's practicing that the whole time. She must have had a trunk file bigger than. I don't even know, something big.

[Syd]

Well, some of her other adventures as a young woman, she was an extra in Hollywood. She modeled back in Paris for Chanel and Schiaparelli. She wrote for Vogue magazine again to pay the bills, which cracks me up, like, it's aspirational for most people, and for her, it's like, yeah, this is something I can get for a minute while I'm. Right now.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

So Hilarious. And she traveled all through Europe with her married man. Monsieur Juvenal was the stepson of the infamous author Colette, by the way, But Colette.

[Becca]

And maybe we'll cover her sometime. I. I don't know. I have to fall in love with her more than I am right now. But she did not like Martha with her stepson one bit. And at one point, Martha got to meet her. I mean, this is one of her idols. And Colette told Martha that she needed to do something with her makeup, like take a liner and fill in your brows until they're almost touching. And so Martha did, until one of her friends was like, what are you doing? You look ridiculous. So point to Colette.

[Syd]

Correspondingly, Martha's parents hated Monsieur Juvenal. Martha and he were presenting themselves as man and wife. They just did that all through Europe as if it had happened. And, you know, nobody can really check. And back in St. Louis, you know, it was a little bit unclear. Was she or was she not married? Her parents hated trying to keep up with this deception. They didn't want to out her, but neither did they want to go along with it. Even now, you'll see she has three husbands. Well, she wasn't really married to that first one. He was married the whole time to someone else. Martha was fired from her job at the United Press in Paris because she reported sexual harassment from an ambassador or titan of industry. It's a little bit unclear. Someone with lots of influence, and it was and probably still is unfortunately easier to remove the squeaky wheel, the complainant, than to fix the vehicle, I. E. Deal with the man. And so she was let go from her job. Now, more seriously, while she was in Europe, Martha was bearing witness to what was happening. In the early 30s, Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. She once met the leaders of the Hitler Youth as part of a French delegation of like a meeting of the young people of the all nations or whatever. The economic realities of the depression were not just an American phenomenon. Of course, there was poverty, unemployment, restlessness and despair. And she found herself amidst the political riots in Paris. I mean, this woman had more of an action packed youth than most people get all the way through their whole lives.

[Becca]

Now she's still in her early 20s, so this is like up through grad school. If she had finished college and gone on, that's quite an education.

[Syd]

I'm not entirely certain what the event was that led her to come back to the United States. Whether it was tensions in Europe, a need for money, a plea from home, I'm not entirely sure what the event was, but she did come back to the United States and was introduced by a friend to the director of a government agency called the Federal Emergency Relief association, or fara, one of the quadrillions of agencies known by abbreviations that were operating during this time under the Roosevelt administration. We talked a lot about those during the coverage of Frances Perkins. So if you want to know more, more of those. But Martha got a job that was right up her alley. She, along with a few other writers, was sent out into the public in different sections of the country to report from the ground floor, as it were, the situation in America economically, socially, with regard to the Depression. They. They were to be the eyes and ears of the Roosevelt administration on the ground.

[Becca]

It had begun with a journalist named Lorena Hickok. She had been hired to go out and report back to Washington what she saw. Not necessarily statistics, because, you know, FDR and his cabinet could get statistics. They wanted actual stories. And Lorena was coming back with so many that they said, ooh, we should, you know, send more people out and get these stories of what is happening on the ground, which is such a great job for Martha at this time. I mean, we're in the middle of the Depression right now, but she was paid $35 a week, but she had a train pass, she had a per diem, and she just went and found stories. It was kind of her first really, you know, regular journalist gig, kind of as a stepping stone to being a freelance journalist.

[Syd]

Martha was assigned North Carolina and New England. I do want you to get the picture in your mind superficially, superficially, before I tell you a little bit more about the substance of her reporting. So Martha was always known as a very attractive and athletic woman. Her attractive appearance caused many to dismiss her and all her contributions. So that's the downside. Now she, and she would even say this herself, was able to parlay her looks into a lot of access and later in influence. But the downside of that was that she was hardly ever taken seriously as probably she should have been. People opened up to her a lot more than they might have had she not looked. So I don't want to say frivolous, but like, kind of frivolous.

[Becca]

She.

[Syd]

Her entire wardrobe was made up of samples that she had been given by Schiaparelli and Chanel. She didn't have money to buy clothes, but yet she had couture clothes that she's traipsing around Appalachia with.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

Do you know what I mean?

[Becca]

And then she Looks very wholesome, very preppy, I would say. You know, I can see why people would talk to her because she, she just looked important, kind of.

[Syd]

And she looked non threatening.

[Becca]

Important yet non threatening.

[Syd]

Yeah, I think so, yeah. More like a confidant than a tax collector, you know.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

Well, she was shocked by the grim living and working conditions in America. In this country, you know, of dreams or possibility. She saw broken down shacks, broken down people, a lack of hope, abuses of power from the rich who took advantage of workers desperation to treat them poorly and grind them further into abject poverty. Charging more for groceries, paying less in wages, making more people homeless by foreclosing on their houses. Disease ran rampant and you know, from the government. There was a lack of regard for the basic humanity of the people she met and talked to. You know, they were not numbers, they were human beings. Which she was like, I don't understand how people don't realize that there are people at the end of these statistics. As she traveled, she grew more and more troubled about the widespread destitution. That's what Martha and the other investigators were there to report back. What was the general mental state of America. And the answer was pretty grim. Hopelessness and anger was growing by the day. People were giving up. People were no longer educating their children. People were just trying to dumbly to make it to the next morning with no thought for the future. She wrote, the picture is so grim that whatever words I use will seem hysterical and exaggerated. It is hard to believe these conditions exist in a civilized country.

[Becca]

She was seeing syphilis at every corner, even in children. Something that, you know, she never would have encountered had she lived her life back in St. Louis.

[Syd]

She went on a little bit later in her journey here to partner with Dorothea Lange, to document who she was. A photographer who documented how the Great Depression impacted everyday Americans. Homelessness, hunger, you've all seen, I bet you have Dorothea Lange's photo called the Migrant Mother. That's probably her most famous portrait.

[Becca]

Dorothea Lange was working for a different organization. She was working for the Farm Security Administration, not the Federal Emergency Relief Association.

[Syd]

But if you meet in the field and you're working very similar beats, it makes sense to combine and you know, the pics are worth a thousand words, et cetera. While on assignment in Idaho, of all places, Martha encountered a group of workers who sort of had to throw their shovels in this lake every day. Their boss told him to do it so he could order new shovels at an inflated price and get the money. But for it's hard to explain. Like, so for the time that the shovels weren't there, the men were out of work.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

And they complained to Martha about it. And she said, you know what you should do? You should break the windows of the Pharaoh office to draw attention to your boss. You should tell on him. And it did work. That action did create some attention that came and they did fire the corrupt boss. I don't know if they excavated all the shovels from the lake or not, but yeah, he was printing money supplying shovels to the government that were really at the bottom of the lake. But FE hired her for being a, quote, dangerous communist. Yeah, she actually wrote that to her parents. It's kind of funny. Like, okay, that's what makes me a communist. Fair enough. Okay.

[Becca]

Martha had struck up a friendship with a woman who invited her to stay at her house to give her time to regroup. Martha described this woman as, quote, she gave off light. I cannot explain it better. And that's how 26 year old Martha Gellhorn moved into the White House at Eleanor Roosevelt's invitation.

[Syd]

So here's the thing. Eleanor Roosevelt also was very key in hiring Frances Perkins, who was FDR's, I mean, everything advisor. Eleanor Roosevelt recognized talent early and also probably because she was one of her mother's friends. That helps a lot. Your mother's friends can move mountains. Note to self, if you are a teen or a twenty something, sometimes the mom network, yeah, you're going to read.

[Becca]

That Edna Gellhorn and Eleanor Roosevelt met at Bryn Mawr and maybe they met there, but Eleanor Roosevelt didn't go to college. So any implication that they were students together is inaccurate. Interesting.

[Syd]

Yeah, I did. I read that everywhere. So here is Martha living in the White House. She spent her evenings there helping Eleanor Roosevelt, the First lady, with her correspondence and also with the First Lady's column in the Women's Home Companion that was entitled My Day. But the main thing the Roosevelts were giving her was time and space to work on a book about her experiences and what she had seen and what it all meant. Now, Martha had published a novel before. Her first was not very well received and in fact one she was not very prone to talk about in later life, I'm sorry to say. Her father was a piece of work about it. He actually wrote, quote, it will be pretty dark for you if you remain in this groove you've been plowing the past six or seven years. That's the only thing you haven't got. Tired of this self deception. I want to write I want to write. Then why the devil don't you? If you really want to write, write by all means, instead of capitalizing on your yellow hair and spicy conversation.

[Becca]

Ouch, dad.

[Syd]

So was she goaded by his disbelief? Absolutely. Was she haunted by what she'd seen in America? Absolutely. And she buckled down and wrote a book for pretty long stories that illustrated the situation in America. The resulting book, called the Trouble I've Seen, earned her acclaim from reviewers all over the world.

[Becca]

If you're going to read anything that she wrote, which you should, I would start with this because it's four short stories. Short stories are easy to read. It is fiction. But it's based on things that she saw when she was traveling the United States for Fira. You know, actual people that she saw became characters in this book. And it tells the story of four different people at four different ages. And the story of Ruby will break your heart. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

[Syd]

The introduction was written by H.G. wells, just one of the many names we could drop here. And part of it goes as follows. We live the lives of these people of hers, so patient in their way, so plucky, so reluctantly losing their old freedoms and sturdy self assertion, and so infinitely perplexed. There's no propaganda in this book, not a passage of exhortation, no effort to sharpen or barb the point. And yet I do not think it will be easy to read it all the way through and not feel a new strength of resolve to work for a reorganization of human life in order to make these stories seem like an incredible nightmare, misery in the history of mankind. I love the way he basically said, she doesn't force it on you, but she makes her points. Yeah, she had a reputation for. And this actually is kind of the beginning of her style, laying things out in plain language and letting the reader perhaps rather draw their own conclusions.

[Becca]

I love that she had this really interesting relationship with H.G. wells, that some sources say they had an affair. Some sources say it was just this massive flirtation. I mean, he was much older than her. They had this long term relationship, friendship. Could you figure out what it was? I loved it. I thought it was just he could have this pretty young woman around him that he could flirt with and she could get information, you know, I found.

[Syd]

Him very creepy, but I was actually like, don't let him stalk you. No, you don't have to let him stalk. I felt uncomfortable the whole time about him. But I don't think she did because I think she didn't take him seriously. But looking back on my age at that scenario, I was like, dough.

[Becca]

Yeah. He was 70, she was 27 at this time. And he just kind of followed her around a little bit. I mean, she let him stay with her.

[Syd]

He asked her one time if she could be his secretary and just walk around. And I'm like, no website.

[Becca]

Another time, he was driving her nuts, and she was trying to get some work done. She was trying to write another book. And so she contacted a friend of his, said, you have to invite this guy out. He's gotta leave. So Charlie Chaplin invited HG Wells to California for a visit to get him out of Martha's hair.

[Syd]

Oh, we just name drop all the.

[Becca]

Rest of the story.

[Syd]

Oh, this story.

[Becca]

There's so much big heart.

[Syd]

I'm glad to say that her father read the manuscript of this book before its publication. This book is woven not out of words, but out of the very tissues of human beings. I'm glad they came to an accord. Because her father died suddenly, she was.

[Becca]

Able to get back to St. Louis before he had surgery for some mysterious abdominal ailment. The surgery went well, Martha left, and he died in his sleep shortly thereafter.

[Syd]

Curiously, in his obituary, there was a factual error.

[Becca]

Martha is listed as, quote, the wife of Bertrand de Juvenel, French journalist, which would have been a surprise to his actual wife.

[Syd]

That that was just marketing in the pre Internet age. Like, if you asserted it and wrote your name a certain way and wore the ring, like, who's gonna dig up the parish records? Nobody. It was the end of an era. In Martha Gellhorn's, the preparation for the holidays has whizzed by so fast. I mean, this year got a hold of me in a way. So technically, some of the major holidays have already passed. But you know what hasn't passed? Family arrival. A lot of times, the families with little kids come that week between Christmas and New Year's, and that's what's happening in my family. So Wayfair has been very, very valuable to me in order to get the guest room and the playroom that is now sort of a guest room put back together for the chaos that is about to descend upon my house. And it's amazing fun.

[Becca]

You know, there's nothing like getting ready for holiday company, to see the shortcomings in your home. Things that your eye glazes over, like, you could use some new throw pillows or, oh, a mirror would be really good on that wall. Why did I never think of it before? Well, Wayfair is the place to go. It doesn't matter what your style is. They will have whatever you're looking for at a very reasonable price and free delivery, even on the big stuff.

[Syd]

So you can do gifts, decor, kitchen supplies for the big meal that everyone's going to hoover. My husband is a chef. I did not cook it. Therefore it is delicious. So there's something for every style and every home, no matter what your space or budget. And Wayfair makes it easy to tackle whatever your home goals are and your gift list with endless inspiration for every space.

[Becca]

So get last minute hosting essentials, gifts for all your loved ones and decor to celebrate the holidays. For way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop for all things home.

[Syd]

That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Just after her father died, her mother and younger brother and she decided to take a little holiday and they went to the Sun. They traveled to Key west.

[Becca]

They had gone to Miami, and they thought it was just meh and had heard some really good things about the Keys. So she headed down there. They meandered into a bar named Sloppy Joe's. And there, as Martha later described, was a large, dirty man in an untidy, somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt reading his mail.

[Syd]

It was Hemingway. Sloppy Joe's is still there. It has an extensive margarita menu, if that's your thing. But evidently Hemingway liked to drink daiquiris with no sugar. What is that story about? I don't really know. So her first impression of him was that he was a large, dirty man. His first impression of her was that she was a bride on her honeymoon because she was traveling with her mother and her brother and that he planned to steal her affections from her new husband. And he gave himself three days to do it, which starts out pretty nefarious.

[Becca]

No kidding. I want to give some something to Alfred. That's the younger brother. He had just finished medical school and he was going to follow his father's footsteps. He had planned on it, you know, before his father had died. So I thought that. I don't know. I love that about him. When he was a little kid, he'd follow his dad on calls and stuff. House calls.

[Syd]

Well, I do love that. And I wonder if I, you know, you were always talking about nature and nurture. Remember? The two older brothers didn't have a good relationship with their father. I wonder if there had been some pressure to bear. I mean, maybe they lucked out With a third one that he really wanted to be a doctor. Yeah. Or maybe he had the pressure of. Well, we struck out twice.

[Becca]

Yeah. Somebody's gotta do it. It might as well be me.

[Syd]

I don't know.

[Becca]

Do we need to give a biography about Ernest Miller Hemingway at all?

[Syd]

How about do it? Yeah.

[Becca]

All right. He was nine years older than Martha. Like her, he didn't finish college. But unlike her, he never started. He started off as a reporter at our Kansas City Star for six months. And he did credit their style guide for the foundation of his writing. And I'm only telling you this because I also work for the Kansas City Star, and I'd gone to their old building and they had his Pulitzer in like a glass case, which he didn't win when he was writing for the Star, but somehow they got their hands on it. I didn't ask. Huh. Yeah, interesting. But in their style guide, they said, use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs, which pretty much wraps up his. His writing style. Ernest was not accepted into the army, but he did become a World War I Red Cross ambulance driver. And that's when he was wounded. He was sent home and he started to write. He was on his second wife when they met, and he had three children from two different wives.

[Syd]

Well, so the two Hemingway and Martha hit it off. He followed her about. I must say, here's another dude that doesn't need to be a creeper, but is. Well, in their conversations here and there, it came out that it was his plan to go report on the Spanish Civil War. Martha decided that taking a little ride on his coattails was not a bad idea. She pulled some strings and got assignments from Collier's magazine to justify the trip as a whole and some other jobs from Vogue to pay for it. And she traveled with Ernest Hemingway to go cover the Spanish Civil War. Now, they hopped on a boat to Spain. Now, here's the Cliff Notes version of that war. The party on the left won power in an election. The party on the right tried to stage a coup that wasn't immediately successful. The party on the right was supported by Nazi Germany. The party on the left, duly elected as they had been, was supported in name by other Western democracies in spirit, but not very well in might. And materials. And civil war erupted. Ultimately, the Progressive Party was defeated, and they ended up with a dictator named Generalissimo Franco, who stayed around until the 1970s. There you go. Civil war has erupted. It was in Spain that Martha found her place as a war reporter. I am so taken with her. Voice when she's talking about things, it's almost like a modern social media post, not to put too trivial of a spin on it. So she was in her hotel and heard a lot of shelling. She was new to the town and to the action, but the people themselves had sort of become accustomed to it, and that really struck her. Martha and Hemingway took up residence at the Hotel Florida, which became a hub for writers including Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, who nobody liked, remember from our coverage of Dorothy Parker, nobody liked her. Hemingway's name and reputation gave him passes to go to the front lines, just anywhere he wanted, really. He and a partner were filming a documentary about the Spanish Civil War called the Spanish Earth, and he took Martha with him. She had access, therefore, to sights and horrors that many other journalists simply did not see. However, what she chose to write about, in her simple way, was the effect the war had on the everyday people. That was her forte.

[Becca]

It was great that he taught her, like, really, a crash course in weapons and military strategy and all the things about the technical things about war, you know, how to not get shot, that kind of thing. But that's not what she wrote about. I. She wrote about a little kid that she saw.

[Syd]

I wouldn't mind, if you'll indulge me, reading a little bit of a dispatch that she sent back that I think is interesting. You would be walking down a street, hearing only the city noises of streetcars and automobiles and people calling to one another, and suddenly crushing it all out would be the huge, stony, deep booming of a falling shell at the corner. There was no place to run, because how did you know that the next shell would not be behind you or ahead or to the left or to the right? Going indoors was silly, too, considering what shells can do to a house. So perhaps you went into a store because that's what you had intended doing before all this started. Inside a shoe shop, we're all trying on shoes. Two girls are buying summery sandals, sitting by the front window of the shop. After the third explosion, the salesman says politely, I think we'd better move further back into the shop. If the window breaks, it will cut you all winter long. There's no fuel. The days are cold, the nights are colder. Food is scarce. All these people have sons and husbands and sweethearts at the front somewhere. And now they're living in a city where you take your chances and just hope your chances are good. You've seen no panic, no hysteria. You know, they have the kind of faith which makes courage and a fine future you have no right to be disturbed. There are no lights anywhere. The city itself is quiet. The sensible thing is just to go back to sleep.

[Becca]

Regular life at the front lines, you know, you're living your life. Yeah. That was all of her work. Kind of focused on that. She wasn't the only female there. She and Virginia Cowles, who is another correspondent, became friends during this war. And they would do, like regular girls going out things just blocks from the actual front line.

[Syd]

It was weird.

[Becca]

I thought, it's just people are living their lives here, and there happens to be this horrible violence right there.

[Syd]

Right. She did talk about having a drink at a table where that morning a shell had exploded and killed the three people that were at the table that sat there in the morning. That kind of thing.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

Baffles me, but she said it in plain language. I also want to say there's something that Martha struggled with during all her time covering wars, I think, but it started here. She struggled between reporting exactly what she saw and taking a step back to see the greater good and framing things as a story. What do I mean by that? So do you report the 20% bad behavior of your friends in order to be objective, knowing that revealing they're not angels might turn the tide of public opinion against them? Or do you report on the 80% bad behavior of the obvious bad guys, knowing no one will be surprised and it might not sell papers? That's. I'm sure it's something journalists have to fight with in the modern day as well.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

Like when somebody purports to be good and proves to have done one thing well, that's news. But when nefarious people always do nefarious things, it's whatever.

[Becca]

Yeah. I think that you. You nailed it, though. You said it.

[Syd]

I mean, Franco's side was pretty much categorically, yeah. Not good.

[Becca]

Virginia Cowles went there to report on both sides. And at this point, Martha's like, I don't want to report on both sides. You know, I am pro republic, I am anti fascist, and I have zero desire to look at both sides.

[Syd]

Like, Ms. Cowles thought it was important to dig out the good aspects of the bad guys and present them side by side. And then, of course, Martha is like, I'm not digging out that one nugget of good. I'm not doing it.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

Because they don't deserve that reputation.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

Yeah, Yeah, I get it. I mean, I think it's just like a philosophical difference between the two of them.

[Becca]

And even now in journalism, it's still A philosophical difference between journalists.

[Syd]

Well, upon her return to America, Martha set out on a speaking tour. She was giving lectures about the Spanish Civil War, what had led to it, the seamy underbelly, just everything to audiences of thousands of people. I'm amazed, she wrote. Maybe history is a stinking mess and victory's always wrong. But one thing is sure, good men are as absolute as mountains. And as long as there are any good men, it's worthwhile to live and be with them. And one cannot feel utterly hopeless about the future knowing such people exist whether they win or not. Inspirational. Yeah, I thought.

[Becca]

And you know what kind of how she lived her life at this point reflected her approach to telling the story about real life happening right next to violence. And that she and Ernest fell in love during the war and they started a relationship during the war. And that's supposed to be like a honeymoon, blissful time, but there's bombs going off right outside their windows.

[Syd]

Mel, maybe that added some spice.

[Becca]

Her first night there, she was in her room and there was a shelling attack, and she went to leave the room, and the door was locked from the outside because he didn't want her going out of the room. Like, they weren't in sharing a room. It was just her by herself. So she was stuck in this room while all these bullets are hitting the hotel.

[Syd]

Well, he said that dudes would try doors in the hotel, and he didn't want her to be asleep and have somebody come in like she just got there.

[Becca]

He kind of took her under his wing to teach her war corresponding. I guess so.

[Syd]

Oh, is that what they're calling it?

[Becca]

That's what the kids are calling it these days. That's right.

[Syd]

Well, the Spanish Earth movie was finished. Martha actually did some Foley work. I'm fascinated by videos of Foley work. So Martha would tap her fingernails against the screen or pop a balloon, that kind of thing, to provide the sound effects. I always like when they, like, slap a ham then. The premiere was to be held at the White House at Eleanor Roosevelt's personal invitation. And I know we haven't covered Eleanor Roosevelt yet, but she was famous. Her kitchen, in any house she was in, was famous for focusing on quantity. Taste was completely beside the point. Do you have enough calories on your plate? But Martha insisted, before they got to the White House, she had to stop and eat a bunch of sandwiches and advised that Hemingway should do it, too, because there was going to be nothing edible at the White House. Sure enough, Hemingway was astonished to find out that was completely true.

[Becca]

If he'd only talked to her grandchildren. They would have told her, dinner is healthy, not necessarily tasty.

[Syd]

Well, Martha and Hemingway then traveled to China to cover the Second Sino Japanese War. I'm going to simplify this for you. This is Pre World War II, although it is considered pretty much to be the opening battles in the whole epic drama that would become World War II. Japan invaded China. The United States supported China and its efforts, and then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. I mean, that's like a very big simple. I mean, there's lots more. It goes on for years, but that's where we are. We're pre Pearl harbor right now in that situation where Japan was tearing through China. Millions of Chinese people died in this conflict. Martha had an assignment from Colliers. She was supposed to go to China and Hong Kong and Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and Burma. Just a little bit, a little run down the street. And Martha practically dragged Hemingway to China. She later wrote in a book, and gave him the name Unwilling Companion or uc. He didn't want to go. He was perfectly happy where he was. But she knew that in order to get the proper paperwork and passes, she needed a name with firepower. She pressured him so hard to go, and it was a rolling disaster. It is hilarious to me, I think, if you want to read the travelogues, she wrote them down later in a book called Travels With Myself. And another. It was so bad. Dirty, stinky, broken, dangerous. Oh, my goodness. There was a lot of culture to dig through, a lot of hoops. In fact, she expected every day that Hemingway's famous temper would bust out, because, I mean, the conditions were so horrible that they were traveling in. But, you know, she just thought, any minute he's going to lay waste to everything around him. But instead, the worse the trip got, the better tempered Ernest Hemingway seemed to be. And anytime she complained, he'd be like, who wanted to come to China? And she'd have to shut up because it was her. It was so funny. Many of the times she came back to the room that they were in to see him surrounded by random warlords and generals and who knows what all drinking up all the local hooch. Great male camaraderie has been gotten, and it made her so angry. He was having a good old time, like burping and farting and drinking all the stuff. In fact, she came home once and he handed her this jar, and it rattled. And she's like, what's in here? And he goes, snakes. And if you throw up, I will never forgive you. She drank Snake Wine.

[Becca]

I listened to that one on audiobook. I really enjoyed. And I just really loved her writing style.

[Syd]

I love it, too.

[Becca]

It wasn't pretentious. It wasn't. You know, at the time, people were trying to put all the emotions in with all the big words and the flowery language. And she just. It's very modern. I think she was so ahead of her time. You know, when she was back at the beginning in France wearing Schiaparelli and Chanel, she was an influencer. She's like wearing these clothes out to parties and stuff to show them off, like an influencer would. And now she's nice. She's a contemporary writer during World War II.

[Syd]

Well, okay, one more story about Hemingway, and then I gotta let it go, because you could tell them all day. So the transportation that they had to take on this one road was really small. So they had these horses and they were kind of small. And Henning was like, this thing is going to break in half. I'm a giant dude. And this poor old horse is going to rue its day. And they're like, no, these are the horses we have. And his toes were practically dragging on the ground. The story is that he got irritated, got off the horse, picked up the horse and carried it the rest of the way. There you go. A little tall tale for you about Ernest Hemingway told by his lady friend herself. Now, he had actually been asked to use his star power to get information for the US Government, which reminds me a lot of Josephine Baker. You know, I'm using my celebrity to kind of hide the fact that I'm really spying on you. They met and had dinner with Chiang Kai Shek and Madame Chiang. And did we ever tell you the story we were told at Eleanor Roosevelt's house about Madame Chiang Kai Shek?

[Becca]

Oh, is that who that was? Oh, yeah.

[Syd]

Yeah, that's who that was. So Eleanor and Madame Chiang Kai Shek were having a formal conversation, and one of the grandchildren had waited too long to get out of the pool to go to the bathroom and went screaming through that room dripping wet. I got a poop, slammed the bathroom door. Everyone was horrified. And Eleanor Roosevelt just mildly said, oh, I'm sure Madame Chang also has grandchildren. How it goes. And just kept going.

[Becca]

Just totally chill.

[Syd]

Yeah. Well, they also met with the opposing leader also, so that was a big secret that could have gotten them in a big amount of trouble. By now, they were a known item. They were openly living together. Even though Hemingway was still married to his second wife, Pauline at the time. They were traveling Together, living together, a unit, and everyone knew it.

[Becca]

Eventually, Ernest went back to the United States, but Martha stayed in Europe. She had an agreement with Colliers, and they paid her a thousand dollars a piece for every article she would send them. That's. That's like $23,000 per article.

[Syd]

Amazing.

[Becca]

I know. She went on to Czechoslovakia. It was a country that, at this time, it was starting to feel the pressure from neighboring Germany on three sides. Martha, at this point, she's 31 years old, and she had seen what the Germans were up to years before, and she could see the Germans flooding into Czechoslovakia and Poland and the beginning of the war. So she is covering World War II at this point. For her covering, I mean, it's just like we would imagine a war correspondent. She would have to get into a country. She'd have to get through barricades, she'd have to get through checkpoints. She'd have to hunt down people in leadership or knowledgeable positions just to get the stories and report back what was actually going on. And that she would always do it in the easiest way possible. You know, she.

[Syd]

That was.

[Becca]

Her goal, is to write things that were easily digestible, to explain the atrocities she was watching.

[Syd]

She wrote, this country is a fortress. The atmosphere is of someone waiting in an operating room for the surgeon who will soon come to work with a blunt knife and no anesthetic. The French and the British, to appease Hitler, had caved in to his demand and given him what was called the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, just outright, with no battles. Martha could not believe it. She wrote, Chamberlain, that's the prime minister of England, has given you up to the dictators, and there seems to be very little hope that democracy will survive on the entire continent. She blamed cowardice by the politicians in Western Europe for allowing this to happen and not stopping Hitler here, where it might have been more possible had everyone gotten together. Treachery, betrayal, incompetence. She wrote, how long are the English going to put up with these bastards that run their country? She wrote a report on the refugee crisis and barged into the office of the League of Nations with her green silk scarf and her glorious khaki trousers. And she beat on the table and screamed at those guys to wake up, and no one listened to her. She wrote the Night of Kristallnacht, November 19, the day the Nazis went out en masse to break windows and round up Jewish people. They caused destruction and terror throughout all their territories. She chose to write about how Paris was alive with costume balls and fancy dinners, champagne and caviar fiddling while Rome burned. She wrote. I will maybe lose my mind with fury and helplessness. She wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt. I cannot yet understand why there must be so much suffering. I shall never be a good writer. The human animal escapes me. There will be millions like me who will never know what to believe again.

[Becca]

She cannot take all that in all the time. And she and Ernest went back to his favorite place, which was Cuba. At this point, Ernest and Pauline's marriage was technically over. It would take about another year and a half for it to be finalized. But Martha and Ernest kind of looked around Cuba for a place to live.

[Syd]

He had taken up residence in a hotel like he had in Madrid. And she got to Cuba and there were two rooms full of man clutter. I'm not going to be too stereotypical, but he had a shelf of meat. Have you ever gone away on a girls trip and come back to the like genies cave that your living room has become? Martha was like no sir. And she went and found something else.

[Becca]

She found one that she absolutely loved and he was just like no, I don't like that place. And she said I don't care. So she actually herself with her money because remember she's making money, it's not like she's riding his coattails. She with her own money rented a beat up villa in Cuba called Finca Dejia which is Spanish for lookout tower or lookout farm or state. It's on the top of a hill. Beautiful. She used her own money to make this beat up place a home. From cleaning to getting rid of the jungle that was growing around outside, painting it, furnishing it. And she made this charming house out in Cuba for them to live in. And she loved, she's such a cool person. She loved to write outside, not wearing any clothes. She just loved the sun beating on her and the wildlife's making sounds, you know, the birds and the bees and everything. And just wrote that was her favorite place to write. And so she did that in Cuba.

[Syd]

I have pictures of Chris Graham at this house. He visited it the last time he went to Cuba.

[Becca]

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[Syd]

And it feels really indulgent to treat yourself sometimes to something that actually works. And that smell, grapefruit, lime and cypress combined with the sweet notes of mango and mandarin is the perfect thing to uplift you during these dark days of winter.

[Becca]

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[Syd]

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[Becca]

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[Syd]

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[Becca]

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[Syd]

S E A malibu.com code chicks. Martha and Hemingway's three children got along great. She fit right into that adventurous sort of masculine household. The kids called her the Marty, the.

[Becca]

Eldest, who at the time was 16. He said that she was, quote, the first attractive lady I ever heard use the F word.

[Syd]

Well, that's memorable.

[Becca]

But they're just doing family stuff. They're fishing in Cuba and they're going to Idaho and hiking and playing tennis with Dorothy Parker. Oh, and Gary Cooper. Oh, another name. This whole thing, so many name droppings.

[Syd]

Yeah. Hemingway credits Martha with having inspired him to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls and he dedicated the book to her. That book would make his fortune, especially after the movie rights got sold. Her own book, A Stricken Field, was published the same year. It was about the way the Gestapo oppressed the population in Prague and reflections on her experience there. The main character was pretty clearly based on herself.

[Becca]

Yes. In November of 1940, they were able to pose together as a couple for a Time magazine spread because his divorce was finally finalized. And on November 21, just weeks after that, posing for Time magazine, 32 year old Martha and 40 year old Ernest were married in Cheyenne, Wyoming and dined on moose for dinner.

[Syd]

They were married in the dining room of the Union Pacific railroad depot. Okie doke.

[Becca]

If you're in Wyoming, that seems like a great place, doesn't it?

[Syd]

There were several newspapers that covered the wedding and one of the reporters described it as a union of flint and steel. So which was which? I don't really know.

[Becca]

She wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, ernest and I belong tightly to each other. We are a good pair, and we are both crazy about being married.

[Syd]

Okay.

[Becca]

I wonder if Eleanor believed her.

[Syd]

Well, what's really sad about this is I think Hemingway married Martha to stop her wandering. He was getting jealous of, I guess, the world. Yeah, you know, I don't really know. I don't really know. She was content for a while, but got so restless that she rented a boat and set off during hurricane season to look for German submarines in the Caribbean. I mean, give her something to do. Please give her something to do. Luckily, luckily. Question mark. Another war had broken out. And so I don't know how many specific war stories really, we should include here, you know, the stories from each location, out of context, they lose a little bit of their shine. But she went to cover the Winter War, Finland versus Russia, I'm sorry to say, another war had broken out. She went back to London and uncovered how the years of bombing had affected the ordinary people. The common thread running through all her war reporting, regardless of location, is her absolute admiration for the bravery and the stoicism and the ingenuity. And I don't. What's the word? Collectivity. I mean, the growing together of the common people, like under duress and in terrifying circumstances that they had not brought upon themselves. And then also her absolute disgust and anger for the politicians in every country who had forced their everyday people into these situations due to petty grievances and bungling and a lust for power. It was heavy and influential stuff from her brave and intelligent heart and head. Hemingway preferred having Martha at their home in Cuba playing tennis and having pictures of drinks and laying in the sun instead of traveling the world to cover war. And you know what? Why did you take a bird flying free and try to put her in a cage? Infuriating. Now, that attitude led to stress within their marriage. Of course. You know, sure, it's great to garden. It's great to sit outside with friends and watch the sparkling water of the ocean. But when there are such world events happening, it would almost be a crime, she thought, not to acknowledge their existence and do your best to try to tell the world what was happening. That's another thing that she noted. In fact, while the world is falling apart, the everyday people were scrambling for crumbs of an ordinary life. Over and over, she would report on the leaders in palaces or country estates, basically fiddling while Rome burns. Another pattern that people kept refusing to recognize.

[Becca]

And her pattern was when an event was coming up. She took any opportunity to leave Cuba and go write about it and continue to do the job that she had wanted to do her whole life and she was so good at, and she loved this lifestyle.

[Syd]

In 1943, she took a job that took her to Italy, where she covered stories of orphans and French army efforts against the Germans there. And it was during this trip that she received a letter, kind of the first of many from Hemingway, that said, are you a war correspondent or are you a wife in my bed? With the implication being that she couldn't do both. And, you know, things came to a head, and I am very irritated about this. The Allied invasion of Normandy was coming, and it was like the Holy Grail, the golden apple. Everybody wanted to cover it. Everybody was scrambling for magazines, newspapers, outlets to send them there to cover this part of the war.

[Becca]

Every publication only could send one correspondent.

[Syd]

And so Martha, with all her years of history at Colliers, was pretty sure they were going to send her until there was some chicanery.

[Becca]

Guess who talked his way into being sent as a very experienced war correspondent for Colliers?

[Syd]

One.

[Becca]

Ernest Hemingway.

[Syd]

And then he refused to help her by using his connections to get her a ticket even to London. He. He wouldn't help her get a flight to London. He wouldn't help her get any visas, anything. If she wanted to go back there to Europe and Normandy in particular, she would have to find a way to do it herself. And so she did. And she got on a two week trip on a Norwegian freighter that was so dangerously in this time and place, carrying dynamite.

[Becca]

So imagine Ernest Hemingway is sitting on a plane chatting up a movie star to get to Europe, and she is on a freighter filled with explosives.

[Syd]

I mean, and. And it's his fault, right? Yeah.

[Becca]

And when she got to Liverpool, eventually she got word that he had been in a car accident, and she raced to his hospital room and found him flirting with the woman who would be wife number four. She.

[Syd]

Yikes.

[Becca]

Yeah, she just kind of laughed at his bandaged head and booked herself back into her own room at the hotel.

[Syd]

Okay. The date is June 6, 1944. And Martha had never received official clearance to be a part of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Hemingway had. He had permission, but she used her wiles and made it happen.

[Becca]

All the journalists were in a hotel listening for word that the invasion had begun. And as soon as they had it, those like Hemingway went their official ways. And Martha, she booked it up the coast, talked her way onto a medical ship by saying she was there to Interview nurses, locked herself in the head. That's the bathroom inside the ship. And that's how she landed on the first U.S. hospital ship to cross the Channel.

[Syd]

They arrived on Omaha beach, and Martha was the first female reporter on the scene. She was disguised as a stretcher bearer. She found her way onto a landing craft that was serving kind of as a water ambulance. And so in the process, she really became one of the only women, and in fact, one of the only journalists to land on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. She actually waded ashore and took up a position working with the medics to get wounded men back to the hospital.

[Becca]

And where was Ernest Hemingway in all of this? He was safely on the journalist ship out in the middle of the English Channel, not even on the beach.

[Syd]

Meanwhile, she wrote, it will be hard to tell you of the wounded. There were so many of them. There was no time to talk. There was so much to do. They had to be fed. Most of them had not eaten for two days. Their shoes had to be cut off. They needed help to get out of their jackets. They wanted water. The nurses and orderlies, working like demons had to be found and called quickly to a bunk where a man suddenly and desperately needed attention. Plasma bottles must be watched. Cigarettes had to be lighted and held for those who could not use their hands. It seemed to take hours to pour hot coffee from the spout of a teapot into a mouth that just showed through copious bandages.

[Becca]

So Ernest's cutridge of this was all about people that he talked to and about him. He centered himself in all of his pieces where Martha is talking about what is happening all around her. You know, other people, the nurses, the.

[Syd]

Medics and the men themselves. She made a point when she got back to the main ship to interview wounded soldiers from the beach and record their conversations. What they had been through, what brought them there, had they lost people. She wanted to show the human face of the war.

[Becca]

When she got back to London, she filed her piece as soon as possible. And she was arrested because she. She did what she wasn't supposed to do. And she was sent to a nurse's camp where she broke out of and hid out at H.G. wells house.

[Syd]

Isn't that funny? AWOL. So from this point, she had to use subterfuge. She had some uniforms, some disguises. She had some connections. She did some nighttime sneaking. She used her charm. She knew she had that weapon. She talked her. She could talk herself into Mexico by telling a guy, you know, this and that. So, yeah, she used her wiles. She used her. As my husband would say, what a molliness. That's a birdcage reference. Please let me know if you reference it. But, you know. So she scrounged lifts and filed stories wherever she could. She had a convenient and complete disregard for authority figures, which came in very handy. She had no respect for them.

[Becca]

No. At one point, she wrote a letter to Colliers, who she had been filing pieces with, asking for a break. And they just thought it was so well written that this was just a letter from her asking if she could have a break from all this for just a little bit to regroup her brain. They thought it was so well written that they published it without her consent.

[Syd]

No.

[Becca]

So she didn't get to take her break. And she was equally upset, but she just kept following the war.

[Syd]

And when their D Day pieces appeared in Collier's, Ernest Hemingway's was the COVID story, of course. So that marriage was over.

[Becca]

So she's still following the war. In 1945, as the concentration camps were getting liberated, she followed the troops as they reached Dachau. Now, Dachau had been the very first concentration camp ever built. It was like the prototype of the.

[Syd]

Camps, first for political enemies, by the way.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

We ourselves went to Maffhausen in Austria, which has been sanitized and preserved as a museum and memorial. And even so, we came out of there sobered and saddened. But she came across what was, in fact, all the horrors laid bare. And just like many others, she said that she was never the same again.

[Becca]

It's kind of ironic to me that she is a journalist and she is going to the camps where the first journalists were sent as prisoners.

[Syd]

She. I'm not going to describe. We all can picture the horrors. And if you want to know more, we can certainly provide you with a link to what specifically they saw. But she said to Eleanor Roosevelt in a letter, it's as if I walked into Dachau and there fell over a cliff and suffered a lifelong concussion without recognizing it. I know I have never again felt that lovely, easy, lively hope in life which I knew before. Not in life, not in our species, not in our future on Earth. Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau and all the other places like Dachau and everything that Dachau stood for and to abolish it forever.

[Becca]

But she still didn't go home. She went on to report from other camps she covered the Nuremberg Trials, which were when the Nazis were brought up and made to explain their actions and punish, punished for it. She was in Paris on VE Day, which was Victory in Europe Day. She spent time reporting for the Saturday Evening Post from the quarters, from the quarters of the 82nd Airborne stationed in Paris. Then she went to Bali to cover the Japanese surrender for the New Yorker.

[Syd]

After the war was over, she wrote again to Eleanor Roosevelt. I wonder all the time, what sort of world is going to come out of this. The great crime the Nazis have invented is this one of filling the world with hate. Because the hate will stay like an infection in the blood, even after all the killing is over. I know that's a downer. Hemingway and Martha were divorced officially after the war. Although honestly, you know, the relationship had fallen apart long before this. He's a loose cannon. That's just how it is. And then Martha was herself. I don't know that I would call her a loose cannon. She's a rolling stone.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

With no sense of limits for herself as is. I guess what I would say, he wanted to be in charge of it all, be the rock star. And she just wanted to be in charge of herself. It wasn't going to work out. He didn't want to share the limelight. She was by this time a renowned and well respected war correspondent in her own right. And the fact that everyone kept circling back to her relationship with Hemingway, who was jealous of her success and not very supportive, frankly, of her work there. Toward the end, when journalists asked about her relationship with him, she refused to answer. She was fed up. I mean, she had so many novels out by now, short stories, articles, all of her war coverage. Hemingway himself badmouthed her up and down. He wrote her into some of his stories, unflatteringly. And then when he was drunk, which was increasingly the case, he would tell bad stories about her and call her all kinds of names, trying to turn their friends against her. It was horrible. This was her philosophy about Hemingway from now on. She didn't return the firepower, but she said, why should I be a footnote to someone else's life? Here is something that I was wondering about the whole time I was reading about her. She had been the witness to so many wars and her pattern recognition kicked in every time, Right. So she was shocked by the House on American Activities committee. That's the McCarthy communist red scare purge, where they hauled in Hollywood stars, including our old friend Charlie Chaplin, to interrogate them. You know, are you a Communist? Have you ever been a Communist? Do you know any Communists? And do you know the story of Cassandra doomed to always be right in her predictions, but have no one believe her? Oh, I feel that Martha saw a lot of things getting ready to pop off before they actually did. They always say, you know, history repeats itself. And I don't know that it repeats itself exactly. But human nature tends to go along similar tracks, right? And there's a lot of echo and there's. It's very frustrating to her that she can't just take the entire world by the collar and give it a good shake and make them hear what she was saying. Over and over. She would say, you forget whatever combatants there are. There's people at the bottom of this. There's people. And not. It's. You know. And that's my inevitable Terry Pratchett quote. When Granny Weatherwax says, all the trouble in the world starts when you start seeing people as things.

[Becca]

Oh, she's wise.

[Syd]

Yeah. So when Martha sees in the House of Representatives who are, and I quote, determined to spread silence, to frighten the voices which will shout no and ask questions, defend the few, attack cruelty and claim the rights and dignity to man. If these things in this chamber should come to pass, America's gonna look very strange to Americans. And they will not be at home here, for the air will slowly become unbreathable to all forms of life except sheep. Was anyone listening? Not to the extent they need to be listening. She bought a house in Mexico and lived there, gathering her peace to herself and to make money, like our friend Jo March from Little Women, she discovered she can dash off what you might even call pot boilers. Short stories, fictional, with lots of daring do articles that meant sort of little to her, like the most delicious candy. The magazines snapped all that up. Yeah, she was kind of mad at herself. I don't know. Stooping to this level. I guess if you were a rock star, you'd be like, I sold out to the man. But I think it was a necessary break for her mind. And Mexico was really good for her. Her body, you know, and her spirit. She found a haven in Mexico. She continued to write, however, for the Saturday Evening Post. Serious pieces they sent her to explore the toll of the war on the street children of Rome. She wrote, they ought to declare war on grownups who killed their childhood. And she decided she was inspired to change her life when she was there.

[Becca]

She's 41, it's 1949, and she's seeing all these children, and she begins to mull over the idea of adopting A child. All of these children that she's reporting on, they're just making an impression on her. And she began to feel that her child was somewhere in Italy. She visited 52 orphanages before she found her son, a chubby toddler with blonde hair that was drawn to her as she was drawn to him. I mean, she had seen hundreds of children, just so many, all in need of homes, and she just saw this one child, Alessandro, and she thought, that's my child. Finding him, however, was the easy part. Through an Italian lawyer, a recommendation from Eleanor Roosevelt, a bishop in Missouri, and the ambassador in Rome. Three months after meeting Alessandro, she was allowed to go get her child, who she called Sandy. On her 42nd birthday, she wrote of.

[Syd]

Him, I sure waited a hell of a long time to fall flatly in love.

[Becca]

His full name was George Alexander Gellhorn. And sadly, the first thing she had to do when she picked him up from the orphanage was take him to the doctor because he had both bronchitis and measles.

[Syd]

There's nothing like jumping in the deep end.

[Becca]

Yeah. Yeah. Now, all this time, she and her mom still have a very close relationship. They had done traveling together anytime they could. So her mom helped her and took Sandy to their new, for now, home in Mexico.

[Syd]

Amazing.

[Becca]

Getting Sandy's US Citizenship was another logistical mess. It would take quite a while, mostly because Martha wanted to stay as far away from the US as possible during the McCarthy Red Scare era. So she's in Mexico. There she entertained her friends Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, and she had a love affair with Eleanor Roosevelt's married doctor.

[Syd]

There was a lot going on.

[Becca]

There is Martha. And Sandy stayed in Mexico for four years, so he's six at this point, before she decided it was time to move him to Europe, to Italy specifically. And that's where he started school. He learned Italian. And they have this very international life because they're in Italy. And then they moved to London. It sounds almost glamorous, but I don't know how it is to raise a child who needs stability. And that's when she met a man named Tom Matthews. He was a former Time editor, and he was a widower, so there was no entanglements, no divorce to be had. He was smitten with her. And in 1954, when Martha was 46, they married.

[Syd]

But the allure of action and controversy reached in and got hold of her again. She was asked to cover the aftermath of the 1948 Arab Israeli War. Israel declared statehood and independence that year, which prompted Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia armies to invade Israel. And I have to admit that having read so far in Martha's life, I was a little surprised that she did not side with the Palestinian refugees in her work during this period. Now, we did sort of mention it earlier that Martha Gellhorn's parents were each half Jewish. She has just witnessed the horrors of Dachau, which made an impression. I was just very interested to notice that even though typically she sided with the civilians and the oppressed, the people swept up in a conflict, she had very little sympathy for the 700,000 Palestinian refugees that resulted from this conflict. In one of her articles about this time, she pretty much says, this is actually a direct quote. I have no blanket sympathy for the palestinians. There are 39 million non Arab refugees walking the Earth. And the Palestinians have the heart, the of and attention of the world. They're much better off than millions of others. There you go. She also wrote, the modern Middle Eastern countries have been hit with both independence and the 20th century at once, and they are not handling it safely or sanely. There you go. So she really has, I mean, a hard line, and that actually goes decades. Like, she went back and covered it again. She had the same perspective, and I don't fully understand it because she was so. I mean, is it racism? I mean, that's our. That's where we're going right out of the gate, right?

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

But in all other ways, she seemed to be a fan of the underdog. So I don't know, I just admit to being a little surprised about that.

[Becca]

No, I completely agree. But her entire life, she was kind of just when I thought she was heading in a predictable direction, she'd go off somewhere else on another one. Like even this marriage to Tom. They were married for 10 years, and their life was very traditional. He was extraordinarily wealthy, so they traveled a lot. He had four sons that she was a stepmom to. So she did a lot of very traditional things at this time, which seems. Which is different than she had been living her life.

[Syd]

I wondered if this was a calculated marriage of convenience. Actually, I don't know. He was rich and dependable.

[Becca]

Yeah, well. And she said at one point, a man is of no use to me unless he can live without me.

[Syd]

Oh, there you go.

[Becca]

Yeah. And unfortunately, that applied to her son as well.

[Syd]

I know. I'm sorry to say. Her husband had. His youngest son, was also named Sandy. Please, what are the odds of this? And both Sandys were sent to boarding school. I am not sure Martha ever Really resigned herself to the responsibilities of motherhood. And she recognized it and in later life was often feeling pretty wretched about it. Not for nothing, she also thought she was a horrible daughter because her mother, Edna, was often very, very patient. She reminds me a lot of Lorelei Gilmore and Rory in the later seasons. Is anybody with me? When Rory acts up and is mean to her mother, like, we don't even see her in season or whatever. She's so mean and distant. And Edna, slash Lorelai just rides out the storm by being sad but hopeful. And that's basically Edna and Martha's relationship for many years, grateful for when her daughter chose to treat her well. Occupied with her own affairs, she is perfectly able to run her own life. While her daughter was being a pill, she wasn't sitting home, you know.

[Becca]

Yeah, I mean, they're still very close, which is. Blows my mind since, you know, they can't pick up a cell phone and text each other, whatever, right? But Edna's close with her husband. I mean, Ernest Hemingway was calling Edna to tattle on Martha when he was getting frustrated with her. And at this point, Edna was off in, in London. And then Edna would travel with Tom and, and Martha, and at one point they were in Africa and Edna and Tom left. They just were like, yeah, I've done enough here, we need to go back. And she, Martha stayed there for a long time, traveling, writing a little bit, just living and appreciating Africa and the culture there as there was at this point, no conflicts for her to attend to.

[Syd]

So Martha first published her collection of war reporting, the Face of War, when she was 51. Now, of course, there were updated editions, I'm sorry to say, in 1967, 1986 and 1983, because conflicts just keep it coming. And so did her coverage. The book gathered up her firsthand account from her war reporting. It was extremely well received every time it came out with the additional chapters. I'm also very sorry to say that on Martha's 54th birthday, her friend Eleanor Roosevelt died. And Martha wrote this about her friend, the First Lady. I always thought she was the loneliest human being I ever knew in my life and so used to bad treatment. I've wept for her often and been shaken with anger for her, too. And I never liked the President nor trusted him as a man because of how he treated her. I always knew she was something so rare, there's no name for it. One of the two pillars that upheld my own little cosmos had vanished. She was the finest conscience in America, the most Effective one, too. No one would fail to be moved by her. She gave off light. I cannot explain it better. The marriage between Matthews and Martha. Ooh, Martha Matthews. That's funny. That's one reason I'm telling you right now. Anyway, she discovered that he'd had a long term affair with another woman.

[Becca]

Yeah, I think they kind of had a little bit of an open, turn your head the other way situation because she was gone so much. But this particular relationship was an affair of his heart and. And that was the end of their marriage. So she left him. He paid her $20,000 a year in alimony.

[Syd]

$20,000 a year in 1963 money, which is $212,000 a year now.

[Becca]

And poor Sandy came home from boarding school to the home he's known for 10 years. He's 16 at this point, to a new house in London and no stable stepdad anymore. And the same time he's 16, he is finally granted U.S. citizenship. Tumultuous life. Marshall's buyers are hustling hard to get.

[Syd]

Amazing new gifts into stores right up.

[Becca]

To the last minute. Like a designer perfume for that friend who never RSVP'd wishlist topping toys for her kids who came too. Belgian chocolates for the neighbor. A cozy scarf for your boss and a wool jacket for your husband that you definitely did not almost forget. Marshalls, we get the deals, you give the good stuff, even at the last minute. Phew. Find a Marshall's near you.

[Syd]

Martha settled into the estate she was building in Kenya, fully intending to stay there for most of every year, indulging in her favorite vacation activity, communing with nature by herself, clothing optional while writing. But news came of the Vietnam War and she saw again the pattern she'd seen so many times she was astonished. She wrote, I cannot endure the words spoken by those in charge. It amazes me that everyone in this country is not deafened by echoes. This is the very language of the Nazis. The choices were absolutely clear then. But now we live in a smeary world. I can understand why the ostrich buries his head in the sand. The view is too sickening. Everywhere. She decided if she was silent, she was an accomplice. And so she had to go to war. And it'd been 20 years since the last time she'd been to an active war zone. And she looked around for an outlet that would send her to war.

[Becca]

She was 58 for the Guardian. She was writing for The Guardian, also St. Louis Dispatch, and interestingly, the Ladies Home Journal accepted some of her pieces. But as before, she focused on the experiences of ordinary citizens in the war. As a backdrop almost. She visited hospitals and orphanages. And going back to the Ladies Home Journal, they ran an article that began, we love our children. We are famous for loving our children. And then she went on to describe what American guns and munitions did to children of vietnam. This is 1967 and the ladies Home Journal published this article and I'm not.

[Syd]

Sure if it's in this article, but she made sure to cover the effects that napalm had on the human body. Yep, she fought to influence American journalists to cover Vietnam fairly. She told them, opposition to this war is not anti American. And I don't know, you know, if it was the zeitgeist in the air. We are entering the, you know, we're in the 60s after all, or if it was actual Martha. But reporting on the Vietnam War, especially back home in America, began to take on more of a humanistic tone and it influenced opposition at home. After such reporting, you know, the opposition to the war grew in intensity. We all know what happened at home with protests against the Vietnam War. I feel very strongly that Martha's reporting and those that imitated her are the cause of the sentiment at home. I just have a very strong feeling that she was pushing, pushing the needle. You know, her critical reports led to her expulsion from Vietnam after just a few months by the South Vietnamese government. She was in fact blocked from here on out from getting a visa. No one really knows if it was the United States that blocked her or Vietnam, but she was never allowed to go back there again. She was a powerful, open critic of Lyndon Johnson, the president and the war in general. And it seems like whoever was in the power position could not tolerate her. So she worked very hard at home, attending demonstrations, providing material for those that could go, that got visas, contacts, contexts, writing letters to the editor, pulling in favors, anything she could do to help the citizens of Vietnam and to bring an end to the war.

[Becca]

In 1970, Martha was 62 and her 91 year old mother, Edna passed away. She was at Edna's bedside near the end and she wrote to Sandy, her son, and she said, I can hardly imagine that I'll ever laugh again. And I'm haunted by her face. Then she told him that she loved your mom more than even you, old boy. And always have since my earliest childhood. Never loved anyone that much, that long, that well. Like she's writing this to her son. I mean, she's hurt, I get it, right?

[Syd]

She said something to her brother That I just want to make a note of right here. The reason for which will be clear later. I have never stopped blaming myself for lacking the courage to give her the pills so she could go away. It was a long decline. In addition to her mental anguish, Martha's physical self began to go downhill kind of rapidly. A series of health issues that piled up. She also, for the first time, began to notice that she was looking her age, which is, of course, a normal human experience. But for someone who, and she admits this had traded on her looks her whole life, she felt like she saw a stranger. When she looked in the mirror, she said, ah, I look like Dorothy Parker. I look 102 years old. Martha began to spiral a little bit mentally too. There's no reason to my life, she wrote to a friend. There's no direction. I have a mental block when it comes to writing. I'm very lonely, she wrote. How on earth am I going to live like this for 25 to 35 more years? How I wish I knew if everyone suffered the same sensation. And, you know, I was just talking about this with Chris the other day. When you get to a certain amount of years, a certain age, there's no one older to ask how it is, how to get through whatever you're experiencing. You know, everybody goes through it the first time, right?

[Becca]

Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure.

[Syd]

Yeah. So you reach an older age, there's ultimately no one to show you how to navigate the water. She really, really flailed around. She and her son were fighting. He had gotten in serious trouble with substances and the law. She was unreasonable about his weight, of all things.

[Becca]

Yeah, I know. Is that. Wasn't that weird? I mean, he was. Had a problem with drugs for a long time. He was drafted into the army, but most likely through her connections, he was stationed as a camera operator in Berlin, which was great, until he found drugs there and he went awol, came back and was sent to a psychiatric treatment facility followed by a discharge.

[Syd]

Well, Martha kept trying to compare him to the manly adventurers she had surrounded herself with, you know, during her career. And he always seemed to come up short. I'm not entirely sure she ever reconciled herself with the true responsibilities of motherhood. No, I'm just really nice. She never made a secret of telling him his shortcomings, which actually, if you think about it, hearkens straight back to the way her father had treated her.

[Becca]

Oh, absolutely.

[Syd]

She did not manage to break that cycle.

[Becca]

And as she got older, you know, as women get older, our filters get thinner. And hers was Pretty thin to begin with. So I think that contributed to the way she treated her son.

[Syd]

She had to rest herself out of her funk, so she looked around and tried to find things to write about. When Generalissimo Franco died In Spain in 1977, the New York Times reached out for her to cover the joyous experience of Franco dying in Spain. She wrote, everywhere people are slowly beginning to take risks by speaking freely. Although no one forgets the only man who died was Franco, not the policemen who were still very much active and alive. Let's not forget the process known as the quote, transition to democracy is much more cosmetic than democratic. When Franco died, the Civil Guard and other politicians continued to commit acts of brutality. It was not yet time to celebrate the death of only one man.

[Becca]

You know, and, and you've been talking about the patterns of history that she was seeing. You know, it wasn't Twain who said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. He didn't say that. But the patterns I think is even more fitting.

[Syd]

In 1978, Martha published Travels with Myself and Another. And I think this is one of the books you should start with when you go into her body of work. I, I agree. I love that she, I mean, we already kind of talked about the trip to China. It is hilarious to me, that whole thing. And then another experience she had in Africa where hired a guy that was pretending to be a guide and in fact just wanted to be glamorous and he was completely useless in the field.

[Becca]

She hired him as her driver and he didn't know how to drive and.

[Syd]

He didn't fully understand that one had to avoid wildlife that wanted to eat you crazy.

[Becca]

I think this book is so funny. I mean, I'd laughed out loud several times and again, I am a big fan of her writing style. But if you want to start with something a little bit lighter than looking back at the Depression, that, yeah, that's a good place to start for sure. That's where I started. That was the first book I read and I was like, I'm in. I, I love her.

[Syd]

And then she traveled to El Salvador to cover the war in the 1980s between the US backed military and the rebels. And guess what she found out. The CIA had a file on her and the FBI going all the way back to when covered the Spanish Civil War. She used the Freedom of Information act and got copies of her supposed questionable communist activities. And they came to her almost completely redacted in black ink, quote, for reasons of security, to which she said, there's only so much mad hattery one person can be expected to absorb.

[Becca]

Oh, gosh, those patterns again. You had mentioned that her health was starting to deteriorate. She developed osteoporosis. And while she was on one of her African time, she loved spending time in Africa. She was robbed and brutally assaulted, although her approach after it was to buy a bikini to expose her injuries. And she said of the incident, I was afraid twice, but I have been frightened by high explosives far more often than that. That fear is only damaging if you let it change your attitudes and actions, which certainly I shall not.

[Syd]

She referred to that incident only as, quote, the ugly event on the steps.

[Becca]

Yeah.

[Syd]

When she referred to it at all. She was 79 years old when she was assaulted. In 1988, when she was still 79, she published a View from the Ground, a compilation of non war stories that go. That went back through her career. That is where that short piece about the lynching justice at Night, got a lot of attention. It was very controversial, having been written as if it were a memoir. I think it was written honestly as far back as 1936 as an experimental story. She sort of conflated an account of a lynching with an incident in which she and her companion had had to divert from a lynching because of an angry mob that had gathered ahead of them on the road. This is one of those stories that people admired while the controversy raged over why she'd write it in the first person. Did she or did she not actually witness the lynching? Is it truth? Is it a story? I don't think she had necessarily the responsibility to be truthful if it wasn't published as a news story.

[Becca]

Right, right. And I think that's the beauty of a lot of her pieces is, is that they are technically fiction, but they're so based on her life that there is a lot of truth in them. And I think that might be one of them.

[Syd]

And it. They illuminate truths of other people. Like, she liked to just say the thing and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

[Becca]

Right.

[Syd]

And that. That pattern went all the way back to that story later that decade, I'm sorry to say, as her body, which was slowly failing her, was slowing her down. She actually did go to cover The United States 1989 invasion of Panama, but finally and at last declared herself too old at 85 to go to Bosnia in 1993. So sorry. She actually did, though, drag herself to Brazil to cover violence against the poor homeless people of Brazil. It wasn't exactly a war zone, but it, it she. Her violence for that last. That last gasp.

[Becca]

She's almost 85 and she's got osteoporosis and she has glaucoma. So she is having a very hard time seeing, but she's still getting on a plane and going, yep, I'm gonna go cover this. You know, I don't know how I'm gonna see what I'm writing, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

[Syd]

New editions of many of her books came out, which, with the addition of the Vietnam segments in her book the Face of War, began to focus attention on her and her writing and her adventures in a way that had not been seen in decades. She started to gather around her very young men and women of letters. I mean, to her very young. Some were in their 40s, but almost 50 years younger than her. She said, I've been rediscovered by kids. I'm a geriatric debutante. Pictures of her during this era are glamorous as heck. She called them the chaps, even the lady persons. And she began to. You have a constant stream of young visitors coming to her house, which is a fact and a situation that I wish for us all, in fact.

[Becca]

Yeah. Mary Cassatt, remember, she was having the people come, you know, the younger students come and just sit at her feet and talk to her. Fortunately, at this era, we have, you know, videotape of her and having conversations, and she is just. I don't know that I would like to be on the receiving end of her iron, but just to watch it. It's just. She's just so blunt and succinct.

[Syd]

I think if she loved you, she loved you. And if she was bored by you, and I'm so surprised. She's not a Gemini, by the way. No, I'm just kidding. Well, I mean, if you. If you follow it, she's a Scorpio, so just take from that what you will. It's not really something I'm 100 serious about, by the way, so don't write us. But yeah, if you. If you bored her, she was. She Romeo out. You were blocked. In an era pre blocking, you were hand analog blocked from life.

[Becca]

I don't see you anymore.

[Syd]

Does.

[Becca]

Gosh, you know, that's a great way to be for people that are just crossing your boundaries or just irritate you. If you can just block them out, that's great.

[Syd]

The chaps. The remaining chaps that made it through the gauntlet gave her a party for her 85th birthday at the Groucho Club in London with a cake Shaped like a typewriter.

[Becca]

A Didn't your mom have a cake? Or.

[Syd]

What was that for both of my parents. My mother, upon her retirement from the symphony, had a giant cake shaped like a French horn. And my papa, to celebrate his 50th, that's a 50 year in the symphony, had a large cake shaped like a base. Stricken with liver and ovarian cancer and various other illnesses, feeling old and tired, unable to read or write or travel or really move about comfortably anymore, Martha decided it was time to bring her adventures to a close.

[Becca]

At the time, she had written to a friend, there are two things that matter to me. One, my body is too old. I can no longer do what I want to do. Two, I'm bored.

[Syd]

God. She arranged her photograph. She got her affairs in order. She put on a new silk nightgown and laid in her bed and then took a cyanide pill.

[Becca]

She died of suicide at her apartment in London, and that had been her home base since 1970. Now she had everything in order. She had controlled what was going to happen. After she passed, per her wishes, there was a gathering of her friends and family in her apartment. And that apartment at 72 Cadogan Square in London, has recently received a blue plaque and memorial of their time spent there. She wanted to be cremated, and her brother Alfred, her son Sandy, and her stepson Sandy sent her cremated remains in the outgoing tide into the Thames, her.

[Syd]

Last journey into the vast ocean.

[Becca]

Her trust established. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. The following year, it's awarded to journalists who, in print, had exemplified her style and focus.

[Syd]

It was an award given for impactful, quote, unpalatable truth reportage.

[Becca]

Sadly, it seems the last award was in 2017, and according to the website, it's on what we would call a hiatus, which is very sad.

[Syd]

I wonder why.

[Becca]

A maybe it ran out of money. I don't know exactly what happened, but it could have been a number of things.

[Syd]

Evidently, it was removed from the Charity Commission Register on July 27, 2021, marked as quote, does not operate. But there's never been any specific reason.

[Becca]

You know what? I think that's kind of fitting for her. The award went out several times. Her name lived on in the award and she was done. So she just, you know, closed shop. If she had been alive, I think this was pretty consistent with her modus operandi. In 2008, the U.S. postal Service honored her. I Every time I see this, I think of our friend June who works for the Postal Service. She's a historian and she's always going to those postal museums in cities I didn't even know they existed. And, you know, that's one of the coolest things about this gig, is that you meet people that are into things that you never knew existed.

[Syd]

Right?

[Becca]

Yeah. So in 2008, the U.S. postal Service issued five stamps honoring journalists and Martha was the only woman. Huh.

[Syd]

And that will bring us to the end of the life of Martha Gellhorn. Now, I have never, with possible exception of Gertrude Bell, known anyone without the fear hormone. I know in a way that Martha Geller had, like, not physical. I mean, I myself would not travel across an ocean in a boat with submarines prowling that was full of explosives. I would not do that. Over and over, she took her fate into her own hands. It started very, very early when she left home, and she really never stopped. And her contributions to the understanding of human nature and the nature of war are incomparable and valuable and really were a model for war coverage even now.

[Becca]

But I think in the ever changing field of journalism, her life is one to study because she kind of made her own rules and did it the way she felt ethically was the right way to do things. Things, even if it put her in a bad position.

[Syd]

It's amazing. And she's a person that most people know to our great shame, mostly as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

[Becca]

I have to tell you, I already started the show notes. I put him as a footnote. Oh, you're welcome, Martha.

[Syd]

So there you go. I'll try my best to get a picture of Chris Graham at her house in Cuba. Yeah, yeah. But Chris Graham got to set foot on the Pilar, which is his boat. Wow. They open the doors every day, I guess, or most days. And you can wander about and take photos. There's like a thousand cats. I don't know. He loved it. Okay, well, it's time for media.

[Becca]

So many books.

[Syd]

Although the only children's book I really found was Michelle Corpora called the Fog of War. Martha Gellhorn at the D Day Landings, which is in the True Adventures series.

[Becca]

Yes. And actually I did find one more that was written at that level. It's a compilation. It's called In Praise of Difficult Women. I really love the title. In praise of difficult 29 heroines who dared to Break the Rules by Karen Carbo.

[Syd]

Now, the book that I have that has the most post its in it is a 20th century life by Caroline Moorhead. I love that book. It has plenty of photos.

[Becca]

Yep, that was at the top of my list. Too.

[Syd]

Now, there's also. Okay, this is controversial. Both by an author named Carl Rolisson. There's Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave the Story of Martha Gellhorn. Martha herself hated this book. It came out during her life. And then Beautiful Exile, the Life of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rowleyston. And I don't know. I don't know her feelings on that book, but there you go. There's those.

[Becca]

There's also a critical biography of Martha Gellhorn by Dr. Jacqueline Orsage. It's out there. I, personally, I would go for the Life One, the Carolyn Moorhead book. Right. Because I've got more pictures. No, it's really detailed. It's going to give you all the. All the backstories. I mean, as it is, this has been a very long episode. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah. There's so much that we had to skip.

[Syd]

There is. And you know what? Okay. We don't normally have as many letters. You know, we'll never have letters again now that everyone talks on their phones. But we do. We do for this one. And there are two books of selected letters. One is yours for probably always. Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War. This was edited by Janet Somerville, but the person that wrote the biography that we recommend you start with also compiled Martha Gellhorn's Letters. Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn by Caroline Moorhead. So maybe that's a package deal. Get both the Caroline Moorhead books and go through the places that we missed.

[Becca]

There was a book that I read that is. It's kind of niche, sort of. It's called Women on the Convergence of Fact and Fiction. And Martha Gellhorn's work by Ritu Parna Mohar and Guru de Meyer, it kind of looks at all of her work as literary journalism. I love this term so much. I used to think of it like creative nonfiction. But that does not explain Martha Gellhorn's style. It is literary journalism. Perfect.

[Syd]

Yeah. Also not exactly adjacent, right on the nose for a very specific part of Martha's life. Hotel Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vale. V A I L L We have encountered many of her books before, and this is where Martha Gellhorn's writing style and her war correspondence really came into being. And so it goes into the personalities that were in and out of the Hotel Florida during that conflict that Martha met and was influenced by. So I love that very much.

[Becca]

We had talked to Amanda Vale years ago when she started work on a Biography on the Schuyler sisters. That book was released this year. It's called Pride and the Schuyler Sisters in an age of revolution. 720 pages. I mean, it took her a very long time and she would drop us notes every once in a while about things that she was doing to research the book. And it was just interesting to us because we just devour these books so fast. And she spent years on this book.

[Guest Singer]

Book.

[Becca]

I have not yet read it. Have you?

[Syd]

No, I don't have time to read anything except for what we're actually working on.

[Becca]

I usually fit in like just a really light fiction after we do these kind of a little palette cleanser. Yeah, that's about all I could get in. Yeah.

[Syd]

Now, of course, the subject of our episode herself has an extensive bibliography. I would say start with Travels with Myself and another for a little light reading and then go into the Face of War, which has been updated many, many times and reaches into the 90s. Those are the two I would read first.

[Becca]

I would go back farther and the Troubles. I've seen her work during the Depression. Yeah, it's so moving. She has collections of short stories and novellas and articles. Just look for her books. And there's so many to choose from.

[Syd]

And you will find over and over in. In the Internet archive in newspapers.com and you'll find her Collier's articles in their entirety. We'll give you links to some of them in the Saturday Evening Post has archived so you can find her actual articles looking exactly like they looked. So she's out there. Definitely. People have taken the the time to digitize her work.

[Becca]

There are several documentaries that you can watch and learn about her. But what I really love there was an interview done by Leonard Bernst in 1997. It was shortly before she died, so it was really later in her life. She's just sitting there chain smoking and you can hear her talk. And she kind of has that Katharine Hepburn Eastern seaboard accent, which, you know, that totally tracks with how she presented herself. I loved it. It was just. It ended too soon for me. So we'll link you up to that. There's also the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary, but she's in Footnote in there. So.

[Syd]

Ken Burns, what's the deal? I know you did so well on the American Revolution, including women in the story. Well, speaking of other movies, there's a movie called Hemingway and Gellhorn starring Nicole Kidman as Martha and Clive Owen as Hemingway. It only got six out of ten on Rotten Tomatoes. Take from that what you will, I think, think presentation wise, personality wise. I think Nicole Kidman did a great job. I don't know that I ever would have picked Clive Owen to play anyway.

[Becca]

No kidding. I agree. I think Nicole Kidman was perfectly cast in this. I mean, that's, it gives you that. Here's this beautiful woman doing all this dirty, gritty, dangerous stuff and I really.

[Syd]

Think, I don't know, sorry, Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen, but I really think there's opportunity to have it happen again. If only they'd done it 20 years ago. I could see Cate Blanchett. Oh, sure. Doing a great job.

[Becca]

Sure. Well, that's on Prime. I, I, you have to rent it.

[Syd]

Right.

[Becca]

I thought it was worth it.

[Syd]

I'm not going to go through them, but I have lists of, of articles that I wanted to show you to the children Pay the Price, which is her coverage of Rome and other parts of Italy after World War II, her position on Palestine in the Atlantic. There's some articles on Military.com about how she became the only female journalist list to land on the beach at D day. Articles from the Guardian, scans from Colliers. I mean, I have a lot of articles to show you.

[Becca]

The one that I, I have a list. I have the same, probably the similar list, the one that I put a star next to her. There's a link to her very last magazine article on the US invasion of Panama. And even at that advanced age, the girl still had it. She, it was just as biting as anything she'd done earlier. Earlier. And I don't have anything else.

[Syd]

And that will do it for our episode on Martha Gellhorn. And in closing, we'll leave you with a little quote from Martha Gellhorn herself.

[Becca]

It seemed to me personally that it was my job to get things on the record in the hopes that at some point or other somebody couldn't lie about it.

[Syd]

Thanks for listening.

[Becca]

Bye.

[Syd]

If you liked what you heard today, please, as usual, tell a few friends about us. Maybe pick a specific episode that you think they would like and, and introduce them to the history chicks at a holiday party or an office party or during a quiet wine evening at home, wherever you happen to be. Thank you so much for yet another good year. This has been year 14 of gathering friends together with us from all over the world. We appreciate each and every one of you. Links and photos and a player will be on our website thehistorychicks.com and there will be lots of photos of the glamorous Martha Gellhorn on our pinterest page board, which will be linked on the website. Also, don't forget, by the way, to listen to our episode on Mrs. Claus. It's become a tradition for many to play it on Christmas Eve. We would like to warn you again though, if you have small ears who still absorb the magic of the season, if you know what I mean, that is an episode you would like to listen to with headphones on. The end song is War by a band called Pastis and I thought this song could work for either the relationship between Hemingway and Martha themselves, or, viewed with a longer lens, Martha's relationship to the world and how it kept coming back to the same patterns over and over. See you in 2026.

[Guest Singer]

Can anyone stop the noise that's inside my head In a voice.

[Becca]

That keep.

[Guest Singer]

Telling me things horrible things about you. And I remember what they used to say you should count to 10 and then you take a deep breath and run out of things to say.

[Becca]

I.

[Guest Singer]

Go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and then I start in the war. Yeah start a little more.

[Becca]

Do you.

[Guest Singer]

Ever feel the same that you too can hear my voice Keep telling you things, horrible things about me. But I don't want to play this game no more I've run out of cards to play so I smash a plane against a wall and scream While you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 678-9-10 and they you start a little war. Same way as before yeah you start a little war. Same way as before yeah you start a little war. If you know how to stop the noise that's inside our heads Please don't stop telling us things horrible things about counting to 10 again and again always the same it's like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and then you start a little war. Same way as before yeah you start a little war. Same way as before yeah you start a little war. Same way as before yeah you start a little war. Same way as before yeah you start a little more. Foreign.

[Syd]

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