Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (7 page)

Not surprisingly, Lucien Vogel, editor of the weekly newsmagazine
Vu
, was eager to publish Capa’s Geneva photos, but he wasn’t fooled by Gerda’s assertions about the man who’d taken them. “This is all very interesting about Robert Capa,” he said dismissively—and then ordered her to send “that ridiculous boy Friedmann who goes around shooting pictures in a dirty leather jacket” to see him immediately. In the Paris magazine world this command was like a royal summons. Vogel, a balding, Proustian figure who favored stiff collars and waistcoats, was married to Cosette de Brunhoff, the editor of
Vogue
; before founding
Vu
he’d cut a swathe in the media world as an editor and art director of
Art et décoration
and
La Gazette du bon ton
.
Vu
, whose documentary images and dynamic layouts gave the printed page the immediacy of a newsreel, had a circulation of almost half a million readers; under the art direction of the Constructivist-influenced Alexander Liberman, it published all the best photographers: Man Ray, Brassaï, Capa’s mentor Kertesz, his friend Cartier-Bresson, and others.

So the newly minted Robert Capa anxiously presented himself at Vogel’s sixteenth-century chateau, La Faisanderie, for one of the Sunday-afternoon “at homes” to which all the
gratin
of the political and media worlds were invited. And Vogel, who claimed that all he had to do was stroll the length of his vast lawn with you before he knew whether you belonged, took the young man by the arm for a chat. By the time they returned to the house, Capa had passed the lawn test:
Vu
published Capa’s pictures from Geneva, with a byline (by no means a usual occurrence), as well as the photos he took of the raucous Popular Front celebrations in Paris on Bastille Day, July 14.

Then, a week after he’d gone to Verdun to photograph the Peace Pilgrims’ demonstration, the first news came from Spain of an uprising by the army against the government. At first, the reports were dismissive: leftist papers claimed the rebellion was being “crushed,” while more conservative ones said the situation was “confused.” By the end of the week, though, it was obvious that something very big was happening in Spain, and both Capa and Taro—who had been shooting pictures herself and developing them in a darkroom she shared with Capa and his friend and colleague Chim in the rue Daguerre—felt the adrenaline rush of a scoop in the making. Chim, in fact, had been in Spain all summer, and was still there, working on a series of features about the political and social situation—much as they loved him, why should he have a monopoly on this story?

Fortunately, Vogel seemed to agree. He immediately plunged into planning for a special issue of
Vu
devoted to the unfolding events in Spain, which would call on the talents of a fleet of journalists, among them Robert Capa and the as-yet-unpublished Gerda Taro. Vogel would give them accreditation and charter a plane to fly them to Barcelona, after which they’d fan out across the country to chronicle what was happening there. On the strength of Vogel’s offer, Gerda quit her job at Alliance, and she and Capa set about getting the necessary papers for their trip. Here was a chance to document the struggle between fascism and socialism that was already consuming their homelands and might soon spread to all of Europe. It would all be a most extraordinary adventure, and it would make them famous. Together. They could hardly wait.

July 1936: Brno

Ilse Kulcsar had been underground for almost two years when she heard the news about Spain. Well, not underground
exactly
; she and Poldi—her husband, Leopold Kulcsar—went by their own names in this Czechoslovak university city, where they edited a leftist newspaper and met with the other Austrian political exiles who gathered in the coffeehouses near Masaryk University, smoking and talking about the precarious state of the world. But when they’d crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia in November 1934, they’d done so with false passports; they knew that if either of them ever set foot in Austria again they’d be arrested and possibly executed—even though, or maybe because, Ilse’s uncle by marriage, Johann Schober, a former chancellor of Austria, was currently president of police.

Living dangerously, however, is what they did: Ilse’s father, a mild-mannered school headmaster and government councilor, described his daughter’s existence as
a powder keg
. Always gifted and forthright—the words her father used were
passionate
and
turbulent
—Ilse had turned her back on the conventions of her Viennese childhood, the strolls in the Belvedere gardens, the afternoons at the opera,
kaffee mit schlag
at Sacher: instead of pursuing a degree in medicine or science, as her father hoped, or in music, her mother’s choice, she’d enrolled in the new field of political science at the University of Vienna. Convinced that capitalism was doomed, she had joined the fledgling Communist Party of Austria. Because she was a persuasive speaker, the Party sent her to make presentations to workers’ groups in Scandinavia (where she’d spent time as an exchange student as a child) and England. It was through the Party that she’d met Leopold Kulcsar, a blond working-class youth whose ice-blue eyes burned with a fierce intelligence that belied his lack of formal education. They were married with her parents’ reluctant consent (they would only have lived together anyway, her father realized) and almost immediately got into trouble trying to smuggle Party funds across the Hungarian border to a Romanian opposition leader. Something had gone wrong, wrong enough that they were picked up by Horthy’s secret police and thrown into jail in Budapest for four months. But the Party never lifted a finger to help them—it was Ilse’s parents who scraped together money for lawyers to get them out of Hungary—so they’d quit in disgust.

That wasn’t the end of their political involvement, however. Joining the more moderate Social Democratic Workers’ Party, they’d dedicated themselves to writing and speaking against the efforts by Austria’s chancellor, Engelbert Dolfuss, to break the power of the socialists—whose policies favoring worker housing, free clinics, and children’s day care made them popular in Vienna and distrusted in the conservative, Catholic countryside. Then, in February 1934, fighting broke out in Vienna between armed militias of the conservatives (the
Heimwehr
, or Home Guard) and the socialists (the
Republikanischer Schutzbund
, or Republican Protection Association), and Dolfuss sent the army to fire on the socialists. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands more arrested; the Social Democratic Party was outlawed and its members hunted down; and the conservatives replaced Austria’s constitutional democracy with an authoritarian regime modeled on Mussolini’s. Kulcsar was briefly imprisoned, but he was released when he argued that he wasn’t
involved
in the fighting, just covering it as a journalist. At that point he and Ilse made a fateful decision.

Using their apartment on the Herrengasse as a headquarters, they started a resistance cell that they called Der Funke, “The Spark,” a translation of the name of Lenin’s original revolutionary unit,
Iskra
. The idea was to get medical aid to victims of the fighting—many of whom had been hiding out in Vienna’s sewers for weeks—and spirit them and others out of the country with false papers. Der Funke would also stay in illicit contact with the exiled Social Democratic leaders and bring in underground literature from abroad. All of this would cost money, more money than two impecunious journalists could scrounge up, so they were glad to recruit as a member a young American heiress named Muriel Gardiner, who had come to Vienna to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and would become a valuable colleague of theirs. Another member was an English economics student, Hugh Gaitskell, later head of Britain’s Labour Party; not officially
in
the cell, but in contact with it, were two other Englishmen, one a tall, blond, pink-faced poet, Stephen Spender, who (somewhat surprisingly, since his previous relationships had all been with men) was having an affair with Muriel Gardiner, the other a dark, extremely charming aspiring journalist, recently married to an Austrian girl who, like him, was a Communist. His name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, but everyone called him Kim.

The Spark was successful at first, using contacts in England to channel aid from British trade unions, and getting the word out about what had really happened in Vienna. But then the unthinkable happened. The Austrian police arrested a courier that the group used to carry money, messages, and illegal documents between Vienna and their exiled leadership in Brno, and through the courier—who was having a romance with the Kulcsars’ maid—Ilse and Poldi’s cover was blown. It would be only a matter of hours before they were picked up and imprisoned, or worse. Fleeing to a little inn in the mountains two hours south of Vienna, where Ilse had spent carefree summers as a child, they waited for terrifying days until Muriel Gardiner could bring them the false papers they needed to escape. Finally, near midnight on a stormy evening, she appeared—soaked to the skin, having traveled by bus and on foot up the icy road in the rain to deliver the precious documents; the next day, with their photographs neatly inserted into two strangers’ passports, Ilse and Poldi crossed the Czech border and made their way to Brno.

That was in November 1934, and nearly two years of life in exile had been hard. Ilse missed her family, and Brno’s medieval alleyways and sleek new Bauhaus apartment buildings made her homesick for her beloved Baroque Vienna. She and Poldi were working together to launch a new, multinational socialist review for which she planned to write, and that was exciting; but the rootlessness and petty infighting in their circle of émigrés were wearing Ilse down. Developments in Germany, where Hitler had just occupied the Rhineland and was making noises about annexing northern Czechoslovakia, were far from reassuring; things were worse at home, where Dolfuss (having eliminated the leftist opposition) had been assassinated by Austrian Nazis and, Muriel Gardiner reported, many of their former associates were being arrested.

But the real trouble, for Ilse, was with her husband. There was the business of the money: back in Vienna, Poldi had been the bookkeeper for the Spark, and before they left he’d apparently started skimming off some of its funds into a special account he had—for what? There was his domineering streak, his need to tell her what to do, what to think. Then there were his contacts with a shadowy network of operatives in Germany and elsewhere, in which he used the code-name “Maresch.” Most ominous of all was the new hardness he’d begun to demonstrate: speaking of a comrade he suspected might be a turncoat, he’d said, with a look that blended pleasure and cruelty, “If it is true, we shall have to put him out of the way.”

Into the anxious fog that surrounded her, the bulletins from Spain—the army’s attempted coup, the government’s resistance, and even more the revolutionary changes that were taking place in the wake of the rebellion—came like a ray of clear light. In Spain fascism was being openly confronted, not accepted, or appeased, or explained, or ignored; people were
acting
on their convictions, instead of endlessly talking about them, as her and Poldi’s friends seemed to do. Perhaps, she thought, she could find a way to get to Madrid, where she could volunteer as a writer, an editor, a translator—there must be some use for the six languages she spoke—and start fresh, doing work that mattered. A new life! It seemed just barely possible.

July 1936: Key West

On July 17, the cruiser
Pilar
, thirty-eight feet long with a black hull, green roof, and mahogany cockpit, tied up in Key West harbor after a six-week fishing trip to Bimini; and its captain, Ernest Hemingway—burly, dark, unshaven, in his usual Key West getup of dirty shorts and torn T-shirt—made his way home to the big house on Whitehead Street that he shared with his second wife, Pauline, and their two sons, Patrick and Gregory. The Bimini trip had been a fine one. To begin with, Hemingway had hooked a 514-pound, eleven-foot-long tuna off Gun Cay, and after a seven-hour battle—Hemingway had sweated away more than a pound an hour hauling on the lines—he’d managed to land it, still full of fight, thirty miles away from where he’d started; by the time he got back to port he’d drunk so much beer and whiskey he could hardly stand, but somehow he pulled the fish up on stays on the dock and proceeded to use it for a punching bag. Almost as good as the fishing were the couple of meetings he’d had with an editor from
Esquire
magazine, Arnold Gingrich, who suggested he make a novel out of a couple of short stories he’d written about a renegade Caribbean rumrunner called Harry Morgan—a book that, both men felt, would put Hemingway back on top of the literary world where he belonged.

In the early 1920s, in Paris, when he had lived in the cramped flat above the sawmill in the rue Notre Dame des Champs with his first wife, Hadley, and their baby son, John, nicknamed Bumby, and his first collection of short prose sketches (with its bravely uncapitalized title),
in our time
, had been published by one of the little presses, no one had been more innovative, more exciting, or more admired among the Lost Generation literati than Hemingway. And when
The Sun Also Rises
, his novel about angst-ridden expatriates in Paris and Pamplona, appeared in 1926, followed three years later by the tersely elegiac Great War love story
A Farewell to Arms
, no writer had seemed so successful. His spare, clean prose and his clear-eyed presentation of unvarnished subject matter that he knew from personal experience—“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” he would say; “write the truest sentence that you know”—seemed to set him apart from all who had come before him; in consequence he’d been rewarded with critical praise, robust book sales, and record-setting magazine fees. For the past three years
Esquire
, for which he’d been writing articles about such far-flung places as the Caribbean and Kenya, had been giving him an audience of half a million readers a month. And when
A Farewell to Arms
was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, Hemingway became even more of a celebrity than before.