Most writers can only daydream about meeting — in the flesh — the characters they've imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman's bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel.
"It's as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged — out of his own mind," says director Phil Kaufman. "The woman of his dreams, of his own writing, came into his life."
Kaufman is not musing idly; he's recently completed directing a film about the relationship between the burly novelist and Martha Gellhorn, the intrepid war correspondent whom Kaufman sees as reminiscent of Lady Brett Ashley from "The Sun Also Rises."
After Gellhorn walked into Sloppy Joe's bar on that day in 1936, her life, like that of the novelist, was fundamentally altered. Hemingway — married at the time to Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife — urged Gellhorn, still establishing herself as a writer, to go with him to cover the Spanish Civil War. There the two began a romance, and they were later married in what proved to be a passionate but often difficult union.
As Kaufman sees it, Hemingway's enthusiasm and support lighted a spark in Gellhorn, but that's where things got complicated. "He ignited it," says Nicole Kidman, who plays the journalist with an assertive spirit. "But once he ignited it, I don't think he wanted that flame to grow."
By the end of the marriage, things had gotten emotionally and physically brutal. But along the way, the two went on a wild ride, both as lovers and as witnesses to history, including the early stirrings of the Chinese Revolution.
"There was this five-, six-year tussle with her," says Kaufman. "It's a very mythical kind of relationship they had: She's a Hemingway heroine. The problem being: Is that what he really wanted in real life?"
