Hemingway’s Son

From “The Slow Crack-up”: a review of Hemingway’s Boat by Allan Massie,

“Which brings me to Gregory, Hemingway’s bright and troubled youngest son…Known as Gigi (pronounced with hard g’s), he was a boy of many talents and a compulsion he could never be rid of and that eventually destroyed him.

It came to light when he was a boy and was found trying on his stepmother’s stockings. He was arrested in drag in a ladies’ lavatory in Los Angeles in 1951. .. .Months later, Gigi told his father that the arrest had been “no big deal.” “It killed Mother,” Hemingway replied. Gigi’s cross-dressing intensified. He qualified as a doctor, like his grandfather Hemingway, and was a good doctor, sometimes, but his life was a mess. There were more arrests. He had a sex-change operation and died in prison after being arrested for exposing himself in public in 2001.

What has this sad story to do with Hemingway? Mr. Hendrickson, who came to know and like and respect—yes, respect—Gigi, makes it clear that father and son were much alike, which was why Hemingway recognized Gigi’s “dark side” so early. Gigi gave expression to a side of Hemingway’s nature that is discernible in his work. (Zelda Fitzgerald had noticed it too, saying “the hair on his chest is a toupee.”) In his sexual ambivalence, Gigi lived what Hemingway wrote about most clearly in “The Garden of Eden.” “This lifelong shamed son,” Mr. Hendrickson writes, “was only acting out what a father felt, which was why they couldn’t forsake each other, no matter how hard they tried.”

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