Lady Business: Martha Gellhorn and other war heroes; Gwyneth, Buffy, Shonda, and … Julia?
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the thirty-sixth issue, published July 26, 2018.
20th Century Women
I recently mentioned that one of the things I most appreciated about Nanette was how Hannah Gadsby expressed her rage through art history. There was also this great line, which sums up me lately:
Anyway, Gadsby spends a good amount of time skewering Pablo Picasso, who’s up there with Ernest Hemingway among the anointed Great Men of the 20th Century. Both also happened to be artistic, selfish monsters, especially to the women in their lives. Picasso, as this Paris Review article from last year points out, destroyed those who loved him physically as well as psychologically and, of course, artistically:
After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself. “Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot, his mistress after Maar. After they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: “For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.”
I was thinking of Picasso this week as I read this long, fascinating, and infuriating Town & Country essay, by novelist Paula McLain, about Martha Gellhorn. One of the major war correspondents of the 20th century, Gellhorn reported from London and other battlefields during World War II; was the only reporter on the beaches at D-Day; witnessed the Allied liberation of the Dachau concentration camp; hung out with Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, who invited her to crash in the Lincoln Bedroom between jobs; wrote novels and novellas in addition to articles; covered Vietnam and Nicaragua and only gave up war reporting in her 80s, a few years before she died, at age 89, in 1998.
Oh, and she spent five, miserable-sounding years married to one of the great assholes of 20th century American literature:
Hemingway was a complicated man to love—and one who demanded absolute loyalty. After they had been together for six years (they married in 1940, a year after moving to Cuba), the war in Europe escalated and Collier’s sent Gellhorn to London, which was nearly unrecognizable after the Blitz. But Hemingway complained of being abandoned, sending her a cable that said, “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed?” There wasn’t, and couldn’t be, any way those roles could coexist.
… The breaking point came in the summer of 1944. Livid with Gellhorn for choosing her work yet again, Hemingway offered his byline to Collier’s. At the time, each magazine or newspaper could send only one correspondent to the front, and Collier’s chose Hemingway. Gellhorn now had no credentials, and no marriage to speak of.
Which didn’t stop her from doing her job! Gellhorn talked her way onto a hospital barge bound for Normandy, and found herself on the first medical ship to arrive at the D-Day battle. Which is how she wound up as the only journalist on the beaches, helping out as a stretcher-bearer and interpreter--while, according to McLain, “everyone of the hundreds of credentialed journalists, including her husband, sat poised behind her in the Channel with binoculars, never making it to shore. … There were 160,000 men on that beach and one woman. Gellhorn.”
(Oh look, yet another World War II story about a heroic woman in the thick of battle. Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan: Do make a note.)
I’m often critical of the obituaries written for accomplished women, so I’m pleased to report that the 1998 New York Times offering for Gellhorn is a pretty decent tribute, and manages to avoid mentioning Hemingway until the second paragraph. It also highlights her professional approach towards facts versus truth, which seems especially relevant today:
As a journalist, Ms. Gellhorn had no use for the notion of objectivity. The chief point of going to cover anything, she felt, was so you could tell what you saw, contradict the lies and let the bad guys have it.
''You go into a hospital, and it's full of wounded kids,'' she once said. ''So you write what you see and how it is. You don't say there's 37 wounded children in this hospital, but maybe there's 38 wounded children on the other side. You write what you see.''
Lady Bits:
--Please read Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Gwyneth Paltrow, Goop, and “I swear to God something called Psychic Vampire Repellent, which is a ‘sprayable elixir’ that uses ‘gem healing’ to something something ‘bad vibes.’”
--Speaking of vampire repellents: Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, yay or nay? I spent a good half hour discussing this at a birthday party over the weekend, and personally, I would be way more into the idea if Joss Whedon stayed far, far away. (Give it to Michelle Lovretta! Or, hell, Shondaland.)
--Which brings us to the Netflix projects of Shonda Rhimes, including adaptations of New York’s grifter story and Ellen Pao’s memoir. More surprising is the adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series, an actual full-fledged historical romance novel franchise. As an occasional fan of (some) historical romances, I’m conflicted; Shondaland’s blessing will probably help legitimize the genre, but with one exception, most of the Bridgerton novels are just not that good.
--And to complete the TV roundup: It feels weird to say this about Netflix, home of the overbloated superhero series, but I kind of wanted GLOW’s second season to be a little longer. Or at least for individual episodes to take a few more minutes each, to set up some of the season’s big plots. (Could they not get the actor who played Florian back for one more episode?) But the Debbie/Ruth confrontation, and the show-within-a-show episode, were both tremendously satisfying.
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