Every summer, in the third week of July, scores of white-bearded men wearing safari jackets and cable-knit sweaters descend upon Key West, Fla. They’ve come for the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, staged annually since 1981 at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, the onetime hangout of the acclaimed writer, whose birthday is July 21. There’s just one problem: The Hemingway these men are mimicking bears little resemblance to the virile, chest-thumping bard who made Key West his home base in the 1930s.
Those Key West idolaters aren’t alone in their anachronistic devotion to the Nobel laureate. A few summers ago, I chanced upon a lunchtime meeting of the Rotary Club of Oak Park-River Forest. The group displayed a large banner emblazoned with the images of two men who had once called those Chicago suburbs home: Frank Lloyd Wright en chapeau and a hoary, hirsute Hemingway.
You may know the image: the white-bearded author, head and cap tilted, the bill of the cap casting a shadow over his eyes. It was shot in Spain in 1959, the year Hemingway turned 60. But as in so many of the photos from the last years of his life, the writer looks much older — in other words, nothing at all like the dimple-cheeked child and, later, handsome, clean-shaven young man who spent most of the first 20 years of his life living in Oak Park.
Which makes the image a curious choice to evoke the town’s link to this literary lion. Or rather, it would be curious if the choice were not so common. Oak Park used the photo in 1999 to tout events honoring the author’s centenary. It has hung above the entrance to the village’s museum devoted to the writer, and it continues to materialize whenever the need arises to quickly conjure Hemingway’s ghost.
It was not always thus. Though during his lifetime Hemingway cultivated (as his biographer Carlos Baker noted) a variety of “luxuriant beards,” his public persona was more often mustachioed. Recall those pictures from the cafes of Pamplona in the mid-1920s, where a young man in a beret flashes a wicked grin from beneath a dark mustache. And then there’s the picture of Hemingway on the dust jacket of 1940’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”: manly forearms bared, the writer — ‘stache, no beard — pecks away at a typewriter in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Twelve years later, Life magazine published “The Old Man and the Sea,” accompanied by photos of Hemingway in Cuba. His steady gaze confronted legions of readers — the issue sold 5.3 million copies in two days — from above a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper mustache. Once again, there’s no hint of a beard.
Only in subsequent years did full, white facial hair become de rigueur for the author. That’s the man in the oft-seen photograph shot in 1957 by Yousuf Karsh, the one where a sun-bronzed, silver-bearded Hemingway wears a dark turtleneck sweater. More than any other picture, the Karsh photo, especially when paired with the sobriquet “Papa,” best exemplifies, in today’s parlance, the Hemingway brand.
Back in Key West, Sloppy Joe’s has adopted as its “classic logo” the Karsh portrait, which adorns shot glasses, T-shirts and other merchandise. And that’s generally the template for participants in the bar’s annual look-alike contest. Those fleecy-faced gents are entitled to their fun (though it would be nice if one of them, just once, got the sweater right). But this veneration of Papa’s graven image does the writer they so admire a disservice. Not only does it blur our perception of Hemingway the man but it also burdens first-time readers of his novels and stories with a set of facile, preconceived notions.
What’s the solution? Next July, instead of following the grizzled gang south to Key West, try heading north to Petoskey, Mich., the resort town on Lake Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay. As a boy, Ernest (a name he despised) spent idyllic summer days nearby, and there he recuperated from the wounds, psychic and otherwise, suffered in World War I. At 602 State St., the white clapboard house where he boarded for three months in 1919 still stands. I once stopped by the place during a nighttime stroll through Petoskey and found the house dark — except, that is, for a solitary light radiating from a second-story window. It seared onto my mind the indelible portrait of a young man with shrapnel-riddled legs and a broken heart laboring through the godless night over a sheaf of papers. He is focused, he is disciplined, he is earnest. Deadly so. And though he doesn’t have a beard, I know exactly who he is.
Geoffrey Johnson is a Chicago writer.
