Inside Suristan, a club near Madrid’s Plaza Santa Ana, flamenco fans are assembling for a show featuring two of the city’s newest generation of flamenco stars. Jeronimo Maya, a cherubic 20-year-old guitarist, and Dieguito, an Armani-clad Gypsy singer, quaff pre-gig drinks at the bar.
Heads turn as David Byrne, with an armada of Spanish record execs, parts the cloud of cigarette smoke on his way to a stage-side table. Byrne, uneasy as a nun, is surrounded by a group of boisterous Gypsies cheering the performers who take the stage.
Maya’s sinewy hands fan over the strings in the first slow, sad passages of a Soleares. Dieguito, eyes closed, emits a low throaty cry that hushes the room. Byrne’s eyes lock on the singer in either a moment of primal conversion or recognition of the next recording contract bonanza.
After weeks of travel through Spain sampling flamenco music in clubs, outdoor festivals and the ubiquitous private flamenco clubs called peñas, it became clear that Spain’s flamenco music scene was moving toward a flashy rock-style promotion evident in Madrid’s clubs.
For Donn Pohren, an American who’s spent the past 45 years in Spain writing about a flamenco world that has slowly given way to Americanized commercialism, it’s a sign of corruption. He’s the only non-Spaniard ever awarded the title of “flamencologist” by the closed circle of writers and academics who make up the “Catedra de Flamencologia.” And his books, praised by such Spanish artists as guitarist Andrés Segovia and dancer Carmen Amaya, have become underground classics fueling a quiet affair between legions of flamenco aficionados around the world and this uniquely Iberian art form.
We’d arranged to meet at a cafe in a suburb 12 miles from Madrid. The next morning I boarded a train that crawled through the tawny hills outside the city past an abandoned bullfight school, its crumbling walls a reminder of the rustic Spain where flamenco once thrived.
I found my way to the cafe and took a seat near a rack of hoofed hams dangling from the ceiling. With a predictable Spanish tardiness, Pohren appeared at my table briskly ordering a drink in Minnesota-tinged Spanish. Over a five-hour lunch accompanied by several bottles of vino tinto, Pohren told me the story of his flamenco pilgrimage.
“In the beginning I used to say my mother was Spanish, and call myself Daniel Maravilla, which did help in getting accepted,” the 69 year-old author says of his early efforts to gain admittance to the then-closed flamenco world. “Now I couldn’t care less whether I’m accepted or not.”
Pohren has reason to be sure of his reputation these days. A few months ago he joined the pantheon of flamenco heroes memorialized by statues in the public squares of small towns dotting Andalusia. A plaque was erected in Morón de la Frontera, a town near Seville popularized in his writings, which decades before regarded him as foreign provocateur.
When he arrived in Spain, though, flamenco music was still an outsider art — every bit as back-alley to Spain as jazz or blues was in the United States at the turn of the century. It was a music that devotees spoke of in mystical, quasi-religious terms, describing their discovery of it as a “baptism.” Pohren’s exploration of the flamenco cabal became an expedition through the dark umbra of Spain’s alter ego on a river of wine and song.
His flamenco baptism, he says, occurred on a family vacation in Mexico City in 1947. “Wandering downtown one day I heard a guitar, singing, foot-stomping issuing from a bar, and went in. During a break I asked the guitarist what the music was,” Pohren recalls. “He smiled and told me it was flamenco.” Pohren remembered reading about Carmen Amaya’s troupe, whose tours through the U.S. had made headlines. “I mentioned this to the guitarist. He pointed to the woman who had been dancing and singing and told me, ‘That is Carmen Amaya!’”
The chance encounter with Amaya and famed guitarist Sabicas in a Mexican cantina marked the beginning of the 17-year-old’s lifelong sojourn. Six years later Pohren abandoned his orderly Eisenhower-era Minneapolis neighborhood with a one-way ticket on the Queen Mary bound for Spain tucked into his pocket. His quest took him to Seville’s narrow corridors, where Gypsy singers, toreros and their rich benefactors all rubbed elbows in pursuit of the flamenco life.
“I lived for a period in the Barrio Santa Cruz, in Seville,” Pohren says. The compact, mostly Gypsy, neighborhood, with its jumble of narrow streets overflowing with flamenco bars, was then the heart of the flamenco world. “The flamenco scene in Seville was still in full bloom; an all night, round-the-clock affair. The cafes on Alameda de Hercules at about 2 or 3 in the morning were overflowing with flamenco artists waiting to be hired.”
For decades, though, Spain had had an ambivalent relationship with flamenco due mostly to anti-Gypsy prejudice and its association with low culture. “Laws were eventually passed closing the bars at 12:30 a.m.,” Pohren says. Franco’s Guardia Civil, the loyal police troops recognized by their shiny “Mickey Mouse” hats, made certain that the streets were safe from the spontaneous revelry associated with flamenco. “Flamenco was too scandalous for the church and the government was making commercial ties to the states,” Pohren says. “Spain’s inefficiency was embarrassing. Could a country be competent if a goodly share of the working population didn’t make it to work the next day or arrived sloshed?”
Pohren and other flamenco writers reverently refer to those years before the sanctions as the “epoca dorada” or golden age of the music. Pohren is convinced that modernization has spoiled not only the country, but more importantly its music. He recounts a vacation taken in a small fishing village called Torremolinos 30 years ago. A place now part of the expensive resort hotel studded section of the Costa del Sol. “I hitchhiked south. The traffic was such then that it took us a full week to cover the 400 miles.”
Over the years Pohren married, his daughter was born, and he managed to finish his university studies in Madrid and along the way learn enough flamenco guitar to earn a modest living.
“Our savings were just about gone. I heard of a job opportunity for an accountant at an air base. I went there and applied and they grabbed me as their previous accountant had had a nervous breakdown trying to cope with the work. I stuck that job out three years. The only period of regimented work in my lifetime,” Pohren says proudly.
“During that period from 1960 to 1963, I did a great deal of research for my books and actually wrote the first one, ‘The Art of Flamenco,’ mostly while working as an accountant. The book was first published in 1962 and widely regarded as the “bible” on the music, found a ready audience among growing numbers of flamenco fans in the U.K., Germany and the U.S. The book was quickly followed by “Lives and Legends of Flamenco,” an opinionated and lively history including intimate sketches of the many flamenco performers he had met in his travels.
Finally Pohren left his day job and accepted an offer to open a private flamenco club in a cellar in Madrid’s calle Echegaray. The club, near where Suristan now attracts large crowds to hear flamenco, failed after a year. Pohren packed up and headed back to Andalusia where his adventures began.
A remote two-story ranch house, called a finca, became available and he saw an opportunity to continue his pursuit of the flamenco life. His third book, “A Way Of Life,” is a memoir of life on the ranch which gradually became the nexus for enthusiasts from around the world. Pohren assiduously collected flamenco characters from the surrounding villages who mixed with clients from New York, San Francisco and other points on the globe in an atmosphere that was part old-world flamenco fiesta and part cosmopolitan cocktail party. “We were dedicated to offering pure flamenco. Commercial flamenco is banal and insincere — it’s good business, but not authentic folk art,” Pohren says.
“The scene appealed to professional people, lawyers, doctors, scientists. We had two judges over the years. We had lonely divorcees, writers, poets, music buffs and so forth. The finca brightened Morón de la Frontera’s normally quiet existence.”
Word of the finca along with the popularity of his first book quickly made the country inn a destination for die-hard flamenco fans and the fashion-conscious folk music crowd alike. Pohren had brought the world to a small town outside Seville with mixed results. Ironically, the town that would pay him tribute 30 years later, viewed the sudden popularity of the old finca and the influx of exotic tourists with suspicion. “The town was absolutely sure of one thing, the finca was slated to be a cabaret featuring prostitution and flamenco,” Pohren says.
“There was also the indirect activity caused by the finca being in operation,” Pohren says. “Many aficionados came in search of the flamenco way of life and stayed in town. After a time, it became a hippie stopover in the hash route from Marrakech to Europe.” An affable and prodigious drinker, Pohren is heroically nonconformist about most things except drugs.
Pohren presided over the nonstop flamenco partying, which occasionally spilled over into the otherwise quiet town, like an unflappable scientist watching an experiment go berserk.
“On one occasion a dance teacher from Paris came with her students — 10 girls. The town was still living in the dark ages then, town folk dressed somberly and any act slightly out of the ordinary caused eyebrows to rise,” Pohren says. “The French girls were unconcerned about that and wore miniskirts and halters. Young men followed them around in the streets in silent wonderment.”
For the local guitarists and singers it was free drink and food and cash at the end of the night. The Gypsy performers, who often died penniless despite having made a small fortune in their lifetimes, welcomed collecting their first regular paycheck.
“The flamenco juerga, or jam session is the only vehicle for true flamenco expression,” Pohren says. “We hired artists from out of town such as Manolito de Maria, Monolo Heredia, Juan Talega, El Farruco, all great artists in their own right.”
The star at the finca became Diego del Gastor, a princely local Gypsy noted for his simple and emotional style of guitar playing, who would later become a legend and icon to flamenco fans and musicians around the world. “He played mostly private parties. The very essence of this man emerged through his playing. He arrived directly at the soul of flamenco without frills or bullshit,” Pohren says. Diego’s death in 1973, commemorated by a bust in a small park and a street bearing his name, spelled the end for the finca.
I mention the popularity of the flamenco stylings of the Gypsy Kings, and Ottmar Liebert’s diluted new-age noodling as well as the Spanish television shows featuring flamenco, suggesting that it may have helped boost the art in recent years. I tell him of the subtle incursion of flamenco as background music for truck commercials in the states, and the celebrity of Joaquin Cortez, the shirtless Gypsy dancer whose romance with Naomi Campbell made tabloid headlines.
“There are people who will think that Ottmar is the real thing,” Pohren replies, with a hint of disgust. The advent of American-style record deals hatched in Madrid clubs, Pohren believes, is like the infiltration of McDonald’s in the country’s ancient squares: an evil he can’t prevent but one that he won’t accept. “Today’s affluence is deadly to the flamenco way of life,” he says.
Dorien Ross, author of the acclaimed novel “Returning to A,” which recounts her immersion in the flamenco world, credits Pohren with inspiring her first trip to Spain. “He was the first adult I’d met who was really like a big boy,” the New York author recalls about her eventual meeting with Pohren. Ross’ novel recounts the time she spent at the finca and the nearby town learning to play guitar with Diego del Gastor. Her journey at 17, began with a letter to Pohren and ended with her boarding a plane clutching a map he’d drawn on a cocktail napkin.
“I devoured his books,” Ross says, “it was like falling into another world.” She shares Pohren’s conviction that those days marked the end of an epoch. “Being in Morón de la Frontera in the ’60s was one of those gifts life occasionally offers that changes the course of the river.”
Hampton Fancher’s career spans 40 years and includes credits as an actor,
screenwriter, producer and, most recently, director of “The Minus Man.”
It’s an eclectic mix, from appearances on “Gunsmoke” to screenwriter for the
futuristic noir classic “Blade Runner.” Fancher spoke to Salon People about his passion for flamenco dancing, which led him to board a freighter bound for Spain in the ’50s and adopt a new identity.
You mentioned that you first heard flamenco as a kid.
I was fascinated by
dancing, my sister was a dancer, my mother used to be a dancer, though not
flamenco. You know, I didn’t have other means of expressing myself. I used
to see movies and try to interpret them. But when I was 10 or 11, I went to
see a really dumb movie, called “Valentino,” I think. If I saw it now I’d probably be horrified. In the opening sequence the
guy who played Valentino in the film, Anthony Dexter, was with a Spanish dancer
on a ship. It started out with him doing heel-work on the table with a
guitar. At that moment the duende (the spirit
that inspires flamenco at its most magical moments) entered me. I went crazy. At that
moment I fell, literally, in love. It got me big.
There’s a long-standing connection between Hollywood and flamenco, lots
of movies with cameo flamenco scenes.
In 1952 or 1953
MGM made a film called “Sombrero,” with Ricardo Montalban and Cyd Charisse,
a musical. I can’t find it anywhere. Jose Greco played a bullfighter in it and danced. Nobody
could do a farruca like he could.
Your mother was hip enough to recognize your interest in flamenco. So
at some point you just said, “I’m going to Spain”?
There was not much flamenco in America then. I was already a Spanish
dancer and had a little group. I was, like, 13; I had already quit school
and had older dancers with me. The companies would come. Greco came with
four Gypsies in ’52, and that really did it. I went to talk to them and I
got some names. Finally, at 15, I decided to go to Spain. I got a freighter
in Texas and went to Barcelona. I didn’t know anybody — I was a kid.
There was a teacher everybody told me about in Madrid, an old Gypsy guy, Estampio.
Everybody said to study with him, so I went to find him. When I got to Madrid,
I couldn’t find him anywhere. I was
wandering around in the old part of Madrid after I’d gotten an address from a
girl who said she was a dancer, and I went there. I went into the vestibule
and there was an old man sitting in a chair wheezing, and I said I was
looking for Estampio. He said, “What do you want with him.” I said, “I’m going
to study with him.” He said, “But you’re an American.” I said, “Yeah.” He said,
“But Americans can’t dance.” He said, “I’m Estampio.” He was a portero, a
doorman.
There are a lot Americans in Spain involved in flamenco and they all
assumed this Spanish identity at some point, like you did. Was it a
way to get inside?
Uh-huh. In my case I think it was based on fear — fear of myself. I dyed
my hair black and became Mario Montejo. In America I spoke with an
accent. Nobody called me by my real name until I was probably 28. I
finally said, “Wait a minute — I’m not Mario, I’m Hampton.”
You could probably pass as a Spaniard.
I thought I could — except I’m 6-4. You know, it was kind of schizzy
for me. I was really very lonely and pretended to be above it all.
The whole attitude thing is still a part of the flamenco scene. To hang
with these Gypsy guys you’ve got to be in the part, so to speak.
Yeah, that’s the romance. It’s a dangerous thing on some level for some
people. In “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” T. E. Lawrence says that a person who lives in two cultures at once can go insane.
I sort of identified with that — not that I was insane. But I was
definitely …
You were immersed in it …
It also incarcerated me, you know. I mean, every kid is trying to find
out who he is, and then he learns that he’s not who he
thought he was.
When you were in Spain it was in a sort of time warp.
It was 19th century. There were no Europeans, I never heard
English. There were no Americans there except some servicemen and
maybe some salesmen from England. In ’54 in all the bodegas there was
always a retiree who was paid to listen to anything off-color
politically — and you were out of the country. Flamenco was totally
anti-Franco. Look at what the right-wing Spaniards did to [Federico Garcma] Lorca; they
hated flamenco. In cosmopolitan Madrid, flamenco was like hillbilly.
Flamenco has produced this whole bohemian subculture. Did any of that
inform your later work?
It’s about the man who comes to nothing. The man who’s the outsider.
The tragedy. Flamenco’s informed by a lot of things. Flamenco’s informed
by the sky in Spain. I even studied bullfighting there, because that was
part of it for me.
You studied in Spain for a couple of years.
I think by the time I was 17, I was back in New York dancing. I
couldn’t handle it. I always had a group of about four people and one
guitarist, and I was just too crazy as a kid. I was too angry.
So you were leading your own troupe.
Yeah, but I was too temperamental. I didn’t have any patience with what
they couldn’t do. I was an asshole.
Do you still listen to flamenco music?
Oh yeah! It’s never ceased to do the same thing, just like
it did to me in the ’50s.
What is it about this music that really grabs people — that seems
to be operating beneath the words in the songs?
In Spanish, one single word can have such reverberations in a romantic
or spiritual way. Our language doesn’t own that kind of darkness. The
language doesn’t quite have the snakebite; there’s a duality in Spanish. In
flamenco, if you hear a siguiriya, something goes through the body. It
makes me think that it’s something that goes so far back, that unconsciously
you’re responding to something primitive. When I see some of the snakelike grace of that Indian
dancing, it’s the same thing that’s talking to somebody who responds
deeply to flamenco. A lot of people don’t respond to it.
Some of my friends call it toothache music.
I know a guy who heard flamenco for the first time at my house. He
was like a dog who heard his master’s voice. Americans are afraid of it.
I think probably they’re
just guys who are afraid of sex.
What are you listening to?
I’ve got a lot of old stuff. I’ve got some live stuff from the
South — those guys really get me. And I love Paco de Lucia.
There seems to be an ongoing renaissance with flamenco in Spain that
started about the time you were there.
I didn’t think it would happen; I thought it was going to die. In the
late ’50s, I thought: Too bad for flamenco, the modern world is going to crush
it out of existence. But then it popped up. The flamenco that I was doing
was really born around the turn of the century.
Was your ambition ever to just stay in Spain and be a dancer?
I think I was too young. I was so young emotionally. By the time I
got to L.A., I was involved in other things. I thought, I want to write, I
want to direct, act.
Does the flamenco experience inform what you’re doing now?
I imagine so, because the same thing that attracted me to flamenco is
something inside me that finds expression in other ways, and it’s a darkness.
It’s something that’s open-ended, it’s not so pat — you know, three acts and
here’s the hero. I think there’s a wildness that attracts me, that is
flamenco-like. There’s a speech that Lorca gave in Cuba, that is the best
definition of what this is all about. It was an essay on duende, before he came to New
York.
Getting back to the present, have you ever thought about doing a film involving flamenco?
Yeah, I’m doing it. I can’t write it right now, so we’ve been looking
for a writer who would understand what the story is, and I would like to
direct it. It’s about an American, a businessman who thinks he’s going on a
vacation. He’s in a traffic jam on his way
to East Hampton, and he hears Paco de Lucia, or something. So he goes to
study for a week, and he goes down the vortex and winds up in Jerez de la
Frontera and gets fucked up.
Does he have to get fucked up?
Well, it’s flamenco — and he gets waylaid. We’re working on it right now.
Soon after the American soldiers were pulled out of the civil war in Spain in 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote this description of Milton Wolff, commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion: “Twenty-three years old, tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg. He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed.”
Now 83, Wolff will leave his small apartment outside San Francisco this week and fly to Illinois to pay his own tribute to Hemingway. The ceremony, at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, marks the 100th anniversary of Hemingway’s birth and coincides with the publication of Hemingway’s last “posthumous novel,” “True at First Light.”
Wolff first met Hemingway when Wolff was a 22-year-old private in the International Brigades, a force made up of volunteers from more than 50 countries who went to Spain to fight alongside the troops of the liberal government of the Republic against Gen. Francisco Franco’s military revolt. While the two men would call each other friend until Hemingway’s death, their first encounter was not promising. Wolff stole Hemingway’s girlfriend.
Tall, dark-eyed, a thatch of black curls atop his handsome head, Wolff marched into the swank Cafi Chicote in Madrid and lured away a raven-haired beauty who was Hemingway’s mistress.
“He didn’t object,” Wolff recalls, one of his dozen or so pipes held between his teeth. “He didn’t say anything. Never brought it up with me.”
Wolff admits, though, that for a while he did feel a hint of pride at having taken Hemingway’s girl. “He was a bull, a big strong guy. She was just hungry.”
Wolff says he forgot the woman’s name long ago but does recall that she spoke little English. “She didn’t know what they were bullshitting about and neither did I. They were talking tactics and strategy and I couldn’t care less.”
On leave from the front, Wolff knew only that the burly man seated among a group of well-dressed women and men that evening had invited him for a drink. The bar was one of the poshest meeting places along Madrid’s Gran Vma, and it was the drink that he’d come for.
“I hate to admit this but I had not heard of him,” says Wolff, who sketched the scene in “Another Hill,” his 1994 novel about the Spanish Civil War. “I had not read his books. I had not read ‘A Farewell to Arms.’ I had not read ‘The Sun Also Rises.’”
Wolff, understandably, had more important things on his mind. Arriving in Spain from Brooklyn in March 1937, he’d served first as a medic, then as a machine-gunner in the Washington Battalion. He fought in fierce battles at Brunete, Quinto, Belchite and Fuentes de Ebro. By the battle of Teruel he was captain of a machine-gun company. When his commander was killed, Wolff took charge of the battalion of 3,000 Americans and led an offensive into the Sierra Pandols. Altogether more than 45,000 volunteers from Europe, Canada, the United States and Mexico fought in the war against Franco. Some 16,000 of them died before the force was disbanded and sent home as Franco’s army, backed by the fascist governments in Germany and Italy, closed in on victory. Wolff went on to fight in Italy and Burma during World War II, but in the ’50s he and other Americans who had served in Spain were marked for persecution in the anti-Communist fervor of the day.
Wolff still speaks in support of the beliefs that took him to Spain, but he is
not an idealist. “There are no heroes in this Balkan war,” he says. “There are villains but there are no heroes. In the Spanish Civil War it was different. And as far as the International Brigades were concerned, there was nothing like it in history. We were all volunteers, there were no mercenaries. There wasn’t a pot to piss in. There were no rewards, no medals. There was nothing. We got our asses kicked in Spain and then we came back. It’s been called the pure war, but nothing’s pure in life, I’ve decided. But it’s the closest thing to it that I know of.”
Despite the fact that Wolff had snatched his girl, Hemingway later summoned the newly promoted officer to his room at the Hotel Florida, in Madrid, and asked him to read a rough draft of his play “The Fifth Column.” From there a fractious friendship evolved, an on-and-off connection between Hemingway and “El Lobo” (Wolff’s nom de guerre) that often erupted in harsh words but lasted until the writer’s death in 1961.
Wolff and other war veterans criticized Hemingway’s novel about the war, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which was later made into a movie starring Gary Cooper. “Here was a guy who among all the correspondents knew more about what the hell was going on there,” Wolff says. “We expected him to write the definitive book on Spain, not a goddamn Hollywood production. So there was keen disappointment on my part. I called him a tourist in Spain and he called me a tool of the Communist Party and a lot of other bad things in an exchange of letters. Then we made up. But he called me every name under the sun. He cursed me out. What got him was that I called him a tourist.”
Wolff was a former art student immersed in the labor politics of the day; Hemingway was one of the most celebrated authors of the time, whose books had brought him fame, wealth and a succession of beautiful women. It was maybe the women that Wolff admired more than anything else.
“I knew Martha Gellhorn a hell of a lot better than I knew him,” Wolff says of Hemingway’s wife at the time. “She had nothing good to say about him.”
Gellhorn later confided to Wolff her husband’s frequent affairs. “She was trying to get a divorce from him,” he says. “She was pissed off. He dragged her around like a wet rag.”
Wolff is not sure Hemingway would have wanted him at this month’s gathering in Illinois. In one of their last exchanges Hemingway called from Cuba to ask Wolff for a letter confirming that Hemingway had loaned $400 to a veterans group headed by Wolff. Wolff says Hemingway wanted to use the donation as a tax deduction; Wolff, the battle-hardened anti-capitalist, refused. Hemingway, unaccustomed to being denied, was incensed.
But Hemingway continued to address the younger man as “Commandante,” perhaps aware that his own writing about war and courage were as far removed from true heroism as Wolff’s life was disconnected from tax dodges and Caribbean estates.
“One of the last letters I had from him was from the Mayo Clinic,” Wolff says. “He said, ‘You were my friend, we’re friends no longer.’ About two or three weeks later a letter came from Cuba and he said he didn’t mean it.”
Hemingway apologized and told Wolff that he understood that his criticism of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” had been ordered by the Communist Party. “Which was bullshit,” Wolff says. “It was all my own idea.”
At least part of Wolff’s criticism of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was spurred by his affection for Dolores Ibarruri Gomez, the woman known as “La Pasionaria” who acted as organizer, spokeswoman and maternal symbol for the Republican armies. Hemingway’s unflattering portrait of her angered many veterans of the war.
“I was pissed off, frankly,” says Wolff, his voice reaching a field commander’s pitch. “This was the main thing that really got me. Why’d he single out her, who we all adored, who said it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees?
“There was one thing that always bothered me about these correspondents, which reveals how immature I was at the time,” he adds, his voice softening. “I resented the fact that they could come and go as they pleased. Go up to Paris when the booze ran out, when the cigarettes ran out. And we were stuck there fighting. But guys like Hemingway and [New York Times correspondent] Herb Matthews and others did a marvelous job in defense of the Republican cause.”
Wolff has done a fair amount of public speaking over the years. He’s accepted token fees but his adventures have not made him a rich man. He lives modestly, working on a manuscript about his experiences before the Spanish Civil War and his remembrance of service in World War II, in the OSS under “Wild Bill” Donovan.
One of the events at the week-long celebration in Illinois that Wolff has been asked to attend, titled “I Knew Papa,” promises to be a nostalgia fest of the sentimental sort that Wolff says he would just as soon skip. Among the memorabilia resurfacing for the Hemingway birthday celebration is a Robert Capa photo of the Nobel Prize-winning author with Wolff at the Ebro River front.
“When I heard he killed himself, I wasn’t surprised at all,” Wolff says. “He’d done everything, he’d written everything. And the last things he wrote were such crap that even he must have known it. I couldn’t read it. As far as I’m concerned the last great thing he wrote was ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’
“He grew away from everything before he died. You know, Gary Cooper and John Wayne he hung out with, killing lions and stuff like that. I don’t know. I felt sorry for the guy. When you examine his whole life, the high point was Spain.”
