Winston Conrad
Chapter 17
From: Chapter Seventeen
HEMINGWAY AND FISHING WITH CHRISTIE BRINKLEY
“Uliuli Kai holo ka mano. Where the sea is dark, sharks swim. (Sharks are found in the deep sea. Also applied to men out seeking the society of the opposite sex.)”
––Mary Kawena Pukui, ‘Olelo No’eau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings, 1983
The night before the Kona expedition, Paulette and I went to Lulu’s, Kona’s hot nightspot. It was packed with revelers––locals and tourists of all kinds. On the bar was a plaque inscribed: “Hemingway pissed here.” As I had spent two years writing a book titled Hemingway’s France: Images of the Lost Generation, I was happy to get away from anything to do with the writer. Yet it turns out that Hemingway most likely did piss there. In 1941, while on his honeymoon in Honolulu with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, he was summoned over to Kona to verify what was believed to be a world record Black Marlin. It indeed proved to be a record at 815 pounds and 13 feet in length. However, the angler, Charles Clapp, had received assistance reeling in the fish, so he was disqualified. Hemingway, always in the limelight of the world, then disappeared for a few days. He went up the slopes of the Mauna Kea.
In Waimea, just a couple of weeks before our trip to Lulu’s, a talented artist of island scenes, Harry Wishard, had handed me a black and white photo of Hemingway standing beside a man on horseback with a big horned sheep slung over the saddle. “My grandfather, Leslie Wishard, let the Hemingways stay in his guest cottage for several days, and he arranged for the paniolo (island cowboys) to guide him hunting,” Harry said. “All the way up the Mauna Kea the paniolo assured Hemingway that they had very fine wine.”
“Yes,” I said, “he liked fine wine and normally drank Margauxs and Bandols.”
Harry said with a sly smile, “But when it came time to serve the wine, after the arduous journey, it was screw-on-cap sherry. When those paniolo of ‘O’okala came into town, all they bought was rice and bottles of cheap sherry.”
“Pretty simple living up there then?” I asked.
“Yah, sheep, sherry and rice,” Harry said. He knows the territory and is an expert hiker and hunter in the outback of Hawaii.
From Kona the Hemingways returned to Honolulu, finishing their honeymoon at the Halekulani Hotel. Martha wanted a honeymoon and wrote about the islands, “This is a place where hospitality is a curse… and no one can be alone.” Their belated honeymoon had gotten off on the wrong foot, right from the beginning, when they had stepped off the S.S. Matsonia in Honolulu and were adorned with no less than eighteen leis around their necks. Martha later wrote in Travels with Myself and Another that Ernest said, “I never had no filthy Christed flowers around my neck before and the next son of a bitch who touches me I am going to cool him and what a dung heap we came to and by Christ if anybody else says aloha to me I am going to spit back in his mouth.” (Their marriage didn’t last long.)
Before departing for Manila, Hemingway prophetically stated, “Japan will attempt to tie us up in the Pacific.” It was only ten months later that the Japanese imperial forces bombed Pearl Harbor.
Like Hemingway I had become an aficionado of deep-sea fishing, and the Kona coast is ideal for it. The morning after partying by the plaque at Lulu’s, I was steering the Wahanui through the Honokohau Harbor. Mario was fiddling with the tackle, and, along the sides of the canal, people in wide-brimmed hats fished with long poles for mullet, mackerel and other pan-sized fish. Waves were breaking on either side of the channel entrance, and we idled in the clear turquoise water inside the break wall. After a set of south swells passed, I nosed the boat out while Mario squared the deck. Soon we were skipping over the water like the flying fish leaping beside us. Just a few hundred yards offshore, there is a bountiful reef––a haven for billfish, tuna, and wahoo. When we hit the deep ultramarine blue ocean, Mario threw out the lines.
A course was set and there was little to do except “talk story.” With a cigarette dangling from his lips, Mario cracked open a couple of beers, turned the passenger seat backward facing the lines, and sat down. I thought of the line from John Williamson, the lieutenant on Captain Cook’s voyage who wrote, “A seaman in general would as soon part with his life, as his Grog.”
Between swigs Mario spoke of his sport charter days. His favorite client had been Christie Brinkley, the cover girl model and ex-wife of Billy Joel. “What did she wear?” I asked. He paused and gazed out to sea with longing adoration, as if he were envisioning a goddess.