The Backstory: A man’s man…and his colony of pussy cats

When you meet a guy dripping with testosterone who loves hunting, war, alcohol, and women, you don’t expect that he’s going to be obsessed with kittens and cats…and have dozens of them all over his home and office. That’s the paradox of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author, Ernest Hemingway.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
When you think of old school kind of macho intellectuals,
Ernest Hemingway is definitely near the top of that list, right.
He told amazing stories, had a great, clean writing style,
and a fascinating lifestyle. But he was incredibly attracted to
violent sports like big game hunting, bullfighting, boxing, and deep
sea fishing. He loved war, drinking, and womanizing. He was

(00:24):
the kind of guy that one hundred years ago was
idolized as a man's man. But he had one passion
that you wouldn't necessarily associate with a man's man. I'm
Patty Steele. Ernest Hemingway and his obsession with kitty kats.
That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back. Ernest

(00:48):
Hemingway was a totally macho kind of guy. His novels
frequently included stories about all his favorite testosterone driven pastimes
like bullfighting, hunting, fishing, boxing, and drinking plenty of it,
as well as sex. He loved women. He had multiple
lovers as well as four wives, but at the end
of the day, one of the things he loved most

(01:10):
was cats. He was a paradox. His other obsessions, like
big game hunting, were wild. He hunted everything from waians
to grizzly bear, to elk and big horn sheep. But weirdly,
he's quoted as saying, there is no hunting like the
hunting of men, and those who have hunted armed men
long enough and liked it never care for anything else thereafter. Okay,

(01:36):
he loved the rush he got from war. He actually
told friends like Marlene Dietrich and Pablo Picasso that in
war he'd been wounded sixteen times and had killed one
hundred and twenty two enemy soldiers, and he sparkled when
he talked about it. He loved traveling to exotic destinations
and would take rickety small planes that were little more

(01:57):
than flying tin cans. Vacation in the wilds of Africa
on Safari, Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary were injured
in a crash landing the very next day. They got
on another plane to get medical treatment, and that plane
exploded at takeoff. He was badly wounded, and when he
finally got to civilization, the press had already wrongly reported

(02:20):
his death, so he got to read his own obituary,
and he loved it. Hemingway was also passionate about deep
sea fishing and actually set a world record catching seven
marlins in one day, each one close to one thousand pounds.
When it came to reeling in marlins and giant tunas,
he tried to prevent sharks from attacking the fish before

(02:42):
he landed them, and occasionally dispensed with the sharks by
blasting them with his submachine gun. Yikes anddy to have
around Huh. His fishing expeditions led him to write one
of his most famous novels, about a fisherman battling a
giant marlin. The Old Man in the Sea won him
a Pulitzer Prize and was listed among the books that

(03:03):
won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. So many of
his most iconic books, including for Whom the Bell Tolls,
to Have and Have Not and The Snows of Kilimanjaro,
were written at his house in Key West, Florida, which
is where he was introduced to deep sea fishing and
also to cats. He spent his mornings writing in a

(03:24):
studio on the property, surrounded by the scores of cats
he loved. Ernest had gotten his first cat, named snow White,
in the nineteen thirties after becoming fascinated with her on
a boat. She was given to him as a gift
from the ship's captain. Snow White was polydactyl, meaning she
had six toes. Ernest adopted more polydactyl cats he loved

(03:46):
him and allowed those he had to interbreed, so the
majority of his cats had six toes. It's kind of
hard to imagine a macho guy falling in love with
kitty cats who can be very independent, but he explained
his love for them, saying a cat has absolute emotional honesty.
Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings,

(04:09):
but a cat does not. In Key West, he had
dozens of cats, and at his home in Cuba he
had more than fifty. He often said he liked nothing
better than the feeling of having cats surrounding him. He
called them his per factories, and he claimed that one
cat just leads to another. Guests at his home would
tell stories about kittens in all the beds and the

(04:31):
dinner table swarming with cats. Wow. Now these days, if
you visit the Hemingway House Museum in Key West, you're
going to see a ton of cats, many descended from
Ernest's original cats. They have about sixty of them there,
and most have six toes, while the rest carried the
gene for it. Guides will tell you about Hemingway's love

(04:52):
of his cats and the names he gave him, and
his description of their personalities. What were some of the
names Princess six Toes, Zane, Gray, Clark, Gable, Uncle Wolfer,
fur House, Crystaball, and Goodwill. Hemingway believed in the individuality
of each of his pets, and he chose names based
on their personalities. Toward the end of his somewhat tortured life,

(05:16):
Hemingway found his greatest peace with his cats. In the evening,
He'd feed them cases of fresh salmon, and he would
drink with them, tossing back whiskey himself and offering his
cats bowls of milk and whiskey. There's all quite a
contradiction for the original man's man. Today, the descendants of
the cats he adoringly called his love sponges still sleep

(05:40):
on Ernest Hemingway's bed, lounge on his writing desk, and
wander the gardens at his home in Key West. I
hope you like the backstory with Patty Steele. I would
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(06:01):
me if you have a story you'd like me to
take a dive into to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty
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The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premier Networks, the Elvis
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Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday

(06:24):
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
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to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.