Speaker 1: When you think of old school kind of macho intellectuals,
Speaker 1: Ernest Hemingway is definitely near the top of that list, right.
Speaker 1: He told amazing stories, had a great, clean writing style,
Speaker 1: and a fascinating lifestyle. But he was incredibly attracted to
Speaker 1: violent sports like big game hunting, bullfighting, boxing, and deep
Speaker 1: sea fishing. He loved war, drinking, and womanizing. He was
Speaker 1: the kind of guy that one hundred years ago was
Speaker 1: idolized as a man's man. But he had one passion
Speaker 1: that you wouldn't necessarily associate with a man's man. I'm
Speaker 1: Patty Steele. Ernest Hemingway and his obsession with kitty kats.
Speaker 1: That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back. Ernest
Speaker 1: Hemingway was a totally macho kind of guy. His novels
Speaker 1: frequently included stories about all his favorite testosterone driven pastimes
Speaker 1: like bullfighting, hunting, fishing, boxing, and drinking plenty of it,
Speaker 1: as well as sex. He loved women. He had multiple
Speaker 1: lovers as well as four wives, but at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, one of the things he loved most
Speaker 1: was cats. He was a paradox. His other obsessions, like
Speaker 1: big game hunting, were wild. He hunted everything from waians
Speaker 1: to grizzly bear, to elk and big horn sheep. But weirdly,
Speaker 1: he's quoted as saying, there is no hunting like the
Speaker 1: hunting of men, and those who have hunted armed men
Speaker 1: long enough and liked it never care for anything else thereafter. Okay,
Speaker 1: he loved the rush he got from war. He actually
Speaker 1: told friends like Marlene Dietrich and Pablo Picasso that in
Speaker 1: war he'd been wounded sixteen times and had killed one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty two enemy soldiers, and he sparkled when
Speaker 1: he talked about it. He loved traveling to exotic destinations
Speaker 1: and would take rickety small planes that were little more
Speaker 1: than flying tin cans. Vacation in the wilds of Africa
Speaker 1: on Safari, Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary were injured
Speaker 1: in a crash landing the very next day. They got
Speaker 1: on another plane to get medical treatment, and that plane
Speaker 1: exploded at takeoff. He was badly wounded, and when he
Speaker 1: finally got to civilization, the press had already wrongly reported
Speaker 1: his death, so he got to read his own obituary,
Speaker 1: and he loved it. Hemingway was also passionate about deep
Speaker 1: sea fishing and actually set a world record catching seven
Speaker 1: marlins in one day, each one close to one thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: When it came to reeling in marlins and giant tunas,
Speaker 1: he tried to prevent sharks from attacking the fish before
Speaker 1: he landed them, and occasionally dispensed with the sharks by
Speaker 1: blasting them with his submachine gun. Yikes anddy to have
Speaker 1: around Huh. His fishing expeditions led him to write one
Speaker 1: of his most famous novels, about a fisherman battling a
Speaker 1: giant marlin. The Old Man in the Sea won him
Speaker 1: a Pulitzer Prize and was listed among the books that
Speaker 1: won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. So many of
Speaker 1: his most iconic books, including for Whom the Bell Tolls,
Speaker 1: to Have and Have Not and The Snows of Kilimanjaro,
Speaker 1: were written at his house in Key West, Florida, which
Speaker 1: is where he was introduced to deep sea fishing and
Speaker 1: also to cats. He spent his mornings writing in a
Speaker 1: studio on the property, surrounded by the scores of cats
Speaker 1: he loved. Ernest had gotten his first cat, named snow White,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties after becoming fascinated with her on
Speaker 1: a boat. She was given to him as a gift
Speaker 1: from the ship's captain. Snow White was polydactyl, meaning she
Speaker 1: had six toes. Ernest adopted more polydactyl cats he loved
Speaker 1: him and allowed those he had to interbreed, so the
Speaker 1: majority of his cats had six toes. It's kind of
Speaker 1: hard to imagine a macho guy falling in love with
Speaker 1: kitty cats who can be very independent, but he explained
Speaker 1: his love for them, saying a cat has absolute emotional honesty.
Speaker 1: Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings,
Speaker 1: but a cat does not. In Key West, he had
Speaker 1: dozens of cats, and at his home in Cuba he
Speaker 1: had more than fifty. He often said he liked nothing
Speaker 1: better than the feeling of having cats surrounding him. He
Speaker 1: called them his per factories, and he claimed that one
Speaker 1: cat just leads to another. Guests at his home would
Speaker 1: tell stories about kittens in all the beds and the
Speaker 1: dinner table swarming with cats. Wow. Now these days, if
Speaker 1: you visit the Hemingway House Museum in Key West, you're
Speaker 1: going to see a ton of cats, many descended from
Speaker 1: Ernest's original cats. They have about sixty of them there,
Speaker 1: and most have six toes, while the rest carried the
Speaker 1: gene for it. Guides will tell you about Hemingway's love
Speaker 1: of his cats and the names he gave him, and
Speaker 1: his description of their personalities. What were some of the
Speaker 1: names Princess six Toes, Zane, Gray, Clark, Gable, Uncle Wolfer,
Speaker 1: fur House, Crystaball, and Goodwill. Hemingway believed in the individuality
Speaker 1: of each of his pets, and he chose names based
Speaker 1: on their personalities. Toward the end of his somewhat tortured life,
Speaker 1: Hemingway found his greatest peace with his cats. In the evening,
Speaker 1: He'd feed them cases of fresh salmon, and he would
Speaker 1: drink with them, tossing back whiskey himself and offering his
Speaker 1: cats bowls of milk and whiskey. There's all quite a
Speaker 1: contradiction for the original man's man. Today, the descendants of
Speaker 1: the cats he adoringly called his love sponges still sleep
Speaker 1: on Ernest Hemingway's bed, lounge on his writing desk, and
Speaker 1: wander the gardens at his home in Key West. I
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Speaker 1: take a dive into to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty
Speaker 1: Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele.
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Speaker 1: Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history
Speaker 1: you didn't know you needed to know.