Key West Live Cam

The wall is the first thing you see. It's odd. The courses of brick rise and fall gently rather than follow a straight line. The mortar between the bricks looks smeared on, not smoothed and pointed the way an experienced mason would do it.

But Hemingway was delighted when his handyman, Toby Bruce, built the wall in 1935. It was solid enough to keep tourists from strolling onto his Key West, Florida, property and tall enough to keep them from snooping on him while he enjoyed a drink and a cigar with celebrity friends on his porch. Public curiosity about Hemingway hasn't waned with time. More than half a century after the author left his house at 907 Whitehead Street with his second marriage in ruins, tourists pour through the gate of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum at the rate of 500 or more each day. The wall is just a relic. It's okay to come inside.

Crossing the wide paved walkway shaded by a giant Indian banyan tree - only four feet tall when Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, planted it in 1931 - visitors pass a curious fountain. Built in the shape of a Civil War ironclad warship, it's an eccentric thing to have sitting along the approach to a Spanish Colonial-style house. Then there are the cats. Lying on the fountain, curled up on front porch chairs, prowling the grounds, there are more than 50 cats in residence, most descendants of Hemingway's cats - with names such as Zane Gray, Ava Gardner, Erroll Flynn and Marilyn Monroe. Descended from a charming but deformed old Tom the author brought back from a boat trip to Havana, a lot of them have six toes.

From the mutant feline livestock to the funny fountain to all the odds bits of furniture, books and hunting and fishing trophies, it's obvious this was meant to be a private place, a spot a famous man could come to indulge whims, relax and be ignored by a town made up of folks not big on reading. At least, that's what it started out to be. Proud of the house, the novelist wrote his editor "You will be crazy about this place when you see it."

This was Ernest Hemingway's home during some of his happiest, most productive years. With this house and town as his base, he started building his image as the larger-than-life writer, hunter, fisherman, lover and brawler of international reputation - "Papa" Hemingway. Before that, he was the son of a physician, a native of Oak Park, Illinois. He left home at age 18 to drive an ambulance in the Italian army near the end of World War I. Seriously wounded in July 1918, hospitalized in Europe, he returned to the U.S. in 1919 and lived briefly in Chicago. Marrying Hadley Richardson, he learned the news business in Kansas City, then took his bride to Paris in 1921 where he worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. The couple returned to North America in 1923 where Hemingway worked in the Star's main office. But the writer clashed with the city editor and by January 1924 was back in the "City of Lights" with his wife and infant son John.

The Paris years are the most romantic in the Hemingway legend. As part of "The Lost Generation" of expatriate American writers and artists, he drank hard, played hard, attended American poet Gertrude Stein's literary soirees and enjoyed boozy adventures with American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. His own literary output was steady: In Our Time, his first short-story collection, appeared in 1925; his first novel, The Sun also Rises, based on the expatriate experience, was published in 1926. Then he threw over his wife for Vogue fashion magazine writer Pauline Pfeiffer. They married in May 1927.

After a home accident and other problems, Ernest and Pauline, pregnant with his second child, decided to return to the U.S. Hemingway recalled Dos Passos telling him about an out-of-the-way Florida town called Key West. After a 1924 visit he described it as a "dreamland," the perfect place for Hemingway to "dry out his bones" after his bad luck. Dos Passos waved a tasty bit of trivia at Hemingway to lure him; the island's name is a corruption of the Spanish Cayo Hueso, or Bone Key.

Once prosperous, Key West was a poor island town when the Hemingways showed up and rented an apartment there in late '27. Its 10,000 residents, living in a collection of run-down, unpainted frame houses, scratched out a living fishing and smuggling rum and whiskey from Havana, 90 miles south. Their only connection to Florida's mainland was a miles-long railroad bridge. A tough, independent collection of Cubans, New Englanders and Bahamians known as "Conchs," they were steadfast in their live-and-let-live approach to each other and took the burly writer to their hearts.

While working there on his novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway made friends with wealthy Key West businessman Charles Thompson and speakeasy owner "Sloppy Joe" Russell. But locals didn't believe him when he said he was a novelist. In an April 1928 letter, he asked Scribner's publishing house editor Maxwell Perkins to send copies of his books so he could prove it. It was an anonymity he would yearn for in a few years.

The Hemingways went to Kansas City in June 1928 for the birth of their son Patrick. They returned to Key West in November, moving into a rented house at 1100 South Street. Several weeks later, the writer's father died, a suicide. Hemingway left immediately for the funeral but was back on the Key in January 1929. He urged friends to visit him. Perkins, Dos Passos and painters Waldo Peirce and Mike Strater were lured by his reports of mid-70s January temperatures, wonderful Gulf Stream fishing and "lots of liquor" recovered from a bootlegger's wrecked boat.

After a visit and a fishing adventure, Perkins said Key West was a good place for Hemingway; the novelist was starting to agree. Before the Hemingways left town again for summer travels, Pauline looked at properties with Charles Thompson's wife, Lorine, including one Lorine described as "a miserable wreck of a house" at 907 Whitehead Street.

The house, made of coral rock quarried at the site, was once home to Connecticut-born merchant and salvager Asa Tift, one of mid-19th-century Florida's wealthiest men. Tift built it with opulent touches, putting up New Orleans wrought-iron porch railings and balcony supports and Italian marble on fireplaces.

Tift died in 1889, and his house passed through several owners. When Pauline looked at it in 1930, the once-grand place seemed unfit for habitation. The roof leaked; plaster crumbled and fell from ceilings. Some moisture-warped doors wouldn't close.

The next year Pauline took a second look and sized up the wrap-around balconies, spacious yard and old carriage house with its second-story loft - ideal for a writer's work room. With help from her family, the couple paid $8,000 for the house in April 1931 and moved in shortly before Christmas, a month after their son Gregory was born.

Pauline started work on the house and never quit. "Mother was always fixing and changing and remodeling," Gregory Hemingway recalled in a 1976 memoir. Local workmen repaired the place, and Toby Bruce, a cabinetmaker from Pauline's hometown of Piggot, Arkansas, came to build fixtures and furniture. In a 1932 letter to Perkins, Ernest wrote "There have been [enough] plumbers - roofers - screeners - electricians etc. here to drive you bughouse."

Pauline joined the kitchen - once in a separate building - to the main house and created a small breakfast alcove for their sons. She raised the kitchen counters several inches so her tall husband wouldn't get a backache stooping to clean fish; with a catwalk, she joined the second-floor master bedroom to the carriage house second-story work room.

Visitors today look at Pauline's renovations, the couple's furniture and the writer's collectibles and mementoes and get an idea of life with the globe-trotting pair.

In his years on Whitehead Street, the novelist rose early every day, prowled the second floor while his cook prepared breakfast, then ate in bed with Pauline before crossing the catwalk at 8:00 to work in his studio.

The catwalk was destroyed by a storm in the 1950s, but today the studio looks as though Hemingway still uses it. A hayloft when the building was a carriage house, it's large and sparsely furnished. A battered steamer trunk with the initials EH on its lid sits beside the entrance. The walls are lined with bookshelves and trophies from his hunting and fishing expeditions; the head of a kudu shot in Africa hangs opposite the door peering down at visitors. Cats come and go as they please, snoozing on the round table Ernest used as a desk, the spot Harry Morgan, hero of Hemingway's Key West and Havana adventure novel To Have and Have Not was created. Beside it is the Cuban cigar-maker's chair the novelist used.

A small Royal typewriter sits on the table. But tour guides explain Hemingway actually used a pencil to write and had someone else - often Pauline or his sister Sunny - type his manuscripts. He gauged his production by the number of pencils he wore down. A seven-pencil day was a good one.

He usually worked about six hours, knocking off around 2:00 for a nap or a swim with his pals at the nearby Navy Yard.

Evenings were often spent at his buddy Russell's saloon, "Sloppy Joe's." But sometimes Northern visitors came and there were dinners or parties at the Whitehead Street house.

What the writer's friends saw then, visitors see now. Antiques the Hemingways brought from Europe are scattered throughout the house. The centerpiece of the dining area is Pauline's 18th-century walnut table from Spain, under a chandelier made of hand-blown Venetian glass. Between the kitchen and living room is a 17th-century walnut bench from a Spanish monastery. The upstairs master bedroom features a king-sized bed with a headboard made from a monastery gate of the same period and an unusual memento from Hemingway's Paris years - a vividly painted ceramic statue of a sitting cat crafted by Pablo Picasso. This last bit, like every good collectible, came with a story.

Jack and Bernice Daniel bought the house in 1961 after Hemingway died. Bernice found the curious little statue in pieces in a box in the basement. She glued them together, with no idea she had an original Picasso until first wife Hadley Richardson Hemingway visited in 1964 and identified it. Until then, it was just a damaged old knick-knack, close to ending up in the trash.

Fans of The Sun Also Rises, The Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea know the author as a bullfight fan, big game hunter, combat veteran and sport fisherman, and as the man who coined the term "Moveable Feast." Where he was, so were the good times, the action and the occasional argument. Hemingway's early Key West days made this clear. An April 1934 Esquire magazine advance payment of $3,000 allowed him to buy his own fishing boat, the Pilar. He used it for entertaining friends and fishing trips to Cuba and Bimini.