ARE WE THERE YET?

Pfeiffer family real stars of Hemingway museum

A photograph of Ernest and Pauline greets visitors to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott.
A photograph of Ernest and Pauline greets visitors to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott.

PIGGOTT -- In real life, Ernest Hemingway relished his swaggering headline act as world-famous author and adventurer.

At Piggott's Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Education Center, even though his name comes first, he pretty much plays second banana to Pauline Pfeiffer and her wealthy Arkansas family.

Pauline was No. 2 of the novelist's four wives. Museum visitors in our state's far northeast can easily come away with the impression that he married her as much for money as for love. And they'll likely conclude that she was deeply enamored of him.

They also figure to depart fascinated by the varied personalities of the Pfeiffers. The relatives included her devoutly Catholic parents, Mary and Paul, along with athletic sister Virginia and beneficent Uncle Gus, who gave Hemingway much financial help.

When Pauline met Ernest in Paris in March 1925, she and Virginia were well-heeled Americans enjoying the French capital's joie de vivre.

Ernest was living in an apartment with his first wife, Hadley Richardson. She became good friends with Pauline, then a reporter and writer for Vogue magazine in Paris.

That friendship went awry when a love affair germinated between Ernest and Pauline. Hadley, apparently oblivious for quite a while, become the odd person out in the triangle. In May 1927, after she divorced the author, he and Pauline married.

Visitors to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum get a guided tour of the family's rambling two-story home, as well as the barn that was converted to a studio to give the author privacy for writing. There, during stays in Piggott, he wrote some of A Farewell to Arms and several short stories.

The house's living room features a Steinway piano that was a gift from Uncle Gus. On it is displayed sheet music from the 1932 movie version of A Farewell to Arms, which starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes.

The upstairs bedroom used by Pauline and Ernest opens onto a balcony, where the family's live-in housekeepers would play with the couple's two children.

Furnishings in the barn include a period typewriter used by Hemingway as well as a poker table where he played some evenings with locals. An alcove holds mounted animal trophies like those the couple brought back from a 1934-35 African safari. Photos suggest that Pauline did her fair share of shooting.

The museum's gift shop sells most of Hemingway's works, along with other books about the Pfeiffers and him. Well worth reading is a detailed 2012 volume by Ruth A. Hawkins. An Arkansas State University administrator, she created the Arkansas Heritage Sites program that includes the Piggott museum.

The book observes that Pauline is less known than the other three wives, even though she was a capable editor who "lived and worked with him during his most productive period as a writer" and bore two of his three children.

Hemingway divorced her in 1940 to wed his next wife, Martha Gellhorn, a correspondent he'd wooed and won while covering the Spanish Civil War.

"When Ernest betrayed Pauline," writes Hawkins, "he cut himself off from the Pfeiffer resources that had sustained him for years -- a loss perhaps harder to reconcile than the loss of their daughter."

The book's title could well sum up the arc of couple's tangled relationship: Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow.

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, 1021 W, Cherry St., Piggott, offers public tours on the hour 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday, 1-3 p.m. Saturday. Admission is $5 ($3 for senior citizens and groups of 8 or more). For details, call (870) 598-3487 cq or visit hemingway.astate.edu.

Weekend on 05/14/2015

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