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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 23 Among the most accomplished outdoorswomen of her day, gorgeous Jane Mason inspired Hemingway's nastiest femmes fatales. BY tom davis Hemingway's principal Cuban residence for most of the 1930s, it was ground zero for his torrid four-year affair with the model for Margot Macomber, a young (she was 22 when they met), impetuous, drop- dead gorgeous American socialite named Jane Kendall Mason. Indeed, Hemingway boasted that she'd sometimes climb through the hotel window to sleep with him, the not-so-subtle implication being that Papa swung the heavy lumber and she couldn't get enough of it. She brought plenty to the party, too. Impossibly beautiful—Pond's Cold Cream had used her likeness in an advertising campaign, comparing her luminous features to those of a Botticelli Venus— she also oozed sexuality. Hemingway himself described her as "about the most uninhibited person I ever met." One tends to break out in a sweat just pondering that. But there was more. Jane Mason was unable to conceive children, meaning that there was no fear of pregnancy with her and no need for any form of birth control. This had to be as liberating to her partners and her as the introduction of the Pill was to couples in the 1960s. And while at the time it would have given her a leg up in the sack race against practically any other woman her age, it gave her a particular advantage over Pauline, Hemingway's wife. Advised by her doctors not to have more children after the difficult birth of their second son, Gregory, in 1931, Pauline insisted that they practice coitus interruptus—the only method of birth control permitted by her Catholic faith. Now, a lot of men find this method less than satisfying, but for a man like Hemingway, whose ego was inseparable from his penis and for whom sexual potency was a critical measure of self-worth (see Jake Barnes), it was close to intolerable. Calling herself "a bloody fool," Pauline blamed it for the breakup of their marriage, although when Hemingway finally left her it wasn't for Jane Mason but for another stunning blonde, Martha Gellhorn. They met toward the end of 1936 in Sloppy Joe's, Hemingway's favorite Key West watering hole; soon, repeating the pattern he'd established a decade earlier in Paris when he became infatuated with Pauline while married to his first wife, Hadley, he essentially installed Martha as a member of their household. "Here comes the Memsahib," he said. She was walking over from her tent looking refreshed and cheerful and quite lovely. She had a very perfect oval face, so perfect that you expected her to be stupid. But she wasn't stupid, Wilson thought, no, not stupid. W hen Ernest Hemingway wrote that—it's from his devastating story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"—the face he saw before him was no composite, no construct of the imagination. On the contrary, it was the face of a specific woman, bright, distinct, and blazingly, even disturbingly, real. It was a face that, in the five years since he'd first laid eyes on it, crossing from Cherbourg to New York aboard the Île de France, he'd seen many times in many places: aboard his own boat, Pilar, while fighting giant marlin in the blue water of the Gulf Stream; at the Club de Cazadores in Havana, standing elbow-to-elbow with the finest live pigeon shooters in the world; at the wheel of her Packard, roaring down the narrow Cuban backroads on yet another daiquiri-fueled thrill ride, seeing how far and fast she could go before his nerve broke and he begged her to slow down . . . But where he saw that face most intimately and yet most mutably—as if in a dream that isn't quite a nightmare but haunts nevertheless, coloring one's waking moments like a stain—was inches from his own, on the twisted sheets of his bed at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. Room 511, to be precise. The dish he couldn'T land