Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/787068
30 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S score. He knew her track record. Jane was difficult, demanding, and self-absorbed—"high maintenance," in today's vocabulary. The thing that clearly took the heaviest toll on their relationship, though, was her declining health. In Toys, Gingrich speaks of frequent trips to Baltimore in order for Jane to receive treatments at Johns Hopkins. He also alludes to ambulance rides to a hospital in New York. He provides no specifics regarding her diagnosis, however. One source claims that she suffered from hypoglycemia, but whatever ailed her, the inevitable conclusion is that her lifestyle, in particular the years of hard drinking, had a hell of a lot to do with it. When you fly close to the sun, at the very least you're going to singe your wings. Jane burst into flames. She could ignore the rules of society, but the rules of biology are ultimately inescapable. In 1964, at the age of only 55, she suffered a stroke that rendered her a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. The best snapshot of her in those days comes from the writer M.F.K. Fisher, who in a 1968 letter described her as "a hopeless and completely helpless paralytic and ex-alcoholic" who is "cared for like a rare orchid." By then Fisher and Gingrich were two years into a relationship that would continue until Gingrich's death, from lung cancer, in 1976. They'd first met in 1939, and while their affair was carried out mostly at long-distance—Fisher lived in the California wine country—it was nevertheless intense. They exchanged literally thousands of letters, rendezvoused discreetly when they could, and, in the words of one observer, "epitomized a kind of grown-up glamour." Sophisticated, witty, and piercingly intelligent, Fisher wrote about food—and no one, ever, has written more elegantly, or more sensually, about the acts of cooking and eating. Gingrich tips his hand in Toys (published the year their affair began) when, recalling a luncheon with her in 1945, he rhapsodizes "M.F.K. Fisher was then, and for that matter is still, my idea of the world's most beautiful author, both in person and in prose." As for Jane, she was a ravaged husk, alone and angry at the world, each day the same as the one before and the one that came after. Her great beauty, the one friend she could always rely on, had deserted her. For a woman who'd been a force of nature, cutting a wide swath both in the Great Outdoors and the Great Indoors, such grievous physical reduction must have been unimaginably difficult—and she endured it for 17 years. Whether she was aware of her husband's infidelity, or of the bitter irony of finding herself in the position of the wronged wife—the shoe on the other foot, and all that—is impossible to say. Still, she was capable of flashes of insight. Consider the blackly humorous epitaph she composed for her tombstone: Talents too many, not enough of any. When she finally slipped away in 1981, the photographs of four men regarded her from her bedside: Grant Mason, Richard Cooper, Arnold Gingrich, and Ernest Hemingway. n encounters attempting to follow Hemingway's trail, it was actually Gutiérrez who told him the story of "an old man fishing alone in his skiff (who) hooked a great marlin." Hemingway first recounted the bones of this tale in the October 1936 Esquire, some 15 years before fleshing it out into the novel that helped secure for him the greatest honor a writer can receive, the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1954. And what of Jane Mason? After divorcing her first husband in 1939, she sandwiched two subsequent marriages, both short-lived, around an affair with the editor of Reader's Digest. Following her third divorce, she married Arnold Gingrich in 1955. "That shit!" Hemingway reportedly bellowed when he heard. The irony is breathtaking: What made Gingrich wealthy enough to attract Jane (and to afford her) was Esquire; what made Esquire an immediate success was Hemingway . . . and now Hemingway's mistress when he was writing for Esquire was the wife of its founding editor and current publisher. Gingrich himself had been married four times by then, although three of those unions were to the same woman (!) and the fourth, to a woman who shared his passion for fly fishing, lasted a whopping eight months. In his 1965 memoir, The Well-Tempered Angler, he wryly notes that while he hesitates to identify Jane as his fifth wife, "she herself has been married four times and a man must try any way he can to assert rank." The Well-Tempered Angler is dedicated to Jane, and whenever Gingrich speaks of her therein, his tone is admiring, even adoring. Here he is on her achievements as a sportswoman: "She shot two elephants so big that their tusks comprise the posts of a monumental four-poster bed, and a rhinoceros that was the biggest of the year, and while she never held any big game fishing record, she has insisted that every trout I ever caught was smaller than something she had once used for bait, and it is a matter of record that while fishing with her second husband she tried to throw back a 9-pound smallmouth as an object that nobody could conceivably want to keep." He tells of fishing for Atlantic salmon with Jane in Iceland and Ireland alongside such sporting luminaries as A.J. McClane and Charles Ritz; he mentions that Jane gave him a Paul Young "Martha Marie" fly rod as a Christmas gift in 1959, just a few months before Young's death. In this and in Toys of a Lifetime, published a year after Well-Tempered Angler, Gingrich seems the bemused husband who's not merely tolerant of his wife's eccentricities and peccadilloes but charmed by them—as when she set fire to their suite in a midtown Manhattan hotel, for example. The reality, as it invariably is, was much messier. Their marriage was described as "stormy;" Gingrich apparently moved out after a couple of their frequent rows, although he always moved back in. (They lived at several addresses in New York before settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 1962.) He was also said to be extremely possessive of Jane, but you have to cut him some slack on that The irony is breathtaking: What made Gingrich wealthy enough to attract Jane (and to afford her) was Esquire; what made Esquire an immediate success was Hemingway . . . and now Hemingway's mistress when he was writing for Esquire was the wife of its founding editor and current publisher.