|
Producer Dimitri Villard is the son of Henry Villard, Ernest Hemingway's
wartime friend and the author, with scholar James Nagel, of Hemingway in
Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, which tells the true
story of the love affair that inspired Hemingway to write his masterpiece
A Farewell to Arms.
It was Villard who shaped his father's memoir for screen and developed the
first-draft of the screenplay. "We didn't want to do a biography
of Ernest Hemingway," says Villard. "I was convinced that if
one looked at it from a different point of view, that of a woman torn between
following her heart and following her head, it was a great, classic love
story."
Credited with writing the screen story with Allan Scott, Villard developed
the screenplay with New Line Cinema and eventually presented it to Richard
Attenborough, who was in Los Angeles to confer about another picture. Attenborough
was immediately drawn to the story. "Although I thought that the screenplay
needed a lot of work to be really cinematic," he says, "the subject,
the context and the personalities were just magical. "
Attenborough agrees with Villard that the story of Ernest Hemingway and
Agnes von Kurowsky would be fascinating "whether these two characters
were named Gertie and Bill, or Agnes and Ernie," but adds that he has
always been interested in stories about "embryo figures," historical
personalities at an early turning point in their lives. "I'm much
more interested in fact than fiction. I love people who could stand up and
be counted."
"Some, like Gandhi or Churchill, change our very destinies," he
explains. "Others simply illuminate our lives, and the complexities
and difficulties and confrontations that we inevitably have to face. Hemingway
is one of those. This is a story which demonstrates human relationships,
human fallibilities, passions and adrenaline aroused under the circumstances
of imminent danger and death."
Chris O'Donnell, who had been aware of the project before Attenborough was
attached to it, agreed to play young Ernest Hemingway. "When I heard
that Richard might be interested, I started to aggressively pursue it,"
he recalls. "The story was wonderful, but getting to work with Richard
Attenborough was the primary driving factor to become involved."
After a Thanksgiving lunch with the director in her hometown of Washington,
D. C., Bullock was excited at the prospect of playing Agnes von Kurowsky.
"This was an opportunity to play a character who was an incredibly
modern for her time," she explains. "Until now, my roles have
been contemporary women. Here was a chance to play a woman who was well
ahead of her time in the early 1900s, when women weren't given the leeway
to be that way. Agnes was in a class all her own. She did it her way,
got a lot of heat for it and was pretty impressive."
Oddly enough, Agnes' background was very similar to Bullock's. One German
parent, the other American. Born in Pennsylvania, raised in Washington,
D. C., but well traveled.
"The only thing that showed her emotional life were her letters. If
those letters didn't exist, we would have no idea what went on between her
and Ernest Hemingway. As we started reading through the letters and diaries
and interviews with Agnes, we started piecing together her personality.
At first we weren't quite sure what the cadence of the letters was, whether
she was trying to be funny, or making private jokes, but once we got done
with the research, everything fell into place."
Attenborough worked closely with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Anna
Hamilton Phelan (Mask, Gorillas in the Mist) to develop the final version
of the screenplay. Phelan says that her main inspiration, apart from Villard's
memoir and other research on the actual events, was of two kinds: poems
written during the Great War, expressing the participants' emotional reactions
to the trauma of modern trench warfare and histories of the Red Cross in
World War I.
"Hospitals, because of the life-and-death situations all around, create
strong passions," said Phelan. "I told Richard that I wanted
to take as my thread for the character of Agnes the idea that she was drawn
sexually, almost obsessively, to this young man. He said, 'Go for it.'"
Adds Bullock: "Like many women during this time, Agnes was somewhat
repressed. She never dealt with passion because she was there to heal and
help, and not to delve into her own emotions. Then suddenly she was confronted
with somebody who came across at first as a beautiful, sweet younger man.
He just opened up everything that was raw about her. "
Bullock believes that it was Agnes' own resistance to the passion she was
experiencing for the first time that made her resist the affair. Even though
she was very brave and ahead of her time, she was afraid, because she knew
that stability was not going to come from being paired up with Ernest.
O'Donnell, a Chicago native, identified with the script's depiction of Hemingway
as an untried kid from the Midwest. "I went to his house in Oak Park,
Illinois, and I read his newspaper articles and everything he had written
up to that time, but I tried to stay away from thinking too much about what
he became," he says. "The love story is so emotional, it really
stands on its own."
"What you see at the beginning of the film," says Bullock, "is
a completely innocent, beautiful, egocentric, cocky, fun-loving, witty,
sharp young man. You don't see the wild animal until the end of the film.
Watching Chris play him, you have to abandon what you know about Ernest
Hemingway and accept that everybody starts out as a child. So you have
a wonderful place to start and a great place to end."
"His talent and ambition were right there on the surface, but some
of the darker aspects of the Papa Hemingway we all know hadn't shown themselves
yet. Like most Americans at the time, Ernie was an idealist. He was eager
for adventure, and couldn't wait to get into the war. The reality of it
was horrible, but then he had this love affair to believe in. When that
failed, it changed him forever."
The relationship between Sandra Bullock and Chris O'Donnell was a very easy-going
one, which Attenborough encouraged. "For years mutual friends said
that we should work together because we are exactly alike," says Bullock.
"As soon as we met we felt very comfortable with each other."
Both tended toward fun-loving behavior until the camera rolled -- then
they became thorough professionals, absorbed in the rigid mores of 1918.
"There were times where Richard would separate us or I would just walk
away," says Bullock, "because while we enjoy playing together,
that's the contemporary -- that's easy. Then the minute I'd step into a
scene, there was an intensity and a darkness that developed."
"It's tragic to think that something, which in the 1990s would have
worked so easily, was defeated because Agnes was afraid of allowing love
to open her up. But at that time, it made her grow for an instant and then
completely close up. It's very sad. We so rarely find this kind of passion
in our lives. It's really a gift. When you find it, you should be able
to embrace it, not run from it."
Playing Agnes was a challenge for Bullock, who is known for playing comedic
roles of a very different sort. "There were things I needed to explore
in this character," she says, "and I needed someone to say, 'You've
done this. Now let's go a little deeper and go away from what's easy for
you, because that's a crutch.' I couldn't have played this part two years
ago."
"Sandra is one of those magical figures that the lens adores,"
says Attenborough. "What was marvelous about working with her was
that she said, 'I want to be challenged.' And I felt she was capable of
much more depth, more refined acting than anything she has done before this.
And that's what happened. She is exquisite. She has the ability in front
of the camera to convey with absolute reality a sophistication, a complexity
of thought and resultant action, which is bewildering."
Attenborough and Bullock had a private code -- he'd etch out a "B"
for "Bullock" in the air if he thought she was taking the quick
and easy route. Says Bullock: "Richard Attenborough made me think
of choices I would never have developed on my own. He is a true teacher.
I believe he pushed me to become a better performer, extensively a better
actor, and a better interpreter of the word. He helped me see diversity,
rather than going for the obvious choice."
"He's the first director I've worked with who was an actor," says
Chris O'Donnell, "and that did make a huge difference. He knows how
to communicate what he wants without throwing you off, so you feel safe
enough to take risks. I found myself really growing as a result of working
with him."
To support his key players, Attenborough assembled a fine supporting cast
of actors unknown to film audiences: Ingrid Lacey, Emilio Bonucci, Tara
Hugo and Ian Kelly, among others. The crew were all old collaborators of
the filmmaker, many of whom are Academy Award-winners themselves. Once
the production moved into high gear, locations were found and filming was
accomplished quickly and efficiently, despite the intense heat of Italy
in the summer.
In Love and War was filmed on location in Vittorio Veneto, at the base of
the Dolomites, Venice and Montreal. Interiors were filmed at Shepperton
Studios, London. Despite the key battle scenes and the feeling of a sweeping
epic, In Love and War is an intimate film and shooting lasted only eleven
weeks.
The authenticity of the hospital scenes was greatly abetted by Jean Waldman,
a widow in her fifties who was working as a Volunteer Nurse Historian at
the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington. Responding at first
to research questions over the telephone, she eventually found herself spending
the spring and early summer of 1996 with the filmmakers. She was always
first on the set every day, reveling in the experience and always delighted
by the results.
In Canada the filmmakers were joined by James Nagel, who co-wrote the book
on which the film is based, and he, too, announced himself delighted with
what he saw. Previously, at Shepperton Studios, the company had been visited
by Agnes von Kurowsky's step-daughter.
ERNIE & AGNES: A FAREWELL TO IN LOVE AND WAR
In May of 1918, during the darkest period of Italy's battle to fight off
the invading Austrian army, 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway set sail for Europe,
one of a small army of Red Cross volunteers sent by Woodrow Wilson to shore
up Italian morale while American troops that had been committed to World
War I were stalled in France. For a month Hemingway drove an ambulance
ferrying wounded Italian soldiers back from the Italian-Austrian front.
Then, eager to get closer to the conflict, he volunteered to carry refreshments
to the men fighting on the front line and became the first American casualty
in the war on July 8, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday.
He later embellished the experience, claiming to have been wounded while
fighting with the crack Arditi regiment, but the truth of the incident which
removed him from the war was heroic enough. Despite wounds sustained when
a Minenwerfer shell demolished a forward listening post on the west bank
of the Piave, the young non-combatant carried a wounded Italian soldier
to safety, catching a spray of machine-gun bullets in his right leg -- an
act for which he later received the Italian War Cross of Merit and the Silver
Medal for Military Valor.
While convalescing in the Red Cross hospital, Hemingway fell in love with
a 26-year-old American nurse, also a Red Cross volunteer, Agnes von Kurowsky.
A romance blossomed during his five-month convalescence, and she accepted
his marriage proposal. When the war separated the lovers, Hemingway returned
stateside in January of 1919 to a hero's welcome, determined to earn money
as a writer in order to marry Agnes.
Despite a passionate correspondence, however, Agnes suffered from doubts
about marrying someone still in his teens, which were only aggravated by
the attentions of a more mature and much more appropriate suitor, an Italian
nobleman. Finally, she wrote Hemingway a letter in which she broke off
their engagement and announced plans to marry Count Domenico Carraciolo.
The rejection hurt him so deeply, writes James Nagel, co-author of Hemingway
in Love and War, "that he wrote about it all his life" -- most
notably in his second novel.
Ten years after the end of World War I, Hemingway, already an established
author, published A Farewell to Arms, based on his experiences during the
Italian campaign and his romance with Agnes von Kurowsky. Banned in Boston
for licentiousness and by Mussolini for its "demoralizing" portrayal
of the Italian army in defeat, the book became a best-seller, and Hemingway
was recognized as the literary spokesman for the generation shaped by the
First World War.
During the intervening years he had married, divorced and married again;
had suffered the shock of his father's suicide and had outgrown the youthful
idealism that sent him to Europe. In 1942 he would describe World War I
as "the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that had ever
taken place on earth," and that is how the war is portrayed in the
novel, which charts the gradual awakening of the narrator -- an older version
of Ernie the ambulance driver -- to the senseless horror of what is going
on around him, culminating in the catastrophic retreat of the Italian Army
from Caporetto, during which hundreds of Italian soldiers were killed by
their fellow countrymen.
Unlike The Sun Also Rises, which preceded it, Hemingway's second novel was
the fruit of ten years of reflection, culminating in fifteen months of intensive
work. He re-wrote the ending for A Farewell to Arms 39 times before getting
it right. Shorter pieces published in the twenties show him struggling
to make artistic sense of his war experiences, particularly in "A Very
Short Story," a cynical two-page account of his brief love affair with
Agnes.
Once purged of his bitterness by time, experience, and that single act of
literary vengeance, Hemingway did not portray his youthful love with the
disillusion that marks his descriptions of the Italian campaign. Instead,
the doomed attempt of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell
to Arms to find a "separate peace" in the midst of war is one
of the most powerful love stories in modern literature.
Some readers have had trouble believing in Catherine, the passionate woman
who woos Frederic away from the War, then dies giving birth to his stillborn
child. The first to object was Hemingway's friend and editorial advisor
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who found her too good to be true and wrote Hemingway
that her heroic character, which could only be an infatuated adolescent's
idealized image of a woman, was the book's major flaw.
Later critics accused Hemingway of having created a male wish-fulfillment
fantasy, calling Catherine a "dishrag" and an "inflated rubber-doll
woman," while another school -- all-male -- saw her as a witch who
lures the hero away from his social responsibilities. It took a new generation
of readers and critics who had grown up in the shadow of another insane
war to see in the war-traumatized Catherine what one contemporary reviewer
recognized at first glance: "the apotheosis of bravery in a woman."
The identity of Catherine's real-life model remained a secret until Leicester
Hemingway revealed it in a memoir published in 1961, just after his brother's
suicide. Ten years later scholar Michael Reynolds interviewed Agnes von
Kurowsky in Florida for his book Hemingway's First War, the first comprehensive
study of A Farewell to Arms debunking the idea that the novel is autobiographical.
Insofar as the war passages are concerned, Reynolds' book performs a valuable
service. He shows that the nightmarish portrayal of the retreat from Caporetto,
for example, was only partly inspired by the author's first-hand experience
of trench warfare -- he was still in high school when it happened. Like
Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage, Hemingway based his account of
the war largely on conversations with veterans, newspaper articles and tomes
of military history, and later was at some pains to discredit the idea that
his masterpiece was a thinly-veiled piece of journalism. That is why, Reynolds
says, he praised Crane's novel in his 1942 introduction to a collection
of war writings as "truer to what war is than any war the boy who
wrote it would ever live to see."
But Reynolds, armed with his thesis, was perhaps too ready to believe everything
Agnes von Kurowsky told him about her youthful romance with Hemingway.
Understandably vexed that tour guides in the Hemingway Museum at Key West,
Florida, where she was living happily with her second husband, were describing
her to tourists as "Hemingway's girl," she denied being really
in love with young Ernie and emphatically denied that there had ever been
anything improper about their relationship.
Reynolds concluded that "Agnes von Kurowsky contributed little to Catherine
Barkley other than her presence and her physical beauty....Whatever their
relationship, it cannot have been that of Catherine and Frederic."
It wasn't until the publication of Hemingway in Love and War by Henry Serrano
Villard and James Nagel that a fuller picture of Hemingway's wartime love
affair emerged. Later an ambassador and diplomat, young Harvard graduate
Henry Villard had also been a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross
in Italy in 1918. Villard came down with malaria and jaundice at the same
time Hemingway was wounded and the two became close friends in the Red Cross
hospital in Milan. Equally important, Villard had known Agnes von Kurowsky
well, and like all the men in the ward, had been smitten with her, although
he realized that his friend Ernie had beaten him out "when I caught
him holding her hand one afternoon in a manner that did not suggest she
was taking his pulse."
Villard renewed his friendship with Agnes shortly after Hemingway's death,
and 20 years later was able to render her a last service. She wished to
be buried in Soldiers Home National Cemetery with her parents and grandparents
(her mother's father had been Quartermaster General of the Union Army during
the Civil War), but National Cemetery regulations made no provision for
Red Cross nurses. Because of his years in government, Villard was able
to have the ruling reversed, and after a peaceful death in a convalescent
home, Agnes von Kurowsky was buried in 1984 in Washington, D.C. with an
honorary six-man marine guard, in accordance with "her gallant and
honorable services" with the Red Cross.
In gratitude, her husband sent Villard his late wife's war-time diary, a
document whose existence no one had ever suspected. It was published in
1989 together with her letters to Hemingway, Hemingway's letters to his
family from Italy, a memoir by Villard and a sober examination of the facts
by Hemingway scholar James Nagel.
For a private journal, Agnes' jottings in her clothbound "Agenda 1918"
are surprisingly guarded. Although Hemingway figures prominently, first
as "Mr. Hemingway," then as "Ernie" or "the Kid,"
Agnes never says she is in love with him, although she makes no secret of
the fact that their romance is progressing in spite of the watchfulness
of nursing supervisor Katherine De Long and the disapproval of Agnes' best
friend, Elsie MacDonald.
What she does express is her conflicting feelings about the double impropriety
of an older nurse becoming involved with a patient still in his teens:
"Ernest Hemingway is getting earnest," she writes on August 26.
"He was talking last night of what might be if he was 26-28. In some
ways -- at some times -- I wish very much that he was. He is adorable &
we are very congenial in every way. I'm getting so confused in my heart
& mind I don't know how I'll end up. Still, I came over here for work
and until the war is over I won't be able to do anything foolish, which
is lucky for me."
The letters are considerably more revealing. The day after Hemingway leaves
for Stresa on holiday, she writes to him, "I've just been in your room,
& talk about chairs that whisper! The whole room haunted me so that
I could not stay in it." (In her journal for the same day: "It
was the most dismal night I ever spent on night duty. I missed him so much...")
When she is transferred to Florence, she writes every day and sometimes
even twice a day, despite Red Cross restrictions on letter-writing during
the wartime paper shortage. And when she learns that he is returning to
the States, she sounds rather like Catherine Barkley: "Kid, I miss
you more & more, & it makes me shiver to think of your going home
without me. What if our hearts should change? Both, I mean, & we should
lose this beautiful world of us?"
The letters are filled with private jokes and pet names. She calls Ernie
"Kid" or "My dearest Kid," twice addressing him, playfully,
as "My Old Master" or "Dear Old Man." Usually she signs
herself "Aggie," "Mrs. Kid" or "Your very own Kid,"
although she occasionally uses more overt expressions: "From the love-letters
of a Rookie" and "I love you still -- ever." She writes
in the sprightly style expected of young women of the day, often chiding
herself for being too sentimental, and chiding him once for thinking she
is "ashamed" of him.
One passage throws light on the disparity between the journal and the letters:
"I never pined for anyone before in my life," she writes on October
29. "In every book I read I seem to find a parallel between you &
me. Does it sound foolish to you when I write like this? I really never
thought I could write what I feel so plainly & openly. Writing has
always made me draw into a shell -- it seemed so irrevocable. Once written
you can't take back what you have said....I'd hate to be opening my heart
like this on paper, if I thought you were not responding in yours. But
then, I'm almost sure I could tell by the way you wrote if you began to
change."
In the end it was Agnes who changed. In her letter of 1919, breaking off
the relationship, she is already trying to talk herself out of her earlier
professions of love, and it is clear that Ernie's fears that she was ashamed
of being involved with a younger man were justified: "It's all right
to say I'm a Kid, but, I'm not, & I'm getting less & less so every
day," she writes. "I am now and will always be too old."
Brave enough and tender-hearted enough to have a passionate romance with
a wounded soldier eight years her junior at a time when women who did were
stigmatized, Agnes was finally too conventional to marry him, although in
the letters she speaks of their plans to marry after the war, signing two
of them "Yours (some day)" and "Your missis."
Given the period, her decision seems tragically inevitable, and it is certainly
understandable that she would have wanted to erase her memory of their romance.
But it is hard not to agree with Henry Villard's conclusion: "Spontaneous,
unaffected, caring, these are letters such as any young woman of that particular
period in history might write to her sweetheart," he says in his introduction
to the letters. "They should be taken for neither more nor less."
Was Agnes the model for Catherine Barkley, as most scholars have supposed?
Villard writes, "I had no doubt, that the major contribution was
that made by Agnes herself....In no other work did Hemingway describe his
heroine in terms of such passionate tenderness....Surely, the tale had its
wellspring in something wholly unfeigned by the writer. And the fact that
Ernie had in his possession three of her letters until the day of his death
showed that he had not forgotten."
Despite critics who see in A Farewell to Arms an act of vengeance like "A
Very Short Story," what Hemingway did in that book was to reinvent
his romance with Agnes by imagining, as she had put it, "what might
[have been] if he was 26-28," with a senseless but somehow inevitable
death at the end to explain the man he had become as he prepared to turn
thirty:
In writing A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway immortalized his lost love in the
character of Catherine Barkley, one of the great heroines of English literature.
But it was his old friend and rival Henry Villard who revealed to the world,
after both parties to the love affair were gone, the real Agnes von Kurowsky,
who is in her own way every bit as moving as her fictional counterpart.
Suggestions? Comments? Fill out our Feedback Form.