Gloria Hemingway
Encyclopedia
Gloria Hemingway born Gregory Hancock Hemingway, was the third and youngest child of author Ernest Hemingway
. He became a physician and authored a memoir of life with Ernest Hemingway. After struggling with gender identity issues for decades, he underwent gender reassignment surgery and at times presented as female and used the name Gloria, most notably when taken into police custody just days before dying in a women's jail.
on November 12, 1931, to novelist Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer
, and named Gregory Hancock Hemingway. In childhood, he was called Gigi or Gig and was, according to a close observer, "a tremendous athlete" and a "crack shot." As an adult he preferred the name Greg. Hemingway attended the Canterbury School, a Catholic prep school in Connecticut, graduating in 1949. He dropped out of St. John's College, Annapolis, after one year and worked for a time as an aircraft mechanic. Moving to California in 1951, he married against his father's wishes and experimented with drugs, which led to his arrest. When his mother died the day following his arrest, he inherited a fortune, which he used to finance several African hunting safaris. He later spent three years in Africa as an apprentice professional hunter, but failed to obtain a license because of his drinking. He joined and left the U.S. Army in the 1950s, suffered from mental illness, was institutionalized for a time, and received several dozen electric shock treatments. Of another stint shooting elephants he wrote: "I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic." He entered medical school and obtained a medical degree from the University of Miami Medical School
in 1964.
and received $5,000 in return. They had intermittent contact thereafter. He wrote a short account of his father's life and their strained relationship, Papa: A Personal Memoir that became a bestseller. When it appeared in 1976, the preface by Norman Mailer
said: "There is nothing slavish here....For once, you can read a book about Hemingway and not have to decide whether you like him or not." The New York Times called it "a small miracle" and "artfully elliptical" in presenting "gloriously romantic adventures" with "a thin cutting edge of malice." Hemingway wrote of his own ambitions in the shadow of his father's fame: "What I really wanted to be was a Hemingway hero." Of his father he wrote: "The man I remembered was kind, gentle, elemental in his vastness, tormented beyond endurance, and although we always called him papa, it was out of love, not fear." He quoted his father as telling him: "You make your own luck, Gig." and "You know what makes a good loser? Practice." Time
criticized the author's "churlishness" and called his work "a bitter jumble of unsorted resentments and anguished love." His daughter Lorian responded to Papa with a letter to Time that said: "I would also like to know what type of person the author is....I haven't seen him for eight years....I think it sad that I learn more about him by reading articles and gossip columns than from my own communication with him."
According to his wife Valerie, Hemingway enjoyed how his father portrayed him as Andrew in Islands in the Stream (1970) and later used the text as the epigraph to his own memoir of his father. He included this text as the epigraph to a tribute to "Gregory H. Hemingway" he wrote two years after his death:
In 1972, Maia Rodman
, Hemingway's childhood tennis coach and a family friend who had fallen in love with him, dedicated her book The Life and Death of a Brave Bull to Gregory.
He practiced medicine in the 1970s and 1980s, first in New York and then as a rural family doctor in Montana, first in Fort Benton
and later as the medical officer for Garfield County
, based in Jordan
. Interviewed there, he said: "When I smell the sagebrush or see the mountains, or a vast clean stream, I love those things. Some of my happiest memories of childhood were associated with the West." Authorities in Montana declined to renew Hemingway's medical license in 1988 because of alcoholism
. Hemingway battled bipolar disorder
, alcoholism, and drug abuse
for many years.
Hemingway and his brothers tried to protect their father's name and their inheritance by taking legal action to stop the popular local celebration called "Hemingway Days" in Key West, Florida
. In 1999, they collaborated in creating a business venture, Hemingway Ltd., to market the family name as "an up-scale lifestyle accessory brand". Their first venture created controversy by putting the Hemingway name on a line of shotguns.
He considered gender reassignment surgery as early as 1973 and had the surgery in 1995 and began using the name Gloria on occasion. Despite the surgery, Hemingway, presenting as a man, remarried Galliher in 1997 in Washington state.
His public persona remained male. As Gregory, he gave occasional interviews about his father as late as 1999. In July of that year he attended events marking the centenary of Ernest Hemingway's birth in Oak Park, Illinois. He also spoke at the dedication of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum
in his mother's family home in Piggott, Arkansas
, when it opened on July 4, 1999.
Hemingway's transition from male to female was a long process left incomplete at death. He had breast implant surgery on one breast and then had it reversed. He was sometimes seen in women's attire. Yet dressed as a man he frequented a local tavern and presented as what a patron called "just one of the guys." When arrested just days before his death, the police report said that he first gave the name Greg Hemingway and then changed it to Gloria.
and cardiovascular disease
in Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center. On the day of his death, he was due in court to answer charges of indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence. He had been living in Florida for more than ten years. All the children survived him.
Most publications wrote obituaries under the name Gregory, but Time published a brief notice of the death of "Gloria Hemingway, 69, transsexual youngest son turned daughter of novelist Ernest Hemingway" and noted the novelist once said Gregory had "the biggest dark side in the family except me." The gravestone in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho
reads: "Dr. Gregory Hancock Hemingway 1931-2001".
Hemingway left two wills. One will left most of the $7,000,000 estate to Galliher, the other left most of it to Hemingway's children. The children challenged the will that named Galliher as heir, claiming that Galliher was not legally Hemingway's widow since Hemingway's home state of Florida
did not recognize same-sex marriage
s. The parties eventually reached an undisclosed settlement.
wrote about her father in the 1999 book Walk on Water: A Memoir. Son Edward, an artist, published his first illustrated children's book Bump in the Night in 2008. Son John
wrote the critically acclaimed memoir Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
. He became a physician and authored a memoir of life with Ernest Hemingway. After struggling with gender identity issues for decades, he underwent gender reassignment surgery and at times presented as female and used the name Gloria, most notably when taken into police custody just days before dying in a women's jail.
Early life
Gregory Hemingway was born in Kansas City, MissouriKansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
on November 12, 1931, to novelist Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer
Pauline Pfeiffer
Pauline Marie Pfeiffer was the second wife of the writer Ernest Hemingway. She was born in Parkersburg, Iowa, on July 22, 1895, moving to St. Louis in 1901 where she went to school at Visitation Academy of St. Louis...
, and named Gregory Hancock Hemingway. In childhood, he was called Gigi or Gig and was, according to a close observer, "a tremendous athlete" and a "crack shot." As an adult he preferred the name Greg. Hemingway attended the Canterbury School, a Catholic prep school in Connecticut, graduating in 1949. He dropped out of St. John's College, Annapolis, after one year and worked for a time as an aircraft mechanic. Moving to California in 1951, he married against his father's wishes and experimented with drugs, which led to his arrest. When his mother died the day following his arrest, he inherited a fortune, which he used to finance several African hunting safaris. He later spent three years in Africa as an apprentice professional hunter, but failed to obtain a license because of his drinking. He joined and left the U.S. Army in the 1950s, suffered from mental illness, was institutionalized for a time, and received several dozen electric shock treatments. Of another stint shooting elephants he wrote: "I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic." He entered medical school and obtained a medical degree from the University of Miami Medical School
Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine
The University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine is the school of medical education of the University of Miami. The main medical campus is located in the Civic Center, Miami, Florida within the UM/Jackson Memorial Medical Center complex...
in 1964.
Relationship with Ernest Hemingway
Father and son were estranged for many years, beginning when Gregory was nineteen years old. As an attempt at reconciliation, Hemingway sent his father a telegram in October 1954 to congratulate him on being awarded the Nobel PrizeNobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
and received $5,000 in return. They had intermittent contact thereafter. He wrote a short account of his father's life and their strained relationship, Papa: A Personal Memoir that became a bestseller. When it appeared in 1976, the preface by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
said: "There is nothing slavish here....For once, you can read a book about Hemingway and not have to decide whether you like him or not." The New York Times called it "a small miracle" and "artfully elliptical" in presenting "gloriously romantic adventures" with "a thin cutting edge of malice." Hemingway wrote of his own ambitions in the shadow of his father's fame: "What I really wanted to be was a Hemingway hero." Of his father he wrote: "The man I remembered was kind, gentle, elemental in his vastness, tormented beyond endurance, and although we always called him papa, it was out of love, not fear." He quoted his father as telling him: "You make your own luck, Gig." and "You know what makes a good loser? Practice." Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
criticized the author's "churlishness" and called his work "a bitter jumble of unsorted resentments and anguished love." His daughter Lorian responded to Papa with a letter to Time that said: "I would also like to know what type of person the author is....I haven't seen him for eight years....I think it sad that I learn more about him by reading articles and gossip columns than from my own communication with him."
According to his wife Valerie, Hemingway enjoyed how his father portrayed him as Andrew in Islands in the Stream (1970) and later used the text as the epigraph to his own memoir of his father. He included this text as the epigraph to a tribute to "Gregory H. Hemingway" he wrote two years after his death:
Middle years
In the course of his first four marriages, he had eight children: Patrick, Edward, Sean, Brendan, Vanessa, Maria, John, and Lorian. One of those marriages, to Valerie Danby-Smith, Ernest Hemingway's secretary, lasted almost twenty years. Gregory's fourth marriage, to Ida Mae Galliher, ended in divorce in 1995 after three years, though they continued to live together.In 1972, Maia Rodman
Maia Wojciechowska
Maia Wojciechowska aka Maia Rodman was a writer of books for teenagers and young adults. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, spent some time in France and England, and later came to the United States with her parents. In 1965, her book Shadow of a Bull won the Newbery Medal...
, Hemingway's childhood tennis coach and a family friend who had fallen in love with him, dedicated her book The Life and Death of a Brave Bull to Gregory.
He practiced medicine in the 1970s and 1980s, first in New York and then as a rural family doctor in Montana, first in Fort Benton
Fort Benton, Montana
Fort Benton is a city in and the county seat of Chouteau County, Montana, United States. A portion of the city was designated as a National Historic Landmark District in 1961. Established a full generation beforethe U.S...
and later as the medical officer for Garfield County
Garfield County, Montana
-Politics:Garfield County is a solidly Republican county. It might be the most Republican county in Montana and one of the most Republican in the nation....
, based in Jordan
Jordan, Montana
Jordan is a town in and the county seat of Garfield County, Montana, United States. The population was 364 at the 2000 census.-History:Originally settled in 1896, Jordan received a post office on July 11, 1899...
. Interviewed there, he said: "When I smell the sagebrush or see the mountains, or a vast clean stream, I love those things. Some of my happiest memories of childhood were associated with the West." Authorities in Montana declined to renew Hemingway's medical license in 1988 because of alcoholism
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...
. Hemingway battled bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder or bipolar affective disorder, historically known as manic–depressive disorder, is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a category of mood disorders defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated energy levels, cognition, and mood with or without one or...
, alcoholism, and drug abuse
Drug abuse
Substance abuse, also known as drug abuse, refers to a maladaptive pattern of use of a substance that is not considered dependent. The term "drug abuse" does not exclude dependency, but is otherwise used in a similar manner in nonmedical contexts...
for many years.
Hemingway and his brothers tried to protect their father's name and their inheritance by taking legal action to stop the popular local celebration called "Hemingway Days" in Key West, Florida
Key West, Florida
Key West is a city in Monroe County, Florida, United States. The city encompasses the island of Key West, the part of Stock Island north of U.S. 1 , Sigsbee Park , Fleming Key , and Sunset Key...
. In 1999, they collaborated in creating a business venture, Hemingway Ltd., to market the family name as "an up-scale lifestyle accessory brand". Their first venture created controversy by putting the Hemingway name on a line of shotguns.
Gender
For years Hemingway had experienced gender dysphoria. He experimented with wearing women's clothes on a number of occasions. Wife Valerie wrote:He considered gender reassignment surgery as early as 1973 and had the surgery in 1995 and began using the name Gloria on occasion. Despite the surgery, Hemingway, presenting as a man, remarried Galliher in 1997 in Washington state.
His public persona remained male. As Gregory, he gave occasional interviews about his father as late as 1999. In July of that year he attended events marking the centenary of Ernest Hemingway's birth in Oak Park, Illinois. He also spoke at the dedication of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum
Pfeiffer House and Carriage House
The Hemingway-Pfeiffer House, also known as the Pfeiffer House and Carriage House, is a house in Piggott, Arkansas where novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote portions of his novel, A Farewell to Arms...
in his mother's family home in Piggott, Arkansas
Piggott, Arkansas
Piggott, Arkansas is a city in Clay County, Arkansas, one of that county's two seats . It is also the northern terminus of the Arkansas segment of Crowley's Ridge Parkway. As of the 2000 census, Piggott's population was 3,894. The town was founded by William N...
, when it opened on July 4, 1999.
Hemingway's transition from male to female was a long process left incomplete at death. He had breast implant surgery on one breast and then had it reversed. He was sometimes seen in women's attire. Yet dressed as a man he frequented a local tavern and presented as what a patron called "just one of the guys." When arrested just days before his death, the police report said that he first gave the name Greg Hemingway and then changed it to Gloria.
Death
Hemingway died October 1, 2001, of hypertensionHypertension
Hypertension or high blood pressure is a cardiac chronic medical condition in which the systemic arterial blood pressure is elevated. What that means is that the heart is having to work harder than it should to pump the blood around the body. Blood pressure involves two measurements, systolic and...
and cardiovascular disease
Cardiovascular disease
Heart disease or cardiovascular disease are the class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels . While the term technically refers to any disease that affects the cardiovascular system , it is usually used to refer to those related to atherosclerosis...
in Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center. On the day of his death, he was due in court to answer charges of indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence. He had been living in Florida for more than ten years. All the children survived him.
Most publications wrote obituaries under the name Gregory, but Time published a brief notice of the death of "Gloria Hemingway, 69, transsexual youngest son turned daughter of novelist Ernest Hemingway" and noted the novelist once said Gregory had "the biggest dark side in the family except me." The gravestone in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho
Ketchum, Idaho
Ketchum is a city in Blaine County, Idaho, United States, in the central part of the state. The population was 3,003 at the 2000 census. It is in the Wood River Valley, adjacent to Sun Valley; the two communities share many resources and both sit in the same valley beneath Bald Mountain, with its...
reads: "Dr. Gregory Hancock Hemingway 1931-2001".
Hemingway left two wills. One will left most of the $7,000,000 estate to Galliher, the other left most of it to Hemingway's children. The children challenged the will that named Galliher as heir, claiming that Galliher was not legally Hemingway's widow since Hemingway's home state of Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
did not recognize same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage is marriage between two persons of the same biological sex or social gender. Supporters of legal recognition for same-sex marriage typically refer to such recognition as marriage equality....
s. The parties eventually reached an undisclosed settlement.
Children
Daughter Lorian HemingwayLorian Hemingway
Lorian Hemingway is an American author, whose books include the memoir Walk on Water, the novel "Walking Into the River", and the non-fiction book "A World Turned Over" about the devastation of her hometown, South Jackson, Mississippi, by the Candlestick Park Tornado in 1966...
wrote about her father in the 1999 book Walk on Water: A Memoir. Son Edward, an artist, published his first illustrated children's book Bump in the Night in 2008. Son John
John Hemingway
John Patrick Hemingway is an American author, whose memoir Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir examines the similarities and the complex relationship between his father Dr...
wrote the critically acclaimed memoir Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir.