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pair of shoes and no underwear. I was with him when he went into Mark Cross on Fifth Avenue to buy a bag. The salesman showed him one that held ten suits and cost three hundred dollars. "Can afford the bag," Ernest told him, "but can't afford to buy nine suits."
    But getting back to that October day in 1949 when Ernest checked into the Sherry-Netherland with his Across the River manuscript. On the morning of that day Herbert Mayes (who had succeeded our friend Arthur Gordon as editor of Cosmo) called me into his office and said that eighty-five thousand dollars was so exorbitant as to be beyond reason and I was to tell Mr. Hemingway that, and offer fifty thousand instead. I refused. As far as I was concerned, a solid deal had been made and I was not going to carry the weasel. I offered, however, to bring Mayes and Ernest together so that Mayes could tell Ernest himself. But Mayes decided, with considerable rancor, to let the price stand, and I was dispatched to the Sherry-Netherland to get the manuscript.
    Ernest's suite was well attended when I got there. In the center of the sitting room was a round table on which rested two silver ice buckets, each containing a bottle of Perrier-Jouet, a huge blue tin of beluga caviar, a salver of toast, a bowl of finely chopped onions, a bowl of lemon slices, a salver of smoked salmon and a thin vase containing two yellow tea roses. Around the table were Marlene Dietrich, Mary Hemingway, Jigee Viertel, Charles Scribner, Sr., and George Brown. Off to one side, with a stenographer's pad in her lap, sat Lillian Ross of The New Yorker. Jigee Viertel, formerly Budd Schulberg's wife, at that time married to Peter Viertel, had known the Hemingways for some time and was booked to cross on the lie de France with them. George Brown was one of Ernest's oldest and best friends; the genesis of their friendship was George's demised Brown's Gymnasium, once the hangout of the boxing elite. Ernest always said that George knew more about prize fighting than all the New York managers and trainers put together. Lillian Ross, in her corner, was taking rapid shorthand notes for a profile of Ernest she was doing for The New Yorker. ("It was a shorter hand than any of us knew," Ernest was to say a few months later.)
    Ernest introduced me to his guests and suggested that later on we all go to "21" for dinner. He said that "21" first qualified as his alma mater back in the Twenties at a time when he was living in a little room at the Brevoort. He was behind in his rent and had not eaten solidly for a week when Jack Kriendler, co-owner of "21", eased him into a posh party that was being given on the second floor of the speak-easy. During the course of the evening Ernest was introduced to an Italian girl who he said was the most beautiful girl—face and body— he had ever seen, before or since, any country, any time. "She had that pure Renaissance beauty, black hair straight, eyes round at the bottoms, Botticelli skin, breasts of Venus Rising. After the joint closed and everyone started to leave, she and I took our drinks into the kitchen. Jack said it was okay, since there were two or three hours of cleaning up to be done downstairs. So we talked and drank and suddenly we were making love there in the kitchen and never has a promise been better fulfilled. By now it was five in the morning, and she said we'd better be leaving, but we got only as far as the stairway—you know that landing as you come up the stairs of Twenty-One? That's as far as we got and then we were making love again, on the landing, and it was like being at sea in the most tempestuous storm that ever boiled up; you think you'll go under with the rises and falls, but ride it out, knowing you are close to solving the mystery of the deep.
    "She would not let me take her home, but when I awoke the next day in my Brevoort squirrel cage, my first thought was to find her again. As I put on my jacket, I noticed green sticking out of the pocket—three