The Untold Story—and Tragic Death—of Hemingway's Muse
Several years ago, I came across a photograph of young Ernest Hemingway sitting at a cafe table with a group of people, including one beguiling, fashionable lady. There was something about the way she gazed at the camera; she managed to be both demure and coquettish. I soon learned that her name was Lady Duff Twysden, and that she had been the real-life inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley, Hemingway's iconic femme fatale in his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises.
I was astonished at first; I have long been a Lost Generation obsessive, but I hadn't realized that Brett was drawn from real life, and I wanted to learn more about her. I started looking for a compelling account of the full, real-life story behind The Sun Also Rises, and found nothing. I decided to write that book myself-Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises-and spent many subsequent months in Lady Duff's company.
She was a tricky person to reconstruct. When she died, she left no known diaries, few surviving letters, no self-aggrandizing memoir-which was rather unusual within her coterie of publicity-seeking expats. Anyone and everyone who ever had a Hemingway connection seems to have turned it into a book at one point or another. Very few photos exist of Duff; I've only seen three from the 1920s, when she was allegedly at the peak of her allure.
Much of what is known about Duff has been pieced together through the testimonies and writings of her contemporaries. When Hemingway met her in 1925, she was in her mid-thirties. A Brit, she had acquired her title by marriage, but was soon to lose it: she had come to Paris to weather a nasty divorce. Her aristocratic husband had remained back in the U.K. Though a notoriously hard drinker, she handled her liquor admirably for such a stylishly lithe creature.
"We were all in love with her," recalled writer Donald Ogden Stewart. "It was hard not to be. She played her cards so well."
Everywhere Lady Duff went, a flock of men sat at her feet, "listening to her every word, loving her looks and her wit and her artistic sensitivity," as one former expat put it. "We were all in love with her," recalled writer Donald Ogden Stewart. "It was hard not to be. She played her cards so well." She treated her many admirers with a democratic flippancy, calling each of them "darling," possibly because she couldn't remember any of their names.
A few writers in the expat colony in Paris were already eyeing her as a muse for their writings, and it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone translated her on paper as a character in a novel.
Hemingway got there first. Even though he was married to his first wife, Hadley, when he met Duff, he reportedly became "infatuated" with her, according to one of his former Paris friends. The timing of Duff's entrance into his life was auspicious: Hemingway was, at that moment, trying to stage a professional breakthrough and desperately needed material to create the all-important debut novel.
Lady Duff would soon provide the basis for the perfect anti-heroine. That summer, when Hemingway took an entourage to Pamplona, Spain, to take part in the San Fermin bullfighting festival there, Lady Duff came along, with two of her lovers in tow, no less.
As one might reasonably expect, the voyage was not a harmonious one. The outing quickly devolved into a Bacchanalian morass of sexual jealousy and gory spectacle. Hemingway nearly came to fisticuffs with one of Duff's suitors, Harold Loeb; Duff herself materialized at lunch one day with a black eye and bruised forehead, possibly earned in a late-night scrap with her other lover, Pat Guthrie. Despite the war wound and atmosphere she was creating, Twysden reportedly glowed throughout the fiesta. The drama became her.
It also became Hemingway, but in a different way. Seeing Twysden there amidst all of that decadence triggered something in him. He realized that he finally had the basis for an incendiary story. The moment he and Hadley left Pamplona to watch bullfights throughout the region, he began transcribing the entire spectacle onto paper.
Suddenly every illicit exchange, insult, and bit of unrequited longing that had happened within his entourage during the fiesta had a serious literary currency. The story became a novel-eventually titled The Sun Also Rises-which he finished in just six weeks.
In the end, The Sun Also Rises was a (barely) fictionalized account of the events that had gone down in Pamplona. Donald Stewart, who appeared in the book's pages as "Bill Gorton," was astonished that Hemingway was even passing it off as fiction: it was, in Stewart's opinion, "nothing but a report on what happened … [it was] journalism."
The first draft of the manuscript even contained the names of the real-life people up until the very last page. Lady Duff would not become Lady Brett until Hemingway revised the book. (He considered and rejected various names for her character, including "Lady Doris.") Yet little about Lady Brett Ashley was fictional: in a later-omitted introduction to the book, Hemingway laid out Lady Duff's background in excruciating detail, from her failed marriage to her drinking habits to her physicality, including her sleek, boy-short haircut, then known as an Eton crop.
When the book was released a year later, Brett Ashley became something of a lifestyle icon to girls who reveled in her dissolute glamour. "Young women of good families took a succession of lovers in the same heartbroken fashion as the heroine," recalled expat writer Malcolm Cowley.
But Lady Duff was reportedly aghast by the portrait. In the years that followed, she was said to call the novel "cruel" and added that Hemingway had played a nasty trick on her and the others. In her opinion, it was nothing more than an example of "cheap reporting." For her and the other people whose lives and misfortunes had been co-opted the book, life could now be divided into two categories: "B.S." (Before Sun.) and "A.S." (After Sun).
In the years that followed, she was said to call the novel "cruel" and added that Hemingway had played a nasty trick on her.
Readers of The Sun Also Rises likely suspect that the character Lady Brett Ashley was not destined for happiness. After all, as Hemingway wrote in Sun, she and the others belonged to a Lost Generation: without hope, beyond redemption.
Lady Duff Twysden did not fare badly, on the other hand, although she died tragically a little over a decade after Sun was released. After her divorce came through, she married Clinton King, a young Texan artist and heir to a candy fortune. This might have given Duff some security at last, but his family, displeased by their union, cut him off following their wedding. The couple stayed together anyway, and were reportedly happy. They returned to North America for a decade "A.S.", drifting from New York City to Mexico to Santa Fe.
The Kings elicited mixed reactions there "on account of their drinking and lewdness," noted Santa Fe-based poet Witter Bynner. (Duff was apparently virtuosic in the art of swearing and had a repertoire of indecent music hall songs.) That said, Bynner conceded that Duff was "witty and hearty on the uptake and a swell yelper over puns," and added that she had remained "lankly handsome." It was known in the Santa Fe community that Hemingway had based Lady Brett Ashley on Duff; her neighbors occasionally referred to her as "Brett" or even "the Duff-Brett woman."
Duff would spend her final days in the city. In 1938, while in Texas, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The Kings returned to Santa Fe, where Duff was placed in a sanatorium. "She looks as frail as a dried sea horse but maintains the gallant sparkle," Bynner reported to a friend. He predicted that the disease would keep her hospitalized for a year and might even kill her.
She died just 22 days after this prediction was made, on June 27, 1938, at the age of 46. While Lady Brett Ashley would forever live on as the model of unconventional glamour, "Mrs. Duff Stirling King" was listed as a "housewife" on her death certificate.
News of her death filtered back to Hemingway, who once again could not resist taking liberties with her life narrative. "Brett died in New Mexico," he told his friend A. E. Hotchner years later. "Call her Lady Duff Twysden, if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett."
All of "Brett's" pallbearers had been her former lovers, he went on; one of these gentlemen slipped while holding the coffin, which then crashed to the ground and cracked open. (In reality, Duff had been cremated, and no funeral was held.) When Hotchner repeated the ghoulish story in his 1966 book Papa Hemingway, it created a minor sensation and added another ignoble chapter to the already notorious fictionalized life story of Lady Duff Twysden.
Clinton King outlived Duff by more than 40 years, and when I was researching Everybody Behaves Badly, I worked hard to track down remnants from his estate. I hoped for photos of Duff, letters, paintings by her (she was a supposedly a passable artist)-anything.
After Duff's death, King had married again, this time to Chicago meat-packing heiress Narcissa Swift. Swift's niece told me that she had been jealous of Duff and likely made Clinton dispose of any memorabilia pertaining to his former wife, news that made my heart sink. It seemed I would have little luck in finding any tangible remainders from her life.
Then, one afternoon, I received an email from a Santa Fe gentleman who had been charged with handling items from Ms. Swift King's estate, which contained remnants of Clinton's papers and effects as well. Most of those materials had been sold or "liquidated" before I had contacted him. However, this fellow still had a few boxes of materials in a basement, and had kindly combed through them for me-and came across an astonishing image.
"[Here is] Lady Duff is sitting on a mule during an adventure up in Northern New Mexico, probably enjoying the services of a dude ranch," he informed me. He speculated that the photo was taken in Bandelier, a national park with over 30,000 acres of canyon and mesa country.
The image is undated, but it may be the last surviving photograph of Lady Duff Twysden, and this is the first time it has been published. It was poignant to behold her there in that desert, a world away from the raucous cafes and bals musettes of Montparnasse. Even though free at last from fleets of suitors, she still seemed to have a commanding presence-and the aloofness that intoxicated men on two continents. This seems appropriate. After all, so few people have been so effectively immortalized yet remained so mysterious at the same time.
Blume is the author of Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, from which this article is partially adapted.
