In 1926, Ernest Hemingway had a wife (his first, Hadley), a three-year-old son named Jack (who they called Bumby), and was having an affair with heiress Pauline Pfeiffer. Hadley knew about Pfeiffer and was quite upset at the betrayal. When Hadley took Bumby to visit Gerald and Sara Murphy (previously) on the French Riviera, Bumby was diagnosed with whooping cough. They were sent to a nearby house owned by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to protect the Murphy’s children. Hadley and Bumby were eventually joined by Pauline Pfeiffer and then by Hemingway.
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The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, a contagious, sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, but Hemingway later described the setting as “a splendid place to write.”
The Murphys and the Fitzgeralds did what they could to keep up the morale at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer homestead. In the early evenings at cocktail hour, they would park their cars on the road in front of the house have a drink by the fence lining the small front yard. Hemingway, Hadley, and Pfeiffer held up their end of the party from the veranda.
They were indeed social distancing pioneers, and it gave the Fitzgeralds and Murphys front-row seats to the drama of the Hemingways’ unconventional new arrangement—their “domestic difficulties,” as Zelda put it. At the end of each evening, the group mounted their empty bottles upside down on the fence spikes. By the time the Hemingways and Pfeiffer left a few weeks later, these trophies ran the entire length of the fence.
Read the story of this strange arrangement during that strange summer at Town & Country magazine. -via Damn Interesting
Source: neatorama