Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Franklin’s Bullfighter from Brooklyn recall their meriendas at “La Playa,” Franklin’s camp on the Manzanares River in the summer of 1931.
Franklin recalls that he had time to play because he was recovering from an injury. They cooked paella, probably prepared by Franklin’s cook Mercedes. He says that Hemingway sometimes brought along his son Bumby (John), but Hemingway doesn’t confirm this. He enjoyed Franklin’s company, and in the concluding passages of Death in the Afternoon, he ends with a remarkable elegiac remembrance of how when the meriendas were done, he “walked home in the dark with cars coming fast along the road; and with electric lights through the green leaves and the dew settling the dust, in the cool at night.”
Hemingway might be testy with gay men but not with Franklin. Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, despised Franklin and his recollections of the Spanish Civil War.
Featured Image: Unknown photographer. Picnic on the Manzanares River. John F. Kennedy Library, Cambridge, MA, from Harvard University. On the left is Franklin standing next to his mozo, assistant, Luis Crovetto, and then Hemingway (wearing dark shorts and a knee brace). Nudity prevailed, except for this photograph. Bumby, Hemingway’s son, is not present.
See Ernest Hemingway. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s, 1932; Sidney Franklin. Bullfighter from Brooklyn, an Autobiography of Sidney Franklin with an Evaluation of Sidney Franklin from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952; Bart Paul. Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2009