Read Online Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson - Free Book Online Page B

ads began to show up in the press. The big event every year for showcasing new boats—and for taking orders—was the National Motor Boat Show, held in January at Grand Central Palace in New York. This is when the shipyards from across the country unveiled their beauties in the flesh, seeking to outdo one another with flashy exhibit spaces and giveaway trinkets and walk-through models. Sometimes chastely sexy girls were there to greet buyers on the foredeck. In other words, the New York boat show was just like a big car show, except that the motoring dreams were on water instead of the open road. Since he was in Africa, Hemingway was going to miss by roughly two months the gaudy 1934 show at which the Wheeler firm was one of the starring concerns.
    Many American boat makers in the thirties were just trying to hang on, no matter the impression they were giving to would-be customers. By mid-Depression, some companies were down to a handful of employees. And their new models were often pretty much the old models—using the same hulls from prior years, but with different manufacturing numbers.
    The 1934 Playmates—how Hemingway must have loathed the name—rangedin size from twenty-eight to forty-six feet. The company produced mainly stock boats rather than custom-made craft, although if you were sufficiently well-heeled, the boatyard at the foot of Cropsey Avenue was glad to do custom work, starting either from absolute scratch or, more characteristically, from a stock Wheeler hull and constructing upward to your specifications. Mostly, though, Wheeler was known to yachting enthusiasts as a “production shipyard.” The company had a reputation for good woodwork, inside and out, especially in its cabinetry. Its “brightwork” (what you see on the exterior) was known to be very solid, if not spectacular. Still, when you said “Wheeler,” you tended to think of look-alike boats. To pure yachting snobs, for whom the Depression would have been an inconvenience, that term, “stock boat,” no less than the term “production shipyard,” would have had an odor.
    And yet it’s also true that the designers and old-school Scandinavian master shipwrights at Wheeler would produce some famed original boats in these years—a sixty-nine-footer, for instance, for a financier named Charles S. Payson, so that he might hydroplane to his office on Wall Street. These craft were known in the yachting world as “streamline commuters” or simply “commuters.” Payson’s custom Wheeler came out the year after
Pilar
and was christened
Saga
, with photographs of her in the boating journals, knifing the water with her V-12 Packards, this legend underneath: “Streamlining in Mahogany.” Charlie Payson, known to be impeccable with his money, was married to the former Joan Whitney, and Joan was the sister of Jock Whitney, and Jock and Joan were the only children of Helen Hay Whitney and Payne Whitney, fabulously rich Americans and devotees of the sporting life. In the thirties, Jock Whitney and his spouse, and Charles Payson and his spouse, lived next to each other on Long Island’s Gold Coast. It sounds so tight and clubby and Gatsbyesque, although apparently things were competitive, too, in a sporting way.
Saga
is said to have come about in the first place out of Payson’s need to outrun Jock Whitney’s mahogany commuter,
Aphrodite
. The brothers-in-law wished to race toward their money in the city, and whoever got there first could make more.
    If you went past forty-six feet in length for your Wheeler watery dream, you were really talking about a yacht, not a motor cruiser. So technically speaking, Ernest Hemingway never owned a yacht, even though that phrase is often thrown around in connection with the history of his boat. The 1934 Wheeler catalog on the stock thirty-eight-foot cabin cruisers said:
    Do not forget that a WHEELER “38” is