I’ve always been a sucker for obscure trivia, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Wild Bird: The True Jazz Age Tale of Ruth Wightman Morris is chock-full of it.
For instance, how could I not mention that Floyd Crosby, the cinematographer on the motion picture Tabu, which was filming in French Polynesia while Ruth was in the area, was the father of rock musician David Crosby? Or that the man who tried to kill himself in Ruth and Govie’s home in Tahiti was Mia Farrow’s father?
Still, even for someone who loves this stuff, I had to make some hard choices, and a few bits of trivia had to be left out. Now I have the opportunity to share some of those deleted bits, though first I must provide some context.
It’s important to know that Ruth Morris was in Pamplona, Spain, in 1925 at the same time as Ernest Hemingway, and that she came to his attention—and not in a good way. It’s also important to know that a woman named Lady Duff Twysden was a member of Hemingway’s traveling party, provoking jealous competition among the men, and that Lady Duff would become the inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises.
Here’s one of the bits of trivia I left out: soon after that summer in Spain in 1925, Ernest Hemingway’s marriage to his first wife, Hadley, began to come undone, and when the divorce was final, Hadley traveled from Europe with their young son to Carmel, California, to recover, placing her roughly four miles from Ruth and Govie’s home in Monterey.
Here’s another: years later, in 1938, Lady Duff Twysden died in New Mexico at age forty-five, less than ten months before Ruth Morris died in New Mexico at age forty-one.
Here’s still another: Ruth Morris’s nephew, Philip Bonsal, became the last United States ambassador to Cuba before Fidel Castro’s revolution drove him off the island. He became great friends with Ernest Hemingway and had dinner with him every Tuesday night. I wish I could tell you that Ambassador Bonsal regaled Hemingway with stories of his aunt’s exploits in a bull ring, but Hemingway’s last secretary, Valerie Hemingway, who was present at all those dinners, burst my bubble in an e-mail, saying she had no recollection of that ever happening.
There’s more interesting trivia I left out of the book, but I’ll save it for another time.