Hemingway, the Photographer, and the Cheesemonger

Murray's Cheese on 23rd Street in Chelsea was my go-to shop when I was planning a dinner for guests. I love to serve a cheese course after the entree with a big green salad like the French do and knew I would find just what I wanted there. But one afternoon as I was shopping for a special dinner, I didn't know what I wanted. The cheesemonger was ready to help. As I puzzled over the wide selection, he asked what I was reading. I said Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer. "Ah, a mahon," he recommended. Obviously, he knew his authors as well as his cheeses. He added a manchego and a cana de cabra and I hurried back to my apartment to cook.

 A Hemingway fan since I first read The Sun Also Rises as a student, I was reading his last great bullfighting story because I had recently been given three photographs taken during the epic bullfights of that dangerous summer shot by Tony Triolo. Tony had been a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated for years and had covered the mano a mano between Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miquel Dominquin during the 1959 season. For years, rolls of film of the fights from the season had been lost in the labs at SI. Now someone had found them, and Tony had prints made for me—Hemingway, serious in the stands, Dominquin and Ordonez, capes swirling as they executed their signature passes. Over his career Tony had shot more than 50 covers for Sports Illustrated and his images were a special gift.

Luis Miguel Dominquin

Antonio Ordonez

Just months earlier Tony had followed my friend Sue and me to my apartment building from the Pottery Barn outlet on 10th Avenue. He was a heavy-set man with a warm smile and second-generation Italian charm. He didn't look like a stalker. Sue and I let him chat us up on the sidewalk and he asked if he might have my phone number. Why not?

He called and for a time we enjoyed pleasant dinners together. Over lunch at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, he introduced me to a group of his accomplished friends. When I had a dreadful cold, he brought me homemade pasta sauce worthy of Marcella Hazan. Always entertaining, always a gentleman, Tony was good company. The problem was that Tony wanted a girlfriend not just a friend. As much as I would miss his companionship and stories, I knew I had to stop seeing him. He was disappointed but didn't deny his intentions.

 The framed images still hang on the walls of my office, reminders of a talented and generous photographer, Hemingway's singular prose, the fierce rivalry of long-ago bullfighters, and the serendipity of a chance encounter on a New York streetcorner.

If you would like another Hemingway story to complement his photograph, here's Guy Clark and Hemingway's Whiskey.