The Fun Also Rises

The man who looks exactly like Ernest Hemingway is well into a night of beer drinking and is proceeding with gusto--like the great Papa would have, of course--as he sizes up those around him at Sloppy Joe’s bar in the heart of this tropical oddball colony and tourist trap.

The cavernous watering hole is packed. And at least one in 20 of its inhabitants appears to look and dress more like Hemingway than the famous writer and bon vivant himself.

“Some of them are very good this year,” the man, Bob Orlin, says matter-of-factly.

The 18th annual Papa Hemingway Look-Alike Contest--part of an annual 10-day salute to one of Key West’s most famous ghosts--is about to start in earnest. As Orlin scans the crowd, his words are lost in a din that grows by the minute, what with the live band, the hundreds of drunken revelers, and all of the overly exuberant Hemingways.

The Hemingways swagger about the establishment, greeting one another loudly and heartily like the old friends they are, with manly hand locks and bear-like backslaps. Hugs, though, are verboten: Hemingway would have tolerated nothing of that sort.

Some Hemingways are tall, others short. Fat ones, thin ones and ones with bowling-ball paunches. With their trademark bushy Hemingway beards and thick crops of snowy hair, though, they are almost interchangeable from where Orlin stands, save for their outfits.

Over there, flirting with a woman half his age, is a khaki-clad Hemingway, looking as if he’d just cabled home his latest dispatch from the Spanish Civil War. Nearby, jostling for some breathing room, are Hemingway the marlin fisherman in fly-fishing vest and long-billed cap, Hemingway the big-game hunter, and Hemingway the participant in the running of the bulls, complete with black beret, white trousers and shirt and bright red sash.

And then there are the old “lion in winter” Hemingways, who seem to be everywhere. They stand in stoic silence, all of them roasting in the trademark white cable-knit turtleneck sweater that Papa wore in his later years while scowling his way through the Idaho countryside, just before he blew his head off with a shotgun at age 61, less than a decade after winning the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Only this isn’t Idaho. It is the southernmost city in the continental United States in the dog days of summer. The heat, humidity and Klieg lights have combined to make the room feel like the inside of a steam cooker, even at 8 p.m.

But as the sweat beads up on the Hemingways’ foreheads and pours down their ruddy cheeks and onto their beards, none of them so much as flinches.

They can’t. The judges may be watching.

Nobody wants to show an iota of discomfort. Better to suffer stoically, silently and in a manly way, just as Hemingway would have. Not that he’d have worn winter clothing in a crowded bar when the mercury is well above 90 degrees.

*

T he week is almost over, and this rambunctious army of nearly 100 Hemingway look-alikes--this plethora of Papas, if you will--has been careening through the tourist-clogged streets of Key West at all hours of the day and night.

Some drink heavily, carouse and generally engage in a very public attempt to out-macho one another in a constant display of Hemingway-like joie de vivre, aping his search for meaningful adventure.

Others, like Orlin, have come with their wives and families and act, well, not the way the Hemingway of exaggerated legend would have. They behave themselves, posing patiently to have their photos taken with every tourist who wants one. And it seems as if everybody does.

Mechanics and brain surgeons alike, the Hemingways have come from cities across the United States. In past years, they’ve come from as far away as Saudi Arabia and Brazil.

Technically, they’re here for the Hemingway Days Festival, a mishmash of activities sponsored mostly by boosterish local merchants to honor the author as a literary icon and to celebrate the, uh, boisterous lifestyle he enjoyed during his eight years in Key West starting in 1931.

There is a writing workshop and short-story competition overseen by Hemingway’s granddaughter Lorian. There are storytelling competitions, parties, walking tours of Papa’s haunts, a Caribbean street fair, golfing and fishing tournaments and even a 5K road race. In all, 88 sponsors--especially Sloppy Joe’s, the bar where Hemingway is said to have met his third of four wives--have gotten a piece of the action.

But the men have really come to compete in the look-alike contest, to be local heroes for 10 days in Key West and then forevermore in their hometowns. That’s why everyone else is here too--to see them. There are so many people here that the Hemingways must line up outside a special entrance to Sloppy Joe’s so they can make it to the stage when the live deejay calls out their names.

This is the sixth look-alike contest for Orlin, a 51-year-old artist from St. Cloud, Fla., and the buzz at Sloppy Joe’s is that this could finally be his year.

“He’s the best,” says festival director Karen Thurman. “He works at it. There’s a difference between the people who think it’s a karaoke contest and the guys that come and know what the contest is all about. They’re really scholars of Hemingway.”

Many bear as striking a resemblance to Hemingway as does Orlin (who also looks a bit like singer Kenny Rogers, truth be told). But, as Thurman notes, few could match Orlin’s encyclopedic knowledge of the writer and his life and work--or his authentic Hemingway outfits.

Tonight Orlin is wearing an exact replica, he says, of what Hemingway wore while covering the Spanish Civil War, all the way down to the knee-high leather riding boots, Australian bush hat and .44 Smith & Wesson--a pistol so huge it looks like a shotgun strapped to his hip.

Orlin paces, thinking of what he will say as the Papas are called to the stage in rapid-fire order. Each steps to the mike and makes a mercifully quick pitch to the raucous crowd and the panel of judges--nine look-alike winners from past years and Hemingway’s great-granddaughter Cristen.

The booze is flowing freely. It is a noisy spectacle, and Cristen Hemingway seems to be enjoying it. She looks much younger than her age (26) and oddly out of place with her punked-out hairdo. But she is remarkably at ease with so many familial impostors.

“As a teenager, I hated it--the hero worship kinda thing,” she confides. “Now I think it’s kind of hilarious.”

Some of the potential Papas must think so too. When their names are called, several bound onstage and thrust their chests outward in exaggerated displays of masculinity. Many have come with cheering sections--actually, screaming sections--complete with custom T-shirts, campaign signs and catchy slogans. “Vote for Conroy, he’s got class. If he don’t win, he’ll whip your ass,” screams one corner of the room, even though Conroy has long since left the stage.

Others resort to shameless bribery, like the contestant with the chicken legs and scraggly beard who tosses bags of airline peanuts to the judges “from my many, many trips down here to try and win this damned thing.”

Another look-alike who has lost for many years in a row tosses a pair of glasses to each judge.

“I figure this will help,” he says.

Apparently, it doesn’t.

“Throw money instead,” one judge yells back, grinning.

Then it’s Orlin’s turn. He is confident, having placed in the finals on four of his five tries. This year, he has dyed his black hair white and has put on 20 excess pounds specifically for the event. He’s got the intense, brooding Hemingway stare down solid, and, more important, he’s spent five years getting in the good graces of the judges.

Orlin is a quiet man, not given to the kind of embarrassing self-promotion practiced by many of his predecessors on stage.

“Well, I’m not gonna tell everybody how much I want to win, because everybody knows. It’s no secret,” Orlin tells the crowd. “But I will tell all of you what it’s like to be in this contest. It’s an addiction. You need it more and more each year. There’s no 12-step program and no cold turkey. The only way to beat it is to win.”

Orlin gets more cheers than most of the 60 or so competitors, and when the judges submit their beer-soaked tally sheets at the end of the night, he is among the dozen picked to compete in the finals Saturday night. A similar semifinal match will produce another eight finalists, and an Internet competition will add one more.

*

The look-alike contest has always been more a macho male beauty contest than any kind of homage to the man or his work. No knowledge of Hemingway’s writings or now-legendary exploits is required; contestants pony up $25 each and are told to keep their speeches short. They’re judged on their beards, their outfits and what judge Bob Anderson (look-alike of 1991) calls “their overall Hemingwayness.”

Several judges, including Cristen Hemingway, admit that they favor contestants who have proven their commitment by coming back year after year and helping to promote the event. That favors Orlin, who sculpts the annual bust of Hemingway given to the winner and who drew the design for this year’s commemorative T-shirt.

But there is much more to this beauty contest than the stage presentation. And so, for the 10-day stretch (which ended Sunday), the contestants go all out to act as authentically Hemingway as they can. Some, like Orlin, change outfits several times a day. They participate enthusiastically in the Look-Alike Fish Fry and Fish-Off, considered the talent portion of the contest. They arm wrestle and face off in pie-eating contests.

And at 2 p.m. Saturday, under a scorching sun, they ran with the bulls through the streets of Old Town. They actually were wooden bulls on wheels. Unlike last year, when they had a real bull in with the two fake ones.

“They said it’s too hot for the [real] bull,” Orlin said as he milled about with the other crimson-faced Hemingways. “But not for us, I guess.”

As they awaited the start of the event, the various Hemingways consumed large quantities of beer. But Orlin drank from a homemade leather wine sack--just like the one he says Hemingway used when he ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, an event he later wrote about in “The Sun Also Rises.”

Soon, they were ambling through the streets, laughing, drinking and yelling, “Run for your lives!” in mock terror.

The loudest of all was Kevin Sullivan, who, with his flaming red beard and gap-toothed smile, looked more like a cross between David Letterman and Richie Cunningham than Hemingway--in any of the author’s many guises.

A New York City police officer, Sullivan is the Clown Prince of the competition, having entered 10 times already, before the age of 40. On Friday night, he made it to the finals for the second year in a row, thanks to what he says is his unparalleled devotion to living as Hemingway did, if not looking exactly like him.

“I’m boozed, bruised and battered,” Sullivan said, “just like Papa was.”

The judges say they let Sullivan into the finals because he’s a good draw. The crowd boos him, and he threatens to arrest them all. Throughout the week, he regaled one group of tourists after another with tall tales of his Hemingway-esque adventures, such as running with the bulls in Pamplona last year and crying like a baby at Hemingway’s grave each winter.

*

By Saturday evening, the anticipation at Sloppy Joe’s has built as Orlin and the other exhausted contestants prepare to face off in the finals.

It normally is a huge media event. This time, it’s even more so: The festival attracted international headlines last year when it almost died due to a feud between organizers and two of Hemingway’s sons. The heirs had suddenly asked for a 10% share of the festival’s profit and veto power over its content, and the organizers said they’d rather cancel the whole thing than agree to such demands.

A settlement was reached, and even though the brothers are now sponsoring their own “family oriented” annual Hemingway fest at nearby Sanibel Island, the Hemingway Days folks say they’re back on track to making their event a can’t-miss attraction.

The Sanibel festival (which this year preceded Hemingway Days by a week) irks Orlin, who says it’s not right to whitewash Hemingway’s dark side--his temper, the insensitivity he could show toward others, and allegations about his anti-Semitism.

“How can you clean up someone’s image when everybody knows about it?” Orlin asks one afternoon while giving an impromptu tour of Hemingway’s favorite places around Key West. “You might as well rewrite all his books.”

For the look-alikes, there is far more at stake here than an all-expenses-paid trip to next year’s Hemingway Days and a $100 bar tab at Sloppy Joe’s. They say they want to continue the legacy of Hemingway in all its complicated and, at times, contradictory glory.

Not to mention the groupies. Perhaps drawn by the legends of Hemingway the lover, women flock to these men, on street corners and in bars, snaking their arms around an expanding waistline or two while posing for photos, often giving the Papas in question a smooch just as the flash goes off.

The winner also will act as a Hemingway emissary of sorts, explaining to the many who ask just why it is that they so want to emulate their hero.

He is likely to say that Hemingway was a brawling bear of a man, a “man’s man,” who lived hard, loved often and traveled the world in search of adventures, witnessing three major wars in the process. And that while Hemingway could be cruel and unkind, he also could write one hell of a book, and offer some of the most dead-on accurate assessments of the human condition of any writer, particularly when describing why men love, hate, and go to war and kill.

“What made him think like that and act like that?” 1987 look-alike winner Jack Waterbury asks aloud. “How can such a bullyish guy be so tender in his writing?

“That’s the secret,” he says, smiling slyly. “Nobody knows. Do they?”

Orlin too wants to participate in that annual dialogue and to join Waterbury and others in what he calls an elite fraternity of men united around its respect for one of the great men and authors of all time. More than anything else, Orlin says, it is fun and enlightening to spend 10 days a year with them, particularly in a town as lively as this one.

*

As the finalists are called to the stage, the crowd grows ever louder.

It is a denouement of sorts, though, since most judges already have made up their minds. Orlin’s speech is even more subdued than during the semifinals. And then he goes outside to await the results.

He paces nervously. He grows even more anxious when there is a delay. Unbeknownst to him, there is a tie. The judges are asked to vote again.

Soon, the emcee quiets the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he crows, “we have a new Papa!”

It is Don Duncan, a sales rep from Sarasota, Fla., who at age 65 has won on his seventh try. He is mobbed by past winners as he approaches the mike and accepts the bust of Hemingway that Orlin made.

As he clutches it, the normally gruff Duncan looks stupefied. He begins a thank-you speech and then stops, too overcome with emotion to continue. “This is awesome,” is all he can blurt out.

Orlin is inside by now, and he claps for Duncan as loudly as everyone else. Later, he will learn some especially disappointing news: He was the second man in the tie, and he might have won outright if one judge--who had pledged to vote for him--hadn’t left the bar early because he couldn’t take the crowd.

But that’s life, says Orlin, who later will win the “Aficionado” award given to the contestant who most honors “the spirit” of Hemingway.

He smiles and pledges to keep coming back year after year, whether he wins or not.

And with that, he makes his way into the crowd surrounding Duncan and offers his hand in congratulation. A manly, hearty one, of course. But no hug.