Pauline Pfeiffer

She was born on July 22, 1895, in Parkersburg, Iowa to a wealthy Catholic family of real estate agent Paul Pfeiffer and his wife Mary Downey Pfeiffer. Jinny Pfeiffer was her younger sister.

Pfeiffer spent her early years in north central Iowa and in 1901 at six years of age she relocated to St. Louis with her family. There she attended Visitation Academy of St. Louis and completed her high school graduation from there in June 1913.

Later her family shifted to Piggott, Arkansas while Pfeiffer stayed in Missouri and attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism from where she obtained a degree in 1918.

Initially Pfeiffer worked in Ohio on the night desk at the Cleveland Press and then moved to New York to work with the Daily Telegraph. After a stint there, she turned her focus on up-scale magazines and worked with popular culture, fashion, and current affairs magazine ‘Vanity Fair’ and fashion and lifestyle magazine ‘Vogue’.

Her proficiency in writing and copy editing complimented with her perceptiveness in fashion soon landed her with an offer to join the Paris bureau of Vogue. She went to Paris in February 1925 accompanied with sister Jinny.

The following year she got introduced to Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Hemingway was then a rising writer who moved to Paris a few years back with Hadley to work as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.

Affair, Marriage & Life with Ernest Hemingway

In January 1926 she joined Hemingway and Hadley in Schruns, Austria where the couple were spending their winter. Pfeiffer pressed Hemingway to sign contract with American publisher ‘Charles Scribner's Sons’, although against the advice of Hadley. Accordingly Hemingway left for New York to meet the Scribner's.

Following her divorce with Hemingway, she remained in Key West for life and visited California frequently. She ran a designer fabric, upholstery and gift business called the Carolina Shop.

On October 1, 1951, she died after suffering an acute shock. This was considered to have generated from her son Gregory’s arrest due to drug possession and subsequent call of Hemingway to her from Havana spurting a heated argument while she was visiting her sister. Although she was rushed to Hollywood hospital, she died on the operation table.

She was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in Los Angeles County, California, US.

Gregory became terribly upset when Hemingway accused him of Pfeiffer’s death.

Later when Gregory became a medical doctor, he elucidated that Pfeiffer had a rare pheochromocytoma tumor on one of her adrenal glands. According to him, Hemingway’s phone call caused surge of adrenaline from her tumor and stopped thereafter thus leading to blood pressure change resulting in an acute shock which turned fatal.