The Muehlebach Hotel
200 W 12th St, Kansas City, Missouri 64105, United States
In mid-December 1917, Hemingway, who had been a budding reporter for the Kansas City Star for only 2 months, wrote to his parents from the press room in the Muehlebach Hotel. The twelve-story Muehlebach had opened in 1915 and was one of the finest hotels in the Midwest. The Star maintained a pressroom in the building and reporters could use it to write their stories and phone them in. Hemingway occasionally made use of this facility. The room had a bath, easy chairs, desks, telephones, a typewriter and lots of paper. You felt like a million dollars, having a private room at the hotel, Hemingway told his parents.
Hemingway actually wrote several letters to his family from the Muehlebach. In the one written on 17th December, he told his parents he hoped to get a raise from the Star soon, as all his colleagues felt there ought to be one coming to him. His starting salary was $60 a month and this was increased to $75 a month but money was tight much of the time.
Sometimes when he was working late on a story for the paper and was either too tired or too late to catch the streetcar home to Agnes Avenue, Hemingway would sleep in the bathtub in the pressroom, which was possible if you articulated your knees properly, he said. Towels to lie on helped too.
On 2nd March 1918, Hemingway wrote to his sister, Marcelline, from the Muehlebach telling her that he had enlisted as an ambulance driver in the American Red Cross Ambulance Service in Italy. Hemingway was ineligible for service in the United States military because of poor eyesight but the American Red Cross did accept him. Four months later, on July 8th, Hemingway would be seriously injured by an exploding mortar shell at the Italian front line.
Hemingway also stayed at the Muehlebach Hotel in November 1940, only four days after he married his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The couple planned to catch a train to New York from Union Station, which he had first set foot in 23 years earlier. By 1940, of course, he was a world-famous author and had just published For Whom The Bell Tolls, his great novel of the Spanish Civil War. While they were at the Muehlebach, Hemingway granted an interview to his old newspaper, the Kansas City Star. Hemingway reminisced about his time in Kansas City as a young reporter, remembering it as an exciting, violent time. This was Hemingway’s last known visit to Kansas City.
Over its lifetime the Muehlebach has welcomed many celebrities including Helen Keller, the deaf and blind author, disability rights activist, and lecturer; Babe Ruth, the famous baseball player; actress Jean Harlow, who was born in Kansas City; Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States, stayed in the hotel’s Presidential Suite so often that the Muehlebach became known as ‘White House West’. The Presidential Suite itself was later renamed the Harry S. Truman Presidential Suite. Harry S. Truman, incidentally, worked for two weeks in 1902 in the mailroom of the Kansas City Star. He wasn’t the only President to visit the hotel, in fact every President from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan did.
In 1976, Missouri-born science fiction author, Robert Heinlein was the Guest of Honor at the 34th World Science Fiction Convention held both at this hotel and another one across the road. The Dean of Science Fiction, as he was known to fans, was booked into the Muehlebach’s Harry S. Truman Presidential Suite. As someone who enjoyed Heinlein’s early work, I was amused to discover there’s a tiny, glancing connection between the science fiction writer and Ernest Hemingway. During the winter of 1917-1918, the ten-year-old Robert Heinlein, who grew up in Kansas City, got up at 4 am every morning to deliver the Kansas City Star to his neighbours, dragging a sledge piled high with the newspapers through the snow. Those newspapers would, of course, have included articles by the young Ernest Hemingway, who was living and working in Kansas City at the time …
The Muehlebach Hotel was bought by Marriott Hotels in 1996 and is now run as one of three wings of the Kansas City Marriott Downtown Hotel.
The Literary Tourist 