Jack Hemingway: A son with a sense of humor
Papa’s boy was no imitation Hemingway
Jack Hemingway memorial Saturday
Jack Hemingway, Idaho conservationist and son of famed
novelist Ernest Hemingway, died in New York Dec. 2 of heart failure. He
was 77. The long time Ketchum resident fell ill in New York and suffered
complications following heart surgery there.
Though he lived sandwiched between generations of
celebrities, people who know him say he made no excuses for his
comparatively simple existence as an Idaho outdoorsman. "Jack really
understood wildlife, and fisheries in particular," said Joe Greenley,
a now-retired Fish and Game director.
Friends and family of Jack Hemingway plan to hold a
public memorial service for the deceased outdoorsman 2 p.m. Saturday at
the Sun Valley Lodge.
Among those expected to deliver eulogies are Idaho Gov.
Dirk Kempthorne, actor Adam West, sportscaster Tim Ryan and retired Idaho
Nature Conservancy director Guy Bonnivier.
Hemingway’s widow, Angela, also is scheduled to give
a short speech. His brother Patrick and daughter Mariel may also speak.
By JEFF CORDES
Express Staff Writer
Many well-deserved tributes have been written about
Ketchum’s Jack Hemingway since the 77-year-old standard bearer of the
Hemingway legacy died Dec. 2 in New York City.
Hemingway, a family man proud of his three daughters, was
a great outdoorsman and a committed conservationist.
He shouldered the difficult role as the son of a famous
father with grace and a sense of proportion. He knew his limitations and
steered clear from the excesses that colored his father’s celebrated
life.
Barnaby Conrad, author of 27 books including Matador,
said recently from his home in southern California, "Jack fit very
well in his own skin. He was possibly the greatest trout fisherman in the
world and a great conservationist. First and foremost, Jack was the son of
a world-famous person, but it never seemed to bother him."
Hemingway’s rich laugh and generosity of spirit were
distinctively his own. Nevertheless, he inherited a finely-tuned sense of
humor from his father, Ernest—and that sense of humor guided both men
through adventures and adversity.
Conrad, who wrote about the Hemingway family, said,
"Jack was a wonderful person. He was easy-going and laughed easily.
And he was modest beyond reason.
"When we spoke about his father, Jack always used to
defend him. He’d say to me, ‘What I never read about my father was
what a bundle of laughs he was.’ And he’d say his only resentment in
growing up was that he didn’t get to spend enough time with him, between
all his father’s marriages."
Another famous author, Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451,
The Martian Chronicles), said "Jack was a very amusing guy, with
a pretty nice sense of humor."
Above all, he was a good sport, wise to the pitfalls of
fame but unbowed by its demands.
That part of his character that enabled Hemingway to live
a long life and avoid the family history of suicide was perhaps best
illustrated by Jack’s frequent participation in the International
Imitation Hemingway Competition.
Conrad, 78, and Bradbury, 80, have been judges in the
writing contest every year since it started in 1978. The contest’s
original premise was to have people submit one page of writing in the
style of Ernest Hemingway, with the winner receiving round-trip airfare
and dinner for two at Harry’s American Bar and Grill in Florence, Italy.
Amazingly, the contest has endured in the same
good-natured format, having celebrated its 20th anniversary last June on
"Judgment Night" at Harry’s Bar and American Grill in Century
City, Calif.
Lending credibility to the fledgling contest, Jack
Hemingway first jumped on the bandwagon as a contest judge in 1980, the
same year that the International Imitation Hemingway Contest nearly
tripled in the number of entries it attracted from around the world.
Jack judged every other year throughout the 1980s, Conrad
said. It wasn’t a hard job for any of the five or six judges. They had a
ball.
Bradbury, a prolific writer of science fiction and a lover
of Ernest Hemingway’s works, said, "There wasn’t a serious person
there. All we were trying to do was separate good bad Hemingway from bad
bad Hemingway. It was fun, but difficult, too. Sometimes we had big
arguments about the favorites. Then we’d have to read them aloud if
there was a problem."
Reading the entries aloud prompted new rounds of laughter.
The convivial atmosphere was spiked by wine and other refreshments.
"If this were serious, I’d disqualify myself right
now," Jack Hemingway was quoted as saying about the judging in a 1981
Wall Street Journal article about the contest.
Bradbury said, "We’d get there about 3 p.m. By
about 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. we’d come up with the winner from about 20
finalists, and then we’d call the winner on the phone. If they lived
locally, we’d invite the winner to join us for our dinner that
night."
Coincidentally, Bradbury was in New York City only days
before Hemingway was stricken with his final illness. Bradbury, busy with
two novels, two books of poetry and three screenplays in the works, was
accepting the National Book Award’s gold medal for his contributions to
American literature during a $1,000 a plate dinner.
Bradbury knew Jack Hemingway only from their judging
experiences, but freelance writer Conrad knew Hemingway better.
Conrad said, "Twenty-five years ago I was assigned a
cover story by Signature magazine, to go up to Sun Valley and go
fishing with Jack, and get him to talk about his father and his daughters.
I remember Mariel was 14 at the time, and she cooked for us because Jack’s
wife was ill. We did that for three days, and I can say Jack was the
greatest fisherman I ever met.
"He’d tell the story about the times his father
came home with 30 fish, and then he’d quickly say that times were
different then, because we thought then that we’d never run out of
fish."
Men open up and talk more about themselves when they’re
fishing together. That’s what Hemingway did with Barnaby Conrad.
"He was very modest, but he did say, ‘Barnaby, I
have two boasts. Name one person, he said to me, that ever parachuted into
Nazi Germany with a fishing rod—just in case there was a trout stream
there.’ And, of course, that was Jack."
The other boast had to do with Jack’s name.
John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway was born Oct. 10, 1923m, in
Toronto. His mother was Hadley Richardson, the first of Ernest’s four
wives, and his godmothers were famous Roaring Twenties women-of-letters
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
The middle name of Nicanor came from Nicanor Villata,
"a great bullfighter in his father’s time," according to
Conrad, who began his career as an amateur bullfighter in Mexico and
subsequently wrote eight books on the sport.
"Jack once joked to me, saying that anyone named
after a great bullfighter, whose godmother was Gertrude Stein, couldn’t
be all that bad," Conrad said.
As the Imitation Hemingway Contest proclaims in its annual
advertisements penned by judge Digby Diehl, "Sometimes you’ve got
to be bad to be good." And Jack’s sense of humor was as good as
they come, just like his father’s.
Once asked if his father would have liked the
spoof-of-a-contest, Jack said, "Yes, because he had an enormous sense
of humor, despite what some biographers say.
"At one time he said that it would be very amusing to
disguise himself and take the course they were giving at Princeton on
Hemingway," Jack continued. "He was willing to bet anything that
he couldn’t pass it."
Jack Hemingway met his challenges steadfastly.
During the mid-1950s, as Jack struggled with the
difficulty of finding a steady career and Ernest tangled with his own
private demons, the father and son drank and hunted together in Havana.
In one conversation the famed novelist made his first-born
son pledge that he wouldn’t commit suicide.
Jack kept that promise.
"He was a great guy," said Conrad.
