June 15, 1999

PUBLIC LIVES

A Line of Hemingway Furniture, With a Veneer of Taste

By JAN HOFFMAN

ast week, Jack Hemingway -- yes, son of -- was here promoting the new Ernest Hemingway collection of furniture by Thomasville. As far as he's concerned, the guardians of civilization can just go wring their hands. Everybody else? Consider the hunky "Kilimanjaro" bedside chest with silver-finished hardware and paw feet, or a "Catherine" slipcover love seat.

Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times

Jack Hemingway, Ernest's eldest son. Related Article For Whom the Sell Tolls? It Tolls For Thee (October 8, 1998)

Some years back, he and his two half-brothers signed with a licensing agent to assert control over the family name, particularly in this centennial celebration of Papa's birth. There was a Hemingway Mont Blanc pen, an attempt at sports clothes, "but nothing as potentially profitable as this," Hemingway said the other day at his Manhattan hotel.

"And it's not just furniture," added Hemingway, 75, who has pink skin, crisp blue eyes and an uncanny resemblance to his father, and does 100 sit-ups every morning. "It's also accessories, like picture frames, desk sets, clocks and throws. "

He amplified, "In the public eye, he's much better known for his life style than his writing."

Hemingway -- Bumby in "A Moveable Feast" -- has a big, unapologetic laugh, which he rolls out frequently.

"Would this be fine with him? Probably not!" The laugh.

Especially in light of his family history -- pervasive alcoholism; suicides of father, a grandfather, an uncle and an aunt; a struggle with depression by a half-brother who had a fondness for women's clothes; the history of mental problems of one daughter; the overdose of another (the actress-model Margaux), ruled a suicide -- he presents himself as a remarkably jolly fellow. It's as if he decided that given the alternatives, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, he might as well live.

Hemingway's firstborn probably had the best of his Papa, in the early years before the ego ballooned and darkness fell. The son of the first of the writer's four wives, Hadley Richardson, John Hadley Nicanor (a matador) Hemingway spent his toddlerhood in the cafes of the Lost Generation's Paris; his godmothers were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. His parents' divorce was not rancorous. Jack vacationed with Papa: in Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Havana and Sun Valley.

Time with Papa meant a gruff bonding as they hunted, fished and boxed. "He was my hero," Hemingway said. "When he was with you, you were the total center of his attention. But when I left to go back to school, I was out of his mind."

Jack was lucky. Never a serious student, he didn't aspire to dance with his father's muse. Instead, he became a devout fly fisherman. "I was proud of Papa for his sports," his son said.

"When I was in prep school, an English teacher said to me, "Hemingway, I expect more from you!" And I said, 'Why, sir?' "

In some arenas, son could go mano a mano with father. "He knocked me down, but I cut his eye and did a lot of damage," Jack said. When Papa smugly arranged for the teen-ager to be initiated by a Havana prostitute, Papa didn't know that handsome Jack had already made her acquaintance, gratis. During World War II, while arguing with French Communists, Jack pulled a pin on a grenade. Before parachuting behind enemy lines, he packed his fishing rod.

The Germans shot him in his casting arm and held him captive for six months. ("Papa loved to have me show off my scars.")

Professionally speaking, Hemingway was neither here nor there. His 1986 memoir describes revolving-door jobs and is largely a paean to Papa and fishing. After a stint as a stockbroker, he moved his wife and three daughters to Ketchum, Idaho, living on trusts from his father's estate, and became a conservationist of note. He was an Idaho fish and game commissioner for six years, and sits on several boards to protect North Atlantic salmon from nets.

The Hemingway legacy has its blessings and burdens, said Hemingway, who calls himself an imperfect father. With his gifted but troubled eldest, Muffet, he was overbearing. Next, "Margaux was a ray of light," he said, "but she lived in the fast lane and it caught up with her."

Though his door was open, he didn't reach out. "When the problem was there, it was there, and when it wasn't, it wasn't," he said. "I was like my father."

As for Mariel, the actress, "She was her mother's darling, and had her head screwed on from the get-go." Hemingway's first wife died 12 years ago and he has been remarried for a decade.

Hemingway's candor is startling, and then rather winning. "Papa set a high premium on telling the truth, and I believed everything he said," said Hemingway, who later learned that Papa, a notorious self-mythologizer, had lied to his son about his war record.

Papa also broke the most important vow he ever made. "Neither one of us will ever shoot himself, like Grandfather," Ernest told Bumby. "Promise me and then I'll promise you."

Papa also told Jack never to sign anything he hadn't written. But last week, there was Jack, at the Huffman-Koos furniture store in Hackensack, N.J., jauntily autographing the latest Hemingway biography, by one David Sandison. Anything to sell furniture. And accessories.

At least the licensed collection is tasteful, Bumby said. "It's protecting my father's name, and it's taking advantage at the same time." Big laugh.