Jack Hemingway; Legendary Author’s Son

As a toddler he accompanied his father to Paris cafes and bookstores, meeting the likes of James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His godmother was Gertrude Stein.

As an adult he became a devoted naturalist and outdoorsman. He wrote several books on fly-fishing, a passion he shared with his famous father.

As a father himself he saw two of his daughters become well-known actresses. And he experienced great loss when one died of a drug overdose.

John Hadley Nicanor “Jack” Hemingway, eldest son of Ernest Hemingway, died Friday night. He was 77.

Family members decided Friday to remove Hemingway from life support systems after complications from heart surgery at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.

Hemingway bore a striking physical resemblance to his father, and his public life never escaped the shadow of the larger-than-life figure who is perhaps the best-known U.S. author of the 20th century.

The son struggled at times with his father’s legacy, never settling into a permanent career. He wrote and spoke frequently about life as the offspring of the celebrated novelist and Nobel Prize winner.

Jack Hemingway will be remembered by many as the baby Bumby of “A Moveable Feast,” his father’s memoir of his early years in Paris. The boy was born in Toronto in 1923 to Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley. The young couple soon took him to France. It was a time that the elder Hemingway often looked back on with great nostalgia and a sense of loss.

“At three months Mr. Bumby had crossed the North Atlantic on a 12-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “He never cried on the trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could not fall out when we were in heavy weather.”

Later, as his father changed wives and residences and became ever more of a celebrity, the author and son saw each other mostly during vacations. They shared fishing, hunting and boxing adventures from Pamplona, Spain, to Havana and from Key West, Fla., to Idaho.

During World War II, Jack Hemingway had his own adventures in the Office of Strategic Services, the legendary wartime spy agency. He parachuted into occupied France--carrying a fly rod--to help the Resistance and report on German forces, he wrote after the war. He recalled that he was almost captured while trout fishing.

A longtime Idaho resident, he served as a member of the state’s fish and game commission in the 1970s and developed a reputation as an ardent conservationist.

He also endeavored somewhat to rehabilitate his father’s often raucous and authoritarian image. While acknowledging Hemingway’s well-chronicled shortcomings, the son criticized as too one-dimensional Carlos Baker’s biography--”Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story”--which is widely considered the definitive portrait.

“Baker’s view only showed one side of my father: the bullying side,” Hemingway said in a 1988 interview with The Times.

His father, he said, could also be a warm, vibrant and even tenderhearted figure, a theme that the son explored in his 1986 memoir: “Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa.” The generally well-received work recounted in lighthearted fashion his own dedication to fly-fishing, his wartime experiences and the mixed blessing of the Hemingway legacy.

At one point, the son recalled a conversation with his father in 1955 at the author’s home in Cuba. He had confided to his father his concerns, at age 33, that he might never find a steady job.

“The one thing you must promise me you will never do, and I will promise you the same, is that neither one of us will ever shoot himself, like Grandfather,” the son quoted his father as saying. “Promise me, and then I’ll promise you.”

Jack Hemingway wrote: “So I promised. And then he promised.”

But Ernest Hemingway broke his promise when he committed suicide in 1961 by shooting himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Jack Hemingway’s daughter Margaux, who along with her sister Mariel had a film acting career, died in 1996 of a drug overdose.

A memorial for Hemingway will be held Saturday in New York, wire services reported. Burial is to be in the Sun Valley, Idaho, area.