Writer A.E. Hotchner, friend to Hemingway, Newman, dies

A.E. HOTCHNER, a welltravelled author, playwright and gadabout whose street smarts and famous pals led to a loving, but litigated memoir of Ernest Hemingway, business adventures with Paul Newman and a book about his Depression-era childhood that became a Steven Soderbergh film, died Saturday at age 102. He died at his home in Westport, Connecticut. A. E. Hotchner, known to friends as “Ed” or “Hotch,” was an impish St. Louis native and exmarbles champ who read, wrote and hustled himself out of poverty and went on to publish more than a dozen books, befriend countless celebrities and see his play, The White House, performed at the real White President Bill

House for Clinton.

He was a natural fit for Elaine’s, the former Manhattan nightspot for the famous and the nearfamous, and contributed the text for Everyone Comes to Elaine’s, an illustrated history. Hotchner’s other works included the novel The Man Who Lived at the Ritz, bestselling biographies of Doris Day and Sophia Loren, and a musical, Let ’Em Rot! co-written with Cy Coleman.

In his 90s, he completed an upbeat book of essays on ageing, O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night. When he was 100, he wrote the detective novel The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom.

Hotchner wrote an article about Elaine’s for Vanity Fair that included an anecdote about director Roman Polanski making advances on a woman on the way to the funeral of his wife, Sharon Tate, who was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson’s followers. Polanski sued the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast, for libel and in 2005 was awarded some $87,000, plus court costs, by a jury in London.