Writer, Hemingway formed strong bond
A.E. Hotchner, the writer, who has died aged 102, created a salad dressing business with Paul Newman, but was better known as the confidant, fishing companion and collaborator of Ernest Hemingway during the last 13 years of his life.
Hotchner met the novelist in 1948 when Cosmopolitan magazine sent him to Havana, where Hemingway was then living, to persuade him to write an article on the future of literature.
The pair met at the Floridita, Hemingway’s favourite bar, where, over Papa dobles — double-strength frozen daiquiris — Hemingway informed Hotchner that he did not know “a damn thing about the future of anything.”
The article never appeared, but Hemingway and “Hotch” formed a firm friendship that lasted until Hemingway’s suicide in 1961.
Hotchner wrote the 1966 memoir Papa Hemingway, of the deterioration of his friend’s physical and mental state prior to his suicide, and later adapted many of Hemingway’s stories for the stage and screen.
Aaron Edward Hotchner was born on June 28, 1917, in St. Louis, Mo. He studied History and Law at Washington University in St. Louis, and briefly practised law before serving in the air force during the Second World War. After the war he moved to New York.
It was while working on the script for a play, The Battler, in 1955 that he met Paul Newman.
Hotchner and Newman became friends and neighbours in Westport, Conn., where, in 1980, the actor invited Hotchner to help in his Christmas ritual of mixing salad dressing to be put in wine bottles and given to neighbours.
“There were some bottles left over and he said: ‘Why don’t we put them in stores?’” Hotchner recalled. The pair found a bottler and after selling 10,000 bottles of dressing in two weeks, Newman’s Own was born.
After Newman’s death in 2008, Hotchner wrote about his friendship in Paul and Me. His other works included bestselling biographies of Doris Day and Sophia Loren.
In 1990 he published Blown Away, a book about the Rolling Stones in which he suggested that Brian Jones’s death in 1969 might have been due to foul play.
Hotchner is survived by his third wife, Virginia Kiser, by two daughters from his first marriage and a son from his second.