Free Republic

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life. There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life. Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his...

ERNEST Hemingway and Hollywood had a tempestuous relationship - but his utter hatred of the movies made from his famed novels is now just coming to light. In "The Good Life According to Hemingway," out next month, A.E. Hotchner, who traveled the globe with him, bares a series of never-before-published slaps Hemingway took at the film business. When producer David O. Selznick crowed that his wife, Jennifer Jones, was starring in "A Farewell to Arms" and he'd pay Hemingway a $50,000 bonus from any profits, the novelist wrote back: "If by some miracle, your movie, which stars 41-year-old Mrs....