HUFFPOST: “My Trip to Cuba With Mary Hemingway!”, por Jay Weston (Inglés)

The New York Times ran an article on March 28 detailing how the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation has acquired 15 letters written by Ernest Hemingway, bought from an 80-year-old friend of the famed writer, Italian-born Gianfranco Ivancich, a member of a noble Venetian family. The most interesting of the letters expresses Hemingway's softer side: his anguish about having to shoot his favorite cat, Willie, who had been hit by a car near their home, the Finca Vigia outside of Havana, Cuba. "Certainly missed you, Miss Uncle Willie. Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for 11 years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs." It was of more than academic interest to me since I have spent the last 20 years working to produce a motion picture about the life of Hemingway, and in so doing had the adventure of going to Cuba with his fourth wife, Mary, and also director Sidney Pollack and screenwriter Waldo Salt, to meet with Fidel Castro and obtain permission to film there!
There is an HBO movie about to be shown detailing Hemingway's tempestuous relationship with his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, although Mary told me that it was actually a brief relationship and she ended up hating him (as was detailed in her autobiography.) After I optioned the film rights to Mary's biography, How It Was, I enlisted the late, great film director Sidney Pollack to helm the movie and -- in what turned out to be a mistake -- got the Academy-Award winning writer, Waldo Salt ("Midnight Cowboy"), to do the script. (He took four years to write it! All 400 pages of it, which killed the deal I had made with Sherry Lansing to film it at MGM, with Jon Voight playing Hemingway and Jill Clayburgh playing Mary.) Interestingly, when Waldo was dying at Cedars-Sinai, he called me to his hospital room and gave me a cut-down 150 page version of his brilliant script.