Keeper of the Hemingway Flame : Son Jack Calls Keach’s Portrayal of the Old Man ‘Marvelous’

Jack Hemingway was prepared for the worst.

Time after time, Ernest Hemingway’s eldest son has cringed and fumed at biographies or screen portrayals that he feels have distorted, sensationalized and exploited his father’s life and writings, both for commercial payoff or literary blood sport.

But now comes “Hemingway,” the six-hour docudrama starring Stacy Keach as America’s most celebrated writer. The two-part story concludes tonight on KCOP Channel 13. To his great relief, Jack Hemingway finds it a balanced and entertaining portrait of his father as writer, adventurer, husband and father.

“My father was a fun-loving person, not the evil, sadistic, macho, woman-hating guy that comes through in some of the biographies,” Hemingway said in a telephone interview from his home in Ketchum, Ida. “They did a better job than I expected. Stacy Keach was marvelous. He looked more like my father than anyone who had ever played him before.”

Still, Hemingway, as always, attracts controversy. The German-American co-production prompted a complicated literary and legal argument about the rights to Ernest Hemingway’s life story. Buried in all the legalistic aspects of the issue is a larger question of principle in the view of Jack Hemingway and Charles Scribner III, Ernest Hemingway’s principal American publisher: Who owns the rights to a famous and public person’s life story?

“We objected to the idea that anyone could buy rights to a life story simply by buying a biography,” Hemingway said. “Who owns the rights to a life story?”

For Jack Hemingway, the question of principle merged with a worry about fairness to his father. At the outset, the screenplay for the television dramatization was to be based exclusively on what is widely considered to be the definitive biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author: “Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story,” done by Prof. Carlos Baker of Princeton University.

Before his death last year, Baker devoted much of his life to studying the life and work of Hemingway and in the process he antagonized Hemingway’s three sons and four wives. Jack Hemingway in particular felt that the Baker portrait simply failed to capture the warm, vibrant, often tender-hearted figure Jack knew his father to be.

“Baker’s view only showed one side of my father--the bullying side,” Hemingway said.

The problem was settled amicably late last year. According to Jack Hemingway, he and his brother, Patrick, raised their objections to Daniel Wilson, whose New York-based production company anchored the project with the German firm Alcor Films.

The co-producers then agreed to pay $50,000 to the Hemingway Foundation, a literary trust, for the rights to Hemingway’s lifelong correspondence with his family and with America’s other literary lions. These were edited by Baker and first published by Scribner’s under the title “Ernest Hemingway--Collected Letters 1917-1961.”

“This protected the principle that it was not the biographer who controlled the rights to a life story,” Hemingway said.

For Charles Scribner, now a vice president of Scribner’s parent company, Macmillan Publishing, the inclusion of the letters as material for the screenplay also helped provide a rounded, accurate portrait of Hemingway, a man whose life and writings have often been obscured by layers of myth and apocryphal stories. He believes it also helped Keach produce a powerful, rich and complex portrayal of Hemingway.

“The letters reveal the full dimensions of the man,” Scribner said. “As far as the rights to a man’s life story, I don’t think anyone owns the facts to his life, insofar as a man is a public figure. But by including material from the letters, the producers kept the screenplay true to the man. Their motives were pure.”

Still, tonight, while Keach as Hemingway is seen writing such legendary works as “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and going off hunting in Africa, Scribner will remain annoyed about yet anothebr twist to the rights controversy: the novelization of the docudrama.

In concert with the television story and all its attendant publicity, St. Martin’s Press in New York has brought out a paperback based on the screenplay, a book complete with eight pages of photos of Keach as Hemingway and a cover of movie art.

According to Sally Richardson, publisher of the mass-market paperback division, St. Martin’s bought the screenplay last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair from the company Alcor Films, then commissioned writer Christopher Cook Gilmore to “novelize” it. She reports it is selling “pretty well” at $3.50 a copy.

“As someone interested in preserving literary history, I find this ironic,” Scribner said. “It’s like novelizing Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’ Why not go with the original? To novelize a life as rich as Hemingway’s--I think Hemingway would have had a few things to say about that.”

What remains above dispute is the continuing power of the Hemingway novels and short stories. Unlike many of Hemingway’s rival authors, such as Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, Scribner said Hemingway sales have never dramatically slipped, though there was what he calls a “slight dip” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now he reports a definite Hemingway revival.

“In the ‘60s there was the blossoming of the counterculture movement, the Vietnam era. The macho quality that Hemingway seemed to personify was somewhat out of favor,” Scribner said. “But from the early 1980s on, there has been a definite renewal of interest. Sales of Hemingway books still run more than a million copies a year in America and twice that worldwide.”

Jack Hemingway, at 64, known to millions of readers as the baby Bumby of “A Moveable Feast,” has grown weary of decades of Hemingway controversies. First, he was known as the son of Ernest, then as the father of the actresses Margaux and Mariel and artist Muffet.

“I was always somebody’s son or somebody’s father,” he often said.

But two years ago, Jack Hemingway finally took center stage himself with his own memoir, “Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman.” It recounts in lighthearted fashion his own life of wartime experiences, of fly fishing, and of coming to terms with the heavy burdens of the Hemingway legend.

Heavy they still are. After Ernest Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, his fourth wife, Mary, became the most prominent keeper of her husband’s literary trust and reputation. But Mary too has died, and now Jack is his father’s keeper.

“The only thing that’s really important is the stuff he wrote,” Hemingway said. “That’s what he cared about, and that’s what’s worth protecting. The myth and the man time eventually separates. But the work endures.”