• December 18, 2000
• Vol. 54
• No. 26

Father Figure

Like His Famous "Papa," Ernest, Jack Hemingway Lived Large

In 1986, Jack Hemingway wrote that he had spent the first 50 years of his life being the son of a famous father and was spending the last 50 as father of famous children. True, his father was Ernest Hemingway, America's storied novelist, and his daughters Mariel, 39, and Margaux, who died of a drug overdose in 1996 at age 41, achieved celebrity in acting and modeling.

But Jack Hemingway, 77, who died after heart surgery in Manhattan Dec. 1, was more than just a man in the middle. A celebrated fly fisherman and ex-Idaho wildlife commissioner, he lustily perpetuated his father's outsized legacy while escaping the torment that caused Ernest to kill himself in '61. "He lived a life as big as the whole outdoors," says his second wife, Angela, 52.

The eldest of Ernest's three sons, Jack was raised primarily by his mother, Hadley, spending summers with "Papa," who once hired a Havana prostitute to handle his son's sexual initiation. A POW in WWII, Jack eventually settled in Ketchum, Idaho, where he and first wife Byra Whittlesey raised daughter Joan (Muffet) as well as Mariel and Margaux. According to an old fishing pal, Jack once said that he and his brother Patrick were "determined to see how long a Hemingway can live." And, it would seem, how well.