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[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E194-E195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HONORING A.E. HOTCHNER
______
HON. STEVE COHEN
of tennessee
in the house of representatives
Friday, February 21, 2020
Mr. COHEN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak in admiration of the
life of A.E. Hotchner, the novelist, bon vivant, friend-of-the-famous
and philanthropist who died last Saturday at the age of 102. Mr.
Hotchner led a charmed life filled with movie stars, musicians, and
literary lions. He was known as a loyal friend and companion,
particularly to the likes of Ernest Hemingway and his Connecticut
neighbor Paul Newman. With Mr. Newman, he founded Newman's Own, a
nonprofit brand of salad dressings and sauces created to underwrite
charitable causes that has, since 1982, delivered hundreds of millions
of dollars to good causes. He and Mr. Newman also founded the Hole in
the Wall Gang in 1988 for children with life-threatening illnesses,
underwritten in part by a 1991 Lincoln Center benefit gala starring
Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matt Damon, Joanne
Woodward and her husband, Mr. Newman. It was Mr. Hotchner's adaptation
of one of Hemingway's short stories, ``The Boxer,'' that introduced him
to a young Paul Newman, who played the part of the boxer originally
intended for James Dean after Dean was killed in a car crash in 1955. A
St. Louis native and a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis
and its law school, Mr. Hotchner met Hemingway in 1948 as a literary
agent for Cosmopolitan magazine, where his job was to persuade famous
people to write for the publication. He found Hemingway in Cuba,
beginning a friendship of travel and drinking that included Spanish
bullfights and hunting in Idaho and only ended with Hemingway's suicide
in 1961. The best known of his many works about celebrities was Papa
Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (1966). He also published a book of their
correspondence, Dear Papa, Dear Hotch (2005) and two plays about the
Nobel Prize winning novelist. Mr. Hotchner also wrote about film stars
Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Doris Day, and Sophia Loren; about the
heiress Barbara Hutton and the French fashion designer Coco Chanel; and
the illustrated history Everyone Comes to Elaine's, about the Manhattan
nightspot famous for its prominent clientele. Mr. Hotchner was famous
in his own right for a series of memoirs, historical novels and plays.
His play
[[Page E195]]
``The White House'' was staged at the White House for President
Clinton. His service in the Army Air Forces in World War II was
chronicled in The Day I Fired Alan Ladd (2002), the third of four
autobiographies. A series of essays on aging, written in his 90s, was
titled O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night. His last book, a novel about
a 12-year-old living in his native St. Louis, came out in 2018, when he
was 101. It's a joy to muse upon such a complicated and full life. The
world was better for having Mr. Hotchner in it.
____________________
