Ernest Hemingway + Marlene Dietrich Letters - New York Times

Ernest Hemingway - Marlene Dietrich - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum - New York Times: "Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and hunter of lions, was not good at everything, it seems, including aquatic love. At least that’s what he wrote to the actress Marlene Dietrich.

“It was too hot to make love if you can imagine that except under water and I was never very good at that,” he wrote to Dietrich in a November 1951 note from Cuba, one of 30 letters he wrote her from 1949 to 1959, reflecting their deeply intimate, flirtatious, yet apparently platonic relationship.

“They adored each other, but there was no sexual thing,” said Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva. “They were buddies, they were friends, they were comrades in arms.”

On Monday the public can ponder anew the affections and undercurrents that ran between two of the great figures of the 20th century when the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum here unseals 30 letters from Hemingway to Dietrich. The letters were given to the library’s Ernest Hemingway collection in 2003 by Ms. Riva, on the condition that they remain closed until now, giving the museum time to preserve them archivally.

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