A. E. Hotchner

Bestselling author A. E. Hotchner's intimate account of his 53-year friendship with his pal Paul Newman.A. E. Hotchner first met Paul Newman in 1955 when the virtually unknown actor assumed the lead role in Hotchner's first television play, based on an Ernest Hemingway story. The project elevated both men from relative obscurity to recognition and began a close and trusted friendship that lasted until Newman's death in 2008.In Paul and Me, Hotchner depicts a complicated, unpredictable, fun-loving, talented man, and takes the reader along on their adventures. The pair traveled extensively, skippered a succession of bizarre boats, confounded the business world, scored triumphs on the stage, and sustained their friendship through good times and bad. Most notably, they started Newman's Own as a prank and watched it morph into a major enterprise that so far has donated all its $300 million in profit to charities including the Hole in the Wall Camps worldwide, dedicated to helping thousands of children with life-threatening illnesses. Paul and Me, complete with personal photographs, is the story of a freewheeling friendship and a tribute to the acclaimed actor who gave to the world as much as the world gave him.From the Hardcover edition.

"Bound together for the first time, these two boyhood memoirs relate A. E. Hotchner's coming of age in the Midwest during the Depression"--Provided by publisher.

"This memoir of A. E. Hotchner's World War II experiences explores a different side of the troubled war years. Hotchner, who grew up in St. Louis, was a rookie lawyer fresh out of Washington University Law School when the United States declared war. Like many others of his generation, he aspired to serve his country. He tried to enlist in the navy, first as a pilot and then as a deck officer, but he was rejected for faulty depth perception and flat feet, respectively. Drafted as a lowly GI into the air force branch of the army, he was accepted to bombardier school. But on the eve of his departure, he was ordered to write and perform in an air force musical comedy instead. He eventually went to Officer Candidate School and was assigned to the Anti-Submarine Command as a lieutenant adjutant, but just before his squadron's departure for North Africa he was detached and, despite knowing nothing about moviemaking, ordered to make a film that glorified the Anti-Submarine Command's role in combating U-boats.". "All through his four-year military career, despite his efforts to get into combat, fate and the military bureaucracy thwarted him. The author skillfully recounts the events of those years, describing the encounters he had with many unforgettable characters, including a footsore and sentimental Clark Gable and an inept Alan Ladd - best known as the star of Shane. Ladd, then a GI, did such a poor job reading the narration for Hotchner's film Atlantic Mission that Hotchner had to fire him. The author also describes his encounters with other well-known people, notably Tennessee Williams, with whom he attended a playwriting class at Washington University, and a wistful, vulnerable Dorothy Parker."--BOOK JACKET.

They were friends, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner. Between 1948 and 1961, they traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, they fished the waters off Cuba, they hunted in Idaho, they ran with the bulls in Pamplona. And everywhere they talked. For fourteen years Hotchner and Hemingway shared a conversation. In it Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene in the twenties, remembered his early years as a writer, recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction. And Hotchner took it down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa - in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, in Ketchum (Idaho), where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 - provide the material for this utterly truthful, profoundly compassionate bestselling memoir of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinning author. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a great writer who had, and determined, the time of his life.

"In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade. Hemingway divulged the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the true part of the literary woman he'd create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. He told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which he stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice; of midnight champagne with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him: humble and full of regret. To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife Mary (also a close friend) and to satisfy the terms of his publisher's cautious legal review, Hotch kept the conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. Hemingway in Love puts you in the room with the master as he remembers the definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and stayed with him until the end of his days"--

""Acclaimed author and feisty nonagenarian Hotchner's witty ruminations about the art of living well into old age...with brio and a touch of his trademark sass, Hotchner writes about rediscovering love after 75, finding joy in a scrappy African gray parrot he named after his longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway, and going on his very first safari at age 88." - Kirkus Reviews When youngsters in their seventies and eighties, nervously lurching toward the horizon of ninety, ask me, "What's the secret?" That's what I tell them: "O.J. in the morning, gin and tonic at night." You don't have to be in your seventies or eighties to enjoy A. E. Hotchner's elixir for aging happily, but after reading this charming collection of essays, you may wish you were. Nonagenarian, novelist, playwright, and biographer, Hotchner gives us heartfelt and laugh-out-loud anecdotes that describe his unique reflections on the aging process. His musings cover everything from the outlandish commercials that target the older generation (Viagra, Cialis, and Flomax) to suggestions on adapting the tennis game for seniors (he suggests lowering the net by two inches and moving all outer lines two feet inward) to the advantages of having a pet (his pet parrot often tells guests to "kiss my ass"). He can equally capture the headier side of aging, which is bittersweetly revealed in his piece about divorce. With his disarming, eloquent voice and dry sense of humor, Hotch illuminates life's wisdoms through his optimistic, witty, and romantic outlook, all the while maing you feel, well, not unhappy about growing older. O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night is a book of courageous advice, humorous wisdom, and, above all, good strategies for how to stay young at heart"--