Mariel Hemingway has written what is probably one of the most anticipated memoirs for those familiar with ’70s and ’80s Hollywood gossip. As the granddaughter of iconic author Ernest Hemingway and the sister of Margeaux Hemingway — both of whom waged very public battles with alcoholism and ended their own lives after living in the spotlight — Hemingway is now talking firsthand about her own struggles and triumphs throughout her life and career in her new memoir, Out Came the Sun, from publisher Regal Arts.
While Hemingway does discuss what’s known as “the Hemingway curse,” the real selling point of her story is how many men she worked with who made her professional and personal life a living hell, starting with Woody Allen. While still a teenager, Hemingway starred alongside Allen in Manhattan. When filming was over, the notoriously skeevy filmmaker flew to her parents’ house to whisk her away to Paris the next day, but he didn’t make it very clear whether or not she was getting her own bedroom once they got there. Rather than step in and protect their young daughter, her parents actually tried encouraging her to strike something up with him.
Hemingway recalls waking up in the middle of the night ‘with the certain knowledge that I was an idiot’.
She then went to Allen’s guest room, shook him awake and asked: ‘I’m not going to get my room am I?’
While he fumbled to put on his glasses, Hemingway made up her mind before he could even respond.
‘I can’t go to Paris with you,’ she said.
The next morning, Allen ordered a private jet and left the family’s ranch.
But we all expect Woody Allen to be a creep. It’s Hemingway’s Robert De Niro story that’s a little surprising, only because he was beat out for a role by Eric Roberts. And guess what? They’re both terrible! De Niro read for Roberts’ role in Star 80, about the doomed Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, but “didn’t look anything like the Robert De Niro that I was in love with,” writes Hemingway. “He was fat and unpleasant and talking in that thick accent. And then, he started to hit on me.”
But Roberts was barely a step up:
‘He was a dream during rehearsals – but he ‘turned into a monster’ when she said she wouldn’t go out with him.
‘He wouldn’t look at me until cameras started, or he would stomp down on my toes just before a close-up. He even spit in my face once’.
‘Eric wore me out every day. He made a difficult movie more difficult. And then like magic, his personality switched back’. At the end of the shoot, he said, ‘Didn’t we have a wonderful time’?
But the absolute worst behavior that Hemingway had to endure sounds as though it came from Bob Fosse, the director of Star 80, who apparently went on “drug-fueled rampages” after work, during which he’d pursue Hemingway. When she resisted, he called her “a manipulative little cunt.”
What a peach! After years of tending to herself and, most likely, being honest with herself, she feels like she’s accepted her crazy life for what it is. She’s owning it:
‘I am not a Hemingway scholar, but I am a Hemingway, and to me, that means that I have a ticket to understanding a world of darkness, of courage, of sadness, of excitement, and at times – of complete lunacy.’
It was clearly not an easy road to this point, but she got here, didn’t she?
Source: The Daily Mail
