PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUCHOSiOREG GORMAN
Mad scientists? They seem awfully happy. With the able assistance of her
Creator co-stars, Vincent Spano (left) and Peter O Toole (right), Mariel
Hemingway tests the effects of laughter on various chemical compounds.
gether that we'd go out. I don't know
why we ever lived together. He works
through the night and I was filming all
day so we never saw each other —
perhaps that’s why it worked so well. We
had such a close bond from the three
years of Personal Best and I didn’t want
to lose that. Then of course, as soon as
Star '80 was over, I realized I hadn’t
needed to move in. I've learned from
that. Now I don’t move in with every
person I become attached to!”
Mariel won’t comment on her current
relationship, reportedly with French
actor Christopher Lambert, who was
Tarzan in Greystoke and who was seen of
late squiring her around London, Ms.
Hemingway looking uncharacteristically
fashionable and elegant in a black silk
pantsuit. But there are plenty of things
she will talk about, like her new-found
celebrity in the wake of Star 80. "There
are a couple of things that really bother
me about it, like standing in line at the
grocery store, standing in line to buy
stamps and going to dance classes. The
dance classes always made me nervous,
actually. I always felt tall, even before
people recognized me. And standing in
lines is when you start to hear, ‘Oh, I
think I know who she is...”
Part of her early shyness,'Mariel feels,
had to do with being the great Heming
way’s granddaughter. Though she was
bom after he died and didn’t read his
books until she was a teenager, she is a
knowledgeable and fierce partisan of her
grandfather’s writing and she admits to
being “teased a lot at school. And can you
imagine having to hand in an essay with
the name ‘Hemingway’ on the bottom?”
But much more important was her self
consciousness about her looks. At 21, she
is confident and carefree, but an infal
lible way to get Mariel to revert to a
blushing teenager, holding a restaurant
napkin up in front of her face, is to tell
her she’s pretty. “I’m not! And when
people tell me I am, it makes it worse. I
feel like a fake. When I was a teenager I
had a very bad period when I grew like
crazy — my legs got immensely long in
proportion to my body. And I had a
friend who was really beautiful all the
time. I’d try so hard. I’d get dressed up
to go out and my hair would be greasy
and messy so I’d wash it and style it. Five
minutes later, it was greasy and messy
again. I’m a natural scruff”,
A natural scruff and a natural actress,
Hemingway is also a natural athlete. It
was seeing a photograph of her on a
trampoline that prompted Towne to cast
her in Personal Best and that led to a
year of intensive physical training. “I
thought I was pretty athletic until I found
First Hemingway in Hollywood. Novelist and short story writer Ernest
Hemingway sold a wealth of Ns tales to the film industry.
THE IMPORTANCE
OF GRANDPA ERNEST
e wrote of people living dangerous lives. His style was
sparse. His theme was stoic courage, expressed in tales
of -resolute soldiers, bum-luck athletes, aged fishermen
and. quintessentially, bullfighters. Ernest Miller Heming
way, bom in July of 1893, committed suicide in July of
1961, well before MarieI Hemingway was born to his son
Jack. He saw life as war; perhaps, with his self-inflicted
shotgun blast, he believed he was refusing to surrender
though he couldn't continue to fight. He had once said,
speaking of his many stories about bullfighters. "I was trying to learn to write,
commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things and the
most fundamental is violent death."
Because his style is so unadorned that it can, quite on purpose, approach
monotony, Hemingway has collected his share of critical horse-laughs.
Nevertheless, he is among the most powerful and influential writers in-Ameri
can history. His plots and dialogue were highly original and his psychological
observation acute. Some of the delight in reading Hemingway's novels and
short stories comes from realizing how much freight his tight, economical con
structions carry. His first novel was The Sun Also Rises (1926), his first book
was In Our Time (1924). A Farewell to Arms (1929) drew on Hemingway's expe
riences while serving with the Italian infantry during World War I (his exploits in
that war won the author decorations for valor). For Whom the BeH Tolls (1940),
another war novel, draws on the •Spanish Revolution and may be Hemingway's
best. If any of the above sound cinematically familiar, along with other titles like
The Old Man and the Sea, To. Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream,
you have just recognized Ernest as the first Hemingway to make a splash in
Hollywood.