[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 35 (Friday, February 21, 2020)]
[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.

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