For All We Know We May Never Meet Again

He called her "Kraut," and she called him (what else?) "Papa." Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich met while traveling across the Atlantic on the Ile de France in 1934. Their friendship lasted until the Nobel Prize-winning author's death in 1961. It's plain from both sides of the correspondence (the JFK Library already had 31 letters and telegrams from Dietrich to Hemingway, sent between 1950 and 1961) that the strong emotional bond between them was matched by a comparable physical attraction. Intense protestations of love pepper the correspondence . Yet Dietrich and Hemingway were never lovers. And yet the timing was never right. As A. E. Hotchner writes in his book “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir,” Hemingway once told him: “The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Île de France, but we’ve never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion.” Such longing and passion come through in the letters, not to mention occasional jealousies and, once, even a sense of regret. “Marlene I love you very much as you damned well know,” Hemingway wrote in a 1950 letter from Cuba. “It was you who decided that time on the boat that we had just left whoever we were mixed up with too soon. It wasn’t me.” Their friendship, however, seemed strengthened by remaining platonic The lack of physical consummation may have contributed to the often-heated sentiments Hemingway expressed. “I love you and I hold you tight and kiss you hard,” Hemingway ends one letter. In another he writes, “I can’t say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.”