I went to Ketchum to see what remained of Ernest Hemingway in the place where the Nobel laureate ended his life. Though the author is often associated with Spain, Paris, Key West and Cuba, Hemingway is perpetually located in Ketchum, his last residence and final resting place. I found his legacy there very much alive.
Photography provided by John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
When Hemingway arrived in 1939, Ketchum was merely a crossroads, a mining town anchored by a handful of saloons moonlighting as casinos. He came with Martha Gellhorn while still married to his second wife, Pauline. They stayed at the Sun Valley Lodge, a mile north, where the owners of the country’s first destination ski resort offered celebrities like Hemingway free lodging in exchange for the publicity they brought. He worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls in the mornings, hunted in the afternoons with friends he quickly made among the locals and fell in love with the countryside, which reminded him of Spain.
He returned twice with Martha, whom he had eventually married, and after World War II with Mary Welsh Hemingway, his fourth wife. In 1959, Ernest and Mary bought a house in Ketchum on a hillside above the Big Wood River from Bob Topping, a playboy who, the story goes, built the concrete structure painted to look like a log cabin in the style of Sun Valley Lodge to spite its management for kicking him out. The house had very modern amenities for the times, such as a movie projector with a screen that dropped out of the living room ceiling, a television with a remote control, air conditioning and double Thermador ovens. Huge picture windows provided stunning views of the surrounding mountain ranges on three sides.
It was there, in the front foyer, that Hemingway shot himself on July 2, 1961.
Photography provided by Mary and Ernest Hemingway House and Preserve Collection. Photos used with permission from Hemingway, Ltd.
My first stop was the Casino, a windowless, working man’s bar with low wooden beam ceilings. Hemingway played the slots and drank at the Casino. “He used to sit in the corner there,” the bartender told me, confirmed by photos on the walls. The Casino’s antithesis across Main Street, Whiskey on Main (formerly Whiskey Jacques), is a cheerful bar and eatery with high ceilings and large windows. They used to say, “You go to Whiskey Jacques for a cocktail and a show; you go to the Casino for a shot and a fight.” Hemingway visited Whiskey on Main when it was the Alpine Restaurant for the “sizzlin’ steak” (inch-thick sirloins served with potatoes and coleslaw for $1.25).
Nowadays, Hemingway likely wouldn’t recognize Ketchum, which has grown to eight square blocks and become a collection of boutique shops, yoga studios, ski rental outlets and real estate offices. The building where Pete Lane’s General Store anchored the crossroads of Main Street and Sun Valley Road for decades now houses Enoteca, an upscale restaurant that serves duck confit with risotto and wood-fired pizzas in a long, narrow brick-walled space. Since Lane’s catered to the Basque shepherds who had populated the area after World War II — a sign painted on the back of the building still reads “Eat More Lamb – It’s Delicious.” — I ordered the lamb chops, which were, indeed, delicious: tender and cooked to perfection.
Though chic, brick sidewalks have replaced the town’s former wooden planks, Ketchum retains its casual Western roots. When I called the Sawtooth Club to ask if it had a dress code (I had only packed two pairs of jeans), the host laughed. The place is rustic, with wooden tables and a moose head above the entry, but it serves decent food (I tried the jambalaya). The Sawtooth trades on its Hemingway connection, marketing a Hunter Thompson quote (“He could sit in the Sawtooth Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life . . .”), yet when I asked the young waitress about Hemingway, all she knew about him was the photo hanging by the fireplace (depicting the author in Key West, not Ketchum).
Photography provided by The Community Library Center for Regional History Donald Snoddy and Ralph Burrell Collection Photos used with permission from Hemingway Ltd
Three of the Basque restaurants Hemingway frequented — the Rio Club, the Idaho Club and the Tram — are long gone, but his favorite restaurant in town, Christiania, remains, now called Michel’s Christiania. The stone A-frame with booth-to-ceiling windows looks up Bald Mountain, known to locals as “Baldy.” (When I skied it one morning, I was pleased to find a run named “Hemingway,” though he did not ski in Idaho.) An enormous chandelier hangs above tables draped in white cloth and lit with oil lamps. Here, Hemingway ate his last meal, a rare New York steak and, most likely, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I sat at the same table, a corner booth in the back. In memory of Hemingway as a trout fisherman and because the waiter told me that the nearby Buhl River supplies 75% of the country’s trout, I ordered the trout à la meunière with couscous, green beans and baked tomato. It was excellent. So were the crêpes with locally foraged morel mushrooms in a sherry cream sauce. Over dinner, I pondered how Hemingway — sitting in that same booth — felt about what he planned to do the following day.
Sun Valley Lodge was overhauled a mile down the road in 2015. Hemingway’s room, No. 206 — he nicknamed it “Glamour House” — has moved to No. 228 and now features a bronze statue of the writer at his typewriter. The Ram restaurant, which Hemingway mentions in his short story “The Shot,” has retained its Austrian ambiance and recently featured a Hemingway Hasenpfeffer on its heritage menu. (Ironic because Hemingway shot hundreds of rabbits to relieve farmers of the pests but did not like to eat them.) Up the road, Trail Creek Cabin looks very much like it did when Hemingway partied there, tossing an olive into the mouth of his friend Gary Cooper on one occasion and passing New Year’s Eve with Ingrid Bergman on another.
Mary Hemingway willed the hillside house in Ketchum to the Nature Conservancy, and it is now managed by the Community Library, which has a vast Hemingway collection of books, letters and photos in its regional history center. The house has been restored to the way it was when Hemingway lived — and died — there. It is closed to the public but open to private tours. I spent more than two hours inside, reconstructing in my mind scenes of Hemingway watching the Friday night boxing matches with friends and the days he struggled with the manuscript published posthumously as A Moveable Feast.
Photo by Lloyd Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
It seems everyone in Ketchum has a story to tell about Hemingway. The retired gentleman eating lunch next to me at the Bigwood Bread Bakery & Cafe who had given tours of the Hemingway house told me with mischievous delight about the Playboy magazines he imagined Hemingway perused. (Doubtful. The magazines in the home have been added as props.) A librarian who grew up with Hemingway’s granddaughters told me in a conspiratorial whisper that the gun Hemingway used to shoot himself had been buried about 30 miles south of town. (Possible. I heard competing theories about the gun’s fate.)
The best stories came from a 70-year-old realtor named Jed Gray, whose parents had befriended the author. Hemingway often made his rounds of the town in the afternoon, stopping at the post office and drugstore before driving out to the Gray house, not far from the Sun Valley Lodge, for his daily walk. Jed often accompanied him along the remote dirt road by Ruud Mountain, where Sun Valley installed the nation’s first chair lift, and Hemingway went to watch the annual ski races in the spring before his death. Today, the chairlift no longer runs, and the paved road resembles a subdivision lined with houses.
One evening at the Gray house, when Jed was sick, the author read to him from The Old Man and the Sea. Another evening, they watched the television debut of A Farewell to Arms. During a commercial break, Hemingway decided it was time to teach the two Gray boys and another youth how to drink red wine from a bota. He encouraged them to hold the wineskin at arm’s length. “We all got wet,” Jed says.
Photography by Bettmann
At the Ketchum cemetery on the edge of town, Hemingway’s grave is marked by a flat granite slab beneath two large pine trees. Pilgrims leave bottles of whiskey, cans of beer and coins scattered across his gravestone. The day I visited, there was also a letter written by a fan along with a framed 5-by-7-inch shot of the view from Hemingway’s Cuba home.
On my way out of town, I wanted to see the Hemingway Memorial beside Trail Creek about a mile and a half up Sun Valley Road from the resort. I had trouble finding it so I stopped to ask directions from a woman walking three dogs. Celebrity sightings are not unusual in the area, where you might spot Clint Eastwood driving his battered pickup or Reese Witherspoon on a chairlift. Serendipitously, the woman turned out to be Mariel Hemingway, the author’s granddaughter. She pleasantly directed me to the site.
The memorial features a bronze bust of Hemingway; his gaze permanently fixed across the valley (now the seventh fairway of the Sun Valley Golf Course) toward the hills. It is inscribed with words he wrote for a Ketchum friend killed in a hunting accident that he may as well have written about himself: “Best of all he loved the fall/The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods/Leaves floating on the trout streams/And above the hills the high blue windless sky/Now he will be part of them forever.”
