Group rejects offer on Hemingway house

BOISE – An environmental group that owns the former home of Ernest Hemingway has rejected an offer from neighbors to buy the property, setting up a legal row.

The board of The Nature Conservancy’s Idaho chapter voted Friday to move ahead with a plan to turn the 13-acre property near Sun Valley into a literary library and museum.

It includes opening the home – where the Nobel Prize-winning author shot himself in 1961 – to tours.

Neighbors fear the proposal would disrupt the residential character of the upscale Ketchum community and plan to discuss the latest development with their lawyer. They’ve threatened a lawsuit, claiming a private driveway leading to the residence should be off limits to tourists.

“We’re disappointed they didn’t accept our offer,” said Gene Whitmyre, a retired real-estate executive who lives next door to the home.

“We thought it (our offer) was a win-win for everyone,” Whitmyre said, “but the board didn’t feel the same way.”

The home was purchased by Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, in 1959. The neighbors had agreed to pay market value for the property – which could have fetched more than an estimated $5 million – on the condition the house be moved elsewhere.

The Nature Conservancy’s board members decided that uprooting the home would have been difficult and would have been contrary to the wishes of Mary Hemingway, who left the estate to the group in 1986.

“The board appreciated the offer but thought it was in the public interest and best represented what Mary Hemingway wanted for the land and the home to remain together,” spokesman Matt Miller said.

The Nature Conservancy used the property briefly as office space. But it has been trying to get rid of it for years because it costs up to $50,000 annually to maintain and doesn’t fit with the group’s mission of environmental protection, said director Geoff Pampush.

The environmental group still must persuade the Ketchum City Council to sign off on its plan, which includes turning most of the property into a nature preserve.

Its proposal calls for transferring the place to the Idaho Hemingway House Foundation. Its members include Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, and actor Tom Hanks.

That group would organize literary workshops, fund-raising events and tours of up to 15 people a day.

The house was built by Henry J. “Bob” Topping Jr., the one-time owner of the New York Yankees, in 1954.

Hemingway bought it five years later, calling it a “good rental property.”

There are still reminders of the writer inside: a mounted gazelle’s head in the second-floor master bedroom; a painting of a slaughtered bull after a corrida by Waldo Pierce, a Hemingway friend from their days in 1920s Spain; and a postcard-sized drawing by Pablo Picasso.

Neighbors and some Hemingway family members, including Patrick Hemingway, the writer’s lone-surviving son, have said that the house is inappropriate as a memorial to “Papa.”

By the time he bought the house, they say, his mental health was deteriorating rapidly and he’d long since passed his artistic prime. They also contend the plan for the literary memorial would draw thousands of visitors every year.

Still, at a Jan. 13 public meeting in Sun Valley, many area residents said they wanted to see the house opened up and celebrated.

“The board felt that no matter what decision we make, there are going to be critics,” Pampush said. “But the board felt we were doing the right thing.”