I said I remembered him writing about Le Jockey and the fight with the British sergeant in one of his stories, but the girl wasn’t Josephine Baker. “No,” he said, “I thought her feeling about the soul was her private business, so I invented a woman to take her place in the story and I left out everything about the soul.

Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

“Harold jumped up, overturning his chair, threatening to knock my block off. Duff took over. She told us not to get feisty. Told me I should go and take my books with me. ‘We are who we are,’ she said. ‘We used to be your friends.’

“Something even sadder happened that time in Paris.” He slowly shook his head and took his time remembering. “I was at Lipp’s on their enclosed terrace having a drink—there was a taxi stand there and a cab pulled up to discharge a passenger and damn if it wasn’t Hadley. Hadn’t laid eyes on her since our divorce. She was very well dressed and as

I asked Ernest about Harold and Pat and he explained that Harold Loeb was Princeton from a very rich New York family, had been on the boxing and wrestling teams in college. He had literary aspirations, even started a little magazine in Paris called Broom. Fiercely devoted to Duff, very jealous of Pat, who alternated weekends with Duff.

When he asked me to take over all future adaptations, I demurred because I had no experience. He said, “What’s that got to do with it? I had no experience writing a novel until I wrote the first one. So, write one script, then you’ll have experience.”

“I invited her into Lipp’s for champagne. We discussed people we knew and what had become of them. I said, ‘You know, Hadley, I think about you often.’ “‘Even now?’ “‘You know what I’m remembering—that evening when The Sun Also Rises was published, and I put on my one necktie and we went to the Ritz and drank champagne with fraises des bois in the

and he appeared to have diminished somewhat; I don’t mean physically diminished, but some of the aura of indomitableness seemed to have gone out of him.

I told Ernest how moved I was reading his loving tribute to Hadley in the final chapter he had given me. I said, “No man has ever loved a woman more or written about that love so tenderly. I only wish that one day I would meet a woman I would love like that.” “Hadley and I were lucky. The stars were perfectly aligned for us. Hadley believed in me