Portrait of Hemingway — Lillian Ross
“ Ernest was now calling her Daughter and considered her a first class writer. Ross, in effect, became Hemingway’s first real chronicler, and by so doing helped create the Hemingway myth…”
When Lillian Ross first saw Hemingway he was “…standing on the hard packed snow, in dry cold of ten degrees below zero, wearing bedroom slippers, and no socks, with Western-style trousers with an Indian belt that had a silver buckle, and a lightweight Western-style sports shirt open at the collar. He had a greying moustache, and looked rugged and burly and eager and friendly and kind.”
It had taken Ross hours to get to see Hemingway, but thankfully the interview went well with the novelist telling Lillian story after story about bullfighting and his time in Spain. He made the young writer stay for lunch and then gave her a signed copy of Death in the Afternoon. She went away happy but had forgotten to ask Hemingway about his friend, the bullfighter Sidney Franklin, a man she’d just visited. Not a problem: it would give her an excuse to meet up with Hemingway again.
In her preface to the 1961 edition of Portrait of Hemingway, Ross writes about that first meeting with Hemingway:
“ I was on my way back to New York from Mexico, where I had gone to see Sidney Franklin, the American bullfighter from Brooklyn, about whom I was…
