"Papa" Barton wins, leaving sons behind

Eager to cash in on the Annual Hemingway Days Festival, three sons of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist demanded 10 per cent of the profits, telling organisers they were using the family name without paying any licensing fee.

They also said they were tired of rowdy Key West and wanted to make the event more dignified.

Fearing a costly legal battle, the original founder called this year’s festival off, but the owner of the local Hemingway House later bought rights to the festival name and promised to carry on regardless.

So for the 17th year, the festival celebrating Ernest Hemingway went on largely as planned this weekend. It didn’t matter that the legal dispute with the three Hemingway sons Jack, Patrick and Gregory, remained unsettled.

“We were worried about it,” said Fred Johnson, the president of the newly formed Hemingway Look-alike Society.

“We decided we were coming anyway, festival or no festival.” Key West was a favorite haunt of Hemingway’s, a then isolated sea-side spot where he lived and drank and raised children and told stories for most of the 1930s. And Key West is also where he wrote some of his most beloved work.

“Papa liked it here,” said Richard Barton, this year’s Hemingway look-alike winner. “This is where it should be.”

Hemingway descendants held another festival a week ago on Sanibel Island about 240 km away, an island Hemingway never visited, creating a family event to contrast with Key West’s wild party atmosphere.

In Key West, visitors gathered by the dozens on Saturday in front of the two-storey, Spanish-style house shaded by Banyan trees and palms where the writer once lived.

With cats roaming the grounds, they heard someone read the winning short story by Lee Deigaard of Wildwood, Georgia. It was nicely written. But unlike Hemingway’s characteristic snappy prose, her sentences were very long.

Granddaughter Lorian Hemingway read from her new autobiographical book. Her writing was clear and crisp, just what you would expect from a Hemingway.She stayed with the Key West festival this year against the wishes of her cousins because she wanted to keep her short story contest alive and because she loves colorful, energised Key West as much as her grandfather did.

Some Hemingway look-alikes told stories about Papa. Bill Young told of meeting the great writer at a hotel in Spain and at the bullfights. Red Noyes told of staying in the writer’s home in Ketchum, Idaho, recounting the thrill of sitting at the writer’s desk.

One look-alike came all the way from Brazil, and a British agronomist named John Landers was so moved by the festival-family dispute that he wrote a poem about it.

Past winners and Hemingway’s granddaughter judged the event limited to look-alikes who’ve never won before.