'Papa' Hemingway's letters to Dietrich revealed

He was "Papa", tormented by the "un-synchronized passion" he experienced with her. She was the jealous other woman, reassured by him that there is "only one of you in the world".

The passionate correspondence was between Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich. Thirty previously unseen letters from the writer to the German-born actress and singer reveal an intense and flirtatious but apparently platonic relationship.

They were donated to library by Dietrich's daughter Maria Riva and went on display for the first time yesterday. They complement 31 letters by Dietrich to Hemingway that have already been made public.

Some handwritten on hotel notepaper and others typed by Hemingway at his home in Cuba, they show an enduring love between the author, who committed suicide in 1961, and the film star he met on an ocean liner in 1943.

The couple were powerfully drawn to each other and both appeared to regret that timing and distance meant a full-blown love affair never developed. Advertisement" I fall in love with you bad and you're always in love with some jerk," wrote Hemingway, who signed all his letters "Papa", in 1950.

"Marlene, I love you very much as you damned well know. It was you who decided that time on the boat that we had just left whoever we were mixed up with too soon. It wasn't me. We have been shot in the ass with bad luck more than probably any two people."

Hemingway wrote dozens of missives between 1949 and 1953. The correspondence, which began when Hemingway was 50 and Dietrich 47, is now open to the public at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston." Toi et moi have lived through about as bad times as there ever were," wrote Hemingway, who saw action on the Italian front with the Red Cross in the First World War and as a reporter in the Second World War.

"I don't mean wars. Wars are spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and give co-ordinates."

Writing in September 1949, Hemingway said: "I am very jealous at you being a grandmother, and me not being a legal grandfather."

At the time of that letter, Hemingway was working on Across the River and Into the Trees, of which he wrote; "I am finishing a brick and should be through in about three weeks. I think that you will like it very much. You aren't in it and nobody else is because it is all made up. But it is made up as well as I can make it."

Dietrich read the manuscript, describing it in a handwritten note as: "Like a terrible animal lying quietly in your room and you don't know when it will kill you. I read it with one eye and my heart had gooseflesh."

Hemingway described the relationship with Dietrich to his friend, writer A.E. Hotchner, by saying they were: "Victims of un-synchronized passion who fell in love when they met but we've never been to bed.

"Amazing but true... Those times when I was out of love, the Kraut was deep in some romantic tribulation, and on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvellously seeking eyes, I was submerged."

Despite the platonic nature of their relationship, Dietrich was intensely jealous of Hemingway's relationships with other women, forcing him to defend his friendship with actress Ingrid Bergman in a letter in May 1950.

"I cannot help it if I am fond of Bergman and am loyal to her when she is in trouble," he wrote.

Telegraph