The muse remembers. Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter Mariel Hemingway has written a memoir of her own, and in it, she details how Woody Allen tried to seduce her when she was 18 years old and he was in his 40s.
Hemingway, 53, shot to fame at age 16 as the star of Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan, in which she portrayed his significantly younger love interest. The actress wrote about his advances in her new memoir, Out Came the Sun, which was exclusively excerpted by Fox News on Wednesday, Mar. 25.
“Our relationship was platonic, but I started to see that he had a kind of crush on me,” Hemingway reflected in her book. “Though I dismissed it as the kind of thing that seemed to happen any time middle-aged men got around young women.”
According to Hemingway, she was so inexperienced at that age that the sexual innuendo in the movie embarrassed her. The literary scion wrote that Allen, now 79, flew to her parents’ Idaho home and allegedly suggested they take a trip to Paris after she turned 18.
While inexperienced, the young actress knew Allen had other plans in mind. Hemingway warned her parents Jack and Byra Hemingway that she “didn’t know what the arrangement was going to be” for the proposed trip.
“I wasn’t sure if I was even going to have my own room. Woody hadn’t said that,” she wrote. “He hadn’t even hinted it. But I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me.”
The anxious teen star supposedly woke up mid-sleep “with the certain knowledge” that the trip was a bad idea. “No one was going to get their own room,” she wrote. “His plan, such as it was, involved being with me.” Hemingway then walked over to the guest room, shook Allen awake, and demanded an answer about his intentions.
“I’m not going to get my own room, am I?” she asked the director. “As Allen fumbled for his glasses, Hemingway informed him: ‘I can’t go to Paris with you.'” According to Hemingway, Allen left on his private jet the next morning.
This is not the first time Hemingway has spoken out about her relationship with Allen. In 2011, she told W magazine: “My first real make-out session in my life was with Woody in a hansom cab in front of a camera crew. Before the scene, I practiced making out on my arm in front of the mirror. After we had done the scene once, I said to the cinematographer, Gordon Willis, ‘We don’t have to do that again, do we?'”
Hemingway’s relationship with Allen in Manhattan served as a precursor for what would take place in Allen’s real life relationship with Mia Farrow. The director had an affair with his adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom he eventually married.
Allen’s alleged troublesome behavior was detailed last February, when his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow wrote in a shocking open letter that the director had “sexually assaulted” her when she was 7 years old. Allen responded with a rebuttal of his own, which was published in the New York Times last February.
Out Came the Sun will hit bookstands on April 7.
