It's plain from both sides of the correspondence (the JFK Library already had 31 letters and telegrams from Dietrich to Hemingway, sent between 1950 and 1961) that the strong emotional bond between them was matched by a comparable physical attraction. Intense protestations of love pepper the correspondence .
Yet Dietrich and Hemingway were never lovers. They were, as Hemingway once remarked to his friend and future biographer A.E. Hotchner , "Victims of un-synchronized passion." Whenever one party was unattached, the other was not.
The lack of physical consummation may have contributed to the often-heated sentiments Hemingway expressed. "What do you really want to do for a life work?" he wrote on June 19, 1950. "Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel." Later in that letter, he refers to his new novel as "Under the Arm-Pits and Into the Trees."
(Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe | March 27, 2007)
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