When Denne Bart Petitclerc visited Ernest Hemingway's former home outside Havana two years ago, he stopped in the living room and touched the legendary writer's chair, preserved as a museum piece by the Cuban government.
Standing there alone, he silently wept for the man he called "Papa."
"He loved Ernest Hemingway so much," said his wife, Wanda Petitclerc, who described the scene. "He thought of Hemingway as his father figure."
Mr. Petitclerc, a former Chronicle reporter, television and screenwriter, whose fan letter to Hemingway in the 1950s led to their friendship, died Feb. 3 at age 76 of complications from lung cancer.
His ashes will be reunited in Ketchum, Idaho, with the remains of his hero.
Born on May 15, 1929, in Montesano, Wash., Denne Bart Petitclerc was only 5 years old when his father took him shopping and told him to look at the big angel on top of a department store Christmas tree. "Stay here, son," he was told as he gazed at the angel. "I'll be right back."
His father never returned.
Mr. Petitclerc and his older sister were soon placed in an orphanage in San Jose so his mother could go to school. His mother kept in touch with her children but lived her own life, according to relatives.
At age 13, Mr. Petitclerc moved in with a foster family, dropped out of school and worked for a time in the oil fields. He wanted so badly to become a writer that he copied Hemingway's books in longhand, hoping the practice would teach him spelling and grammar.
After a brief stint with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where he was nearly fired because of his poor spelling, he was hired by the Miami Herald.
At the Herald, he became infuriated by a newspaper review that claimed the short sentence was Hemingway's only contribution to the English language. He wrote to Hemingway complaining about the review and recounted his own long hours studying the author's books.
A week later, Hemingway called the newsroom and invited Mr. Petitclerc fishing, beginning a friendship that lasted the rest of the novelist's life and involved numerous trips to La Finca Vigia, the Hemingway home in Cuba.
Mr. Petitclerc covered the Cuban Revolution for the Herald and for The Chronicle, where he went to work in the early 1960s. He wrote after Hemingway's suicide in 1961 that "the important thing that Hemingway had is still here and will be long after whatever it was that got him, gets you and me, and whatever comes after us."
In an era when reporters wore coats and ties, Mr. Petitclerc wore a Navy surplus coat and hat, looked like a merchant seaman and wrote prose that read as if from a Hemingway novel, according to his former colleagues.
In a story about a bomb that was mistakenly dropped in San Francisco by a Navy plane, he described how it ricocheted around downtown office buildings and eventually "tumbled into the street below, hitting a Pacific Gas & Electric Company truck where three workmen sat munching their noon-time sandwiches."
"Boy," one of the workers was quoted as saying, "next time we eat lunch with our hard hats on."
In 1962, he described the pain of baseball great Joe DiMaggio during the funeral procession for his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe.
"Unable to contain his grief any longer, he had leaned over her pale, beautiful face, murmuring, 'I love you, I love you,' and kissed the still lips."
Mr. Petitclerc, who lived in Sonoma at the time, left The Chronicle in the 1960s to work as a writer on the television series "Bonanza." In 1969, he created the NBC series "Then Came Bronson," about a motorcycle-riding former reporter searching for meaning in life. He wrote the pilot for "The High Chaparral" and worked on numerous other television shows.
At the request of Hemingway's widow, Mary, Mr. Petitclerc served as an unofficial executor of Hemingway's literary papers, according to Wanda Petitclerc. As such, she said, he helped edit "The Garden of Eden" and "Islands in the Stream," which were published after Hemingway's death.
Mr. Petitclerc wrote "Rage of Honor," which was published in 1966 and "Le Mans 24," a sort of companion book to the Steve McQueen movie "Le Mans," in 1971. He also co-wrote the 1981 novel "Destinies."
A semiautobiographical screenplay called "Papa" was in pre-production at the time of Mr. Petitclerc's death. It is the story of a young journalist who finds a father figure in Hemingway during the Cuban Revolution.
"He never got over being abandoned, and many of the things he wrote about involved fathers and sons," said his wife. "Hemingway was married four times and had been criticized by his kids for being absent most of the time. Their friendship filled a void for both of them."
Besides his wife of 35 years, Mr. Petitclerc is survived by sons Scot of Venice (Los Angeles County) and, from a previous marriage, Bart of Grass Valley (Nevada County); daughters Gayle Petitclerc of Seattle and Jackie Nelson and Patricia Petitclerc, both of Nampa, Idaho; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
