“I was born in New York City, educated at Buckley School until age nine, when I went to Switzerland for my schooling,” begins the filmmaker and author John Heminway. “After three years at le Rosey, I returned to the States—as a ‘third-former’ at Saint Mark’s School in Massachusetts. Soon after arrival, I did all to shed my Mid-Atlantic accent.”

Born to a father who traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and a mother from St. Louis, John Heminway speaks respectfully of his “slightly nonconformist” parents who provided him with tools for a “slightly nonconformist” career. His mother, Jane Johnson Heminway, “was a celebrated equestrienne, with dark good looks, and Auntie Mame-ish humor. I am grateful she taught me to go my own way and that she insisted I acquire an education better than hers. Sadly, we didn’t have her for very long. I was 19 when she died.”

John’s father, son of Dolly O’Brien, grew up in Europe. Greatly influenced by his stepfather, Jay O’Brien, who captained the American bobsled team to glory in the 1932 winter Olympics at Lake Placid (as featured in Andy Bull’s Speed Kings), he excelled as a golfer, helping to win the 1936 German Amateur. “A certain chancellor-turned-dictator actually handed him his prize… Quite amazing because eight years later when he landed at Utah Beach, he was probably the only man in his battalion who had actually shaken hands with Adolf Hitler. Whenever I polish the silver tray, I experience a frisson of horror.”

After graduating from Princeton in 1966, John took off for Africa to write a book. This decision was not altogether surprising since he had fallen in love with the continent at age 16. His first encounter began at St. Mark’s, where “on an especially dreary weekend night, the Saturday guest speaker showed us his film about Africa. I don’t suppose it was anything special, but I was so taken by it, I went up to him afterwards and asked him whether I could join him on his next expedition. I did. That is how the summer of 1960 set me on a trajectory that continues to this day.”

The speaker who introduced Heminway to Africa was Quentin Keynes, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The journey began in Southampton, England, when he, three other schoolboys and a Land Rover boarded a Liberty ship, the Winchester Castle. Two weeks in third class later they were in Cape Town. For two months they drove on dirt tracks across what was then South-West Africa, Bechuanaland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia. Every day promised adventures with lions, elephants, and crocs. The people they met and the discoveries they made had a huge impact on Heminway. It can be said that Africa was the first step in a career that has spanned the globe.

Above: Heminway with Tim, the largest elephant 
surviving in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park

Courtesy of JOHN HEMINWAY

Since 1960, he returned every year to Africa, one time even hitchhiking across the Sahara with his brother, Jay. In 1968, after his first book, The Imminent Rains: A Visit among the Last Pioneers of Africa, was published, Heminway remembers his father saying, “Now you’ve had your fun. It’s now time for you to settle down.” His attempt to pursue a career in business lasted all of nine months—“until finally I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Serendipitously, a friend working as a cameraman for ABC Sports showed The Imminent Rains to a producer, who promptly gave Heminway a job writing the network’s American Sportsman series. Hugely popular at the time, it featured movie stars and celebrated athletes hunting and fishing around the world. This was a time when it seemed “that every taxi driver in New York was a starving but qualified filmmaker.” He felt “damn lucky” to have landed such a plum job “with no qualifications whatsoever, except one book, soon to go out of print.”

Heminway learned his craft first as a production manager, “with lofty responsibilities like bringing sandwiches to the crew. In those days films were edited on a Moviola; the film went in one set of sprockets, the sound in another. With a toggle switch you rock-and-rolled each scene, weighing what to say. Basically, I developed a sense for ‘film words’ and how to measure them through timing, sparseness and sparkle—pretty much the essentials.” Heminway wrote for the American Sportsman’s host, announcer Curt Gowdy, a Wyoming native well known as the “voice” of the Boston Red Sox for 15 seasons and for a career that spanned almost every major sporting event, including Super Bowls, World Series, and the Olympics. “He had a very special diction and cadence which I had to master. By the end of my four years, I was not only writing the series, but I had graduated to field producer and director. Filmmaking is a collaborative art. Getting along with others, showcasing their talents, practicing diplomacy in places where diplomacy was foreign—that was what I learned in those days.”

Heminway worked with a rich roster of legends, like Bing Crosby. “What a voice! He would sing lullabies to each member of the crew when we returned to camp in the evening… Then there was Ted Williams who we filmed in Zambia. Everything wild intrigued him. One day he and I spent hours studying an antlion take down flies twice its size. He was one of the most intense human beings I’ve ever met. Then there was actor Patrick O’Neal, who we got to capture and translocate a leopard, followed by the luminous Gene Kelly catching Nile perch in Lake Rudolph (now Turkana). From every encounter with a star I learned new lessons in my developing craft.”

John Huston was Heminway’s favorite. They both worked on a film about the search for Ahmed, the biggest elephant in Africa, in northern Kenya. “We traipsed all around, over four national parks, getting to know the wardens, and seeking out Ahmed. While I was only the film’s writer and production manager, my time with John primed me for big film ideas. I recorded his voice-over once in Madrid, later in L.A. Hanging out with the master was irresistible. Imagine sitting with a man with the voice of Moses, over a stiff drink and an illegal Cuban cigar, while he intoned: ‘When I was with Bogie and Katie in the Congo making The African Queen.’ You don’t even want to breathe in case you miss something. He made me realize the celestial power of the story.”

Heminway spent four years with ABC Sports, and, after a mountain climbing injury and a stint exploring the Southern Sudan and Ethiopia’s Omo River, he accepted a job offer from Aubrey Buxton (later Lord Buxton), an Anglia Television executive. “He invited me to London to join a fledgling group called Survival, composed of the world’s finest wildlife filmmakers. They needed an unimposing American who could, from time to time, film people. Over three and a half years I traveled to places like the Bangweulu Swamps in Zambia, to capercaillie haunts in Scotland, and to Iran’s Kavir Desert where we lived in a caravanserai. Hanging out with Iran’s tribal peoples, I began to sense the Shah’s days were numbered and Iran was destined for colossal upheaval.”

One of Heminway’s films for Survival Anglia was about dhows, “the oldest trading vessels in the world. For over 2,000 years they have done a cat’s-cradle circuit of the Indian Ocean, trading from India, to the top of the Persian Gulf and along the east coast of Africa. On board the Mir-El-Lah, we were blown by the trade winds from the top of the Persian Gulf along the Hadramaut, past the island of Socotra, then down the Somali coast, finally dropping anchor in Lamu off the north coast of Kenya. 

“It was a magical ocean adventure in the company of two mad Italians, Lorenzo and Mirella Ricciardi. We were arrested three times, each time suspected of espionage. Once, under house arrest in Somalia, our Mogadishu inquisitor shocked me by asking where I went to university. Then he grilled me about the name of my eating club. I said, ‘Huh? I’m in the middle of Somalia and you’re asking me about my club at Princeton?’ Then he wanted to know if I was a member of the Young Republicans.’ I fired back at him: ‘What about you?’ He responded: ‘University of Chicago, class of 1962.’ We ended up giving each other giant bear hugs.”