Ernest Hemingway was bad at aquatic sex. Oh, and War is Spinach.

Flirtacious letters written by Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich – the world-renowned actress of early film and stage – have revealed a playful and intense relationship between the two icons.Thirty letters Hemingway written between 1949 and 1953 to the German-born actress and singer were made available to the public for the first time on Monday at the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Hemingway’s letters will complement 31 letters from Dietrich to Hemingway that are already in the collection, and reflect the depth of the pair’s relationship. In the letters she calls him Papa and he calls her daughter and Kraut, a common World War II pejorative that he uses affectionately.

The correspondence written by Hemingway include seven hand-signed letters, eighteen type signed letters, four telegrams, and a Christmas card. Hemingway wrote to the Dietrich from: Cuba, France, Italy, Spain and Kenya.

In a letter dated June 19, 1950, at 4 a.m., the he wrote: “You are getting so beautiful they will have to make passport pictures of you 9 feet tall. What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody’s heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I’d bring the nickel.”

“I love you and I hold you tight and kiss you hard,” Hemingway ends one letter. In another he writes, “I can’t say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.”

And yet the timing was never right. As A. E. Hotchner writes in his book “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir,” Hemingway once told him: “The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Île de France, but we’ve never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion.” Whenever one party was unattached, the other was not.

“They adored each other, but there was no sexual thing,” said Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva. “They were buddies, they were friends, they were comrades in arms.”