By Jonathan Bing and Michael Fleming

NEW YORK (Reuters/Variety) - The world's top publishing trade show, the Frankfurt Book Fair, will open as scheduled October 9, but it will be unlike any Frankfurt fair on record.

An abiding desire to be at home in a stormy and frightening political climate has been enough to stop dozens of American publishing executives, rights directors, scouts and agents from flying to Europe's second largest financial centre.

The international rights market -- the engine that drives the event -- is usually booming this time of year. But book submissions, which ground to a halt on September 11, have only recently begun to regain momentum, with much of the focus now on books about international affairs, terrorism, spirituality and heroic rescues.

Add heightened flying jitters and inconvenience, and many publishing insiders have concluded that the fair's business prospects aren't compelling enough to lure them overseas.

"I'd spent the past three to four months setting up back-to-back meetings over five days," said agent Rafe Sagalyn, who cancelled his trip to the fair. "My family asked me to stay close, a wish that I didn't have a hard time heeding."

Executives at Random House and Putnam said employees were not required to attend. Even so, those who chose to stay home said it was an extremely difficult, and personal, decision.

"We just thought it was incautious for both of us to be out of the country at the same time because of our daughter," said agent Betsy Lerner, whose husband is a publishing exec.

West Coast agent Sandy Dikstrja has opted not to go, and has cancelled a party she was to co-host with Bertelsmann for author Amy Tan. Also axed is the Little, Brown U.K. party that traditionally kicks off the fair, and the splashy affair usually thrown by German publisher Heyne.

Despite these cancellations, overall fair attendance isn't down much. Organisers are expecting 6,671 exhibitors from 105 countries to fill the many hangar-size halls, with more than 400,000 books on display -- roughly the same numbers as last year.

Americans who are going see it as a chance to bask in the support of international colleagues. In a business that's always depended on word-of-mouth enthusiasm for new books, personal contacts across borders have rarely seemed more important.

"It is about the books," said one scout. "But it's also about the handshake, the hug and the latenight drink."

In recent years, Frankfurt has been a launching pad for some of the most hotly sought-after books of the year, including major film acquisitions like "The Horse Whisperer," "If Only It Were True" and "Artemis Fowl."

While the American rights trade has slowed massively since the attacks, publishers and agents are certain that as yet hard-to-predict titles will materialise and electrify the market, as they have in years past.

"We're all dealing with the unknown right now," said Creative Artists Agency exec Robert Bookman, who will attend. "But it always comes down to whether some great piece of material emerges that will excite people. This has been a traumatising year, but if there's a piece of great material, people won't bypass the opportunity to acquire it."

Bookman added, "Everyone from the president to Mayor Giuliani on down has said we have to put our lives back together. Frankfurt is the single most important book fair of the year, and everyone is going to be there except arguably some people from America."

MIAMI (Reuters) - Gregory Hemingway, whose troubled relationship with his late father, writer Ernest Hemingway, led him to a tormented life of drink and depression, has died in Miami, officials said on Thursday.

It was another sad chapter in the story of the literary lion's family.

Hemingway, 69, died of natural causes in a Miami jail after being arrested for indecent exposure.

He was picked up last Wednesday after walking naked down the street in Key Biscayne, a Miami island community, carrying a pair of black high heels and wearing jewellery, police said.

"He had a difficult life. It's not easy to be the son of a great man," Scott Donaldson, president of the Hemingway Society, told Reuters.

Gregory, younger brother to Jack and Patrick, struggled to cope with the burden. A transvestite who later had a sex-change operation, he suffered bouts of drinking, depression and drifting, according to acquaintances.

"I don't know how it was done, the destruction," he said in a 1987 interview with the Washington Post. "What is it about a loving, dominating, basically well-intentioned father that makes you end up going nuts?"

At the time of his death, he lived in the Coconut Grove district where he was well-known to its Bohemian crowd. He sometimes went by the name of Gloria and wore women's clothes.

Last Wednesday, he was reported walking naked through Key Biscayne. When an officer arrived, he was sitting on a curb trying to put on a flowered thong, the police report said.

He had a hospital gown wrapped around his shoulder but was exposing a breast and his genitals, it said. When the officer tried to arrest him, he screamed and refused to be handcuffed.

He gave the name Greg Hemingway, then later changed it to Gloria, the report added.

Taken to the Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center, he was found dead in his cell early on Monday, spokeswoman Janelle Hall said. The cause of death was hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

He had been due to appear in court later that day on charges of indecent exposure and resisting arrest. He was booked into the women's jail because he had a sex change operation, Hall added.

It was another strange and tragic Hemingway death.

Ernest, the Nobel Prize-winning author who was almost as famous for his adventurous life as for works like "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Sun Also Rises," shot himself in 1961. Ernest's father, brother and sister also committed suicide.

Actress and model Margaux Hemingway, Jack's daughter, was found dead in Santa Monica in 1996 at the age of 41 after battles with alcohol, drugs and depression.

Gregory was born in Kansas City in 1931. His mother was Hemingway's second wife Pauline. He lived his early years in Key West.

"In many ways he was the most talented as a boy -- he was a wonderful shooter. He won pigeon-shooting competitions down in Cuba," Donaldson said.

In the Post interview, Hemingway spoke about the pressures of trying to live up to the expectations of his macho father. He once killed 18 elephants on a safari in Africa.

"Yes, I had the most talent. I was the brightest, I could do so many of the things he loved most," he said.

He also said his father knew about his cross-dressing.

"I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying not to be a transvestite. It's a combination of things - first you've got this father who's super-masculine but who's somehow protesting it all the time. He's worried to death about it."

Known to the family as Gigi, he attended the University of Miami medical school. He later practiced medicine, including a period as a country physician in Montana, but lost his license as he wrestled with alcohol and his personal demons.

He said he had received electric shock treatment many times and had several nervous breakdowns. He sometimes drifted, living in cars, motels or friends' houses.

But acquaintances remembered him as a man who could be charming, kind and brilliant on his good days.

"Everything in his life was troubled. He was troubled by his relationship with his father, with his mother," said one, who asked not be identified. "His father blamed him for the death of his mother, or Greg thought he did. I would say he was tormented."

He married four times, the last time in Key West in 1992 in a ceremony in the old Hemingway house. That marriage ended in divorce in 1995, according to the Miami Herald. He is believed to have had six children.

In letters to his father, Gregory called him an "ailing alcoholic" and derided "The Old Man and the Sea" as "sentimental slop."

In Ernest's book "Islands in the Stream," novelist Thomas Hudson's son Andy -- "the meanest" -- is based on Gregory.

Gregory wrote about their relationship in a book "Papa: A Personal Memoir," published in 1976, which opened: "I never got over the sense of responsibility for my father's death and the recollection of it sometimes made me act in strange ways."

But he also spoke of the good times, like playing war games in the yard of the Key West house.

The Hemingway sons received at least $100,000 per year from their father's estate, according to various published reports.