A web search confirms this was in the cold war period. The following is from a 1985 Boston Globe article, "Hemingway: A Clean, Well-Lighted Life?":
"By the postwar years, he [Hemingway] had become physically and emotionally violent, was consuming 'gallons' of martinis and -- having hit the nadir of author-celebrity exploits --was endorsing Ballantine beer and Parker pens." (See http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/nobel/1985/1985l.html)
And from something called giftline.com comes this: "Hemingway is no stranger to being used as a marketing tool. During his lifetime, he pitched Ballantine Ale ('That's the test of an ale with me: Whether it tastes as good afterwards as when it's going down. Ballantine does.'), as well as Parker pens and flights on Pan Am airlines. Since his death, Hemingway's mystique has been used to sell Calvin Klein fragrances and Gap khakis ('Legends Wear Khaki')." (See http://www.giftline.com/news/stories/52400more.shtml)
It slipped my mind yesterday that some of our more revered iconoclastic writers also figured in that Gap campaign -- notably William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg. I was reminded by this interesting web-search citation re a class discussion (at California Lutheran University) on advertising and American literature: 'The anti-capitalist, anti-advertising bias remains implicit in American letters. And, the simultaneous pro- and anti- perspective of advertising present in early novels like [William Dean Howells’s] Lapham and [Henry James'] The Ambassadors has continued to be an undercurrent in the evolution of public and authorial attitudes about advertising. Current research claims that this dual attitude still underpins the general responses toward advertising. Ernest Hemingway and Alan Ginsberg both illustrate it. These authors have reputations for opposing commercialism and exposing the evils of capitalism. Yet both posed for full page magazine ads that sell products. Hemingway helped Ballantine sell ale and, more recently, Ginsberg has helped the Gap sell khakis. The illustrations make clear that even writers as disdainful of capitalistic society as Hemingway and Ginsberg bought in to the advertising industry that drives capitalism." (See http://public.clunet.edu/engdept/ad/overview.html)
Carl
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