THE novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel was probably more
celebrated for the people he knew than for his own fame. His 1992
memoir, Dangerous Friends: At Large With Huston And Hemingway In
The Fifties, covered his friendships with those luminaries and
others, including Orson Welles, Ava Gardner and Humphrey
Bogart.
His nomadic high life led him to Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, and
to Africa, where he “doctored” the script of The African
Queen (1951) for the director John Huston. His experiences
there led to his novel White Hunter Black Heart, itself made
into a movie by Clint Eastwood.
Viertel, who has died at 86, a few weeks after his wife, Deborah
Kerr, wrote six novels and contributed to 12 screenplays. He was
born in Dresden, the son of the Austrian poet and film director
Bertold Viertel, and Salka Viertel, the Polish-born actor and
writer. Brought up in Santa Monica, California, he spent his early
years surrounded by artistic emigres, including Sergei Eisenstein,
Jean Renoir, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Aldous
Huxley and W.H. Auden.
Viertel, who studied at the University of California, published
his first novel, The Canyon, at 19. According to Viertel,
Hemingway “said he had read it slowly, with great pleasure,
standing up in his study, a chapter every morning, to make it
last”. However, the relationship with Hemingway became strained
when the great novelist had an affair with Viertel’s first wife,
Virginia Ray.
His first screenplay was Saboteur (1942), a superb
example of Alfred Hitchcock’s picaresque pursuit movies. He wrote
the taut melodrama The Hard Way (1943), starring Ida Lupino,
before serving with the US Marines in the South Pacific and the
French secret intelligence section.
He co-wrote for Huston We Were Strangers (1949), set in
revolutionary Cuba and starring John Garfield and Jennifer Jones.
His screenplay for Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn
(1951), about the last days of Nazism, featured one of the first
sympathetic postwar screen portraits of Germans. Huston, Truman
Capote and Viertel wrote Beat The Devil (1954) 12 hours
before each day’s shooting. He adapted Hemingway’s The Sun Also
Rises (1957) for Gardner and Tyrone Power, and The Old Man
And The Sea (1958), starring Spencer Tracy.
Viertel is credited with introducing surfing into Europe, at
Biarritz in 1956. He married Kerr in 1960 and settled in the Swiss
resort of Klosters and a villa in Marbella, where he concentrated
on writing novels. He is survived by a daughter from his first
marriage.
Ronald Bergan,
Guardian News %26amp; Media
17
Dec
Copyright © 2008 Tour Novel. All Rights Reserved.
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