Peter Viertel, screenwriter R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

Obituary : Peter Viertel
Novelist, screenwriter and husband of Deborah Kerr

Ronald Bergan
Wednesday November 7, 2007
The Guardian


The novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel, who has died aged 86, almost
two weeks after the death of his wife Deborah Kerr, was probably more
celebrated for the people he knew than for his own fame. His name-dropping
1992 memoir, Dangerous Friends: At Large with Huston and Hemingway in the
Fifties, covered his friendships with the luminaries of the title and many
others others, among them Orson Welles, Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart and the
bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. (Viertel's 1964 novel, Love Lies
Bleeding, was about a matador.)

The nomadic high life of the gregarious Viertel led him to Ernest Hemingway
in Cuba, and to Africa, where he "doctored" the script of The African Queen
(1951) for director John Huston. The experiences on the set led to his 1953
novel, White Hunter Black Heart, itself made into a movie in 1990 by Clint
Eastwood. Co-written by Viertel, it featured a screenwriter called Pete
Verrill. Altogether, Viertel wrote six novels and contributed to the
screenplays of 12 films.
He was born in Dresden, the son of the Austrian poet and film director
Bertold Viertel, and Salka Viertel (née Steuermann), the Polish-born actor
and writer. Brought up in Santa Monica, California, from the age of six, he
spent his early years surrounded by artistic émigrés in and around
Hollywood, including Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, Bertold Brecht, Arnold
Schoenberg, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, WH Auden and
Christopher Isherwood. His bisexual mother was also a great friend of Greta
Garbo, for whom she co-wrote a number of screenplays.

Viertel, who studied at the University of California, published his first
novel, The Canyon, set on the Californian coast, at the age of 19. According
to the author, Hemingway "said that 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 rather strained when
the great novelist had an affair with Viertel's first wife, Virginia "Jigee"
Ray.

Viertel's first screenplay was Saboteur (1942), a superb example of Alfred
Hitchcock's picaresque pursuit movies, famously ending with the struggle on
the top of the Statue of Liberty. He followed this up with Vincent Sherman's
taut melodrama The Hard Way (1943), starring Ida Lupino, before doing
wartime military service with the US marines in the South Pacific and the
French secret intelligence section.

Returning to Hollywood, he worked for the first time for Huston by
co-writing We Were Strangers (1949), an excellent drama set in revolutionary
Cuba in 1933, 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 screen portraits of Germans since the
war.

Two further collaborations with Huston followed, The African Queen and Beat
the Devil (1954), the spontaneous feeling of which might have derived from
the fact that Huston, Truman Capote and Viertel (uncredited) wrote the
script 12 hours before each day's shooting. There were also two fairly
faithful Hemingway adaptations, Henry King's The Sun Also Rises (1957), an
all-star production headed by Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power, and The Old Man
and the Sea (1958), featuring Spencer Tracy.

Among his other accomplishments, Viertel is credited with introducing
surfing into Europe. In 1956, while working on The Sun Also Rises in the
Basque region, he was so impressed by the waves at Biarritz that he sent for
a surfboard from California and soon after started Europe's first surf club.
He married Deborah Kerr in 1960 and settled in the Swiss Alpine resort of
Klosters and a villa in Marbella, where he concentrated on writing novels.
He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage.

· Peter Viertel, novelist and screenplay writer, born November 16 1920;
November 4 2007

[dremble wedge]

Viertel's time with John Huston was also covered in Ray Bradbury's 'Green Shadows, White Whale' set in Ireland in the mid-50s when Bradbury was writing the screenplay for Moby Dick

[julian_craster]

The Times
November 8, 2007

Peter Viertel
Sociable Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter who worked on films with Huston, Hemingway, Hitchcock and many others

Peter Viertel, who died soon after his wife of 47 years, Deborah Kerr (obituary, October 19, 2007), was a cosmopolitan screenwriter. His work, often with John Huston, included a first draft of the cultish Beat the Devil and a second of The African Queen, whose vexed filming inspired his third novel, White Hunter, Black Heart (1953), later filmed by Clint Eastwood. Although women complicated his earlier life, he was unique among visitors to Ava Gardner's bedroom for chastely listening to her problems and ensuring that she woke in time from sufficient sleep to film The Sun Also Rises.
Peter Viertel was born in Dresden in 1920. His father, Berthold Viertel, was a man of letters and his mother, Salka acted with her close friend, Greta Garbo, whose films she later wrote in Hollywood, where the family moved in 1928 when Berthold turned to film. Berthold was described by Christopher Isherwood as “the kind of intellectual who takes his intellectualism too seriously and thus becomes the captive of his own opinions. He could be dazzlingly witty, grotesquely comic, but never silly, never frivolous.”
By the end of the 1930s, the charming Peter Viertel had studied at Dartmouth College, married Jigee, the beguiling ex-wife of Budd Schulberg, and written a Californian novel, The Canyon (1940). The book brought him work on two 1942 films — a showbusiness melodrama, The Hard Way, with Ida Lupino, and Hitchcock's Saboteur — before he joined the Marine Corps for service in the Pacific and, after D-Day, Europe.
The marriage survived their wartime infidelities and then a stillbirth. Viertel set about a novelist's life, but Line of Departure (1947) hardly sustained a Malibu house that included his mother — his father had left for Europe and another woman. A Broadway collaboration with his lifelong friend Irwin Shaw on The Survivors (1948) was more esteemed than lucrative, but while skiing in Idaho Viertel met his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, who unexpectedly proposed a collaboration. That fraught idea was soon forgotten but it led to work on Huston's We Were Strangers (1949), set among assassins in Cuba. Although disgusted by Hemingway's relish for cockfighting, Viertel remained in awe of the novelist's bombastic charm.
Such film work funded the Viertels' European sojourn, with Irwin Shaw and Robert Capa. There, in abandoning a novel, he “lacked self-confidence, that product of the ego that is almost as important as talent”, while his wife's closeness to Hemingway, miscarriage and first epileptic fit hardly eased his affair with Colette Harrison, to whom Jigee said, about a copy of The New Yorker: “You've borrowed my husband, so you might as well help yourself to my magazine.”
Stormier than the marriage was the filming of The African Queen for which, in Africa, Viertel supplied the dialogue lacking in James Agee's outline. Huston's chaotic, simultaneous desire to hunt an elephant made Viertel flee from apparent disaster. “We had spent only ten days out hunting, but that was enough for me. I wanted to get the hell out of there, leave Africa forever, put the heat and the racism and the jungle behind me.” A masterpiece somehow ensued — and also Viertel's best novel, sportingly endorsed by Huston.
With Viertel and Jigee's trial separation, she took up again with Ring Lardner but one night's reunion with Viertel brought a daughter, Christine, while his deep involvement with Bettina Graziani, a fashion model, continued. This overlapped with more Huston projects developed at the director's Irish estate. It was also visited, for Moby Dick, by Ray Bradbury who felt “like a prisoner in a very special kind of madhouse”. Beat the Devil was later reworked, on the hoof, by Truman Capote, while Viertel was responsible for Huston's fixation on Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King — though Viertel did not contribute to the script when it was eventually filmed in 1975.
When visiting an injured Hemingway in Madrid, Viertel renewed his friendship with Ava Gardner, then involved with Picasso's friend, the bullfighter Luís Miguel Dominguén, who was the inspiration for Viertel's 1963 novel Love Lies Bleeding. She appeared in Henry King's version of The Sun Also Rises (1957), scripted by Viertel. While Juliette Gréco's small part led to her growing involvement with Darryl Zanuck, gossip about Viertel's and Gardner's chaste friendship was fuelled by her co-star Errol Flynn witnessing his dawn return and the assumption he had “obviously been doing some late gardening”.
Viertel also scripted Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea for John Sturges, with Spencer Tracy, in 1958. In Vienna in the same year, while doctoring the script of The Journey, he met its star, Deborah Kerr. He bought her an antique, heart-embossed box; the note within was read by her husband, who demanded a divorce. Viertel did not have to persuade the now-alcoholic Jigee to agree to a divorce, for, when drowsy from pills, she lit a cigarette that caught her nylon nightdress, and she died from the burns within a month.
He married Kerr in 1960. While dividing his time between Klosters and Marbella, he readily admitted the truth of Irwin Shaw's censuring his “inability to spend as many hours seated in front of the typewriter as he did”. His lengthy memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), however, is continually enjoyable and his sixth novel, the Riviera-set American Skin (1984) deserves wider recognition.

Viertel is survived by his daughter.

Peter Viertel, scriptwriter and novelist, was born on November 16, 1920. He died on November 4, 2007, aged 86