Peter Viertel

Dec 26 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE WAS a man of exuberant talent and expansive tastes, embracing women, food and gossip seasoned with charm, as well as the whiff of celebrity and exotic spices.

These qualities drew the handsome, firm-jawed figure into the circle of beautiful actresses, among them Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr; literary lions and movie moguls with hairy chests, most notably the director John Huston and the macho-man himself, Ernest Hemingway.

However, his reluctance to join Huston on an elephant-shooting expedition led to tensions between them during the making of The African Queen (1951), which Peter Viertel was adapting for the screen from the CS Forester novel.

His observations of Huston’s cavalier treatment of the crew, including the stars Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, inspired Viertel’s best book, a thinly fictionalised account of those days, White Hunter, Black Heart (1953), in which the Huston character kills a sacred elephant.

The book was a commercial and critical success and, in 1990, it was turned into a film by Clint Eastwood, with Viertel helping him with the script.

Viertel was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of Berthold, the poet and novelist, and his wife, Salka, a friend and screenwriter for Garbo, with whom Peter, too, became very friendly.

The family moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1928. Their home was celebrated for its Sunday afternoon “salons”, at which any roaming star or writer could find a berth – among them Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Capa, Huston and Charlie Chaplin. But Hemingway let it be known that he preferred saloons to salons.

Viertel, who graduated from Dartmouth College, had published his first novel, The Canyon, when he was 20. During his war service with the Marine Corps in the Pacific, Vertel befriended Irwin Shaw and together they wrote the Play, The Survivors. Although he wrote nine novels and numerous articles and screenplays, Viertel is perhaps most renowned as the chronicler of Hemingway’s Lost Generation. Some of his writing was influenced by Hemingway and he wrote screen treatments of “Papa’s” The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises.

Among his many women was his first wife Virginia Ray “Jigee” Schulberg (divorced from the novelist Budd), with whom he had a daughter, before marrying the revered actress Deborah Kerr, who died 19 days before him.

Peter Viertel, novelist and screenwriter; born November 16, 1920, died November 4, 2007.