The Herald (17/Nov/2007) - Obituary: Peter Viertel
(c) The Herald (17/Nov/2007)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Viertel, Saboteur (1942)
Obituary: Peter Viertel
Peter Viertel, who has died aged 86 less than a month after his wife the, Glasgow-born film star Deborah Kerr, was a filmwriter and novelist.
Viertel did last-minute rewrites for the classic 1951 film The African Queen and turned the experience of working in Africa with the legendary director and hellraiser John Huston into the novel White Hunter, Black Heart (1953).
The two main characters were thinly disguised versions of Viertel and Huston called Pete Verrill and John Wilson. In the book, as in real life, the director holds up filming by going off big-game hunting.
The whole thing came full circle in 1990 when Clint Eastwood made a film version, in which he also played the film director. Viertel was one of the writers and was played on screen by Jeff Fahey.
Viertel was also a close friend of Ernest Hemingway and wrote film adaptations of The Sun Also Rises (1957) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
Viertel was born in Dresden in 1920. His father was Berthold Viertel, a poet, novelist and film director, and his mother was Salka Viertel, a writer who worked regularly with Greta Garbo.
They moved to California and their home became a regular haunt for celebrities from films, literature and the arts, including Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Garbo and Huston.
Viertel Junior began writing stories and screenplays in his teens, his first novel The Canyon was published when he was just 19 and he was one of the writers on the Alfred Hitchcock film Saboteur (1942).
During the Second World War he served in the US Marines in the Pacific, before resuming his career in Hollywood, where he enjoyed a reputation as a bon vivant. It has been suggested that he and his first wife Jigee Ray were the models for the Redford and Streisand characters in The Way We Were (1973).
He left her when she was pregnant for the French model Bettina. Bettina left Viertel for Prince Ali Khan. Huston reassured him that Khan was "one swell guy". When Khan subsequently began a relationship with Huston's wife, Viertel could not stop himself reminding Huston what a swell guy Khan was.
The African Queen was one of three films on which Viertel worked with Huston in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Conditions on location in East Africa were dreadful and in his fictionalised account of the experience Viertel turned Huston into a Captain Ahab figure.
"John had a bee in his bonnet that he was going to kill an elephant, and it became an obsession with him," Viertel said. However, Huston seems to have taken the novel as a compliment, coming up with suggestions for the character.
They shared a passion for travel and in the 1950s Viertel settled in Europe, where he effectively pioneered the sport of surfing. He surfed at Biarritz while making The Sun Also Rises and is credited with helping establish it as a major surfing centre today.
He met Deborah Kerr on a film set in Vienna, they married in 1960 and divided their time between homes in Switzerland and the south of Spain.
Viertel wrote several other screenplays and novels and a memoir entitled Dangerous Friends: At Large with Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties (1992). He even engineered a meeting between the two in Havana.
He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage.
