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PETER VIERTEL (1921 - 2007) |
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Nationality: USA Email: n/a Website: Click here to visit |
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Literary Agent: n/a |
Peter Viertel, 86; wrote about Huston, Hemingway His death comes three weeks after that of his wife, Deborah Kerr. y Jon Thurber, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer November 6, 2007 Peter Viertel, the novelist, memoirist and screenwriter best known for his books chronicling episodes in the lives of Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, has died. He was 86. Viertel died of lymphoma Sunday in the Spanish coastal resort of Marbella, according to Paula Kane, a family friend. His death came less than three weeks after his wife of 47 years, actress Deborah Kerr, died in Suffolk, England, also at 86. A formidable figure and bon vivant in his own right, Viertel drew upon his relationships with Hemingway and Huston -- two larger-than-life friends -- in his most noted books, the novel "White Hunter, Black Heart" (1953) and the memoir "Dangerous Friends: At Large with Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties" (1992). He would later help adapt "White Hunter, Black Heart" for the 1990 film that Clint Eastwood starred in and directed. Huston invited Viertel to accompany him to Africa in 1951 to help with dialogue in James Agee's unfinished script for "The African Queen," hich gave Viertel a front-row seat to watch the distracted filmmaker hunt wild game while the crew endured wretched conditions, unbearable heat, aggressive insects and dysentery during delays in shooting. Huston's goal was to bag an elephant -- and the film, which turned out to be a classic, took second billing to that endeavor. The relationship between Huston and Viertel suffered over their different views about the script and Viertel's decision not to hunt with the director. "John had a bee up his bonnet that he was going to kill an elephant, and it became an obsession with him," Viertel told The Times some years ago. "People like Hemingway and Huston did that kind of thing to prove themselves." And although Huston didn't get his elephant, Viertel bagged enough rich material from the expedition to write "White Hunter, Black Heart," hich, although fictionalized, laid down in honest detail his true feelings about the dark side of Huston's genius. "I really wrote the book as a personal letter to him," Viertel told The Times. "I was very, very fond of him. Outside of Billy Wilder, I thought he had more potential than any other filmmaker, and I didn't want him to [throw] it away." After finishing the book, Viertel showed it to Huston and offered to change or delete anything he thought offensive. Huston asked for no changes, and as Richard Schickel noted in his biography of Clint Eastwood, "White Hunter, Black Heart" became a best seller in 1953 "thanks in part to an ending suggested by Huston himself in which his character is portrayed more monstrously than he was in real life." Eastwood asked Viertel to help with revisions on the film's final script. The film was shot in Zimbabwe, and Eastwood played the Huston character named John Wilson; Jeff Fahey played the Viertel character named Pete Verrill.In "Dangerous Friends," Viertel continued to spin tales about Huston and Hemingway, as well as other figures of interest he met along the way, including Orson Welles, Ava Gardner and Viertel's first wife, Jigee. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Philip French saw "Dangerous Friends" as "inclined to present [Viertel's] peripatetic crowd of writers and socialites as a new 'lost generation.' " In the New York Times, critic Janet Maslin noted that the memoir "unfolds strangely, mixing trenchant observations with others that center solely on name-dropping, some of it inconsequential or even secondhand." The portrait of Huston emerging from the book was far more favorable than that of Hemingway, who was depicted as "a social bully with a swollen ego -- in other words, the Hemingway we have come to know all too well from the many biographies and memoirs that have appeared since his death," wrote Bruce Cook in the Chicago Tribune. Cook also noted that when Viertel wrote about Huston, he "emphasizes the director's charm, which was authentic and spontaneous, and his fundamental sense of himself." Viertel, who met Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1948, would also be responsible for bringing Huston and Hemingway together at a meeting in Havana while Viertel and Huston were in Cuba to work on a script.V iertel later wrote the screenplays for Hemingway's novels "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Sun Also Rises." Critics considered Viertel's novels "Love Lies Bleeding" (1964) and "American Skin" (1984) to be Hemingwayesque in tone.
- Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary
Plays by Peter Viertel
Souvenir | ||
| 1st Produced: | Los Angeles | 1975 | ||||
Company: | n/a | |||||
| 1st Published: | I don't think it has been published. Try emailing Playwright or Agent where listed at top of page. | ISBN/ASIN: | - | |||
| Music: | - | doollee no | #35570 | |||
To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||||
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Genre: | n/a | |||||
| Parts: | Male | - | Female | - | ||
Parts other: | - | |||||
Notes: | written with George Axelrod | |||||
Synopsis: |
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Further Reference: | - | |||||
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Survivors, The | ||
| 1st Produced: | - - - | - - - | ||||
Company: | n/a | |||||
| 1st Published: | Dramatists Play Service, NY, | ISBN/ASIN: | - | |||
| Music: | - | doollee no | #35571 | |||
To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||||
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Genre: | Melodrama | |||||
| Parts: | Male | 13 | Female | 2 | ||
Parts other: | - | |||||
Notes: | written by Peter Viertel and Irwin Shaw | |||||
Synopsis: | The authors are demonstrating the futility of killing. But instead of presenting it as a political argument, they have embodied it in a rousing gun drama laid in Missouri after the Civil War." -NY Times. | |||||
Further Reference: | - | |||||
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