Viertel’s Heroes: Hemingway & Huston

Peter Viertel (1920-2007) had a fortunate background and enviable life, and was impressive for who he was as well as for what he did. He was a novelist and screenwriter, athlete and war hero, friend of famous men and lover of beautiful women: Ava Gardner, the model Bettina Graziani and many others. He was married to Jigee Ray, Budd Schulberg’s former wife, and then to Deborah Kerr for nearly fifty years. Though he was never rich, he enjoyed great freedom and never had to work at a regular job. He had many loyal companions in America and Europe, traveled extensively, and lived mainly in France, Marbella, Spain and Klosters, Switzerland.

He was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1920, the middle of three brothers, and came to Los Angeles six years later. His Austrian father, Berthold, was a poet, later became director of the Vienna Stadttheater, and was portrayed in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet. His mother, Salka, had been an actress, wrote many of Garbo’s screenplays and was her closest friend. She also had a famous salon in Santa Monica that brought together all the illustrious émigrés in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Thomas Mann, Bert Brecht, Aldous Huxley and Charlie Chaplin.

Viertel published his first novel, The Canyon, at age nineteen; served in the Marines in the Pacific (New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands), had a distinguished war record, and earned a Silver Star and three battle stars. With the OSS in Europe he recruited anti-Nazis from American prisoner of war camps, who – for money and adventure or from idealism – were parachuted behind German lines in the spring of 1945. After the war he graduated from Dartmouth College.

Viertel was a close friend of Ernest Hemingway and John Huston. These two masculine heroes – mythic types, like the giant race before the flood,

who have disappeared from contemporary life – were the subjects of his fascinating memoir Dangerous Friends. He also became my friend and, when I was writing Hemingway’s life, helped me with an introduction to the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín. Viertel wrote White Hunter, Black Heart (1953), based on Huston’s adventures in Africa while filming The African Queen and made into a film with Clint Eastwood; and Love Lies Bleeding (1964), inspired by Dominguín’s dazzling career. These books boldly invaded his heroes’ territory and challenged Huston’s views on filmmaking and Hemingway’s on bullfighting. He also wrote the screenplays for two of Hemingway’s novels: The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea.

I wrote to Viertel asking for an interview, and on 18 December 1982 he replied that he would like to meet and wanted to correct some serious distortions in books by Hemingway’s parasitic camp-follower and biased imperceptive wife: ‘Both Hotchner’s and Mary’s books are inaccurate. Hotchner helped encourage the false myth of Hemingway as He-man, and Mary’s book was her personal view of a man whose greatness I doubt she ever fathomed’. After he’d read and liked my life of Katherine Mansfield, we spent three days together in Marbella in early July 1983. He was handsome, intelligent and congenial, straightforward, articulate and easy to interview.

Since I’d lived in a hilltop village near Marbella from 1971 to 1975 and knew Spanish, we had a lot in common and talked about expatriate life in Spain, post-Franco politics and over-development on the Costa del Sol. We discussed Hemingway, Dominguín and his rival Antonio Ordóñez, Viertel’s wife Deborah and his sometime lover Ava Gardner, and he told me how to contact her in London. We also spoke about other people I’d interviewed, mutual writer friends, and our extensive travels in Europe and Africa. Instead of meeting for a few short hours, we played tennis every day, went swimming in the gentle surf, took long walks on the beach and ate leisurely wine-fuelled meals.

Viertel clarified Mary’s distortion of Hemingway’s flirtation with Jigee, and portrayed Mary as hard, rude and competitive. She irritated Hemingway by

exclaiming that she adored Viertel’s friend Irwin Shaw – her former lover. Viertel was perceptive about the technical and literary problems of making his two Hemingway films, and had a clear memory of the novelist’s stories and speech. When they couldn’t film a real giant marlin jumping out of the water, Hemingway insisted, ‘No movie with a rubber fish ever made a goddamn dime’. He blamed Irwin Shaw for attacking his wartime colleague Leicester Hemingway, whom he weirdly defended by stating, ‘He is a jerk, but he’s still my brother’. He warned Viertel that his pocket might be picked as the crowd pressed together during the running of the bulls in Pamplona and then discovered that he himself had been robbed. He claimed that the African plane crashes had given him an enviable permanent erection. After Gary Cooper converted to Catholicism, he cynically remarked that his friend could now have ‘all that money and God’.

Viertel told me that Hemingway had read his first novel, The Canyon, a remembrance of his boyhood years in Southern California before World War II. To bond with him and jumpstart his own work, Hemingway suggested they collaborate on a book based on his wartime sub-hunting adventures in the Caribbean. Viertel was supposed to write the scenes aboard the German U-boat but, wary of the literary minefield, said he could not portray events he had never experienced. He thought Hemingway in his late forties was well past his prime: scarred, bloated, jowly, grubby and disfigured by skin disease. Not at his best – but still Hemingway. But Viertel also remembered him as a thoughtful, charming and amusing companion, who tried out his literary and military stories in fascinating conversations before they appeared in his books.

Hemingway’s relations with Ordóñez and Dominguín, whose personal and professional rivalry inspired ‘The Dangerous Summer’ articles that appeared in Life in September 1960, had never been explained. I wanted to know what these two matadors thought of Hemingway – about his knowledge of Spain, of Spanish and of bullfighting. I found their contradictory answers to my questions revealed as much about Ordóñez and Dominguín as about Hemingway.

I’d written twice to Ordóñez but received no reply. Still, when I phoned from Marbella in July 1983 he was extremely friendly and responsive, and suggested we meet on the 12th at the Hotel Inglaterra in the Plaza Nueva in Seville. He had a slight limp from a recent bullfighting accident, sustained when he attempted a comeback. The tip of his left little finger was missing. He was charming and kind – the very qualities he praised in Hemingway. But he was unusually discreet and careful not to criticise his friend, and his brief answers tended to close off rather than develop the conversation. When I met Ordóñez at a Hemingway conference in Madrid the next year, in an auditorium filled with American professors, he walked up to the stage and as I rose to greet him called out ‘Amigo!’ and gave me a warm abrazo. The Hemingway cadre was greatly impressed.

Viertel generously arranged my interview with Dominguín at the matador’s ranch near Andújar, three hours east of Seville, and gave me some examples of his sharp wit. Dominguín bitterly noted, ‘I can count more on my enemies than my friends’. Just after Viertel wed Deborah, they attended a bullfight and one of Dominguín’s cuadrilla squeezed a dwarf between them. As Dominguín approached to dedicate his bull to them, he remarked, ‘So recently married and already such a big son’.

I drove several kilometres from the gate – past grazing bulls, a small bullring, a few guest houses and an enormous dammed river – to a circular stone hunting lodge on the top of a mountain. The heavy door was opened by his servant Alfonso, who looked like a Gothic retainer in a grade-B horror movie. The ‘secretary’, who seemed to have no typing skills, was a stunning girl in her early twenties. Dominguín had a world weary and dissipated look. He wore a knit shirt and shorts, and his legs were badly scarred from crotch to ankle by horn wounds. As with Ordóñez, I conducted the interview in Spanish. When I asked, ‘Shall I begin the questions?’, he deferentially replied, ‘A sus órdenes’, which pleased and amazed me. Cool and distant, much more critical of Hemingway than Ordóñez, he had not, like his brother-in-law and rival, been willing to play the son’s role. He was still bitter about Hemingway’s extreme partiality to Ordóñez and his criticism of Dominguín in ‘The Dangerous Summer’, and said, ‘He never

gave me any advice or encouragement about writing my memoirs. I threw away all his letters because I fear paper even more than I fear bulls’. The day with these two brave men was one of the best in my whole life.

Viertel’s novel Love Lies Bleeding (1964), dedicated in Spanish ‘For Luis Miguel, with a bit of nostalgia’, recommends the influential Death in the Afternoon in a note at the end of the book. The novel portrays Dominguín’s personal life and experience as a matador as he is closely observed by his companion, based on Viertel, who joins his entourage. Their Mercedes races frantically on the dusty roads from one corrida to the next throughout Spain and southern France. The hero’s father is dying, his wife is pregnant and his ex-mistress is bitter as he approaches the climactic mano a mano duel with his main rival. Since the greatest matador takes the greatest risks, he is gored several times, suffers terrible wounds and must travel with his own surgeon. In the best bullfighting novel since Blasco Ibáñez’s Blood and Sand and Henry de Montherlant’s The Matador, Viertel describes a cornada: ‘The bull’s right horn caught him and propelled him helplessly up into the air, and then as he was falling, turning like a stirred-up leaf, the horn that had sought the cloth found his flesh and he was jerked up short into the air again’.

Viertel’s best book, Dangerous Friends: At Large with Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties (1992), is also the best memoir of Hemingway, whose Dangerous Summer inspired the title. The memoir, which complements his novels, begins with meeting Hemingway while skiing in Ketchum, Idaho, in January 1948 and ends just after his suicide in July 1961. It doesn’t describe, except for brief hints, Viertel’s parents and early life, education and first novels, war experience and seduction of Jigee away from Budd Schulberg as well as Deborah away from her husband, and it ignores the last five decades of his own life.

Viertel describes Hemingway as physically robust and athletic, a bon vivant, lover of wine and pretty women, but also alcoholic, paranoid, obsessed with death and suicidal. Hemingway never forgot his grudges and reviled his old friends. Only his first wife, Hadley, and Max Perkins,

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper were exempt from condemnation. Viertel had to adjust to Hemingway’s leadership and whims, his mercurial moods and ‘black ass’ depressions. The egoistic Papa, who didn’t like to be alone, demanded loyalty, obedience and admiration from his entourage. Viertel always ‘looked forward to Papa’s arrival [and departure] with a mixture of anxiety and pleasure’.

Like Ordóñez and the young Venetian, Gianfranco Ivancich, Viertel was Hemingway’s substitute ‘best son’, and had quite a lot in common with his oldest real son, Jack (1923-2007). Both Viertel and Jack had famous fathers with notoriously quick tempers, were close contemporaries and were born in Europe: in Dresden and in Paris. Both had two brothers, were handsome and attractive to women, attended Dartmouth, and were good athletes and expert skiers. They worked with the OSS and the French Resistance and had impressive war records. They had two wives and their first child was stillborn. Both wrote memoirs of Hemingway. The sons could never equal their fathers’ achievements and were bound to disappoint them. As Viertel’s Mexican friend, the son of a matador, sadly told him, ‘My father’s life is perhaps fun to read about . . . but less amusing if you happen to be his son’.

Hemingway tried to recapture, and Viertel tried to discover, the older man’s imaginative creation of Paris in the 1920s – the sacred precincts of Joyce and Fitzgerald – though the characters in The Sun Also Rises and later in A Moveable Feast spend most of their time getting drunk and fornicating. Hemingway had loved the cafés as places to write and meet friends; the Louvre for art; the bars and bistros for drinking and eating; and perhaps best of all the arenas for sporting life: tennis, boxing, bike races and steeplechases. He even idealised the flat above the sawmill, but it’s not clear why a writer with his wife’s trust fund and an infant son would want to live close to such screeching noise. Sadly disillusioned, Viertel recalled, ‘To live in Paris to write had been one of the romantic fantasies that I had discovered was not for me’.

Viertel introduced John Huston to Hemingway in May 1948 when they were in Havana to make We Were Strangers, a movie about Cuban

revolutionaries. When Huston unwisely mentioned that he had boxed professionally, Hemingway challenged him to a fight and threatened to ‘cool’ the gangling lightweight. Anticipating Huston’s tactics, he said, ‘With those long arms you might just stand up and keep jabbing me in the nose. Maybe, cut me up’. Huston chivalrously replied, ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing that, Papa’. Fortunately, Mary quietly pleaded Papa’s poor health and canceled the match. When Hemingway, on his boat the Pilar, shot and wounded a huge iguana, Huston and Viertel swam ashore but could not find it hidden in the rocks. Unwilling to leave the wounded reptile, Hemingway followed them, holding the rifle above his head and swimming with one hand. After a long search, they tracked down the iguana in a cave and gave it the merciful ‘gift of death’.

There were striking similarities between Viertel’s two heroes. Hemingway and Huston had grandfathers who fought in the Union Army in the Civil War, and both self-educated men were born in the Midwest at the turn of the century: Hemingway in Illinois in 1899, Huston in Missouri in 1906. Keen athletes, big game hunters and heavy drinkers, they were restless and moved around frequently. They enjoyed early success, cultivated a dashing Byronic persona, and knew the satisfactions of celebrity and the perils of fame. Charming and larger than life, they were competitive and domineering, witty and amusing, but with a cruel tongue. They supported large households and commanded a loyal entourage, were generous with money and felt great empathy for the troubles of younger friends. Both participated in fierce fighting in World War II in Europe: Hemingway as a war correspondent, Huston as a documentary filmmaker. They had an adventurous spirit and sought hardship and disasters, courted danger and took foolish risks to prove their manhood. Hemingway had four wives, Huston had five, and both married increasingly younger women. But Huston was unashamedly promiscuous, Hemingway a guilt-ridden serial monogamist. Both had three children and were difficult, demanding and often absent fathers.

Hemingway’s values and ideals, character and courage, virile ethos and code of honour strongly influenced Huston. His best films, The Treasure

of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon, can be thematically defined by Hemingway’s titles: Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing. Huston said:

I’ve enormous admiration for Hemingway, and to my generation he was a great influence. Hemingway laid down a certain set of standards for my time, standards of behaviour. He made some effort to describe tastes and the good things of life and put them down on record, evaluating their importance. It was important for a man to be brave and have valour. They influenced my generation to the point of being almost a new religion.

Viertel admired Huston almost as much as Hemingway, but was also aware of his faults. When they worked on their film scripts, Huston often postponed work for pleasure, and ‘seemed distracted, unwilling to talk about the problematic ending or even about the theme of the story’. He was crazy about wild animals, and during his marriage to Evelyn Keyes he brought home an incontinent, destructive and aggressive chimpanzee that bit her. In the Belgian Congo, instead of directing The African Queen, he spent most of his time obsessively hunting elephants.

In his novel about making that film, White Hunter, Black Heart (1954), Viertel portrays the main characters in the Africa expedition. It focuses on John Wilson (Huston), famous for his skill at directing but notorious for his renegade overspending.When Wilson, a great womaniser, fails to show up as expected, Philip Duncan (Bogart) tries to explain his absence: ‘Where’s the ogre? Why wasn’t he there to meet us? I bet he’s shacked up with one of these black ladies and has forgotten all about us’. Mrs. Duncan (Bacall), who’d come to Paris with a mountain of luggage, is also sceptical about his motives and worried about his fondness for practical jokes: ‘I’m sure that bastard John is thinking up some horrible gag for us. He wants to get us off in some horrible hole, and then just stay and stay and watch us all suffer’. This is the key to Wilson’s character, and in the novel Verrill (Viertel) tells him: ‘You know what your success is based on? . . . Your deep-seated sadism. You love to torture people, the audience included. You love to put

them through hell and reward them with futility and disappointment. Your cruelty is your biggest box-office quality’.

When Viertel told Huston that he’d written a novel about him, the director seemed flattered and amused. He offered to change anything Huston didn’t like and said, ‘“if you hate the whole thing, I won’t publish it. If it really bothers you, I’ll just throw it away”. “Nothing anybody writes about me bothers me, kid,” he said, grinning. “You want me to sign a release. I’ll sign one right now”’. Yet Viertel also made clear that the cruel Huston inspired intense loyalty, even devotion, in his colleagues: ‘The crews in Hollywood always loved [Huston] and had worked themselves half to death whenever he had asked them to do so. He was nice to everyone and everyone who worked with him was eager to do so again. He delegated authority and was usually correct in his estimate of the people in whom he put his trust’.

Like Hemingway and Huston, Viertel tested his courage in combat and wrote about his experience in World War II. In 2009, while working on Huston’s biography and searching for his letters, I got in touch with Viertel’s only child, Christine (born 1952), who sent me the typescript of his 350page unpublished novel. Viertel’s The Paper Parachute is interesting and well written, has lively dialogue and an important subject. It begins and ends with brief chapters on the social set in Marbella, where Viertel and Deborah lived for part of each year. But it’s mainly a first-person flashback to the hero’s OSS work in World War II, dropping agents behind enemy lines in the winter of 1945 to gather information just before and after the invasion across the Rhine to Germany. It continues after the allied victory in May 1945, and describes the corpses and the grim survivors at Dachau, the search for and capture of the filmmaker Leni Riefensthal and other eminent Nazis. The themes, as in Hemingway’s novels, are the loyalty to comrades and the perils of love in war.

Hemingway had also changed my own life and influenced my values. He inspired me to live for years in Spain and see scores of bullfights, to spend two summers in East Africa, to work on a yacht in the Caribbean – and to

become a writer. I too wanted to pay tribute to Viertel as he had done to his heroes. Christine, who lived in Austin, Texas, and had been too ill to attend Viertel’s funeral in Marbella, was a semi-invalid and desperately in need of money. With the permission of Thomas Kuhnke, Viertel’s Swiss-German lawyer, I tried to help Christine to find a publisher for his last novel and get the royalties. But it had some serious flaws, and needed an enthusiastic and expert editor. The prologue and epilogue in Marbella, which revealed at the beginning that the heroine had survived the war, as well as some minor scenes and undeveloped characters, could easily be cut. The narrator was a more difficult problem. By directing the espionage operations but not taking part in them, he eliminates the main military action: the infiltration of the foreign OSS agents.

My literary agent concluded, ‘the sex scenes are written in a very delicate, old-fashioned way, dating the work severely. Also, I found a lack of narrative tension – for instance, the recruits never achieve anything striking enough to warrant devoting a novel to their adventures. And often, the manuscript reads more like a war memoir than a novel, or at least there is not enough dramatic plot development or forward motion’. There seemed no point in my editing the novel without a publisher’s strong interest. Nevertheless, to test the waters, I boldly sent it out to ten trade and university press editors. But like his former editor, Nan Talese at Doubleday, they all rejected it. Viertel was no longer alive to promote his last book. If he had lived longer and been able to revise the novel with an experienced editor, it might have been successful. When I reread Dangerous Friends and saw the film Decision Before Dawn (1951), with a script by Viertel, I realised that it had the same plot as his unpublished novel. The film also portrays an American OSS officer running German secret agents from France into Germany to prepare for the allied invasion. He seems to have put his best work into the film and had nothing significant left for the expanded Paper Parachute.

Thomas Kuhnke wrote me that Viertel had struggled for over half a century to complete The Paper Parachute. His client had suffered a stroke and his lymphoma had become increasingly virulent. As Deborah’s health deteriorated, she moved from Spain to England to be close to her two

children and died in Suffolk at the age of eighty-six. Viertel died less than three weeks later in November 2007. Despite having an intensely adventurous life and successful career of his own, Peter Viertel’s best work was undoubtedly shaped by his friendship with two towering personalities.