The writer Peter Viertel has died, at eighty-six, a little more than two weeks after the death of Deborah Kerr, to whom he was married for forty-seven years. A novelist, journalist, memoirist and all-around freelance word merchant and world traveler of the old school, Viertel wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Saboteur, adapted Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea for the movies, and did on-location script doctoring on John Huston's Beat the Devil and The African Queen. (In 1992, he commemorated his experiences with Hemingway, Huston and other notables in his book Dangerous Friends.) Yet his best-known accomplishment, and the work that made him a cult figure to generations of readers and movie fans, was his 1953 novel White Hunter, Black Heart. Readily acknowledged to be have been based on the time he spent in Africa with Huston while making The African Queen, the book details the verbal jousts between screenwriter "Pete Verrill" and the flamboyant, high-living director "John Wilson", described by the narrator as "the leading exponent of the 'screw-you-all' type of personality." The book is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written about the movie business. (It was filmed in 1990, with Jeff Fahey as the writer and with the movie's director, Clint Eastwood, swaggering around talking as if the Dust Bowl had settled in his larynx, as the Huston figure.) — Phil Nugent
