Peter Viertel

Peter Viertel (16 November 1920 – 4 November 2007) was an author and screenwriter. Biography Viertel was born to Jewish parents in Dresden, Germany, the writer and actress Salka Viertel and the writer Berthold Viertel. In 1928, his parents moved to Santa Monica, California, where Viertel grew up with his brothers, Hans and Thomas. The home in Santa Monica Canyon was the site of salons and meetings of the Hollywood intelligentsia and the émigré community of European intellectuals, particularly at the Sunday night tea parties given by Viertel's mother. However, Viertel identified more with Southern California youth culture than with the European milieu he was exposed to by his family. "The physical aspect of European intellectuals was so totally different from what an American kid wants to be," he told the International Herald Tribune in 1992. "I knew Bert Brecht was close to being a genius, but he was a funny-looking man to me." Viertel graduated from Dartmouth College in 1941. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private, but after being assigned office work in California (in his memoirs he joked he was a "Remington Raider" in reference to the typewriters they used), he applied for officer training and eventually was accepted by the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, where his recruiters were impressed that he had already published at 19 the highly acclaimed novel The Canyon (1940), and had written a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock, Saboteur (1942), as well as the script for The Hard Way (1943). His obvious high intelligence, native German language skills, good looks and athleticism were useful in Nazi-controlled Europe. He finished the war as a second lieutenant where he served with the Seventh United States Army in Southern France where he recruited several female agents. Based on his experiences, Viertel wrote the play The Survivors with his friend Irwin Shaw. It premiered in New York City in 1948, and was turned into an episode for the US Studio One TV series in 1950, and a BBC television movie in 1957. Some of his war experiences found their way into the screenplay for Anatole Litvak's highly acclaimed movie Decision Before Dawn (1951). He found it difficult to turn his OSS experiences into a novel and struggled with it for several decades, and a draft was found after his death, but as of 2018 there has been no news of potential publication, nor of the second volume of his autobiography.