Dangerous Friends

This book evokes the mythic giants of the glory days of the American film industry. Creative artists and men's men, flamboyant egoists, performers of spontaneous acts of selfishness and generosity: these are Peter Viertel's "dangerous friends". Seeking to distance himself from the intellectual climate of his European emigre upbringing, the young Viertel left the company of Franz Werfel, Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood and others of the Los Angeles refugee community to follow his own star. After serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Viertel was an aspiring screenwriter and novelist when he came to know Ernest Hemingway, John Huston, Orson Wells and others, seeing in these quintessential American extroverts the authentic self-expression he sought in his writing and in his life. In this unsentimental memoir, Viertel draws pictures of these men and how they influenced him. As Viertel follows his mentors around the world, he also retraces an older, deeper journey: the ageless search of a young man for his father - and his own identity.