Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Ernest Hemingway

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“The only times I’m self-conscious are-when I’m Jean Arthur. In front of the camera I lose my identity completely, and with it I lose my timidity. As a character in a play I feel as if I can be what people expect. As Jean Arthur, I never feel as if I know what people expect.”
—Jean Arthur (born Gladys Georgianna Greene; 1900 – 1991)

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Telling the Truth in Hollywood

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Screenwriter Peter Viertel visits wife Deborah Kerr during the filming of “The Chalk Garden” (1964).

A less than glamorous job, most successful screenwriters are solitary individuals who work quietly and diligently at their craft.

But screenwriter Peter Viertel (1920 – 2007) lived the jet-set life that is the glittering exception. Born in Dresden to an artistic and assimilated Jewish family, mother Salka was a screenwriter who was Greta Garbo’s best friend. His father, Berthold Viertel, was also a prominent writer and intellectual. The family moved to Hollywood in 1928. Peter’s childhood was the stuff of dreams: weekends were spent in the company of Garbo, Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

Young Peter was Hollywood royalty.

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