Alfred Polgar, critic for Das Tagebuch, pronounced Lorre an actor according to Berlin taste: “He bills himself; through each word, each gesture demandingly pressing…. He stretches out a second. A slow motion actor.”
Kurt Pinthus described the new discovery in Berlin’s 8-Uhr-Abendblatt: “And a new face was there, a frightful face: the hysterical son of the petty bourgeoisie, whose bug-eyed, bloated head swells in a yellowish manner out of his suit; how this lad staggers between sluggishness and hysterical outbursts, as he timorously walks and grasps and sometimes greedily fumbles. Even people older than I am have never seen anything so uncanny in the theater. This person is Peter Lorre. If he can also portray other figures in such a comprehensive manner, then here is a first-class actor.”
After the performance, Lorre stood on the stage and looked out into the cheering crowd. “I was afraid,” he recalled, “that it was mock applause, that it was like the laughter which greeted me when I rehearsed my first part in Breslau. Then I realized that these people were really cheering me. It was heady wine. I thought, ‘Now, I can buy a new suit.’”
Lorre told Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s that Aufricht threw his arms around him and said, “Lorre, my boy, you were wonderful. What do you need? Money, perhaps? Ask me for anything and it is yours.”
Presumably stretching a point, Lorre related that he “was still in a daze. I didn’t have, literally, a mark in my pocket. I said to him, laughing, ‘My friend, you might give me 30,000 marks [$7,200].’ The manager reached in his pocket and peeled off thirty thousand-mark notes. I had never seen money like that—no, not even when I worked in the bank. I took it and said, ‘In the morning I will buy a new suit.’”22
“I was the hottest thing on the Berlin stage,” Lorre later told film historian Joel Greenberg. The “facemaker,” as he dubbed himself, had arrived.
Aufricht placed Lorre under contract. Peter told Celia that the following Monday morning Reinhardt sent an assistant to sign him. As it turned out, Aufricht, who considered Pioniere in Ingolstadt the most successful production under his management of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, was agreeable to lending Lorre’s services, but not to selling them. And Lorre preferred to stay with Brecht.23
Rave reviews and morphine kept Lorre on his feet. During the run of Pioniere in Ingolstadt, he suffered another hemorrhage. Rather than admit him to a hospital, a physician supplied the actor with enough morphine to ensure his continued appearance in the play.
In the audience on opening night sat a thirty-two-year-old actress named Celia Lovsky. Once she recovered from the shock of seeing Lorre pick flies off the window pane and pull out their wings and feet, she felt the full weight of his performance. Even by Berlin standards, his was a singular talent. When the curtain fell, she squeezed backstage to congratulate the actor, but “there were women all over him.” Celia closed the door and left. She often stopped by Schwannecke’s, a pub just around the corner from Peter’s apartment on Eislebener Strasse. Arriving there at noon one day, she spotted him sitting alone contentedly devouring a dish of Knödel (dumplings). Celia walked over to his table and held out her hand: “I congratulate you on your sensational success.” He invited her to sit down. After the prerequisite shop talk, he asked if he could escort her home. They chatted, but he was obviously nervous. Peter and Celia strolled past the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and took either Budapester Strasse by the zoological garden or the Kurfürstendamm to the Spree. Following along the riverbank, they crossed over the Potsdamer Bridge and down Schöneberg to Victoria Allee in the theater and culture sector. The farther they walked, the quieter he became. Suddenly, he blurted out that he loved her. “I laughed,” recalled Lovsky, “and told him anybody could say that.” Angry, Peter screamed “Untier” (monster) in her face. The nickname stuck.
Lovsky may well have been unaware of Lorre before March 29, but he had known of her for some time. He later told her he had seen her as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello at an open-air restaurant in Kritzendorf, ten miles northwest of Vienna. “I was only a schoolboy,” said the presumably bemused Lorre, highlighting their seven-year age difference, “but night after night I visited the theatre there and—and worshipped.”24 He confessed it had been “love at first sight.”
“I always wanted to play romantic roles,” Lorre later admitted, “but after I had gotten some small roles, in which I had to wrap my arms around my partners on the stage, I decided that I would rather save love for my private life.”
Lovsky was born February 21, 1897, in Vienna, to Bratislav Emil Lvovsky, composer and chief editor of the Österreichische Musik und Theaterzeitung, and cellist Walburga “Wally” Prochaska.25 Cäcilie Josephine Lvovsky (later simplified to Celia or Cecile Lovsky) attended the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Academy for Music and Performing Arts) from 1913 to 1916. Although she received no financial support her first year, Celia won a two-hundred-kronen scholarship “for exemplary and needy students” her second and third years. A model student, whose studies included acting, drama, German, Italian, and French languages, and dance and fencing, she received an A on her final exam and graduated June 13, 1916, just after appearing in the title role of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. She had also portrayed Amine in Goethe’s Die Laune des Verliebten (The Mood of the One in Love) and Countess Blandine in Oskar Blumenthal’s Wenn wir altern (When We Grow Old). Lovsky soon stepped onto the New Wiener Bühne, where she earned a reputation as a gifted and versatile actress whose ability to “form her parts out of her heart and her mind” ranked her alongside Maria Orska and Elisabeth Bergner. During her tenure at the Deutsche Volkstheater (1925–27), Lovsky developed a deeply devoted personal connection to playwright Arthur Schnitzler, from whom she solicited letters of recommendation, including one to Franz Herterich, director of the Burgtheater.26 By 1928 she had moved to Berlin, “the city which consumes one totally.” Performing continuously for a year without a free evening, she still found time to lobby him for a role in Fräulein Else, starring Elisabeth Bergner.27
The boyish, fun-loving Lorre and the stunning, experienced Lovsky made an unlikely pair.28 On holiday in the Black Forest, he was warned against sledding down icy trails. “If somebody said don’t do it, he did it,” said Celia. “Peter sat in front on the sled and chauffeured it. My job was to work the brake. We almost collided with a horse and cart. I couldn’t control the brake and yelled, ‘Stop immediately, I want to get out.’” Headlong in love, the couple careened toward a more permanent living arrangement and soon moved into his apartment on Eislebener Strasse.
To mark the anniversary of Die Dreigroschenoper, Aufricht planned another Brecht-Weill collaboration “in the same combination.” Although a little embarrassed by the “middlebrow popular success” of the stage blockbuster, which, according to the official German Communist Party paper, Die Rote Fahne (the Red Flag), “contained not a hint of modern social or political satire,” Brecht couldn’t turn his back on the financial possibilities. He proposed that Elisabeth Hauptmann, his “best” collaborator, piece Chicago underworld and Salvation Army elements from her short stories into a play. Under the pseudonym Dorothy Lane, Hauptmann produced the basic script for Happy End. Kurt Weill wrote the music and Brecht the lyrics, in addition to creating roles for Carola Neher, Helene Weigel, Kurt Gerron, Oskar Homolka, Theo Lingen, and Peter Lorre. After bullying director Erich Engel into quitting, Brecht continued to participate but dragged his feet at every stage of production.
Happy End premiered on Saturday, August 31, 1929. It got off to a good start, playing just as well with the audience as Die Dreigroschenoper had one year earlier. And then came the third act. Cheap rhymes, filthy language, and sacrilege taxed the public’s patience. Between “a couple of nice ideas,” Brecht and Weill had sandwiched too many songs, clogging an already unfocused and flighty story line. Disappointed spectators fidgeted and coughed. Aufricht waited in the wings for the ensemble to sing a finale. Suddenly, Helene Weigel walked to the front of the stage. He couldn’
t believe his eyes. She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket and in her piercing voice delivered an anticapitalist diatribe filled with “vulgar Marxist provocations.” Brutally roused from their boredom, the audience booed and whistled for the curtain to fall.
The public probably had even better reason to shun the Singspiel than the near-riot atmosphere inside the theater. It quickly became apparent that Brecht, who disowned the play after having represented himself as the author (discrediting Hauptmann with a failed production that he had consciously sabotaged), had repeated himself. Stand still and “build your position” or move forward, advised Herbert Jhering: “Both positions are impossible.” The avalanche of criticism, however, did not bury Brecht’s acting ensemble, which performed superbly. Lorre played Dr. Nakamura (the Governor), a sinister Oriental thug, whose pidgin English, karate chops, and gun play made good practice for his role as Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective, eight years later. Lorre also turned his vocality loose on “Song of the Big Shot” (“If you want to be a big shot / Start by learning to be tough”).
When Happy End closed after only three performances, Aufricht found himself with a cast of players on full salary, but no production. A solution came easily enough with Lorre. After learning that Aufricht looked to lend out the young actor, Franz Theodor Csokor had put Lorre in touch with stage director Karl Heinz Martin at the Volksbühne.
Berlin provided a politically correct setting for Georg Büchner’s bleakly fatalistic tragedy Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death), set in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is 1794. The battle is won, but revolutionary rhetoric now strangles freedom. “Death to all who have no holes in their clothes!” shout the People. “Death to all who can read and write!” Lorre, as Saint-Just, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, allows that “humanity comes out of the cauldron of blood.” Georges Danton, author of the Revolutionary Tribunal, cannot stop the People, “who smash everything to see what is inside.” Although he is disillusioned, his voice is still strong enough to accuse Saint-Just, Robespierre, and their hangmen of high treason for seeking to suffocate the Republic in blood.
Berliners heartily endorsed the four-hour production, which opened on the same day (and hour) as Happy End. Critical approval of the “world-view drama” focused on Karl Heinz Martin’s energetic and innovative direction. Draping the drama with verse from contemporary Communist marching songs did not, it seems, undermine the play’s historical authenticity. The reality of the street detail and mass scenes, the thundering of the Marseillaise and Hanns Eisler’s music intoxicated the audience with the spirit of revolution.
According to Lorre, Brecht enabled him to overlap appearances as Dr. Nakamura in Happy End and Saint-Just in Dantons Tod by “killing off” the Governor in the first act. A waiting taxi, in which Lorre hastily changed from gangster garb to general’s uniform, sped him from the Schiffbauerdamm Theater to the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz. When Brecht learned that Lorre had time to return before the end of act 3, he resurrected the seemingly slain Nakamura: “You thought I was shot? No, I’m just a little bit injured.”29
Lorre presented a radically different spectacle from the heavy-lidded simpleton in Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Outfitted in a military uniform and wearing a blond wig, he appeared older and physically commanding—all the more so, one imagines, since the actors spoke their lines directly to the audience.
Berlin critics singled out Lorre’s “philosopher of terror” as the high point of the evening. “Hypocritical, mollusk-like with soft effeminate gestures of a spoiled child is Peter Lorre’s St. Just,” wrote drama critic Alexander von Sacher-Masoch for Vorwärts. “His ability peaks in his speech to the people.” Far more important to Lorre’s marketability as an actor was the recognition that his uniqueness did not type him. On the contrary, he displayed “many natural possibilities,” keeping his “great histrionic talent” before the Berlin public in a variety of roles.
For now, however, Lorre might do as another pathetic teenager. Martin arranged to hold the actor over for a starring role in Frank Wedekind’s controversial child-tragedy Frühlings Erwachen (Spring’s Awakening). Inspired by the alarming rate of suicide among young people, Wedekind had earlier addressed himself to the adolescent sex drive. Society, he believed, could attain a more natural and healthier complexion if liberated from moral constraints. By keeping young people ignorant of their awakening sexual feelings, stupid, prudish adults—caricatured as grotesque brutes pitted against lyrically simple children—held them in a bondage of shame.
Fourteen-year-old Moritz Stiefel, played by Lorre, suffers from the pangs of puberty. He feels awkward about “manhood’s emotion” and grapples with the shame brought on by his urges: “To be overcome by such a sweet wrong and still be blameless seems to me the fullness of earthly bliss.” Melchoir Gabor (Carl Balhaus), whose liberal parents have enlightened him on the matter of sex, gives him a pamphlet that he has written and illustrated. It is entitled Cohabitation. The soulful Moritz, full of angelic simplicity and hounded to death by his conscience, decides to kill himself. Alone in the woods, he reflects on self-destruction until interrupted by Ilse (Lotte Lenya), a former classmate who has freed herself from the constraints of home life. A simple girl, she is also a nymphomaniac who shares the company of an entourage of male devotees in a wild, animalistic existence. After Moritz declines Ilse’s offer to join her band, she leaves him and he takes his life.
Melchoir is held responsible for Moritz’s suicide and sentenced to reform school, but escapes. Wandering through a cemetery, he meets Moritz, who steps from behind a headstone with his head under his arm and tells his friend that only in the afterworld will he find peace and joy. From behind another tombstone emerges a masked man who discloses Moritz as a charlatan unhappy in death and convinces Melchoir to rejoin the world of the living.
Max Reinhardt had first staged Frühlings Erwachen in 1909. Shocked by the play’s explicit sexual situations, censors touched off a firestorm of criticism that led to a purged version of the text and court-imposed restrictions on its dialogue and content. Its power stripped, Wedekind’s drama became just another romantic love poem rife with pathetic sentimentality. The play had not been performed for fifteen years when Martin decided to restore the raw power of the original drama. Updating it to the present, he scrapped the Bavarian for a Berlin dialect and substituted, with Caspar Neher’s expert help, an attic for a hayloft, a canal for a river, and big-city housing blocks for a small-town milieu.
Frühlings Erwachen polarized an already divided audience. Liberal forces stood for ten curtain calls and applauded “the breath of our times” that blew over the scenes. For the more conservative element, however, modernizing the play had compromised its timelessness and redeeming value. The 1929 version of Frühlings Erwachen was smutty, indecent, and empty, and the “gliding togetherness of both children” was now seen as an act of rape.
Once again, Lorre escaped unscathed. He seemingly could do no wrong. As “a youth to whom hardness and heaviness make everything a problem,” Lorre’s Moritz Stiefel won the undivided praise of Berlin critics, who credited him with imbuing the play with a newfound spiritual dimension that penetrated the heart of eternal human feelings. “Probably no words from a handssaved fallen-off head have ever been so full of resigned longing for the torso,” wrote critic Walter Benjamin, “than those spoken by Peter Lorre.” Tortured by the perplexity of his helplessness, Lorre expressed “the quiet Vulcan of a soul, which explodes—and how!” Alexander von Sacher-Masoch dissected his performance without puncturing its magic: “An extraordinarily capable technician. He builds his portrayal out of small, apparently inconsequential gestures and accentuations into powerful effect. He hardly plays, sometimes one has the sensation that he would be talking with himself. Raw guttural sounds, hasty, rushed language, sudden hesitations, awkward posture, sloppy movements. All of this creates the impression of a great naturalness and is indeed thought and weighed out in the finest detail. His originality helps him not
to lose himself in technical details.” It was his second role as a neurasthenic, schlemiel figure in six months, but surprisingly no one drew a comparison to the similar character in Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Everyone agreed only that Lorre’s talent had once again confirmed itself.
No one knew this more than Celia Lovsky, who couldn’t stop talking about him. Putting his career before hers, she invited Germany’s leading film director, Fritz Lang, and independent producer Seymour Nebenzal, cofounder with Richard Oswald of Nero Films, to a dress rehearsal of Frühlings Erwachen. Lang later claimed to have already seen Lorre in Pioniere in Ingolstadt, but Lovsky knew better. Certainly, he had followed the actor’s success. He had even seen him at the Mutzbauer restaurant, where the Viennese colony of writers, composers, artists, filmmakers, and actors (among them Elisabeth Bergner, Rudolph Forster, Robert Stultz, and Walter Reisch) gathered for Wiener schnitzel. Whenever the director entered, they politely bowed.
What Lang saw struck him as an unlikely means to a murderous end. “If he is cast properly,” he told film director and historian Peter Bogdanovich, an actor “must have either the ability to play the role, or already have the characteristics of the part.” Lorre had both. Already a specialist in troubled teenager roles, the fleshy, pubescent actor “looked like a negative superman,” said Lang, who “wanted to get away from the typed murderer with broad shoulders and dark eyes.” Celia introduced Lang and Lorre backstage and left. The actor was awestruck. He too had seen Lang at the Mutzbauer and had even exchanged social courtesies, but he had never talked with him or sat at his table. “I will do my first sound picture,” said Lang, bridging the gap. “I don’t know yet what it will be and I don’t know when it will be.30 I am aware that you will receive many offers from pictures. But if you don’t accept any other offers, this picture will be written for you. You will be the star of it.”
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