The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  “I’ll pick you up Sunday morning,” he said cryptically. “I need you. We will be back before night.” Only after reaching the Avus River did Jacobson confide that he was driving to the Baltic Sea: “I know a deserted beach close to Ahrenshoop. There you have to help me burn records and membership lists which they entrusted to me.” If a single name is revealed, he told Lorre, “the unhappy one” will be lost.

  When Lorre asked who owned the car, Jacobson replied that it was the actor and director Johannes Riemann: “He’s reliable.”

  “Then you could have gone directly to Eugen Rex,” suggested Lorre, who clearly knew more about party politics than he let on.16 “Riemann is for quite some time a member of the party.”

  “Riemann?” replied the stunned newspaperman.

  “I could give you a list of prominent pretenders,” said Lorre, “who just can’t wait to appear as cleansed stars in the heaven of the German acting profession.” He listed [Werner] Krauss, [Emil] Jannings, [Heinrich] George, and [Veit] Harlan. They were, said Lorre, “friends from today who have boozed with us and who would stick a knife in our back with the same charm.”

  When they reached the Baltic shore, the beach was deserted. Jacobson and Lorre changed into swimsuits, placed a handful of twigs in a pit, and piled on the papers. Inexperienced arsonists, they worked up a sweat trying to start a fire in the capricious sea breeze. Suddenly, a policeman showed up.

  “What are you doing here?”

  As he trudged back to the car for a camera, Jacobson explained that they were filming a scene for the new Peter Lorre movie, The Fire Victim of the Baltic Sea.

  “Oh, Mr. Lorre in person. Can I be of any help?” he said, beaming.

  “Yes,” answered Jacobson, “we need a stronger fire. Could you please help us burn the papers?”

  With the policeman’s help, they finished their work in about an hour. “The eye of the law did bravely what it could,” Jacobson noted sarcastically. They thanked the civil servant, who left with Lorre’s autograph for his wife.

  On Saturday, February 25, 1933, Sam Spiegel sat down for a shave. His barber told him he had “better not be home that night,” recalled the famed raconteur in one of several versions of his flight from Berlin. “He was a member of an S.S. [Schutzstaffel] troop that was supposed to arrest and beat us up or kill us. We had no idea this was going to happen. I simply called Homolka and Lorre and told them to get the hell out of Berlin and join me in Vienna a few days later. I went to a little suburban station in Berlin, took a local train to Leipzig, changed to a train for Vienna without an overcoat and without bags or anything, just with my script under my arm, because we had to pretend that we were just going into the country for the weekend so as not to be molested on the train. Lorre made it. Homolka made it with me on the same train. Josef von Sternberg was on that same train by accident, and Jascha Heifetz. Several weeks later we started shooting in Vienna.”

  Shot at Sascha-Film studios and produced by Spiegel’s Pan-Film, Unsichtbare Gegner featured the fourth-billed Lorre as a criminal agent overcome by magnanimity. Spiegel knew the actor was absolutely right for the part of Pless.17 He was also very much aware that Lorre was most anxious to avoid being typecast: “We chose him [because] he had a good reputation, a good name, but it was really typecasting. In those days, I wasn’t adventurous and clear enough about what movies should be about [so] the typecasting came naturally to me, as it did to everybody else in one’s early stages of a career. But I do remember this kind of preoccupation whether he would like to play something unlike Peter Lorre.”

  Typecasting notwithstanding, Lorre seemed “very docile and easy to handle” until “moments of great tension [when he] suddenly became intractable.” These he dissipated by playing pranks on Oskar Homolka. Katscher recalled that when they had an important dialogue scene, using a “stand” microphone, Lorre, as the nervous Pless, “twiddled his hat in his hands, always surreptitiously covering the microphone with his hat whenever Homolka’s lines came, which drove the sound-recordist to distraction. Time and time again, he stopped the ‘take,’ shouting: ‘I cannot hear Oscar’s lines!’”

  The strong cast could not save what the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung characterized as an unbelievable and unbelievably awful picture.18 Even actors who obviously “felt no creative joy during work” outshone the flawed script and lumpy direction. Katscher was very good with actors, said Spiegel, but he was “not an extremely astute director.” Knowing that Lorre had accepted the assignment somewhat reluctantly, Spiegel turned him loose on Pless, out of which, said the producer, he “created an extremely interesting character.” Critics, however, thought Lorre’s presentation represented the lackluster performance of the film. While Die Filmwoche said he “was frozen and without interest again,” the Lichtbildbühne, less charitably, echoed Herbert Jhering’s warning that cramping his ability will result in his giving “only a double of his earlier films.”

  Celia had arrived in Vienna several weeks earlier for rehearsals of Ferdinand Bruckner’s Die Marquise von O (based on Heinrich von Kleist’s novel) at Max Reinhardt’s Theater in der Josefstadt. She had been reluctant to leave Peter in Berlin, believing that his friendship with Brecht put him at risk. On February 25, two days before the burning of the Reichstag paved the way for the suspension of basic civil liberties, Lorre joined her at the Hotel Imperial on Kaerntnerring 2–25, just a few hundred meters east of the Staatsoper (Royal Opera). To Celia, more than the times must have seemed unsettled. The critics judged her performance as the mother in Bruckner’s play either “completely colorless” or “beautiful in her sympathetic, quiet, subdued way, very noblesse especially in such seconds of fate in abyss-deepest silence.” About the production, which was directed by Otto Preminger, they agreed: it was long and laborious.

  In mid-April, Lorre found work as Judas in Professor V.O. Ludwig’s Golgotha. Presented for the first time in Vienna, the Passion play was sponsored by Cardinal Dr. T. Innitzer and performed at the newly remodeled Zirkus-Renz with a cast of three hundred—including Hans Schweikart as Jesus and Ebba Johannsen as Mary.

  Believing that his dream of a Greater Germany was divinely inspired, Hitler justified any measure that would “lead back his homeland into the Reich.” The Austrian-born chancellor concentrated his efforts on politically destabilizing his native land in anticipation of Anschluss (union). On May 29, 1933, he imposed a fee of one thousand deutsche marks on German visas for travel to Austria. Although it wrought havoc with the tourist trade, the levy did not trigger the contemplated collapse of the Austrian economy. That summer, Hitler rocked Austrian independence with a terrorist campaign of bomb attacks, sabotage, and cross-border skirmishes conducted by the Austrian Legion, a Nazi paramilitary group that operated from the German side of the frontier. Clashes between Nazis and Socialists turned the streets of Vienna into a bloody battleground. In the face of a general strike that threatened to cripple his Christian Socialist government, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved Parliament and proclaimed, in effect, the end of democracy, bringing Austria to the verge of civil war. Vienna was under martial law.

  Lorre shared lodgings with his friends and fellow actors at the Hotel Kranz-Ambassador. “We were under an eight o’clock curfew,” said Walter Reisch. “There was absolutely nothing you could do. You couldn’t go to the theater, you couldn’t go to a coffee house. Everything was closed…. At the hotel there was a subterranean Bohemian wine place called Majolica Hall. When the curfew started, we had to go down there and get our food. There was no radio. There was no light. Outside we could hear pop-pop-pop and police cars racing around. After dinner there was not great fun demanded. It would have been out of place because while we were sitting there everybody knew the houses in the district of the workmen were being shot at. People were dying. It was the kind of climate in which you would rather talk about anything else but the shooting outside. There was a moment when everybody was rather gloomy and Robert Stoltz, the composer of ‘Two Hearts in Three-Qu
arter Time’ started to talk to Lorre and said, ‘You know, it is funny that they always give you parts in which you play either a monster or a second violin, just a Greek chorus, Dr. Watson, that sort of thing. What would be wrong if you played once an important classic part?’”

  “You are thinking of Hamlet,” Lorre replied. “I know the whole play from beginning to end, all the parts.”

  Rosa Stradner, who later married director-screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz, urged him to recite some of the play: “We have no audience here. We are all friends. Come on, shoot.” “And the others felt a little funny about that,” recalled Reisch. “After all, he with his shoulders hanging down and the fat face. He was very, very overweight at the time. He looked much older than he really was. Everybody said, ‘Come on, don’t be silly.’”

  “Yes,” agreed Lorre. “I want to do it, really. It has been deep in my heart ever since I was twelve. Ever since I ran away from home. Ever since I saw Hamlet with all the great stars of Europe, it has been the great dream of my life. If you will really keep quiet, I will give you a bit.”

  “Everybody really tried very hard to be serious,” continued Reisch, “although we knew that it could be nothing but a disaster. After all, everybody knew Hamlet. It was part of our education.”

  Lorre called the waiter over. “No serving for the next quarter of an hour.”

  “He didn’t start with ‘To be or not to be.’ He started reciting the first gravedigger from beginning to end.”

  After finishing, Lorre scolded his audience, “You sons-of-bitches, you thought I was going to play Hamlet and make a fool of myself. My part is the gravedigger and if I had ever played it on the stage I would have stolen that play. There would have been no Hamlet and no Claudius, no Polonius, no Laertes and no Ophelia. It would have been me.”

  “And I tell you something,” concluded Reisch. “It was terrific. After the first lines he got up and took a knife, as if it were the gravedigger’s spade, and he started to dig into the earth. You forgot the shooting outside, you forgot the Majolica Hall, you forgot everything. You forgot Hitler. You forgot Hamlet. You saw Peter Lorre as the gravedigger and that showed to me this guy knew his limitations, and at the same time made the best of his shortcomings, his figure, his funny face, his reputation as a monster.”

  In Berlin, Lorre had relied on the acumen of politically minded friends such as Brecht and Lang (who undoubtedly winced with incredulity at his salute “to the readers of Mein Film [that] all is good”). Lacking these connections, he grew anxious in Vienna, where the anti-Semitic clamor had grown more audible. With his narrow escape still fresh in mind, Peter and Celia retreated to Vranov, Czechoslovakia, a town of just over nine thousand inhabitants that sat peacefully on the River Thaya. There they visited her mother in early summer.

  Mulling over their few options did not take long.19 Rumors of work in Paris—Lorre boasted a fluent use of French—and the fear that Nazi troops would any day march into Czechoslovakia, brought them to the gray, high, narrow Hotel Ansonia on the Rue de Saigon, where, according to fellow exile Friedrich Hollaender, the rooms “are small, but dirty. Dirty, but cheap. What do you want, the Ritz?” For as long as three months, a refugee might pass himself off as a tourist, but then he was required to obtain a Carte d’Identité. Although it was much easier to secure than a labor permit, and allowed a refugee to work, importuning the officials too eagerly could result in a trip to the border. Lorre did not play the despairing exile. M still played in theaters, and on the streets people followed after him and called out, “Le maudit! [The Damned One],” a reference to the French title of the picture. Instead, he viewed his stopover as a respite in a grand design, with Hollywood the final destination. “It is necessary to wait for one’s luck to change,” he said. “If I did not have the courage to wait, all that I suffered until now would have been in vain. In that case it would have had more value if I had not become an actor.” That fall, Lorre optimistically told an interviewer for Cinémonde that if he didn’t enjoy Paris, he wouldn’t be there, and boldly stated that he intended to make the city his headquarters. Not only was he set to make some French language films, but he would soon get Caspar Hauser back on track.

  A mood of humor and expectancy welded the Ansonia group together. In addition to Lorre and Hollaender, the vertically arranged nest of exiles included Billy Wilder, Franz Wachsmann (who later changed his name to Waxman), Hans G. “Jan” Lustig, Hanna Luke, Max Kolpe (who later became Colpet), and Rudolph Joseph. “Emigrant four on the second floor,” mused Hollaender in his autobiography, “listened to emigrant nine coughing on the fifth floor. Knows that he also cannot sleep.” Lorre’s brother Andrew had lent him and Celia money to travel to Paris. Beyond that and the help received from fellow émigrés such as Wilder, who worked illegally writing under other people’s names, they scrimped and scrounged, bound by their meager purses. “There’s an old proverb,” explained Andrew, who visited his brother in Paris, “that in all Hungary, there are only one hundred pengös, but every night they belong to someone else.”

  “Do you remember,” Lorre asked German refugee Manfred George, who interviewed the actor in 1951, “what a three-cornered life we led, among the nearest delicatessen store, the subway and the psychoanalyst?” By day, they ate hard-boiled eggs at Café du Dome or sat at the small sidewalk tables of the Café Colisée and looked back to their life in Berlin. Lorre loved to tell of the time Joseph Goebbels toured UFA just after he had fled Berlin. He related that the minister of propaganda had one day asked a studio executive, “Tell me, where is that little man who did so many marvelous pictures? The Führer wants to meet him.”

  “There is a slight difficulty,” the executive nervously stuttered.

  “There can be no difficulty,” Goebbels impatiently replied. “Send him to me.” Informed that the actor in question was Peter Lorre, who was Jewish, he snapped, “I never want to hear that name again.”

  It made a nice story. Actually, after seeing M on May 21, 1931, Goebbels wildly praised the film in his diary and predicted that Lang would be “our director one day,” but did not even mention Lorre. Furthermore, one year later, on May 31, 1932, Der Angriff, a National Socialist paper edited by Goebbels, caricatured Lorre as a prototype killer, who had “lost nothing of his gruesome repulsiveness to this day.”

  Lorre said that shortly after arriving in Vienna, he received a telegram from Goebbels asking him to come back. The “darling actor of Hitler” reportedly replied, “For two murderers like Hitler and me, there’s not enough room in Germany.” Unable to improve on this story, Lorre repeated it until 1963, when he appeared on the Hy Gardner Show with Boris Karloff. He offered a revised account in what turned out to be close to a deathbed confession. His sudden departure, he said, had left the Caspar Hauser project in limbo and UFA somewhat nervous about film rights. The studio asked Lorre to sign over the German rights to the project; in exchange, he could keep “all the outside versions.”

  “One night I just happened to be in a mood,” admitted Lorre. “I don’t know whether I had a drink or not. Most probably I did. I addressed a telegram, not to Hitler, but to the general manager of UFA, and I said, ‘There is no room in Germany for two murderers like we are, Hitler and I. Signed, Peter Lorre.’”

  The restive energies of the captive audience demanded an outlet, a cooperative walking of wits. Together they assembled around the table in scenarist Max Kolpe’s first-floor room to hatch an idea for a film. Usually their efforts dead-ended on page two, or with the seconded motion to adjourn to Korniloff’s, a nearby Russian restaurant, or to an American movie at the Cinéma Madeleine. When Kolpe attracted a sponsor from the executive ranks of the Pantheon Lightbulb Factory, who agreed to back their venture on condition that his wife star in it, they forged ahead, “each one toying, gagging, and advising, anticipating a share of the kill,” with a suspiciously familiar story line: Lorre would play a “lust murderer” who strangles his female costar. The actor found the idea lacking and st
ood up. “In an expressionist hand movement,” wrote Hollaender,

  he part[ed] the waves: A moment please. With the distance which apparently is removing you and which only an actor can possess, I have just recognized the club foot in the manuscript. It came to me like an enlightenment. The character of our lust murderer is still lacking the essentials: warmth of heart, amiability, nicety, with a word, he is lacking our sympathy. After all, if I am supposed to play this role, something of scope has to stick to this character, something popular. I would like to say something which appeals to the simple man in his child’s soul, unless it doesn’t matter to you if I play him or not. Then naturally, I don’t have to!

  Lorre then sat down and looked at a spot on the ceiling while Wilder unraveled a second plot and Waxman and Hollaender worked out a musical theme.20

  “Don’t get so excited,” piped up Lustig. “The picture will never be made. This Galliard woman is a cow. The whole thing will collapse. She can never play that part. Besides both would hardly agree that she will be suffocated after the first 150 meters of film.”

  “Just the opposite,” laughed Wilder. “Galliard would be delighted to see her strangled.”

  “Children, stay on the carpet,” interrupted Lorre. “I’m prepared to rewrite the role myself for a pair of grubby per cents of the entire profit. Now, isn’t that an offer?”

  The group had decided to remove to Korniloff’s when Hanna Luke broke in with the news that Max Alsberg, the famous Berlin defense attorney, had shot himself in the head.