The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  “I just crossed out Korniloff’s,” said a dampened Lorre. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  Alsberg’s suicide in September of 1933 marked the first of two setbacks for Lorre. Soon after arriving in Paris, his addiction had again gained the upper hand. “Because of my physical condition, and the depressed condition mentally and physically which I had been under,” he told narcotics authorities in 1947, “I went to various doctors and got prescriptions for morphine, and kept using morphine for longer than I had a medical need for the drug.” Contradicting his own statement that he had become addicted five years earlier in Berlin, he asserted that “this was the first time I considered that I was really addicted to the use of narcotic drugs.”

  In late summer, Lorre approached Paul Falkenberg, who had arrived in Paris a year earlier, and told him that he was a morphine addict: “I have to have a cure. Can you help me? Can you give me the money?” Falkenberg’s generosity placed Lorre in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Paris. When film director G.W. Pabst learned of the actor’s need of a job, he and his wife paid their ailing friend a visit. “Lorre was at a terrible stage,” remembered Rudolph Joseph, who had since emigrated to Paris. “He was in the middle of treatment.” Pabst not only picked up the balance for Lorre’s cure, but created a small part for him in his current French production, Du haut en bas (From Top to Bottom, 1933). The gesture would appear to have been an afterthought, given the extraneousness of the role and its awkward placement in the story. In the picture, Lorre plays an unsuccessful beggar whose luck turns a corner once it has been pointed out to him that he doesn’t look shabby enough to elicit sympathy. After he rips his pants leg, his door-to-door business picks up—until a kind seamstress too poor to give him any food decides that the least she can do is sew up the tear. At his benefactress’s instruction, the beggar retreats behind a screen to take off his pants for mending. She turns her back on him as she bends to her task. The camera closes on a pair of shears hanging on the wall. When the beggar’s hand stealthily creeps out to grab the potential weapon, the audience is sure that the unsuspecting seamstress is about to pay dearly for her generosity. But then comes the punch line: the beggar has cut his coat to ribbons in order to compensate for the newly mended trousers. It had been three years and several striking departure roles since the release of M. Nonetheless, Lorre still could not step out of the shadow of Hans Beckert and the expectation that behind his sad innocence lay something more sinister than subtle impudence.

  By October 11, only days after completing Du haut en bas, he was once again under treatment for morphine addiction. Of the many roles Celia played in Peter’s life, none was more important than financial manager. Early on, she developed, out of necessity, a proficiency for keeping creditors at bay. A loan of three thousand schillings from Karl Kraus had enabled them to get this far. Lorre had promised to pay it off in several weeks and even put up his life insurance policy of ten thousand deutsche marks as security. On October 15 the full sum, plus interest, came due. Celia wrote Dr. Oskar Samek, Kraus’s attorney, that they were unable to repay even one schilling at this time because a “life-important” cure had placed Peter back in a clinic until the twenty-sixth. Not only had poor health forced him to decline other film offers, but his earnings for four days of filming also went for the cure.21 “The moment Lorre makes money,” she assured him, “it won’t be hard to honor his debt.” Clearly embarrassed by their “awful situation,” Celia asked his forgiveness. It was a closing she would have reason to repeat in the future.

  Job prospects looked no better for the other refugees. Newborn ideas that “hummed about like flies” died just as quickly, wrote fellow Ansonian Paul E. Marcus. “It was one large market of illusions.” Waiting for something to turn up caused “a mixture of depression and revulsion against the times, with an added hazardous tension,” conditions symptomatic of a prevailing epidemic called “stay-in-bed disease.” It developed, said Hollaender, “when the monotony of the days and their lack of events became stronger than the increasingly thinner humor with which one tried to meet them.”

  Lorre suffered a full-blown case of this “form of paralysis, this proneness to hibernation” that stole “from us the concept of time. Sun and night sky, day and darkness were not any longer kept apart.” He and Celia lay in their twin beds, eyes open, without speaking. Sleep was impossible with the thunderous speeches of Hitler coming over the radio from the floor above and the angry, indignant rejoinders of their fellow Germans: “False! False! … Lies.”

  In Those Torn from Earth, Hollaender’s fictionalized account of the emigration, Lorre brooded over his success in Berlin and his frustration in Paris: “There, one had played outstanding parts, acquired an enviable screen-name. His pictures had inspired all the servant maids with horror, made them shudder, and now? Barely able to get a ‘bit’ for three days; ‘atmosphere’ in tails. Dammit, it wasn’t that one had to be an actor, a clown! Smearing grease paint on one’s face was disgusting enough. Sooner or later he would have chucked this so-called vocation, and turned to some honest labor.”

  Like most refugees, Lorre vacillated between believing in the transience of his own fate and vegetating into decline. Offers of work fell through with discouraging regularity. “Sometimes things look more hopeful, sometimes gloomier,” wrote Marcus. “Every day is the same. Everything is so unending. You get blunted. There was a time when you were a useful member of human society; now you are an outsider … without, indeed, a regularized right to exist.”

  3

  ESCAPE TO LIFE

  Ever since I came to this country I’ve been trying to live down my past. That picture “M” has haunted me everywhere I’ve gone.

  —Peter Lorre

  A benign fate—as he liked to believe—intervened to end Lorre’s Hungerjahr in Paris. At Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, more commonly known as “the Bush” to film habitués, Alfred Hitchcock and Ivor Montagu, his associate producer, readied production of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) for Gaumont-British film studios. From his German comrade Otto Katz, who held a position on the Soviet-backed Comintern press, Montagu learned that Lorre had left Germany “for conscientious reasons” and was living “professionally at liberty” in Paris.1 He reminded Hitchcock of the actor’s forceful performance in M. “We wanted him at once,” said Montagu. “There was never any question about his coming over to be inspected or tested—even his English was not in question, for a German accent was no obstacle in the part. He came over, not to be approved, but to be engaged.”

  Katz knew where Lorre was staying and offered to get in touch with him. With the ready consent of Michael Balcon, director of production at Gaumont-British, they cabled the actor to come over. Balcon also agreed to cover Lorre’s expenses and secure a period immigration permit to allow him to work in England. Before leaving, Peter contacted his brother Andrew, who was in town for the Paris International Motor Show, an annual event scheduled the first Thursday in October. He shared his good fortune (he had a job in England) and his bad fortune (he was, as usual, short of money). Tapping the filial rock once more, the improvident brother drew French francs and was off to London.

  Despite his German triumph in M, Lorre was little known to Englishspeaking audiences. That, along with his presumably poor English, had relegated him to consideration for only a small role in the picture, said Montagu: “Hitch and I both considered that Peter would be excellent as the ‘Hit Man’ of the gang in the situation Hitch had envisaged.” They “admired him and jumped at the chance to get him and to do him a good turn at the same time, but the production company needed a certain amount of persuading.”

  Sidney Bernstein—impresario, showman, exhibitor, theater owner, builder of supercinemas, and founding member of the National Film Society—undoubtedly put in a good word. Along with Ivor Montagu and Otto Katz, he belonged to the Committee for the Victims of German Fascism, which had initiated the “Reichstag Fire Trial of 1933.” Bernstein also played an equally active
role on a private level, supporting a public boycott of German goods, coauthoring a pamphlet titled The Persecution of the Jews in Germany, boosting membership of the Committee for Co-ordinating Anti-Fascist Activity, and extending a helping hand to needy refugees.

  An acquaintance from the Berlin days, Bernstein invited Lorre to stay first at his flat on Albermarle Street, where the actor bumped into intellectual luminaries and film celebrities—including Charles Laughton—and then at Long Barn, a Tudor house in Sevenoaks Weald, featuring low ceilings, sloping dark oak floors, exposed beams, and leaded windows, which he had leased from Vita Sackville-West.

  “Peter told me that he was deeply embarrassed,” recalled Paul Falkenberg, “because he had never been in England before. He was lying in this beautiful bed and he had only one pair of underwear and in comes the butler and opens the curtains and says, ‘Good morning, sir, would you like your tea,’ and so on. It was a totally new world that opened to him.”

  German refugee Paul E. Marcus (PEM), who now published a newsletter in London recording the activities of fellow exiles, also remembered hearing Lorre dress up the story of his arrival in London

  with a single suit on his body and dress coat in his suitcase…. Every morning the proper butler asked him which suit he should put on, where there was no choice. One evening his host invited Lorre to go out with him. “Put out the dinner jacket,” said Lorre proudly to the butler. While getting dressed, Lorre noticed that the dress coat had a built-in hump from his last movie role, which he could not get rid of. Hence, there was nothing for him to do, except to explain the thing to Mr. Bernstein. He only laughed and they both went out together. Wherever they went on this evening, girls fought their way to Lorre to touch his hump because it would bring good luck.2

  Bernstein introduced Lorre to Hitchcock and Montagu at London’s Hotel Mayfair in Berkeley Square. Lorre listened while Hitchcock sounded out his plans and took in first impressions. “Now all I knew in English was yes and no,” recalled the actor, “and I couldn’t say no because I would have had to explain it, so I had to say yes to everything, which doesn’t quite befit me. Sidney put me wise to the fact that Hitchy likes to tell stories, so I used to watch him like a hawk and whenever I thought the end of a story was coming and that was the point, I used to roar with laughter and somehow he got the impression that I spoke English and I got the part.”

  “As soon as Hitch saw him,” said Montagu, “he agreed, so did Peter, and we developed his part in the picture.” Not that of Levine, the hired gunman, as originally intended, but of Abbott, the diabolical mastermind of the gang. From all appearances, the actor answered his search for new and different faces. The director later remarked, “Your big problem in casting is to avoid familiar faces…. I’ve always believed in having unfamiliar supporting players even if your stars are known.” Actually, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock’s supporting actors were familiar to British audiences. It was the scarred visage of the second-billed Lorre, his cigarette smoke wafting menacingly out of frame, which appeared in poster artwork for the picture. Alongside ran the byline, “Public Enemy No. 1 of All the World.”

  Despite his desperate need for work, Lorre was cautious in accepting the role of an international archcriminal. Abbott’s kidnapping of a young girl and his almost Oedipal deference to the androgynous nurse Agnes recalled Hans Beckert’s perverse sexual presence in M. The part was a purely menacing one, however, calling for malefic amiability rather than tortured pathos. In the end, a first-rate script and Hitchcock’s reputation dispelled Lorre’s fears. The actor recalled that he was

  almost in despair when I was given the script of The Man Who Knew Too Much to read, with a view to my taking the part of the spy. This, although of course it did not allow me to get away from my “horrid” screen nature, was a really intelligent and constructive film, and the part called for subtle characterisation…. There was no obvious terrorism in it. I had to be a villain without making it apparent until the film had half developed. I had to be a villain enough for a child, with the clear perception of childhood, to dislike me; and yet for grown-ups to see nothing out of the ordinary in me at all. This gave the role a background of reality and I was very glad to play it.

  When all was settled, Peter wired Celia in Paris with big news. At a press party, he told her, Rufus LeMaire had walked up to him and put the question: “How tall are you?” After that, the casting director kept his ear to the ground. If Hitchcock liked this newcomer, perhaps Hollywood had room for him. LeMaire cabled Harry Cohn, chief of Columbia Pictures, and received a clearance decision to sign the diminutive Hungarian actor. On May 15 Lorre reportedly inked a five-year contract, renewable in six-month options, that carried a weekly salary of five hundred dollars. Celia hurriedly packed up, said good-bye to their fellow exiles in Paris, and sailed for London, where she and Peter moved into Carlton Court in Pall Mall Place. There Celia once again devoted herself to looking after Peter’s happy-go-lucky ways, keeping meticulous accounts, and staying one step ahead of his creditors.

  How quickly Lorre learned English is difficult to say. “I wasn’t the man who knew too much English when I started the picture,” he later explained. “At that time Peter’s English wasn’t exactly great,” confirmed screenwriter Charles Bennett. “Hitch had recently employed a young female Oxford graduate named Joan Harrison … with high honors in French. With language difficulties existing, and since Peter was known to be a French linguist, Hitch asked Joan to discuss the next scene or such with Peter in French. Peter listened bewilderedly for a while, then said in his halting if hopeful grasp of the English tongue, ‘Please—please, speak English.’”

  Lorre claimed that he learned English in two to three months with the aid of a tutor. At night he sat up with a cup of black coffee and mentally translated his dialogue into German in order to firmly fix its meaning and inflection. After getting a handle on his characterization, he returned to his English lines, rehearsing and memorizing them word by word. However he managed it, by the time filming began on May 29, Lorre had more than a working knowledge of English. His acting is far too subtle and well-shaded to be dismissed as mere parroting.

  Whoever conceived the idea—Hitchcock claimed collaborative credit—The Man Who Knew Too Much got its start as “Bulldog Drummond’s Baby.” At the suggestion of Walter Mycroft, story editor at British International Pictures, which owned the rights to Herman C. “Sapper” McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond character, Bennett wrote an original scenario for Alfred Hitchcock to direct. John Maxwell, head of B.I.P., allowed that it was “a brilliant scenario, a tour de force,” but told Hitchcock he would rather keep his ten thousand pounds, a modest budget even by the studio’s parsimonious standards.

  Hitchcock decided to move on. After a brief stint with Alexander Korda, he signed with independent producer Tom Arnold to direct Waltzes from Vienna (1933), “a musical without music, made very cheaply,” which was being filmed at the newly organized Gaumont-British at Lime Grove Studios, Shepherd’s Bush. One day Michael Balcon stopped by the set. Asked what he was doing after this picture, Hitchcock told him about a story he had “worked up” with Charles Bennett and Edwin Greenwood toward the end of his unhappy tenure at B.I.P. Balcon invited Hitchcock, Bennett, and Bulldog Drummond to join him at Gaumont-British. When he learned that Maxwell held the rights to Bulldog Drummond, Balcon commissioned Hitchcock to buy them, which he did for 250 pounds. Hitchcock reworked the story with Bennett and Montagu, introducing sights and situations he had mentally jotted down during his honeymoon in St. Moritz. In the end, they scrapped the names of the characters, including Sapper’s hero, settled on a gentleman agent less articulate in crime detection and the niceties of international intrigue, and retitled the scenario The Man Who Knew Too Much.

  In the film, a terrorist gang plots to assassinate a visiting foreign diplomat at Albert Hall. At the last moment, however, a woman’s scream foils Abbott’s well-orchestrated plan to synchronize the sound of a bullet with the climax
of William Walton’s “Storm Cloud Cantata.” In an enhanced reconstruction of the famous Sidney Street Siege of 1911, in which Metro police and Scots Guards received automatic pistol fire from Russian anarchists holed up in a house in Stepney, bobbies storm Abbott’s hideout. Behind a door, the chiming of a pocket watch invites a burst of gunfire; the door closes, and Abbott unceremoniously slumps to the floor.3

  The shooting script did not end so predictably: “The door is turned back. Behind it can be heard the last notes of the chiming watch. In the foreground creep one or two of the police with [Inspector] Binstead, their guns outstretched. Binstead advances and swings the door suddenly back—only a waistcoat hangs on the peg—a watch chain dangling from the pocket.” More closely resembling the final version was an alternate ending in which Abbott shoots himself behind the door. No matter how much he preferred the more typical “cupboard empty” ending, Hitchcock didn’t dare invoke the wrath of the censors, who demanded that miscreants be punished, or Gaumont-British, for incurring reshooting expenses.

  Like Brecht and Lang, Hitchcock understood that the cleft—real or imagined—in Lorre’s personality expressed itself in his understated acting style. Knowing his own strengths, the actor reasoned that “little men are ineffectual only in direct relation to their noisiness and boastfulness in trying to delude others into believing they are ‘walking dynamite.’” Fortunately for Lorre, Hitchcock believed in “getting good actors who know how to express a mood or intention with the slightest gesture or change of expression, like Peter Lorre. This is the way to make your characters stand out effectively.” The director wanted “an actor to play a part for which his personal experience in life has raised him. In this way he does not have to resort to cheap mannerisms and unnatural movements. The best actors are those who can be effective even when they are not doing anything. Understatement is priceless.” Most directors engaged Lorre for an express purpose and gave him a character so narrowly defined that he could do little with it. Hitchcock likewise retained the actor for what he could bring to his role, but he allowed him—a rare confession—an unusual degree of creative freedom.