The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  “It is a book about a dumb soldier, a half comic, half pathetic character,” Lorre explained. “It is a psychological study of this soldier. I want to play that soldier very much. Everyone reads the book and laughs. ‘That is not screen material,’ they tell me. I say, ‘All right, forget it,’ but you know some day I will play the part. Some day someone will make the Good Soldier Schweik.” Chaplin suggested that he would like to direct an American version of the Švejk story with Lorre in the leading role. Although their plans never materialized, the actor took Švejk to the movies in many of his best screen portrayals.7

  Lorre had caught the first flight of European artists from Hitler. In 1934, 4,392 immigrant aliens (at least one-third of them Jewish) listed Germany as “Country of Last Permanent Residence.” Those who followed the refugee trail to America in 1933–35 included a cross section of the German intelligentsia—scientists, scholars, writers, and artists, among them mathematician Richard Courant, physicist Albert Einstein, composer Erich Korngold, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, actress-singer Lotte Lenya, and theologian Paul Tillich.8

  America extended a cold shoulder to the “huddled masses” of refugees from Nazi Germany, who ran headlong into the Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, restrictive barriers symptomatic of an isolationism rooted in the nineteenth century. In the wake of World War I, a wave of national spirit fed the strong distrust of foreigners. The State Department suspected an invasion of criminals and subversives, while labor unions feared a deluge of cheap workers. Rigid legislation reflected the national mood to stem the “alien flood.” In 1929 the United States had adopted an annual quota ceiling of 153,774. The great crash in October of that year, widespread unemployment, and the influx of refugees had prompted President Hoover to resurrect the “public charge” clause of the Immigration Act of 1917. On September 8, 1930, he issued a White House statement instructing consular officials to judge whether an applicant was “likely to become a public charge” at any time, even long after arriving. In an avowed effort to prevent immigrant aliens from becoming burdens to their communities, Hoover reminded them that they must possess sufficient resources to support themselves for an indefinite period without employment or be able to enlist the support of friends or relatives. At one time, an immigrant with $100 could gain entry to the United States. Now, as Vice-Consul Burke, an immigration official in Hamburg since 1924, pointed out, he doubted that a man possessing $10,000 “should be regarded as unlikely to become a public charge.”

  Under section 7 of the act of 1924, American consular officials also required applicants to provide police certificates of good character (on October 18, 1934, the chief of police of Berlin had certified that Peter Lorre had no criminal record), passports, birth and marriage certificates, and other available public records. Émigrés encountered yet another hurdle in a “contract labor” provision, which denied admission to those under employment contracts. Along with this, the Immigration Act of 1917 demanded the “exclusion of persons whose ticket or passage is paid for by any corporation, association or society, municipality or foreign government either directly or indirectly.”

  “They were expected to be self-sufficient though penniless,” wrote Arthur D. Morse in While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, “capable of supporting themselves though unemployed, and prepared to pay their passage without accepting help from friends.” The consular officers had the final word, sealing fates with a rubber stamp. Charged with stringently applying the acts and provisions, they arbitrarily exercised their prerogatives, screening out undesirables, political radicals, and immigrant aliens who, upon their discretionary judgment, should be turned away. Diligent enforcement of the quota restrictions sharply curtailed the arrival of newcomers. The number of immigrants admitted to the United States fell from 241,700 in 1930 to 97,139 in 1931 and to 35,576 in 1932. Only 6,514 of 63,000 Jews who fled Germany in 1933–34 entered the United States.9 America’s “closed door” policy ideally suited Hitler, who used the United States’ racially discriminatory immigration policies to justify his own anti-Semitism. “Through its immigration law,” he stated, “America has inhibited the unwelcome influx of such races as it has been unable to tolerate within its midst. Nor is America now ready to open its doors to Jews ‘fleeing from Germany.’”

  Despite the barriers, 1935–36 saw an increase in the number of Jewish immigrants from Germany admitted to the United States. Presumably years of preparation finally had paid off. Also, worsening conditions in Europe enforced the necessity of hurdling obstacles erected by the American government. In 1937, when President Roosevelt relaxed the restrictions of the “Hoover Directive” of 1930, the trickle of German and Austrian refugees swelled to a flood.

  Sociologists quickly began to study them, to record their impressions of America—and America’s impression of them—and to chart the progress or failure of their integration into American society. Their field notes, interviews, and graphs shaped the refugee profile: middle-or upper-class; primarily business-oriented, professional, and white collar; well-educated; city-dwelling; cosmopolitan; generally older; learned English rapidly; aspired to a high standard of living; tended to join American organizations; migrated in family units; and naturalized rapidly and in high proportion.

  The reality of exile lived harder than it read. Most refugees arrived with limited funds and became dependent upon the generosity of friends and relatives. Jews leaving Germany after Hitler came to power were allowed to take out up to $10,000, but this ceiling soon fell to $6,000, then $4,000, and finally $800. In October 1934 the Nazis further restricted the currency outflow to ten reichsmarks (about $4) per emigrant. Finding work was imperative, but refugees often encountered a “closed shop” policy, only one aspect of an intangible animosity toward foreigners. In the throes of an economic depression, America offered few jobs, at least on a level commensurate with the experience and aptitude of the refugees, who were ineligible for work relief; judges became clerks and dishwashers, and university professors worked as night watchmen. Unfounded fears that cheap labor would flood the marketplace and displace American workers unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism. Immigrants (predominantly Christian) of an earlier period, who were of lower economic and educational backgrounds, did not readily extend a helping hand to the apparently better-off latter-day arrivals—roughly 80 percent of whom were Jewish—who sought to continue their European style of living. Strongly nationalistic Germans viewed with suspicion the refugees of fascism, whose abandonment of the Fatherland invited their contempt. Those sympathetic to National Socialism (an estimated fifty thousand were ardently anti-Semitic) even defamed emigration with anti-refugee propaganda.10

  A microcosm of isolationist America, “Hollywood was still a closed society,” observed writer-producer-director John Houseman in 1939, “whose social, financial and professional structure, though subject to constant shifts, remained basically rigid and unchanged.” Big names took refuge in the studio star system, while those whose reputations did not precede them bumped their heads against a brick wall of indifference. Hollywood, it seemed, took more interest in the loss of foreign revenue and in the closure of American-owned cinemas brought on by the war than in the plight of the refugee artists from Hitler’s Germany.

  Hollywood’s reception fractured the émigré community into cliques along geopolitical, literary, professional, artistic, and philosophical lines; in short, the makeup of their lives before emigration. Pre-exile Germans clustered around Emil Jannings, the Viennese sought out Max Reinhardt, and the Hungarian enclave identified with George Marton. What you did and who you worked for also defined social spheres. Former stage actors banded together. Likewise, studio employees formed their own clans. Only the larger salons crosscut the colony. German director William Dieterle and his wife Charlotte’s circle attracted politicians, preachers, film people, artists, and writers, including Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann. At the Mabery Road cottage of Salka Viertel, an MGM screenwriter and ac
tive member of Hollywood’s “Popular Front,” exiled intellectuals mingled with European and American artistic and literary figures such as W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Charles Laughton, John Houseman, Oscar Levant, Otto Klemperer, and many others.

  Ideologically, the émigré colony fell into two camps, those who burned their bridges and forged ahead, and those who resisted the urge to assimilate. Many refugees viewed America as a temporary residence and their stay as a brief stopover. For them, going to America was in itself an admission of defeat that was only partly mitigated by efforts to preserve a “culture in exile.” These émigrés suffered an especially severe case of displacement. They behaved as outsiders, belonging nowhere. Some made a fetish of their exile condition, ready at a moment’s notice to discard their uncomfortable hotels and provisional furnishings for flight. Lingering between arrival and departure, they developed a taste for transience.

  “The experience of defeat, of emigration, of the breakdown of hope,” wrote German Jewish academic Henry Pachter, characterized exile literature. Klaus Mann found the American landscape hostile and alien, and glamorously unreal. The stars in the sky, he noted ironically, were perhaps only “a subdued reflection of the electric stars below.” This Lotus Land harbored a deceptive beauty where beneath the illusion of splendor the common run bargained away their souls for fame and money.

  Émigrés with diverse backgrounds expressed their lostness in common metaphors. Thomas Mann wrote disparagingly of the “soulless soil” that knew nothing of him and to which he owed nothing. “Neither the things that grow nor the people seemed to have any real roots,” continued English actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, as if finishing the thought.

  That America fell short of their preconceptions was partly their own doing. The German art movement of the 1920s, with its romanticized images of a modern, urban, vibrant land of the future, took root in the consciousness of the so-called educated bourgeoisie. What the émigrés saw—and deprecated as emotionally immature and politically ignorant—was a “pop” culture choked with mindless melodramas and soap operas. Nothing prepared them for the culture shock they experienced and, in many cases, continued to feel. Although New York lived up to its reputation as a cosmopolitan hub, Los Angeles failed to meet expectations. There, most of all, émigrés complained of geographical and cultural isolation.

  More defensive than discourteous, cultural elitism echoed a loneliness of the transient heart that, in exiled writer Karl Zuckmayer’s words, had made “a journey of no return.” As outsiders who looked in on a strange and hostile environment, they turned their feelings of despair inward.

  Such exiles clung to one another out of the need for sympathetic contact with fellow sufferers. They maintained their separate identity by reading German newspapers, listening to radio broadcasts in their native language, and singing familiar folk songs. As Americans were wont to forget, refugees from Hitler’s Germany were not immigrants but emigrants who looked to the day when they would return to reestablish democracy in Germany. Meanwhile, these unhappy guests idealized the past and dreamed of Strauss waltzes, Tyrolean mountains, and Unter den Linden. “The poor refugees had a hard time settling down,” wrote exiled Austrian actor S.Z. Sakall. “They roamed the streets like masterless dogs. The only joy in their tragic situation was the same innocent little lie. They told the Americans and each other that in the old country they had been prosperous and had held jobs of authority and importance.”

  Peter Lorre was one of a special and select group, whose transition from Europe to America was made easier by his stopover in London. There he had learned enough English to convincingly convey a studied malevolence in The Man Who Knew Too Much and had acclimated to filmmaking techniques and production methods that were only one step removed from those in Hollywood. Moreover, it had earned him a movie contract and a ticket to America, where Columbia Pictures—although it boasted little more than poverty-row status—had parted the waves of red tape. While others, such as novelists Leonhard Frank and Franz Werfel, won their freedom after close encounters with death, Lorre had effortlessly flung open the golden door to opportunity, arriving in America as an international film star whose singular looks made him one of the most recognizable actors of his day. He took passage first to a state of mind, Hollywood, and second to a geographical reality, California. “As long as Hollywood wants me, I want Hollywood,” he celebrated. “I am convinced that my future, from an artistic point of view, definitely rests here. I have no desire to return to Europe for some time.”

  For Lorre, America was the end of flight and the takeoff for new beginnings. He believed that Berlin’s “consequential position” in world cinema was a thing of the past: “Germany’s artistic resources have been scattered to the four winds, leaving her poor indeed in this respect.” The actor had broken with the past and, he hoped, with the legacy of his German screen image. In launching a new film career in America, he strove to put away the old and place before him the new, not obtrusively, but quietly. America, he felt, owed him nothing but a chance to start over. Like noted émigré Max Berges, he believed that “we have only a future now, a future which demands of us only one thing of which we can be proud: To be Americans, and nothing but Americans!”

  Lorre neither romanticized the past nor identified with Americanbashing Germans who judged Los Angeles provincial and its local customs quaintly inferior; they were now his customs. Unlike many refugees, he was better off in Hollywood, where there was a ready market for his talents—or screen identity, as it turned out—and where he now enjoyed a higher standard of living than he had known in Europe. In an economy where actors, musicians, and writers—many of whom, bitter and disillusioned, returned to Germany after the war—faced occupational adjustment problems because of the importance of speaking and writing English, he had comfortably nestled under the studio wing, easing his introduction to the American lifestyle. Hollaender recalled that Lorre, “who but a short time ago … had shuddered to crawl into his only suit not completely in rags,” found himself “in a peaceful villa close to the ocean, sauntering through the hall, in flannels, or trimming roses in the garden.”

  Lorre had fallen for the California lifestyle and exulted that “we have a home at [326 Adelaide Drive] Santa Monica, near the sea, because I love the water and sunshine and fresh air and flowers. I am delighted to be here, because I can have a home. I am now busily engaged in putting in a badminton court and planting flowers, many flowers.” He had known change, daily and epochal, and transience. He had witnessed a culture spiraling toward dissolution and had retreated to seedy hotels and lived at the expense of friends. The glazed red-tile detail and glistening white stucco walls of his Spanish colonial house, which overlooked the ocean, washed away the gray memory of exile. He padded along the beach, sat in the sun, played tennis and badminton, and counted his blessings.

  Celia wanted to live near the studio, so her husband wouldn’t spend all of his time commuting. However, Peter preferred to stay as far away as possible. He isolated himself in the tropical setting, far from the grim political realities of Europe. “I love everything about it,” declared Lorre. “The people, they are charming. The climate, it is perfect. The life, it is ideal. We live on the beach and never dress up, and we adore the lazy, lounging clothes of Hollywood.” He felt renewed and ready to plan his future in the New World. In the sudden shift of fortune, Lorre was on the inside looking out:

  I confess that I have looked forward throughout my professional career to this visit…. No question exists in my mind that the American motion picture is the finest product of its kind in the world.

  Hollywood definitely is the place where picture making is natural, like champagne is natural to France. The huge smooth-running production organization you have here—and there is nothing to equal it anywhere—has developed step by step over a period of years. It has a tradition behind it by now. Regardless of competition, it will be the main factor in the world market for a
long time to come.

  Even the matriarchal nature of American society, often singled out for comment by European émigrés, suited his and Celia’s living arrangement, in which she functioned as wife, mother, friend, and accountant—though not actress.

  When he returned from the studio, Lorre closed his door on publicity. Whereas most actors thrived on getting their names into the industry trade papers, he tried to keep his out. “I am the worst actor in private life,” he explained. “I can’t make nice faces, pay nice diplomatic compliments. When I am not acting I can’t pretend. A man like me needs solitude. In Hollywood I have often gone out of my way to please people, lest I be taken for a snob.” With telegraphic punch, the Hollywood Reporter’s “Rambling Reporter” crammed its columns with tantalizing news bits, party lists, and the names of notables lunching at the Vendome, a posh restaurant-nightclub hot spot belonging to Billy Wilkerson, who also owned the Hollywood Reporter. The celebrity roll call very seldom mustered Lorre into its ranks. “One of the most amusing paradoxes,” he confessed, “is that most of my screen activities should be concerned with the sinister things of life, for by nature I am almost too shy.” He admitted that “the constant excitement and activity of the big cities makes me fidgety” and added that “meeting people, talking, exchanging ideas draw too much vitality from an actor. I find it is better to conserve my energy for work.” Even at home, said Celia, “he still is strange and remote in some mysterious way. We have never quarreled nor had disagreements. He just retains some remoteness inside which I cannot penetrate. He is wise, quiet, and happy, like a Buddha.”