Although he enjoyed a healthy isolation from Hollywood’s cliques, communities, and salons, Lorre occasionally turned up at Salka Viertel’s home for exchanges that delicately accorded past and present. He did not wish to parade his good fortune, or what the German colony—divided between “haves” and “have-nots,” or between those who sold out and those who, in spite of their protestations otherwise, waited to be bought out—begrudgingly viewed as commercially stepping up and artistically stepping down. Lorre lent his presence to these occasions, but seldom his participation. By casting himself in the role of a party clown who unsurely played off his monstrous screen image, he sidestepped the partisan wrangling that routinely marked the discussions.11Among his fellow exiles, he no longer knew where he stood; to his old-world compatriots he was an insider whose subsequent film work was of little consequence, and to moviemakers, he was an outsider banished to permanent exile on-screen. At a gathering of German and Austrian émigrés, William Dieterle told the members of his table, including Klaus and Erika Mann, Luise Rainer, and Lorre, that he could barely remember an actor that he liked better to work with than Paul Muni. Klaus and Erika Mann recorded the reaction to his comment:
“And where do I come in?” asks Peter Lorre, turning his bearded face to the producer, his round eyes full of surprise and disappointment.
“You keep quiet, Mr. Moto,” says Dieterle. “You’re silly and you haven’t even shaved!”
Lorre registers indignation. “It’s for your sake,” he complains, “that I am growing a beard. Only for you, for your good. It’s you that will profit by it when you see my incomparable presentation of a tramp. You’ve got no gratitude—no, not even you, Ma,” he wails, stealing a bit of roast beef from Luise Rainer’s plate. “You are cold and perfidious!”
“Assimilation,” wrote Donald Kent Peterson in The Refugee Intellectual, “is a process of absorption. It is a process by which one body ingests a foreign body and so incorporates it that its original identity is lost and it becomes an indistinguishable part of the absorbing body.” Lorre met American society, with its expectation that refugees wanted to assimilate as quickly as possible, more than halfway. Like the child émigrés, who most easily absorbed new ways, he was boyishly optimistic about his New World adventure. He didn’t feel obligated to demonstrate his good intentions by participating in community projects, joining civic organizations, or attending classes in American history, customs, and politics sponsored by the refugee aid groups. The need to belong came naturally.
The process of “de-nationalizing” and “renationalizing” was too political to describe Lorre’s easy adjustment. He jumped in with both feet. “We were into Americana,” said fellow émigré Billy Wilder, who never regarded America as a foreign country, but as a place where he belonged. On Wednesday nights Lorre and Wilder motored to the Olympic Theater to watch professional wrestling. The actor later boasted to interviewer Mike Wallace that soon after he arrived in America, some Hollywood friends threw a party so that he could meet another European sensation, Greta Garbo. “I was very pleased by the prospect,” he proudly recalled, “but on the night of the party, I forgot all about it and went instead to see Man Mountain Dean wrestle.” An enterprising Fox publicist later parleyed Lorre’s wrestling mania into a fitting press release: “Lorre hasn’t missed a wrestling match here in more than a year, and whenever Dean wrestles is on hand in Dean’s corner as an unofficial second.” It was the only profession, he said, where you can overact without being punished for it.
People were sure to see the actor even if they didn’t recognize him. Like a prisoner freed from long confinement, he cast off musty old-world formality for the latest and loudest fashions. He sported polo shirts, informal combinations of colorful shirts and loose ties, a yellow greatcoat, and even a gray buckskin jacket bristling with metal zippers. “He looks like a Jack Pepper stooge,” slammed one onlooker. “Maybe a Ted Healy stooge.” Personal freedom also gave free rein to his appetite, which he satisfied with hot dogs and Coca-Cola mixed with raspberry vinegar.
For many émigrés, surmounting the language barrier presented a daunting challenge. “If I had known the tremendous ordeal ahead of me in learning English adequately,” moaned a Czech actor, “I believe I would rather have stayed in Europe and faced Hitler.” Slang, colloquialisms, and conversational language isolated the refugees, who clung together out of the need to hear their own language. Lorre, in contrast, immersed himself in the “racy” vernacular, with its colorful jargon and idioms. One of the original “hipsters”—so called by a close friend—he strained the latest smart talk through a Continental accent.
The hospitable corporality of America all but submerged Lorre’s European identity. As much as a “rococo cherub gone slightly astray” could, he melted into the Hollywood landscape. Some German émigrés, intent on preserving old customs and habits, which they felt were superior, disparaged America for a perceived lack of seriousness, especially on political and cultural issues. Americans, in turn, attacked the “European stiffness of behavior.” No one accused Lorre of anything less than irresistible enthusiasm. He took refuge in the openness and natural informality of his adopted countrymen. If being an exile was a state of mind, as Henry Pachter observed, and not a matter of needing a passport, then Lorre had found a permanent home in America.
At first, his sinister screen persona had amused him. But in true Hollywood fashion, it had grown larger than life. Lorre was weary of being reminded of M. Unless he expunged his identity as a “horror hero” from public consciousness, he could not hope to reorient his image or his career. After M, Lorre told the press, Hollywood had deluged him with offers to play homicidal maniacs. “I am a young man,” he said, justifying his refusal. “If I should play nothing but horror pictures, when the craze for murder pictures is through—which will certainly be in a year or two—I would be through. I have no wish to be through. I want to act forever.”
Lorre took Harry Cohn at his word that signing on the dotted line guaranteed him a fresh start in Hollywood. Their verbal understanding assured the actor a variety of roles in mutually acceptable screen vehicles. “I am having less trouble about being typed,” explained the hopeful actor, “because Mr. Cohn feels the same way—that my work requires a change. That’s why I signed with Columbia.” Undoubtedly, he recalled for Cohn his varied experience on the European stage and screen, of his roles in farces, comedy revues, and historical and political dramas. “What I would like to do is to play many characters,” he said, “and be known as a general character actor as at home.” He pointed out, somewhat inaccurately, that until he made M he had “never played a bogey man…. I was an out-an-out [sic] comedian, of the broadest sort. When I was on the stage in Berlin and Vienna, no producer ever thought of me as anything except a funny character.” Intent on demonstrating his versatility, the actor asked to play the kind of half-comic, half-tragic characterizations that had earned Charles Laughton his popularity. “I am, of course, physically limited to a certain extent,” conceded Lorre. “I could not, for instance, play the sort of part that calls for Clark Gable. I could not play a tall Viking with a crest of gold on my head. But those are minor limitations. It does not mean that I cannot play the lover, the adolescent, the dreamer, the murderer, the Falstaff—since all of the emotions, love and hate and fear and sorrow and joy are in the mind.”
Cohn assured Lorre that his production staff was searching for a suitable vehicle, one to garner critical success and box-office returns. Not content to leave it at that, Lorre broached the idea of filming Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (1928) and suggested fellow Ansonia expatriate Hans Lustig, a Berlin theater and film critic turned scenarist, to adapt it for the screen. In September 1934 Variety reported that Columbia had set Lorre to play the name part in “Kasper Hauser” as his first picture, but nothing materialized of the actor’s earliest attempt to chart his own course.12 “It is the same in Germany,” Lorre sadly commented. “There, too, they remember what you have done
last. If it is good, then you must do it again, in another play or in another picture. It doesn’t matter what it is. They give you no chance at doing anything else. So I would rather do nothing than be typed like that.”
Weeks of leisure turned into months of waiting. Lorre studied the works of Carl Jung, greedily devoured the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe, tended the garden, and played with his Airedale terrier. Meanwhile, Celia stalled Dr. Samek. Since she and Peter had arrived in Hollywood, the attorney had kept up pressure with monthly reminders of his overdue debt to Karl Kraus. Just as often, she asked for short extensions, which she met with payments that fell far short of the promised sum. In January Columbia extended his option for another six months, but still had nothing for him to do. With Lorre on full salary, Cohn asked himself what he could do with his trophy, this actor for whom casting presented such a vexing problem. Perhaps, he felt, he had another Charles Laughton on his hands, a specialty, an oddity nearly impossible to classify. Laughton’s recent appearance as a maniacal doctor in Island of Lost Souls (1932) came easily to mind. Even the press lumped them together as unconventional evildoers, though exaggerating their physical similarities as pop-eyed, spongy-faced ogres. Laughton had effectively sidestepped the typecasting dilemma with his Oscar-winning performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1932). Cohn doubted Lorre would as summarily escape the same fate.
Whether or not Cohn was aware of it, Lorre walked in Hans Beckert’s shadow. Both, it seemed, searched for an identity. The Lustmörder found no home among the gunmen and molls of the popular cycle of gangster movies of the 1930s. For many, the outlaw served as a depression-era Robin Hood, who, through his criminal acts, defied a corrupt system and reaffirmed the myth of individual success. After all, John Dillinger robbed banks, not people, and even flirted with older women bystanders. American criminals were adventurous pirates, not sexual psychopaths. Beckert was no more welcome in the ranks of movie-made monsters, fiends, and madmen. In an industry where filmmakers thrived by satisfying public expectations rather than contradicting them, Columbia was at a loss to explain Lorre as anything but what he appeared to be, an outsider who hinted at things better left unknown.
In their “color biographies,” studio publicists sold the real Lorre as a boyish, affable, would-be comedian who had taken his hard knocks on the Continental stage, playing everything from broad comedy to tragedy. Only on screen, they emphasized, was he typed as a “monster man.” To prove it, Columbia sent a photographer to peer in on his private life. His camera recorded—and reinvented—enough sides of Lorre’s character to warrant a diagnosis of multiple personality. There was the dutiful Lorre swathed in domestic bliss with Celia, the landed gentry Lorre surveying his—rented—estate, the pensive Lorre in high-waisted white slacks leaning against a baby grand piano, the debonair Lorre in double-breasted suit and slicked hair, the gardener Lorre, the quiet intellectual Lorre, the dog-lover Lorre, and the smiling, good-natured, secretive, and mysterious Lorre, along with the bogeyman Lorre just to top off the photographic essay on a familiar note. Sympathetic with their motives, although not with their methods, Lorre played along with whatever gags and gimmicks studio publicists cooked up. To prove he was not a murderer, but an animal lover, a press agent even shoved a dog into his hands, snapped a shot, and released the story to newspapers: “Lorre Saves Dog …”
Truth is often stranger than fiction, and sometimes the press gave better than it got. Los Angeles Times columnist Philip K. Scheuer proved there was more to Lorre than met the public eye with a story titled BERLIN BURIAL:
Peter Lorre, expatriate, has just buried a dachshund in Germany. Eight years ago … he played a farm boy [Pioniere in Ingolstadt], and in one scene came on stage carrying a small bewildered dog. In time Lorre grew to regard the dachshund as a mascot. One night a flat fell on the dog behind the scenes, breaking its shoulder and a foreleg. The actor placed it in the care of a stage hand, with the promise to send a monthly check for its maintenance, come what may…. From Hollywood he continued to mail money orders to Berlin. This week the stage hand wrote that the old trouper, age 10, was dead. “I gave the dachshund a beautiful funeral,” went the letter, “and I had a headstone made by a monument maker for his grave. It cost me the equivalent of two months’ care.” A money order, the last, is on its way home.
While Columbia covered all angles, making the highs higher and the lows lower, Lorre decided the best way to unseat his screen image was simply to be himself. To get his point across, he freely gave his time to interviewers, some of whom pegged him—quite accurately—as a bibliophile who could enlarge upon his appreciation of Schiller, Goethe, and Sardon. Yet another journalist characterized him—quite rightly—as being “as quiet and dignified as he is voluble and gay…. In Hollywood, where it is better to be gay, Peter’s the gayest of them all!—the life of every party.” One woman even described him—quite sympathetically—“as a sweet little fellow with the sad look of a wounded raccoon.” Lorre just wanted people to know he was quite normal:
I am afraid that I must disappoint you. I know what you expected of me, what you hoped of me…. You would like me to tell you that I sleep in a darkened room, inhabited, perhaps, by bats and evil spirits, lit with a red lamp, the evil eye. You would like me to say that I am familiar with visitations from another world, that I spend my days and nights reading ancient tomes of old devils, that I am drenched in the lives of murderers and mental criminals. No. I am sorry. I am afraid that I am a very normal, happy, wholesome individual, with no complexes.
Other émigré artists who had been brought over on the strength of their reputations discovered that admiration and accolades didn’t always translate into steady work. After codirecting only one picture, the disastrous A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), the legendary stage director Max Reinhardt opened an acting school and theater workshop. Stage and film actor and director Fritz Kortner traded the classics for small character roles, appearing in eight films in almost as many years before returning to Germany. Max Ophüls sat idle for six years before directing Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Fritz Lang, signed by David O. Selznick in 1934, passed more than a year without directing a feature film. His poor English, smart “Prussian” bearing, and monocle too easily recalled the arrogant and autocratic Erich von Stroheim, an independent producer and director who had been similarly chafed by the lack of creative control in Hollywood. During his idleness, he traveled extensively, even living with the Navajo Indians; devoured newspapers and comic strips, a common denominator of American life; and mingled with the man on the street, gauging the national character by taxi drivers, bartenders, and grease monkeys.
Lorre may well have wondered if the same fate awaited him. The hiatus generated deep concern about Columbia’s intentions. Already Cohn had invited the actor to accept a featured part in one of the studio’s Jack Holt melodramas. By his own telling, Lorre had said no in several languages. Frustrated with the studio’s seemingly endless search for a suitable role, Lorre took matters in hand. His literary tastes inclined toward the Russian masters. Fyodor Dostoyevsky especially suited his aptitude for psychological investigation, for crawling inside a character and unmasking its motives. More than once he voiced interest in bringing Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground to the screen. MGM had built its reputation on prestige pictures such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and The Good Earth (1937). Lorre found this willingness to branch out, to experiment with the classics, a hopeful sign: “The boy, the girl, the villain—with a dash of this and a sprinkle of that—this old formula for the sure box office hit no longer is so sure. In fact several of the recent pictures made on the old pattern have been failures. This is why there are producers now who are seeking desperately for new formulae, and this is why they are willing to experiment with opera, with Shakespeare, with such stories as ‘Crime and Punishment.’”
At the same time Lorre praised MGM, he took Hollywood to task for the censorship of ideas: “There�
��s too great insistence, not only on films that won’t corrupt the child-like mind, but also on films that won’t strain it.” He also berated “West Coast acting,” which he found, in many cases, wasn’t acting at all, but “a trick of personality, a histrionic gag.”
Realizing that Harry Cohn would not be strong-armed into reading the Russian novel, he presented him with a two-page summary of the book that had been prepared by a secretary and slyly added, “You can have the rights for nothing.” Lorre, who never missed a chance to mock the mogul, loved to tell the story of how he put over Crime and Punishment on Cohn, who supposedly exclaimed, “Has this story got a publisher yet? This would make a great suspense story.” With time, the story got better, until it outgrew its own credibility: “As a matter of fact, Tolstoi was credited in most of the credit sheets. The publicity writers, who didn’t know how to spell Dostoievski’s name, just said, ‘Oh, yes—it’s by that Russian guy,’ wrote ‘Tolstoi’ and let it go at that.”
Lorre had the last laugh, but Cohn had the last word. Crediting the actor with “a rather Napoleonic understanding of tactics,” the New York Times reported that Lorre knew how to “concede a minor position in order to execute a devastating flank attack.” In order to recoup the studio’s investment in the actor, who had been on the payroll for nearly a year, Cohn considered lending Lorre to MGM to star in Mad Love (1935), the story of a crazed surgeon who grafts a guillotined knife-murderer’s hands onto the mutilated stumps of a concert pianist, based on Maurice Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac (1920) and converted to celluloid in 1924 for Austria’s Pan-Film by Robert Wiene, best-known for the expressionist classic Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920). “I’ll do the Metro picture,” offered Lorre, “if you promise to make ‘Crime and Punishment’ and give me (Josef) von Sternberg as director.” It was a masterful move. As the New York Times put it, “The Hungarian Napoleon had outsmarted the Hollywood Wellingtons.”13
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