The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  It was a private house. After all the joints had closed, Bogey kept wandering in the hills. We were then doing “Passage to Marseilles” [sic]. He was unshaven and dirty for the part. It’s ugly enough, his face, without it. As he was wandering around in the hills, he smelled coffee from a house. He puts his face against the lit up kitchen window, his horrible face. “Could I get a cup of coffee?” he said. The woman inside let out a horrible shriek. But then she recognized him. She had just arrived in Hollywood and was a movie fan. “Mr. Bogart, come in,” she said. So there he was, when I got there, sitting with four kids around him, drinking brandy and coffee, talking to the kids, a big story conference.5

  It was the pixie in Lorre, the elfin charm, that struck a chord with Bogart. Bogart, said Lorre, had a heart as soft as goose liver, and just as big. Whatever they saw in each other—scamp or Samaritan—Bogart and Lorre didn’t trade in images. “I like Bogie because he is one hundred per cent what he is and that is very rich if you know him,” said Lorre. “So you take all the disadvantages with the advantages.” “Bogie called a spade a spade,” said Dan Seymour, who played greasy villains in numerous Bogart and Lorre films. “Peter did this, too.”

  While their methods sometimes differed, their goals remained the same. Bogart was confrontational, always willing to take a suspension to press his point, while Lorre took a page from Švejk, mocking his victims—usually the patriarchal echelon—in the very act of subordination.

  During the making of The Cross of Lorraine (1943) at Metro, L.B. Mayer one day crashed the set with a company of Washington brass. “Colonels were just errand boys in that group,” said director Tay Garnett.

  Mayer was playing every instant the big boss over all this big thing. And he was showing off pretty well and Peter walked by him and he had on, of course, the Nazi uniform, the black shirt.

  “Oh, Peter, come over here,” called Mayer.

  So Peter turned around and said, “Yes, Mr. Mayer,” and walked over to him.

  “It seems strange to see you in a Gestapo uniform. How do you keep yourself in character?”

  And Peter looked him right in the face and said, “I eat a Jew every morning for breakfast.” Well, it got a hell of a laugh from the brass, because they all knew Mayer was Jewish and a lot of them didn’t know that Peter was.

  More often, Lorre and Bogart set their sights on the Warner brothers. They labeled Jack a “kreep.”

  “How dare you call me that?” demanded the studio head. “The dictionary says that a creep is a loathsome, crawling thing.”

  “But we spell it ‘Kreep,’ not ‘Creep,’” explained Bogart.

  Lorre shared the “honor” for introducing the descriptor into the Hollywood vernacular with New York Journal-American critic John McClain, writer John O’Hara, and actor Gilbert Roland: “They used to use the word ‘jerk’ for everybody and we got sick and tired of it, so we made up our minds to invent a new word and so we invented ‘kreep.’ Now ‘kreep’ is spelled with a ‘k’ and it doesn’t come from creeping. It’s just a word.” One of the most recurrent epithets in Lorre’s vocabulary, it described anybody and everything, depending on the given inflection. “Those kreeps that steal the show,” he explained, are the big stars. “That kreep!” with an exclamation point, is synonymous for “That jerk!”

  “In any case,” said Lorre, “the word today is more misused than ‘jerk,’ so let’s drop both of them.” Jack Warner, who held that “every actor is a shit,” didn’t buy it and returned the favor in his autobiography, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965), in which he called Lorre “a plump little fellow with a deceptive baby face [who] deliberately upstaged other actors because there was no other way he could compensate for his lack of height and good looks.”

  One afternoon Harry Warner conducted a decked-out delegation from the Iranian air force around the studio.

  “Listen, you creeps,” said Lorre, feigning almost uncontrollable indignation, “get those uniforms the hell back to wardrobe in a hurry.”

  In an interview with Life magazine entertainment editor George Frazier, Lorre told how he had found himself in the midst of a group of studio sycophants during a break on The Mask of Dimitrios. He began to pace nervously up and down and pretend to pull out his hair. “God damn that Jack Warner!” he shouted. “I sent the creep out for a beer for me ten minutes ago and he isn’t back yet.”

  “Lorre says that it was wonderful to watch everyone suddenly drift away from him,” wrote Frazier in his Hollywood memoir, “as if mere proximity to a heretic would indict their own willingness to die for dear old Warners.”

  At Finlandia Baths, a steam room on Sunset Boulevard where Hollywood’s glamour boys relaxed after a tough day before the cameras, Lorre took a high colonic.

  “Jesus, it stinks in here,” Bogart greeted him.

  “It’s a lot of those Warner Bros. scripts I’m getting rid of,” Lorre returned with stinging quickness.

  “When he pulled these dirty cracks,” said director Tay Garnett, “he’d have that innocent expression on his pan, which made his menace infinitely more powerful, but he was anything but innocent. Some of these shafts had barbs on them and some of the barbs had venom on them, because he could be vindictive when he disliked anything, but his delivery was always the same.”

  Like Bogart, Lorre crusaded against pomposity, toppling the highbrows and cutting through the posh and pretension. “Peter claimed that people never listened to what you say in a social context,” recalled Hal Kanter. To prove it, Lorre took him to a party. The hostess greeted them and asked, “How are you?”

  “I’ve been terrible,” said Peter, smiling. “I caught your husband fucking my maid.”

  “Oh, how nice,” replied the inattentive hostess.

  Prefacing his forecasts with a favorite expression—“I can feel it in my urine”—Lorre scorched ears and raised eyebrows.

  No one bored them for long. Together, Bogart and Lorre choked off hard cases by puffing smoke in their faces. They called it their “smoking gag.”

  Director Michael Curtiz was another of their victims. Lorre told Goodman,

  When he was directing “Passage to Marseilles” [sic], in our drunken stupor we decided to blackmail Curtiz into a sense of humor. Curtiz has no sense of humor when shooting. He eats pictures and excretes pictures. Bogey and I are one-take people. In addition to that, we were not supposed to waste any film during the war.

  We came in from a horrible night. Bogey apologized to Warner. Then we went on the deck of a big boat set. Bogey was in the first shot. Mike says to Bogey: “You do this,” and Bogey says: “I heard the most wonderful story” and tells some stupid, square joke, endless. Bogey gets through and Mike says, “Now we shoot.” He made nineteen takes and didn’t get it. He almost went out of his mind. Then I started to tell a long story. It took him about two days to find out whenever he laughed he got the scene in one take and whenever he didn’t laugh he didn’t get a take. Two mornings later, Bogey and I, two staggering little figures, arrived on the big set. Mike saw us a block away on the set and he started laughing like crazy in advance.

  Jack Warner wasn’t laughing. “I noticed today that there was a tremendous amount of takes of one scene on your picture,” he wrote in a letter to Lorre. “Upon investigation, I find that you did not know your dialogue, after the director had told you on Saturday you were going to have an important scene today…. There is a war going on, and we are trying to save film. This one scene used up many unnecessary hundreds of feet of film.”

  Passage to Marseille notwithstanding, “the bum true-blue,” Truman Capote paraphrased Bogart in his own language, “was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a ‘pro’ in his work…. Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy for breakfast: he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part.”

  At Shepperton Studio, where Bogart and Lorre were completing Beat the Devil in spring of 1953, the two actors to
ld an interviewer, “Acting’s our racket, so we do our best.” Doing their best, however, meant not taking themselves too seriously, either.

  “You’re supposed to be a tough guy?” someone once belligerently queried.

  “Yes, but only for the money,” Lorre softly answered.

  “As long as we have to do this meaningless shit,” he told a co-worker, “let’s have fun while we’re at it.” He loved to stir up trouble, to charge situations with humor and excitement. “Whenever they were setting up for a shot,” recalled Frank Capra of Lorre’s antics on Arsenic and Old Lace, “the assistant director would always measure the distance from the camera to the subject so that they would have the proper focus. He would hold the tape in his right hand and back away from the camera to the subject holding out his hand with the end of his tape behind him. The assistant was a rather elderly man and every time he approached Peter, whom he couldn’t see, he would snarl, giving the old guy seizures.”

  “Peter was always ready for a laugh,” said Lorre’s friend and East Coast attorney Jonas Silverstone. “He was always ready to provide one. He could see humor where the average run-of-the-mill Joe may not have seen it. He’d laugh very well, very heartily. As a matter of fact, he laughed so heartily his face became red. He would guffaw, really. He would explode with laughter if something struck him as being funny. He loved a good story. He loved primarily good situations from which he could draw fun.”

  If the situations didn’t exist, Lorre happily created them. He often carried a makeup bag. Broderick Crawford related that when Lorre heard the call, “We’ll be ready in five minutes,” he would cry out, “I’ve got to check my makeup and fix my hair.” He would then retreat to his portable dressing room, where he closed the door, unzipped the bag, and retrieved his schnapps. After a relaxed drink and a cigarette, he appeared, looking exactly as before. Among his cohorts, his familiar greeting, “Want to check your makeup?” meant a welcome break from filming.

  “Peter told me,” said Frankie Avalon, who starred in Muscle Beach Party, one of Lorre’s last pictures, “that he and Bogie were once doing some publicity work for a picture. When the public found out that the two were at ‘21,’ a crowd began to wait for Bogie to come out and sign autographs. Bogie didn’t want to and asked the maitre d’ for a large napkin. Peter tied it around Bogie’s writing arm and explained to everyone that he could not sign autographs because he had broken his arm.”

  “Another night Bogey and I were bored at Chasen’s,” Lorre told Goodman and countless others. “With two other guys, we dragged out the safe from Chasen’s office and onto Beverly Boulevard, several blocks away from the restaurant. We were loaded at the time. It took twelve people to drag it back.”

  Together they even lifted a rubber hand from the property department and draped it over the side of an open casket at the Utter McKinley Mortuary showroom on Wilshire Boulevard.

  At a party stocked with studio executives and contract players, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Academy Award-winning composer of musical scores for many Warner Bros. pictures, was, as usual, asked to play the piano. “As he was playing,” related his son Ernst W. Korngold, “my mother faced him with her back to the other guests. She suddenly felt a sharp nip in the nether regions of her anatomy. She whirled around to discover Henry Blanke, the producer and a close friend, directly behind her. Assuming he had pinched her, she slapped Blanke’s face at the same time—sort of—apologizing by telling him, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t like that.’ Blanke protested his innocence but did not elaborate until the next day when he sent her flowers and a note in which he affirmed that he had not pinched her, that, in fact, nobody had pinched her, but that Peter Lorre, who was setting next to him, had bitten her. So much for the Golden Age of the cinema.”6

  “Everything was looked at with a great sense of humor and skepticism,” Paul Henreid warmly remembered. It was an attitude, a hearty response, but more than that a well-rounded life of hard work and stress-dissipating, bonding fun. At Warner Bros., it was the Dead End Kids grown up.

  In his autobiography, Jack Warner told of receiving news in late summer of 1936 that Nazi thugs in Berlin had trapped Joe Kauffman, “our Warner Brothers man in Germany,” in an alley and “hit him with fists and clubs, and kicked the life out of him with their boots, and left him lying there.” Joe Kauffman was presumably Phil Kauffman, the studio’s general manager in Germany, who had fled the country in 1933, was transferred to London, where he continued in the same capacity, and died later that year of natural causes in Stockholm. Warner didn’t need to concoct a story about the brutal slaying of a loyal employee to justify the studio’s stand against fascism. The Warner brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—were no strangers to oppression. Anti-Semitic pogroms in their native Poland had forced the family to flee in 1883. A lack of formal education “was the seed that made me strive to make movies the way I did,” recalled Harry, the eldest son. “I didn’t want to just entertain, I felt the need to educate.” When it came to “combining good citizenship with good picture making,” the Warner brothers put their money where their mouths were long before they could afford to do so. In 1917 they went far out on a financial limb to make a motion picture of Ambassador James W. Gerard’s My Four Years in Germany, which carried a “stirring warning about the menace of the German military threat.”

  Anti-European sentiment ran high in postwar America. Senate Republicans, in the ascendancy following the 1918 congressional elections, opposed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which included membership in the League of Nations. The unsettled political climate abroad during the 1930s drove American heads deeper into isolationist sands. A majority wanted no part of “a foreign war for whatever idealistic purposes.” Abiding the letter of America’s neutrality policy, Warner Bros. courageously violated its spirit in a series of successful historical dress biographies—The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emil Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939)—that drew veiled parallels to recent developments in Europe.

  Warner Bros. looked no further than national headlines for their next foreign policy statement. After uncovering a German spy ring in America in 1938, G-Man Leon Turrou sold his story, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” to the New York Post. On June 23, the same day the first installment was scheduled to appear in print, the studio purchased the film rights to his forthcoming book, Nazi Spies in America, and immediately began to transform the news story into a topical exposé of Nazism.7 With Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the most overtly anti-Nazi film made in Hollywood before America declared war on Hitler, Warner Bros. heralded the threat to world peace: “The Nazis are Coming!”

  Those already here called the Warner brothers alarmists. Because the German-American Bund, from whose ranks spies had been recruited, protested the making of a movie that advertised the Nazi threat to the internal security of the United States, the studio skirted litigation by fictionalizing the principal characters. Dr. Georg Gyssling, consul for Germany in Los Angeles, not only voiced his government’s objections with Joseph Breen, but met with Hal Wallis and asked that he cancel the film. The producer stood firm. When Confessions of a Nazi Spy opened on April 28, 1939, Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires, in a message to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, denounced the picture as an example of “pernicious propaganda poisoning German-American relations.” Gyssling even warned the film industry that Germany would ban any motion picture featuring an actor who had appeared in Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Back in Germany, Joseph Goebbels threatened the State Department with retaliatory documentary films about American unemployment, gangsterism, and judicial corruption. Calling his bluff, Harry Warner fired back with a series of fourteen Technicolor patriotic shorts “driving home to Americans the manifold advantages they enjoy under a flag Warners has been proud to wave.” Although Warner Bros. reportedly lost more than $1,250,000 on the production, promotion, and booking of the series, Warner vowed to turn out one film every three months because the studio had “a tremend
ous investment in the future of America and … the technical losses are justified in helping to secure that future.”

  In a speech at a St. Patrick’s Day dinner in 1939, Harry Warner pledged to disregard “threats and pleas intended to dissuade us from our purpose. We have defied, and we will continue to defy, any elements that may try to turn us from our loyal and sincere purpose of serving America.”

  Out of deference to President Roosevelt, Jack Warner announced there would be “no propaganda pictures from Warner Brothers.” No prowar pictures, however, did not mean the studio could not slip in the back door with anti-Nazi and pro-Allies films. As America’s involvement in hostilities looked increasingly inevitable, the “Roosevelt Studio” prepared moviegoers for action with such titles as The Fighting 69th (1940), Dive Bomber (1941), International Squadron (1941), and Sergeant York (1941).

  Credited with being “among the country’s first industrialists to recognize the menace of the Fifth Column,” Warner Bros. also packaged a wake-up call in All Through the Night (1942), which pitted tough and territorial gangsters against a group of Nazis muscling in on the American way of life. “I’ve been a registered Democrat ever since I could vote,” says racketeer Gloves Donahue (Humphrey Bogart), protesting his patriotism. “I may not be citizen number one, but I pay my taxes, wait for traffic lights and buy twenty-four tickets regular to the policeman’s ball.” When a woman declares, “It’s about time someone knocked the Axis back on its heels,” Donahue retorts, “It’s about time somebody knocked those heels back on their axis!” American audiences took pride in homegrown hoodlums defeating Nazi spies at their own game. As in M, where the criminal underworld rallies to expunge the evil in its midst, American gangsters—“Damon Runyan types,” director Vincent Sherman called them—oust Nazi fifth columnists—The Fivers—an element far more rancorous in the minds of domestic audiences.8