Once again, Lorre figures as a foreigner, this time as Pepi, a Nazi agent pursued by the underworld. However, he is no longer pitiful, but a savage and sadistic assassin, aptly characterized by Donahue as a “goggle-eyed little rat.” As in M, he prefaces murder with music, this time by humming “Frohe Botshaft” (“The Joyful Message”). By adding a touch of humor to villainous parts and shading his comic roles with sinister overtones, Lorre liked to keep audiences guessing.
In his opening scene, the script called for the actor to squeeze some information vital to the Nazi sabotage operation from Papa Miller, a reluctant informant played by refugee actor Ludwig Stössel. “He was always inventing business,” said Sherman.
He would never try to hurt another actor. But he had a way of doing a scene so that your eyes would be on him. He would do something offbeat with it that would attract attention. He was very inventive about props. I remember one incident where he came into a shop. “Brother Vince,” he said, “do you think you could have a popcorn machine on the outside so I could come in with a bag of popcorn, be eating popcorn while I play the scene with this man [Stössel]?” He was playing a scene in which he was very menacing and he thought it would be more effective if he casually ate popcorn, which is an interesting way for an actor to do things. I said, “That’s a very good idea, Peter,” and sure enough I had a popcorn machine outside and he came walking into the store. It was a bakery shop, and before I knew it he was running his hand over the icing on the cake. And he did two or three different things, and he was doing so damn many things, I said, “Peter, would you like a feather duster?”
He said, “A feather duster, what for?”
I said, “You can stick it up your ass and dust the furniture while you’re at it.”
He laughed.
Production on All Through the Night began on August 4 and lasted nine weeks. Sherman understood that the studio only wanted to put the picture behind it. Anti-Nazi films were finding only a lukewarm reception at the box office.9“We had a great laugh kidding the thing,” recalled the director. Nonetheless, Lorre’s patience could wear thin.
One day there was a scene in which Peter was running down a hallway with a revolver, followed by Judith Anderson. And she was saying, “Was ist los? Was ist los,” or some damn German thing, and he shot into the lock of a door and kicked the door open. They did the scene once, and I said, “O.K., cut.” And I wasn’t quite sure whether I wanted to do it again or not, and I hesitated for a moment before I said, “Print that one.” And Peter said, “That’s all, brother Vince. It’s six o’clock. I can only do this kind of crap once.”
In the legal sense of the word—and only that—Peter and Celia had separated in 1940. Friends supposed Bogart, booze, and broads broke up their marriage. That’s all it was, supposition drawn on distant memory. Lorre had barely met Bogey, rarely drank to excess, and hadn’t gotten up to speed on the carnal highway. In Celia’s silence, it is easy to read self-sacrificing indulgence of almost every possible peccadillo. Letting him off lead hardly mattered. However far he strayed, she knew he would always come back. Their relationship never really broke apart; it simply changed shape. Nothing—failure, setback, disappointment—tarnished his image as an unappreciated genius in Celia’s eyes. Years after their divorce, his name still figured frequently in her diaries. As companion, mother, and agent, she kept her situation. She remained a constant in his life, unchanging, dependable, and above all, loyal. Except for several brief intermissions, Celia took care of Peter to the end of his life. After his death, she venerated his memory from her basement apartment—a veritable archive of his life and career—in their one-time home on Crescent Heights. It is Celia who is likely to be remembered as Mrs. Peter Lorre.
Cast opposite Humphrey Bogart and Conrad Veidt as a nightclub singer and Nazi pawn in All Through the Night was the “violet-eyed, blonde and vivacious”—so described in a Warner Bros. press release—Kaaren Verne.10 Born in Berlin on April 6, 1918, and christened Ingeborg Greta Katerina Marie-Rose Klinckerfuss, Karen inherited a musical background from both sides of her family. “They lived music,” said Barbara Sykes, Karen’s younger sister, “though none were really musicians, except my [paternal] grandmother, Johanna Schultz Klinckerfuss, [who] was a pianist and the last pupil Franz Liszt took.” On her mother’s side were the Bechsteins, an internationally famous family of piano manufacturers. Although Ella, Karen’s mother, gave private vent to her operatic singing skills, her station in society prevented her from going public with her considerable talent. “They were immensely rich,” said Barbara, “and she wasn’t even allowed to go by herself to the mailbox around the corner of the house in Berlin.”
Apollo Klinckerfuss, Karen’s paternal grandfather, had rented and repaired pianos and even dabbled in design. At the turn of the century, Erich Klinckerfuss, Karen’s father, came to America for a business education. When Erich wed Ella in 1904, he married into the firm as a franchise manager for the United Kingdom. The advent of war in August 1914 caught them on holiday in Germany, cut off—permanently as it turned out—from their household possessions in London. Commissioned to an artillery unit, Erich survived the war to eventually become general director of the Bechstein piano company.
At age six, Karen attended the Lehwess-Schule, a private school in the Nikolassee district of Berlin. Students who expected to continue their education through the thirteenth grade and take the Abitur, a rigorous three-day written and oral exam, began the study of languages in the fifth grade. First came English, then French, and finally Latin in the eleventh grade. Under protest, Karen and Barbara also took piano lessons. “We hated it,” said Barbara, who remembered Aunt Margarethe Klinckerfuss sitting beside them with a ruler. If they did not hold their fingers in the correct position, “we got it on our knuckles but really hard.” Harsh discipline, along with a minimum of one hour of practice each day, backfired with both sisters. After six years, Karen admitted being “never too good at it.”
“She was a very bad student,” said Barbara. “She was artistic and she could sing—not like our mother—but otherwise she was hopeless.” An inventive child who “could put everyone around her finger,” she openly nurtured the dream of becoming an actress. She was and remained starstruck. Matching famous names and faces came easily with her collection of movie stills and autographs. Soon after enrolling in the Lyzeum und Deutsche Oberschule Zehlendorf, Karen won an acting scholarship to Berlin’s Staatstheater. The youngest student in her class, she began her lessons on April 6, 1934, her sixteenth birthday. Her decision to become an actress won family acceptance. She clearly had talent. Moreover, tuition was free, no small consideration to the Klinckerfusses, whose fortune had collapsed in the wake of the 1929 crash.
Contrary to reports generated by studio biographers that she had won awards for her acting, Karen passed through almost unnoticed, playing small roles in yet smaller productions. Graduation hinged on a political examination, which she failed. Asked what office Joseph Goebbels held, she correctly answered, “Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda,” but could not remember the name of Theater Chamber president Rainer Schlösser, who had succeeded Otto Laubinger in September 1935. Goebbels’s Reichskulturkammer (State Chamber of Culture) also directed that members of the State Theater sign a loyalty oath to Hitler. Karen refused. According to Barbara, the new requirement didn’t accord with her political conscience, which went “against anything where you had to do something she didn’t like.”
Soon after, she met and fell in love with pianist Arthur Young, who was appearing in Berlin with the Jack Hylton Orchestra. When Erich died of tuberculosis in 1934, his brother Walter assumed guardianship of the girls—until they turned twenty-one. Karen, then eighteen, and Young laid plans to elope outside Germany. Tipped off to the scheme and assuming they would travel to England, her Uncle Walter alerted the police, who monitored the western border crossings. But Karen and Arthur headed north to Taarbeck, Denmark, where they married on August 30, 1936. A
fter completing a concert tour of Norway, Young and his pregnant bride returned to Berlin, where Karen gave birth to a son, Alastair, on April 8, 1937. By 1939 the couple had separated. Arthur reluctantly agreed to a divorce on one condition: that he keep Alastair. Without setting legal machinery in motion, both parents went their own way, leaving the boy in the care of a nanny.
A British subject by marriage, Karen decided to pursue an acting career in England, where she worked as a model. Her perfect teeth, featured in toothpaste advertisements, gave her the exposure she needed. It is at this point that Karen is usually “discovered” by film producer Irving Asher. The storybook beginning leaves out a few things. In September 1938 she failed to win a role in Gaumont-British’s The Outsider about an osteopath who makes a crippled girl walk. By mid-January 1939, 20th Century-Fox had signed and then released the young actress over a contract dispute about an allowance, which was needed, Karen wrote, “not so that I could support myself and the child, but so that I could be deasently [sic] turned out and a credit to the company.” Her screen test brought Karen to the attention of Asher, who gave her a list of names, told her to pick one, and cast her opposite Rex Harrison in the London Films production of Ten Days in Paris (1939).11
On the strength of the producer’s recommendation, MGM offered Karen a contract and brought her to Hollywood in the spring of 1940. Five days after arriving in California, she suffered an acute case of appendicitis and underwent surgery. Traveling “under convoy!” through Nazi-infested waters had also exacerbated a skin condition “brought on by nervousness.” Karen wrote Rosalind Martin, Alastair’s babysitter, that she “couldn’t even think of starting a picture or making a general test for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.” After convalescing under the care of the Ashers, she began a daily routine designed to eliminate her German accent: “I am beginning to get how seriously they take it making pictures here and what a lot of training they give you, before you start on a picture.” The Hollywood Reporter announced that the actress was “slated for a top role in Witch of the Wilderness, her first Hollywood picture.” Metro also considered her for a supporting part in Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy’s Bitter Sweet (1940), a musical remake of Noel Coward’s 1929 operetta. “I have made one test that’s been quite a success,” she told Rozzie, “so it looks as if I’ll get a start soon.” What she got was Sky Murder (1940), a Nick Carter mystery. Frank Orsatti, Karen’s agent (also Lorre’s) had assured her “that once I had done a picture, they would get me an entirely new deal at the studio.” Despite her lackluster beginning in a budget whodunit, Karen believed that “they liked me in this last picture I did and also realize that this illness [anemia followed by a tonsillectomy] wasn’t my fault.” After “talks” with Louis B. Mayer, she was told that her option would be taken up. It wasn’t.
“A beautiful German girl … was brought to my office by an agent,” recalled director Vincent Sherman in his autobiography Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director. “She spoke English with only a slight hint of an accent and seemed to be a good actress.” He immediately cast her as Sylvia Helmuth, the female lead in Underground (1941), an anti-Nazi melodrama about a German family split along party lines. In February 1941 Karen had signed a freelance contract with Warner Bros. Because her extended work permit was due to expire in October, she was only too glad to grant the studio an option for a longterm contract in August. Steve Trilling even promised her that Warner Bros. “would give her whatever aid we could” in obtaining a quota number.
Visiting the set of The Maltese Falcon, Karen heard “that voice” on the other side of a partition.12 She had to meet him. The starstruck newcomer told Peter that she was his biggest fan, despite the fact that “in Germany my folks would not let me see any Lorre pictures because they were too gruesome.” During the making of All Through the Night, Peter and Karen became inseparable. She sat on his lap for studio photographers. They strolled around the back lot, hand in hand, and turned their lunch break into a picnic retreat. By the end of the picture, everyone recognized that their friendship had grown into something more serious.
To Peter, Karen was beauty, elegance, excitement. To Karen, Peter was celebrity, intellect, and old-world charm. On the set of Kings Row (1942), whose production schedule overlapped shooting of All Through the Night, she spoke very lovingly of Peter and admitted to co-worker Bob Cummings that she found him surprisingly gentle and romantic. “Karen admired him a great deal,” said Naomi Yergin, Irving’s wife. “Peter was a very charming man. He was an ‘I kiss your hand, madam’ type of man. European men have a way of making a woman feel important and Peter had that down.”
Vincent Sherman first suspected the romance when Lorre asked if they would be working on an upcoming Saturday. “He was like a different person when he was with Karen,” said the director. “He was a romantic young man then. I’ll never forget that when he came on the set, he was wearing a little slipover sweater and his hair was neatly combed and he was very well dressed. I think it was in late spring or early summer and I thought, my God, how attractive he looks, very dapper. He was obviously very happy.”
Lorre had Gilbert Roland to thank for the brush-up. The athletic Latin lover had encouraged him to lose weight and get in shape. Lorre heeded his advice and dieted on steak and spinach. On August 8, 1941, the five-foot-five American citizen weighed in at a svelte 130 pounds. Lorre felt like a new man in more ways than one. That same day, by order of the U.S. District Court, “Ladislav Lowenstein [sic]” officially became Peter Lorre.
Lorre’s exuberance showed, on and off screen. On weekends Peter and Karen headed to the beach, where he confidently braved the waves for the first time. Roland also shoved a racket into his hand and pushed him onto the tennis court. Three times a week he battled the likes of Billy Wilder, Paul Lukas, and tennis pro Bill Tilden at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. Lorre was “an active physical type,” recalled friend Burl Ives, with “arms of steel.” Keen to work his mischief on his tennis mates, Lorre cut Paul Lukas from the flock, targeting him as a lamb ripe for slaughter. Stomping onto the tennis court, he raged, “You thief! Kleptomaniac! You stole my shirt! Don’t deny it! Look here, the initials P.L!” Lukas knew the routine all too well. Denial was futile. He wilted under fire while Lorre ripped the shirt off his back.
Less than two months after All Through the Night was completed, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Wrenched from its isolation, America geared up for war. Mobilization bred conviction, commitment lashed rhetoric into patriotic fervor, and Hollywood joined the armed forces in earnest. Director Frank Capra expected to enlist in the Army Signal Corps and make training films.13“Anytime they wanted to call me,” he said, “I was ready.” Before leaving for duty, however, he needed to crank out “a cheap film for a fast buck to keep [his] family going.” Capra had earlier seen Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s sellout stage hit Arsenic and Old Lace and had fallen in love with it. It was just the show he needed. Back in New York, he caught Lindsay backstage between acts; “Howard, I’ve got a yen to film your great show. Any hopes?” Lindsay told him they had already sold the rights to Warner Bros.14 Anyway, a film version could not be distributed for theatrical release until the play closed on Broadway, in three to four years.
“Jack Warner was sort of a mercurial man,” said Capra. “He’d go for things that maybe other people wouldn’t go for, if he had the right incentive.” The director counted on that and did his homework. After all, Warner would be a fool to invest money in a film and then lock it in a vault for three years, maybe longer. Capra learned that Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, and John Alexander had four weeks’ vacation coming. He negotiated their salaries beforehand, conditionally, of course, and arranged to bring them to Hollywood. He next set Cary Grant, a sure box-office success, to star as Mortimer Brewster, and asked the production staff at Warner Bros. to secretly draw up budget estimates for a four-week schedule. Capra handed the set designers interior and exterior sketches for a single set, a spooky old house next to a cemetery in
Brooklyn. With production costs calculated to the last dollar, he went to see Jack Warner and made his pitch.
“Don’t throw me out the window until you hear me.”
“What the hell you got?”
“I want to make Arsenic and Old Lace.”
“What window do you want to be thrown out of?”
“No, no, I got it all set. I got the cast, the star, the sets, the budget, everything’s all set.”
“You know I can’t make the picture.”
“You got me to make the picture. Now that’s an asset. And I’ve got it all set up and I’ll make you a hell of a picture and that’s an asset.”
“Why, you son-of-a-bitch, you got everything ready, you could go tomorrow, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, I can.”
And he did.
Lorre was Capra’s first choice for the role of the diffident plastic surgeon, Dr. Einstein. The director was a great fan of Lorre’s, “as an actor, as a personality, and as a man who could do almost anything he wanted to do.” There had been talk of the two working together in 1935, while they were both under contract to Columbia. In 1939 Capra had turned independent, forming his own production company, Frank Capra Productions. Jack Warner had been his first customer. From a one-picture commitment had come Meet John Doe (1941). Now Capra asked for Lorre, who was ready and willing to cross over to comedy. He was also available, since he was not scheduled to begin work on The Constant Nymph, his next assignment, until early spring.
Lorre built Einstein into a fawning and frantically squeamish adolescent, the victim of his own waywardness. “You could give him a little bit of a part and he’d just milk it and add to it and be that character,” said Capra. “I think he had more to do with his own characterizations than anybody else, because he knew himself better than anybody else.”
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