The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  According to Blum, the studio had envisioned The Boogie Man Will Get You as a “goose pimple” picture. At the premiere, however, audiences laughed rather than trembled. Briskin blasted Blum, who responded with a four-letter rejoinder. He was canned on the spot. “Boogie turned out to be a film of some minor historic meaning,” claimed the screenwriter.

  You see, nobody realized it was “camp,” because no camp existed in those days. Lorre didn’t know it was camp, nor did Karloff. They played it absolutely straight, which is the only way camp can come off—that is, if the camp is in the writing. The reason the camp was in the writing was that I was and still am incapable of writing a straight horror film. Without knowing it, I tend to secretly kid it. There was not a single person in that company who thought they were doing anything other than another horror story…. this special brand of film has culminated now in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”

  The whole idea is incomprehensible. The Boogie Man Will Get You reeks of plot contraptions, tired gags, and giddy dialogue; it’s as humorless as it is horrorless. Karloff and Lorre kidded the story themselves, salvaging an uncertain situation with mock malevolence.

  Horror-comedy didn’t rattle the publicity department for an instant. Advertising a “Double Dose of Chills,” it followed through on the original premise, even coming up with the gimmick of asking critics to select the ten best screen menaces. When they elected three Disney characters—the witch in Snow White, the wolf in Three Little Pigs, and the cat in Pinocchio—for the top slots, the scheme quickly withered.

  In September 1942 Variety carried notice that Jack Barry’s New York–based Minoco Productions would make Captain America, its first full-length feature film, based on the popular comic-book hero. Frank Wisbar was scheduled to direct from an original story by himself and Marilyn Barry, the producer’s wife. Minoco had planned to star Lorre, presumably in a villainous role. However, commitments on the West Coast apparently blocked his involvement in the independent production.15

  At the end of the month, Lorre returned to the front in Eric Ambler’s wartime spy novel Background to Danger (1943). Directed with a cops-and-robbers edge by Raoul Walsh, the picture starred George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet, and Lorre as Zaleshoff, a vodka-slurping Russian agent, high-strung and full of benign petulance.

  Ambler had known Lorre fleetingly in Hollywood and last saw him in London in the early ‘50s. “We spent an evening in his suite at the Savoy Hotel,” remembered the writer. “He wanted me to write a picture for him that he would produce. I wanted only to get away. The only drug I understand is alcohol and am no good writer [when] under the influence of any other, heavier kind.” However brief their acquaintance, Lorre’s screen image seemed to have taken root in the writer’s imagination. He might well have had the actor in mind when he created Zaleshoff, a character who “gave the impression of being almost childishly naive [and] … possessed a subtle sense of the value of histrionics. Violent displays of emotion, if well timed, distract the shrewdest observer and hamper his judgment. Zaleshoff’s timing was invariably perfect.” In the film, his time was shortened and reduced in importance to accommodate George Raft, whom Ambler called a “putty-faced dummy.”

  One of Warner Bros.’ more turbid spy melodramas, Background to Danger is probably better remembered for the fireworks behind the scenes. According to Mack Grey, Raft’s personal assistant, in one scene Raft sat tied up in a chair while Lorre blew smoke in his face. Cautioned to “knock it off,” Lorre instead laughed and persisted, earning him a belated clobbering in his dressing room. Harvey Parry, Lorre’s stuntman, offered another version:

  Peter was a little character and he knew exactly what he was doing when he was in a scene. And he was on this little bench, tailor style, with a cigarette and talking at the same time. George and Brenda Marshall were also in the scene and George asked Peter what the hell he was doing.

  Peter says, “What do you mean?”

  “With that cigarette.”

  He says, “I’m stealing the scene.”

  “You’re stealing the scene from whom?”

  “From you and Brenda.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “They’re like you, they all watch me.”

  George says, “You son of a bitch.”

  So the scene was over and they had a little confrontation.

  “Don’t put that cigarette in your mouth again.”

  He says, “Georgie, I do what I want, you do what you want. I wish you good luck.” He bombed him. He hit poor Peter. He knocked him right off the little couch he was on.

  Walsh grabbed him and said, “Now come on, George. He’s just a little helpless guy.”

  Jack Dales, executive secretary of the Screen Actors Guild, told Warner Bros. general counsel Roy J. Obringer, that he would take no action on the George Raft-Peter Lorre matter unless a formal complaint was filed. In such a case, he added, the guild would have full jurisdiction to make a binding decision. But things never got that far. After Lorre agreed to return to work, Obringer assured Jack Warner that he found both actors “are working this morning.”

  From 1936, when he debuted in “The Creation of Dr. Mallaire,” until 1942, Lorre enjoyed a fleeting acquaintance with radio, performing in variety shows (The Lifebuoy Program, The Royal Gelatin Hour) and dramas (The Lux Radio Theater, The Philip Morris Playhouse). On Hollywood Hotel he also performed—in full makeup—in sketches with movie tie-ins, either anticipating or coinciding with the release of pictures in which he was currently starring, such as Nancy Steele Is Missing and Lancer Spy.

  At 9:30 p.m., Tuesday, December 15, 1942, church bells rang over the CBS airwaves, and Suspense host Joseph Kerns, the “Man in Black,” introduced “one of the screen’s past masters of the art of suspense” to listeners of the weekly radio broadcast. In an episode titled “Till Death Do Us Part,” Lorre played an insanely jealous mathematics professor who carefully plots to kills his wife but inadvertently poisons himself instead. Produced and directed by William Spier, who built a reputation as “the Hitchcock of the airlanes,” Suspense presented tales that kept its listeners guessing until the last possible moment. During the 1940s Lorre returned often to the popular series, performing in stories rife with morbid ironies woven around his screen image.

  In the next five weeks, he gave as many radio performances. On December 17, Lorre, Grace Moore, and Jane Cowl gathered around the microphone on the stage of New York’s CBS Radio Theater to benefit the Stage Door Canteen, which offered live entertainment for servicemen. After appearing on the Al Jolson Colgate Show, The Texaco Star Theater, and The Kate Smith Show, on which he performed in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” the actor returned to Suspense as a Hungarian count who harbors a dark family secret in “The Devil’s Saint” on January 19.

  In February 1943 Variety reported that the Music Corporation of America had signed a flock of film clients—including Shirley Temple, Maureen O’Hara, John Garfield, Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard, Marlene Dietrich, and Peter Lorre—for radio bookings.16

  Later that month, Lorre appeared in “All Star Convoy,” a benefit for the A.W.V.S. (American Women’s Voluntary Services) Motor Transport Service at New York’s Alvin Theater. In addition to performing at charity events, the actor also donated his services to wartime radio shows such as Stage Door Canteen (even as a singer), Treasury Star Parade, and Stars for Humanity, most often in roles to which producers felt he was best suited. For the Hollywood Victory Committee, he performed on Mystery Playhouse and G.I. Journal, which were broadcast over the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) to servicemen overseas. Besides freely providing their programs to the AFRS, the network studios felt a patriotic duty to boost morale at home. The second installment of NBC’s five-part series The Day of Reckoning on March 6, 1943, put Benito Mussolini on trial for his crimes against the Italian people, with Mephisto, played by Lorre, acting as his counselor.

  Long before Hollywood extended his options wi
th caricature roles, Lorre lampooned his menacing screen image over the airwaves. On Duffy’s Tavern, he described plans to write a children’s hour: “The first story is about a little boy and girl. And they are late for dinner because on their way home from school they have fallen in a concrete mixer. Their parents would have been there, but they were strolling down a country lane and got their heads cut off by a windmill.” His appearance on the June 4, 1944, broadcast of Texaco Star Theater came complete with a disclaimer: “Ladies and gentlemen, any knives, daggers, stilettos, dirks or other cutlery found sticking in people’s backs after Mr. Lorre leaves tonight must be wiped off and returned to the Keen-Kut Kutlery Company at once. These utensils have merely been loaned to Mr. Lorre. Remember, just because it’s in you, it doesn’t mean it’s yours.”

  Fast-paced, broad-based, and easily digestible, radio anticipated television by several decades by pushing programming to popular extremes, from Nazi-bashing to hee-haw humor, from variety acts to virtuoso performances. Accommodating all tastes, high, low, and in between, radio likewise stretched Lorre in opposite directions. On Texaco Star Theater, Fred Allen said to Portland Hoffa, his wife and sidekick, “Peter Lorre isn’t anything like we expected, is he? … You sure are a let-down, Peter…. I thought you’d come creeping in here on all fours, drooling arsenic with a buzzard on a leash. You’re supposed to be a brutal killer. You couldn’t take a kumquat away from a Chinese baby.”

  Accused of being a “slab [sic] happy … odious little runt” by Allen, Lorre puns, “Fred, why do people think I’m such a monster? I’m just a loveable little guy trying to get ahead…. If people knew the story of my life, they’d see that

  I’m not a mad, twisted creature. They’d feel sorry for me…. When I was two years old, I was an orphan, no father, no mother.”

  “You poor kid. What happened to your father and mother?”

  “Oh, I strangled them with a yo-yo string.”17

  When director Tay Garnett learned that MGM had purchased the screen rights to German émigré Hans Habe’s A Thousand Shall Fall, a novel about the French Resistance Movement, he picked up a copy of the book and read in it the potential for “a whale of a picture.” In The Cross of Lorraine (1943), as it was retitled by the New York sales office, Nazis promise French soldiers that, under the armistice, they will be demobilized and returned to their homes and families to begin rebuilding France. Instead, their captors throw them into a military prison, where, through a program of torture and starvation, they crush body and spirit. Although rumors of Nazi death camps had reached America as early as the summer of 1941, most Americans did not believe them. Ring Lardner Jr., who coscripted The Cross of Lorraine, was an exception, judging by the line: “The Germans don’t bury you; they make soap out of you.”

  From a list of actors given him by the casting director, Garnett set contract players for most of the roles. One part, however small, called for someone who was not on the studio payroll. For the brutally vicious and bloodthirsty Sergeant Berger, Garnett thought of only one actor: Peter Lorre. “I knew his capacity,” recalled the director. “I thought he was magnificent, because for a small man he was so much more menacing than anyone we have today.” Lorre put extra menace into his role. With fiendish delight he tosses a loaf of bread on the ground and watches the starving prisoners scramble for it. Shooting a praying priest puts a cruel smirk on his face. In a befittingly gory end, the ruthless Nazi is stabbed in the neck and tossed from a moving truck, blood draining away the little life in his veins.

  Despite the heavy subject matter, cast and crew gave production the atmosphere of a social club. Lorre and Cedric Hardwicke affectionately needled each other about most everything. “Anytime Peter would say anything,” remarked Garnett, “Hardwicke would try to find something wrong with what he had said. And Peter would do Hardwicke’s English accent right back at him with a slight German tinge.”18

  At best, war pictures were risky business. Box-office success often hinged on split-second timing. Variety credited Warner Bros. with “a lot of luck picking its spots to coincide with front page news.” More often, “happy coincidences” depended upon delaying or rushing a film into production and distribution. Not all efforts ended so successfully. The question still remained: to whose timetable must Hollywood set its watch. America had urged the invasion of France in 1943, but prolonged fighting in North Africa made such a plan impossible. Winston Churchill, however, preferred a Mediterranean offensive, to strike “at the soft underbelly of the Axis.” Not until the early hours of June 6, 1944, did the great armada, as Churchill liked to call it, finally cross the Channel.

  Release-date tactics backfired with The Cross of Lorraine, which, reported Variety, had been thrown back into production for “a new ending in case of an early invasion of the continent.” Thomas M. Pryor, for the New York Times, complained that the picture “should have been on the screen a year ago, when the future of French resistance was not as apparent as it is now.” History alone, however, was not enough to temper the studio’s projections that the “stark, heavy and unrelieved drama” would have to be double-booked with a supporting feature. At a time when audiences preferred lighter fare, The Cross of Lorraine‘s harsh realism, including Lorre’s “expected masterpiece of cruelty as a Nazi jailer,” left no room for comedy or romance.

  On June 2, 1943, Lorre signed a standard five-year contract with renewable options “to act, pose, sing, speak or otherwise appear and perform for and as requested by the Producer,” with Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. It had not happened overnight but had taken five films and two years to soften the skeptics in the Front Office. Hal Wallis realized early on that “Peter was a unique and fine performer and added considerably to any picture he was in.” Acknowledgment from Jack Warner arrived only after Lorre had prominently figured in two studio blockbusters—The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

  Inscribing his name above the word “Artist” committed the actor to appear in no fewer than two films per year for “the sum of Seventeen Hundred Fifty Dollars ($1750) per week for a period of not less than six (6) consecutive weeks with respect to each of the aforesaid motion pictures.” Provided the studio picked up his option, Lorre stood to earn the same pay the second year, $2,500 the third year, $3,000 the fourth, and finally $3,500 the fifth and last year of his contract. The arrangement tied him to the past in more ways than one, limiting his compensation for the first two films to the “highest wage or salary paid Artist between January 1, 1942, and September 15, 1942,” during which time he had appeared in All Through the Night, The Constant Nymph, and Casablanca. Warner Bros. retained the right to “lend, rent, or transfer” his services to “any other so-called ‘major’ producer of motion pictures.”19

  The agreement grudgingly honored Lorre’s prior commitment to direct and star—as himself in the role of a sadistic actor—in I Play the Devil, a stage play written by his friend Ernest Pascal, proposed for the upcoming Broadway season. Under the conditions of the contract, Lorre agreed to advise the studio on or by August 15, 1943, if he wished to appear in the play. Warner Bros. granted him a “single engagement … during the theatrical season commencing October 1, 1943, and ending June 1, 1944, and for no other period of time” if it did not interfere with completion of work in progress. Possibly because of all the strings attached, the project never materialized.

  With his seemingly permanent move to Warner Bros., Lorre’s affair with radio blossomed. The studio parted the airwaves, granting Lorre the right to absent himself once a week to perform on radio, providing it did not interfere with “studio services.” Lorre’s radio and movie work proved mutually reinforcing. In the next three years, the actor gave over forty radio performances, most typically in roles with a sinister aspect.20 Inner Sanctum Mysteries’ “Death Is a Joker” cast him as an ugly, clumsy comedian who finds black humor—and tragic irony—in becoming “a criminal all because he thought he had committed a crime and had to think like a criminal.” In an episode for Suspense titled “N
obody Loves Me,” he played a murderer who gets something like love when he kills, because “there won’t be anyone else in the world for you, but me. No one else will matter.” In June 1944 the actor was offered a package thriller, Journey into Fear, written and directed by Norman Winters, as a half-hour evening show. Apparently, his agent’s asking price—$2,000 for the first thirteen weeks, $4,000 for the next thirty-nine, $4,500 for the next fifty-two, and $5,000 thereafter—put it beyond reach.

  Although his contract did not stipulate it, the studio also asked that Lorre obtain the necessary releases, submit scripts to the publicity department forty-eight hours in advance, and plug his current Warner Bros. feature. Lorre’s official reply to this request came from Ann Rosenthal, an attorney for the William Morris Agency, which represented the actor, in a letter to Roy Obringer: “In a spirit of cooperation, Mr. Lorre will agree to use his best efforts and endeavors to have the producers of said radio program comply with your request.”21

  It was not the kind of body and soul agreement the studio originally had in mind. Steve Trilling, promoted from casting director to Jack Warner’s personal assistant, subsequently sought to sign Lorre to an exclusive seven-year contract limited to six pictures annually and feature billing.22 “PETER LORRE has been up at [Lake] Arrowhead,” he wrote the production chief on July 24, 1943.

  [He] is not returning for at least another four or five days, and telephone conversations are very unsatisfactory. LORRE is trying to avoid an exclusive deal, would rather not be tied down, hoping eventually to become a director. We therefore suggested, as bait, to make ours a two-way contract and if sometime later on in his career he showed proclivities as a director, we might be interested…. However, with LORRE’s attitude, not wanting to be exclusively committed, I do not know what we will arrive at until I can get him in my office and talk to him personally.