The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  John Huston reassembled most of the principal cast from The Maltese Falcon for Across the Pacific (1942). The company and crew enjoyed being together again but missed Lorre, who secretly arranged with Huston to visit the set. “One afternoon,” wrote Mary Astor, “he donned a white coat and walked through a scene in which Sydney, Bogie and I were being served breakfast on the ship. We didn’t know John had made the switch with the actor who was playing the waiter. He was behind us, so we couldn’t see him, and Peter served us, making tiny mistakes—holding a platter a bit too far away, just touching Sydney’s arm as he lifted a cup of coffee. Finally he leaned down and kissed me on the back of the neck and we all broke up.”

  To Lorre, Greenstreet was “the old man.” Greenstreet called Lorre “Puck.” They competed for the camera’s eye, yet they relished each other’s company, although away from the studio they rarely socialized. They shared much in common: a sense of humor that lightened the atmosphere of filmmaking, a feeling of ease and comfort on the set, an erudition that cross-fertilized their very literate minds, and a respect that reached well beyond their admiration for one another’s craftsmanship. “Sydney Greenstreet was not only one of the nicest men and gentlemen I’ve ever known,” said Lorre, “I think he was one of the truly great, great actors of our time.” Joan Lorring, who worked with the actors in Three Strangers (1946) and The Verdict (1946), saw Lorre as the stronger magnetic force, “which sought out other minds like it.” She added that “neither were impressed by being a recognized human to other humans. They were both on the same wave-length.” Nevertheless, Lorre always had the last word. “It’s fun to work with Sydney,” he once told an interviewer. “The only problem is staying out of his shadow.”

  Five weeks after wrapping production on The Mask of Dimitrios, Lorre once again suited up, metaphorically speaking, for the war effort, as one of The Conspirators (1944). Hal Wallis had hoped to reunite much of the Casablanca cast but only reassembled Paul Henreid, Lorre, and Greenstreet, loosely teamed, but all on the side of the Resistance.27

  Freely adapted from Frederic Prokosch’s novel of the same title and uncertainly directed by Jean Negulesco, The Conspirators is substandard wartime fare about anti-Nazi undergrounders in Lisbon. “I have just been to see my first film after a year and a half abroad,” wrote Prokosch to the New Republic. “All I felt when I rose to go was weariness, intense boredom and certain amazement…. amazement at the mentality which can concoct such nonsense with a straight face.” The film editor, Rudi Fehr, joked, “It was a mishmash of leftovers from Casablanca and Passage to Marseille, so we re-titled it The Constipators, starring Headache Lamarr and Paul Hemorrhoid. But Hal Wallis liked it; that was enough.”

  The Hollywood Canteen, a serviceman’s club cofounded by Bette Davis and John Garfield, opened its doors to visiting soldiers on October 3, 1942. At no cost, they could dance, mingle, and be waited on by movie stars, including Lorre, who donned an apron, greeted the boys, and even joined in the singalongs. Inspired by the activities of the Canteen, writer-director Delmer Daves fashioned a scenario to showcase Hollywood’s war effort. With barely a thread of a story—a veteran of the South Pacific visits the Canteen and is overwhelmed by the number of celebrities he meets there—Hollywood Canteen (1944) is no less than a benefit show boasting sixty-two marquee names, including Bette Davis, John Garfield, Paul Henreid, Jack Benny, Tommy Dorsey, the Andrews Sisters, Roy Rogers and Trigger, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and many more.

  Daves, who also directed the picture, put it to Lorre and Greenstreet: “What would you be comfortable doing?” They got back to him with their ideas for a sketch, which he used to develop a one-and-a-half-minute exchange in which the two, supposedly playing themselves, help Patty Andrews escape from a determined but hopeless dance partner:

  G.I.: Honey, I’m going to dance your hips right out of your sockets.

  Miss Andrews: Oh, please!

  Greenstreet: I beg your pardon, young man, but exactly what did you say you were going to do with Miss Andrews’ sockets?

  G.I.: Dance her out of them, Mr. Greenstreet.

  Lorre: Say, Sydney, doesn’t that constitute mayhem?

  Greenstreet: Definitely, Peter.

  Lorre: And besides, it would be very gruesome.

  Greenstreet: Horrible sight.

  G.I.: Uh, now look, gentlemen, it’s only a figure of speech. You know, like you’ll say you’ll tear a guy limb from limb. You wouldn’t really tear a guy limb from limb. (Laughs)

  Lorre: Huh?!

  Greenstreet: Wouldn’t we?

  Lorre: Uh, pardon me, sir. Would you mind stepping outside with me for a moment?

  G.I.: Uh, now, now, excuse me, gentlemen. I’ve got to join my outfit.

  Lorre: All I wanted to ask him is to join me in a cigarette.

  Greenstreet: He didn’t trust us, Peter.

  Lorre: No. And we are such gentle people.

  Greenstreet: Are we?

  Lorre: Hey, Sydney … (shaking his head suspiciously)

  Clearly, Lorre and Greenstreet yielded to audience expectations. The compressed characterizations lampooned their familiar images as screen menaces. Lorre meekly whines, always the menacing milksop. Greenstreet is imperious but gracious, brimming over with malevolent affability. Only a very small part of the picture, the sketch is a delightful interlude in two hours of musical acts.

  Production on Hollywood Canteen had begun in December 1943, but a dispute with the Screen Actors Guild over the salaries for cameos by freelance actors forced Warner Bros. to shelve the picture until a settlement was reached. The studio felt that the performers should accept nominal remuneration for their brief appearances as a patriotic gesture. This violated Guild Rule 33, which stated, “It shall be conduct unbecoming a Guild member to perform in any motion picture without compensation or for compensation substantially lower than the normal payment of the performer.” More than the issue of money troubled the guild, which feared that studios would pressure actors to appear in Canteen-type movies and expose them as unpatriotic if they turned down the roles—even if their reasons for refusal were artistic rather than political.

  After a five-month hiatus, Warner Bros. and the union finally got together, settling on a minimum of one week’s usual salary for freelance actors, but also granting them the right to freely bargain above such an amount. Contract players, however, were compensated on a pro rata basis. For their one-day sho ot, Lorre earned $291.67 and Greenstreet $416.17. In The Maltese Falcon, their first film together, Warner Bros. had billed Lorre over Greenstreet and paid him $2,000 a week. Greenstreet had reaped exactly one-half that amount in a larger role. Lorre was never again billed over Greenstreet or earned as much, no matter how their roles compared in size. Even in Casablanca, Greenstreet received a whopping $3,750 per week to Lorre’s $1,750. Although it never caused any hard feelings between the actors, Lorre felt that Warner Bros. selfishly profited by the inequity, which reflected his depreciated stature at the studio.28

  Lorre didn’t press the point, at least directly. The day actress Andrea King signed with Warner Bros., she went to the business building, opened the door, and looked down the hall to Jack Warner’s office. There she saw “this very pathetic, ragged, scrubby little man with a tin cup and some pencils in it, and his head was bowed. I thought, what is that crouched in the corner next to Jack Warner’s door? I said to myself I’d better look and see if I can help. I quietly went down the hall about three hundred yards and here was this creature. All of a sudden, these enormous eyes looked up and I about fainted. I knew right then and there it was Mr. M himself—Mr. Peter Lorre. He wriggled his tin can with these pencils and said, ‘This is my way of asking Jack Warner for more money.’”

  For a time, it looked as if Columbia would sign his next check. After paying almost $350,000 for émigré Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowksy and the Colonel, a “Comedy of a Tragedy” about a Polish-Jewish refugee and an anti-Semitic Polish military officer who flee Nazi-occupied France toget
her, the studio decided against using the Broadway cast and opted for Lorre in the lead role. By the time it reached the screen—as Me and the Colonel—in 1958, Danny Kaye and Curt Jurgens had filled the starring roles.

  With production on his next assignment scheduled for fall, the William Morris Agency set Lorre, billed as “The Man of Intrigue, Mystery and Melodrama,” for a three-week—later extended to nine weeks—house tour, beginning with the Earle in Philadelphia on August 18, 1944, and finishing up at the National in Louisville, in late October.29

  Vaudeville-houses-turned-movie-theaters combined new and old by prefacing their feature presentation with a stage show. For an actor between assignments or willing to promote his new release, treading the boards was a common enough pastime. At the least, it meant making a personal appearance to plug a picture. In Philadelphia Lorre headlined a bill that included singer Ray Kinney, whose Hawaiian orchestra backed him on “Hawaiian War Chant” and “Sweet Leilani”; the dancing Aloha Maids; the Oxford Boys, whose impersonations ranged from popular radio figures to President Roosevelt; and comedic acrobats Jean, Jack, and Judy. Breaking the ice, Lorre whispered into the stage microphone, “It’s so-o-o-o nice to see live people again, only they don’t stay alive very long, I’m afraid, when I’m around.” On walked the statuesque blonde singer Marcella Hendricks, who, as a breathless, starstruck reporter—and foil—from “The Woman’s Home Companion,” posed questions about his toughness and penchant for monstrosity, which he fielded with ghoulish rapture. His “favorite hobby,” he tells her, “is digging, his favorite flower the lily and his favorite color, black.”

  As the laughter died down, a new tone crept into Lorre’s voice. “What I would like to do is very different,” he told the audience. “With this I will need your serious attention and your talents. I’ve chosen a story written by Frank Wilson. It’s a very powerful study of a psychopathic killer. It is as exciting and breathtaking as any story ever conceived by the imagination of a great writer. The title—The Man with the Head of Glass.”

  Lorre had earlier engaged veteran radio writer Frank Wilson to work up a story that sounded a familiar note with audiences.30 Wilson gave him just what he wanted, a spasmodic monologue he could further tailor; each performance bore small changes and elaborations. In fitful, frenzied jump cuts, Lorre reprised the spirit of his screen past:

  But you said you were my friend. You said you were doctors and that you understood me and what I have done. And now you’ve come in here and you look into my head and you watch and you laugh at what I am thinking…. You said you would give me back my hat. I won’t let these people look into me … all right, I will tell…. I will tell you and then you will give back my hat. The first time? The first time I think it was in a streetcar. Yes, a woman, she stared at me and she got up in a terrible rage and she called the conductor and he put me off the car. And then I knew my head is glass and she could see through me. And she knew what I was thinking—how wonderful it would be to put my hands around her fat ugly throat and press and press. And then I know what I have to do. I get myself a large heavy black hat that comes way down over my eyes and I’ll be safe. Now I can think and think and no one can catch me while I am thinking…. And then out of nowhere came a little girl and she laughed with me. She was so sweet. She took me by the arm and she pulled me along. Oh, I’m so tired and I slipped and she mocked me and she pulled my hat over my eyes. And the hat fell off. No. No. She must not get away…. I am shoving through the crowd and people laugh at me…. Why do they laugh? There’s no air. I can stand it no more. And I rise. They can see. They close in on me, striking and biting and tearing and kicking…. They are going to kill me now. What are you pushing me for? What do you want? You want me to sit down on this chair? … What are you doing to my hands? What are you doing to my feet? You’re strapping me in, but you said you would give me back my hat…. You’re putting my hat back on for me. (laughs) Thank you, my friends. This is very nice. But gentlemen, this is not my hat, this is only the band of a hat…. Hey you, what are you doing over there at the switch? Get away from that light…. I CAN’T STAND TO BE IN THE DARK!

  Variety applauded Lorre for spending “some time figuring out just what he was going to do on a personal tour, and taking care to do it well.” During his performance in Hartford, “the audience sat enthralled and absolutely still.” Afterward, applause thundered throughout the State Theater and “demanded Mr. Lorre’s continuous curtain calls.” At the National, reported the Louisville Courier-Journal, Lorre left the stage “with great dignity and with the exhausted appearance of a great tragedian of the time of Mansfield, Mantell, John Barrymore or E.H. Southern.”

  Reporters in nine cities buttonholed Peter—and Karen—for interviews in which they covered familiar ground: the future of pictures, his bogeyman image, her movie career, and his tours of army hospitals. Lorre also mentioned their three-year marriage, although he and Karen would not wed for another seven months. (Reporters who knew the falsity of his statement were polite enough not to challenge it, possibly in light of the standard “morals” clause in studio contracts.)31 Along with the thumbnail reprise of his life before and behind the camera, Lorre threw out a rare reference to his contractual arrangements with Warner Bros., which apparently was still dangling the proverbial carrot, stating that after his return he “hopes to direct a couple of movies, free to do whatever he wants.” Meanwhile, Hotel Berlin and The Fountainhead awaited him in Hollywood.

  In 1944 Warner Bros. paid fifty thousand dollars for Hotel Berlin ‘43, Vicki Baum’s timely updating of her best-selling novel Grand Hotel, set during the crumbling of the Third Reich. Collier’s serialized the story in late 1943. Doubleday brought out a trade edition in 1944. Warner Bros. put it on the screen in 1945. Hotel Berlin (1945) crowds a swanky Berlin hotel with a disaffected Prussian general, a duplicitous Nazi actress, a vicious Gestapo chief, a smoldering blonde floozy, and a handsome underground leader. It was, wrote Harrison Carroll in the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express, “like seeing the whole high German kit and caboodle dropped like rats in a barrel with a terrier on their necks.” Added to this collection was the drunken and disillusioned Professor Johannes Koenig (Peter Lorre), who acts as the film’s conscience. Beaten into submission at Dachau, he nonetheless scoffs at the idea of Germany’s rebirth: “There are not ten good Germans left…. We shall be wiped off the face of the earth. Serves us right, absolutely right.”

  Aiming “to hit the jackpot again, as it did with Casablanca,” Warner Bros. raced to get Hotel Berlin into the theaters before the Russians felled the German capitol. On January 31, 1945, Variety trumpeted, “WB Hypos ‘Hotel Berlin’ on Strength of News…. Two-way drive in Germany has developed a third campaign in Burbank.” Jack Warner pressed all departments to get the picture out within the next thirty days. Double crews of cutters edited 50,000 feet of film to 9,000 in five days, while mixers and dubbers worked around the clock and three orchestras readied Franz Waxman’s musical score.

  Warner Bros. released Hotel Berlin on March 17, beating the Russian army to the German capitol by over a month. What the picture gained in time, however, it lost in continuity. For Lorre, scooping history had a downside. On the cutting room floor lay remnants of a larger role, now inexplicably disconnected. (His appearance in underground headquarters at the end of the film is not only unexpected, but also unexplained.)

  As if audiences needed to be reminded of Warner Bros.’ patriotic commitment, studio publicists advertised Hotel Berlin’s “Violently Anti-Nazi” cast, singling out those who had “brushed up against the Nazis” in Europe, including Peter Pohlenz and Trudy Berliner, who had seen the inside of a concentration camp.

  During his brief tenure as a screenwriter at Gaumont-British in the mid-1930s, John Huston had conceived the story of three strangers who meet at midnight on Chinese New Year and cosign a sweepstakes ticket in the hope that Kwan Yin, the goddess of fortune and destiny, of life and death, will grant their wish. The ticket is drawn in the lo
ttery but becomes a clue linking one of the strangers to murder. Thereafter, she deserts her suitors, tainting their lives with tragic denouement. Huston had told his story to Alfred Hitchcock, who liked it, but apparently Michael Balcon did not, and that was the last he heard of it. In 1937 he sold “Three Men and a Girl” to Warner Bros. for five thousand dollars, with the provision that he write the screenplay.

  Lorre learned of the story, presumably from Huston, and saw an opportunity for a romantic leading role. He asked Howard Koch, with whom he had become friends during Casablanca, to read Huston’s treatment. “He always began when he would see me with some deprecatory remark about the heads of the studio, whom he cordially disliked,” said Koch. “‘These damn Warner brothers,’ complained Peter, ‘all they can think of is that I fit into a category.’”

  Because the story was what Koch described as “Hustonesque, somewhat reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon,” with its “bizarre twists and turns,” he told Lorre that he really ought to take it up with Huston. “It wasn’t my kind of picture,” said Koch. “I had been more concerned with pictures that had some social theme. But, for once, Peter was not kidding. He wanted to make Three Strangers outstanding.” Lorre kept after Koch to read the story. Touched by his conviction and convinced of his dilemma—and because he liked him—Koch lent a sympathetic ear. “Finally, I said, yes, alright, I’ll do it. And the studio wanted me to do it.”