The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Huston and Howard Koch completed the script for Three Strangers in 1942, just before Huston accepted a commission in the Signal Corps. Koch said that his “contribution was mostly in writing the scenes that [Huston] had indicated in his treatment—although I probably stressed the romantic elements more than he had intended.” Huston planned to shoot it with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet in the leads. Before war’s end, however, the project fell into Jean Negulesco’s hands.32 When Jack Warner learned that Negulesco wanted Lorre in lieu of Bogart, not slyly sinister, but warmly romantic, he laughed and told him he was crazy. But knowing he had little to lose on the modestly budgeted picture, the cost-conscious studio chief agreed not to stand in his way. Opposite Greenstreet’s rudely dignified solicitor, Lorre’s philosophic drunk showed just how far his Hollywood experience had separated him from his European sensibilities. As his body became leaner, so did his performances. By 1940s standards, Lorre’s earlier work seemed as stiff and self-conscious as the old-world milieu that shaped it. His acting had moved away from the psychological introspection of Mad Love and Crime and Punishment toward a bold immediacy that was, at the same time, casual and comfortable, off-center and ironic. Where he was, philosophically speaking, offscreen had come of age on-screen.

  Given freedom to improvise on Three Strangers (1945), Lorre brought to his portrayal, in Negulesco’s words, “his own melancholy whimsy, the calm of a poet.” The actor openly stood apart from his movie-made persona and looked at his surroundings with a sense of floating detachment: “I was looking at all the lights in all these houses…. Well, you see, each light cuts a tiny little circle out of the darkness, and each circle is the center of somebody’s life. People swing around these lights like planets swing around the stars.”

  Lorre worked for the first time with Joan Lorring in Three Strangers. Although she had earned accolades in The Corn Is Green (1945), she described herself then as a naive and diffident youngster: “I was a retard at the time, nineteen going on eleven.” Working with veteran actors fed her feelings of insecurity and self-consciousness. Lorre sensed his costar’s discomfort. Recalled Lorring:

  The first time I met him, I was coming out of the make-up building, and he was coming in. Somebody introduced us. I have to preface this by saying I was so painfully shy and so absolutely certain that I was ugly enough to stop a clock and had legs that should never been seen…. Well, I had never met Peter Lorre before…. As we were introduced, he said, “How do you do?

  “I just wanted to tell you something. Do you know how many years I have been in this country?”

  “No,” I said.

  Then he said, “Do you know how long I have waited to play a romantic part?”

  “No,” I said.

  He said, “It’s been a number of years. All of my dreams of playing with the most glamorous women, and here is my first romantic part, and look what I get to play with!”

  This comment crushed me, but I laughed. This was Peter’s therapy for me. After that I didn’t feel like such a freak. I don’t think I could have done the role with anybody else. He changed the way I felt.

  One day, when Lorre plopped his tired body next to Lorring on a bed on the set, she mistook his meaning and slapped him. “I felt very embarrassed about it afterwards,” she admitted. “But he didn’t even look angry. He understood more than I did.”

  In a scene beneath the clammy Battersea Bridge, art imitated life when Icy (Lorring) tells Johnny (Lorre), “You make me feel as if I was … somebody. At first I thought you were makin’ fun of me. But you’re not. That’s just the way you are.”

  Lorre drew Lorring to him, first offscreen, then on, reinvesting their rapport into what the actress felt “was the best work I have ever done.” Koch recalled that “Peter had a very good kidding relationship with the other members of the Three Strangers cast and never tried to upstage them. He didn’t seem to have that kind of competitiveness that he wanted to bring anyone else down, except the people who were running the studio.”

  Production on Three Strangers began on January 10, 1945. The common cold, inclement weather, and differences of opinion between Negulesco, producer Wolfgang Reinhardt, and Lorre on the interpretation of a scene encumbered the usual assembly-line pace at Warner Bros. The director completed production on February 22, eight days behind schedule and nearly $50,000 over the $440,000 budget.

  Reviewers were less critical than curious about Three Strangers, finding it novel, esoteric, even arty, a melodrama cast in the noir mold. Adolph Deutsch, who had scored The Maltese Falcon and The Mask of Dimitrios, composed the music for Three Strangers. And cinematographer Arthur Edeson’s sure hand was present, smudging the characters in shadow tones of gray and black, saying more with the camera than the writers did with their lines of dialogue. Huston said he didn’t think much of the film, which he felt had been “rather sentimentalised.” Critics grudgingly acknowledged Negulesco’s skillful weaving of three stories, saving their accolades for the leads. Life praised Greenstreet as “a polished, patrician villain, whose cold, sinister machinations lurk beneath the apparent dignity and wisdom of old age.” Lorre fared no less well with Variety, which complimented him for handling the part, “one that is difficult in its transitions, with telling skill.” Cast against type, he drew only a peripheral glance for his “under-acting.” The Front Office caught on in a small way, plugging him into a similar role in The Verdict (1946). After all, amiable drunks were as readily recyclable as psychotic killers.

  For Lorre, the new beginning had already dead-ended, except in his own imagination, where he role-played better parts. Co-worker Andrea King remembered that “he would go to wardrobe and put on these incredible costumes, such as the Mutiny on the Bounty Charles Laughton costume, and right in the middle of a take on Errol Flynn’s set, as Errol would be speaking, he would let out, ‘Here we go! Mutiny!’ And Errol would say, ‘Oh God, it’s Lorre again. Will you get him off the stage?!’ And I had a feeling that he felt one day he would give anything to be able to be some kind of a leading man in one part or another.”33

  Little more than a week after wrapping Three Strangers, Lorre found himself on a plane to New York to attend the premiere of Hotel Berlin at the Strand on March 2. Besides plugging his new release, the actor revived his house act for three weeks, restaging his bloodthirsty gags with Marcella Hendricks and reciting “The Man with the Head of Glass.” Seven days into his run, the New York Times bylined Lorre as a “Sensation!” then upgraded him to “Chilling on Screen—Super Thrilling on the Stage!”

  Lorre made for “the exception to the usual dullness when a Hollywood star makes a personal.” He mesmerized audiences. People couldn’t get enough of him. Perhaps it was because he was so recognizable. Or possibly that they wished to see firsthand how he stacked up to his movie image. They wanted to touch him, to talk with him, to connect with that part of him that was larger than life. After a show at the Roxy, Peter, Karen, John Garfield, and Irving Yergin headed for Greenberg’s delicatessen on New York’s Lower East Side. When an unruly crowd of admirers gathered outside the restaurant, Greenberg called in four squad cars, but it was an undaunted cabby who warded off fans with a tire iron.

  Confusing person and persona only enhanced the attraction. Women especially fell under his spell. A fan magazine in the 1940s had mused that its readers would “probably wind up trying to mother him.” Co-worker Hazel Court found that the middle-aged Lorre “actually had tremendous sex appeal. When he talked to you, you felt you were the only woman in the world. And the eyes were hypnotic…. They were most expressive—not beautiful—but they were incredible. They used to look at you, as much to say, I’m going right into your soul.” June Vincent, Lorre’s costar on Universal’s Black Angel (1946), recalled finding the actor sitting alone at the postproduction party. He was covered with lipstick, evidence of kisses bestowed by a bevy of young actresses who had worked on the picture. “You know,” she said smiling, “you must be terribly popular.
Have you looked at your face?” Lorre sat there with an impish grin. “I like to make people happy.” Jonas Silverstone saw another side of this chemistry: “When you blend a star with menace and his obvious potency, he became attractive to some women and I saw this happen.”

  When Lorre played at New York’s Roxy Theater in 1947, he received a constant stream of fan mail and personal notes at the Sherry Netherland Hotel. Returning early one morning, he found “Shorty the Nurse,” a beautiful young woman swathed in fur, sitting on his living room couch. According to Irving Yergin, she had paid the maid ten dollars to get in. When Lorre learned she was naked beneath her coat, he told Irving he would see him later. Afterward, she kept sending him cards and even several paintings.

  Not surprisingly, the criminal element closely identified with him. At the Earle in Philadelphia, nitery owner Benny-the-Bum Fogelman clenched his fists in anxious anticipation of Lorre’s execution in “The Man with the Head of Glass.” He couldn’t take it. With tears streaming down his face, the mobster sobbed, “Ain’t he the sweetest little son-of-a-bitch you ever seen!” Yergin recalled that “Benny became quite attached to Peter. He offered Peter his car and bodyguard. He even recommended to the manager of the Earle that Peter should have a better dressing room.” He backed up his suggestion by threatening to burn down the theater.

  To be on a first-name basis with a movie villain delighted gangster fans. It was their payoff. According to Yergin, a small-time hoodlum in Cincinnati sent up a refrigerator stocked with beer and cheese. When Lorre learned that Amadeo “Mimi” Capone planned to visit him in Chicago, he sent Karen out to shop. “If there is anything you need,” offered Capone, “just let me know.” The flattered if incredulous Lorre thanked him for his concern and assured him that if his services were required, he would get in touch.

  Actress Betsy-Jones Moreland, who worked with Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney Jr. on “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” a Route 66 episode aired in 1962, recalled that

  Peter Lorre and other actors of that sort, Humphrey Bogart and so on, were always loved by “the darker side,” if you know what I mean. The Mafia. The hoods of this country. Those actors were always treated with great respect and love and devotion. We went one night, Peter Lorre and I, and I forget who else, a whole bunch of us—we were taken by “gentlemen” from that world to a nightclub, to dinner, and we were treated like royalty. Absolutely like royalty! Peter Lorre wasn’t allowed to pay for anything, there was no way that anybody like Lorre could ever pay for anything when the other kind of people were around. And everything was done first class. It was very interesting. You sort of had a feeling there was an undercurrent all-l-l-l the time, that other things were going on that you didn’t know about and didn’t want to know about, but you’d read about them in the paper tomorrow. There’d be little exchanges at the other end of the table, somebody would step out from the shadows and whisper in somebody else’s ear, and you thought, “Oh, God, somebody was just macheted somewhere!”

  Asked by film historian Tom Weaver if “she got the feeling that Lorre knew more than you did about what was going on,” Jones-Moreland said, “I don’t think so, I don’t think he was part of it. I think he was like a mascot. He was a pet, but not a pet who knew anything!”

  Silverstone said that “Peter was very well liked in Las Vegas, where the syndicate operated. Whenever he would enter one of the places, the doors would open wide. They couldn’t do enough for him.” His gangster fans adopted him as one of their own, extending their protection against threats, real or imagined. “I remember once some people got close to Peter,” continued Silverstone. “Some of the guys in one of the casinos thought they were a little too close and presumptuous. They moved in and blocked these people off, just got rid of them. They were too close. They were threatening their idol.” How did Lorre feel about this endorsement? “That was his reward,” said Catharine Lorre. “He was honored because he had touched that closely.”

  “I guess there was originally a sexual attraction,” said Paul Falkenberg, who had known Peter and Celia since 1931, “but I think it was more of a mother-son relationship in the end. She kept a protective hand over him and saw to it that everything went as smoothly as possible, saw to it that he got married again when they got divorced.” They had lived together—by bureaucratic default —for six years before marrying. Karen and Peter had gone half that distance by 1944 and Celia felt it was high time they legalized their living arrangement. Karen was not oblivious to the legal kinks in her and Peter’s situation. In November she filed for divorce from Arthur Young, now a bandleader with the British armed forces, on grounds that he had failed to support her, and asked for custody of Alastair, who was still in England. Having repeatedly failed to contact Young, Karen filed notice in the Los Angeles Legal Journal. That was not good enough, ruled Superior Judge Robert H. Scott, who “continued the case for three months during which time proper service on the husband must be made.”

  Meanwhile, Celia took steps to clear the way for Peter and Karen. Toward the end of January 1945, she escorted Karen to Las Vegas to satisfy the six-week residency requirement necessary to obtain a divorce in Clark County, Nevada: she from Peter and Karen from Arthur Young. On March 13 Celia filed a complaint alleging that she and Peter had lived “separate and apart from one another without cohabitation for more than three (3) consecutive years.” Lorre didn’t appear before the Eighth Judicial Court. Because his attorney “failed to introduce any evidence in support of the answer,” District Judge George E. Marshall awarded Celia a decree of divorce and $200 weekly in alimony until she remarried or died.

  Karen refiled her own complaint for divorce on the same day, stating that she and Young had not cohabited for more than three years and charging “extreme cruelty without cause therefor, causing plaintiff great and grievous mental suffering and resulting in impairment of plaintiff’s health.” According to Karen, she had begged her husband to let Alastair come over after she had settled in. Cable after cable asking him to send the child in July 1940 went unanswered. Finally came Arthur’s reply: “Alastair must stay here, letter of explanation following.” The letter never arrived. And the boy remained in the custody of the nanny who took him for an afternoon and ended up raising him as her own after both mother and father abandoned him. Payment for his support dribbled in, when it came at all. However she felt about Alastair, in her complaint Karen relinquished her son to the defendant, “who is a fit and proper person to be awarded the care, custody and control of this child,” simply to expedite the divorce.

  On May 16, which also marked the studio’s extension of his one-year option, Peter and Karen announced plans to marry. Taking a page from Bogart’s book, Lorre, who was forty-one, tied the knot with twenty-seven-year-old Verne in a private ceremony on May 25 that was officiated by Judge Marshall. Only minutes before, he had granted Karen’s divorce from Arthur Young, who had failed to answer or make a defense to the plaintiff’s complaint, served on April 23 in London. Friends Paul Mentz and actress Patricia Shay witnessed the wedding. Afterward, Peter and Karen flew back to Hollywood to celebrate with newlyweds Bogart and Bacall. Lorre had become one of Bacall’s biggest supporters. Bogart had told him that he loved Bacall, but confessed that the twenty-five-year difference in their ages bothered him. Lorre had dispelled his doubts: “What’s the difference? It’s better to have five good years than none at all.”

  Lorre put their honeymoon on hold, pending completion of a tour of army camps in northern California. Then in July Peter, Karen, and Celia drove to Big Bear Lake. After all, Celia had brought them to the altar. If not for the first Mrs. Peter Lorre, Karen would very possibly not have become the second Mrs. Peter Lorre. Karen apparently didn’t think the arrangement strange. “Celia didn’t have anyplace to go,” she honestly explained to inquisitive acquaintances. “We had to take care of her.” Celia later returned the favor. For a short time, Peter and Karen lived with his first wife before moving into a rental property on Queen�
��s Road in the Hollywood Hills.

  The newlyweds spent much of their honeymoon in the saddle. Celia was no equestrian, but she was not ignored. Before trotting off on moonlit rides, Peter and Karen arranged for a car to drive her to the planned destination. Peter had earned a reputation as an expert riding instructor. On earlier visits to Palm Spring’s B-Bar-H Ranch, he had crawled out of bed before the birds, told a sleepy Karen he was going for a walk, and reported to the stable. After brushing up his own equine skills, he taught her to sit erect and keep her heels down.

  As a wedding present, Lorre rented a three-acre ranch in Mandeville Canyon, which he and Karen furnished in early American style and populated with a menagerie of goats, cats, a St. Bernard called Bum, a Boston terrier named Happy, a seagull identified as Cornelius S. Gull, and horses. “Peter and Karen had so much fun there,” recalled Naomi Yergin. “They really blossomed into country gentry with the riding.” Galloping off together into the Hollywood Hills became a daily routine.

  On May 24 Lorre starred in the radio broadcast of “An Exercise in Horror: A Peculiar Comedy” for Arch Oboler’s Plays.34 In the opening minutes, he asks Oboler to write him a nice horror story, like the one about the guy who wears his girlfriend’s ear on his key chain. “I’m really very sorry, Mr. Lorre,” replies Oboler. “I’m not going to write a horror play for this series.” Lorre prods him but gets nowhere. “I can’t write any horror plays,” says Oboler, “because some people in recent years have been writing far more potent ones than I can ever do…. Here, Mr. Lorre … is horror such as I could never invent.”

  The first story tells of a benign German family that turns a blind eye to the existence of a nearby concentration camp whose victims’ ashes are canned for use as garden fertilizer. Touring the camp after the war, the father laments to his son that the most terrible thing of all was “that it was not hidden…. It is the duty of Germans to do things to perfection.”