The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  On another occasion, the cast was assembled for a dining room scene. The camera rolled, and the players began their lines. King said that when she turned to talk to Lorre, he “would have a piece of celery or a carrot in his ear or up his nose. Well, we got the giggles.” During another take, he told those gathered around the table he didn’t feel well. Suddenly, he pitched forward and made a retching noise, prompting King to scream and cover her face.

  Not everyone found his shenanigans amusing. When Lorre had acted up on Hotel Berlin, the dignified Raymond Massey had chastised, “After all, Peter, you’re supposed to be an actor. You are an actor, unfortunately. But God didn’t give you any talent for this sort of behavior, so stop it, please.” If he had stopped then, he did not now.36

  Victor Francen, who played the part of the pianist, was suffering from a bronchial condition. When he had had enough of Lorre’s pranks, he simply got up and left. “This is just impossible,” grumbled Florey, who also walked off the set and canceled production for the rest of the day.

  Lorre was also up to old tricks. Some called it “bits of business.” John Carradine, who remembered Lorre mugging for the camera when they worked together on I’ll Give a Million, called it scene-stealing: “The director [Walter Lang] would tell him to save it for the close-up. Of course, there would be no close-up.” Whatever you called it, green actors had to stay on their toes. “I think it is common knowledge that he was a tremendous scene-stealer,” said actor Robert Alda, who costarred in The Beast with Five Fingers,

  and that you had to be prepared for this all the time. You were able to study some of the pictures that he had done before and see some of the little tricks that he did. A lot of times, you might be doing a scene with an actor and he turns his back on you and you think, well, he is out of the scene. Not Peter. He would turn his back on you and his hands would be going behind his back, and he would have things to do with his back pocket, or that famous trick of his of unleashing his collar from the front, or those hands were giving themselves a self-manicure, or anything to keep the camera’s eye on him.

  Lorre had made it especially interesting for friend and co-worker Broderick Crawford, whom he had met through Bogie. “One night in Chasens we started making faces at each other for the fun of it,” said Crawford, “because he was known as ‘the little monster’—because of the picture M—and he called me ‘the big monster’—because I did ‘Of Mice and Men’ in New York. So every time we’d see each other we’d make the worst faces we possibly could at each other and it became kind of a gag around town that we were trying to scare each other.” Crawford regarded the actor as “one of the greatest scene-stealers in the business. He’d light a cigarette in rehearsal and then you’d wait for him to light a cigarette when you got into the take, [but] he wouldn’t light the cigarette, which threw your timing off. These are little tricks that actors have and do to each other. The actor doesn’t resent it, and when he says, ‘You bastard, don’t do that to me again,’ he’s laughing, because Peter trapped him. And the next time you make sure Peter doesn’t trap you, that’s all.”

  During the fourth and final week of shooting, Lorre took more interest in his work, greatly facilitating Florey’s job. “I think he started out tongue-in-cheek,” said King, “and then he became involved and thought it was a colorful role…. I don’t know whether his sense of humor gave further energy for what he did, but he would just be hilarious, then he would all of a sudden—boing—go into a dramatic scene and play it to the hilt! … His whole being was in it. He didn’t use tricks. It just came from inside him.”

  Florey gave The Beast with Five Fingers as much expressionist style as he dared with lighting and photography, but Lorre, under no such restraint, remained true to the director’s original idea. Any number of his screen performances, most notably in M, Crime and Punishment, and Der Verlorene, bear moments of expressionist acting. As Cummins, the crazed librarian who seeks to “rediscover the key to the future known only to the ancient astrologists,” he exteriorizes the emotional “inner rhythm” of his character, nearly sending his repertoire of familiar mannerisms over the edge. He furrows his brow and bulges his globular eyes. His broad hands knead his face, distorting its features. No longer able to distinguish between imagination and reality, Cummins moves in a “sleepy delirium, like a somnambulist.” Lorre avoided the jerky, robotlike movements of early German expressionist actors and smoothly synthesized his role, reducing thought and action into a single word or gesture.

  Florey dressed Lorre in dark clothing, contrasting his white face, front-lit from below, with his black body, as he had done in The Face behind the Mask. Eerily luminescent, Lorre’s face hangs in space, severed from rational sensibility. Visually italicizing Cummins’s mental deterioration, Florey, like Karl Freund in Mad Love (1935), vertically divided the actor’s face with light and shadow, symbolizing his split psyche. Caressing the hand arouses conflicting passions of pleasure and revulsion, each read on his mobile visage. One moment it is tender, the next terrible. With insanity grown to homicidal mania, Lorre pumps panic into full-blown hysteria. He purrs and pants, rants and raves, reaching a crescendo of guttural cries when the hand crawls to his neck, strangles him, and vanishes.

  Between its completion in January 1946 and its premiere in December, The Beast with Five Fingers underwent extensive editing, including the elimination of visual effects that would have drawn the audience into Lorre’s sense of reality. In the original ending, for example, Bruce Conrad (Alda) and Julie Holden (King) discover the charred remains of the hand in the fireplace, indicating that Cummins had imagined the attack. The scene was deleted from the final cut. Critics were divided as to whether Lorre had turned in a forcefully introspective portrayal of grotesque proportions or merely overplayed his hand. “Without any explanation of the switches from straight narration to scenes registered by Lorre’s deranged mind,” observed Variety, his madness lacked a constant point of reference, a sense of perspective.37

  The utter believability of the hand remains one of the film’s strongest assets. In his short story, Harvey described the living hand as “moving quickly in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crablike motion to the whole.” The studio’s special-effects department did justice to Harvey’s macabre conception. For long shots, a mechanical hand, mounted on two small wheels, wound its way across the set like a toy train. Its fingers humped up and flattened out, scuttling along a tier of books, wriggling in agony. In close-ups at the piano, the hand was that of pianist Erwin Nyiregyhazi, who was otherwise covered in black velvet. In another scene, the hand belonged to Florey, who pushed open the cover of a box on a desk and moved his fingers threateningly. Still another hand was made out of wax and wood.

  Florey all but disowned the release cut of The Beast with Five Fingers, which the studio advertised as “THE MOST TERRIFYING ADVENTURE EVER HURLED FROM THE SCREEN.” Indeed, the director left Warner Bros. after the project was completed. He advised friends not to see it, and in their own way, critics said the same thing. They called the picture “grisly,” “repulsive,” “tasteless,” “bloodcurdling,” “for strong stomachs only,” “gruesome and horrible,” “for the ghoulish trade, a must,” and a “cinematic nightmare.” Time concluded that “Director Robert Florey, plainly untroubled by considerations of taste, concentrated on peddling gooseflesh to cinemagoers who dote on being frightened.” Ironically, The Beast with Five Fingers did better business than expected, perhaps because it had no competition in the horror market. Although the picture turned out to be the requiem for the horror genre, which had been supplanted by another Hollywood perennial, the science fiction movie, it is regarded as a “classic,” wrote Florey biographer Brian Taves, “innovative and influential in its day and still effective and successful with modern audiences.”

  Lorre’s screen persona had also become obsolete. In May 1946 his contract came up for renewal. Although it had t
wo more years to run, Lorre sensed the studio would not exercise his option. He had proved himself readily recyclable in film noir after ending his time at Warner Bros. on loan to Nero Films for The Chase (1946) and Universal for Black Angel (1946), both based on Cornell Woolrich novels. Nonetheless, with the end of the war films and the eclipse of the Lorre-Greenstreet team, he felt his stature shrinking.38

  “There has not been a script written bad enough to cause me to take a suspension,” Lorre told a friend. “As long as they pay me, and well, I’ll be anything they want me to be, a Martian, a cannibal, a monster, a king, even Bugs Bunny. I don’t give a damn.”

  Jack Warner had called his bluff.

  Sinister currents at Warner Bros. indicated that something stronger than suspension was in the air, something equally shadowy but far more pernicious. Lorre believed the political insinuations attendant upon his friendship with Bertolt Brecht had further alienated him from the Front Office. Those who knew the dangers inherent in associating with a supposed Communist never doubted Lorre’s suspicions that Jack Warner—a friendly witness who, in May 1947 would name names in a preliminary hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating alleged subversive influence in motion pictures—had graylisted him, in effect putting a safe distance between the actor and Warner Bros. By “mutual agreement,” Lorre and Warner Bros. agreed to “release and discharge each other” on May 13.39

  The actor later joked that he had spent several years of hard labor at the studio. Metaphors of prison life, of a sort of chain-gang existence, haunt the memories of those who worked at Warner Bros. “We were all rather unhappy there,” recalled contract player Geraldine Fitzgerald. “The way the studio was run was very confining. For example, writers couldn’t come on set unless they had permission from the Front Office. The whole atmosphere was restrictive and prison-like. We all felt this since we were under really iron-clad contracts. Warner Bros. had a lot of talented people there. We clung together to make our lives interesting. The camaraderie on the Warner Bros. lot was remarkably strong, but the reason for it was not such a good reason.”

  Sentenced—as he liked to believe—to a maximum term of character work, Lorre squeezed through the prison bars, under cover—ironically—of the movie camera. He milked his parts, feeding audiences fragments of self-expression. For all the artful dodges, however, Lorre sensed his was a sealed fate. “For the rest of his career he would remain a character actor,” said Florey, “a fact he deplored more than once. He told me that if he had been a foot taller he might have become a leading man, but with his globulous eyes, his short legs, his soft hands and his gnomic appearance, he had to be satisfied in sharing his lot with ‘Old Man’ Greenstreet. Realizing the hopelessness of his ‘leading man dream,’ he had become a philosopher hiding his melancholy behind a disabused grin.”

  What lingered in Lorre’s nostalgia-softened, anecdotal memory of his years at Warner Bros. were the pranks, camaraderie, and home-away-from-home life. Among the selected high points was not, but perhaps should have been, a time of steady, lucrative work. For an artist of Lorre’s stature, if not of his ability, Warner Bros. presented a workable compromise. He most often went his own way—within obvious limitations—rising above the constraints of his typecast and giving more. “Any director who was striving to get him to do anything else than be just what he was,” said Harper Goff, “was wasting his time.” That Lorre played the game on both the studio’s terms and his own was as much a testimonial of his ability to serve two masters as of his inability to commit to celebrity or to himself. Only being kicked out of the nest enforced some kind of decision.

  6

  INSIDER AS OUTSIDER

  I’m here, free as the wind, fountain of extraordinary knowledge, splendidly corrupt, and eager to be of profitable service.

  —Peter Lorre

  An actor is the meanest, most contemptible sort of creature alive. So debased that he throws away his own self, his own individuality, and takes on the personality someone else wants him to be—for what?—for money, or maybe for fame.

  —Peter Lorre

  By all appearances, Lorre had gone Hollywood at Warner Bros. With pal Humphrey Bogart, he frequented popular watering holes—Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, the Villanova—and steamed the alcohol out of his pores at Finlandia Baths. He pulled pranks and practical jokes and cracked wise. He spent more than he made, even tapping Bogart for loans both knew he would never pay back, and romanced a woman fourteen years his junior. He made fifteen films in six years, playing sinister villains, insidious foreign agents, a disenchanted scientist, an obsequious writer of detective yarns, a volatile plastic surgeon, a contemplative barfly, an artist about town, a homicidal librarian, and on several occasions, a true-blue patriot. He had made the team.

  In the shadow of the movie marquee, however, stood another Peter Lorre, one whose Hollywood lifestyle gave no hint of a secret existence as hard to believe as some of his screen roles. Behind the scenes, the stage was set for a collaboration that would have turned his career inside out. Even as he had trundled between RKO and Columbia, he looked to more substantial roles. In late 1940 screenwriter Jo Swelling (Pennies from Heaven, Made for Each Other, The Westerner) had broached the idea of adapting émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Der falsche Nero (The False Nero, 1936) “as a play and at the same time as a vehicle for me.”1 Lorre had his sights on the role of a corpulent red-headed potter named Terrence, whose resemblance to the slain Nero sets the bloody stage for his impersonation of the late emperor. Anxious to move forward, he dashed off a short letter to Feuchtwanger in January 1941, asking when he would return to Los Angeles. If not in the “foreseeable future,” perhaps they could correspond. Failing that, he proposed coming to New York between film assignments. Despite Lorre’s enthusiasm, his efforts progressed no further. What he most wanted to make public—his aptitude for artistically worthy roles—seemed destined to remain private.

  On July 21, 1941, two days after Lorre completed work on The Maltese Falcon, Bertolt Brecht sailed into San Pedro, California, with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel; their two children, Stefan and Barbara; and his collaboratormistress-agent Ruth Berlau. Having fled Berlin one day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, he had hugged the German border with a mind to making a quick return when the Nazi regime collapsed: “Don’t go too far away. In five years we shall be back.” Hitler’s advance, however, forced Brecht’s retreat through Prague, Vienna, Zurich, and Paris. In December 1933 he took shelter in Denmark. As the Reich grew and free Europe—“this moribund continent”—shrank, Brecht began to fear for his safety. Clearly, he could not remain “perched on one of these little islands at a time when the slaughter seems to be on the point of breaking loose.” Stripped of his German citizenship and facing possible deportation, he applied for American quota immigration visas for himself and his family in March 1939. In April Brecht moved to Sweden. While he was there, he received an invitation to join the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, putting him a giant step closer to securing an entry permit to the United States. On April 9, 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark resisted for two hours, Norway for two months. Brecht sailed for Finland. Painted into a tiny corner of the globe, he waited until May 3, 1941, for an immigrant quota visa number, then traveled across Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad and boarded a Swedish ship bound for America from Vladivostok on June 14.

  Even given his limited access to the grapevine of émigré news, Lorre likely knew of Brecht’s flight and his pressing need for money, sponsors, and an affidavit of support.2 Just how helpful he was is difficult to say, although Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht’s friend and collaborator, had no doubts. “Lorre has made it big in Hollywood and in the press,” she had confided to Walter Benjamin in fall of 1934, adding that her “faith that anyone would make the slightest move to help is totally gone. I don’t even muster the courage to write to him, although he owes me money.”

  Martha Feu
chtwanger and refugee actor Alexander Granach met Brecht’s party at the pier. Lorre’s absence underscored the privacy in which he held their relationship. For reasons more personal than political—or financial—he divided past and present, keeping silent on what would become the darker half of a double existence during Brecht’s exile in America. Of all the dichotomies, or as Brecht would have it, dialectics, that encapsulated their friendship, the most striking was that his arrival as an unknown with no audience for his plays coincided with Lorre’s greatest commercial success.

  The next day Brecht visited his old friend and collaborator Lion Feuchtwanger, who advised him to stay in California “where it is cheaper than in NY, and where there are more opportunities for earning.” Touted as “the New Weimar,” Los Angeles housed not only a community of literary émigrés in whose company Brecht might feel contentiously comfortable, but also theater and film people like Lorre, Fritz Lang, William Dieterle, Fritz Kortner, Alexander Granach, and Salka and Berthold Viertel, all close friends who had cultivated ties with the film industry.

  The Brechts (minus Ruth Berlau, who took up lodgings nearby) moved into a small furnished apartment on Argyle Avenue in Hollywood near Columbia and Paramount Pictures, just minutes by car from Lorre’s home on Poinsettia Place. One month later they relocated to a modest two-story frame house in Santa Monica. There the family lived in near poverty on an income of $120 per month provided by the European Film Fund, to which refugee film workers—including Peter and Celia—pledged 1 percent of their income. To make ends meet, Weigel shopped for clothes and furniture at the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. Brecht quickly converted his cramped bedroom into a study equipped with only a few books, a typewriter, and a map charting Hitler’s advance in “lobster-red.”