The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  In Hollywood terms, Brecht had an image problem. From the first moment, he cast himself as an outsider who had been sentenced to “involuntary exile.” He was a man on the run, and America was only a stopover. Not surprisingly, he made an ungracious guest who deprecated popularity by being unpopular. From his haircut, which “looked like a treatment for lice or an attempt to humiliate him,” to the tips of his smelly toes, which suffered from a chronic foot condition, Brecht advertised his nonconformity. His crumpled shirts, whiskered face (he made it a point not to shave in expectation of meeting prominent movie people), old weather-beaten jacket, and visor cap—true proletariat apparel—singled him out as one of the worker class. The stench of his cheap cigars told people he had arrived, even before he did.3 “He hadn’t many teeth,” remembered actress Elsa Lanchester, whose husband Charles Laughton became one of Brecht’s closest friends and collaborators, “and his mouth opened in a complete circle, so you’d see one or two little tombstones sticking out of this black hole. A very unpleasant sight.” He once turned up at a party in his honor, only to be turned away by an unknowing porter.

  In the 1920s Brecht had imagined America as a never-never land—vibrant, dynamic, exotic—far removed from the constipated mediocrity of the German intelligentsia. But his studies in Marxism, followed by the Great Depression, tempered his romantic notions about “The New Atlantis.” Nothing, it seemed, measured up to his expectations. He abhorred fast food (“One doesn’t eat such things in Augsburg”) and pronounced the bread tasteless and spongy, the fruit tasteless and odorless, and the air just plain tasteless. Although he had “no feeling for nature,” according to Ruth Berlau, Brecht liked greenery. All the more reason to hate the desert heat and the artificial landscape, which, like a mirage, would fade away if the water bills went unpaid. Scenic seascape vistas bored him. He preferred instead the waterfront slums and storehouses of Los Angeles harbor. The same Brecht who later packaged urgent requests to find him a car—preferably another Steyr—in love notes to Ruth Berlau disparaged America’s automobile-oriented society, in which “houses are extensions of garages.” Americans, he judged, lived a synthetic, transient existence “from nowhere and are nowhere bound.” In a setting so repulsive, yet so seductive, where “a universally depraving, cheap prettiness prevents people from living in a halfway cultivated fashion, ie [sic] living with dignity,” Brecht quickly came down with a severe case of culture shock.

  “Almost nowhere has my life ever been harder,” he wrote, “than here in this mausoleum of easy going.” From his letters and work journal emerge a portrait of a man suffering a sense of intellectual isolation. Contact with refugee artists and intellectuals at dinner, garden, and house parties only served to feed his sense of separation. Instead of filling his plate with content, they heaped it with contention. “Enmities thrive here like oranges,” Brecht wrote a friend shortly after arriving in America, “and are just as seedless. The Jews accuse one another of anti-Semitism, the Aryan Germans accuse one another of Germanophilia.” In his journal, he named names, describing how Bruno Frank jumped to his feet and shouted, “I will not permit the president to be criticised here.” Oskar Homolka threw him out. Kortner caught Fritz Lang making an anti-Semitic remark, then split the émigré community along unemployment lines by accusing those who earn well of “talking with their pay-checks in their mouths.” In a postscript to the proceedings, Brecht briefly noted, “[Rolf] Nürnberg hates Lorre etc.”

  Lorre’s friends painted a picture of a lost soul turning up on the actor’s doorstep with armfuls of books and manuscripts, searching for emotional equilibrium. “They would talk for hours,” observed Irving Yergin, “not about the industry or pictures, but about Nazi Germany, actors that had stayed, world conditions, Brecht’s own writings, etc.” Their conversation often stretched into the early morning hours. Some even thought Brecht lived with Peter and Karen from time to time. More likely, he just slept over rather than violate the 8:00 p.m. curfew on “enemy aliens.”

  During his first few months in America, Brecht produced little other than vitriolic comments about Los Angeles, a kind of hell, which “stink[s] of greed and poverty.” Ruth Berlau confirms that “he was able during the whole of 1941 to write hardly anything of serious concern to him.” All the more reason to make some quick money with an English-language production of Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), a dark comedy written in 1939 that cast Hitler as a Bronx-born gangster. Thinking it could be staged swiftly, Brecht approached Lorre, Oskar Homolka, and other actors he had worked with in Germany. “That, unfortunately, was wrong,” wrote Berlau. “Nobody in America was interested in the play, and it was neither staged nor filmed.”

  However intellectually “out of the world” he felt in Los Angeles, Brecht was not socially insulated. Between Sunday evening Kindergarten at the Brechts and Salka Viertel’s soirees, he networked, in a contemporary sense, with an important cross section of Hollywood’s literati. In addition to renewing old acquaintances, he made professional contacts in the film world, names like Ben Hecht, Clifford Odets, Arch Oboler, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Lewis Milestone, John Huston, Groucho Marx, and Charles Chaplin. By fall, Brecht had shaken his lassitude and gotten down to the business of earning a living. His “first priority,” wrote Berlau, was to collect some dollars, something he thought he could do writing for films; if fifty-nine other refugee German screenwriters could do it, so could he. At the same time, the medium would provide “a platform for his political as well as for his artistic views.”

  During his American exile, Brecht wrote stories, sketches, outlines, and notes for more than fifty films, most of which, says James Lyon, author of Bertolt Brecht in America, he tried to peddle in Hollywood. From an article about a model Ohio farm family put on display in a living diorama of daily life, Brecht developed a film treatment that included a household dispute, shattered furniture, and divorce papers—in short, the breakup of “all-American domestic bliss.” In October 1941 he told Hollywood screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher of his plans for The Bread King, about the “production, distribution and enjoyment of bread.” From this idea, they developed a fifteen-page story outline in a couple of hours.4 Four days later, Brecht related the story to MGM assistant producer Gottfried Reinhardt, the son of theatrical producer-director Max Reinhardt. In his December 17 journal entry, he also indicated progress on other film stories: Days of Fire for Charles Boyer with Fritz Kortner, a film farce called Bermuda Troubles with Metro screenwriter Robert Thoeren, The Snowman with Ruth Berlau. After listening to the plot of his Caesar’s Last Days in spring of 1942, director William Dieterle, under contract to MGM, encouraged Brecht to write an outline, although there was no chance of bringing it to the screen. “The industry isn’t making costume films,” Dieterle told Brecht. According to a June 1, 1942, entry in his journal, Metro even expressed interest in filming The Threepenny Opera. Later that week, at a luncheon hosted by Fritz Lang and attended by Clifford Odets and Hanns Eisler, Brecht also discussed a film version of The Private Life of the Master Race, the American title of Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich).

  Brecht had taken his “place among the sellers” and found it a dirty, degrading business. With one exception, he sold no stories and wrote no screenplays. The struggling scriptwriter must have felt that he had buttonholed nearly every influential person in Hollywood into listening to his story lines. One can imagine them politely lending an ear and between yawns rolling their eyes in wonderment at his blindness to commercial reality. For all his success, or lack of it, he might just as well have sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door.5

  While in Denmark, Brecht had applied unsuccessfully for an American immigration quota visa. From 1938 he had tried a new tack, putting out overtures to screen and stage celebrities in the hope that getting an American production of one of his works would open, if not the golden door to opportunity, then at least a back entrance to asylum. Ferdinand Reyher, who in 193
9 had lobbied intensely, but without success, for an American production of The Private Life of the Master Race “on the main hope for the play, the hope that we can make it the reason to get you in America ahead of your quota number,” wrote Brecht that “with few exceptions it doesn’t do much good to work through actors in this country” and recommended he “tackle” producers instead.

  When that door closed on him, Brecht thought better of taking an actor’s celebrity to the bank. As featured or supporting player, Peter Lorre was a star whom “almost every American knows.” While Brecht had crossed countless borders, Lorre had paid his dues as a freelance actor, climbing steadily toward his commercial pinnacle at Warner Bros. If the writer could not interest producers in his scenarios, perhaps he might secure a foothold in the movie business through the aid of a friend like Lorre, who had made a name for himself.

  Brecht believed that Lorre needed a suitable vehicle as much as he needed a well-placed contact to champion his cause. Sometime during his first year in America, he and Berlau collaborated on The Grass Must Not Grow over It, the first of eight known film stories written for Lorre—and one of almost a dozen for which no manuscript copy exists.

  In Rich Man’s Friend, which he had developed in fall 1941, Brecht stylized Lorre’s story of how he had first come to London and enjoyed the hospitality of Freddy (Sidney Bernstein). Although L. (Lorre) at one time owned ten suits made by Berlin’s best tailors, he now has only two, one aged beyond repair, the other a dress coat with a hump sewn in it, the legacy of his role as a “devilish hunchback.”

  Before he gained lodging in Berkeley Square, L. lived in Green Cottage with Maisie (Celia Lovsky), who “treated him from the very beginning as a great actor, which he indeed is.” L. tries to make the boarders understand how poor he is and shows them a pair of shoes, but “they only clap like those possessed: wonderful how he simply puts something like that forth and pretends.” At a wrestling match, L. hatches the idea of working up a theater act based on the choreographed infliction of pain—a dig at Stanislavski?—by the combatants. But it comes to nothing.

  Freddy arranges to introduce the actor to a Hollywood producer at a great dinner. When he misses his ride, L. decides to go by foot. It begins to rain. Arriving at the Savoy, he is not well dressed enough to enter; “He turns around and there it happens.”

  L. sees a ghostly procession of sandwich men coming toward him in the fog. Their boards advertise M. On long poles swing giant heads: it is L’s. The rain increases. When the sandwich men rest their poles against the wall of an underground station, he captures one and runs away with it. Carrying his own head, the small man in rags runs into the great producer, who is on his way to the train. “In this way,” finishes Brecht, “L. became engaged in Hollywood.”

  The war years caught Brecht in a didactic mood. Rich Man’s Friend is a Lehrstück with a personal touch. Ostensibly for public consumption, it taught Lorre a private lesson in Verfremdung (distanciation), of looking at his own past in a new light and seeing himself in the present, forever crossing the shadowy line between illusion and reality, guilty still of marketing his screen fame to the highest bidder. Weaving Lorre’s reminiscences into a comical film story probably sounded like a good idea at the time. Besides planting the incentive, even the obligation, for the actor to get behind the project, it brought him into the creative fold. Between lip and leaf, however, it lost something, or so Brecht apparently thought, judging by his disclaimer that Lorre “doesn’t tell a story in a very stringent manner, rather he strays and loses himself in details, episodes.” Whether Lorre garbled the tale in the telling or Brecht in the recounting hardly mattered. The surreal jumble so departed the Hollywood norm that Lorre most likely showed it to no one. For whatever reason—and there are many—it didn’t sell.

  What Lorre could have done to help Brecht is unclear. He had no friends at the Front Office—declining to sign an exclusive contract had alienated Jack Warner, who returned the actor’s antipathy—and enjoyed only a casual acquaintance with several writers at the studio.

  Rejection of his work, indeed his mission to “effect change,” invited Brecht’s open contempt of Hollywood. When it fired on him, he answered back with all his senses. In his journal, letters, and poems, he excoriated the “dream factories of Hollywood,” which “are filled with the oily smell of films.” Here buyers and sellers operate a “market where lies are bought.”

  “The very centre of world drug-trafficking” intoxicated audiences, reproached Brecht, dulling their senses and clouding their thinking with suspense, shocks, and surprises, sentimental devices he deprecated as “laxatives of the soul.” Into this “cesspool” he cast the screenwriters, whose “spiritual mutilation,” he said, “makes me ill. It is scarcely possible to stand being in the same room with these spiritual cripples and moral invalids.” Even the actors belonged to “a cult of types which has almost nothing to do with art.”

  “Life in the most advanced capitalist country of the world,” wrote Lyon, “contained enough new experiences to transform culture shock into mordant social criticism.” Cold, sharp, contentious, intransigent, refractory, dogmatic, and irreverent are just a few of the words used to describe Bertolt Brecht in America. No doubt he would have enjoyed the obdurate impression these words and images forged of his steel-hard resolution to divorce emotion from intellect. Cutting himself off from his own feelings, he cast a rational eye on human relationships, subordinating the individual to the idea; he judged people good and evil, issues black and white.

  In her politically partisan reminiscences, Living for Brecht, skillfully woven into an autobiographical narrative by Hans Bunge, Ruth Berlau furnished “Brecht’s Everyday Vocabulary: A Small Dictionary,” tabulating his likes and dislikes. One learns that he praised people who were normal, kind, useful, helpful, gifted, amusing, and genuine. In the theater he asked for contradiction. Why? why? and again and again: why? He enjoyed new potatoes, carp, dumplings, horseradish, and cheese, and on the beverage side lemon juice (“never, on any account, water”). He liked old clocks and fine pipes and needed tables, typing paper, pupils, gifted actors, discussions, detective stories, and to be left in peace. Though Lorre scored well in the “Words of Praise” and “What he Needed” categories, he fell short in “Words of Condemnation”: America had corrupted him; he had sold out to Hollywood and his weaker instincts; he had exploited his own acting tricks instead of putting his talent to use; his performances were nondialectical; he was non-Marxist.

  Happily for Lorre, there was more to Brecht than Berlau’s inventory of likes and dislikes. His “tough-guy” image accounts for only one-half of the “contradiction between conflicting forces and ideas [which] taken together in their ‘synthesis,’ comprehend the essence of what is true.” His lesser-known—at least to most—tender side provided the other half of the dialectical equation. Like Lorre, Brecht wasn’t who he pretended to be, but rather, in Martin Esslin’s words, “a person basically tender, driven to suppress his emotion, to appear hard and rational.”

  The dialectical gears in Brecht’s mythmaking machine afforded him “the luxury of contradicting himself and everyone else within a consistent framework.” After all, his rigid standards were just that, something to go by, not necessarily to live by. On the wide inviting avenue of logistical loopholes—and not a few potholes—Lorre walked back into Brecht’s life.

  Most of the writer’s friends met certain qualifications: “political compatibility … usefulness in making a name or getting a production, availability to collaborate, and willingness to be a disciple.” All except Lorre. Where he fell short, Brecht either looked the other way or propped him up. “If he saw people as being artistically useful in any number of ways,” observed Rhoda Riker, a philosophy major at UCLA drawn into the Brecht circle by classmate and boyfriend Stefan Brecht, “Brecht could excuse a lot of other things about them.” Lorre had a lot to answer for. To Brecht’s mind—and Lorre wouldn’t have disputed him—he was weak. Dr. Ralph G
reenson agreed with both of them that “Peter was undisciplined and didn’t always apply himself.” While Brecht wore exile like a badge, Lorre submerged his foreignness—except on screen—sacrificing his true identity, including his accent, to the integration process.

  One day Lorre and screenwriter Walter Reisch, whom the actor had known in Vienna, sat next to each other on barber chairs at a fashion shop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Reisch invited Lorre to come to his new house, which, he said, had “a certain European flavor.” Lorre accepted the invitation and thanked him. After leaving, Reisch found him waiting for him outside, his face pale.

  Peter said, “I meant to tell you something, which I didn’t want to say in front of the others. I don’t want to come to your parties.” I said, “Why not?” And now he said something which is absolutely the one and only time that I ever heard of such a thing:

  “I am doing my darndest right now to improve my accent and to play not only parts as a foreigner, but parts in which the accent doesn’t appear, or isn’t noticed. And if I come to your parties, all of these guys will be there, like Lubitsch and Negulesco and Milestone and Billy Wilder and Garbo and Ingrid Bergman. And you, Walter, you speak with a terrible accent. I am working nightly six hours to get that foreign nuance out of my vernacular, out of my language. And when I am there at your parties everybody will speak with an accent or in the old language. I cannot afford it.”

  And you know what, he never came to a party of mine, in my house. And I never invited him again. It didn’t hurt really, I understood what he meant, but I thought it was ridiculous, because I don’t think that with his face and the parts he played the accent mattered. To the very contrary, the accent was part of his chemistry. It was part of his mystery. But, in all honesty, I must say that he absolutely cut me down. It was like ack, ack, ack, shrapnel, and I was shot down by him and in a way it was the last time that we really had contact with each other.