The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  The surface signs of Lorre’s Americanization must have also puzzled Brecht. At his ranch home in Mandeville Canyon, Lorre lived out a kind of frontier fantasy. He rode Western, not English, and outfitted himself in tooled belts, silver buckles, piped pockets, and stitched boots. He especially liked cowboy hats—each distinctively creased by its owner, he pointed out—which he collected from local wranglers. At least Brecht, who used and abused the colorful slang and idioms of colloquial English, could more easily identify with his friend’s love of the vernacular. Lorre spoke hip talk fluently. At Las Vegas, where audiences often matched wits with comedians, heckling a young comic called Milton Berle was good sport. One night Lorre sat quietly with Burl Ives, ready to enjoy the show. However, when he spotted Groucho Marx sneaking in the back, he loudly exhorted, “Cream him, daddio!”

  “Peter immersed himself in things American, or rather western,” said actor Tony Martin, “especially slang. His jargon was right up to date, right in with everybody, always right today, like ‘Hello, pop,’ or ‘What are we doing after work? Let’s have a couple of boozes and maybe we’ll get a couple of girlies.’ He was opposite of what he was on screen. Real hip.”

  Like most émigrés, Brecht was impoverished, unrecognized, and, according to Ruth Berlau, very lonely. Lorre was none of these. Unlike Fritz Kortner, whom Brecht praised for his “ability to resist assimilation,” Lorre worked hard to be an insider and to enjoy the fruits of his labor. In Brecht’s stringent view, his friend had sunk into the “glamorous swamp” of Hollywood up to his neck. Writing to Ferdinand Reyher, he observed that “Just like [Charles] Laughton, Lorre is living in shamefaced poverty with four horses and several Japanese gardeners in a $50,000 villa.” Far from enduring a slavery forged of golden chains, however, the actor actually lived less extravagantly than most film notables of his stature. Perhaps it was just that Brecht found it harder to understand excess in one who should have known better. Lorre rented, never owned, and in that way was more transient than Brecht. Until he moved into his ranch house in Mandeville Canyon around 1945, he lived rather modestly indeed. Even then he employed no servants.

  When Brecht looked out his window, he witnessed poverty and inequality. Lorre saw only Joshua trees. His political résumé was painfully thin. Andrew Lorre described his brother as a “salon socialist.” Like most actors, he readily fell in behind Roosevelt and remained a Democrat thereafter, although he might change sides at a moment’s notice just to stir the political pot. “Peter was not a Communist,” said director John Huston. “He would have been a Communist if he found himself in the presence of Orange County Republicans. He would have been a Communist at the dinner table with [President Richard] Nixon. He would have chosen to be. On the other hand, he would have been a die-hard Republican among black militants. Peter loved to shock people for fun.” A sign, Brecht believed, of a healthy intellect.

  Eric Bentley reported that

  the circle who would gather at the Brecht home at Santa Monica on Sunday evenings was, of course, very German. Brecht didn’t make a lot of contact with real American Americans. It was also very left wing, very much in a Communist clique of German refugees or people sympathetic to that. I remember I didn’t know whether Lorre had anything to do with that kind of politics and in fact I never really found out in any direct way, but I recall that once there was some vigorous political discussion in German going on there with the German word for communism occurring a lot. And Lorre came in as this was happening, into this flood of dialogue. I remember him standing in the doorway and there’s this little stop for him to come in and he was saying, “Ah, der Kommunismus, Kommunismus,” communism. He picked up this word and grinned about it. I couldn’t tell just from what point of view the grin was, whether it was from someone antagonistic or someone friendly, or what, but in some humorous way he teased them for being on that topic. In the further discussions he tended not to tangle.

  Although Brecht never joined the Communist party, one knew where his sympathies lay. In émigré circles, he enjoyed the reputation of an “ardent fellow traveler” who “was unfriendly to anyone who wasn’t friendly to the Communist party.” Unable to separate art and politics, he had no time for nonpolitical actors or what was to his mind politically incorrect behavior. In 1939 Alexander Granach had appeared—as a Russian comrade—in the Ernst Lubitsch comedy Ninotchka, which satirized the foibles of Communism. “From that time on,” wrote Berlau in her autobiographical reminisce, “Brecht ceased to mention Granach’s name. Previously, when he was writing a film script, Brecht would express the opinion that Granach might play one role or another. But after his political blunder, as far as we were concerned, he was as good as dead.” If “Red” Ruth held the party line, Brecht wavered as it suited his needs. Granach, one of his favorite actors, turned up as a member of the Gestapo in Hangmen Also Die.

  Given the increasing brittleness of Brecht’s political intolerance in the 1950s, one wonders how he would have reacted to Lorre’s reprisal of the role in Silk Stockings (1957), a musical remake of Ninotchka. There is no way of knowing whether their friendship would have weathered the crisis; Brecht died in 1956.

  If Brecht extended a particularly cold shoulder to those who abandoned Marxism, it was probably a good thing Lorre had never embraced it. “He didn’t talk like a Communist,” said Bentley. “He talked more like an independent radical of some sort. I’m not sure he felt any political commitment.” Knowing Lorre as “an angry nonconformist, a dissenter with limited courage,” Brecht never expected too much of him, or got it. Lorre was not among the fifty-six signatories—including Lucille Ball, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, John Ford, Henry Fonda, Edward G. Robinson, Jack L. Warner, and others—of Hollywood’s “Declaration of Democratic Independence” endorsed on December 21, 1938, which, according to Hollywood Now, petitioned the president and Congress to sever all economic connections between the peoples of the United States and Germany “until such time as Germany is willing to re-enter the family of nations in accordance with humane principles of international law and universal freedom.” Nor had he signed the appeal of the Motion Picture Arts Committee to protest the “inhuman bombing of defenseless women and children in the cities of Loyalist Spain.” Two ambulances purchased by the Motion Picture Arts Committee for the Spanish government bore numerous signatures of Hollywood personalities, but not Lorre’s.

  For Brecht, the Peter Lorre with whom he held so many apparent philosophical and ideological differences was only an adulterated version of his old comrade. As M fixed Brecht’s pejorative attitude toward Lorre’s Hollywood career, so their early association conditioned his view of Lorre’s integrity as an actor. They had much to build on. They referenced the present by keeping faith with a past that had witnessed poverty, malnutrition, and the early struggle to establish a new theater; each knew where the other had been and where they might have gone together had Hitler not intervened. Both believed that America had stifled the free expression of their talent; and each knew he was among the few who truly appreciated the other’s gifts.

  Eric Bentley asked Lorre to write something for the jacket of his second Brecht book, Parables for the Theater (1948). After he did, Bentley could

  imagine, reading from Lorre’s original note, that Frau (Elisabeth) Hauptmann sat him down at the desk or table and said, “Now you,” and he tried a few phrases with her, as I see he was first going to write, “Brecht is a great writer … I think Brecht is the great writer …” He crossed that out and put, “Even an actor has a right to an opinion. Brecht is the poet—he chose that word—of our generation and to my mind its greatest writer.”6

  Now at that date nobody was saying that, I can assure you. The only person from the theater or movie world that gave us a thing like this was Peter Lorre. There was one American or English figure out there that was coming around to an opinion like this. That was Charles Laughton, though he dropped it. He no sooner arrived with opinions of this kind than he dropped them under influe
nces from political sources.

  When I got it I was not only pleased, I was surprised how far he went, because although I had been arriving at the same opinion, I had not found people in the German colony to agree. Most of the older generation people didn’t.

  Lorre publicly advertised Brecht as the greatest writer—and director—of his generation. “I knew that he would be one of the great poets of all time, which slowly turns [out] to be the case,” he told interviewer Hy Gardner in 1963. “You don’t really need much foresight to know that twenty years from now it will probably be Joyce and Brecht.”

  “He worshiped Brecht,” said screenwriter Ellis St. Joseph. “When everybody in the world put Brecht down, when Brecht wasn’t wanted, nobody could see any talent whatsoever in Brecht, except for one or two people like Lorre.” Celia Lovsky characterized their relationship in much the same way Ruth Berlau described Brecht’s friendship with Walter Benjamin, as a “comfortable intimacy” where each understood the other without the need of speech. In later years, Lorre’s first wife cast a transcendent glow over their instinctive rapport, remembering, as did Lorre, that Brecht represented the best, unrealized, part of himself. Long before it meant something to have been one of his original ensemble and long after their collaborative ventures had been forgotten, Lorre still considered himself “Bertolt Brecht’s actor” and Brecht “the only great friend he ever had.” By his own admission, he “[did] not love many people or things but love[d] the few intensely.”

  Brecht did not conceive of human relationships in such terms, but in his own way he regarded Lorre just as highly. If he hadn’t been forced to flee Germany and become just another cog in the dream factory, claimed Brecht—always ready to take a poke at Hollywood—Lorre would have realized his unlimited potential. Nonetheless, remembered friend and collaborator Hans Viertel, “Brecht thought Lorre the greatest German actor.” When his name came up at home, he fell on it with an anger born of frustration. Lorre’s typecasting as a heavy infuriated Brecht, who “thought of him primarily,” added Hans Viertel, “as this sort of deft, light, extremely adaptable kind of actor he liked.”

  “In our wonderful days of washing dishes,” recalled Rhoda Riker, “Brecht would stand there and say he’s better than what they give him. He’s a great actor and they are giving him shit.”7 In much the same way that Helene (Weigel) assumed the role of earth mother, taking under her strong wing presumably wayward souls, so Brecht was “a bit possessive about people … and Peter Lorre was one whom he regarded as properly his, but in this period seduced by American capitalism and possibly to be won back.”

  “Brecht was very opinionated and very determined about people that he thought had tremendous talent,” said Riker. “He would just get these damned ideas and would decide about each of us, this is what we ought to do. Sometimes he’d just get damned pushy about it. When he thought he was right, he was pushy.”

  While others—Kurt Weill for his “culinary” opera and Christopher Isherwood for being “bought”—got “chewed down to nothing in a very short time” or “thrown out like old shoes,” Lorre fell into a different category. “Brecht treated him with great gentleness,” said Riker. “He never spoke of him with contempt, and let me tell you I heard a lot of people spoken about with contempt. Lorre wasn’t one of them…. Brecht was always deferential and polite to him. He never put him down in front of other people.”

  The tough Brecht could be brutal, derisive, and insensitive, but his softer side did not exploit other people’s weaknesses, noticeably Lorre’s “sad and inevitable seduction.” He “regarded Hollywood as deadening to a career like Lorre’s,” said Morton Wurtele, a graduate student in physics at UCLA who lived with the Brechts in 1945–46. “Yes, he (Lorre) was corrupted, but … there wasn’t a significant alternative. Brecht could always write what he wanted to write, but an actor can’t do that. There isn’t any alternative for an actor except to go with the tide.” He even allowed that Lorre “was doing very well in Hollywood and therefore should be treated in a certain regard.”

  “For Brecht, criticism was effective and useful,” realized Berlau, “only when it was made in a spirit of real love.” Brecht expressed his feelings for Lorre by tailoring film stories to the actor’s capabilities—as he saw them—with only a gambler’s chance that his efforts would pay off. His actions spoke louder than his words, shoring up Lorre’s sagging self-confidence and rehabilitating his bruised self-image as an actor. For all his care and concern, however, Brecht never forgot that “the aim of criticism should be to aid production.” Intent on weaning Lorre from his own celebrity, Brecht teased him about hanging out with his old cronies. Breezing in with news of the latest card game at Bogie’s only invited ridicule. “Brecht was very tough,” said Riker, and felt “obligated to behave that way and wouldn’t let Peter get by with one single sentence which sounded as though he was being Hollywood…. He cut the turf out from beneath him.”

  Though Riker identified Lorre with the Hollywood crowd rather than the political-intellectual or émigré circles, most often he turned up alone, oftentimes sporting a red flannel shirt. One wonders whether he wore it in order to fit in or to pique the party-liners. From their conversations, Brecht distilled that Lorre, like himself, lived as an outcast. It showed up in his attitude, offscreen in a cynical distrust of the studio star system and on-screen in a kind of whimsical detachment. Acting, it seemed, had become a joke.

  Early one morning, the bleary-eyed actor stumbled into the makeup department and moaned to actress Lee Patrick, who played Effie Perine in The Maltese Falcon, “For a grown man to come in at this hour just to make faces for a few minutes is ridiculous. It’s really very humiliating.”

  “Me act?” Lorre told a reporter, “I just make faces! Really, that’s all I do. I make lots of faces and they pay me for it. The director says: ‘You’re mad. Make like you’re mad.’ So I make like I’m mad. Then pretty soon someone calls out ‘one hour for lunch!’ I follow the others to the commissary and later return to the set. ‘Make like you did before lunch, Peter,’ says the director. ‘Make like you’re mad.’ So I make like I’m mad again and before long someone says ‘wrap ‘em up. That’s all for today.’ So I go home, have dinner, go to bed, get up, report for work again and the director says: ‘Make like you’re mad again, Peter. Make like you did yesterday.’”

  “His whole attitude toward the picture business, toward acting, was very funny,” said director Tay Garnett.

  The other actors used to look at him in wonderment because he always referred to acting as making faces. He’d say, “Well, I’m going down to make some money today. I have to go and make some faces.” He always said that. Had the desire for self-expression been there, Peter would have been the last one to let anyone know it. He would have been very, very careful to hide it. Peter didn’t want anyone to think he took anything seriously. But actually he was a very thoughtful actor [who] gave a great deal of thought to his part, to what his character meant to the overall construction of the story.

  The other side of the sword says that behind the banter hid the hurt of not being taken seriously as an actor. Lorre no longer talked about acting, but kept his thoughts to himself, preferring instead to let people know that, like Brecht, he shrugged off moviemaking as a “business, like any other racket. Either you know your business or you don’t. What is there to get excited over? A good musician doesn’t set up a wail or clamor when confronted with a new scherzo or gavotte. He knuckles down and learns the thing.”

  “I get a kick out of actors who say they can’t do a part because they don’t ‘feel’ it,” said a surprisingly apostatic Lorre. “If I had to ‘feel’ every role I’ve done, I’d have been a stumble-bum years ago.”

  “I felt a kind of cynicism about his career and about life in general,” recalled director Vincent Sherman. “I think he found that instead of being regarded as a very serious actor in this country he was regarded as kind of a freak.”

  Either way, Lorre depreca
ted not his talent, but the waste of it. In the beginning, wrote Paul E. Marcus, Lorre “jokingly referred to himself as a ‘facemaker’ because he never thought of himself as a serious actor in full-length, feature films. That also must have been the secret of his friendship with Bert Brecht.”

  Now he sold gestures to the studio middlemen, who bought them and packaged them into salable commodities. Undoubtedly, Lorre’s Hollywood experience informed Brecht’s harangues about the “commercialisation of art,” where “custom here requires that you try to ‘sell’ everything, from a shrug of the shoulders to an idea … so you are constantly either a buyer or a seller, you sell your piss, as it were, to the urinal.”

  What began as a joke, however, ended with Lorre “play[ing] both a role and its own commentary.” Whether Brecht, who believed that an actor “derives his morality exclusively from his attitude [toward] what he produces as an actor,” heard only what he wanted to hear, or only what Lorre wanted him to know, this kind of talk was music to his ears.

  “Brecht was very much preoccupied,” explained collaborator Hans Viertel, the son of Salka and Berthold Viertel, “with making all the people he knew productive who he thought could make valuable contributions. He thought Lorre something valuable, a national treasure, so to speak, that had to be recovered.” Bentley wondered if he could persuade Lorre to launch English translations of Brecht’s plays in America. “When you heard Lorre’s conversation,” he recalled, “you kept thinking he would come back into serious theater…. His conversation would suggest that would be one of the things he would most like to do.”

  Brecht was determined to wean Lorre from Hollywood. Clearly, the actor was no good to anyone until he was good to himself. What better way to make him productive and useful than to bring him into the creative fold. Many of the writer’s collaborators were bilingual exiles, such as Fritz Kortner and Robert Thoeren, who had established themselves in the film industry. For Brecht, the act of creation was a collective enterprise. He needed an audience to stimulate, entertain, and listen to him. While Helene Weigel prepared hot Gugelhupf and coffee downstairs, Brecht roamed his spacious studio collecting opinions from his guests. Through discussion he clarified his own thoughts. He invited criticism and often gave better than he got. Every word, idea, and impression was grist for his mill. “When he liked it, then he used it, adopted it, and formed it,” said Marta Feuchtwanger, “and then all of a sudden it was his.”