The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Lorre had the advantage of being a willing and intelligent disciple, “bright enough to offer ideas but too weak to give him resistance.” His rigorous intelligence impressed Brecht, like everyone else. Eric Bentley remembered meeting Peter and Karen at the premiere of Galileo, which starred Charles Laughton, at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles on July 30, 1947:

  Lorre was talking very vigorously and somewhat in monologue as he did when he had a favorite subject and was somewhat correcting everything about this American event from the point of the German, who knew much better what Brecht was all about…. He gave the impression of one who with a different spin of fate might have been an intellectual, might have chosen to be an intellectual. I wouldn’t say he was pretentious, it was just that he was rather widely read. And very intelligent. He would speak to the point and he would speak with real eloquence even in a language that wasn’t his own…. I recall being very captivated by his persuasiveness, the cogency of his personality. I was very surprised at how bright he was. I was going around telling everybody he’s really so bright. One doesn’t usually expect that, at least from members of the acting profession. Since I only knew him as a moviegoer and knew the kind of parts he played in Hollywood, I was terribly impressed to find how much he tried to stay in contact intellectually with various things that were going on and how much grasp he had.8

  In his journal, Brecht, who judged people by their thoughts and actions rather than by their feelings, noted, “Talked to LORRE in the evening about v[erfremdung]-effects. He finds that in my productions (he mentions the production of THE MOTHER in Berlin) the manner of the actors’ technique was neglected, except when they could manage it anyway, and he advises me at least to mention the need for technical maturity.”

  Brecht tolerated intelligent dissent from one capable of making a contribution. However willing he was to subordinate himself to genius, Lorre was no yes-man. Andrew Doe, a theater professor at the University of Southern California who tried to interest the actor in staging a student production of Mann ist Mann in the early 1960s, remembers that Lorre “was not enthusiastic about Brecht as a theorist, rather as a great director.” As much as Brecht valued him as a sounding board, Lorre probably played a more important role as an informant. Who better to give him a behind-the-scenes look at the off-set Hollywood. Too ingrained in the system and too addicted to the lifestyle in which it supported him, Lorre gave private vent to what Brecht said publicly in his poems and plays.

  “I think Brecht to Peter was a form of friendship,” said mutual friend Dr. Ralph Greenson, “in which Brecht represented some of Lorre’s idealistic views which he, Peter, was unable to carry out.”

  Their “oppositional stance” stood them on common ground. In one of the most often quoted testimonials to his perennial dissidence, actress Elsa Lanchester remembered: “[Brecht] was anti-everything; so that the moment he became part of a country he was anti-that country…. He wasn’t a bitter man. He was always funny about institutions and authority. He didn’t want to be in power himself. But he was anti-any power, really; I think he was a professional anti-.” Deprecatory of authority, especially the studio bosses, Lorre likewise rattled his cup on the prison bars. Whether or not he mocked the mogul or remembered his own brief and ineffective campaign to reorient Hollywood’s thinking about literary classics, the spirit of his struggle lodged in Brecht’s imagination. As a fellow victim of movie capitalism, Lorre could help him build his case against Hollywood. Mining the vein of collected injustices gave them a firm footing for a new beginning and a common denominator from which to wave the flags of mutual discontent.

  Distancing the actor from Hollywood was the first regimen in a therapeutic course that included nurturing talents unrecognized by the movie capitalists. Brecht encouraged Lorre to recultivate the art of poetry reading and gave him a copy of his Svendborg Poems (1938). Unconfirmed reports even suggest that they collaborated on several poems. Lorre returned the confidence placed in him at a reading of Brecht’s works in New York City on March 6, 1943. Sponsored by Die Tribüne für Freie Deutsche Literatur und Kunst in Amerika in the Studio Theater of the New School for Social Research, the program featured commentary by Wieland Herzfelde, songs by Lotte Lenya, and poetry readings by Lorre and Elisabeth Bergner.9 Like Brecht, who read his own poetry “with dead-pan face, in the totally flat, antirhetorical manner he had intended it,” Lorre stood there “like a piece of wood” and spoke his lines “better than anyone could speak,” very simply and with complete understanding. He undertook the “thankless task of reciting Brecht’s loose, thought-encumbered poems,” wrote Henry Marx in the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold. “One of his oldest co-workers, he interpreted them well, thanks to his excellent sense for the humor and the deeper meaning of the poems, and by avoiding, above all, pathos.” Brecht apparently agreed, judging by his comment that both Lorre and Bergner “have forgotten nothing, their techniques have remained completely fresh.” After an afternoon reading, he told Morton Wurtele he regarded Lorre “as the finest reader of German poetry alive.”

  Serving two masters was nothing new for Lorre. In 1931 he had worked by day for Fritz Lang in M and by night for Bertolt Brecht in Mann ist Mann. Twelve years later he rendered purrs and guttural bursts over the radio and delivered ironic understatement to Brecht. Little wonder he believed he could bridge the extremes of his acting career.

  The press didn’t pick up on Lorre’s cutaway to New York, or its symbolic import, which was just as well, given the prudence of low-profiling his association with leftist literary figures. Nonetheless, 1943 represented a high-water mark in the American chapter of Brecht and Lorre’s relationship; common need, it seemed, had bred mutual commitment. Brecht wrote one play and two film stories expressly for Lorre within this twelve-month period.

  In 1942 Brecht had dusted off plans for a stage version of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, which he accorded a prominent place in twentiethcentury world literature. No one, argued Brecht scholar Herbert Knust, influenced the dramatist’s writing as much as that indestructible little man; “in many of his great figures one finds Schweykish attitude, Schweykish dialectics and Schweykish tone.” Brecht had kept company with Schweyk since 1927, when he had worked—along with left-wing stage director Erwin Piscator, writer Felix Gasbarra, and artist George Grosz—on the script for a stage version performed at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin. Though unfaithful to the spirit of the book, the enormously successful production catapulted German comedian Max Pallenberg, who played Schweyk as “a sly batman and, in some scenes, an idiot,” into an independent tour of the provinces.

  The prospect of collaborating with Piscator on both stage and film versions kept Schweyk simmering on Brecht’s back burner during the 1930s. En route to England in November 1935, Lorre had stopped off in New York long enough to confer with Piscator and writer Albert Bein about a spring production of “Schweyk,” which did not materialize. However, random references in his work journal in 1940 and 1942 document Brecht’s continued interest in the project. In early 1943, conversations with Piscator turned on the possibility of reviving the successful 1928 adaptation for the Theatre Guild. Piscator went ahead with preparations on the assumption that Brecht would collaborate on the stage play and even introduced him to actors Zero Mostel and Sam Jaffe as possible Schweyks. Gathering momentum toward something definite finally crystallized during Brecht’s stay in New York in the spring of 1943. On April 3 he attended an antifascist rally at Hunter College entitled “We Fight Back,” where two Czech comedians performed a comedy act called “Schweik’s Spirit Lives On.”

  In his journal, dated unhelpfully March-April-May 1943, Brecht noted: “Weill has a big Broadway hit … Aufricht arranges for us to meet…. we plan a Schweyk,” which he also wanted Piscator to direct. Hoping to duplicate the spectacular success of Die Dreigroschenoper, Aufricht, Weill, and Brecht also had their eyes on a fall production on Broadway.

  By mid-May Brecht had completed a story ou
tline for Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (Schweyk in the Second World War), and Weill had written some of the songs. With two planned productions in mind, the dramatist returned to Los Angeles on May 26. Three days later, he related the plotline to Lorre, whom he thought of as the prototypical Schweyk, the archetypal—and literal—little man, subversively wise, full of ironies and contradictions, master of small opportunities. Brecht saw no one else in the role. For Lorre, it was the coveted opportunity of a lifetime.

  Lorre “really went for it,” reported Brecht, but objected to “the scene where Schweyk slaughters a stolen dog and brings it to the landlady at the Chalice so that his friend Baloun can have a decent goulash.” Brecht understood that the actor had “a grisly past in horror films to live down, so the moment he appeared with a parcel everybody would see the dog’s skinned carcass, the skeleton in the brown paper bag as he calls it.” Lorre also may have reminded Brecht that the audience had laughed at the “goulash” scene in Bomben auf Monte Carlo (1931). “But the errors that arise from that kind of thing are productive,” rationalized Brecht, who nonetheless split hairs over Lorre’s enthusiasm “about Schweyk’s being a dog-lover. Which Schweyk of course isn’t, being a dog-dealer.”

  Brecht balked at the first draft of the contract drawn up by Weill’s attorneys, which branded him as “a pure librettist, without any author’s rights.” Already apprehensive about plans to turn the production into a musical comedy, he wanted it clearly stated that Schweyk was their joint property, with Brecht supplying the play and Weill the music. In a less restrained letter to Berlau, Brecht vented, “I must have a reasonably ‘influential position,’ I’m not just the bottle washer…. Moreover, political problems are involved in this play, I must have a say.”

  Brecht completed the first draft in German the last week of June. With Schweyk “largely finished,” he acted on his hope to “make some money soon” on two film treatments written for Lorre with the understanding he would attempt to sell them to his friend and screenwriter Ernest Pascal, who Brecht mistakenly believed was also a producer.10 Brecht told Berlau that the prospect of a solid contact meant that “something permanent could develop out of it, one or two films each year with United Artists.”

  Over the Fourth of July weekend, Lorre brought Brecht and Pascal together at Lake Arrowhead, where, according to Brecht, the actor “rides, swims, drives a speedboat, shoots clay pipes and is generally nice, somewhere between my patron and my student.” Brecht didn’t find the posh surroundings conducive to selling film stories and confessed to Berlau that he didn’t know if anything would come of Pascal’s plans to do a film. Two days later, again in a letter to his mistress, he voiced his frustration with the “playground of the rich … It’s as quiet as living in a forest between two sawmills, because speedboats are always thundering across the lake. Lorre is living with a millionairess, the daughter of a Chicago meat king, the children bite mummy’s pearls to see if they’re real or prove to the guests that they are.”

  Brecht knew better. Well aware that neither Lorre’s seeming affluence—nor Karen’s apparent inherited wealth—had any basis in fact, he nonetheless did not miss this opportunity to stylize the difference between the rich and the poor.11 “We discuss the story in the morning,” he wrote Berlau, “that’s a concession to me; otherwise it’s not normal to work if one goes out to work. I don’t feel a single cubic metre of ground under my feet, merely Lorre’s bank balance, in this polluted continent in a lost century.”

  Brecht came away with, if not a firm commitment, at least sufficient interest in a story idea he called The Crouching Venus to engage Hans Viertel as translator. Viertel recalled that “Brecht had a full-length photo of Toulouse-Lautrec, if one can call it that, which he had cut out of some magazine. And he said to me this is Tottin, a museum curator and Lorre is going to play him. That was how he introduced the character.”12

  In his forty-page treatment, Brecht prefaced his film story with an eye for the movie frame: “Marseilles. Autumn 1942. A few days after the German occupation of the city.” Professor Aristide Tottin, director of the National Museum, hides the gallery’s more valuable pieces and displays its comparatively worthless ones. When members of the German Art Commission accidentally discover the prized Venus de Fontainbleau, a sixteenth-century wooden statue, concealed in the basement, Tottin fends off further inquiry by convincing them it is a copy. Chief inspector Heinz Kippenheyer, an art expert intent on exporting France’s art treasures to Germany, is not so easily fooled. With the help of the influential Madame Coupeau, owner of the Pot des Fleurs, a cabaret in the waterfront district, a plan to steal the statue and smuggle it out of the country—in a coffin—takes shape. Kippenheyer charmingly insinuates himself into the cabaret scene, hoping to get behind the scenes. He invites Yvonne, one of the entertainers, and Tottin to an improvised supper in the singer’s dressing room, where he discovers the statue dressed as a dummy. Asked if he still believes it is a copy, the tipsy Tottin answers no and even nods stoically to Kippenheyer’s accusation that he arranged its theft. Suddenly, however, his apparent apathy takes a bitter tone. Tottin rages at the thieving hyena and sinks back into his chair, but the chief inspector recommends that he save his strength for his talk with the Gestapo. Weakly, Tottin asks for his cane. When he pulls on the ivory handle, the Florentine stick comes apart, leaving Kippenheyer with the sheath and Tottin with a sword, which he plunges into the German. While General Todleben, the German commander of the Marseilles District, rattles the windowpanes with his shouts to close all the dives on the waterfront, the Venus de Fontainbleau sails safely to Lisbon.

  In describing Tottin as “a middle-aged gentleman, very distinguished and elegant in an old-fashioned way” and making the character a connoisseur who speaks with lyrical eloquence on subjects he feels passionately, Brecht flattered his friend. Likewise, casting him as a professor appealed to Lorre’s own selfimage as an intellectual and indulged patriotic fantasies about which Brecht was doubtless unaware. Tottin’s naïveté, however, better served the actor’s movie-made image than the man, clouding the issue of how tightly Brecht fit the role to Lorre.

  Whether or not they consciously patterned The Crouching Venus (subsequently retitled The Fugitive Venus for marketing considerations) after Casablanca, which had gone into national release earlier that year, the story was far more original than many of the anti-Nazi resistance spin-offs. Unfortunately, the Paul Kohner Agency was unable to place the property. Unlike others of his film stories, which were considered too Brechtian for Hollywood, it seemed geared to box-office return. Brecht actually followed the Hollywood formula, placing plot before political platform and skillfully interweaving mystery, intrigue, and politics. One can easily imagine Lorre and Conrad Veidt in the principal roles, with Faye Emerson and Florence Bates in the supporting parts.

  Brecht also went ahead with the second film treatment for Lorre mentioned in his June 4 letter to Berlau. From his antiwar poem “Children’s Crusade,” about a group of hungry Polish children who attempt to “flee the slaughter” to a “country without war,” Brecht adapted a nine-page treatment in German for a film version. He set his story in a rural New England school, where a snowstorm interrupts a “War Stamp Campaign.” Explaining that snow can mean something besides fun, the schoolteacher tells his students about a troop of children who set out in search of a “land of peace” and perish in the drifting snow.

  Brecht’s letters and journal are silent on the matter of placing Children’s Crusade, which was as hopelessly unconventional as The Fugitive Venus was potentially commercial. American filmmakers waged World War II in black and white, reducing global conflict to heroes and villains, right and wrong. Starving, snowbound children fell into that grey area in between and outside the sanction of acceptable propaganda.

  Believing the time was right for Schweyk to go to war, Brecht planned for the possibility of a fall Broadway production, even without Lorre, who he doubted would be available, because “I wouldn’t want to wa
it for him, as I’m against wasting time.”

  While at Lake Arrowhead, Brecht urged Berlau to engage the poet and politically correct Alfred Kreymborg to translate Schweyk into English.13 In August Brecht sent Kreymborg a copy of his manuscript and a one-hundreddollar advance borrowed from Lorre.

  Lorre helped out financially on other occasions too. Morton Wurtele remembered one time when “he was ashamed to bring just the money. That was too coarse, too crude, so he brought a bottle of brandy. ‘Well, here, I brought a bottle of brandy. We’re going to drink and talk and celebrate. And, incidentally here’s the money.’ It was only the money that they were concerned with, of course.”

  In June 1944 Lorre covered the pregnant Ruth Berlau’s airfare from New York to Los Angeles, where she planned to give birth to Brecht’s baby. When he learned that she had lost her job with the Office of War Information, “he drew a key from his pocket and gave it” to her. “Go to Santa Monica,” said Lorre. “You can stay with us.” He even paid Berlau’s medical bill at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where tumor surgery resulted in the premature birth of Michel Brecht, who lived only a few days.14

  Lorre later put Elisabeth Hauptmann on his payroll as his private secretary, whose household duties ranged from letter-writing and cooking to general economizing. Naomi Yergin, Irving’s wife, who visited Peter and Karen at Mandeville Canyon almost daily, remembered her as a “hanger on who just took up room. I was chopping up some scallions and I didn’t use too much of the green part. You should have heard the two German women bitching. You’d think it was a million dollars I was throwing away.”