The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  After receiving a copy of Schweyk in the Second World War, Alfred Kreymborg wrote Piscator, for whom he was expected to adapt Brecht’s 1928 script for the Theatre Guild production, that he had crossed over to the Brecht-Weill-Aufricht camp. Stunned by his translator’s defection, Piscator fired off an angry letter to Brecht, branding his theft a “swinish Brechtian trick.” However, no sooner had Kreymborg begun work than Kurt Weill informed Brecht that “some American writers had told him the play was too un-American for Broadway, etc. etc.”15 Moreover, Aufricht “doesn’t seem to believe in the play” and later returned eighty-five thousand dollars to the play’s backers.

  Having instructed Berlau to secure exclusive rights to The Good Soldier Švejk from the Czech government in exile, Brecht returned to his collaboration with Hans Viertel on The Crouching Venus on August 14. That night, he attended a birthday party for the refugee writer Alfred Döblin at the El Pablo Rey Playhouse in Santa Monica. Among the 180 guests were a list of émigré luminaries, including actors Alexander Granach, Fritz Kortner, and Peter Lorre, who read from Döblin’s works.

  In September Brecht received Kreymborg’s translation, which “has as many mistakes in it as a dog has fleas,” but whose tone, he congratulated the writer, “seems perfect, simple and powerful.” However, Brecht’s son Stefan, Hans Viertel, and Ruth Berlau gave him pause to temper his guarded optimism. “In despair about the Schweyk translation,” Brecht predicted that “we’ll never get a production on the strength of it. Lorre and the Americans he’s shown it to are greatly disappointed.” With Weill now out of the picture and Lorre getting cold feet, Brecht scrambled for a backup plan. Hanns Eisler agreed to do the music. Having lured Kreymborg away from Piscator, Brecht now wanted Zero Mostel for the role of Schweyk:

  [He] would solve many problems. An American (and especially a comedian) would have a much surer judgment about what the public here would and would not understand. He’d be more productive. Less timid. Has he read the play? … The position on Lorre is this: He advanced me the money for the translation…. So my only possibility was to say to him: I have such and such an opportunity, can you too offer a production? He knows I need the money badly. The more practically and realistically you can work out a production with Mostel, the more easily I can sell it to Lorre—or drive him to make a counterproposal.

  It was nothing short of blackmail. Indulging Brecht’s obvious genius, regardless of cost, flattered Lorre, who felt privileged to be used in such a way. Nonetheless, Brecht typically overestimated Lorre’s influence and earning power. Perennially short of cash and very likely counseled against investing in such a speculative theatrical venture, he didn’t budge, prompting Berlau to write: “Peter Lorre supported us on many occasions, but Brecht never obtained from him what he really wanted. They often talked about a production of Schweyk in America, but Lorre never played Schweyk. I have letters from Brecht in which he declared that his only reason for writing his Schweyk in the Second World War was because in America he had Peter Lorre for the main part. But Lorre let him down, as did Kurt Weill, who was to have written the music.”

  Realizing the unlikelihood of getting Schweyk produced without Weill, in November Brecht asked the composer to reconsider. In a letter of December 5, Weill outlined his conditions for collaboration; more music, revision by a prominent American author capable of capturing the humor of the story, and the untangling of legal rights to the property.

  Refusing to give up, Brecht asked Ferdinand Reyher to translate one scene, hoping to convince Weill a good adaptation was still possible. When he declined, Brecht thought to align at least one star in his favor. The following April, he wrote Berlau to say Charles Laughton had read the play and “seems, so far at least, to be sincerely enthusiastic. Perhaps something will come of it.” But nothing did, and Schweyk did not step onto an American stage until 1977.

  Certainly, Brecht’s blame came back to Lorre in feelings of guilt that he carried to his death. At the time, however, the actor doubtlessly asked himself whose Schweyk he was playing. “The good soldier” had cut his political teeth early in life. Liberals, conservatives, Marxists, and non-Marxists kicked him back and forth like some sort of ideological football. For the radical left, he became the flag-bearer for revolutionary change. Conservatives, however, condemned his defeatism and moral cowardice. He was, in a word, an antihero whose slackness tainted the best tradition of soldierly self-sacrifice. Pressing the “little man” into the German Army and casting him as the Nazi nemesis also served Brecht’s own end. In the last scene of the play, Schweyk has lost his way in a blinding snowstorm fifty kilometers from Stalingrad. From behind a bush emerges a starving mongrel, for which he paints a picture of his dogdealing duties in the coming peace. Trudging through the deepening snowdrifts, Schweyk and his newfound canine friend run into Hitler, who cannot go back: “to the north there is the snow; to the south, mountains of corpses; to the east the Reds; and home?” While the Führer turns from one direction to another, the “little man” and his mongrel dog press on. In his journal Brecht wrote on May 27, 1943: “Under no circumstances must Schweyk become a cunning, underhand saboteur. He is just an opportunist specialising in exploiting the little opportunities that remain open to him…. His wisdom is devastating. His indestructibility makes him the inexhaustible object of maltreatment and at the same time fertile ground for liberation.” For Hasek authority Cecil Parrott, Brecht updated history but outdated the character, shelving the passively resistant Schweyk for one “who is boastfully conscious of his demoralising influence.”

  Lorre clearly had another play in mind, one based on the book. Like Schweyk, who “recognizes that political considerations are beyond him and left them to others to sort out,” the actor had no agenda. On the tangled question of “the good soldier’s” simplicity or shrewdness, he no doubt would have tipped the equation toward the triumph of innocence. Lorre’s Schweyk, one supposes, would have haplessly waged his struggle for bare existence with only the “help of comedy, humour and parody,” just as Hasek had intended.

  In writing his Schweyk play, Brecht looked past Broadway to Europe. Although his exile experience as “a non-heroic individual with no power over the course of events, who struggles only to survive,” reinforced his identification with the indestructible “little man,” whom some believe he reinvented in his own image, the updated play kept its peculiarly European flavor. Neither comic nor tragic, Schweyk did not even qualify as an antihero, only a halfbaked saboteur with a genius for surviving (and, in Brecht’s telling, resisting) the Fascist regime. With “Operation Pastorius” capturing newspaper headlines, Americans probably would not have found sabotage, real or imagined, comically appealing. This, along with the play’s loose structure and central European language—Schweyk and his fellow Czechs talk in a southern German dialect, whereas the Nazis speak proper high German—left it in literary limbo.

  As early as 1941, Ferdinand Reyher had introduced Brecht to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poetic monologues in which the dead of Spoon River narrate their own biographies from the cemetery where they lie buried.16 In free verse, they speak to the disparity between the pious epitaphs on their tombstones and the personal frustrations and disappointments exhumed by Masters. Several years later, Brecht asked Reyher, who knew Masters, to locate him and broach the idea of a film version of Spoon River Anthology. Reyher set up a meeting in New York City to discuss the project, but miscommunications and financial difficulties thwarted their plans.

  Lorre also expressed interest in bringing Spoon River Anthology to the screen. Who first read in the “lives-in-death” the possibility of a film is hard to say. Reyher’s familiarity with American literature weighs heavily in his favor for planting the seed in Brecht’s mind. Nonetheless, in an interview published June 23, 1944, Lorre referred to Masters as a “national debt” that needed to be paid. He reportedly wanted to assist the destitute author, who was suffering from pneumonia and malnutrition, by purchasin
g the movie rights to Spoon River Anthology. But, he cautioned, assistance should not be given in a “shameful charity way.” Lorre apparently planned to interest either Warner Bros. or Sidney Buchman at Columbia in filming the American classic. However, with Lorre’s efforts contingent upon the successful meeting of minds in New York, when one plan failed, so did the other.

  Infecting his impressionable friend with stringent views that found a public forum must have given Brecht vicarious pleasure. If Lorre actually shared the ideas he spouted, so much the better. In his work journal, August 10, 1944, Brecht criticized “KORTNER and HOMOLKA, and to a much lesser extent LORRE, [who] judge this country by its theatre, in which conventional evening entertainment is sold by speculators.” Six weeks later, Lorre gave voice to Brecht’s sentiments in an interview for the Hartford Times: “Commercialism has a chance of ruining the theater in the United States. Though we are a country of many parts and many thoughts, our whole theatrical thinking is concentrated between 44th and 52nd Sts. in New York. Between eight city blocks our concepts of what is good and bad in acting and play-wrighting is determined. This monopoly is disastrous. It has come to be, that a Broadway success is more damaging than rewarding to an actor of any integrity.”

  Lorre’s apparent willingness to take a stand held the promise that perhaps he was coming over to Brecht’s side. During a visit to New York City in spring of 1943, Brecht and a handful of German exiles had formed the Council for a Democratic Germany, provisionally chaired by theologian Paul Tillich. Despite disclaimers about playing such a role, it functioned as a quasi-German government-in-exile whose purpose “will be to help promote establishment of a democratic order in Germany and facilitate constructive relations between a renovated German Reich and the world.” New beginnings demanded that “all who shared in the responsibility for the rise of nazism [sic] should be excluded” from reconstructing a democratic Germany. While the council sought to purge all educational institutions and media—including movies and theater—of Nazi and racist teachings, it opposed the economic and political dismembering of Germany, which “would create fertile soil for new Pan-Germanist movements.” On May 3, 1944, the New York Times published a manifesto of the council, subscribed to by sixty-five sponsors (in addition to the original committee), including Hollywood actors Oskar Homolka and Peter Lorre. The FBI claimed that New York council members had canvassed the West Coast émigré communities and told “every outstanding personality of the German political emigration, sometimes in sweet, sometimes in less sweet tones … to hurry up and jump on the bandwagon before it was too late.” It specifically accused Lion Feuchtwanger, Marxist composer Hanns Eisler, and Brecht of mobilizing support among “Hollywood Communist literati, artists and theatrical folk.”

  By early 1945 the gathering momentum of evidence, however spurious, collected by field agents confirmed J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicions that “Brecht has been closely associated with German Communist leaders in the Los Angeles area and is allegedly a Soviet agent.”

  For Lorre, it was not a case of what he knew, but whom he knew.17 The FBI judged him guilty by association. An early entry in his dossier cites the name of Comintern veteran Otto Katz, who had brought Lorre’s availability to Alfred Hitchcock’s attention in 1933. Little more than an acquaintance, Katz was forced at his “trial” to “confess my guilt … as an active spy against the Volksdemocratic Czechoslovakia … working for France, England and America” and was hanged in Prague in 1952.

  Brecht’s friendship with Comintern functionary Gerhart Eisler, who headed the Free German Movement in Mexico, spelled something more sinister for Lorre. This secondhand acquaintance meant to the authorities that Lorre had firsthand knowledge of “confidential information” about the commissar’s alleged activities as an agent engaged in Soviet espionage in America.

  Sailing into San Pedro, Brecht had dumped overboard the writings of Marx, saying, “I don’t want any trouble with U.S. authorities.” Good to his word, he maintained a low profile in America. Still, the FBI, which dubbed him “a revolutionary writer and minion of Marxian [sic] thought,” had kept a watchful eye on his activities. Closer examination of his writings and statements by unidentified sources condemning Brecht as “a radical and an associate of persons with Communistic tendencies” had by 1944 cued the FBI to reclassify him—from the benign “enemy alien” status applied to all German émigrés during the war years—to the more malignant “internal security” category reserved for cases of suspected espionage.

  Between 1936, when he took out first papers, and August 1941, when he became a naturalized citizen (a scant three weeks before Brecht’s arrival), Lorre had kept his political convictions to himself.18 What induced him to throw political caution to the wind is difficult to say. Perhaps a latent desire to burn bridges in Hollywood and throw in with Brecht. Or, just as likely, a combination of guilt and naïveté. Fully aware that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been monitoring his activities since the late 1930s, he seemed oblivious to the fact that the FBI considered him a security risk and had placed him on the National Censorship Watch List for ninety days in January 1943. Three months was apparently more than enough time for authorities to reach the conclusion that he willingly played a small but not unimportant role in the Comintern apparatus. His appearance at the Brecht Evening on March 6 received much coverage and commentary, first by Alfred Kantorowicz, who authored a monthly column—“New York Letter”—for Freies Deutschland, mouthpiece for the Free German Movement, and subsequently by the FBI, for whom the mere appearance of the announcement in a left-wing periodical was incriminating. By default, Die Tribüne für Freie Deutsche Literatur und Kunst in Amerika, innocuously described as originating in New York City on May 18, 1942, with the “express purpose of publishing the works of German authors through their own cooperative publishing house,” was (in FBI eyes) a Communist front organization.

  The FBI also maintained surveillance on the Council for a Democratic Germany (“reportedly formed for purpose of consolidating work of all left-wing German organizations active in Free German Movement in this country”) and its members, including Brecht and Eisler, who had played key roles in its organization, and signatory Lorre. Eisler’s contact with Brecht, however infrequent, and Brecht’s with Lorre completed the circle of suspicion. The FBI had Lorre down in its book as a suspected Communist sympathizer or “fellow-traveler.”19

  Lorre’s portrayal of a mystery writer in The Mask of Dimitrios gave studio publicists an easy promotional angle. After all, he did say he liked “to spend his evenings on scenarios with other writers and actors.” Offscreen, they claimed, the actor had written three detective stories while shooting the picture. Better yet, he housed “desks and trunks full of manuscripts of his own concoction.” Not desks and trunks full, but one, a thirty-page film story by Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lorre, and Ferdinand Reyher.

  When Reyher visited Los Angeles in September 1945, Brecht broke off work on Galileo to make “a COPY OF MACBETH for a film with Lorre and Reyher.” He wrote Berlau that they were working hard on a treatment for the actor: “Maybe I can sell it.” Irving Yergin remembered that Lorre played an active role in developing the property. Brecht very likely involved him but limited his actual contribution to his experience and expertise, such as they were, as a sounding board for salability. Moreover, the writing style bears Reyher’s signature, just as the conceptual framework shows Brecht’s hand. Their collaboration left little room for Lorre’s influence beyond the obvious need to sell the story on the strength of his name. Back-to-back appearances—with two overlapping weeks—in Confidential Agent and The Verdict most certainly ruled out his active participation. Conceived in Los Angeles, All Our Yesterdays came of age in New York, where most of the actual writing was done by Brecht and Reyher the following February. Lorre’s name—listed third—was crossed off the title page of the first treatment, renamed Lady Macbeth of the Yards. On the second draft, again All Our Yesterdays, but subtitled Macbeth 1946, his name was not on
ly restored, but elevated to second place. The final version, Lady Macbeth of the Yards, included a foreword signed with the initials of the three authors, who explain that they “have chosen to adapt Shakespeare’s play of Macbeth into a modern equivalent” because it is “a good crime story … a good acting story … a good love story [and] a good story not of far away and long ago but recurring again and again in common life without losing its profound appeal.”

  Speaking in a “dry police-report style,” they cynically predict that “the famous supernatural elements … will be accepted by a land of hunch-players which supports tens of thousands of spook-merchants; stuffs its amusement parks with Princess Silver Stars, Clarices, yogis, mechanical palm readers; buys two million dream books a year; takes numerology seriously, and can’t even put a penny in a slot machine to find out its weight unless it gets its future with it.”

  Lady Macbeth of the Yards updates Macbeth to the Chicago stockyards. Guided by the fortune slip in a Chinese cookie advising him to “Be bold in your undertakings and fortune is yours,” steer cutter John Machacek rescues a wealthy cattle dealer named Duncan from being trampled by a herd of cattle. Asked what he wants most in the world, Machacek reveals that he and his new wife have daydreamed about owning a little market specializing in choice meats.

  “You now got a market!” shouts Duncan. When he fails to deliver on his promise, however, Mrs. Machacek darkly suggests, “If he makes fools of us again, maybe we’ll fool him.” At his wife’s urging, Machacek kills Duncan with a cleaver. Later, the Machaceks receive word that Duncan had ordered his attorney to find them a market the day after the steer cutter saved his life.