The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Because Machacek can’t stand the sight of blood, he hires a butcher for his meat counter. But recurring nightmares of oncoming steers disturb his sleep. Mrs. Machacek commits a second murder to cover the first. The burden of guilt weighs on both their minds. When Machacek finally breaks, his wife confesses: “I made him do it.”

  Lady Macbeth of the Yards has all the makings of a classic film noir. Beneath a dark fatalism that you could cut with a cleaver toiled and troubled a surrealistic patchwork: a distorting mirror maze, a singing witch, hallucinations, and dreams of “a distant rumble growing into thunder, and a cloud of dust … kicked up by the hooves of an oncoming herd of steers.”20 Altogether, the balance of ideas to action provided a rare piece of common ground for Brecht and Hollywood.

  Lorre broached the subject to Steve Trilling and subsequently submitted the twenty-eight-page treatment—retitled Blood Will Have Blood—“by Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lorre, Ferdinand Reyher” to producer Jerry Wald, who recommended it to Jack Warner’s assistant in November, saying it was “quite good.” Story analyst Judith Meyers received the manuscript on December 3 and quickly reduced it to a one-page synopsis. She “RECOMMENDED” the film story, calling it “a grim and bloody modernization of Macbeth—packed with horror and suspense and practically certain to go over with those people who have strong stomachs. The story impressed me as being real, satisfactorily motivated, and quite different from anything we have done before. I was particularly impressed by the lack of trimming and furbelows. The original is written with utmost economy and disdain for mere words—everything that’s in it is basic and screenable.”

  Blood Will Have Blood quickly climbed the story department ladder. Assistant editor Tom Chapman wrote editor Ellingwood Kay that he was “pleased with this story. It’s out of the ordinary and screenable. It has lots of overtones. It certainly would be something Lorre could play brilliantly…. I think we should send it around and give it a little push.”

  “It’s grim and unusual, and obviously something that Lorre could play to perfection,” Kay relayed to Trilling. But the ball stopped there. Trilling, who thought the story too gory, asked Kay to phone Lorre and tell him “we weren’t interested for now and to go ahead and sell it elsewhere if he could.” The studio officially rejected it February 4, 1946.

  Brecht also had Lorre in mind for a less likely, at least to most, Shakespeare role. According to Eric Bentley,

  The kind of actor he was was very, very important to Brecht in thinking out, not only how to do his own plays and how to act them, but secondly a fresh but not perverse rendering of the classics. And he said more than once that the modern Hamlet would be Peter Lorre. That was a favorite idea of Brecht’s and he had a reply ready when a person would say, but for one thing, he’s too fat—namely, the text says that Hamlet is fat and it’s never played that way. The line exists in Hamlet about Hamlet—“He is fat and scant of breath”—and some editors try to explain away the fat as meaning something else, but it was Brecht’s notion that it means exactly as it says, that this image of the slender young prince is not Elizabethan, it is romantic and nineteenth-century and that the real Hamlet Shakespeare would like to come back and see of our time would be an actor who never played it—Peter Lorre.

  Separating reason from instinct is a delicate business. As symbionts in a mutually beneficial relationship, Brecht and Lorre made good friends, who gave more than they took. But hidden in the give and take of their friendship lay seeds of conflict. In one of Brecht’s stories, the character Keuner tells a questioner that when he loves someone, he makes a sketch of that person, “and ensure[s] it is a good likeness,” with the expectation that the subject will conform to his drawing. Brecht pictured two Peter Lorres and sent mixed messages to both. “You have the natural ability to do with the left hand what should be done with the left hand,” he reportedly assured the actor, “and to keep the right hand free for when it is needed.” Brecht expected the insider Lorre to pass him through the studio gates under the cloak of his own screen fame so that he might storm Hollywood with his artistic and political platform. At the same time, he held the outsider Lorre in “mental reserve [to] play a great part” in the rebuilding of his theater in Germany. Making the actor a means to antagonistic ends further amplified a struggle whose roots ran deeper than Brecht knew. What he failed to understand was that Lorre would not give up celebrity for intellectual respectability. He would have both, becoming all things to all people, a crony to Bogart, a colleague to Brecht. The actor and the playwright were more alike and different than they knew. Nonetheless, they both stood for something and would not be silenced. A “dissenter by disposition,” Bogart prided himself in being an “againster.” He could just as easily have been describing Brecht, who, in turn, would have admired Bogart’s colloquial candor. Both men advertised strong personalities that represented sides of Lorre that never found expression.

  Between the lines of closeted regrets during the Warner Bros. years, one reads larger issues and greater conflicts than that of a frog who wanted to be a prince. Lorre regretted the choices that were made for him and sidestepped the ones he needed to make himself—between the emblematic personalities of Brecht and Bogart. Addicted to a celebrity lifestyle, with its limelight and luxury, he at the same time condemned—in private conversations with Brecht—the crass commercialism of an industry he held responsible for suffocating his career. Vacillation, or what Brecht flatly considered weakness, kept Lorre straddling a fence of his own making, falling neither into a confident choice nor the recognition of mutually exclusive goals.

  7

  The Swamp

  I must say, when Peter Lorre looks upon you with his face filled with contempt you know you have been loathed.

  —Bill Slocum

  I am not a self-centered man and I think I am quite simple myself, but you wouldn’t call me the all-American boy.

  —Peter Lorre

  When Mickey Rooney passed through Pittsburgh on a promotional tour in 1943, he met “a beefy guy with a raspy voice.” Sam Stiefel made his pitch over dinner. The theater operator wanted to sell out his interests on the East Coast and manage the actor. His self-confidence swept Rooney off his feet. They shook hands. With easy handouts, Stiefel took up the slack in the actor’s MGM salary, which was proving unequal to his increasingly luxurious lifestyle. Before long, Rooney decided it was time for his new manager to “put the wheels of my independence in motion.” In March 1944 the actor signed incorporation papers for Rooney-Stiefel and Samick Corp. Rooney served as president, Stiefel as secretary-treasurer, and producer Mort Briskin filled in as legal counsel. Once Stiefel took charge of Rooney Inc., however, he mostly managed the actor’s money, commandeering “whatever cash there was.”

  Two years later. Same pitch. Different actor. Stiefel’s timing was perfect, his message simple. He promised the moon. Lorre hired Stiefel to give shape to his plans to wrest control of his film career. Stiefel in turn persuaded Briskin, who had strong reservations about working with a “narcotic,” to “take a gamble on Lorre.” On June 24, less than three weeks after he had left Warner Bros., Lorre signed a three-way ticket with “Rooney Inc.” to act, direct, and produce under his own trade name. Stiefel formed Lorre Inc. to handle the actor—and his money—personally. The new company embraced the several associates of the Rooney firm, which functioned as the parent firm and actually owned the offshoot concern.

  For an actor with no head for business, the move was out of character. “Peter had no concept of the value of the dollar, absolutely none,” said Jonas Silverstone. “He was lavish with money when he had it. He was even lavish when he didn’t have it. It’s a strange thing to say, but Peter was that kind of man.” In short, Lorre loved to spend money. He squandered it, frittered it, and gave it away. He was liberal with his own money and generous with that of others. He insisted on picking up the tab, even if he had to borrow to do it. He disbursed a small fortune in tips. “He always had a wad of money with an elastic band aro
und it that would choke a cow,” recalled Burl Ives. “He’d peel off bills to doormen and chefs. He liked to do it, but it wasn’t done in a showoffy way.” However, his prodigality never kept him from helping those down on their luck. “Peter was greatly interested in the welfare of the fellow about him who was subjugated, who was without,” continued Silverstone. “He wanted to give. He wanted to give of what he had of his corporeal acquisitions. He would have shared with anybody who he thought needed it, and he would have gone out of his way to help anybody, and he did when he was never expected to. Peter gave more than he took.”

  After checking into a hotel with his friend and agent Lester Salkow, Lorre asked about a bellboy whom he had met earlier. The desk clerk reluctantly confided that money problems hounded the poor fellow to distraction. His wife, it seemed, was hospitalized and needed surgery. Lorre tracked down the bellboy, who was astonished to learn that the star remembered him by name. “There was little conversation between them,” said Salkow. “Peter reached in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of one-hundred-dollar bills and gave them to the bellboy.” Lorre’s generosity and helping hand won him many friends, but his lack of attention to personal finances spelled trouble for the years ahead.

  Before striking off on his own, Lorre fulfilled an old commitment to (Bob) Hope Enterprises Inc. In My Favorite Brunette (1947), a parody of the detective film genre, he played a foreign mobster. Nicknamed “Cuddles” by Hope, the sharp and sober Kismet (Lorre) takes pride in his lethal work: “Such a neat job! Such an artistic job!” When he wards off police inquiries with his ingenuousness, cop Ray Teal observes patronizingly, “You’re not a bad guy, for a foreigner.”

  “oh, but I am going to be a citizen,” Lorre purrs in return. “I am studying for my examination. By the way, could you gentlemen tell me who was the eighth president of the United States?” He later reviews his civics lesson while practicing his knife-throwing on a ham. My Favorite Brunette marked only the third time Lorre’s menace had been translated into a comic setting. Although not a full-blown caricature role, it was a portent of self-parody, and of things to come.

  Lorre needed money. The regular checks from Warner Bros. had ceased, and he had saved nothing. He could not say no to Brecht, to whom he continued to slip cash contributions and for whom he kept Elisabeth Hauptmann on his payroll. Nor could he say no to his St. Bernard, which, he complained, ate seven pounds of meat daily; or to his horses, whose upkeep placed inordinate demands on his budget. Maintaining his gentrified lifestyle, with its incumbent dinner parties and open bar, pushed him into the red.

  To finance Lorre’s promised return to New York to take another cure, Stiefel booked him into the Roxy Theater for a three-week engagement that would begin in February. Lorre arrived on the East Coast in late December and placed himself in the care of his old friend Dr. Max Gruenthal for insulin shock therapy, a treatment that lacked clear evidence of patient benefit and risked forceful contractions resulting in pulled muscles, broken bones, seizures, and even death. An ear, nose, and throat specialist also started him on histamine desensitization. Still unable to get off drugs, “apparently … because he was under the strain of his professional activities,” Lorre impatiently insisted that Dr. Kalinowsky, of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital, perform electric shock therapy, even after he was warned about memory loss following treatment.1 After six sessions, Lorre stopped by The Kate Smith Show on February 9 for a guest spot in “The Painting” and gave a difficult, but drug-free performance.

  The actor opened at the Roxy on Tuesday, February 11, along with jitterbugging harmonica player Gil Lamb, songstress Evelyn Knight, unicyclistjuggler Boy Foy, vocalist Pat Terry, the Roxyettes, and the Paul Ash orchestra. Given his long-standing interest in Edgar Allan Poe, it is not surprising that Lorre chose “The Tell-Tale Heart” (adapted by Frank Wilson) to entertain and enlighten his audience.2

  “When I told people I was going to do this, for the first time in a Chicago theater,” he told the press, “they said I would be hooted off the stage. They said the bobby-soxers wouldn’t go for it, and that it would be over the heads of the audience. I am happy to report that the opposite was the case. Poe knew a thing or two about bobby-soxers and audiences in general, and my trust in him was not misplaced.”

  A mob of rowdy youngsters made up the matinee audience. “You’re crazy to go out there,” warned the stage manager. Credited with “pulling in a goodly share of the trade,” Lorre brushed his concern aside. “What makes a great actor?” he later reflected. “It’s hard to say. Maybe it’s the man who wants to interpret something important. But then we would all like to play great parts in literature. Maybe it’s the guy who walks on stage and something magic happens and the house is hushed while he’s on.” Lorre mastered his audience, just as he had done on the opening night of Mann ist Mann at Berlin’s Staatstheater sixteen years earlier when he stilled a contingent of unruly Nazis. “He knew what to do before an audience,” observed Frank Capra. “He knew how to entertain them. He knew everything about the stage that you could possibly know.” Even Caspar Neher’s stark sets seemed lavish by comparison to Lorre’s lack of adjuncts. Engulfed in darkness, the gnomic figure stood alone on stage, his face suspended by a soft green spotlight. With rhythmic whispers and maniacal screams, he incised Poe’s morbid workings into the impressionable minds of the young audience. After Lorre completed his recitation, they sat there, paralyzed. He turned and walked off. “As his audience applauded,” related Hal Kanter, who heard it from the actor, “the empty stage sank slowly into the pit, with the spot following it down.” Scheduled to appear four times daily, he squeezed in a fifth performance at the behest of the management and the bidding of the audience.

  “Those kids! For some extraordinary reason they have started going for me,” marveled the actor. “It makes me shiver. And I’ll be damned if I know what it is…. I can see the bobby-soxers getting agitated over Sinatra, but this is a case for Freud. I’ve even had my stage door exit changed every day. I should try to fight my way through those kids five times a day?” Swimming against the tide of popular opinion with the observation that Lorre’s “heavy declamation” seemed “out of place with the generally light tenor of the show,” Variety acknowledged that “the crowd shows respect for his ability and he’s away to a hearty salvo.”

  Few cared that at some of the shows Lorre read from the script or simply held the folio. No one, in fact, realized that he had come close to collapsing. “I was unable to remember my lines,” said Lorre “or to proceed with the show; only then did Dr. [Gruenthal] realize that the cure was not successful.” Fearing that his professional career was at stake, and suffering from laryngitis, sinus problems, and depression, he convinced the psychiatrist to place him on Dilaudid. Yet another doctor attended the actor in his dressing room at the theater and furnished him with injections of other morphine substitutes.

  These developments clearly alarmed Dr. Gruenthal, who had good reason to fear that narcotics agents might arrive on his doorstep to question him for continuing prescriptions beyond necessary use.3 The wrong answers could cost him his tax stamp and the right to prescribe narcotic drugs. When the psychiatrist voiced his growing concerns, Lorre asked him to inform the authorities of his condition and request permission to continue the use of drugs until the completion of his engagement at the Roxy Theater on March 4. On February 27 Colonel Garland H. Williams, district supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, asked Lorre to come in. Narcotic inspectors Theodore J. Walker and agent Samuel Levine took Lorre’s statement in the office of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The next day a physician examined him and certified that he was an addict, both physically and psychologically dependent on narcotic drugs. Williams, who had crushed whiskey smugglers during Prohibition before combating traffic in narcotics, demanded that Lorre surrender his syringe; he willingly did so, since he kept another. Knowing what the press would do with the story—the New York Journal-American had already called the distri
ct supervisor to ask whether the actor had been arrested—Irving Yergin scrambled to head off damaging publicity. That afternoon, he called and asked to see Williams, who declined on grounds that Lorre was currently under investigation. However, on February 28 the publicist showed up unannounced at the Church Street office. Yergin appealed for both secrecy and permission for the actor to “stay on drugs though there was no medical reason to justify same” through his run. A wary Williams wanted to swear out a warrant for Lorre’s arrest. However, Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger found “a reason to help an addict who has no criminal record and who is sincere in trying to kick his habit.”4 He made Lorre an offer the actor was not in a position to refuse. Because private institutions had failed to successfully treat his narcotic addiction, Anslinger agreed to allow Lorre to complete the New York play date (including a March 1 appearance at the Kabarett der Komiker’s Nacht der Prominenten [Night of Prominent People] in a sketch titled “Der letzte Österreicher” [“The Last Austrian”] by Kurt Robitschek) and to hold charges in abeyance if he would voluntarily admit himself—which he did on March 3—to the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.5 Lorre accepted the commissioner’s terms on condition that the implicated physicians would not be prosecuted. Believing the arrangement an excellent opportunity for the government to show its “humane” side by giving the addict “every break,” Anslinger accepted Lorre’s stipulation, but cautioned, “The rest is up to him.”

  On March 5 Peter, Karen, and Irving flew to Texas. “Everyone was crying,” Yergin sadly recalled, “but we realized it had to be.” Lorre entered the hospital under his real name, which was recorded as Lazlo Lowenstein, for an estimated three-to-six-month stay at the cost of one dollar per day for his subsistence, care, and treatment.6 He listed his occupation as “movies,” his religion as “Protestant,” and his reason for leaving home as “work.” In the event of serious illness or death, he directed that his “FRIEND, Irving YERGIN … be notified, and in case of death, that all my personal effects, including any money remaining to my credit in the Inmate’s Trust Fund … be transmitted to him.” After turning over his property—1 tweed overcoat, 1 gray coat, 1 pair white trousers, 1 gray tweed shirt, 1 pair red socks, 1 bow tie, 1 money clip with the initials P.L., 1 yellow metal key ring with 6 keys, and 1 ring with purple stone—he underwent a second, more complete physical examination, which found no sinus pathology but confirmed bilateral bronchiectasis. “The patient,” summarized Dr. D.D. Le Grand, the examining physician, “gives a history of depressive and anxiety symptoms precipitated by physical disease and by exhaustive work. These symptoms have apparently been important reason for previous addictions.” In a “pleasant, friendly and cooperative” mood and showing no abnormal mental symptoms, a “correctly oriented” patient embarked on what he hoped would be a final and lasting cure for his addiction. Between March 5 and 17, Lorre underwent a slow withdrawal from Dilaudid and Demoral. He generally ate and slept well, but still lost four pounds. He kept to his room, his ear to the radio. His mood ran the emotional gamut from cheerful and talkative to reclusive, tense, depressed, and anxious. Found crying in his room, he “said that his condition was due to his worry over his situation.” However, a more controlled moment found him “rather disgusted with himself because of depression.” Several weeks later, however, a homesick Lorre telegrammed Yergin that he “CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY I HAVE NOT HEARD FROM HOME AND YOU FOR ONE WEEK LOVE LASLO.”