The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Riding one of his cyclic waves of inspiration, Lorre had earlier told the press that “you can get anything you really want. The trouble is people don’t want it badly enough or work long and hard enough for it…. But you must keep trying or you’ll hate yourself.” One had only to look at the Mandeville Canyon mailbox, where the names Mr. and Mrs. Peter Lorre and Elisabeth Hauptmann appeared, for a clue to his renewed conviction. Like all of Brecht’s female collaborators who supplied “sex and text,” Hauptmann turned the wheels in the Mandeville Canyon Brecht factory, churning out translations of his works with Eric Bentley and letters bearing the signature of the same Peter Lorre who had rarely put pen to paper in his life. Hauptmann gave Lorre the “kick in the ass” that he had recommended for the indecisive and insecure Charles Laughton, who seemed reluctant to commit to Brecht’s Galileo in “the remotest part of the world just to have it put on the stage.” Initially, Lorre told Montagu, “there was a terrific interest in it, the Theater Guild and others fighting for it like mad.” Only after producer Mike Todd and other potential backers politely backed away from the project did the Brecht team suspect—and claim they were later able to verify—that “our old friend, his Excellency and Eminence, Mr. Pacelli [Pope Pius XII], and his outfit just don’t seem to like the idea of GALILEO at all. At this moment, I don’t have to inform you, they are fairly powerful.”

  “My interest, of course, is Brecht and the play,” maintained Lorre, who had developed his role as adviser into that of middleman. Believing “it is one of the best plays written in the last twenty years, a very commercial play which is unusual for Brecht, and in any case a very important play,” he asked Montagu about the possibilities for a stage production and film in London. “Being the dreamer and the ham he [Laughton] is,” wrote Lorre, “he needs a push or a kick or a something at certain points in his worldly career.” Perhaps “an unsolicited letter from you and possibly one or two others whose judgement he trusts,” Lorre added, “might get him going very quick in the right direction instead of wasting his time here wrestling with the windmills.” One of the others, as it turned out, was actor Herbert Marshall, “who is extremely enthusiastic about it and feels that it should be possible to get a serious proposition for putting the play on here if something a little more definite could be secured about the degree of Laughton’s willingness to play it in England.” In December Galileo played for four weeks in New York to unfavorable reviews. Plans for a London performance never materialized.9

  In what for the Lorre household must have seemed like a flurry of outgoing correspondence, there also appears repeated mention of Gogol’s “Coat.” Brecht noted in his journal, March 24, 1947, that he had completed a film outline for Lorre of Nikolai Gogol’s novella Der Mantel (The Overcoat), about a poor civil servant who procures a winter coat only to have it stolen from him. While cold overcomes his body, the lack of compassion shown by apathetic authorities crushes his spirit. Only after he reaches out from beyond the grave to secure a fur coat from the “Person of Consequence” does he rest in peace and warmth.10

  Brecht seemed to be acutely aware of the kinds of roles that both suited and appealed to Lorre. Gogol’s protagonist is a vulnerable and pathetic figure and his story one of tragic irony. Even the author’s sense of the macabre lent itself to Hollywood mythmaking so foreign to Brecht but familiar to Lorre. The actor’s business partners apparently showed as little interest in Gogol as they had in Brecht. Neither, it seemed to them, had any business sense. “No prospects for it in Hollywood,” noted Brecht, “am thinking of Switzerland.” With no hope of its production on this end, Hauptmann sent a rough translation of their script to Montagu in August: “It was meant for Peter. We did not submit the story here for reasons I do not have to explain to you.” In his reply, Montagu thanked Peter and Karen for their welcome parcel and for the scenario of The Overcoat, whose British future looked doubtful. “It would be grand to see you over here once again,” he wrote on September 22, “and to do another job together, but I feel a bit pessimistic about this subject. In the present state of affairs here a classic of non-English literature is hardly likely to make a big appeal to the companies.” Brecht dropped the project, thinking, as always, of picking it up again at a later date.

  Though Brecht began laying plans for his return to Germany in early 1947, he apparently had not given up on creating a screen vehicle for Lorre. In May 1948 director Joseph Losey wrote Brecht that Seymour Nebenzal, who had produced M in 1931, wished to remake the German classic in France or Italy, but that “Lorre is no longer acceptable for it because the producers maintain that he now is regarded by the American movie public as a clown.”11 Instead, for the role of the infamous child murderer, he envisioned Charles Laughton, who “is trying to think of other new stories that would serve as well as ‘M’ which he finds ‘dated’ and distasteful.” In the end, he set M (1951) in Los Angeles and starred David Wayne as the serial killer, with Losey directing. Again, Lorre was out of the picture, not only for his accent, but because Nebenzal felt his acting too European by American standards. The producer’s sad but telling observation, which denigrated the actor as a serious artist, likely gave Brecht the idea for Der grosse Clown Emaël (The Great Clown Emaël). In a prefatory note, he set out his twofold purpose. On the surface, the playful story shows the “touching affection of the great clown for his romantic wife, whom he loves because of, rather than in spite of, her stupidity.” Secondarily, but more importantly, he intends to show how, in his opinion, Shakespeare should be performed, packaging, as it were, his epic theater principles in pink tissue paper.

  Between international tours, the great clown Emaël pores over his beloved quartos of Shakespeare at his manor in Switzerland. When his foolish wife, Emile, becomes involved with a young actor in the local summer theater, he indulgently accepts that “such things spice up vacations.” The ensemble embraces Emile until it learns that her husband will not attend their production of Othello. She applauds their mockery of Emaël but later confesses to him that “it was as if they murdered you in front of my eyes.” Being laughed at washes off Emaël’s back; he has made his fortune this way. However, Emile’s revelation that her lover keeps a young mistress angers him. To teach the troupe a lesson for not showing his wife proper respect, he closes the brewery where they perform. Emaël ponders what to do with the hungry young rascals, who, he points out, don’t even know how to study their text. When Emile says she forgives them, he tells her, “That would be too easy.” Emaël decides to give a benefit performance for those he has thrown out of work and sends a letter to the actor’s young mistress containing a curious note: “Richard III, Act I, Scene 2. Instruction for an intelligent murder”—which sets the stage, quite literally, for Brecht’s lesson in Shakespeare. After murdering her husband, Gloucester wins Lady Ann’s forgiveness by impudently revealing that he committed the crime to win her favor. As art imitates life, so Emaël plays with “loud provocative clown speech” as well as clumsy gestures, drawing obvious parallels to the calculating character actor who preyed upon his wife’s vanity.

  Gloucester’s murder of Lady Ann’s husband in the famous seduction scene echoes an autobiographical incident with dark undertones contained in the endnotes. Out of an unconquerable wish to possess Emile, Emaël had earlier stolen the identity of her husband, the blessed Edwardo, who played a crippled clown. Emaël simulated the lame walk of his rival, making it appear that the grinning Edwardo mocked him because of his infirmity. After enraged passers-by beat his weak-hearted adversary to death, Emaël confessed his trick to Emile, on whose conceited mercy he threw himself. As Lady Ann forgave Gloucester, so Emile calmed Emaël’s pangs of conscience and bought him a little castle with the proceeds from the sale of Edwardo’s circus.

  When Emaël learns that Emile plans to run away with the actor, he selects the proper music for their flight and watches the romantic abduction from his window, then gives chase in his Packard. Playing the scene of the betrayed lover in great style, he
throws the proceeds of the benefit performance at the feet of the actor, then reclaims Emile: “She is completely happy.”

  Whether Brecht wished to expose the private side of Lorre’s double existence to an unappreciative public or simply send him another wake-up call, he left open to interpretation. Emaël walks a rather crooked line, painting Lorre’s life in broad Chaplinesque strokes. Brecht’s infatuation with the silent picture clown harked back to his love affair with America, where he later met his idol and made overtures to work with him. Chaplin’s demonstrational acting had, according to James Lyon, “exerted a profound impact on his dramatic theories and techniques of epic theater.” Because they both spoke the same “gestic” language, Chaplin and Lorre appealed to Brecht for many of the same reasons. Even Lotte Lenya thought Lorre “very Chaplinesque.” In Emaël it is impossible to know where Chaplin leaves off and Lorre begins. For biographical details, Brecht loosely worked from the pantomimist’s early life. Emaël quits his career on stage for the more lucrative world of the Variété, where his personal ideas and inspirations become classic. However, “even as he grazed in the circus of the lower regions for the entertainment of the people,” he quietly studied Shakespeare, putting his knowledge of drama to a practical purpose.

  While Chaplin’s early struggles provided the medium, Lorre’s later years supplied the message. His “facemaking” for the Hollywood merchandisers must certainly have informed Emaël’s selling out higher art forms for lower. Erich Engel believed that only Chaplin could have played the role. Not without limited stage experience as a clown, Lorre felt comfortable with comedy, though he believed being typed as a comedian was irreversible. Brecht needed an actor capable of doing two things at once. Lorre often boasted, not without merit, that he could charm an audience with kindness, then chill them to the marrow. He was just what the screwball comedy with a dark twist called for, a clown who stood in the shadows. Brecht intended that the film be produced in both English and German, with Eric Engel directing, Hanns Eisler or Paul Dessau composing, and Lorre, Käthe Gold, Lucie Mannheim, Therese Giehse, Will Quadflieg, and Karen Verne, as the mistress, filling the main roles. By the time Brecht finished The Great Clown Emaël the following year in Switzerland, time had put enough distance between him and Lorre to cool off any follow-up.

  In September 1947 Lorre punched in at Marston Pictures for his first screen assignment under the aegis of Lorre Inc. Casbah (1948), the third incarnation of Detective Ashelbe’s novel Pepe Le Moko, starred singer Tony Martin, who succeeded Jean Gabin and Charles Boyer in the title role of the thief who leaves the sanctuary of the Casbah for the love of a woman. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Calleia and Lucas Gridoux, Lorre played Slimane, the fez-topped police inspector who smilingly bides his time.

  Believing Lorre a “dyed-in-the-wool good actor,” Tony Martin, who independently produced Casbah with Nat C. Goldstone, gave the actor room to rework his dialogue: “The night before, when he would get the script, he’d say, ‘I’d like to make this or that change.’ And he’d do it.” Director John Berry likewise, in Martin’s words, “let Lorre have the strength” to carry out his own ideas. The actor welcomed the freedom as well as the opportunity to assume a more contemporary role. “I like the role I’m playing now,” he told Martin, “because all I’m doing is being a pursuer.” Martin added that the role was also a challenge: “He loved it, being the great actor that he was. It gave him a new dimension to expand his own acting career and to get out of that Sydney Greenstreet thing he was in…. It caught him with a sense of humor and a tenderness.”

  Singing his way through a string of minor musical-comedies had not prepared Martin for a dramatic debut. He knew he needed help. Lorre cast a spell over the actor and then snapped his fingers: “In those days, the black and white pictures, the close-ups, he could hypnotize you, and he could lull you into a deep inner peace. We’d do a take and I’d be rotten. He’d say, ‘You know, you’re the worst fucking actor I’ve ever seen.’ I’d say, ‘Really?’ He’d say, ‘Yes, nobody worse.’ And we’d start to laugh and the director would say, ‘Alright, let’s go,’ and I’d do a good scene. He had a way of putting me down. He had a psychological way. And we had dinner every night.”

  Martin was not alone. As teacher, coach, adviser, and psychologist, Lorre extended a helping hand to neophyte actors. If a co-worker felt he had not done his best, Lorre got another take. “He’d wait after work and sit in the dark while they did a close-up of me and read his lines,” an appreciative Martin recalled. “And then we’d go to a bar and have a few drinks.”

  Reading the mixed reviews for Casbah begs the question: did critics see the same movie? Arguably, Casbah’s strongest asset—others would say its saving grace—was Lorre. The actor took “Top honors … as the ubiquitous Slimane. His police inspector is smooth, natural, underplayed and a worthy successor to the previous Slimanes.”

  Striking while the iron was hot, Stiefel, who had loaned Lorre’s services for a whopping thirty-five-thousand-dollar flat rate—plus a percentage—for six weeks’ work, ran an ad in Variety picturing Lorre as Slimane above Ruth Waterbury’s review in the Los Angeles Examiner: “Lorre as the Inspector who knows he is going to get his man Pepe is utterly wonderful. He’s lazy. He’s catlike. And smart out of this world. Lorre is so consistently good in every picture that they will probably forget his work in ‘Casbah’ when next year’s Academy nominations for ‘best supporting performance’ come around. But I hope they don’t. This smooth job belongs right up among the best.”

  Waterbury was right on both counts. Neither this nor any other of Lorre’s screen performances won nomination. Nineteen forty-eight was the year of the Hustons. Their work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre earned John Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay and garnered his father Walter an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

  In 1947 FBI agents knocked on Lorre’s door and produced a list of names and asked if he knew the people. “If you want to know who I know,” he responded, “you had better have more names.” Like a “bland cherub who couldn’t possibly tell a lie,” as a friend once noted of his comic delivery, Lorre deferentially began rattling off the names of everyone he had ever known in Hollywood. (One supposes the list was particularly heavy with studio executives.) According to Yergin, the agents flipped their notebooks shut, hopped in their car, and sped off.

  Short on political talk and shorter yet on action, Lorre, perhaps naively, never anticipated trouble. He felt safe in minding his own business and abiding by an unwritten studio policy of keeping his political opinions to himself. His credits as a civil libertarian tended toward antiheroics that never caught the public eye but accorded well with his liberal conscience. When Lena Horne’s family moved into their new house on Horn Avenue above Sunset Strip, “local bigots” circulated a petition to have them removed from the neighborhood. Across the street lived Humphrey Bogart, who greeted their visit with threats to get off his property or “risk being shot at.” Peter Lorre, another neighbor, likewise told them to “buzz off.” At the New York Colony Club, Lorre once noticed waiting customers clustered behind a cordon while tables stood empty. He called over the manager, who scornfully explained, “They’re only tourists. We prefer to seat more important guests, such as yourself, Mr. Lorre.” The “celebrity” unceremoniously removed the barrier and seated them himself. On his way out, he reproached the manager, “I know what it’s like to be kept out.” In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, he pulled into a hotel whose manager welcomed the actor and assured him that his lodgings did not accommodate Jews. It was a common mistake. Lorre’s central European accent and Continental bearing lent him a cosmopolitan mystique. “Once Peter learned that Jews were barred from the hotel,” remembered Yergin, “he innocently spilled the inkwell on the desk and left.” Later, he sent the hotel a three-year subscription to the Jewish Daily Forward.

  At the same time Lorre gave muted voice to his feelings for the victims of oppression, he stanched the bl
eeding hearts of noisy liberals with a little shock treatment. Lorre told George Frazier that minutes after meeting Danny Kaye for the first time, the comedian loudly denounced Nazi war criminals. Lorre apparently listened intently and then shook his head: “That poor Ernst Kaltenbrunner. They want to hang the fellow. He killed a few Jews, so what?”

  Such is the stuff of anecdote, but not the kind of thing that caused ripples in Washington. Heedless of warnings “not to affiliate himself with Communist Party activities because it would ruin him for more important work,” Lorre went his own way, secure in the knowledge that he had not ventured too far out on a political limb. Piecing together an incriminating profile from a poetry reading and the signing of a document to which “the most important German anti-Fascist figures from the ‘Catholic Center’ to the ‘far left,’” had also affixed their names, seemed improbable. However, what Lorre didn’t know—and doubtless would have been surprised to learn—and what the FBI apparently never discovered, could have hurt him. Certainly, the actor could not have anticipated that Hanns and Gerhart Eisler’s sister, Ruth Fischer, an apostate Stalinist, would finger him as a Communist. And little did he know that Jack Warner blamed Communist agitators for the 1945 labor union strike. Because he did not show up for work, it appeared to the Front Office that the actor had taken sides. A note in the January 5, 1945, issue of California Jewish Voice (Los Angeles) under “Our Film Folk,” reporting that Lorre had been invited to Germany after the war by the Free German Movement in Moscow, also found its way into his FBI file.