The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  What the authorities failed to note was Elisabeth Hauptmann’s live-in presence at Mandeville Canyon. In her privileged position on the Brecht team, “she was Americanizing some of the things, some of the phrasing of Marxist ideology,” said Bentley, who considered her “a very conspiratorial lady from the ordinary point of view, as any Communist party worker would seem.” The FBI, which later shared its files with the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC), monitored movements of “enemy aliens” with suspected leftist leanings, jotting down times, places, and license plate numbers. Fortunately for Lorre, Hauptmann did not own a car.

  After leaving Warner Bros., Lorre more freely associated with Brecht. They socialized at each other’s homes and, as best he could, given his limited access to the writer’s pool, Lorre pushed Brecht’s stories in film circles. Just how mindful Lorre was of the political repercussions to his career depended on his frame of mind at any given moment. Neither advertising nor hiding his friendship with Brecht, he mostly followed his conscience at the expense of his common sense. If he heard the wake-up calls—in 1940, John Leech, an alleged former “chief functionary” for the local Communist Party, had testified before a Los Angeles County grand jury about Communist influence in motion pictures, accusing eighteen actors of being “Reds,” including Humphrey Bogart—he did not listen to them. Lorre balanced the threat of gray-listing, which he blamed for the slowdown of his career, against his debt to Brecht.

  In 1938 Congress had established a temporary Special Committee to investigate un-American propaganda activities. Mindful of the possibility “that in any legislative attempt to prevent un-American activities, we might jeopardize fundamental rights far more important than the objective we seek,” Congressman Martin Dies, who had introduced the resolution, upheld the need to protect “the undisputed right of every citizen in the United States to express his honest convictions and enjoy freedom of speech.” After an initial burst of active investigation, the number of public hearings declined each year until 1941, when they virtually ceased. However, in 1945 John Rankin railroaded through Congress an amendment to create a permanent Un-American Activities Committee. On the heels of its announced intention to initiate an investigation into “Communist Infiltration into the Motion-Picture Industry,” chairman J. Parnell Thomas began closed-door hearings of “friendly” witnesses—including actors Robert Taylor and Adolphe Menjou—in Los Angeles in May 1947. That September HUAC subpoenaed forty-one producers, directors, writers, and actors to testify in Washington the following month.

  Affronted by the committee’s infringements on constitutional freedoms—being a Communist was not illegal, after all—directors William Wyler and John Huston and writer Philip Dunne quickly recruited the Committee for the First Amendment, “not as a permanent organization, but as an immediate ad hoc protest against the abuses going on in Washington.” The CFA’s starstudded cast jam-packed meetings at lyricist Ira Gershwin’s home. There, according to FBI sources, Lorre turned up on Sunday, October 26. As a witness to the rise of fascism in Germany, he told stories that drew damning parallels between the methods of HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas and Adolf Hitler. While Sam Jaffe, Bogart’s agent, cautioned the actor that his political activities might ruin his career, Yergin and Lorre mutually supported each other’s defense of freedom of thought and expression. From October 21 to 28, the CFA struck back with full-page ads in the trade press and several Los Angeles newspapers listing one hundred and forty names, including Lorre’s, and stating that

  American citizens who believe in constitutional democratic government, are disgusted and outraged by the continuing attempt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to smear the Motion Picture Industry.

  We hold that these hearings are morally wrong because: Any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy;

  Any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.

  The CFA chartered a plane to fly fifty prominent members to Washington—including spokesmen John Huston and Philip Dunne, the Bogarts, Paul Henreid, Evelyn Keyes, Ira Gershwin, Gene Kelly, Jane Wyatt, Marsha Hunt, Geraldine Page, Richard Conte, and Danny Kaye—to attend the hearings and petition the committee for redress of grievances. According to Yergin, Lorre helped plan the trip and intended to accompany Bogart and Huston. But, said James Powers, who asserted that Lorre was “not a fighter,” he missed the plane.

  However, Lorre managed a statement for Hollywood Fights Back, a CFA-sponsored civil liberties broadcast that aired over ABC on October 26, at virtually the same time the nonpartisan Hollywood delegation was in flight to Washington. In the thirty-minute show, more than forty entertainment and political figures read statements prepared by CBS writer-producer Norman Corwin and members of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP) defending the film industry and questioning the role and goals of the Committee.12 Following Judy Garland, who castigated Thomas for “kicking the living daylights out of the Bill of Rights,” Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall, and Joseph Cotton, Lorre spoke his piece: “This is Peter Lorre. I hope you know what this amounts to. It amounts to this: If you like any of the pictures made by any of these accused artists, then you are not supposed to know what is un-American and what is not. So that’s like saying you’re stupid. Well, we don’t think you are.”

  With about a 50 percent turnover of celebrity personnel, they did it again the following Sunday. Speakers punched specific points in their review of the week’s proceedings. “In the midst of a rising tide of protest, the hearings are suddenly called off,” declaimed actor Hurd Hatfield.

  Chairman Thomas announces the first phase of the investigation is over. But it is not over…. You can’t dump a bucket of red paint over a city and its citizens and run off like a bunch of Halloween pranksters. There are still a lot of questions that demand answers. Here are some:

  This is Peter Lorre. Why, if these hearings were so important to the security of America, were they attended only by a fraction of the Committee’s total membership? And why was John Rankin, co-chairman of this Committee—and you know who he is!—absent from all the hearings? Why?

  The CFA supported rights, emphasized Dunne, not causes. The flight to Washington was made “solely in the interests of freedom of speech, freedom of the screen and protection of the Bill of Rights,” reiterated Bogart in a Photoplay article titled “I’m No Communist.” Members of the CFA had not flown east to demonstrate support for the ten “unfriendly” witnesses (out of nineteen) who were subsequently known as “The Hollywood Ten,” but nonetheless they soon “found themselves lined up with a group of writers who had come across as shifty, ill-mannered, fanatical, and—well, frankly, un-American.” In any case, the CFA celebrated the sudden suspension of the “de facto trials” soon after the testimony of the tenth “unfriendly” witness. The victory was short-lived. Overnight, public opinion turned against the CFA, branded as “one of the most diabolical Red Front organizations ever conceived” and its Washington delegation a “caravan of glamor Reds.” Bogart’s public recantation—“the trip was ill-advised, even foolish … they beat our brains out”—cost him some friends, but not stalwarts Lorre and Huston, who quickly put it behind them.

  Lorre apparently came closer than he imagined to being summoned to testify before HUAC. In May, Thomas had asked the FBI to supply him with information concerning certain individuals in the Hollywood area, including Bertolt Brecht and Peter Lorre. Judging by the depth of its research, which depended on information about Lorre “as one of the actors trained by Bertolt Eugen [sic] Friedrich Brecht” drawn from 20th Century Authors (1942), hard evidence of his suspected Communist affiliations did not exist in either the FBI field reports or at the lending library.

  In the summer of 1947, Brecht had begun preparing to return to Europe. On September 19, a U.S. marsh
al showed up on his doorstep with a subpoena to appear before HUAC. Classified as an “unfriendly” witness, a well-rehearsed Brecht took the stand in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building on October 30. To counsel Robert Stripling’s question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of any country?” he answered, in a word, “no,” tacitly acknowledging the committee’s disputed right to ask the question before leading it on a crooked chase over the German literary landscape in search of clues to his political identity. Afterward, according to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the “Hollywood Ten” fined and sentenced to a one-year prison term for refusing to answer questions about his political affiliation, Brecht apologized for breaking ranks with the other eighteen “unfriendly” witnesses. Lorre later credited himself with advising Brecht to “get out.” It did not take a fortune-teller to read the writing on the wall. Or the recommendation of his well-meaning friend. “When they accused me of wanting to steal the Empire State Building,” Brecht later joked, “I thought it was high time to leave.” Which he did, the next day.

  The “Red Menace” continued to fuel what John Huston called a “miasma of fear, hysteria and guilt.” J. Edgar Hoover believed that HUAC had exposed only the tip of the iceberg—although it had failed to document even one instance of Communist propaganda in the movies. A little-known theater and film producer on the West Coast agreed that “a fine tooth combing of Hollywood is vital.” Myron C. Fagan credited his 1945 stage production of Red Rainbow with exposing Communism in America. Three years later, at the premiere of Thieves Paradise, which unmasked Communism behind the Iron Curtain, he named one hundred “Red Celebrities of Hollywood” who had done “far more to siphon that poisonous ideology into our national blood stream than any other single group of Red termites in America!” The 1947 HUAC hearings “confirmed [his] charges that Hollywood was a captive of the Reds and Moscow’s most dangerous propaganda machine in America!” In August 1949 Fagan came out with Red Treason in Hollywood, which identified “TWO hundred of Hollywood’s great names as supporters of Marxism.” As one of “Stalin’s Stars” whom he sought to knock off their pedestals, Lorre kept company with Humphrey Bogart, Eddie Cantor, Charles Chaplin, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Kirk Douglas, Katharine Hepburn, Vincent Price, Frank Sinatra, and Orson Welles.

  In response “to a tremendous PUBLIC DEMAND,” Fagan followed Red Treason with Documentation of the Red Stars in Hollywood (1950), which “categorically establish[ed] the actual status of each and every individual I named in ‘Red Treason in Hollywood,’” including Peter Lorre. His membership in the CFA, “organized at the behest of the Communist Party … to finally bring about an open and bloody revolution against our form of Government,” and the Actor’s Laboratory Theatre, “an extension of the notoriously Communistic GROUP THEATRE of the early 30s in New York,” earned him a place on Fagan’s distinguished list of “Hollywood Stalinites,” whom the “Red-Baiter” promised to restore to good grace “as soon as we are convinced they have sincerely repented.” Surprisingly, he overlooked Lorre’s co-vice-chairmanship (along with Fritz Kortner and Hedy Lamarr) of an organized relief effort for anti-Nazi Austrian theater people that grew out of a meeting of actors, writers, producers, and authors at the Actor’s Lab. With funds raised from the production of “suitable” plays and other performances, the group planned to “assist in the development of a democratic, cultural, internationally-minded Austrian theatre.” Fagan also encouraged his readers to register their protests with sponsors who employed actors with “pink” reputations. By then, Lorre had taken his own advice and left for Europe, escaping the darkest years of the blacklist.

  Always on the lookout for a good story idea to push himself up the studio ladder, Walter Doniger, a young screenwriter under contract to Paramount, paged through a travel magazine after the war. A piece about the diamondbearing area of South Africa jumped out at him. “I was attempting to write a script that would be a character melodrama in the tradition of Casablanca,” said Doniger. To represent the various nationalities one might find there, he reassembled on paper the cast of Casablanca—namely Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre—but in different roles, ones conditioned by postwar attitudes. Doniger sold his finished script to Hal Wallis, who had left Warner Bros. in 1944 to form his own production company, which released its pictures through Paramount. Although the producer could have starred Bogart and Bergman, “since they were evidently both agreeable,” he had Burt Lancaster under contract “and also had tested and signed the French girl [Corinne Calvet] and felt sure she would be a star.” Wallis collected only three members of the original cast. No longer a French patriot, Henreid plays a brutal commandant and Rains a menacing mine manager. Lorre, as Toady, still scavenges the fringes of society, this time keeping a vulture’s eye view on the illegal diamond trade.

  Like Casablanca, Rope of Sand (1949) begins with a voice-over narration and a mood-setting montage: “This part of the desert of South Africa, where only a parched camel thorn tree relieves the endless parallels of time, space and sky, surrounds like a rope of sand the richest diamond-bearing area in the world. An uneasy land, where men inflamed by monotony and the heat sometimes forget the rules of civilization.” Like Casablanca‘s Rick Blaine, Rope of Sand’s Mike Davis (Burt Lancaster) is, by Doniger’s design, “related in a way to the essence of the philosophy of a Dashiell Hammett or Hemingway hero in that he had his own code which he must live by rather than any societal strictures.”

  It is Toady’s code of survival, however, that puts a philosophical edge on the story: “Consider this place for a minute if you will. It often reminds me of the interior of a whale’s belly. It’s only an intellectual association, of course. But it is just from the whale’s sordid interior that we scavenge the base for the most exciting perfumes and that in turn we confuse with desirability, with virtue, with great passion.”

  Doniger developed the character of Toady with Lorre in mind, at the same time grasping on an unconscious level for a “reflection of the actor’s life, a victim in and of the film world.” Because of his “situation as an émigré,” claimed the writer, Lorre was able to “reach this character, who belongs nowhere and who recognized that morality is a fraud perpetrated on the society in which the only morality is survival.”

  After the preview, Hal Wallis was ecstatic: he had a hit. Doniger was less than enthusiastic. He believed Lancaster and Calvet were miscast and that director William Dieterle, though a fine technician, did not understand the story or have any concept of how to handle actors: “They all acted out of control. I was furious because, part truth, part writer frustration over director’s lack of understanding of underlying elements, I felt Dieterle had missed the sociological and character point of the film.”

  Nevertheless, conceded Doniger, Wallis was right, “because it was an enormous hit and made more money for his company than any picture up to that time.” Largely forgotten now, Rope of Sand won critical recognition in its day. In his several brief scenes, Lorre once again held the screen beyond his time, “stand[ing] out … as a philosopher who is not beneath a bit of deceit if it fattens his wallet.”

  When nothing came of a deal to star in a trio of pictures produced and directed by Mickey Rooney, Lorre once again took Edgar Allan Poe on the road.13 Between November 1948 and June 1949, Lorre spent more time on stage—approximately eight weeks—than before the camera. His monologue had not lost its luster. “By his voice, by his facial expressions, and by the motion of his hands and feet,” reported the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen, “Mr. Lorre treats the audience to a memorable characterization. That the real-life Peter Lorre must be far different from the actor Peter Lorre is evinced in the charm he displayed before he went into ‘The Telltale Heart.’” After the requisite “gags,” the actor kept his audiences “breathless and spellbound” with a dramatization that sharply contrasted with the movie fare following the show, namely Siren of Atlantis at the Earle in Phila
delphia and Streets of Laredo at the Paramount in New York City, and the usual variety of comedians, singers, acrobats, tapsters and even The Three Stooges. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Lorre finishes each performance to the most thunderous applause heard in a Philadelphia house since John Barrymore played ‘Hamlet.’”

  As Hollywood closed down, New York opened up to Lorre. In March 1949, between spots in Baltimore and Philadelphia, Lorre moved from the big to the small screen with appearances on The Texaco Star Theater, on which he recited “The Man with the Head of Glass,” and The Arrow Show, on which he played babysitter to Jack Gilford and Joey Faye. In the next fifteen years, the actor would make more than eighty television appearances, to which he then and thereafter attached surprisingly little or no importance.

  In April 1949 the actor put in his final screen appearance for Lorre Inc. Mickey Rooney also tried to make it his last. According to the Hollywood Reporter, February 3, 1949, Rooney had sought to pull out of Quicksand (1950), the firm’s first independent production, and to sever all ties with his manager. However, Stiefel insisted that Rooney fulfill his seven-year contract. By February 22, the partners had apparently patched up their differences and negotiations were under way to borrow Ava Gardner from MGM to costar in the picture. Fritz Lang was also under consideration for director. In the end, however, the Rooney team settled for Jeanne Cagney in the female role and Irving Pichel at the helm.14In Quicksand the income of auto mechanic Mickey Rooney can’t keep up with the expensive tastes of his mink-minded girlfriend, Jeanne Cagney. He goes from misdemeanor to grand theft, realizes that crime doesn’t pay, and finally surrenders himself to the police. Although it barely filled the large screen, Quicksand boasted a tight story line, suspenseful direction, and honest, hardedged performances.

  Lorre stepped into the role of a blackmailing penny arcade owner with renewed relish. “I just felt that whatever he tackled,” voiced Cagney,