The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  he did with all his might. Even though the picture was not a top drawer film, he still approached it as if it were the “A” picture of all “A” pictures. The thing that really tickled me about Peter was the marvelous sense of humor and really dingy gaiety. I did not expect it. I didn’t know anybody who knew him before I worked with him, and I’d only seen his work on screen. He was so menacing that you felt as though that must have been part of the initial personality. It was like finding gold. In the first place, the slow-moving quality was all gone. His reactions were so much faster, and his feet were so much faster that I was startled. The first reaction was just pure delight in finding an elfin quality. He seemed very much younger when you met him, very much jollier, and quick on the uptake. He and Rooney were just a marvelous team as far as springing off each other with the jokes.

  On the face of it, Peter and Karen’s romance looked like the real thing, and it had been in the beginning. He called her “Momma.” She had given up her career to become a housewife, occasionally appearing in movies to make some “mad money” for Christmas shopping. They talked about children. In photos, he in black turtleneck and khaki slacks and she in a German dirndl dress, they appeared comfortably secure in each other’s affections. But as with all the Lorre marriages, by the time husband and wife said their vows, the blossom of romance had withered.

  Karen often turned up alone at the Brechts’. “Be nice to her,” Helene Weigel entreated Rhoda Riker. Beneath the cover girl confidence, she said, Karen is “a poor, forlorn, lost soul. Everybody thinks she’s sitting on the top of the heap in Hollywood, but she isn’t. She’s absolutely miserable. Take her with you and let her go someplace where the pressure isn’t on her.” As a result, said Riker, “Karen used to be with us fairly often.”

  Their age difference separated Peter and Karen in more ways than just years. He held old-world expectations of marriage. In Karen he found “a clean, sweet, innocent girl … with no nasty habits of any kind.” By relegating her to the role of hostess and hausfrau, he planned to keep her that way. According to friends and relatives, he opposed her acting career. Riker, who lent Karen a sympathetic ear during the early years of the marriage, claimed he actively destroyed it: “He resented her directors—and anybody who looked at her—and would suggest that they were trying to get her into bed. Everything they did was wrong. He killed her whole Hollywood career out of pure and simple jealousy. Oh, he was vile about it.” He not only kept Karen away from the movies; he kept the movies away from Karen. He forbade shop talk at home and refused to allow her to see his films.

  Karen wanted a modern marriage. She took her career seriously and expected to continue acting. “If you are a Bechstein,” she told Riker, “and nothing has happened in your life except that damn piano, you want something else to come along to make your name important.” Karen got Hollywood, or at least that part of the star system, like Bogart and Bacall, who found their ranch home a welcome haven. However, she felt boring and unglamorous by Hollywood standards. By those of the émigré community, she knew she was nothing more than a pretty piece of fluff.

  Karen’s self-esteem fared no better out of the public eye. Peter put her in charge of Bum, their St. Bernard. “The dog gave her a terrible feeling of inferiority,” said Riker. “She used to come in and say, ‘I can’t believe this. This goddam dog is dropping two pounds wherever it happens to be. What am I going to do?’”

  While bragging about his gorgeous home out of one side of his mouth, Peter chastised Karen out of the other for not performing her household duties suitably. “Cleaning shit is not something I can handle very well,” she heatedly replied.

  According to Riker, “Peter tried to build her up, but he didn’t know how deep her feelings of inadequacy were. ‘Peter, you’re a beast,’” she remembered hearing Helene Weigel scold him. “‘You don’t understand what’s happening to this girl.’ ‘But I’m trying,’ said Peter. ‘I do care about her.’”

  If she could not have a career, Karen wanted a normal home life. Pushing a pram better suited her conventional upbringing than dragging around a St. Bernard. “I was hanging from the chandelier in order to have a baby, and it didn’t work,” Karen told her sister Barbara. “They wanted to have a baby very badly,” said Barbara, “but obviously they were not able to. Karen said she tried every gynecologist in the United States and nothing helped.” Unable to conceive, Peter and Karen sought to gain custody of Alastair. When Arthur Young blocked their efforts, the Lorres at least wanted to contribute financially. “As soon as Peter starts his next picture [Casbah],” Karen wrote a friend in June 1947, “(which should be in a month or so) we will have a certain amount sent every week or month … for Alastair’s support.”15

  She added that she did not want to put him up for adoption “unless I could be convinced that it would be essential and important enough for his well being. If I make up financially for his education etc. I think it would only be right to let him decide, when he is old enough to do so, what he wants to do, where he wants to live, if he wants to be with me at all.”

  Isolated from Lorre and his contemporaries—German as well as American—by a generation gap, Karen spent long hours alone while Peter played poker at Bogart or Negulesco’s house. If she dared turn up to retrieve him, he became snappish and demanded to know why she was there—for good reason. According to Negulesco, Lorre used these occasions to repair to the upper rooms of his house with female guests. Tales of his physical prowess soon got around. If Karen, who friends claim never made an issue of Peter’s philandering because she had not kept faith with him, turned a blind eye to his infidelity, J. Edgar Hoover did not. An FBI letter of July 29, 1946, lists Lorre, along with orchestra leader Freddy Martin, actor John Garfield, and as many as seven others whose names are blacked out, as “customers” of “former part-time movie actresses … considered high class prostitutes.” In New York, publicist Gary Stevens had arranged liaisons for the visiting actor, who complained of needing the companionship to get to sleep.

  Karen blamed herself for the cracks in the surface of their seemingly perfect marriage. “She always felt she was responsible,” said Riker. “She felt strongly that she wasn’t adequate to the whole situation.” By now, Karen’s pattern of self-reproach stretched back to childhood. “Her biggest guilt about her past,” claimed Riker, “was that she was a Bechstein-Klinckerfuss.” She had spilled the ashes of a deceased relative years earlier in Germany. Later, she had given up Alastair, whom she would never see again. Now, she labored under the additional burden of a failed marriage.

  Karen envied Peter’s friendship with Celia, especially their ability to communicate, and regretted that “she couldn’t be the same to him as someone who had shared all those experiences. No matter who came and went in his life, that was the primary relationship.” What Peter and Karen would not get from each other, they sought elsewhere. Away from Peter and among her nonindustry friends, Karen breathed easier. At home, she dulled the distance that had crept into their marriage with alcohol, amplifying the highs and lows of a life gone to extremes. “With my sister,” said Barbara, “it was always being wonderful, way up high. Nothing could go wrong. Everything was beautiful, then the next day right down way below in the dumps.”

  She didn’t blame her father, who had suffered from alcoholism, for genetically predisposing her to the disease. Instead, Karen faulted Peter, who returned the favor. “I think both were very bitter about the other person,” said her sister, “because they felt the other party was the one who drove them to their afflictions. They never saw themselves as the guilty person.” A history of depression, feelings of guilt for having abandoned Alastair in England, and her failure to give Peter a son weighed heavily toward lasting escape. Late in the marriage, Karen made the first of several unsuccessful suicide attempts.16

  After stopping over in Zurich, Brecht returned to East Berlin, where he began rebuilding his theater ensemble in late 1948. “Brecht was saying, ‘we must get Lorre, he’d b
e perfect,’” recalled Eric Bentley. “They put it to him that while they couldn’t offer money in the American sense, it would be a life because he would have the roles and be part of something. I wasn’t clear to what extent he thought the political part of that proposition would appeal to Lorre. ‘Part of something’ to Brecht meant they were building socialism in East Germany and he might like to help. I don’t know if Peter Lorre wanted that or would agree with that.”

  Repeated overtures from Brecht to return to Germany confirmed the actor’s place of importance in the “new order.” In addition to Der Mantel, The Great Clown Emaël, and the perennial Schweyk, Brecht’s plans for Lorre included new productions of Dreigroschenoper, Mann ist Mann, and even a four-hour stage version of Faust for the “Goethe Year” in 1949. According to a journal entry of April 12, 1948, he also had the actor in mind for the part of the simple companion—to either Hans Albers or Ernst Busch—in Eulenspiel, a film story for Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) that updated the medieval rogue to a socially minded Robin Hood who mobilizes oppressed peasants. “Brecht would have very much wanted him to play Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” added Bentley. “That’s a Lorre role, he would say.” He even thought of him as Galileo: “Peter Lorre was much interested in that play and that role and talked as one who might easily have been playing it. I think that as far as Brecht was concerned he’d be very welcome to it.”

  In addition to his own projects, Brecht talked with Wolfgang Langhoff about adding a studio theater to Deutsches Theater and getting “first class actors out of the emigration in short guest appearances,” including Therese Giehse, Leonard Steckel, Peter Lorre, Curt Bois, and Käthe Gold.

  To Brecht, the choice between something in Germany and nothing in Hollywood was an easy one. For Lorre, it was not that simple. His debt to Brecht and the guilt of having failed him, and thereby himself, had set up a collision between the private and public Peter Lorres, the one anxious to be won back, the other weak and indecisive. Brecht had banked on turning Lorre’s struggle as an insider who wanted out—and as an outsider who wanted in—into a hard lesson about the need to submerge the actor’s movie-made persona and restore his personal identity. Others of Lorre’s friends knew that Brecht drew on a closed account. Speculating on Lorre’s attachment to the status quo, Dr. Ralph Greenson observed, “I think it was not the capitalism that attracted Peter or Hollywood glamour, but that capitalism made it easier for him to gratify his periodic addictive needs.”

  When Paul E. Marcus dropped by Brecht’s office at the Berliner Ensemble in the early 1950s, the playwright encouraged him to persuade Lorre to come to East Berlin: “As middle man between Lorre and Brecht, I appeared rather peculiar to myself, because I knew Lorre wouldn’t give up his Hollywood chance…. Would he have acted differently had he known that his best times were over?”

  In December 1948 Eddie Brandt heard an agent from Music Corporation of America (MCA), which block-booked its own clients onto Spike Jones’s Spotlight Revue, tell the bandleader that he could “get Lorre cheap” because the actor desperately needed money. “Lorre was so broke,” said Brandt, “he got him for $350, plus hotel and transportation.”

  Lorre had once told Burl Ives that “when it comes time to move under a bridge, we’ll do that. But until then, we’re going first class.” That time came sooner than he imagined. In 1949 it all came crashing down—his management partnership, his shaky financial situation, and his dream of professional independence. Lorre was bankrupt.

  During the making of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), Lorre gave co-worker Barbara Eden some good business advice that was based on his own experience: “Whatever you do … don’t let anyone else sign your checks.” He told her that, in a word, Sam Stiefel had robbed him. Recognizing his own profligacy, Lorre had given Stiefel power of attorney and arranged to receive a living allowance, with his remaining earnings kept out of reach. “He wanted to be treated like a child in other words,” Morton Wurtele heard Brecht tell it, “and restricted from having all this money, which he would have squandered.” At the time, “Peter considered him his best friend, the one person on earth with whom he would trust his wife, his child, his life,” said Eden. Later, “he blamed himself for being lazy. He said he just didn’t want to pay attention to that type of business. He wanted to act and consequently was deeply disappointed and left with nothing, absolutely not a penny.”

  The William Morris Agency recommended a young attorney named Robert Shutan, who became one of the actor’s closest friends, to handle his legal affairs. Besides owing more than $16,000 in back state and federal income taxes for 1945–47 and 1949, Lorre had left a string of unpaid bills from coast to coast. In October of 1947, the Division of Labor Law Enforcement had ordered him to appear before the Labor Commission to answer a complaint filed by Elisabeth Hauptmann, who claimed he owed her $1,202.28 in back pay. In early May 1949, Lovsky won a judgment against Lorre for $9,675 for delinquent support and maintenance, although she kindly dropped the matter of an additional $4,962 that had been orally agreed upon. In addition, she agreed to reduce her alimony from $200 per week to a flat $450 per month, beginning May 15, 1949.

  To exempt his earnings from seizure, Lorre took Jonas Silverstone’s advice to declare bankruptcy before kicking off a ten-week tour of Stoll Theatres in England. Lorre and Shutan sat down over a card table and listed his assets and liabilities. On May 20, the actor filed a voluntary bankruptcy petition in federal court. Informed that Lorre required an additional ten days to prepare A and B schedules, the U.S. District Court gave him until May 31 to file; the deadline was extended to June 10 and again to June 20. Auditors valued his household goods, including clothes, at $5,000, his filly and two geldings at $600. Peter and Karen’s bank account held only $10.21. To more than 120 creditors, he owed $56,561.08 for services (doctors, hospitals, hotels, laundry, steam room, beauty salon, restaurants, airlines), merchandise (dog food, clothes, books), and dues (Beverly Hills Tennis Club, Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Radio Artists).17 On June 15 the District Court gave notice that the first meeting of creditors, who had six months to file their claims, was scheduled for June 27 at the Federal Building in Los Angeles. On August 18 the District Court discharged Lorre from all debts. By then, Peter and Karen had left for London.

  8

  SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

  The fiftieth year means a turning point; disturbed, one looks back to see how much of the way has already been covered and silently asks oneself whether it leads further upward.

  —Stefan Zweig

  I attempted it once as a comedian and then as a clown, but in vain; I was typecast as a villain.

  —Peter Lorre

  Peter Lorre’s approach was always soft and silent. He left the United States, and his life in Hollywood, just as quietly. Dissembling about his sudden departure, he said, “I removed myself from the limelight to give picturegoers a rest. They deserve it. I must be a terrifying experience on occasions!” Braced by the lapse of time, he later glossed over the hiatus as a deliberate decision to say no to money and popularity and to take the gamble afresh. The grim present lived harder than the reconstructed past. Tired of “making faces,” he cut himself adrift and floated into another kind of exile.

  On June 29, 1949, Peter and Karen flew to England, where audiences from the Grand in Derby to the Empire in Shepherd’s Bush hailed his arrival with “rapturous acclamation.” “The Brits were dying to see him,” confirmed comic actor Johnny Lockwood, who was the first to introduce Lorre to a live English audience. “I gave him an enormous build up and he came onto the stage to a big ovation.” Lorre opened with what Lockwood called familiar patter about corpses and body counts, then moved into stand-up suitable to the occasion: “Like all tourists, I stopped off in Chicago and visited the abattoirs. All that machinery wasted on humans.” The next moment a girl rushed on stage shouting, “Peter! Peter!” Lorre took a revolver from his pocket and shot her. Two stagehands then placed her body
on a stretcher and took her off. “Poor girl,” lamented Lorre. “She just got carried away.” More patter followed, then Lorre performed Poe, alternating “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Bells.” Lockwood recalled that he “used to tell people that he went better as he came on to my introduction than he did at the end of his act. I don’t think he realised how funny he was.”

  Between appearances in Hackney and Bristol, Lorre reprised the role of “The Man with the Head of Glass” for the British Broadcasting Corporation on August 27—but not before the station warned television viewers that “Mr. Lorre will be seen contorting his face in close-up and we fear that children watching the performance in a darkened room would find it too alarming. We are purposely putting him on at the end so that children may see the remainder of the show before they go to bed.”

  The Grand Order of Water Rats issued no such caveat when it inducted Lorre into the oldest theatrical fraternity in the world the following day. Having developed a close friendship with the actor, and feeling that he would fit the requirements (two years’ experience as a professional entertainer; no objections from any other Rat; fund-raising activities for charity), Lockwood proposed Lorre for membership in the elite charitable organization. Former King Rat and comedian George Jackley seconded the motion. During his initiation, a ritual filled with solemnity, tears streamed down Lorre’s face. He recovered in time to deliver an acceptance speech in which he jokingly asked that no one spread word of his reaction because it would “ruin his image.”

  Soon after, Rat Number 501 joined a pack of his Brothers on a river outing down the Thames. Anyone who wished to do so was encouraged to give a little impromptu performance. Using his cigarette lighter as a gun, Lorre stood down the gangway so that only his head and shoulders were visible and surrendered to audience expectations. His popularity among his Brother Rats earned him a place in the Grand Order’s photo gallery, alongside pictures of other famous film stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Danny Kaye, Maurice Chevalier, Adolphe Menjou, Ben Lyon, and Vic Oliver.