The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  During the first week of September, with the theater tour near its end, Karen flew to Germany to attend her ailing mother in Eggelkofen, putting off plans—indefinitely, as it turned out—to travel to Devonshire to see Alastair, who had been removed to the country during the London air raids. She had not seen her son since 1940, when she had entrusted him to the care of a nanny. From southern Bavaria, she continued on to the resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen to visit her sister Barbara and to make arrangements for Peter to rest and relax at “a clinically let sanitarium for inner and nerve sickness and those who need to recuperate, with special departments for stomach, intestinal and metabolic diseases.” Founded in 1905 by Dr. Florenz Wigger, the health resort functioned as a popular retreat for overworked celebrities. Although the medical staff declined to treat mental illness and contagious diseases, especially tuberculosis, it catered to every other whim, real and hypochondriacal. For a price, it coordinated causes and cures (including morphine and cocaine addiction, “under certain conditions”), monitored meals, and designed exercise regimens to fatten the fleshless and slenderize the stout. Scenically nestled in the Bavarian Alps, with a view of the Wetterstein’s Zugspitze (Train Peak), Wigger’s Kurheim boasted both shelter and sunny exposure. Air and sun baths in the therapeutic climate, it advertised, increased the appetite, toned the muscles, circulated the blood, strengthened the nerves, and improved the outlook. The facility offered the most up-to-date diagnostic equipment and treatment, from radium to hydro-mechanical therapy. Although it made available no-frills single rooms at negotiable rates, accommodations tended toward the deluxe. Ballrooms, billiards, health bars, south-facing verandas, heated walkways, and shady parks indulged a high-paying clientele. Only two hours by train from Munich, Wigger’s delivered an elevated but accessible escape from the city.

  “She was very excited at that time,” said Karen’s sister Barbara, “that possibly the marriage would not go down the drain completely, if he could stay off morphine.” Lorre’s track record also put the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in a subjunctive frame of mind. Six weeks after his discharge in 1947, the district supervisor in Los Angeles had charged authorities on the East Coast to closely monitor the actor’s activities when he was in New York. Good to their word, narcotics agents showed up at Manhattan’s Warwick Hotel four days before Lorre was scheduled to leave the country. He told them he hadn’t taken any drugs since his treatment. However, after learning that he planned to travel abroad, they returned two days later and collected a urine specimen for analysis at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. At the meeting, Lorre asked whether he was allowed to take anything for his sinus condition, which still bothered him. The agents gave him permission to use Emperin with codeine.

  When Karen picked up Peter in Munich on September 20, she knew that he had relapsed. What she intended as a respite became yet another cure. In an interview for Der Spiegel, September 27, 1950, Lorre said he had checked in under the name of Conrad for treatment of an acute sinus infection, a condition that presumably fed rumors in the German press that he had come to Garmisch for a head operation. (Nonetheless, pointed out the anonymous interviewer, he smoked one cigarette after another and drank his fill of strong coffee.) Der Neue Film also circulated news that Lorre had picked up jaundice while visiting American military hospitals in Germany.1 Both reports contained elements of truth. During the nearly one year Lorre spent at Wigger’s, he underwent both old and new treatments for addiction. Starting off conservatively, doctors first tried to wean him off morphine and then resorted to substitutes, including candy, which only served to add a few extra pounds to his slim frame. He was also treated with Dämmerschlaf, a drug-induced, hypnotic half-sleep intended to reduce the urge for narcotic drugs. The therapy, reported Barbara, rendered him helpless, unable to shave or even walk. He also suffered through a round of near-fatal electric shock treatments. During one of the sessions, his heart stopped. “We were sitting in the lounge,” recalled Barbara, “and they said Karen should come immediately upstairs because Peter was on the edge of going.” Nothing seemed to work, and Lorre later told Mort Briskin that during treatment the doctors wouldn’t allow him out of the sanitarium without two attendants.2

  Before leaving London, the actor had arranged to return to England in mid-October to appear in Associated British-Pathé’s Double Confession (1950), a rambling mystery starring Derek Farr and directed by Ken Annakin. Producer Harry Reynolds needed a menace for his picture as well as a name to bolster the screen credits. With Lorre, he got both. Paynter (Lorre) begs to kill almost everyone in the cast, insinuates that the hero is not nice, and curses the rest as “kreeps.” Occasionally, as a bit of intentional absurdity, he feigns innocence: “Look, sir, in this part of the world, we don’t go around murdering people. Sometimes I wish I could.” At one point, Paynter awakens from a drunken stupor, only to lapse into lethargy after a sharp guttural eruption, followed by an unprovoked rage fraught with facial contortions and vicious snarls.

  The assignment asked nothing new of the actor. Engaged to lend the film what some by now coined “the Peter Lorre stamp,” he savagely turned on his screen notoriety. Annakin got more than he had bargained for from the frustrated actor, who went over the top, crowding everyone else off the screen:

  Peter Lorre taught me a big heap of lessons as a young director…. He was a great screen actor with that inborn gift of making himself stick out on screen—and instinctively and through lots of experience he did everything else to make sure his performance would stick out…. I was fascinated by his personality and what one could create on the screen if one allowed him to improvise, but in Double Confession he was playing the part of a “henchman” to a British heavy called Billy Hartnell, [who] was a very capable good tough actor but completely old time mechanical. He couldn’t understand what I was doing with Peter; was afraid of him; and finished up getting quite hysterical and shouting, “If that bastard so much as touches me again, I’ll kill him!!” He was afraid of Lorre (as a scene stealer) and he had every right to be, because that is exactly what he did … what I allowed him to do … with the result that he ruined my picture! It was all out of balance with the second in command bossing the boss and making nonsense of the story. And all because I admired Lorre so much and was captivated by him.

  The studio’s publicity department concocted a 150-word Star Story for newspapers desperate for film filler. In a piece titled “Lorre Is So Loathsome,” Hartnell is quoted as saying: “Gives me the creeps, he does. Rolls his eyes and purrs like a Cheshire cat at a chap, slips a knife into him, then goes home to cry his eyes out…. He’s a monster, not a man…. Take him away! I can’t stand him.”

  “Oh yes, he wears his bow ties, and his nice smart suits—but he’s crude,” Lorre reportedly replied in “Hartnell Is Too Harsh.” “Now he says these awful things…. Me—always so gentle, so understanding, so friendly…. Perhaps we can find a quiet corner where I can talk to him, reason with him…. It all makes me feel so weary, and so sad, so sad.”

  A publicist stirred the pot—“Sounds like trouble brewing between Elstree and Hollywood’s favourite screen menaces”—and then assured viewers that “in real life Peter Lorre and William Hartnell are quite good friends, and mutual admirers.”

  Lorre was back in Wigger’s Kurheim by mid-December. He now slipped in and out as it suited him. “It was the type of sanatorium where all the patients were not closely guarded,” said Barbara. “Karen, for example, used it more like a convenient hotel.” Lorre likely stayed on, not because he could afford to do so, but because he could not face the final reckoning. Karen confided to Barbara that the sanitarium never received “a penny” from the impoverished couple. “I know she borrowed from a good friend of mine in Munich,” said Barbara, “and never paid it back. I felt so bad about it, but she was so charming and could talk anybody into loaning her money.”

  By now, Peter and Karen’s marriage was as empty as their pocketbook. Barbara characte
rized it as “a cool, correct relationship. I couldn’t see any love between them or anything.” Unbeknownst to Peter, Karen, who kept a single, cheaper room on an upper floor for nearly nine months, briefly carried on an affair with a young physician there.

  The marriage over, Karen left Wigger’s to look up the Bechstein clan in Brauback. Soon after she checked out, Peter telephoned Barbara and asked her to stop by. “He just wanted to let me know that if he would be walking over a bridge following Karen,” related Barbara, “and that if she would jump off that bridge, he wouldn’t even bother trying to keep her from committing suicide. That was all he wanted and then he excused himself. He was an odd man, but very interesting, very highly intelligent.”

  In an undated letter meant “for your eyes only” (which he asked her to tear up), Lorre reluctantly told Elisabeth Hauptmann of their breakup: “The parting itself should have been done a long time ago and it’s o.k. with me.” He added that “this kind of separation makes me vomit,” and admitted that an earlier attempt to end the marriage had failed. “The cast in this dusty Strindberg drama is so nauseating, as though I were to play a waiter.” Peter blamed Karen’s bulldozer mentality for risking his already precarious health. Although she had stopped drinking, said Lorre, she had lost herself in illusion, becoming increasingly vulgar and impulsive.

  More pressing than news of the split-up itself, however, was word of Karen’s planned visit to East Berlin to look for work before returning to America on his “last dollars.” Lorre opposed the plan, which he dismissed as a lame excuse to tell her side of the story to the Brecht circle. He apologized for bothering Hauptmann with his personal life, but he would not suffer Karen damaging his friendship with Brecht. Writing such a letter, Lorre confessed, cost him “an enormous effort.”

  During his stay at Wigger’s, Lorre toured Displaced Person (DP) camps, tent city centers for the homeless, service installations, and American military hospitals. He even took Karen and Barbara shopping and joined Jeanette McDonald and her entourage at the Spanish-style Casa Carioca, a nightclub built in 1945 by General George S. Patton’s Third Army engineers for the troops visiting the Third Army Rest Center. Asked by reporters if he missed his California ranch lifestyle, Lorre confessed that he pined for his horses and dogs but did not miss the people. The slap in Hollywood’s face did not go unnoticed, even in Germany, where he actually touched as many American lives as he had at home.

  The actor had begun visiting veterans’ facilities during the war. In October 1948 the Hollywood Reporter credited Lorre, just back from a tour of hospitals in northern California and the Pacific Northwest, with having been the first actor to enlist in the Hollywood Coordinating Committee’s current program of celebrity visits to veterans’ hospitals.3 He also had made a point of visiting military medical centers wherever he performed on “house” circuits. “During the war it was horrible,” Lorre told an interviewer in 1949, “horrible because you felt a face-maker from Hollywood was so useless. Now it is different. Now you want to let them know they are not forgotten. I visit all the hospitals, all the wards, mental, tubercular, even the locked-in wards. Perhaps it does some good. I don’t know. I just know how good it makes me feel when I can get a sick man to smile. This is important.” The press seldom got wind of his stop-offs. He preferred it that way. Believing that “we who are in the public eye through the medium of film can spread some cheer among these unfortunates,” he continued to tour military hospitals overseas. The patients he visited certainly did not imagine anyone as notorious as the movies made believe. (“They tell me good villains are hard to find,” kidded Lorre. “I just hope that all the people who saw how nice I was on my personal appearances believe I can be the rat the script demands.”) Neither did they expect an actor utterly divorced from his own celebrity: “I would find it very distasteful to have a face-maker from Hollywood shaking hands with me.” Lorre arrived not to put on an act (“I don’t sing or dance, you know”), but to interact one-on-one. “In the United States,” he told Der Spiegel, “there are 150 of the most modern, military hospitals for the war wounded, with all the amenities. But without the essential, what the human being needs, contact with the outside world. This is supposed to be done by actors…. Can you imagine how much that helps! And that’s why I’m also in Germany.” Lorre sat at bedsides and stood by wheelchairs. He shook and held hands, asked about Mama, and heard about wounds. He smiled a smile never seen on-screen. “Such visits,” he said, “are very heart-rending, but also very soul-satisfying. Here you see courage and faith as nowhere else, and one comes from these visits a very humble man.”

  “Lorre has returned to us as an almost totally forgotten one,” commented the Münchner Merkur on the actor’s anonymity in postwar Germany. Losing himself served a greater end. He was not here to make a film, he told the press, but to visit old friends and to perform the “psychological task” of treating the victims of a war that had reduced Germany to “a land of ruins peopled by ghosts, without government, order or purpose, without industry, communications or the proper means of existence.” More than 20 million Germans were homeless or without adequate shelter. By November 1948 the number of German expellees from surrounding countries residing in the Western zones had risen to 12 million, while the International Refugee Organization still worked to resettle 1.5 million Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, and Balts.

  The efflorescence of Weimar—George Grosz’s inflammatory cartoons, The Threepenny Opera, the New Objectivity—seemed tragically surreal against the “great wilderness of debris” that had been Berlin. It now presented a radically different but nonetheless “sordid caricature of humanity.” Gray and yellow faces drifted through their daily existence in a kind of demoralized delirium. More than fifty thousand orphaned children lived “like wild animals in holes in the ground, some of them one-eyed or one-legged veterans of seven or so.” Defeat exacted its “godless destruction” on young and old alike in the form of shortages. Two years after the war, the daily food ration had not risen much above one thousand calories, what the House of Commons Select Committee on Estimates characterized as “slow starvation.” Eating meant standing in long queues for hours and even days for a loaf of bread, an onion, or a potato. Only with Lebensmittelkarte (food rationing cards)—also known as “Death Cards”—could one obtain a basic weekly ration of meat (50 grams), fat (10 grams), and milk (one-half liter). Raw sewage contaminated culinary water, spreading typhoid fever, diphtheria, and dysentery. As the health of the German populace collapsed, public morality sank to new depths. Want bred despair, bitterness, and cynicism. Prostitution flourished, and with it gonorrhea and syphilis. Nicotine became the drug of choice and cigarettes the basic unit of exchange on a booming black market. Berlin experienced a crime wave of murders, rapes, and robberies. The cohesive, almost benign underworld in M had turned willfully malignant. Fed by a “nightmare of uncertainty” about the future, bewildered youths felt a “nihilistic contempt” for government, order, and human values.

  Beneath Lorre’s desire to touch the lives of the war-wounded lay the unconscious need to connect with the past, to draw from it what Hollywood had denied him—a pivotal role in an artistic film. In March 1949 the Baltimore Sun‘s Don Kirkley had posed a hypothetical question:

  What would you say if we were a producer who wanted to do a picture, regardless of box-office value, and regardless of the current taboos and censorship rules, and if we gave you a free choice of subject and character? What story and role would you choose?

  Mr. Lorre named a novel by a celebrated European writer, the name of which he asked us not to divulge, because he is actually negotiating for the screen rights. The role he chose was that of a “lust murderer.”

  This, he believes, would be box-office, according to current fancies of the audience, and at the same time, a work of art.

  At Wigger’s, Lorre met screenwriter Benno Vigny, who, according to publicist Hellmut Schlien, suggested “a psychological study” based on a motif
by Guy de Maupassant; “this man revenges himself of the betrayal by his fiancée and later is reminded of this experience by all the women he meets.” It’s hard to say what de Maupassant theme informed Das Untier (The Monster). The author’s hallmarks—obsession, cuckoldry, madness, isolation, loneliness, insanity, guilt, degeneration—all found their way into its text. According to a note in the earliest extant version of the screenplay, it was “The Horla,” which Lorre had performed on radio, that gave psychological—and literary—shape to Vigny’s short story. Like Hans Beckert, de Maupassant’s victim of an “unknown force” that “pursued, possessed, governed” led “without knowing it, that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us.” From 1931 on, Lorre too had signed his name on two lines, forever dividing into doubles that committed acts “outside himself” “The original idea of the film was the problem of a human being discovering within himself that he takes pleasure in killing,” remembered editor and assistant Carl Otto Bartning, “and through this has a monstrous compulsion to kill.”

  Before Das Untier had taken its first awkward steps, Lorre’s old friend Egon Jacobson—who had changed his name to Jameson after emigrating to England in 1934—turned up at Wigger’s. He carried a clipping from the “News of the Day” section of a daily paper, which read: “In refugee camp E.-D. forty-three-year-old Doctor Carl N. threw himself in front of a train. His medical assistant, the former chemist Hannes N. from Kattowitz, was found fatally wounded in the stomach. According to the police, both lived with forged documents in the camp.” No motive was suggested for the deaths, and the case remained unsolved after passing through German, British, and American hands.