“Well, that’s my fault,” riposted Bankhead. “I’m just going to have to enunciate more clearly. I distinctly told them to get me Peter Lawford!” Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” a comic takeoff on Meredith Wilson’s novel Who Did What to Fadalia? and a few crooned lines from “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” rounded out his return to radio.
Later in the month he sank his teeth into a meatier repast on Lux Video Theater’s “Taste.” Billed as “Hollywood’s Loveable Bogeyman,” he played a sinister gourmet who wagers that he can guess the date and vineyard of a rare claret served with dinner, staking his town and country houses against the hand of his host’s reluctant daughter.
When friends—and oftentimes strangers—asked something of Lorre, he unselfishly lent a helping hand without cross-examining them or qualifying his response. In May 1952 his generosity earned him one of the most remarkable credits in his spare political résumé. After the war, Jonas Silverstone’s commanding officer, Thomas B. Sawyer, had been elected to a Democratic seat in the North Carolina state Senate. Now, in his move to unseat incumbent Representative Carl T. Durham in the May 31 Democratic primary, Sawyer called on Silverstone for a little celebrity backing. Lorre readily agreed to leave Annemarie, who had recently arrived from Hamburg, with Beatrice Silverstone in New York and stump for the candidate through four counties—Durham, Orange, Alamance, and Guilford—making up the 6th Congressional District.
Lorre distanced himself from the political bandwagon by claiming that his chief purpose in coming to North Carolina was to entertain the wounded veterans of the Korean conflict hospitalized at Fort Bragg. Sawyer supporters, however, invented a shared past for the actor and their candidate. Accompanying a photo of the two at the Washington Duke Hotel—warmly pictured with their hands on each other’s shoulders—was a brief, and entirely fictional, mention of their first meeting at an army hospital in Casablanca, where Sawyer had been a patient during the war. Nonetheless, Lorre gladly barnstormed on radio and television and appeared—along with circus clown Buzzie Potts, the Duke Ambassadors Dixieland Combo, Texas Jim Hall and his Radio Rangers, Bob Williams and his Cumberland Mountains Boys, and the Singing Black-smith—at “Tom Sawyer for Congress” rallies in High Point, Greensboro, Burlington, and Durham.
“He didn’t say that Jonas was a mutual friend of ours,” explained Sawyer. “He made it more direct. He just said he was a friend of mine and that he knew I’d make a good Congressman.” After plugging the politician, Lorre drew thunderous applause with his recitation of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and then, with Sawyer and Silverstone, wearily piloted the candidate’s old Studebaker Land Cruiser to their next engagement.
If Lorre and politics made strange bedfellows on other occasions, this was no exception. Politically, he generally rallied some form of commitment de facto, under duress, or ex post facto. Giving politics a wide berth, however, did not spare him an inside look at the “good ol’ boy” network in North Carolina. Carl Durham saw in the Communist witch-hunt hysteria a chance to pull the plug on his opponent’s Hollywood connection. An underling rumored that Sawyer had “C-o-m-m-e-r-n-i-s-t-s” working for him. Though he did not name the actor, Durham even repeated the accusation in a radio ad.
Sawyer was furious and used his military service connections to contact J. Edgar Hoover. “Hoover went into the whole thing,” recalled Sawyer, “and said that Peter Lorre’s former wife [Karen Verne] had once attended a communist front organization and that was the only link they could ever find, so it was strictly guilt by association.” Sawyer believed the allegation “very much shocked” Lorre, but he couldn’t say that he was upset, “because he was beginning to understand the mentality of the southern politician.” Whether the actor hurt or helped Sawyer’s campaign is impossible to assess. Lorre felt that he had done more harm than good, although Sawyer disagreed. Nonetheless, Durham won reelection.
Lorre’s unsettled future returned him to his beginnings. He looked to the theater for renewal. “You can stay alive,” he said later, “even if you have to go back to a little theater somewhere…. If [you’re] good in it you will be all fresh and they will take you all over again.” He had been trying to get to Broadway for seventeen years but had come no closer than appearing—with Marlene Dietrich—in Broadway, “An American Time-Picture in Three Acts” at the Vienna Kammerspiele in September 1927. The right vehicle eluded him, and poor timing plagued him. In 1952 he settled for a summer stock engagement in playwright and screenwriter Edwin Justus Mayer’s A Night at Madame Tussaud’s: A Shocker in the Grand Guignol Manner. Set in Paris in 1794, the bloodiest year in the Reign of Terror, when the fear of being denounced as a rightist hung like a shroud over a nervous citizenry, the play drew obvious parallels to 1947, the year that HUAC began pressing informants to name names.
At Madame Tussaud’s Museum, Brutus (Lorre), a long-haired, pock-faced artist and self-styled patriot who knows the benefits of informing, fashions death masks of the enemies of the Revolution who have met their end under the guillotine’s blade. When Madame Tussaud shelters a titled couple posing as brother and sister, Brutus denounces the house. Before the Marquis Lomenie de Brienne and Ninon can escape to Calais and on to England, she is forced to endure his macabre advances: “Blood. Blood. It’s a funny thing about that, Ninon. I’ve never told you, have I? I don’t understand it myself. I want you. I want you all the time. But never so much as when the blood begins to run over the scaffold. Never so much as then. Why should I want you so much then, Ninon?” When she threatens to inform against him, Brutus replies that the inquisitors will swallow anything he tells them: “Yes, they will! I know it better than anyone! I’ve told them a thousand lies.” In the end, Brutus becomes the unwitting victim of his own treachery, literally losing his head over Ninon, who decapitates him.
A Night at Madame Tussaud’s began its five-week tryout on the “strawhat” circuit, opening at the Norwich (Connecticut) Summer Theatre on August 18, 1952. “Broadway could do with a good horror play with comedy overtones,” wrote Variety’s Vernon Rice on August 20. “Time and a lot of work will decide whether this can be it.” Madame Tussaud was in rough shape. Heavy exposition further congested the already airless piece. The critics, guardedly optimistic, advised accelerating the pace, heightening the suspense, and fleshing out the historical setting. “Somebody will have to decide if the play is going to be an out-and-out horror,” diagnosed Rice for the New York Post’s August 20 evening edition, “or a horror play with comedy overtones. With Lorre around, it should be comedy that’s stressed.” Lorre—who codirected with Mayer—prescribed a full dose of humor for the play’s ailments. In his American stage debut, the actor played, in his own wisecracking words, “a great man, a great artist, and a great patriot.” Relishing, as one critic noted, “crime for the fun of it,” he became a mischievous prankster gleefully romping through the Reign of Terror. “I don’t understand it,” Brutus pleads to Ninon. “I’m the besthearted man in the world. And yet, people always say I frighten them. Or if they don’t say it, they look it.”
Hiding pixies in his menace had long been part of the act. “The reason I can dare to put humor into a dramatic piece,” he boasted, “is because I can get the audience back into it at any moment.” As Peck’s Bad Boy, he set the production on end, translating the melodrama into a “ghoulish mélange of humor, comedy, blood and paranoia.” Lorre conceded toward the end of the Boston run that “the play needs plenty of work, but we’re delighted with the response so far.”1
Behind the scenes, however, conflict undermined Madame Tussaud’s comic overtones. Producer and stage manager Ben Kranz and actress Miriam Hopkins, who played the part of Ninon, had optioned the play. “Lorre and Hopkins hated each other cordially,” said Paul Mayer, Edwin Justus Mayer’s son. Accustomed to being “top dog,” the actress called the shots. Her habitual hysteria rankled Lorre. For a recreational outlet, he arm-wrestled, taking on all comers, and easily put down actors half his age. Under his breath, however
, “you could hear him muttering ‘that bitch’ and so on,” said actor Joseph Warren. “I tell you I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end. He could be rough, rough as a cob.” In Boston Hopkins fluttered on stage like a fidgety canary while Lorre stood next to her, flat and sober, obviously amused at the chance to throw his jaded costar into sharp and silly relief. They finally refused to speak to each another.
Things reached a breaking point at York, Pennsylvania, during the final week of the tour. “Hopkins got so angry with Peter,” recalled Mayer, “that after the final curtain, she kicked him. He took his bow hopping on one foot, certainly more for effect than from pain. He must have enjoyed that!” Their animosity doomed the play’s chances for a major production. The Shuberts had voiced interest in bringing it to Broadway and planned to star Lorre, for whom Mayer had tailored the role, but they emphatically did not want Hopkins, who was twenty years too old for the part of Ninon.2 Conversely, Hopkins wanted the Shuberts, but not Lorre. Mayer asked her to release the play, which she refused to do. “Hopkins held the rights long enough,” said Mayer, “for the Shuberts to cool off, long enough for Peter to go back to Hollywood, long enough for the thing to fall apart.”
“It was not a great play,” conceded the playwright’s son, “but it was an audience-pleaser.” In its second week’s run, A Night at Madame Tussaud’s reportedly drew seven curtain calls at the Boston Summer Theater, affirming Rice’s early prediction that “the master scarer … will prove a draw, if only for curiosity value.”
Plans for a long pre-Broadway tour, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and put on by the Playwrights Company, did not come together. Lorre would not give up, but kept after Mayer to revise the play. Eventually the author trimmed and tightened the overwritten piece. In the summer of 1960, eight years after the first run, Lorre made plans for a second theatrical circuit. The sponsors, Jonas Silverstone, Mortimer Rosenthal, and Manning Gurian, projected a West Coast premiere and a cross-country tour, culminating in a fall Broadway debut. However, in September Mayer suffered a stroke at the typewriter while working on a final rewrite of the script. On his deathbed, he made his son promise to finish the work. Completing the play deferred production another year. By then, growing discord between Paul Mayer and Jonas Silverstone had irrevocably crippled their plans.
Reluctant to surrender unconditionally to Hollywood, Lorre hung back and scouted out his options. Wistfully, he mulled over old plans to reassemble his ideal film production team and stage Pierre La Mure’s Moulin Rouge and chalked out new ones, including a fall Broadway production of The Happy Ant Hill, a character comedy with a European background, by Franz Spencer (previously Franz Schulz, coauthor of Was Frauen träumen).3 He needed to stay professionally active, not just for the money it brought in, because he never kept score on that account anyway, but for the work itself.
When casting did not call, Lorre felt unwanted. He fought back with selfmockery, bantering about his bulging eyes and his puckish stature, keeping his perspective at the price of his self-respect. One evening during dinner he looked across the table to John Appleton, the similarly bug-eyed English character actor.
“You know, John,” cracked Lorre, “we both have eyes that look like fried eggs.”
“John looked literally as if the fried eggs were dripping down his cheeks when he heard that one,” recalled screenwriter Ellis St. Joseph.
At Warner Bros., Lorre once told Andrea King that he thought “he looked like a frog. Oh, he hated having to go to the stills gallery and do publicity things. I mean he really loathed it. And he would make the most awful excuses in the world not to do it, but he’d do it. He’d say, ‘I’m not somebody that belongs in a movie magazine.’ He felt that type of publicity was just for the beautiful people and that it was not his world at all.” Lorre began to gain weight that he would never shed after returning from Germany. “Peter was upset, and that’s a mild expression,” said Jonas Silverstone, “with his size and shape, and because he had so much within him which could have been incorporated into a more attractive physiological being.” Rejection sharpened his growing selfconsciousness. For the past twenty-five years, the actor had successfully turned his singular appearance to commercial advantage. Now even that asset had become a liability.
When agent Paul Kohner got wind of Lorre’s return from Germany—very possibly from John Huston, whom he had represented since the late 1930s—he shot off a letter congratulating him on his “outstanding and successful film in Germany. You know that for years I have been interested in representing you and we have had on occasion conversations about this possibility. I very keenly feel that I could produce very interesting offers for you and I am wondering if you at this time would consider giving me such an opportunity.”
Kohner said he was coming to New York in May 1952 and suggested that they could have a chat. Anxious to get the actor under contract—and clearly aware that Huston had Lorre in mind for a film role—he asked Lorre “to let me know whether you are, in principle, interested.” He was.
In December 1952 Karen filed a divorce complaint with the New York State Supreme Court, citing a long list of reasons why she should be granted a separation and $250 per week alimony.4 Still “sultry, shapely,” according to one reporter, she drew a poignant contrast between her lifestyle and Peter’s. Because her husband resented her success in films, claimed Karen, she had given up her career to take care of the house and him, yet he had left their “happy home” in March 1950. Her letters begging him to reconsider, she stated in her petition, fell on deaf ears. Now, she complained, the studios didn’t want her. Grossly exaggerating her privations and Peter’s perquisites, she underscored the injustice of living a hand-to-mouth existence while he does “extremely well on his $50,000 a year minimum take from movies and stage. He wears the most expensive clothes, patronizes the best restaurants and night clubs and spends lavishly.” Bereft of personal belongings and saddled with failing health, she rested her case for financial support. For whatever reason, Karen shortcut the process and refiled in Nevada several months later.
Huston saw a film in his friend Claud Cockburn’s novel Beat the Devil, a potboiler about a band of international crooks—“fragrant with imperial decay”—bent on defrauding British East Africa out of rich uranium deposits, and persuaded Humphrey Bogart to pay the author three thousand pounds “for rights and screenplay, or a lesser sum up front, against a greater, but as yet insubstantial reward—the famous ‘points’—in the distant future.” Cockburn took the lump sum. After the success of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, Bogart had come to think of Lorre as a “good-luck token.” In November he wrote to Huston: “We are trying to work out some way to get Peter Lorre in the picture. I presume you want him.” Huston did indeed want Lorre for the part of O’Hara, a puckish miscreant more ludicrous than larcenous.
When Cockburn’s screenplay proved unsatisfactory, Huston put Tony Veiller and Peter Viertel on the job. Three months later, Bogart arrived in London to find the new script waiting for him. His independent production company, Santana Pictures Corp., had arranged to share cost and credit with Roberto Haggiag on the Italian end and the Woolf brothers’ Romulus Films on the English end.5 If in Beat the Devil, with its gallery of rogues and quest for riches, Bogart had anticipated another Maltese Falcon, he was sadly mistaken. He told Huston that he couldn’t finish reading the script: “It stinks.” Huston agreed that, in his associate producer Jack Clayton’s words, the screenplay lacked “a certain lightness of touch,” and told Bogart he’d see him in Rome.
The Woolf brothers voiced similar reservations. “My brother and I didn’t care for the book at all and said we would rather find something else,” recalled executive producer Sir John Woolf, “but in the end Huston persuaded us to do it in the same way in which we had persuaded him to do Moulin Rouge, telling us that it would be another Maltese Falcon which, of course, was his favourite film, with a similar cast—Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Sidney [sic] Greenstreet, etc…. We were pr
oposing to shoot it in colour but John Huston, with the Maltese Falcon in mind, wanted it to be in black and white which I think was a mistake.”
Huston told Bogart in a letter dated November 19, 1952, that he didn’t think the picture would be improved by using color, adding, “this is a question that I, a lowly craftsman, am less able to answer than you big corporation guys. Whatever you and Morgan decide is fine by me.” Bogart replied on the twenty-sixth, deferring to the Woolf brothers, whom he dubbed “the brains.”
Several weeks later, at George’s American Bar, Huston and Bogart drowned sorrows that never come too late. On their table lay a copy of Daily Variety, which heralded the technical revolution in Hollywood; black and white pictures were out, and 3-D was in. To make matters worse, in a letter of February 13, 1953—ten days before the scheduled start of production—Joseph Breen pronounced the Veiller-Viertel first draft “unacceptable under the provisions of the Production Code.” Besides condoning the adulterous relationship between Bogart’s and Jennifer Jones’s characters, it glamorized a criminal: “This story would seem to indicate that a man of his kind, with a criminal background, is a very dashing, romantic, and heroic character…. He should be thoroughly denounced by someone in the story.” Foul language, brutality, homosexuality, scanty bathing suits, and a belch rounded out the list of complaints.
The Lost One Page 53