The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

Breen was onto something. Huston had wanted to invent a “brand new” Bogart: “Not that old thing that’s been haunting raincoats and snap-brimmed hats for God knows how long. I’d like to see you a very Continental type fellow—an extreme figure in a homburg, shoulders unpadded, French cuffs, regency trousers, fancy waistcoats and a walking stick.” Neither Breen nor Bogart were buying. “And now we come to the matter of the wardrobe,” Bogart wrote Huston. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought, oh I would say about two or three minutes while I was preparing a highball last night. I agree with you about the trench-coat etc. but as regards your brilliant conception of my wardrobe, may I say that you’re full of shit…. As regards the cane, I don’t have to tell you what you can do with THAT.”

  Bogart’s banter notwithstanding, Huston smelled disaster and proposed they abandon the picture. “Hell, it’s only money!” Bogart rallied.

  “That stiffened my back,” Huston wrote in his autobiography, An Open Book. “You can’t argue with somebody like that, so we went ahead to do the best we could.”

  The David O. Selznick production of Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), for which Truman Capote had written dialogue, was wrapping up in Rome when the Beat the Devil advance unit arrived. Selznick, whose wife Jennifer Jones was set to costar in the picture, had earlier advised Huston to drop the project and take one of his. Now he urged him to call in the “next-door to penniless” Capote, who was living in an outrageously expensive penthouse on the Via Margutta, “even if it is only for two or three weeks…. His is, in my opinion, one of the freshest and most original and most exciting talents of our time—and what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion-picture theater’s sound box as to give you something completely fresh—or so at least I think.”

  Huston gave Capote a copy of the book, which the writer claimed he never read, offered him a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a week, and told him he’d see him in Ravello, a remote village perched high above the Mediterranean along the Amalfi coast and the setting for most of the picture.

  “When I got there,” said Capote, “I found the story impossible as it stood, a straight and rather incredible melodrama. Both John and I felt that the best thing to do was to kid the story as we went along. The only trouble was that shooting had to begin the following week.”

  Huston answered the stress and strain of filmmaking with a party. “We usually have a party toward the end of the movie,” said veteran Huston cinematographer Oswald “Ossie” Morris. “So we have the party and the object was to have a great ceremony of tearing up the script. Now this is the Saturday night before we were due to start the movie on Monday!”

  Capote wrote for his own amusement, prompting a friend to ask, “Was it really all a game to you?” Unit publicist Julie Gibson said that he “changed the whole concept” of the film. “He’d write daily and then say, ‘Oh, John is going to be surprised tomorrow. I changed the whole ending.’ And that’s the way it went, so nobody knew what was happening.” According to Capote, he managed to stay two or three days ahead of the shooting schedule. Associate producer Jack Clayton called it closer than that, insisting that Capote often wrote the next day’s scenes as the unit was out shooting and held anxious consultations with Huston and Bogart in the evenings on their return.

  The picture caught up with them. Like Lorre, who had instructed his players on Der Verlorene that seeing the script beforehand would interfere with the intuitive development of their dialogue, Huston delivered lines just before shooting a scene, along with an explanation that this new technique would foster more spontaneous performances. “We enjoyed the entire experience,” he later joked. “It was, you know, a challenge, but we met it with gaiety and the script really took off and wrote itself after a while. We followed its writing of itself with considerable admiration! (laughter). I didn’t know how good it was, or how bad, or anything like that, we all knew that it was something. We just went with it.”

  Morris recalled that “long before the film started, I talked to John about how we were going to do the film. He said, ‘Kid, I’d like this to be a sort of shaggy dog movie.’” A sense of off-set humor openly fed the on-screen fun. “It was all done to keep this sort of feeling of chaos and fun and everything going, because it was mad,” explained Morris.

  That was all fostered by Huston; it was done deliberately. One night Huston and Bogart were playing poker and the message came down to Bogie, who was supposed to be producing the film, that Miss [Jennifer] Jones was sitting on top of the wardrobe in her room and wouldn’t come down until he, Bogart, went up and got this man out of her bed. And Bogie said it can’t be true. They went on playing poker. Finally, Bogie went upstairs and there was Peter Lorre in a bright red flannel nightie in Jennifer Jones’ bed, smoking his long cigarette and reading the paper. She had come into the room, seen Peter there, screamed and leapt straight on top of the wardrobe and refused to come down until Bogart came up and got him out of her bed and apologized. So Bogie went up and fished Peter out of the bed. It was all a put-up job. That’s the sort of thing that went on.

  The reunion of “the unholy three” turned the clock back to happier days, and less lucrative ones, as it turned out. To work with Huston and Bogart again, Lorre had agreed to half his usual salary. Bogart’s business manager, Morgan Maree, had offered him fifteen thousand dollars, which Paul Kohner persuaded him to accept, along with first-class living expenses. Just like old times, Huston and Bogart unleashed the mischievous prankster in Lorre. “He was a delight to work with and a joy to have as a friend,” said Huston, “as he possessed a rare talent for gaiety. There was not a pompous or even a solemn bone in his body.” When Lorre arrived in Ravello, they pretended shock that he had not dyed his hair blond, as his character was described in the script. If Lorre caught on, he did not show it. Like the seasoned instigator he was, he answered them in kind—and went one step further. “Truman had that crazy little hairdo, the bangs, and the blond hair,” said Gibson, “so Peter came down with his hair bleached and bangs cut exactly like Truman’s.” Lorre quipped, “I thought that this would be good for the character and maybe Truman could play my son.”

  The mood was infectious. Lorre and Bogart, precariously perched on their bow-bedecked burros, trotted down the steep mountain roads to meet visitors, including Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, and Roberto Rossellini. Huston, Bogart, and Lorre hired the town band to serenade recent arrivals into consciousness in the early morning hours. They also very soberly informed a visiting David Selznick that it was customary for British film units to wear full evening dress at dinner. He did not fall for this, and the only victims were the English actor Edward Underdown, who played Harry Chelm, and his new bride, Rose, both of whom turned out in full evening regalia. Lorre also pulled one of his oldest pranks in front of the camera. “He had a famous trick with my camera assistant, which never failed,” related Morris. “Gerry Turpin would take the tape measure out to Peter’s face—an absolute dead-pan—and time and time again Peter would snap at him like a dog, frightening the life out of him and he would drop the tape. It never failed.”

  When they could, cast and crew recessed to Amalfi and Positano. However, most of the time they spent in tiny Ravello, billeted at adjoining hotels, where volatile temperaments quickly kindled petty annoyances and hurt feelings. All seemed to be wrapped up in their own problems, except Huston, Bogart, Capote, and Lorre, who, in Gibson’s words, “seemed to be completely oblivious to it all and having a ball.” Production problems kept the company on edge. Those who worked for Haggiag wondered if and when they would be paid. When his production manager failed to settle accounts with the hotel, they found themselves locked out without their bags. Waiting limousines and buses could not whisk them away until the tab had been settled and their luggage released.

  On the Romulus end, Jack Clayton worked to straighten out the financial logistics, while Lorre kep
t tempers down. Behind the scenes, he assumed the role of psychiatrist, tendering his couch to harangued co-workers. “If anyone had a problem, they’d go to Peter,” said Gibson. “He’d say, ‘Well now, that isn’t a problem. This is the way we will work it out.’ He worked everything out for everybody…. Peter was way ahead of everyone else. He could see through everything that was happening. That was the interesting thing to me, to find that somebody who had played those evil, sinister roles as he did was in life such a good person. I mean a good human being. I don’t think he had a selfish bone in his body.”

  After hours, the hard-drinking raconteurs posted their burro-bruised posteriors around the poker table or leered at the Ping-Pong-playing form of Gina Lollobrigida. Only Robert Morley, who kept to himself, taking his meals in his room, felt discomforted by the comically chaotic situation. Lorre targeted the Sydney Greenstreet replacement as a stuffed shirt primed for a ruffling. He sat back, watched, listened, and then, at the right moment, he struck. With a look, a carefully chosen word—usually a four-letter rejoinder—or even a nettling impersonation, he scandalized the sniffy Englishman, who failed to appreciate his ribald humor. “I have always thought him an intensely tiresome little chap,” carped the disgruntled Morley, “with quite the foulest vocabulary I have ever had the misfortune to listen to.” Lorre peppered his social conversation with what columnist Earl Wilson called “Ernest Hemingway words.” Being slightly deaf, Morley was spared much of his choice vocabulary. Nonetheless, he heard enough. “I remember an occasion on the set when the continuity lady washed Peter’s mouth out with soap,” he recalled—wistfully one supposes—“which didn’t seem to do much good.”

  Huston wanted individuality and spontaneity from his players. He walked them on a loose lead and gently tugged them into place. “I get a man for the part,” he asserted. “I don’t get someone and then train them into it.” Gibson confirmed, saying, “John would let Peter do pretty much what he wanted, because whatever he did was better than anything you could tell him.” Morris also noticed that Lorre “veered off more toward the comic than I thought he would. I got the feeling that Peter got the buzz it was tongue-in-cheek and he was going to make the most of it. And that Huston approved…. Peter got into the character in the morning and he just never dropped it. Now, I’ve got a sneaking feeling that character carried on in the evenings in the hotel…. The person that comes over in the film is my understanding of Peter himself.”

  Huston, who admitted to Gibson that he had only really come to know Lorre during Beat the Devil, considered him “a nimble creature in his mind and in his talents [who] took everything and made it his own and it was extremely personal. He incorporated the role into his own personality, which was a very subtle one indeed, and also supple.”

  Huston later explained that in Beat the Devil “the crooks, ostensibly heroic people, the romance, even virtue, become absurd.” Such is the case of O’Hara (Lorre), a whimsically droll bungler who brings up the rear, scuttling behind his cohorts, a cosmopolitan gang of desperados. When Dannreuther (Bogart) derisively refers to him as a “wide-eyed leprechaun,” Lorre (in one of the few lines preserved from the novel) defensively points out that “in Chile, the name of O’Hara is a tiptop name. Many Germans in Chile have become to be called O’Hara.” Capote got on famously with cast and crew. He enlarged Lorre’s role, giving him some of the film’s best lines and situations, including the discourse on time: “Time, time, what is time? The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. The Italians squander it. The Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is a crook.”

  In a time-stalling scene that Huston described as “a little vignette, a little jewel in the picture, a delightful interlude,” O’Hara prevents Dannreuther from keeping an appointment with Mrs. Harry Chelm (Jennifer Jones), wife of a suspected competitor for the riches of Africa. This allows Peterson (Robert Morley) to keep the rendezvous and nose out their plans. Huston sat Lorre on a chair and centrally framed him in a full shot. The scene simply set, he let the actor go. He began with a few disjointed remarks about age and experience. “It smokes, it drinks, it philosophizes,” Bogart cuts in. Midway through his monologue, O’Hara peers through the window and notices that Peterson has finished. Rather than playing the charade to its conclusion, he scampers out and down the hall, his words echoing into silence.

  Four years earlier, Lorre had promised audiences a break from his face. Beat the Devil delivered what he described as a “healthy departure from my Hollywood roles.” Now, United Artists, the film’s distributor, parlayed his absence into a publicity campaign aimed at resurrecting the menacing Peter Lorre of Warner Bros. fame: “Peter Lorre has been chafing under the bit of virtue. His knife has been gathering rust, his evil eye turned benign from long disuse…. Now, in ‘Beat the Devil,’ he is back at the old evil stand.” It was blatantly false advertising. Lorre capably transcended the past to establish himself as a redoubtable comic presence.

  Beat the Devil defies categorization. After reading the Veiller-Viertel script, Huston admitted in a letter to Bogart that “it is hard to tell whether it’s a drama, a comedy or an action picture.” Bogart, soon after returning stateside, glibly described it as “a sort of satire on the ‘Maltese Falcon’ private detective” picture. Huston later allowed that the film was “more a lark than a satirical story…. It made no points about anything in particular, we just had a very good time.” The frenetic mood, a cast unleashed before and behind the camera, and Truman Capote’s aberrant sense of humor swarmed into a collage that drew on several film genres but served none of them.

  “It was a flop first in New York,” Lorre noted. “Why wouldn’t it be? It was a delicious sardonic comedy, meant for the art theaters, and they opened it with a blood-and-thunder campaign, on the circuits. People just didn’t get it.”6 Either they flowed with the mélange of fresh dialogue and comic situations that roamed the Italian landscape in search of an idea, or they recoiled at the confusion and threw in with Bogart, who ultimately labeled the film “a mess.” Beat the Devil gave, to one critic’s mind, “the air of an expensive houseparty joke, a charade which enormously entertained its participants at the time of the playing, but which is too private and insufficiently brilliant to justify public performance.”

  Only with its re-release in 1964 did audiences appreciate Beat the Devil as a screwball classic. The picture’s flighty and fractured in-group humor and all-too-apparent improvisation (flubbed lines remain in the final cut) appealed to moviegoers of the 1960s, elevating it to cult status. Beat the Devil was conceived as one thing, advertised as another, and finally received accolades as something quite different from either.

  Lorre arrived in Ravello in mid-February without Annemarie, who was well advanced in a pregnancy that must have surprised her as much as it did him. When doctors had removed an ovarian cyst eleven years earlier, they had told her it would be difficult for her to become pregnant. Because Peter was not yet divorced from Karen, Annemarie had returned to her family in Hamburg to give birth. After seven weeks of location shooting at Ravello in the spring of 1953 and ten days of wrap-up work at Shepperton Studios in London, Lorre flew to Hamburg to marry Annemarie on July 21 and to see for the first time their daughter, Catharine, born June 22. (Being a nonpracticing Jew, he followed Annemarie’s lead and registered his religion as Lutheran.) Only two days earlier a Las Vegas court had granted Karen a divorce on grounds that she and Lorre had “lived separate and apart for more than three consecutive years without cohabitation, to-wit: since March 8, 1950” and awarded her a $13,750 cash settlement.

  Now forty-seven, Lorre took on an unlikely role, but one that he slipped into with surprising ease. Annemarie wrote to “Pemsky” (Paul E. Marcus) in Germany that their “miracle child” was “sweet and good, especially when Peter goes to her room in the evening and when she is asleep. Then he is playing his own Emperor of Portugal, you know that beautiful [Selma] Lagerlöf story, which Peter always wanted
to produce and film, and one day he eventually is going to do it.”7 He delegated the care of baby Catharine to Annemarie, while he adored and showcased his daughter to friends. Bogart and Lorre jointly introduced her to the press, and Burl Ives sang her folk ballads and lullabies and gave “horseyback” rides. Lorre’s relationship with Catharine remained constant for the nearly eleven years they had together. He put his doll-like progeny, who bore a striking resemblance to her father—“She looks like me, but on her it looks good”—on a pedestal and kept her there.

  Lorre moved his family to Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, where he rented a house whose warm atmosphere and open fireplace made it, in his words, “an ideal cafehaus.” As Mrs. Peter Lorre, Annemarie confessed that she had “turned strictly housewife. I prefer it that way.” Lorre too preferred that nothing distract her from fulfilling—as he saw it—a woman’s traditional role.

  Annemarie fell in love with California and wrote to friends in Germany that their newfound paradise boasted not only orange trees, hummingbirds, a wondrous variety of flowers, and “a just about English garden,” but also a kitchen “with everything electrical, beginning with the dishwasher to the washing machine and the toaster and garbage disposal.” Between the lines, Annemarie’s letter said much more—that she and her husband stood on the brink of a great new life.

  Lorre’s new life allowed him little time to consider overtures from Fritz Lang, who was under a two-picture contract at Columbia, to star as a psychotic locomotive engineer in a remake of Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938), based on the novel of the same title by Emile Zola. In an undated treatment titled The Human Beast, Lorre (so named) returns from the army after being hospitalized for combat fatigue, which has left him with “momentary fits of madness.” He falls in love with the unhappy wife of the “demonically jealous” assistant station-master, who forces her to witness the murder of a wealthy gentleman on the train. After making her an accomplice to the crime, he blackmails her into staying with him. The woman persuades Lorre to kill her husband. When he fails, she refuses to see him. Though he recognizes her for what she is—“an ambitious, heartless, egotistical woman”—Lorre cannot live without her and begs her to go with him. However, when he learns that she plans to run away with another man, he strangles her, leaving the scene of the crime “completely out of his mind” and reports for work. He madly pilots the train toward San Francisco. His frightened friend tries to reason with him, but “Lorre shouts back that he has killed the only being he ever loved, and that he doesn’t care what happens.” A fight breaks out, and the two men fall from the speeding locomotive, which careens madly toward its doom.