Acting triggered an apparent cleft in Lorre’s personality. When the cameras rolled, self and image separated, the one receding into the background, the other moving into sharp focus. Most directors wanted what the screen personality, with its tools of the trade—the bulging eyes, the baby-faced innocence, the diffident whine—could bring to the role, not what the actor could bring of himself. Far more willing to bank on the ephemeral shadow-image than on its flesh and blood counterpart, they incanted, “Just be Peter Lorre.” For the actor, filmmaking had become a revolving door, with his double, the dark insider, being ushered in, while he was escorted out. At times he gave up waiting for something better and wearily resigned himself to lending the “Peter Lorre” stamp. At other times, he asked audiences not to confuse him with his screen image. In a 1957 newspaper piece titled “Bin ich noch ein Mensch?”—“Am I Still a Human Being?”—he confided:
It is horrible to be a monster! If I had been able to foresee, when they offered me the part in “M,” what direction my career and my life would take—believe me, I wouldn’t have taken the role for all the money in the world.
Look at me. I’m the most frightening and despised villain ever shown on the screen. Whenever a producer needs a detestable film villain, you can be sure that they say: “Get Peter Lorre, he’s a real monster!” And when I stand in front of the camera, they say: “Play it really mean, Peter! Play it like you are!”
I have played so many villains through the years, that I have to look in the mirror three times daily to convince myself that I’m still a human being.
It wouldn’t be half so bad if my roles didn’t influence my private life. They do. Of others I always read in the papers that they are happy, cheerful and that they have an ideal family life. No one writes that about me, although I have a real nice wife and my cute little Catharine, who is three years old. When they want to take my picture for a story about my private life and I try to smile, they laugh at me: “Come on, Peter, try to look a little wicked—as if you just killed somebody!” Sometimes I think that other people think I really do that. How would you feel when you meet somebody and from the first moment you have the uncomfortable feeling that he will ask you in the next moment whose throat you cut? And he will ask, you can be sure of that!
Lorre didn’t want to be typecast at all. “I don’t want to be typed as a villain or a comedian,” he emphasized. “One would be as bad as the other. I had to fight that sort of thing several times in my life. And it’s a painful fight because it consists of turning down money to do a role.” Keeping his options open, he mediated, “Let us say that in the future, I want to do whatever is human.”
The actor wanted to work with directors willing to run the risk of turning the camera on Peter Lorre, that side of him seldom captured on-screen but so familiar in private life. In Rouben Mamoulian he found his director. “Character actors,” explained the filmmaker, “don’t have to be typed at all because character actor means he can play a variety of characters. But a character actor frequently is artificially typecast because he does one part and he’s good in it, so everybody wants him for the same kind of part and the guy becomes very unhappy, naturally.”
Mamoulian drew the most original performances from artists whose screen images he redefined. In his first sound film, City Streets (1931), he cast the benevolent Guy Kibbee in the unexpected role of a murderer. Later, he met a young freckle-faced girl with an upturned nose at a Hollywood party. “You’re not Myrna Loy?!” he burst out. “What about all this Oriental stuff? What about your own personality?” When she complained of being typecast as a Far Eastern beauty, he transported her to the musical Love Me Tonight (1933), relaunching her career. Convinced that Irving Pichel would make a fitting Hyde, Paramount Pictures planned to star the middle-aged actor in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932). Mamoulian balked and insisted on the young and attractive light comedian Frederic March, fresh from his triumph in Laughter (1930). He remained adamant: “I said he can do it. I want him.” The rest is film history.
Mamoulian knew Lorre personally and was
fascinated by the very interesting combination which doesn’t happen frequently in life. The person had a totally different image in his profession from that in his life. “Now Peter Lorre,” everybody said, “Oh, well, he’s for these mystery stories and these strange people.” Actually Peter was a very cultured man, a very sensitive person, a very lovable man, and with a great sense of humor. He said to me that he was doing something in London and was in a very firstclass restaurant and everybody was staring at him. So mischievous as he was, he took one of those little paper things a drinking straw is wrapped in, compressed it, and when nobody was looking he stuck it in his nostril. Then he did something and everybody’s attention was on him. He just sat on the chair and started taking it out of his nose. He wanted to shock these people—they were so stiff. They threw him out and he was never allowed to come back.
At a dinner party given by the Lorres, Mamoulian watched the actor greet his guests, some of whom he had never met, with the face of a blithe cherub. He extended his right—apparently paralyzed—hand, clenched into a rigid claw. Mamoulian stifled a chuckle as the visitors recoiled, threw sidelong glances, and stammered in acute embarrassment before quietly melting away.
He didn’t recognize his friend on-screen. The clashing contradiction overwhelmed him: “My God, in this man, who played all these villains and all of these exaggerated, same type of murderer, there is so much innocence in him in life. He’s a child in a way, and yet with it there is a sophistication, and there is good will. None of that is being utilized.” Lorre’s obvious worldliness, set against his childlike captivation with gadgets—including a slot machine in his home—intrigued Mamoulian. “Most of the time he seemed to be enjoying life hugely,” he said. “He had a great kind of gusto when he felt happy. He was overflowing with feeling, and he was gay and happy, so that when I started Silk Stockings I thought he’d be perfect.”
Mamoulian cast Lorre as Brankov, a comically innocent and easily corrupted Russian commissar seduced by the pleasures of Paris, in Metro’s Silk Stockings (1957), a lavish musical remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939). It was produced by Arthur Freed and starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. On a very happy set, comrades Peter Lorre, Joseph Buloff, and Jules Munshin enjoyed an easy understanding open to a little playful recreation. Each of them subtly maneuvered to upstage the others, taking scenarist Leonard Gershe aside and suggesting business to increase their parts. Soon their little games escalated into major script changes. Mamoulian tells the story:
On every film that I’ve done they always play some huge practical joke on me and yet I’m very strict on the set. But I appreciate them. So I must tell you what Peter Lorre cooked up during Silk Stockings. I had just finished a scene with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse and the next morning I was to shoot the three comedians in a number that follows “Josephine,” where they’re told that they’re all called back and they think they’re going to Siberia.
So the three of them are sitting on this big set and they go through a dialogue scene and then they go into this dance-music-singing thing which goes, “When you’re sent to sweet Siberia, Sibeerie-errie-a … as long as you don’t need ice for cocktails, there’s plenty of it around” … all those horrors of Siberia. I was going to shoot that next morning and so I came on the set, a big ballroom set and had a camera on the crane, and I saw a whole crowd. Fred was there, Cyd Charisse was there. All the other members were there, every producer in the studio was there and the head of the studio, L.B. Mayer.
So I said to my assistant, “What’s going on here?” And he said, “Oh, they just thought they would like a couple of laughs as long as you have those three comedians.” I said, “Oh, come on. Don’t be silly. I never heard of such a thing.” I could understand when I was doing Cyd and her dance; a couple of producers snuck in to see her. She’s beautiful to look at, but don’t tell me they’re coming to see … My assistant says, “They
’re interested in seeing those three comedians.” So, okay, I let it go. I rehearsed for an hour and they were still there. And finally I said alright and they did the scene. They did the song and the dance.
Finally, I said, “Alright, we’ll make a take.” As they go into the number I hear, “When you’re working for Mamoulian, it’s like working for Napoleon …” and so on—a whole new lyric! Now when they started this, I said I’m going crazy, it can’t be! So I look at the people and they’re watching me instead of watching the comedians.
Well, it turned out that Peter Lorre got this idea about rewriting this number and doing it as a surprise on the set for me. So they told him, “Well, you can’t do that because it would take an hour—it’s a Technicolor film and that’s at least $5,000–10,000 cost to the studio.” So they went to the producer Arthur Freed and he said, “Well, I’m telling you I can’t approve this. You’ll have to go to Mr. Mayer.” So they went to Mr. Mayer and he approved it. So having approved it, he wanted to see just what he was paying $10,000 for, so they all came in to see it.
Mamoulian later discovered that Lorre and his compatriots had spent two weeks organizing the prank and writing the lyrics. Of course, they kept their plans a secret. At the end of filming, the trio presented a recording of the song and a framed copy of the text to Mamoulian. “I would almost bet that Peter engineered it,” he reflected twenty years later. “It was very much like him.”
Dance director Hermes Pan choreographed the “Too Bad (We Can’t Go Back to Moscow)” number with Munshin, Buloff, and Lorre. “I’m not a dancer,” Lorre honestly admitted to Pan at their first meeting. Although he was shuffled to the side in the more complicated dance routines, his ineptitude did not stem his enthusiasm to try something new. “He was sort of elated by doing these dances,” recalled the veteran choreographer. “He had a lot of inspirational things that he would suggest to make it funny. He said, ‘Okay, I’m going to hold on to the chair and I’ll do a kazatski.’13 And I said, ‘Great!’” Precariously balanced between table and chair, with a butter knife clenched between his teeth, Lorre executed his own version of the demanding Ukrainian dance. For nearly a minute, he pressed the movement, overtaxed yet obviously pleased with himself. “I don’t like to impose on people and try to make them do things they can’t do,” added Pan, “so he came up with these ideas and I think it was wonderful.”
Lorre shared a dressing room with his Russian comrades. He had little to do with the vivacious Munshin but was quickly drawn to the old-world charm of Joseph Buloff. After closing the day with a drink in their dressing room, Buloff often chauffeured Lorre to his home across the valley. As they drove along, he regaled Lorre with stories of the Jewish theater. Lorre listened and laughed, content to keep the conversation one-sided. Buloff probed, but his co-worker warded off intrusions into his personal life. A shadow would fall across his face, bringing the slow, silent, and restrained aspect of Lorre’s screen persona to mind. Buloff wondered if he simply hated the picture and his role. He only knew for certain that Lorre carried a secret that, after hours, plunged him into deep depression. Lorre volunteered no explanation until one evening, during their ride home, when he suddenly interrupted, “I am a very sick man.” Buloff did not understand or press him about it. It was a desperate little confession, completely out of character.
No one realized that Lorre was physically used up. It was a grand cover-up. He had become a chronic complainer, beset with everyday ailments, habitually rummaging through his bagful of medicines for instant remedies. According to Charisse, “he was taking a little something he shouldn’t have [most likely Cheracol, a codeine-based cough medicine] … and we saw little drops of it fall to the ground as he walked across the stage.” Some chalked him up as a hopeless hypochondriac. The actor’s fragile health and constant pillpopping did not slow him down (although he did injure his leg rehearsing one of the dance numbers). “During Silk Stockings he seemed full of joy and vigor,” said Mamoulian. “I never knew about his health because he was always sliding through like a kid, mischievous, but always serious. He was a fun, colorful guy, if you could get that out of him.” Lorre seemed so altogether content that he even faithfully stuck to the script. He did not grab the moment because it was freely given to him by a filmmaker who had engaged Peter Lorre to be himself.
“In his first big comedy role,” advertised the film’s trailer, the actor earned more money as a hoofer than he ever made as a homicidal maniac. He reported to work October 29, 1956, and checked out January 23, 1957, taking with him twenty-seven thousand dollars for fifty-eight days’ work. Lorre fully realized that Mamoulian had plucked him from the swamp, risking, in Hollywood’s view, a less commercial use of his talents. He applauded the bold move—it meant more to him than anyone knew. He felt renewed, anxious to arrest his slow deflation with further ventures into comedy.14
He got something else instead. There is a fine distinction between caricature—the nonsensical imitation of a characteristic style—and self-parody—a deliberate distortion of that style for comic effect. In many of his last roles, Lorre warily seesawed between the two, but when pushed off balance, he fell headlong into one, the other, or both. Once upon a time, the actor had chilled audiences with rampaging flights into the twisted brain. Now he played the clown. Directors, producers, studio executives, screenwriters, publicists, and casting agents all took part in making a mockery of the actor at a heavy cost to the man. “Peter didn’t want to be a standard character,” said Lester Salkow, his agent and business manager after 1956. “He was remorseful at the thought of the typecast. He didn’t want to be a caricature. He loved new facets and was saddened by the thought that there was limited use made of his talents.”
Lorre supposed he was no longer taken seriously as an actor. On talk shows, he sidestepped audience expectations by reminding them that he had been paid to play these roles: “I can do Japanese pretty well. It’s easy, but for no money, no Japanese…. I don’t think I’m very morbid for no money.” The actor occasionally leveled blame, shooting his barbs at nebulous targets—a mogul, a studio executive, the Front Office—but more often he dismissed the phenomenon with a shrug of his shoulders, as if to say, “That’s how the system works.” One friend chalked it up to a “European kind of fatalistic view.” He never groused about his lot or bored his co-workers with harangues about Hollywood’s misuse of his talents. “That would have been too common an opinion to even bother with,” voiced co-worker Keenan Wynn. “Peter would do whatever job you hired him for and he would do it well, but he knew it was shit.” The trend also found its counterpart in television, usually in comedyvariety shows. A frequent guest on The Red Skelton Show, “the perennial bad man Peter Lorre” most often turned up in comedy sketches that lampooned his popular screen image. In a 1959 show, he played a mad scientist anxious to recruit Clem Kadiddlehopper as a guinea pig for his experiments.
The Lorre image had become so crystallized that impressionists began to mimic his style and mannerisms. Before audiences well versed in Lorre’s lingo, they went goggle-eyed and rhythmically purred with faint malevolence. Impressionists, Lorre claimed—none too convincingly—gratified him. “I am without a question the most imitated man in nightclubs,” he marveled. “Once when I appeared on a Milton Berle Show there were 10 people who tried to tell me how to sound like Peter Lorre.” Actually, he loved to impersonate the impressionists impersonating him, and he claimed that by pinching his nose between his fingers, he could do a better “Peter Lorre” than anyone.
The actor no longer went “first class,” on-or offscreen. When he learned he owed more than four hundred dollars in accumulated dues to the Screen Actors Guild, Lorre addressed an apologetic note to former British stage and film actor Pat Somerset, the head of Membership Services, explaining that when he left for Europe in 1949, he had forgotten to withdraw his membership. “Let me assure you,” he wrote, “that my neglect at the time was due to a long siege of serious illness. I am not to [sic] well off at the
moment financially. Therefore I … would be grateful for an adjustment.”15 In her letters home, Annemarie complained of being habitually short of money. Holiday travel, she lamented, was out of reach. Peter’s philanthropic nature, a backlog of medical bills, and Annemarie’s growing dependence on alcohol, coupled with too little work and a reckless disregard for day-to-day money management, undid them financially.
Lorre’s private life became a closed book. Talking about his marriage upset him so much that when the subject was broached, he clammed up and quietly retreated to his dressing room. He drew from others the care and understanding he did not get at home. If, as his brother Andrew believed, Peter had married all of his wives after he had fallen out of love with them, then his marriage to Annemarie was indeed born under a cloud of duress. Nonetheless, their relationship appears to have held steady the first few years. In early 1956 Annemarie was again pregnant, renewing Peter’s long-standing hopes for a son. On June 6 she suffered a miscarriage—rearranging furniture, according to family history—and lost their boy and nearly her life in the resultant hemorrhaging.
“We have to thank God—that everything went so well,” Peter wrote Annemarie’s parents in Germany. “I can think of nothing else than gratitude that Annemarie is still alive and out of danger. It was close—very close. It was a question of minutes—but God did everything right, so he must love her very much.”
Peter’s letter, written in the wake of near catastrophe, belied the tone of their marriage. His failing relationship with Annemarie wore on him physically and emotionally. Peter’s “nerves shot up,” said Celia, along with his blood pressure, already elevated by years of chain-smoking. On December 8, 1956, she had “dinner at Peter’s. He is so tired and sad. He said to me: ‘I don’t like to go home. I won’t be abused.’” Whether Annemarie’s drinking fed her instability or stemmed from it is impossible to diagnose at this point. Publicly, she flaunted her status as Mrs. Peter Lorre, embarrassing her husband with her egotism and strident insensitivity. At home, she opened his mail. Like the press agent she claimed to have been, she regurgitated for public consumption tales of her husband’s mentorship with Freud and of his promising future as a doctor. “If the theater hadn’t entered his life,” bragged Annemarie, “Peter would probably be a famous psychoanalyst today.” Coming from her mouth, his dreams sounded ridiculous.
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