The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  “Cast as a villain, he plays his roles for comedy,” wrote Rose Pelswick, of the New York Journal-American, who interviewed Lorre in September 1962. “Given a comic part, he injects a serious note into the goings-on … because that, as he puts it, ‘is what makes the character human.’”

  “Peter took a part and changed it so that it fit him better,” said Price. Careening between the sets and story framework, Lorre amplified the comic possibilities of his character, bringing, in critic James Powers’s words, an “elfin Thurber touch to the murderous tale.” In a tasting contest at a wine sellers’ convention, Lorre and Price square off, one as a rank tosspot, the other as a preening sissy. “There was so much hamming in the scene,” added Matheson. “It came out of them.” Coached by a professional wine tester, Price found humor in the elaborate, often extravagant, ritual of wine tasting. He sniffed the bouquet, studiously swished and swallowed, and then robustly inhaled, releasing the aroma, while Lorre just guzzled, belched, and slurred, “It’s very good!”

  Knowing that Lorre and Price had been cast in the principal roles, Richard Matheson tailored parts to players, unconsciously figuring on “Peter’s mad background” to sharpen the comic edge of Tales of Terror. When Herringbone discovers his wife is having an affair with Luchresi, he returns home in time to see them passionately bid adieu after an evening’s tryst. Standing in the shadows, Lorre composed his face “into a mask of deadly containment,” following Matheson’s script note. The screenwriter also gave Lorre the lines, “Oh. Oh. I’ll strangle her. I’ll break her neck. I’ll cut off her head. I’ll dismember her. I’ll—I’ll—do something nasty.” But they are not in the film. Sensitive to the suggestion of caricature, the actor possibly balked at saying them. Other lines in subsequent Matheson horror-comedies featuring Lorre are also missing. What lay behind such omissions is difficult to say. Perhaps, as Price contended, the actor thought that he could write better lines for himself than Matheson could. For whatever reason, his dialogue adjustments carried a kind of Lorre logic. Mixing malevolent rage with puckish humor, he seemed bent on portraying Herringbone as an irascible drunk rather than a cold-blooded murderer.

  Despite the pleasure he took in his work, co-workers noticed that Lorre walked and talked more slowly. He fatigued easily and at times his control of the acting process faltered. With his health giving way under a shell of weight, friends—and doctors—chided, scolded, cajoled, and teased, but failed to stem his appetite for fattening treats or stimulate his desire for nutritious ones. (“I don’t eat that grass,” he chastised waiters who served him salads. “I’m not a cow.”) Protests duly noted, he sipped a forbidden glass of wine at lunch and defiantly ate foods prohibited by his doctor. Herb Meadow had noted Lorre’s ungovernable eating habits during the filming of “The Left Fist of David”:

  He ate everything. He gorged on everything. There was a contest between him and Tommy Gomez, as to which one could become more vast, more round, or gorge more at lunch. We were on location and being catered by Brittingham’s, so the lunches were rather on the posh side. Lorre and Gomez would load their dishes—these were the very large service plates—until they were brimming over, go off and sit down and start pushing this stuff down their gullets, and then to everybody’s horror, because after a while it passed the point of a joke, they would go back and have their plates filled again.

  “I think it was Gomez,” continued Meadow, “who warned him against sweets, Gomez who was addicted to them himself, and Peter said something to the effect that it would take more than that to sweeten his nature, but he was trying, which was a funny little confession.”

  Lorre typically made light of comments about his size: “I’m very little, but I’m solid.” And so did others. When he mentioned his upcoming appearance in Five Weeks in a Balloon on Tell It to Groucho in May 1962, the acerbic comedian jibed, “And are you playing the part of the balloon?” Posing what he cautioned was “a rather rude question” in a 1960 interview, Mike Wallace pointed out that Lorre seemed to have gained maybe twenty-five, thirty pounds. “Since the death of Sydney Greenstreet,” the actor retorted, diffusing the hurt with humor, “I have to make the weight of both of us.” In his in-your-face style, Wallace persevered: “You have put on considerable weight. Why?”

  “I feel good this way or that way,” explained Lorre. “It doesn’t bother me…. Right at this moment I am going to take it off again, because that feels good.”

  Privately, however, he dropped his carefree attitude about his weight and revealed his concern. Over a bottle of Coca-Cola on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, he assured actress Blandine Ebinger, the wife of composer Friedrich Hollaender, that he would improve his health. “I have to,” he said. “For all who love me. Also for my child.” But the pounds stayed on.

  “Do I look like that?” Lorre cracked when stuntman Harvey Parry came on to the set of The Comedy of Terrors (1964) wearing a large pad around his middle. “Yes, Peter,” he answered, “you’re pretty fat.”

  He now avoided all forms of exercise and scoffed at those who did not. Lorre told Hal Kanter that he had once gone to the top of a mountain in Switzerland, where he had met an old Jewish man.

  “How long have you worked up here?” Peter asked him.

  He said, “About forty years.”

  “Well, do you ever go skiing down the mountain?”

  “Skiing, certainly not, that’s goyishe nachas [Gentile happiness or non-Jewish joy]. Only Gentiles are happy skiing.”

  Peter thought that was absolutely wonderful, because he shared the same view. Only Gentiles are stupid enough to enjoy rushing down a mountain on two pieces of wood.

  By his middle fifties, Lorre’s poor health had begun to impose a new set of constraints on his private as well as his professional life. The accident-prone actor became increasingly susceptible to injury, incurring more than his share of mishaps. In May 1963 he even suffered a bloody nose when he lost control of his car on Sunset Boulevard and struck a parked truck.

  With the renewed interest in Brecht in the early 1960s, the actor received invitations to present what he described as programs on the playwright. Easily the most successful of these was “Brecht on Brecht: An Improvisation,” a staged reading of “his poems, songs, ballads, memories, observations, questions and answers,” arranged by George Tabori and presented by the Greater New York Chapter of the American National Theatre and Academy at the Theatre de Lys in 1961. Asked to appear with Lotte Lenya, Viveca Lindfors, Dane Clark, and others, Lorre declined on the grounds that Brecht had not yet been satisfactorily translated: “For instance, the term ‘Epic Theater,’ which is used to describe his plays. Brecht would never call what he was doing ‘Epic.’ But in being translated from the German its meaning was lost.” Lorre’s excuses were academic. His poor health simply got in the way. While the indomitable Lenya belted out “Pirate Jenny” in “Brecht on Brecht,” Lorre was no match for the rigors of live stage.

  His most attractive offer came from University of Southern California theater professor Andrew Doe, who approached the actor about collaborating on a student production of Mann ist Mann. Lorre responded warily, cautioning that he would open up about Brecht, but only in an academic setting. Regrettably, it never worked out.

  Like Brecht, who “had a wonderful habit with girlfriends, of maintaining their allegiance after the essential union was over,” Lorre still enjoyed the loyalty of his first two wives. Indeed, his relationships with Celia and Karen proved far more amicable than his marriage to Annemarie. His friendship with the first and only Mrs. Peter Lorre, as she came to think of herself, remained a constant in his life, as immutable as her devotion to him. Hardly a day went by that Peter did not see or talk with her. Celia chronicled the overlapping of their lives in her diaries, following his career as closely as her own. Using his connections, he helped her land acting jobs and occasionally coached her with her parts. Sometimes he even accompanied her to the television studio, where he offered moral support to the actress,
who was ill at ease performing before a live camera. After Peter and Annemarie lost their baby in 1956, he confessed to Celia, “Now I’m doing better because I can talk with you. It’s good that you’re there.” Celia dined at the Lorres’ several nights a week. She babysat Catharine and cared for Peter in many ways as well. Knowing that roles didn’t come so often to older actresses—Lovsky was in her sixties—he regularly slipped five dollars into her hand. Occasionally, she returned the favor. Believing that an extended family that votes together stays together, Celia proudly recorded in her diary, “We voted—for Adlai Stevenson of course—and then went to Peter’s house. I got $3.50 from Annemarie.” Among her Christmas gifts Lorre stuck a card that summed up his feelings: “Stay as sweet as you are. Peter.”

  All things considered, Lorre’s ex-wives got along famously. Celia’s diaries for these years reinforce the impression that her social contact stretched barely beyond the circle of her husband’s wives. When not at Peter and Annemarie’s, Celia often kept company with Karen, with whom she lunched and attended premieres. Karen even helped Celia study her lines and nursed her when she was sick. Strapped for money, Karen sold Celia her mink coat on the installment plan. One evening Celia and Karen were having dinner at a Beverly Hills delicatessen when Peter, Annemarie, and baby Catharine unexpectedly dropped in and joined them. Celia reported that “Annemarie was very gracious to Karen, and Peter for [the] first time in six years looked her in the eyes and gave her his hand.”

  When Peter spoke of Karen, his eyes lit up and his tone changed. People came away with the feeling that she had been the love of his life and that he deeply regretted the marriage had not lasted. Nonetheless, it was Celia’s exalted position in the Lorre family that nettled Annemarie. She sent his first wife packing, though not for long. While Celia simply stayed away until the storm blew over, Peter found escape in cruising Hollywood in his Buick sedan—driven by a friend—and racing Cadillacs.

  When Annemarie’s psychiatrist, or as Lorre put it, “opposing counsel,” took her side, the lines were drawn; they separated on October 15, 1962. Being apart from his wife was bearable, even preferable, but he missed his nine-year-old daughter and feared for her health. With Annemarie’s alcoholism and Catharine’s diabetes, he rightly worried that his estranged wife would not care for her properly. Lorre moved out of the rented home on Rodeo Drive and into a small, modestly furnished one-bedroom apartment at the rear of a large red brick building at 7655 Hollywood Boulevard, with a private entrance off Stanley Street. He decorated it with small American antiques, colonial glass, and photos and relics of his years on the Berlin stage. Only minutes away, Celia lived on Crescent Heights just above Sunset Boulevard. Here, Lorre found peace and quiet, and much needed respite from Annemarie. He also became socially reclusive. “Peter was very closed mouth, very closed in,” observed Arthur Kennard, who headed the television department at Lester Salkow’s agency. “If you wanted to see him, you met him somewhere. As a matter of fact, I think Peter maybe came to the office once.”

  By his own account, Lorre turned down invitations “all over the place.” It didn’t have anything special to do with Hollywood, he told Helen O’Connell. He just thought that all parties were a bore. In Hollywood, he actually enjoyed a “bigger” freedom to just say no: “I am completely independent and there I live my life in my house, have a few friends come over. We talk a little, or go to their house … and somehow you have a sort of more lebensraum [living space], as Mr. Hitler used to say. Maybe he meant California, I don’t know. But, something they also say, it gets in your blood.”

  Around this time, Hollywood cemented its connection with a Star—located at 6619 Hollywood Boulevard—on its legendary Walk of Fame. Peter Lorre was among the first of 1,558 artists to receive such recognition of his contribution to motion pictures by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which spread the honors over a period of sixteen months, beginning with ground-breaking ceremonies on February 8, 1960.

  Away from the studio, Lorre read and slept away the stillness between guest spots. At close hand were his German-language editions of Brecht and Poe. “He read from one to three books daily,” noted Catharine, “with a wide range—everything from Dostoevsky and psychology handbooks to Agatha Christie. I think a character my father greatly identified with was Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. The dialogue, accent, pattern of thinking were much like him. Poirot never took anything at face value. He used, as my father would say, ‘the little gray cells.’ It was the perfect character because of the sense of drama and comedy.”

  Here a few of his closest friends came to visit him, to chew over film plans or simply offer companionship to the obviously lonely actor. Harvey Parry, who had stunted for Lorre since the Moto days at Fox, stopped by to play cards and have a drink: “I felt that I was doing him some good by going over and talking with him. He’d tell me some of his troubles, personal things … people hurt his feelings. He was a sensitive little guy, but never to the point where he’d get revengeful.” Along with his maid, Beatrice Lane, a surrogate mother who saw to it that he ate properly, Lorre’s friends took a hand in looking after him. Celia made sure his daily needs were being met. Robert Shutan slipped him a few dollars and discharged some of his overdue debts. Fritz Lang even popped in and prepared lunch for him. The living legend and the faded film star met in a setting as remote from Berlin’s frenzied heyday and their triumphs in the German cinema as anyone could conceive. In a dusty gray film can rested the 35mm nitrate print of Der Verlorene, which Lorre had brought from Germany, forgotten by its director, who clung to his dream of again forming his own independent production team. No one asked to see the film—and no one did see it—until its American release in 1983.

  On August 15, 1963, Annemarie filed for divorce, charging her husband with extreme cruelty and wrongfully inflicting upon her grievous mental suffering. The formal complaint was nothing less than a written version of her verbal harangues. She stated that Lorre rarely made less than $70,000 per year, a gross exaggeration of his last lean ten years, “all of which sums he has irresponsibly wasted and squandered or secreted,” and also charged him with failing to provide adequate financial support for her and Catharine. Annemarie accused her husband of sitting on a valuable asset, “Lady Macbeth of the Yards”—hardly a salable property at that point—saying that he refused to produce or capitalize on it. The Los Angeles Times reported that Annemarie asked for $1,150 monthly in temporary alimony and $525 for child support.23 The formal complaint makes no reference to any figures, however, and Shutan did not recall money sums being mentioned. For the time being, Lorre simply continued to pay the bills, as best he could.24

  After the successful tempering of horror with humor in Tales of Terror, Lester Salkow, who also represented Vincent Price and Boris Karloff, negotiated “multiple deals” binding the actors to back-to-back horror-comedies at AIP. “There was always talk of more with the four actors in that genre,” said Salkow, “but, as it was, we just planned them two at a time.” Lorre’s exclusive contract with American International Pictures prohibited him from performing in any other pictures that fell into the categories of horror, terror, or science fiction, or in films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

  In January 1962 AIP had signed Richard Matheson to write two costarring vehicles for Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, the first a full-length horrorcomedy based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” and the second an untitled comedy. This suited Matheson, who admitted never having any particular interest in the gothic storyteller. In fact, the prospect of adapting another of the author’s stygian tales distressed him. Corman likewise winced, uneasy with the thought of repeating himself. “It was tongue-in-cheek from the very beginning,” admitted Matheson. From the eighteen six-line stanzas of the poem lamenting the lost Lenore, he created a screenplay that spoofed itself and the Poe series altogether, behaving every bit like a mischievous child mocking its overweening parents. By now, Lorre’s appearance in horror-comedies had come to ou
tnumber his appearances in the genre they parodied.

  Again, the studio played it straight, taking audiences by surprise. Publicity went all out, overplaying its hand with horror hype that invited moviegoers to “step through the darkness, along touchstones of terror with the raven tapping evermore.” Lending the picture far more literary merit than it deserved, Lorre even maintained that the Poe team worked the author’s satirical sense of humor and dead wit into the picture. Although AIP claimed to have brought to the screen “the basic element of Poe’s great work,” The Raven bore almost no resemblance to its namesake. The publicity department capitalized on Price, Karloff, and Lorre’s first screen collaboration and fostered the idea that their collective power to horrify outweighed their individual efforts: “Now it lives on the giant motion picture screen in color and Panavision, starring the trio that make up the great TRIUMVIRATE OF TERROR—Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff—greater than Dracula, Werewolf and Frankenstein together. Come on an adventure into monstrous terror, as gruesome, as great as the genius who created it.” A promotional recording for the film included Lorre reading portions of the poem, with Karloff telling moviegoers that “this is a sample of what happens in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ … before the picture ends, I guarantee your blood will run cold…. Have I disturbed you? Oh, I didn’t mean to. I want you to see Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. You see, I share in the box office receipts.”

  In The Raven, Lorre appeared as a rain-soaked raven that regains his human form in the gnomish figure of Dr. Bedlo, a medieval sorcerer, only to be reduced to a pool of raspberry jam before once more changing into a bird. After reading the script and agreeing that it made no sense, Price, Lorre, and Karloff wrote some additional jokes and brought them to Corman. “Roger just let the thing roll,” said costar Hazel Court. “He let the three of them have a go.” To set the mood, Price, who later said he played the role of Dr. Craven with his tongue in both cheeks, walked across his study, bumping his head on the end of a telescope, tipping off the audience right away.