The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Nevertheless, Lorre seemed to have wound down, permanently. “Peter was very sick” during filming of The Raven, recalled Hazel Court. “He perspired all the time, and his eyes were always teary, but the moment the camera started to roll, there was no sign of being ill.” And, to the untrained eye, there were no signs of a cover-up. Friends believed that Lorre had held out against morphine, winning his final bout with addiction years earlier. Now, they supposed, he shot up with vitamins instead of narcotics. The pattern, however, was suspiciously reminiscent of his earlier drug abuse. On the set of Rawhide in 1960, Lorre had told director Ted Post that

  he wasn’t feeling well, that he had a huge headache and didn’t feel as if he could do the scene. I said, “I’ll jump to another scene while you rest up a bit, and we’ll see whether you feel better.” He said, “No, no. I’ll tell you what I’ll do … give me a few minutes, and I’ll be right back.” “Okay,” I said, “take whatever you need.” He came back about ten to fifteen minutes later and said, “I feel better.” Then the next day, the same thing happened again. So I got suspicious. And when he said, “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” I followed him. He had drugs—took a shot of heroin, or coke, or whatever it was he used.27 Then he vomited. I was watching him. Then I rushed back to work, and a few minutes later he came back and he said, “I feel better now” and he did the scene!

  AIP had sent Lorre and Karloff to New York City on a scheduled one-week circuit of RKO theaters to promote The Raven in January 1963. Until a blizzard paralyzed the city and forced the cancellation of the tour, the actors made three personal appearances daily. They entered through the front door, parted the sea of adoring fans, and mounted the stage one at a time. Around the middle of the afternoon, recalled Arthur Kennard, who headed the television department at the Lester Salkow Agency and accompanied the junket, Lorre would wind down. On one occasion, he even came close to falling off the stage. A physician was scheduled to arrive at selected theaters and administer an injection. “It was all very hush, hush, very private,” said Kennard, who stood guard and asked no questions (nor did Lorre offer any explanation). “When the doctor showed up, they would disappear in one of the backstage rooms or behind a drape. Nobody was to go near.”

  Several months later, Lorre met Wendy Sanford, a young, attractive, energetic CBS associate producer assigned to “Diamond Fever,” a Dupont Show of the Week episode in which the actor played a straight role as a jewel thief. During production, Lorre had difficulty remembering lines and suffered from lack of energy and physical coordination. After rehearsals, he retreated to his room at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan, where he rested and received his accustomed visit from a physician before he and Sanford sat down to dinner and a seven-to-eleven feeding of his lines.

  On Comedy of Terrors, he could not hide what everyone knew—that he was dying. Film historian Mark Thomas McGee, who visited the set as a young boy, remembered that “after every scene he would slump back into his chair and wheeze for several minutes.” When prop man Bob Burns introduced himself to Lorre as the guy “with his head,” a latex rubber “Peter Lorre” mask worn by stuntman Harvey for scenes requiring the actor to perform even modest physical feats, he replied, “Well, it’s a good thing, because I’m not well. I can’t really DO much in this film.”

  Lorre graciously agreed to inscribe a movie still for Burns from the Route 66 episode with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. Though his hand shook, his mood perked up: “Oh, THAT was a fun show. That was fun to do, getting together with Boris and all the guys.”

  “He wasn’t feeling well at all,” remembered Burns. “They had to work with him in the morning, and by the afternoon, he had to go home.”

  In a wood-splitting scene, Lorre drove an axe into a stump and nearly flung himself to the ground. Harvey Parry stepped in and donned the “head,” a prototype for generations of fashionably collectible life masks. Despite the false face and belly stuffing, the sprightly stuntman was not a convincing substitute for the ailing actor. Even keeping Parry in medium shots failed to feed the illusion. Toward the end of the film, Lorre and Joyce Jameson robustly danced round and round in a scene that could not be believably faked. After reshooting the number without a break, the exhausted actor nearly fainted. Tourneur did not read the signs. He pushed on, bringing Lorre to the verge of collapse. His costar saw the pain in his eyes and sensed the sorrow behind them. “I had a deep feeling for Peter as a suffering man, on an emotional parallel for different reasons,” said Jameson. “He was the martyr of the picture.”

  Lorre kept his sense of humor and took the wear and tear on his health in stride, comfortable in the knowledge that the AIP horror-comedies were his means to a financial end. “It was a romp that gave him money which he needed,” recalled Sanford. “I remember him saying, ‘I’m very happy that I had the opportunity to have a second career because it gives me the money to leave my daughter comfortable.’ I think he probably realized that he would not live to see her married. He seemed to be worried about her and not his wife. I don’t know whether he knew how ill he was.”

  10

  THE MASK BEHIND THE FACE

  I believe that somewhere within his soul everyone is an actor. Instinctively, we prefer to dream our life away in fantasy rather than to face the hard facts of reality. Dreaming, making a fanciful play out of your life, is so much more pleasant.

  —Peter Lorre

  We only saw the tip of the iceberg.

  —Wendy Sanford

  Facial expression,” wrote film critic Béla Balázs, “is the most subjective manifestation of man.” Lorre wore the contradiction of person and persona like so many masks, at times laying bare the inner man, at others obscuring him. Toward the end of his life, he tore away old disguises and created new ones, forever confusing the shadowy line between selves, not as an acting art, but as a survival skill. The face that had expressed the “multiplicity of the human soul” through the characters he portrayed on screen now betrayed his own tangled sensibilities. He reckoned his life in twos—horror and humor, art and commerce, illusion and reality, insider and outsider. Two was the common denominator, though on closer view the dichotomy shattered into a myriad of broken pieces. In a life gone to quiet extremes, the different Peter Lorres parted ways. What he said publicly and what he thought privately reflected a man in emotional flux, one who wasn’t sure where he had been or where he was going.

  His memory did not synchronize with historical events. The actor loved to give advice about young talents tempted by money, based not on his own experiences, but on his reworking of them, reordered into carefully weighed advantages and disadvantages. “It’s an amazing thing to be able to retain your integrity in this business of movie-making,” he had cautioned in 1955. “You do it with your left hand, so you can still be in the business for something good when it comes along. It’s like a doctor—he starts out to help humanity … but he’s soon working at it as a business. It would be a crazy thing to run away from home to be a face-maker and then not hold to the ideal.” Fashioning Brecht’s advice to fit the situation, Lorre counseled set designer Daniel Haller to “do what you can do well with your right hand and you’ll always be a success within your own self. Once you know yourself, you can always branch out.”

  The actor now looked back with passive detachment, ignoring the bonds that had held him for thirty years. Suddenly, liabilities had become assets. Being a personality, he intellectualized, is really a great compliment because it cannot be taught. Moreover, he took typecasting by the tail in a deliberate act of defiance: “There comes a time when you have to find the integrity to stand up and refuse to play certain kinds of roles. Of course, you have to allow yourself to be typed for a period of time. I have been typed five or six times in my life.” But “after a certain amount of time,” he explained, “I have to stop the whole thing. I have to turn down everything that comes my way and start something else.” More accurately, Hollywood had turned him down, limiting his options to stark survival. He
could not afford a strategic withdrawal or a planned hiatus to regroup. He had to keep going. “For a lazy man,” Lorre dissembled shortly before his death, “I work awfully hard.”

  Lorre said he wished more people were as content as he. The echoes of complacency resounded a false note sweetened by memory. On the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Assignment, he told interviewer Elwood Glover that after M and Crime and Punishment, he was box-office poison, which meant that “on top of a great artistic and critical success, no box office.” No one knew me, he explained, “so then I made up my mind right then and there that I’m going to go through the rough way and I took on that ‘Mr. Moto’ series.”

  It had not happened that way. Casting a myopic eye on a past with which he had not come to grips, Lorre focused on another reality, the one he imagined his life to be. Looking back, he had flown on automatic pilot, relying on his instincts to reach the right decisions, and had made courageous choices, where there were few to make. Time was running out. Putting a good public face on a private defeat, he maintained that his breaks still lay ahead of him. Resolving self and image meant rewriting the past and his part in it, not as a lie, but as a shelter for a vulnerable man who needed to make peace with himself. He never voiced regrets, made excuses, or laid blame, on either the moviemakers or himself. “People say if I had a chance to live my life over again,” he told Paul Zastupnevich, “I would do things differently. But you know, if I had not done what I’ve done, I would not be here today and I would not have worked with some of the wonderful people I’ve worked with.”

  By the end of his life, Lorre’s celebration of nonconformity had turned into a lament for the lost Hollywood. Recalling the “good old days” for interviewer Bob Thomas, he implied with sad irony that he belonged to the past. “They just don’t make drinkers the way they used to,” sighed Lorre. “I don’t want to sound eulogistic about those times, but dammit, they were great. Today isn’t so great. The drinking has slowed down. I don’t think it’s just age that has done it.”

  Lorre felt isolated and out of touch. With the eclipse of the studio star system, the stock repertories and the sense of community they fostered likewise faded. Hollywood may have stifled his creativity, his humor, his intelligence, and even his spirit, but it had given him a sense of belonging to a community of professional artists. “I guess I’m one of the last of my group around,” he regretted shortly before his death. “I got real mad when Humphrey Bogart died and Sydney Greenstreet passed on. I was mad because they left me alone.” He had become a relic of the waning institution that had invited him in and then locked him out. “The movies are no longer an industry,” he said. “After all, who ever heard of an industry that offered no loyalty to its employees? The studios offer none at all any more. Making movies used to be fun in the old days. It isn’t any longer. It’s a cold-hearted business.” Lorre now thought of himself as just a working actor, who, said Hal Kanter, “showed up, did his work—sometimes gave a little more—got his check and went home.”

  “I hate to call myself a star,” admitted Lorre. “I’d rather have other people call me a star.”

  Estranged from the present, Lorre clung to the past. “He loved to tell stories of when Hollywood was Hollywood,” said Frankie Avalon, “and particularly about Bogie and Warner Bros. He was kind of reliving that in his mind.” Lorre longed for the days of the journeyman, a time when filling the bill took preference over billing. “In Europe,” he told Morey Amsterdam, “an actor loves to act. You’ll take some of the biggest stars over there who will take a walk-on in another show just for the idea of continually working at their trade. The idea [is] that to become a good actor you only learn through experience, constantly working. And whether it’s a big part or a small one is not important, if it’s a good part.”

  Reminiscing often put him in mind of his theatrical roots. “Peter said that those days were especially fulfilling,” said Joyce Jameson. “To him, it was a good thing that they, as a group, had the courage to put on anti-Nazi theater. They were creating their own protest theater against the government.” Although he occasionally complained of being reminded of M, he was now more likely to bring it up. In 1963 he looked back: “First picture I had a starring role in was the first picture I ever made … called ‘M.’ It’s still running…. And it has one distinction I’m proud of. It’s in general release in Europe again, and is beating out every new picture that comes along.”

  Carrying the torch for his old friend Bogart, Lorre kept the fires of discontent burning with his continued offensive against the studio bureaucrats, the “kreeps” at the top. He had little cause for complaint at AIP, and his struggle remained primarily a symbolic one. Between takes on The Raven, the young daughter of William K. Everson, the distinguished film historian, pointed to a supporting player made up as a decaying corpse and asked, “Is that a good monster or a bad monster?”

  “Oh, it’s a BAD monster,” Lorre told the child. “There are NO good monsters at American-International.”

  He said what he thought; words didn’t slip out of his mouth. On promotional tours, which studios rarely asked of him, fulsome comments came hard. In 1960, when a pre-interviewer for Mike Wallace asked the actor, whom he described in his personal notes as a “playful, pixieish, rebellious gnome,” if he liked Scent of Mystery, Lorre “just looked sad, as if I had twisted his arm.” On the subject of actors, he bluntly stated, “People interest me more than facemakers do…. I don’t like most actors. They’re a breed unto themselves…. They’re all the same bores.”

  “I have very few friends among actors because I don’t like shop talk,” Lorre said several years later. “But I like discussing things. That’s one of the reasons I liked Bogey so much.” He “was my dearest friend, the only facemaker that I have ever known that I really was truly friends with, except for two people that you can’t call actors in a pure sense of the word. That’s Burl Ives … and Joe E. Lewis.” Lorre affectionately labeled them, along with Cedric Hardwicke (the only man who could tell theater anecdotes “without chasing [him] out of the window”), “an incongruous bunch of creeps.”

  The cloud of disconnection that brooded within Lorre condensed with Bogart’s lingering death in early 1957. Bogart’s life had become full after marrying Lauren Bacall. As husband and father, he settled down and comfortably eased into a domestic routine. In his free time, he sailed, therapy to stabilize his personality, as he put it. Bogart at home, like Bogart on-screen, knew who he was and what he believed in. Form followed content, and his image mellowed and matured with the passing years. Winning the Academy Award for Best Actor in The African Queen (1952) heightened Bogart’s awareness of the dignity of his profession. He had fought for—and won—recognition as an artist. “I think he was a terribly underrated actor,” said Lorre, “not as a star, he wasn’t underrated as such, but I think he was a much better actor than most people realized.” He felt that “whatever Bogie played you believed him, you believed his toughness, you believed every inch of what he did. If you can cover a person you play so well that you become that person, then you must be a great actor.”

  Lorre was happy for Bogart. No one, he felt, more richly deserved reward and recognition than his friend. But their paths, which once overlapped, had separated. Lorre’s waning film career, together with his marital and drug problems, had gradually distanced the two actors. Lorre’s name is missing from the roster of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, a band of patrons—including Bogart and Bacall—of Romanoff’s restaurant dedicated to “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence.”

  News of Bogart’s throat cancer rallied his devoted friend, whose admiration and respect never wavered. Several years after Bogart’s death, Lorre looked back with Mike Wallace:

  Toward the end of his life, when that terrible illness befell him, he turned into a great real hero and into the toughest man I have ever seen…. His aversion against drama as such was so great that he kept up the pretense of everyday life up until t
he very last day when he died. They used to prop the man into an elevator. He only weighed about ninety-five pounds at that time. They used to bring him downstairs and he received his friends, he had drinks with them, collapsed around seven o’clock and they carried him upstairs again. But he would never change his way of living and absolutely refused to put any drama into it. And it was the most touching experience and the most heartbreaking one I have ever gone through.

  Lorre never found what he was after. He didn’t care to admit it, even to himself, but his search had dead-ended in a bankrupt dream. Catharine Lorre sensed that this void haunted and hounded him to the grave. He believed in the no-questions-asked kind of friendship he enjoyed with Bogart and only a few others built on nuts-and-bolts professionalism. Bogart’s death removed Lorre one step farther from the past they had shared. “My dearest pal; I still feel the void,” he spoke out five years later.

  Five months earlier, Lorre had also lost Brecht. Celia’s diary entry for August 17, 1956, three days after the playwright’s death, records simply, “Brecht is dead.” Her understatement underscored the enormity of its implications for Lorre at this point in his life. Another door had shut, closing the opportunity for Lorre to redeem himself in Brecht’s eyes.

  In 1943 Lorre had walked over to Burl Ives at the Gjon Mili studio in New York and introduced himself: “I would like to shake hands with you. I’m Peter Lorre. You see, I dig the ballad.” The meeting sparked an instinctive friendship that was closer than brothers, or as Ives used to say, “a copious kind of relationship that I’ve had very few of.” Friends said they were cut from the same cloth. With Ives, Lorre gave in friendship a graceful charm and humor as good as he got in return.