The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Several years later, Ives was

  over at Peter’s one night and had to leave before anyone else. My beard at that time was a tawny color, like my hair. When I left, I went and put on my hat, which was a Borsalino, one of those fuzzy hats, and it was a tawny color. And my topcoat, sometimes called a camel’s hair, was also about the same color. So Peter walked with me to the door and I put on my coat and my hat. And, as he usually did, he put his arms around me and kissed me goodnight on each cheek, and said, “Good night, you summer rabbi.”

  Ives felt he was one of Lorre’s few friends to sit at the receiving end of his mind, what he termed his “essence of spirituality.” Said the singer: “Peter always had a melancholy something about him. I don’t think that he was ever a jolly, happy-go-lucky man. I think he was basically thoughtful and philosophic, and deep. He was a thinking person and concerned himself with much deeper realms of human ambitions, thoughts and desires, all human considerations, than the average person would have suspected. He was a very alive, but controlled man.”

  At one point, Ives considered abandoning his career and going into the restaurant business. “Of all the germs that came together,” said Lorre, intent on dissuading him, “we could have been so many different people. We are actors. We are different. Respect the things we are put here to do.” As “vehicles or wires” through which creative energy flows, he added, actors return the gift entrusted to them. That’s what sets them apart.

  During the last decade of Lorre’s life, Scandia Restaurant became a sort of surrogate home that passed for the Vienna coffeehouse of his youth. Ives recalled,

  We were at Scandia Restaurant one time, and that was after I had been in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and had made a small splash in the movie business…. And I had not played the guitar in some time. To whomever we were sitting with I said I thought I was going to tune up the guitar. In the meantime, the revolution in electronic sound had started. Whoever we were sitting with said, “Are you going to come back and sing ballads just like you did before? Have you ever considered studying the classical guitar and really doing more with the guitar instead of just playing the simple accompaniments which you play?” I said, “Yes, I’ve thought about it, but I don’t like to disturb something that’s working for me.” Peter interrupted and said, “Listen, you don’t argue with the way a man signs his name.”

  Next door to the restaurant on Sunset Boulevard sat Finlandia Baths, another favorite haunt that warmly recalled another time and place, where Lorre worked to sweat off the pounds put on by his beloved goulash, sauerkraut, and liver dumplings. There, at a party catered by Scandia, Lorre met a Bavarian waiter named Ludwig Veigel, whose formal wear—a black tie scotch-taped to his bare chest—delighted him. They struck up a friendship, based partly on nostalgia for the old ways but mainly on Lorre’s need for devoted friends: “Peter was a man who needed friends, but not friends for a good time, friends for a sad time. He wanted to empty his heart out. He wanted to talk about his problems.” Cloistered in the dark, old-world milieu of Scandia, Lorre hid from view. “Peter was actually an introvert,” explained Veigel. “He was very shy. He loved his friends very dearly, but he wasn’t outgoing to strangers. When someone would come in and say, ‘Are you Peter Lorre?’ he would say no.”

  One time Veigel invited Lorre for drinks. They listened to recordings of Viennese Volkslieder, most memorably a song about a carriage driver whose forty-year-old horse dies and cannot be buried. The actor suddenly started crying, tears “rolling down his face,” said Veigel.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Lorre. “Don’t you like the music?”

  “Peter, I heard it before,” replied Veigel. “I cried once. I don’t have to cry again, do I?”

  “O.k., fine,” conceded Lorre, “then it’s my cry.”

  Lorre’s disaffection with the film industry pressed him to seek out those who also remembered an earlier era, journeymen actors such as Cedric Hardwicke and Burl Ives. Moviemaking had grown too flashy, as he used to say; the dream factory had become a circus. He abhorred the phoniness and narcissism nurtured in the new Hollywood. Sitting by himself, he would sometimes go “into a shell,” said Veigel. “He became a strange Peter Lorre, almost a child who hated his mother or father. He withdrew completely. He could change his image so much … not silent, but sphinx-like; he didn’t look right, he didn’t look left, just sat there…. But you could almost see the transfiguration of his mind to his body…. Either he was oblivious to the fact that this was going on or he was so hurt that he was practically bleeding inside.”

  “Don’t you think I would be more typical,” Lorre asked Harper Goff during the making of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, “sitting beside a couch and you laying down on it than if I was trying to be an actor?” He told people that he had studied in Vienna to become a psychoanalyst, and from time to time even added that he had been a student of Sigmund Freud. “Peter seemed to be fully sold on the idea that he had trained to do that sort of work,” continued Goff, “and that acting was a desperate second choice in his heart.”1 The talk signified his estrangement from the acting life, but he repeated it sincerely and people were convinced.

  “I think we respected each other because both of us had the same frustrations,” explained director Joseph Pevney. “Secretly we had the scientific bent. The theater was for both of us, I believe, a form of compensation.”

  Lorre did not merely play at his avocation, but worked at it. “In The Big Circus,” said Paul Zastupnevich, “Peter played with a chap that had gotten extremely nervous. He was about to blow his lines and Peter took him aside unbeknownst to anyone: ‘Well, you know, there is nothing to it. The reason that you are blowing it is because you are hanging yourself up on a word. Why don’t you transpose?’ So he took one thought and transposed it to the front and put the other to the back and said, ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ And the guy went right through the sequence without fluffing. But Peter didn’t like people to know that he could be helpful.”

  In Three Strangers, the script called for Sydney Greenstreet to hurl Geraldine Fitzgerald against a wall. Naturally apprehensive about managing the physical maneuver without a stuntwoman, she confided in Lorre. To calm her fears, he told her he had once been with a circus: “He said that when the tumblers throw each other, they always go and place themselves in the position in which they wish to end up. So he suggested that I go and position myself against the wall in the exact spot where the cameraman wanted me to end up. Sure enough, when Sydney Greenstreet threw me through the air, I did land on the right spot!”

  Lorre reached out to help the inexperienced and insecure June Vincent on the set of Black Angel. “He had a scene in which he had to hurt me,” she said. “And we did it a couple of times, and I was not a good enough actress to come across with it correctly. He whispered in my ear, ‘Now, listen, you think about something else this time. I’m really going to hurt you.’ And he did! He didn’t hurt me badly, but he physically hurt me enough so that I reacted exactly the way I should. And then I realized what he had done.”

  Lorre also helped Morey Amsterdam in May 1945 while performing his house act at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Amsterdam, “San Francisco’s own comedian,” emceed the show, which included Lorre, billed as “that loveable Boogieman,” the dancing Albins, the roller-skating Three Flames, and Irene Manning. When Amsterdam herniated himself on stage, the house doctor told him to put his feet up and rest for a few hours until the swelling went down. Lorre watched quietly. After the doctor left, he told Amsterdam he had studied medicine in Germany and urged him to look after the injury immediately. An ambulance rushed the comedian to the hospital, where another physician confirmed that the hernia might have strangulated and killed him.

  Lorre also occasionally turned his percipience to his own advantage. In August 1962 the actor accompanied co-workers Fabian and Chester the chimp on a promotional tour for Irwin Allen’s Five Weeks in a Balloon. If it were not for Chester, Lorr
e confided to one reporter, he would be having a good time. After the chimp “had an accident” on a publicist in Denver, Lorre tried to smooth things over by telling her that it was good luck. “Good luck!” she yelled. “With a monkey?” “Especially a monkey,” he answered knowingly.

  Publicly, most people saw the same Peter Lorre, a man who role-played a give-and-take game with his screen image, becoming both perpetrator and victim of his typecast. Stretching out his hands and begging for acceptance, if not as the person, then as the persona, he had come to feed on welcome scraps of affection. The first time Wendy Sanford arrived at the Warwick Hotel and called up from the lobby, Lorre joked into the phone, “Tell those undertakers to send you right up.” Such cracks readily slipped out; it had become part of the act. In the spotlight, Lorre quickly slipped into his movie persona and became the “Peter Lorre” audiences wanted him to be.

  On television comedy-variety shows, Lorre played both sides of the net with professional agility. In 1963 Jack Benny introduced the actor as “one of the most frightening, ruthless, cold-blooded and meanest individuals of all time.” Lorre just looked sad and voiced his concern that audiences would misunderstand him. This set up another introduction, one he had written for himself, as “one of the sweetest men in show business, a man whose emotional sensitivities are touched equally by the cry of a lost child, the chirp of a wounded sparrow, or the silent protest of a crushed petunia. That’s the way I really am.” He later sings an old-time favorite: “I want a girl, just like the girl that murdered dear old dad. She was a ghoul, the only ghoul, that daddy ever had.” When Benny stops him, Lorre pulls out a stiletto as long as his arm.

  Hollywood’s teaming of so-called “horror” personalities soon trickled down to TV. The small-screen world of compressed story lines and commercial breaks cashed in on the instant recognition of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, and Peter Lorre, who crisscrossed the two mediums with ease. In Route 66’s “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” in which “some of the creepiest characters who ever chilled the marrows of old-time horror movie fans will come to life again,” Lorre, Chaney, and Karloff were asked to go one better—to play themselves. The three meet incognito at a convention of executive secretaries to test various disguises they intend to use on a forthcoming television series. Lorre and Chaney want to stick with the “old, time-tested monsters,” but Karloff insisted on trying “a new, modern approach to horror.” The studio promised that “Karloff will re-create his legendary role as Frankenstein’s frightening monster, and Chaney will do a trio of terrifying characters—the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Wolf Man and the Mummy. Lorre will supply his inimitable brand of horror sans makeup.” In this case, “sans makeup” meant top hat and cape, a costume ridiculously out of character with his bogeyman image. The actor did better kidding his image than submitting to it. When a hotel clerk tells him he bears a striking resemblance to Peter Lorre, he replies, “That’s pretty insulting, isn’t it?”

  Andrew Lorre knew just how his brother felt: “There was a strong family resemblance in appearance and voice, even our father never knew which one of us called. Often I was told that I talked ‘just like Peter Lorre,’ to which my reply was, ‘Yes, but he is getting paid for it.’ Twice, once in Amsterdam and again in Australia, I was mobbed by reporters who mistook me for him.”

  Wherever he dined, Lorre visited the kitchen, chatted with the chef, and came back with a butcher knife, a souvenir of his visit. It was an innocent hobby, but the sight of the knife-wielding actor amply reinforced his popular screen persona as a homicidal maniac. The actor assumed his on-screen guise even when denying that he was “Peter Lorre.” One day he and friend and attorney Robert Shutan dined out. A woman nervously passed by their table, turned and walked by again.

  “Aren’t you Peter Lorre, the actor?” she cautiously asked.

  Lorre stood up, his eyes swelled, and his napkin hit the table. Mock menace seeped into his voice. “Do you know what a scoundrel he is?” fumed the actor. “You just can’t go around telling people that.” Embarrassed, she apologized and slipped away.

  Lorre likewise fed and fell behind his sardonic screen image with the press as well, not as an alibi to excuse his unrealized potential, but as a refuge from his own vulnerability. Although he occasionally complained of being called “Mr. Murder” and wished that people would stop reminding him of M, more often he wouldn’t let them forget. “In my first picture (M) I was a child killer,” he explained to one interviewer. “You can’t be worse than that. Since then, I’ve graduated to grownups.” Giving vent to the one-sided love affair that arose between him and Chester the chimp, Lorre drolly groused, “I have no feeling whatsoever for him, but he is crazy about me. All degenerates are.”

  In an article titled, “The Peter Lorre Nobody Knows,” a journalist for the New York Mirror recounted a conversation with the actor: “But he didn’t want to talk about pictures. ‘What are you going to do when young men come calling on your daughter?’ he hissed. I said I reckoned I’d open the door real polite-like and ask them in. He shook his head from side to side. His eyes went glassy, the famous sneer-smile twisted his cruel mouth and he said, dreamily, ‘No. No, I won’t do that. I think I’ll just kill them.’ He savored the idea. As I tiptoed out he was lost in thought. I could read those thoughts … ‘No guns, too noisy … stab a few perhaps … but poison is best … it hurts the most …’” “I think he hid behind that a lot,” explained Sanford.

  He had fun with his image and used it, putting on the Peter Lorre voice because he knew that it would amuse them, but he did it tongue-in-cheek…. When he was hurt or disappointed he would go into his Peter Lorre song and dance, saying, “This is the Peter Lorre you want, so okay, I’ll give it to you.” He seemed to feel that it was expected of him. And at those times I don’t think that he wanted people to see that he was a caring, charming, lovable guy. He felt that the other was more interesting and more fun for them, so he danced to the piper.

  When working with young directors, he would ask, in a telling sort of way, “What you want me to be is Peter Lorre, don’t you?” He wanted to give of himself, his warmth, his feeling and his fellowship, but he feared it wasn’t enough, that he wasn’t enough. The public, he believed, expected more of him. “I’ve played mostly bad men—killers—but the audience loves me,” Lorre liked to point out. “You know, I can get away with murder.”

  Being “Peter Lorre” did have its rewards, not the least of which, he joked, was not losing a part to William Holden. During production of “Diamond Fever,” cast members attended a screening of M at a downtown art theater and came back with glowing reports. Lorre thrived on this adulation. It validated his self-image as a star, maintaining his celebrity status in full regalia, as if the wave of success had never set him down. When he walked into restaurants, a parade of security men and newfound friends trailed behind his recognizable face and portly frame. “I had never seen such an outpouring of affection and admiration,” said Sanford. “These were cab drivers and people in restaurants, not just fans, but people who felt a personal connection. Peter had a talent for getting to people, for getting to the core. I mentioned it to him, that this had never happened to me before with anyone else I’d been with and he said, yes, he felt that too, and that he cared about them.” Lorre made the people around him feel important, not least of all by remembering their names. In his company, they also became personalities in their own right.

  Playing the philanthropist also became part of the treatment. As soon as the plane landed in New York City for The Raven’s promotional tour in 1963, Lorre asked Arthur Kennard to get him a roll of five-dollar bills. He liberally disbursed the cash in tips, dropping twenty-five dollars before he even stepped inside the Hampshire Hotel. Every time the actor went up or down the elevator, he tipped the operator five dollars. Soon, the hotel employees fought to serve him.

  His closest friends during these last few years described him as a shy, sensitive man who needed recogn
ition. He either occupied center stage or faded into the background, as conspicuous one moment as he was inconspicuous the next. “If autograph people came up to him,” noted Zastupnevich, “he couldn’t understand why they wanted his autograph. He would say, ‘Well, I’m not that important. I’m not that important now.’” Lorre told his pharmacist that he really didn’t need his regular dose of cherry-flavored Cheracol, a codeine-based cough medicine, adding, “I come here because you’re the only one left who asks for my autograph.”

  Screenwriter Edwin Blum suggested that although Lorre frequented the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, he didn’t quite fit in with

  the gang. It was as if we all took him in because somehow, in a way we didn’t understand, we felt sorry for him. He wasn’t asking to be pitied or taken on because we felt sorry. Had he known that, he would have walked right out. But I, at least, sensed in him some unknown tragedy in his youth—a Kafka-like tragedy. It was as if the monstrous de-personalized forces of Central Europe had sought in a mechanistic way to turn him into an anonymity. And, to conclude my surmise, I really do believe he became the Lorre of “M” as an attempt to escape that anonymity. It was as if he sensed that such anonymity can only result in the death of the living spirit—or in a paranoid response. Thus, in an intuitive creative act, he brought forth the Lorre who still looms before us as the archetype—the expressionist archetype—of the psychotic killer.

  Caught between the present and the reinvented past, Lorre had lost his way. Asked what his reaction was to seeing himself on-screen, he once replied, “I look at the man before me and wonder where I’ve seen him!” Every person is three people: the person people say we are, the person we think we are, and the person we really are. With Wendy Sanford, Peter Lorre also became a fourth, the person he wanted to be, someone who succeeded where he had failed. He cast himself as a Brechtian hero cut from Warner Bros. stock. “He trusted me enough to talk about his life,” she said, “and about things that had been important to him, even though at times obviously he had fantasized about them.” In her company, he recast himself in the role of activist-agent. When Hitler came to power, he told her, he had two strikes against him; first, he had politically opposed the new regime, and second, he was Jewish. After he had fled Berlin and thrown in with fellow exiles in Paris, he secretly joined an underground movement: