The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Up to two days before his death, Lorre worked closely with Daniel Haller on the script for a black comedy titled It’s Alive. Lorre would have been featured as a desert snake farmer, whose wife (Elsa Lanchester) evolved into a serpent in the course of the story. “It was a psycho picture,” said Haller, “but more of a comedy. Peter was going to be a pleasant murderer.”3 AIP had given the go-ahead for the project, which had only reached the story-outline stage when the actor died. Had the film been made, it would have marked Haller’s directorial debut and would have given Lorre his second credit as screenwriter.

  During this time, Lorre and Price’s friend Charles Bennett also wrote a screenplay capturing a personal side of their private lives,

  in which Peter would have played a very gentle, very kind, deeply devout old Spanish priest … combating the lovely, suave “villainy” of Vincent Price. It never crossed my mind (nor anyone else’s) that Peter would come over as a heavy; his gentle amiability would have come through one thousand percent. A lovely kindly priest.

  In any case, the movie wasn’t made … mainly because Vincent decided, perhaps rightly but I think sadly, that his image as a “heavy” had to be changed…. But Peter would have been wonderful as this wily old priest, with a sense of humor worthy of his devotion…. If the movie is ever made, I will find it hard to find as gloriously simple, amusing [an] actor who could take Peter’s place.

  Lorre also voiced definite plans for two independent films, a fantasy and a drama: “To be really independent, you must work by yourself from scratch, not imitate a major company on a lower budget.” Nor had he apparently given up on filming Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. “It is great,” lauded Lorre, “but they have never interpreted it right.”

  Long after Lorre believed his radio career was dead and buried, a small and short-lived company set up shop at General Service Studios in Hollywood and proclaimed a new Golden Age of the airwaves. Master Artists Corporation promised to put “the world’s most engaging personalities” within range of local radio stations with a series called “Star-Essence.” Concepts scaled to published rates included 260 five-and ten-minute radio shows: “Liberace on Love,” Mel Torme’s “Words on Music,” Jim Rodgers’s “Tales of a Balladeer,” and a “BONANZA of superb SUSPENSE and TERROR created by Mr. Peter Lorre’s ‘Treasury of Terror!’” Shows for Vincent Price, Hayley Mills, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke were also in preparation. To promote the future of radio as a “prime entertainment,” MAC distributed sample shows with commercial breaks on 45 rpm long-playing records. Lorre narrated a title-less tale about a police inspector whose unforgiving ex-girlfriend sends him amputated fingers he believes to be her own. “Star-Essence” did not catch on, fading out before it had time to shine.

  On Lorre’s desk also lay the script for 20th Century–Fox’s John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1965), a fatuous comedy that would have cast the actor as an Arab potentate, a role ultimately played by Peter Ustinov. Earlier in the year, the Berliner Tageblatt had detailed the actor’s plans to return to Europe and join up with French comedian Bourvil in Citizens of Fear.4 He never made the trip. And in April Lorre was set to make a guest appearance in Bikini Beach (1964).

  As the project files grew, Lorre’s health ebbed. He had always drawn strength from his work. Near the end, there was none to give or take. “For Peter,” said co-worker Joyce Jameson, “acting was reality. There was no reality in terms of life. If he couldn’t act, there was nothing.”

  In his final screen performance, Lorre glumly portrayed an acrid Hollywood director in The Patsy (1964), originally titled Son of Bellboy, a Jerry Lewis comedy about a group of show business professionals who attempt to turn a bumbling bellboy into a star. Coauthor and director Lewis wanted authentic types, players instantly recognizable to the public. Never was the transience of fame more apparent to Lorre. A younger Lorre might have worked around the strident, egotistical Lewis with subtle defiance. Now, he just ignored him. “There was no conflict with Peter,” said actor Keenan Wynn, “because Peter was more intelligent than any of those people. He didn’t pay any attention to Jerry.” Nor did Lewis impose himself on Lorre, whom he later described as “a scene thief beyond compare,” but left him alone. It suited the actor’s mood. Lorre checked out at Paramount on March 19, 1964. Although he could not have afforded to turn down his role in The Patsy, he avoided conversation about the picture and swore he would never see it. Friends supposed it put the last nail in his coffin. “If he could have had his choice,” said his daughter Catharine, “he would have cut his part out of the film.”

  Lorre knew he was failing. “Peter was afraid to exert himself too much,” recalled Paul Zastupnevich, “because he tired very easily and he wanted to try to save himself for the scene. Once or twice, when he was extremely tired and would fluff his lines, he got very angry with himself because he did not like to hold up his fellow actors.”

  The tight six-day schedule on Kraft Suspense Theatre’s “The End of the World, Baby,” telecast October 24, 1963, had overwhelmed the already spent actor, turning his final television appearance into an unbearable chore. When Lorre admitted he could no longer drive, director Irvin Kerschner arranged for ropes to pull his car out of frame in one scene. Ascending a flight of stairs in another shot was flatly impossible. Nor could he remember more than one line of dialogue at a time. “He just couldn’t sustain it,” said Kerschner, who worked around Lorre’s illness with skill and patience. “He just kept saying, ‘Well, I’ll be alright. I’ll get it,’ but he didn’t. It was really sad.” Kerschner finally decided to give Lorre one line, cut away, and so intercut the rest of the scene. To compensate for his inadequacy, the actor lapsed into storytelling, recounting the good old days at UFA. “It was his way of showing us that he was somebody once,” explained Kerschner. “Every actor will fall back on a way of doing something that they’ve done before. If you don’t do your homework and you don’t get into a character, you have shtick that you do, and I felt that Peter was by then depending a lot on the shtick to get him out of trouble…. I was worried for him. I was embarrassed for him. I felt sorry for him.”

  At AIP, Lorre had carried a satchel of medicines around the set. His use of prescription drugs was symptomatic of more than poor health. It told his friends he was giving in and giving up. They worried for his life. Although he shrugged off their concern, others felt the likelihood of an early death deeply troubled him. “His health was poor,” noted writer Herb Meadow, who had worked with him on “The Left Fist of David.” “We started to bet on whether or not he’d outlast the picture, all of us betting against him, giving him anywhere from ten minutes to an hour. He responded with funnies, but the funnies were only spoken; his eyes were not laughing, and we quit because we realized that we were not being funny, we were only frightening him. He did not enjoy death, he did not enjoy jokes about it. I remember now thinking that he must have had it on his mind a great deal, because he took it in a very troubled way.”

  Jonas Silverstone thought that many of Lorre’s pranks were forced: “Basically, Peter was a very serious man. I think he was playing a point-counterpoint of his own direction. Peter gave the appearance of loving fun and he did like fun very much, but I do think he was driving himself to have fun, particularly toward the end. But above all, I think Peter was and remained a very serious man, full of tragedy. I think he was very aware of it.” Joel Greenberg came away with the impression “of someone utterly jaded and exhausted. Creatively, one felt, he was already dead, and had been for a long time.”

  “He didn’t like being Peter Lorre the clown,” expanded Meadow. “He didn’t like doing what was expected of him. He went along with it because that was the way the dice had rolled. He didn’t have much choice anymore. I think probably that killed him more than anything else. I think that when people as strong-minded as Peter Lorre decide they’ve had enough, they can just turn their faces to the wall and die.” “Peter got more down,” concluded Harvey Parry, “until it finally
worked him into the ground.”

  Perhaps, as he had symbolized in Der Verlorene, fate is an onrushing locomotive, an unstoppable force. The engine had gathered too much momentum to be sidestepped so near the end of its journey. Lorre knew the machine’s path and met it with open eyes. On the evening before his death, Peter saw—collectively—his two ex-wives and Annemarie for a final time. Karen, who noticed the whiteness of his face and hands, even remarked on his deathly pallor. Annemarie rubbed some warmth into his cold feet.

  On Sunday, March 22, he slept most of the day. As she often did, Celia drove to his apartment to prepare lunch for him. Afterward, she went home and telephoned him at about four o’clock. When he did not answer, she returned to his apartment, where she found him in a deep sleep. He awakened and asked her to call his friend and doctor Joe Golenternak. The physician could not be reached, so Golenternak’s associate came instead, took Lorre’s pulse, shrugged, and left. Celia stayed with him until ten-thirty that night. The next morning, Beatrice Lane discovered his body on the bedroom floor. Thinking that he might only be unconscious, she called Celia, who rushed over. Golenternak, who had never received the message from the previous day, arrived at noon and pronounced Lorre dead. By the location of the body, it appeared as if he had gotten up, perhaps to open or close the window, and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. According to Shutan, who arrived soon after, Lorre wore the face of gentle sleep.

  To Lester Salkow fell the sad charge of finding a friend to deliver a eulogy. When Vincent Price asked if there was anything he could do, the agent accepted his offer. During a rehearsal for The Red Skelton Show, Price asked for an extra hour at lunch to speak at Lorre’s funeral. Skelton, on whose show the actor had appeared at least eight times, closed the set while he and his cast and crew attended the services.

  At one o’clock on March 26, 1964, Rabbi William Sanderson conducted brief rites for Peter Lorre at Pierce Brothers’ Hollywood Chapel. Among the honorary pallbearers were both friends and co-workers, including Irwin Allen, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Burl Ives, Joe E. Lewis, Lester Salkow, Robert Shutan, Jonas Silverstone, and Irving Yergin.

  Then Price, who understood Lorre better than he knew—indeed, perhaps, better than Lorre knew himself—spoke of the actor, of the man:

  A great actor of another era said of our calling that we are sculptors in snow and yet at the final dissolution of this ephemeral image the whole world mourns. Something irreplaceable has disappeared, but if there is immortality, surely it is in the remembrance of man, and what the actor creates is a lasting memory however unsubstantial the material of which it is made. The memory of a great performer is elemental, and the elements are life.

  Peter had no illusions about our profession. He loved to entertain, to be a face maker, as he said so often of our kind. But his was a face that registered the thoughts of his inquisitive mind and his receptive heart, and the audience, which was his world, loved him for glimpses he gave them of that heart and mind.

  If the admonition that it is more blessed to give than to receive is to be believed, surely the actor is blest, for he succeeds only in so far as he gives and what he receives can never compensate for what he gives, for he gives fully of himself and receives at best only a part of others … and yet in touching the lives of others, if only in passing, he can never wholly know what great and unexpected good he may have done—relieved some living pressure in making one man laugh, or through interpretation of the great truths of poetry or prose made another think and mend his mind. This is enough and any actor knows it is enough, for talent is the rarest gift, and even if it is given greatly only to a precious few, that talent must be greatly given always … to all.

  Peter held back nothing of himself. He shared his wit, his curiosity, and yet he always seemed to be exploring you. The aura of devotion that surrounded him made all men glad to be his friend, to feed him and be fed by him in turn.

  One of the greatest experiences in our profession, and one that too seldom happens, is the chance to work with another player many times over the years. It makes the contest keener—for acting is an art and the greatest art of it is one actor’s relationship to another—interplay—counterpoint—conflict. Good actors have a thousand faces and one must know them all to be the proper mirror—one for the other. Reaction is the language of the theatre.

  I have had the excitement, the challenge of doing many entertainments with Peter and I say entertainments because that was our concern. In the theatre one can teach and preach, hold up for view the problems of all life, but always for me the primal purpose of our art will be to entertain—to set in motion the chances of escape.

  Peter believed this too and brought to entertainment the veteran’s verve to make it right. No way to bring this about went unexplored and he could map the perfect path to leave no person lost along the way.

  The something sad about him and a certain necessary madness went together to capture hearts and give his fellow players pause lest they be unprepared to match his winsomeness. This was a man to be aware of at all times for he was well aware of all who shared the stage with him and working with him never failed to fulfill the seventh and perhaps most sacred sense—the sense of fun.

  The snow statue of his work perhaps will melt away, but the solid substance of his self must last. Man’s immortality is man, his family, his friends and in the actor’s dream of life, the audience—his identity with them … and this man was the most identifiable actor I ever knew. No part of him was other than himself—his voice, his face, the way he moved—his laugh … perhaps the grief that winters us in losing him may keep his statue whole—if not the image of the actor, at least the stature of the man.

  Afterward, Price recounted anecdotes and incidents that marked the course of their working friendship. He had the small group laughing and crying. “I guess that’s the way Peter would have wanted it,” he concluded. “Thank you for coming.”

  As much as those close to him may have anticipated his death, it seemed lamentably unfair, and many were shocked to learn that he was only fifty-nine years old. “Peter never got his just rewards,” said Daniel Haller, “what he deserved from his career and life.” Those who shared Lorre’s dreams and disappointments knew he was capable of much more than was asked of him. “He always had the feeling he could find the right combination of people,” said Lester Salkow, “a unison where he might be the pivotal person in a real artistic film.” Three days before his death, Lorre had reportedly signed a new contract with AIP that renewed his option for two more pictures.

  Peter and Annemarie had been scheduled to attend a divorce hearing on March 23. Because they had not completed a property settlement, Superior Judge Wolfson had postponed the hearing until April 6. Superior Judge Clarke E. Stephens appraised the actor’s estate at thirteen thousand dollars, but Lorre, who left no will, actually died insolvent, having never fully discharged his back income taxes after declaring bankruptcy in 1949.5 Sadly, he left young Catharine nothing in the way of financial security, which had been one of his greatest fears.

  Peter Lorre’s body was cremated and inurned privately in the Abbey of the Psalms at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.

  EPILOGUE

  MIMESIS

  The good actor is characterized by the high multiplicity of his “phantoms.”

  —Otto Fenichel

  Three months after Peter Lorre’s death in March 1964, police officers in Elk City, Oklahoma, arrested nineteen-year-old Larry McLean for counseling a devil-worshipping cult allegedly responsible for vandalizing a string of local churches. Dedicated to destroying all emblems of God, the secret society also planned to exhume the body of its idol, Peter Lorre, and restore it to life.

  As a pop icon, Lorre had arrived. Merchandisers found the image far more marketable than the actor. Little wonder that he was busier in death than he had been in life. Ironically, it was Eugene Weingand who kicked off the postmortem commercialization of Lorre’s screen image in 1965. Billed as “P
eter Lorre, Jr.,” he played a suspected K.A.O.S. agent who had infiltrated C.O.N.T.R.O.L.’s spy school on a television episode of Get Smart. During the mid-to-late 1960s, Paul Frees reproduced Lorre’s distinctive voice for a recurring role as Morocco Mole—opposite Sydney Greenstreet as Yellow Pinky—in The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show. In 1967 a puppetized Peter Lorre assisted Boris Karloff’s voice-acted Baron von Frankenstein in Mad Monster Party. Another Lorre legatee teamed a Joel Cairo clone with “Sydney Street” in a 1969 episode of The Avengers, titled “Legacy of Death.” That same year, Lorre returned to Casablanca on Get Smart. Along with incarnations of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, he also gave voice to a talking tree in the witch’s forest on behalf of the 1969 children’s series H.R. Pufnstuf. As Igor, he assisted a mad scientist on The Electric Company. In 1970 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? teamed him with Mr. Greenway in “That’s Snow Ghost.” The Lorre persona even took a religious turn in Godspell (1973), a musical version of the Gospels, in which actor Jerry Sroka impersonated Lorre for the telling of a parable about forgiveness. In a scene from The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), a jewel thief (Christopher Plummer) forces Pepi (Graham Stark) to reveal the whereabouts of the “Fat Man” while the notes of “As Time Goes By” hang in the air. In Hanna-Barbera’s Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty (1975–76), Lorre was cast as a villainous cocker spaniel called Peter opposite a bulldog named Sidney Greenalley. As a Boston terrier, he enjoyed the canine companionship of a bloodhound (Humphrey Bogart), a boxer (Edward G. Robinson), a terrier (James Cagney), and a poodle (Mae West), who plan to break out of the dog pound in Disney’s The Shaggy D.A. (1976). Two years later, a curly-locked Dom DeLuise gave his updated Joel Cairo a Lorre-like twist in The Cheap Detective, a parody of The Maltese Falcon that starred Peter Falk as a Sam Spade spin-off. The animated Drak Pack featured three do-gooding teenage boys capable of transforming themselves into Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Werewolf. Assisting their archenemy, Dr. Dred, were Fly, Mummy Man, Vampira, and Toad, a small, squat, round-faced, pop-eyed creature with a high-pitched voice.