225 “hopes to direct … whatever he wants”: ibid.
225 “like seeing the … on their necks”: Harrison Carroll, “‘Hotel Berlin’ Is News-Hot Saga of Nazi Doom,” Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express, March 10, 1945.
226 “to hit the … did with Casablanca”: “WB’s Berlin Timing,” Variety, Dec. 13, 1944.
226 “Violently anti-Nazi … against the Nazis”: “‘Hotel Berlin’ Cast Violently Anti-Nazi,” Hotel Berlin, pressbook, 1945.
226 “He always began … into a category”: Koch, interview.
226 “Hustonesque, somewhat reminiscent … twists and turns”: Koch, “Reflections on a Golden Boy.”
226 “It wasn’t my … to do it”: Koch, interview.
227 “contribution was mostly … he had intended “: Koch, “Reflections on a Golden Boy.”
227 “his own melancholy … of a poet”: Negulesco, interview.
227 “I was a … going on eleven”: Lorring, interview.
227 “The first time … to play with”: “Joan Lorring and Three Strangers,” Ray Nielsen’s “Ray’s Way,” Classic Images, no. 159, Sept. 1988.
228 “This comment crushed … than I did”: Lorring, interview.
228 “was the best … have ever done”: ibid.
228 “Peter had a … running the studio”: Koch, interview.
229 “rather sentimentalised”: Pratley, Cinema of John Huston, p. 37.
229 “a polished, patrician … of old age”: “Movie Murderer,” Life, April 2, 1945.
229 “one that is … with telling skill”: “Three Strangers,” Variety, Jan. 23, 1946.
229 “under-acting”: “Unholy Trio on a Horse,” Cue, Feb. 23, 1946.
229 “he would go … part or another”: King, interview by Katz.
229 “Sensation!”: advertisement, NYT, March 8, 1945.
229 “Chilling on Screen … on the Stage”: advertisement, NYT, March 11, 1945.
229 “the exception to … makes a personal”: “New Acts: Peter Lorre,” Variety, March 7, 1945.
230 “probably wind up … to mother him”: Kilgallen, “Ten Knights in My Date Book.”
230 “actually had tremendous … into your soul”: Court, interview by Katz.
230 “You know … make people happy”: Vincent, interview.
230 “When you blend … saw this happen”: J. Silverstone, interview.
230 “Ain’t he the … better dressing room”: I. Yergin, interview, June 23, 1976.
230 “If there is … let me know”: C. Lorre, interviews.
231 “Peter Lorre and … who knew anything”: Betsy Jones-Moreland, interview by Tom Weaver, in Weaver, Attack of the Monster Movie Makers, p. 193.
231 “Peter was very … threatening their idol”: J. Silverstone, interview.
231 “That was his … touched that closely”: C. Lorre, interview, Oct. 15, 1980.
231 “I guess there … they got divorced”: Falkenberg, interview.
232 “continued the case … must be made”: “British Actress’ Divorce from Soldier Delayed,” LAT, Nov. 29, 1944.
232 “separate and apart … three (3) consecutive years”: Complaint, Cecile Lorre vs. Peter Lorre, March 13, 1945, Eighth Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada in and for the County of Clark.
232 “failed to introduce … of the answer”: Decree of Divorce, Cecile Lorre vs. Peter Lorre, March 13, 1945, Eighth Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada in and for the County of Clark.
232 “extreme cruelty without … of plaintiff’s health”: Complaint, Ingeborg Young vs. Arthur Young, March 13, 1945, Eighth Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada in and for the County of Clark.
232 “Alastair must stay … of explanation following”: Katherine Young to Rosalind Martin, Dec. 16, 1940.
232 “who is a … of this child”: Complaint, Ingeborg Young vs. Arthur Young, March 13, 1945.
233 “What’s the difference … none at all”: Hyams, Bogart and Bacall, p. 103.
233 “Celia didn’t have … care of her”: Miller, interview.
233 “Peter and Karen … with the riding”: N. Yergin, interview.
234 “During the war … of the Gestapo”: Lorant, interview.
235 “tops almost all … fit of hysteria”: “Confidential Agent,” Motion Picture Herald, Nov. 3, 1945.
235 “which he executed … the dirty floor”: Herman Shumlin to author, Dec. 16, 1974.
235 “He used to … tasted so bad”: Seymour, interview.
236 “pocket sized menace man”: “Production Notes of The Verdict,” WBA USC.
236 “No one could … made to seem”: Jack D. Grant, “The Verdict,” HR, Nov. 5, 1946.
236 “Oh, you should … can’t tell you”: “Joan Lorring and Three Strangers,” Ray Nielsen’s “Ray’s Way.”
237 “If I had … much more difficult”: Siegel, interview.
237 “one of the … Abbott and Costello”: Peter Lorre, interview, “Dick Strout with Hollywood Profiles.”
237 “He said he … few the number”: Conversation between Steve Trilling and Peter Lorre before Don Page and Carrol Sax as witnesses, 4:35 p.m., Oct. 19, 1945, JWC USC.
237 “he had been … or any intimation”: ibid., 4:55 p.m., Oct. 19, 1945, JWC USC.
237 “timid guys … don’t go through”: Conversation between Steve Trilling and Jack Dales, Oct. 17, 1945, JWC USC.
237 “what I think … finish the picture”: Statement of Peter Lorre, Feb. 27, 1947, USPHS DHHS.
238 “headaches, hay fever … a marked depression”: Dr. D.D. Le Grand, Admission Summary, Personal History, March 24, 1947, USPHS DHHS.
238 “gave me at … on Sunset Boulevard”: Statement of Peter Lorre, Feb. 27, 1947, USPHS DHHS.
238 “You’re too effete … least a pound”: Siegel, Siegel Film, pp. 98–100.
238 “You can’t make … followed the book”: Siegel, interview.
239 “heavy-handed … sombre monotone”: “The Verdict,” Variety, Nov. 5, 1946.
239 “thrilled”: Lorring, interview.
239 “not big enough … still my opinion”: Curt Siodmak to author, March 26, 1975.
239 “Peter Lorre continues … up the old”: News and Feature Service, Warner Bros. Studio, Nov. 27, 1945, WBA USC.
239 “I read it … as I visualized”: Robert Florey to Raymond J. Cabana Jr.
240 “When a writer … be the monster”: Siodmak to author.
240 “I always had … it was Peter”: King to author, July 5, 1973.
240 “was really an … in your shoe”: King, interview by Katz.
241 “would have a … got the giggles”: King to author.
241 “After all, Peter … stop it, please”: Andrea King, quoted in McClelland, Forties Film Talk, p. 104.
241 “This is just impossible”: King, interview by Katz.
241 “The director … no close-up”: Carradine, interview.
241 “I think it … eye on him”: Alda, interview.
241 “One night in … you, that’s all”: Crawford, interview.
242 “I think he … from inside him”: King, interview, March 14, 1979.
242 “inner rhythm”: Eisner, Haunted Screen, p. 145.
242 “sleepy delirium, like a somnambulist”: Taves, Robert Florey, p. 275.
243 “Without any explanation … Lorre’s deranged mind”: Mike, “The Beast with Five Fingers,” Variety, Dec. 25, 1946.
243 “moving quickly in … to the whole”: Peter Haining, ed., The Ghouls (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), p. 220.
243 “Director Robert Florey … on being frightened”: Time, Jan. 13, 1947.
243 “classic … with modern audiences”: Taves, Robert Florey, p. 279.
244 “There has not … give a damn”: I. Yergin, interview, June 23, 1976.
244 “mutual agreement … discharge each other”: Agreement, May 13, 1946, Peter Lorre legal file, WBA USC.
244 “We were all … a good reason”: Fitzgerald, int
erview.
244 “For the rest … a disabused grin”: Robert Florey to Raymond J. Cabana Jr.
245 “Any director who … wasting his time”: Goff, interview, July 31, 1978.
6. Insider as Outsider
Epigraphs: Peter Lorre in Rope of Sand (1949); Lang, “He’s an INSIDE Actor.”
1. Viking Press brought out an American edition under the title The Pretender the following year.
2. German actor Fritz Kortner and Dorothy Thompson, writer Sinclair Lewis’s wife, financially supported Brecht’s entrance into the United States. Émigré director William Dieterle provided an affidavit of support.
When war threatened, German director Rudolph Cartier (Katscher) asked Lorre to arrange a “faked” contract that would allow him to enter the United States. “Lorre was very fond of Vienna poppy-seed cake,” recalled Cartier, “but the poppy-seed to make it had to be crushed in a mill [German: Mohnmühle] which is unobtainable in the U.S.A. His reply (by cable) became a ‘classic’: ‘You bring Mohnmühle, I arrange contract!’ Unfortunately nothing came of this ruse, because war broke out, travel to outside the United Kingdom was stopped, and I spent the war years in England.” Rudolph Cartier to author, Dec. 29, 1980.
3. The foul smell of Brecht’s cigars left a lasting impression. “Peter invited me one night over to his house when Brecht was there,” recalled Burl Ives, “because he wanted to hear me sing and I sang all evening. Peter apologized for Brecht’s terrible cigars. He smoked those Italian crook cigars. I’m surprised he didn’t smoke good cigars, but he never did.” Ives, interview.
4. Born in 1891 of German-American parents, Ferdinand Reyher graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912 and taught English for one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a newspaper man for the Boston Post, which sent him to Europe as a war correspondent in 1915. Over the next fifteen years, he wrote short fiction, serials, and articles for numerous magazines, most notably Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Collier’s, Harper’s Magazine, New Republic, Saturday Evening Post, McClure’s Magazine, and Liberty. He also penned poems, plays, several novels, and a biography of Admiral David Farragut. Reyher took up screenwriting in 1931, specializing in crime dramas, often based on his own stories. His skills as a writer—an ear for dialogue and the ability to tell a good story—often relegated him to the role of script doctor, improving others’ work without screen credit for himself.
Brecht met Reyher first in Berlin in 1931 and again in Copenhagen in late 1938, when he told of plans for a drama based on the life of Galileo. Reyher likely reminded Brecht that the production of a play or film in America might get him into the United States ahead of his quota number. Brecht surprisingly opted for film first, play later, possibly banking on his friend’s Hollywood connections and the visual potential—“the moon with its mountains, the phases of Venus, the orbits of the planet Jupiter’s four moons”—of a movie version. On December 2 he wrote Reyher that “instead of a film treatment I’m sending you a play” and asked him how to “push” it.
Reyher became “Brecht’s closest American friend, and perhaps one of the best male friends in his lifetime.” No one more actively solicited help in bringing the writer and his family to America. Brecht, in turn, impressed him as “a great man, the most impressive personality I have ever met.” Their compatibility extended to the love of laughter, lively conversation, cheap cigars, chess, and Marxism. With Reyher, Brecht abandoned his customary restraint and let go. “He is a good guide to the states,” wrote Brecht, “when … he explains the peculiarities of that giant baby, America.” Brecht respected Reyher’s opinions and treated him as an equal, seeking his input, and often collaboration, on more than one dozen dramas and film stories. Brecht to Reyher, Dec. 2, 1938, in Brecht, Letters, p. 294; Lyon, Brecht in America, p. 215; Lyon, Brecht’s American Cicerone, p. 40; Brecht, Journals, Feb. 13, 1942, p. 197.
5. It is easy to forget, against the backdrop of failure and frustration, Brecht’s profitable collaboration with Fritz Lang and screenwriter John Wexley on the anti-Nazi film Hangmen Also Die (1943), which gave him “enough breathing space for three plays. (The Visions of Simone Machard, The Duchess of Malfi, Schweyk).” Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger collaborated on The Visions of Simone Machard in late 1942. Feuchtwanger later sold the screen rights to his novel Simone, based on the same material, to Sam Goldwyn for $50,000. For his original idea, Brecht received at least $20,000. Brecht, Journals, June 24, 1943, p. 280.
6. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht’s mistress and collaborator, worked as Peter Lorre’s personal secretary during the mid-to-late 1940s.
7. Riker reported that Brecht actually “liked his role very much in The Maltese Falcon.” Riker, interview, June 21, 1987.
8. At the star-studded premiere, Bentley sat next to Lorre, behind Ingrid Bergman, and in front of Charles and Oona Chaplin. Other celebrities included Charles Boyer, John Garfield, Sydney Greenstreet, and Lewis Milestone, to name just a few.
9. Lorre read six poems from the Deutschen Satiren, “Schwierigkeit des Regierens” (“Difficulties of Governing”), “Über die Bezeichnung Emigranten” (“On the Designation ‘Emigrants’”), “Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking auf dem Weg des Laotse in die Emigration” (“Legend of the Origin of the Book Taoteking on Laotse’s Journey into Emigration”), “An die Nachgeborenen” (“To Posterity”) from the Svendborger Gedichte (Svendborg Poems), and “An die deutschen Soldaten im Osten (“To the German Soldier in the East”). He apparently did not read from the “Gesichten” (“Visions”) of the Steffinsichen Sammlung (Steffin Collection), as scheduled.
10. Ernest Pascal (1896–1966) wrote more than two hundred short stories and six plays before turning to screenwriting. His movie credits date from 1928 and include Lloyds of London (1936), Kidnapped (1938), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), and Flesh and Fantasy (1943). Pascal served as president of the Screen Writers Guild from 1935 to 1937.
11. Lorre owned no property at Lake Arrowhead, whose log for August 28, 1943, carried the item that Peter Lorre and Karen Berg [sic] had been the summer guests of the Vincent Votres. PL FBI.
12. Although the title page credits the more established Berthold Viertel for the adaptation, it was his son Hans, a native English speaker, to whom writing acknowledgment is due. “When we first started talking about doing this story,” said the younger Viertel, “the idea was he’d [Brecht] furnish the story and I’d furnish the English, which didn’t mean he wouldn’t discuss it with me. He was very, very open to suggestion from anybody and sometimes he’d accept my suggestion that I wasn’t sure of much more readily than I really thought he should have.” Viertel, interview.
13. Kreymborg had chaired the International Commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the Burning of the Books, May 10, 1933.
14. After the loss of the child, Ruth Berlau suffered a nervous breakdown in December 1945. Lorre’s friend and doctor (Dr. Max Gruenthal), Ferdinand Reyher, and the police escorted her to Bellevue Hospital.
15. Brecht’s comment did not carry any political baggage. Rather, it referred to Schweyk as being too unorthodox by American standards.
16. In Brecht’s American Cicerone, p. 96, Lyon acknowledges Barbara Brecht’s claim that she gave her father her copy of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.
17. In a “Personal and Confidential” report, dated March 28, 1944, Mrs. Peter Lorre (Celia Lovsky) was reported by various individuals to be an intimate friend of a motion picture director who was allegedly a Communist party member. The name of the filmmaker is blacked out in the unclassified document. PL FBI.
18. Lorre’s October 1940 telegram—one of more than a thousand—to the German-American Writers Association, organized by prominent German-American novelists, playwrights, and journalists “to unite all German-American writers, scientists, dramatists, scenario writers and journalists against the propaganda machine of the Nazis in the United States and to preserve true German culture” did not place him
far out on a political limb, though his action apparently merited inclusion in his FBI dossier. Given Brecht’s almost irrational hatred of Thomas Mann, elected chairman of the association, it is difficult to know whether or not he would have endorsed Lorre’s best wishes or, for that matter, the organization itself. New York Daily Herald, Oct. 8, 1940.
19. According to a May 4, 1944, Office of Strategic Services interoffice memo, Hanns and Gerhart Eisler’s sister, Ruth Fischer, an apostate Communist and FBI and HUAC informant, voluntarily classified thirty-nine organizers and signatories of the Council for a Democratic Germany as Communists, fellow-travelers, or new beginners. Ironically, she identified Lorre as a Communist, along with Oskar Homolka, Fritz Kortner, and Bertolt Brecht, whom she later denounced as “the Minstrel of the GPU” in her book Stalin and German Communism, p. 615, while listing Elisabeth Hauptmann, a dedicated Communist, as a fellow-traveler. She did not name her brother Hanns. PL FBI.
20. The mirror maze is curiously and, as it turns out, coincidentally reminiscent of the hall-of-mirrors sequence in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948). In December 1945 Charles Laughton read Galileo to Welles, who agreed to direct it for presentation by his own Mercury Productions in New York. After seeing his production of Cole Porter’s Around the World, the following April, Brecht, who felt that “this is the greatest thing I have seen in American theater,” wanted no one else for the job of directing the American stage production of Galileo. Welles began familiarizing himself with the playwright’s theories on “alienated” acting techniques, which set the actors—and spectators—at a critical distance from the characters and story. When producer Mike Todd, who had suddenly withdrawn financial backing from Around the World, made Brecht and Laughton an offer they could not refuse, they dropped Welles.”
Although circumstances could be said to have alienated Welles from Brecht, the filmmaker subtly applied Brechtian methods to his next film, The Lady from Shanghai. With the famous mirror scene, which offered a fresh take on reality, the alienation effects in the Chinese theater sequence, and generally cooled-down performances, Welles aimed for “something off-center, queer, strange.” Harry Cohn, however, didn’t buy the “‘bad dream’ aspect” and ordered the film re-edited and rescored. Brecht, quoted in Lyon, Brecht in America, p. 179; Orson Welles, memo to Harry Cohn, ca. April 1948, Orson Welles Collection, Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana Univ., Bloomington.
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