The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre

Chapter 6. Insider as Outsider

246 ❖ The LOst One 6 Insider as Outsider I’m here, free as the wind, fountain of extraordinary knowledge, splendidly corrupt, and eager to be of profitable service. —Peter Lorre An actor is the meanest, most contemptible sort of creature alive. So debased that he throws away his own self, his own individuality, and takes on the personality someone else wants him to be—for what?—for money, or maybe for fame. —Peter Lorre By all appearances, Lorre had gone Hollywood at Warner Bros. With pal Humphrey Bogart, he frequented popular watering holes—Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, the Villanova—and steamed the alcohol out of his pores at Finlandia Baths. He pulled pranks and practical jokes and cracked wise. He spent more than he made, even tapping Bogart for loans both knew he would never pay back, and romanced a woman fourteen years his junior. He made fifteen films in six years, playing sinister villains, insidious foreign agents, a disenchanted scientist, an obsequious writer of detective yarns, a volatile plastic surgeon, a contemplative barfly, an artist about town, a homicidal librarian , and on several occasions, a true-blue patriot. He had made the team. In the shadow of the movie marquee, however, stood another Peter Lorre, one whose Hollywood lifestyle gave no hint of a secret existence as hard to believe as some of his screen roles. Behind the scenes, the stage was set for a collaboration that would have turned his career inside out. Even as he had Insider as Outsider ❖ 247 trundled between RKO and Columbia, he looked to more substantial roles. In late 1940 screenwriter Jo Swelling (Pennies from Heaven, Made for Each Other, The Westerner) had broached the idea of adapting émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Der falsche Nero (The False Nero, 1936) “as a play and at the same time as a vehicle for me.”1 Lorre had his sights on the role of a corpulent red-headed potter named Terrence, whose resemblance to the slain Nero sets the bloody stage for his impersonation of the late emperor. Anxious to move forward, he dashed off a short letter to Feuchtwanger in January 1941, asking when he would return to Los Angeles. If not in the“foreseeable future,” perhaps they could correspond. Failing that, he proposed coming to New York between film assignments. Despite Lorre’s enthusiasm, his efforts progressed no further. What he most wanted to make public—his aptitude for artistically worthy roles—seemed destined to remain private. On July 21, 1941, two days after Lorre completed work on The Maltese Falcon, Bertolt Brecht sailed into San Pedro, California, with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel; their two children, Stefan and Barbara; and his collaboratormistress -agent Ruth Berlau. Having fled Berlin one day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, he had hugged the German border with a mind to making a quick return when the Nazi regime collapsed: “Don’t go too far away. In five yearsweshallbeback.”Hitler’sadvance,however,forcedBrecht’sretreatthrough Prague, Vienna, Zurich, and Paris. In December 1933 he took shelter in Denmark .AstheReichgrewandfreeEurope—“thismoribundcontinent”—shrank, Brecht began to fear for his safety. Clearly, he could not remain “perched on one of these little islands at a time when the slaughter seems to be on the point of breaking loose.”Stripped of his German citizenship and facing possible deportation , he applied for American quota immigration visas for himself and his family in March 1939. In April Brecht moved to Sweden. While he was there, he received an invitation to join the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, putting him a giant step closer to securing an entry permit to the United States. On April 9, 1940, German forces invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark resisted for two hours, Norway for two months. Brecht sailed for Finland. Painted into a tiny corner of the globe, he waited until May 3, 1941, for an immigrant quota visa number, then traveled across Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad and boarded a Swedish ship bound for America from Vladivostok on June 14. Even given his limited access to the grapevine of émigré news, Lorre likely knew of Brecht’s flight and his pressing need for money, sponsors, and an affidavit of support.2 Just how helpful he was is difficult to say, although Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht’s friend and collaborator, had no doubts.“Lorre 248 ❖ The LOst One has...