The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre

Chapter 8. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes ❖ 311 8 Smoke Gets in Your Eyes The fiftieth year means a turning point; disturbed, one looks back to see how much of the way has already been covered and silently asks oneself whether it leads further upward. —Stefan Zweig I attempted it once as a comedian and then as a clown, but in vain; I was typecast as a villain. —Peter Lorre Peter Lorre’s approach was always soft and silent. He left the United States, and his life in Hollywood, just as quietly. Dissembling about his sudden departure , he said, “I removed myself from the limelight to give picturegoers a rest. They deserve it. I must be a terrifying experience on occasions!” Braced by the lapse of time, he later glossed over the hiatus as a deliberate decision to say no to money and popularity and to take the gamble afresh.The grim present lived harder than the reconstructed past. Tired of “making faces,” he cut himself adrift and floated into another kind of exile. On June 29, 1949, Peter and Karen flew to England, where audiences from the Grand in Derby to the Empire in Shepherd’s Bush hailed his arrival with “rapturous acclamation.”“The Brits were dying to see him,” confirmed comic actor Johnny Lockwood, who was the first to introduce Lorre to a live English 312 ❖ The LOst One audience. “I gave him an enormous build up and he came onto the stage to a big ovation.” Lorre opened with what Lockwood called familiar patter about corpses and body counts, then moved into stand-up suitable to the occasion: “Like all tourists, I stopped off in Chicago and visited the abattoirs. All that machinery wasted on humans.”The next moment a girl rushed on stage shouting , “Peter! Peter!” Lorre took a revolver from his pocket and shot her. Two stagehands then placed her body on a stretcher and took her off. “Poor girl,” lamented Lorre. “She just got carried away.” More patter followed, then Lorre performed Poe, alternating “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Bells.” Lockwood recalled that he “used to tell people that he went better as he came on to my introduction than he did at the end of his act. I don’t think he realised how funny he was.” Between appearances in Hackney and Bristol, Lorre reprised the role of “The Man with the Head of Glass” for the British Broadcasting Corporation on August 27—but not before the station warned television viewers that “Mr. Lorre will be seen contorting his face in close-up and we fear that children watching the performance in a darkened room would find it too alarming.We are purposely putting him on at the end so that children may see the remainder of the show before they go to bed.” The Grand Order of Water Rats issued no such caveat when it inducted Lorre into the oldest theatrical fraternity in the world the following day. Having developed a close friendship with the actor, and feeling that he would fit the requirements (two years’ experience as a professional entertainer; no objections from any other Rat; fund-raising activities for charity), Lockwood proposed Lorre for membership in the elite charitable organization. Former King Rat and comedian George Jackley seconded the motion. During his initiation , a ritual filled with solemnity, tears streamed down Lorre’s face. He recovered in time to deliver an acceptance speech in which he jokingly asked that no one spread word of his reaction because it would “ruin his image.” Soon after, Rat Number 501 joined a pack of his Brothers on a river outing down the Thames. Anyone who wished to do so was encouraged to give a little impromptu performance. Using his cigarette lighter as a gun,Lorre stood down the gangway so that only his head and shoulders were visible and surrendered to audience expectations. His popularity among his Brother Rats earned him a place in the Grand Order’s photo gallery, alongside pictures of other famousfilmstars ,includingCharlieChaplin,StanLaurelandOliverHardy,Danny Kaye, Maurice Chevalier, Adolphe Menjou, Ben Lyon, and Vic Oliver. During the first week of September, with the theater tour near its end, Karen flew to Germany to attend her ailing mother in Eggelkofen, putting off Smoke Gets in Your Eyes ❖ 313 plans—indefinitely, as it turned out—to travel to Devonshire to see Alastair, who had been removed to the country during the...