The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre

Chapter 10. The Mask behind the Face

The Mask behind the Face ❖ 425 10 The Mask behind the Face I believe that somewhere within his soul everyone is an actor. Instinctively, we prefer to dream our life away in fantasy rather than to face the hard facts of reality. Dreaming, making a fanciful play out of your life, is so much more pleasant. —Peter Lorre We only saw the tip of the iceberg. —Wendy Sanford Facial expression,”wrote film critic Béla Balázs,“is the most subjective manifestation of man.” Lorre wore the contradiction of person and persona like so many masks, at times laying bare the inner man, at others obscuring him. Toward the end of his life, he tore away old disguises and created new ones, forever confusing the shadowy line between selves, not as an acting art, but as a survival skill. The face that had expressed the “multiplicity of the human soul” through the characters he portrayed on screen now betrayed his own tangled sensibilities. He reckoned his life in twos—horror and humor, art and commerce, illusion and reality, insider and outsider. Two was the common denominator, though on closer view the dichotomy shattered into a myriad of broken pieces. In a life gone to quiet extremes, the different Peter 426 ❖ The LOst One Lorres parted ways. What he said publicly and what he thought privately reflected a man in emotional flux, one who wasn’t sure where he had been or where he was going. His memory did not synchronize with historical events. The actor loved to give advice about young talents tempted by money, based not on his own experiences, but on his reworking of them, reordered into carefully weighed advantages and disadvantages.“It’s an amazing thing to be able to retain your integrity in this business of movie-making,” he had cautioned in 1955. “You do it with your left hand, so you can still be in the business for something good when it comes along. It’s like a doctor—he starts out to help humanity . . . but he’s soon working at it as a business. It would be a crazy thing to run away fromhometobeaface-makerandthennotholdtotheideal.”FashioningBrecht’s advice to fit the situation,Lorre counseled set designer Daniel Haller to“do what you can do well with your right hand and you’ll always be a success within your own self. Once you know yourself, you can always branch out.” The actor now looked back with passive detachment, ignoring the bonds that had held him for thirty years. Suddenly, liabilities had become assets. Being a personality, he intellectualized, is really a great compliment because it cannot be taught. Moreover, he took typecasting by the tail in a deliberate act of defiance: “There comes a time when you have to find the integrity to stand up and refuse to play certain kinds of roles. Of course, you have to allow yourself to be typed for a period of time. I have been typed five or six times in my life.” But “after a certain amount of time,” he explained, “I have to stop the whole thing. I have to turn down everything that comes my way and start something else.” More accurately, Hollywood had turned him down, limiting his options to stark survival. He could not afford a strategic withdrawal or a planned hiatus to regroup. He had to keep going.“For a lazy man,” Lorre dissembled shortly before his death,“I work awfully hard.” Lorre said he wished more people were as content as he. The echoes of complacency resounded a false note sweetened by memory. On the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Assignment, he told interviewer Elwood Glover that after M and Crime and Punishment, he was box-office poison, which meant that “on top of a great artistic and critical success, no box office.” No one knew me, he explained, “so then I made up my mind right then and there that I’m going to go through the rough way and I took on that ‘Mr. Moto’ series.” It had not happened that way. Casting a myopic eye on a past with which he had not come to grips, Lorre focused on another reality, the one he imagined his life to be. Looking back, he had flown on automatic pilot, relying on The Mask behind the Face ❖ 427 his instincts to reach the right decisions, and had made courageous choices, where...