The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre

Chapter 3: Escape to Life

Escape to Life ❖ 89 3 Escape to Life Ever since I came to this country I’ve been trying to live down my past. That picture “M” has haunted me everywhere I’ve gone. —Peter Lorre Abenign fate—as he liked to believe—intervened to end Lorre’sHungerjahr in Paris. At Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, more commonly known as“the Bush”to film habitués, Alfred Hitchcock and Ivor Montagu, his associate producer, readied production of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) for Gaumont-British film studios.From his German comrade Otto Katz,who held a position on the Soviet-backed Comintern press, Montagu learned that Lorre had left Germany“for conscientious reasons”and was living“professionally at liberty” in Paris.1 He reminded Hitchcock of the actor’s forceful performance in M. “We wanted him at once,”said Montagu.“There was never any question about his coming over to be inspected or tested—even his English was not in question, for a German accent was no obstacle in the part. He came over, not to be approved, but to be engaged.” Katz knew where Lorre was staying and offered to get in touch with him. With the ready consent of Michael Balcon,director of production at GaumontBritish , they cabled the actor to come over. Balcon also agreed to cover Lorre’s expenses and secure a period immigration permit to allow him to work in England. Before leaving, Peter contacted his brother Andrew, who was in town for the Paris International Motor Show, an annual event scheduled the first Thursday in October. He shared his good fortune (he had a job in England) 90 ❖ The LOst One and his bad fortune (he was, as usual, short of money). Tapping the filial rock once more, the improvident brother drew French francs and was off to London . Despite his German triumph in M, Lorre was little known to Englishspeaking audiences. That, along with his presumably poor English, had relegated him to consideration for only a small role in the picture, said Montagu: “Hitch and I both considered that Peter would be excellent as the ‘Hit Man’ of the gang in the situation Hitch had envisaged.”They“admired him and jumped at the chance to get him and to do him a good turn at the same time, but the production company needed a certain amount of persuading.” Sidney Bernstein—impresario,showman,exhibitor,theater owner,builder of supercinemas, and founding member of the National Film Society—undoubtedly put in a good word. Along with Ivor Montagu and Otto Katz, he belonged to the Committee for the Victims of German Fascism, which had initiated the “Reichstag Fire Trial of 1933.” Bernstein also played an equally active role on a private level, supporting a public boycott of German goods, coauthoring a pamphlet titled The Persecution of the Jews in Germany, boosting membership of the Committee for Co-ordinating Anti-Fascist Activity, and extending a helping hand to needy refugees. An acquaintance from the Berlin days, Bernstein invited Lorre to stay first at his flat on Albermarle Street, where the actor bumped into intellectual luminaries and film celebrities—including Charles Laughton—and then at Long Barn, a Tudor house in Sevenoaks Weald, featuring low ceilings, sloping dark oak floors, exposed beams, and leaded windows, which he had leased from Vita Sackville-West. “Peter told me that he was deeply embarrassed,”recalled Paul Falkenberg, “because he had never been in England before. He was lying in this beautiful bed and he had only one pair of underwear and in comes the butler and opens the curtains and says,‘Good morning, sir, would you like your tea,’ and so on. It was a totally new world that opened to him.” German refugee Paul E. Marcus (PEM), who now published a newsletter in London recording the activities of fellow exiles, also remembered hearing Lorre dress up the story of his arrival in London with a single suit on his body and dress coat in his suitcase. . . . Every morning the proper butler asked him which suit he should put on, where there was no choice. One evening his host invited Lorre to go out with him. “Put out the dinner jacket,” said Lorre proudly to the butler. While getting dressed, Lorre noticed that the dress coat had a built-in hump from his last movie role,which Escape to Life ❖ 91 he could not...