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Death, a constant specter in Fritz Lang films, began to shadow the director's life. His brother Adolf Lang, had died, at the age of seventy-six, in 1961. Lang had not seen Dolf since the early 1930s. He had delegated all communications to Lily Latte. Letters from Dolf desperately pleading for financial help were met with recitations of the director's own burdens: medical expenses, property taxes, major repairs for the house, et cetera. According to Friedrich Steinbach, Dolf was more interested in reconciling with his brother than in the token packages he sent. But the director's grudge was permanent. Lang regarded his brother as a moocher. Dolf died in a public nursing home, his wife soon after. The deaths of old friends grieved him more. Peter Lorre died of a stroke in March of 1964. Death claimed Gerda Maurus in Diisseldorf in 1968. Teodor Adorno died in Switzerland in 1969. Reading the newspaper, he and Lily Latte would make a point of keeping track of the obituaries of former Berliners. "With time," Lang wrote to a friend, "one is more and more alone." Scientist Willy Ley, Lang's rocket-travel friend, also died in mid-1969, just weeks before the launching of Apollo 11 and man's first footsteps on the moon. Lang wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times lamenting the irony that Ley, who had become the curator of the National Air and Space Museum in the United States, had not lived to see the milestone.* Lang and Ley used to sit out on his terrace at night, the director wrote, and Lang would point up at the moon, jokingly calling it "my location set." When Lang wondered if men would ever walk on its surface, Ley, "perfectly certain and confident," always assured him, "We will be there!" Lang missed Peter Lorre especially. He had never reached a sought-after intimacy with the actor associated with his biggest success. Shortly before Lorre's death, the two were reunited at a UCLA student showing of M as part of a series called "A Tribute: The American Film and its Creators." Lang joked publicly about his callous treatment of Lorre during the shooting of M, and after thirty years the actor was able to laugh it off. "Ironically, Ley's co-consultant on Lang's Die Frau im Mond, Hermann Oberth, was invited to the Apollo 11 launch as a special guest of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. C H A P T E R 2 1 1965 1976 456 FRITZ LANG "I wish I could talk to Peter," Lang would say occasionally, after Lorre's death, overlooking the fact that he had rarely talked with the actor during his lifetime. Lang made do by staying in touch with Celia Lovsky, Lorre's ex-wife, to whom he had stayed faithful as a friend and whom he had cast in small parts. She is the woman who sells Anne Baxter a blue gardenia in Lang's film of the same name, as well as the matriarch featured in a painting on the wall of the ganglord's mansion in The Big Heat. The director acted benevolently toward Lorre's extended family, which generated endless Sturm und Drang for the Lang household. "Nobody should know about that," Lang told Dan Seymour, "because I am known as a no-good shit." Taking the place of the scripts he no longer worked on feverishly was the daily journal he strictly maintained. No associate, no assistant, no secretary recalled the director's keeping such a daily log during the Hollywood years. Lang had kept a diary of activity and thoughts during World War I; then, for fifty years, he had been too busy. Nowadays, he wrote mostly in English: recording his private thoughts, appointments and meals, everyone he spoke to or saw, every visitor, every phone call—everything. It was a chronicle of an old man's minutiae, complete with little Langian sketches and arrows and annotations. The call girls who serviced him were entered into the journalwith observations and remarks—"even some exclamation points," in Pierre Rissient's words. Friends were at first disconcerted when Lang interrogated them, asking them to remind him precisely when they had arrived at his house, what they said or ate, when they had left. The chronology had to be precise down to the minute. Nothing could be left out. 7:30 A.M.: I awake. 8:47 A.M.: I bathe and...

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