-
Chapter 9. Elephant Droppings
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
360 ❖ The LOst One 9 Elephant Droppings With occasional interruptions, I’ve been killing my way through life. It’s that simple. —Peter Lorre I need the hum of the cameras and the illumination of the spot-light. I will make films until I die. —Peter Lorre Disappointment awaited Lorre in America. Wasted and unable to generate interest in Der Verlorene, the defeated actor-director-writer returned from his lonely mission empty-handed. He had sought to listen and to learn, and perhaps to help himself by helping others.His countrymen had paid him back in indifference, “with interest and interest’s interest.” Friends felt that he also wanted to shout down those who doubted he could rise above the studio star system by proving that he could write, direct, and act. No one heard him. Now he picked up where he had left off, as if Der Verlorene had never happened. Back in New York, Lorre visited the Silverstones in Pleasantville, then checked into Beekman Towers at the corner of Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue to be nearer NBC,which guest-spotted him on The Big Show on March 9, 1952. Tallulah Bankhead sugarcoated Lorre’s reintroduction to the American public:“And now,darlings,making his first appearance in the United States after a year’s absence abroad, where his most recent triumph he directed, produced and starred, in one of Europe’s most sensational pictures, the distinguished artist, Mr. Peter Lorre.” He opened on a familiar note: “I started my Elephant Droppings ❖ 361 career in the theater as a romantic actor (laughter), but against my will they put me into horror pictures. I always wanted to be the actor who got the girl, but in my pictures by the time I get the girl, she’s dead. Well, I’ve struggled to get away from playing with monsters, but I guess it is my fate, because here I am today with Tallulah Bankhead.” “Well,that’s my fault,”riposted Bankhead.“I’m just going to have to enunciate more clearly. I distinctly told them to get me Peter Lawford!” Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” a comic takeoff on Meredith Wilson’s novel Who Did What to Fadalia? and a few crooned lines from “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” rounded out his return to radio. Later in the month he sank his teeth into a meatier repast on Lux Video Theater’s“Taste.”Billed as“Hollywood’s Loveable Bogeyman,”he played a sinister gourmet who wagers that he can guess the date and vineyard of a rare claret served with dinner, staking his town and country houses against the hand of his host’s reluctant daughter. When friends—and oftentimes strangers—asked something of Lorre, he unselfishly lent a helping hand without cross-examining them or qualifying his response. In May 1952 his generosity earned him one of the most remarkable credits in his spare political résumé.After the war,Jonas Silverstone’s commanding officer, Thomas B. Sawyer, had been elected to a Democratic seat in the North Carolina state Senate. Now, in his move to unseat incumbent Representative Carl T. Durham in the May 31 Democratic primary, Sawyer called on Silverstone for a little celebrity backing. Lorre readily agreed to leave Annemarie,who had recently arrived from Hamburg,with Beatrice Silverstone in New York and stump for the candidate through four counties—Durham, Orange, Alamance, and Guilford—making up the 6th Congressional District. Lorre distanced himself from the political bandwagon by claiming that his chief purpose in coming to North Carolina was to entertain the wounded veterans of the Korean conflict hospitalized at Fort Bragg. Sawyer supporters, however, invented a shared past for the actor and their candidate. Accompanying a photo of the two at the Washington Duke Hotel—warmly pictured with their hands on each other’s shoulders—was a brief, and entirely fictional, mention of their first meeting at an army hospital in Casablanca, where Sawyer had been a patient during the war. Nonetheless, Lorre gladly barnstormed on radio and television and appeared—along with circus clown Buzzie Potts, the Duke Ambassadors Dixieland Combo, Texas Jim Hall and his Radio Rangers ,BobWilliams and his Cumberland Mountains Boys,and the Singing Blacksmith —at “Tom Sawyer for Congress” rallies in High Point, Greensboro, Burlington, and Durham. [44.198.169.83] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:24 GMT) 362 ❖ The LOst One “He didn’t say that Jonas was a mutual friend...