Iconic actor Peter Lorre once was
described fondly as a “rococo cherub gone slightly astray,”
but as Youngkin’s 613 page opus shows, this extremely
talented man strayed very far indeed from his astonishingly
accomplished theatrical beginnings propelled by the rise of
Nazism, a World War, fickle Hollywood, and a witch hunt, to
name but a few of the distractions that his biographer
enumerates. Born Laszlo Lowenstein in Hungary in 1904, Lorre
doubtless remains one of the singular film figures of the
20th Century. There was never anyone quite like him and as
he immodestly pointed out toward the end of his wildly
eventful life: “There won’t be anyone like me when I’m
gone.” He was right.
Escaping his conservative Jewish family roots, the ambitious
young man was clerking in a Viennese bank when he appeared
in his first play, though according to legend, he had yet
even to see one. Enjoying a success d’estime in
Vienna during the early 1920’s, he departed for the happier
hunting ground for major roles in Berlin, where he was
absorbed into the remarkable work circle around playwright
Bertolt Brecht. Lorre began a life-long friendship with
Brecht, who instantly tapped him for the lead in Mann ist
Mann (1931) and though the play itself was panned at the
time, Lorre gave a striking performance that Brecht, not one
to gush, never tired of praising.
A
canny student of acting, Brecht had begun as a critic and
drew his theoretical ideas from the work of Laughton,
Valentin, Chaplin, Wedekind — and Lorre. Lorre was a
great physical actor and a master at what Brecht termed
“gestus” — gestures that define, clarify, and advance a
role. Brechtian actors reveal humans making hard social and
political choices, and eschew overly emotional performances:
what Brecht termed the “emotional drug trade.” (Brecht liked
to point out that Hitler had learned his rhetorical style
“from the stalls.”) Brecht’s dramaturgy insists that people
are never “one thing” but composed of many traits; some
developed, others less so. Lorre, who easily charmed an
audience one minute and terrified it the next, offered a
vivid incarnation of Brecht's ideas.
In
1931 Fritz Lang cast Lorre as the repellent child killer
lead in his landmark film ‘M,” and with this, his second
film appearance, Lorre suddenly became an international
star. Lorre, as Lang asserted, delivered one of the finest
film performances ever, yet one that haunted and daunted the
actor for the rest of his career. Lorre, in a sense, never
recovered from this great early success. This sinister role
was to typecast him and thus to hinder his artistic
development. Youngkin plausibly suggests that it may
have planted the seeds that destroyed him.
Lorre's politics were of the "fellow traveler" variety. He was
never a Party member. Artist's like Brecht and Lorre were
frequently asked "not to join the Party," the reason being
that a Party membership would have diminished their
publicity value. Prompted by Hitler’s ascent to power and an
otherwise admirably high spot on the Gestapo’s hit list,
Lorre immigrated to Hollywood in 1934. Hollywood was where
glitzy film parts the finest actors from the stage,
homogenizes their language and style, and reduces their
professional lives to a train of serial ingratiation with
moguls and media. Lorre’s role in “M” had made him eminently
employable so he signed as a contract player and began his
long forced march through the ever-deepening mire of a
studio system he came to detest.
Lorre’s first years in la-la land were spent among the refugee
German-speaking intelligentsia; for many of whom exile was a
personal disaster. Unable to master English, severed from
their rich culture, and denied employment, many illustrious
refugees sank slowly to penury. His old mentor Brecht,
driven across Europe by Hitler’s expanding Reich, joined
Lorre in 1941.
Lorre,
however, had a chameleon knack of giving people what they
wanted. So he took to American life with all the gleeful
desperation of a man reprieved from the gallows. He married
three times, and each of his wives was cast as caretaker by
an alcoholic and drug addicted prima donna. Stars invariably
functionalize the people around them: a driver; a cook;
confidantes; the current wife and inevitably a mistress. It
all resembled a small-time Borgia court around a swimming
pool.
The
actor admitted to a “dark” side—and indeed, traded on
it— but Youngkin, perhaps wisely, tiptoes around racy
anecdotal material on Lorre’s sexual kinks and rumored
underworld ties. Yet, unquestionably, the man inspired great
devotion. His first wife Celia Lovsky, a favorite of the
Austrian wit Karl Kraus, gave up her own career for Lorre,
and then after the breakup of their own marriage, she
“supervised” his later marriages—befriending and caring for
her “successors”—and later made of her own plush home a
shrine to his memory.
Lorre’s domestic life was marred by serial philandering and a
psyche so precarious that it required Celia’s
micro-management. Incapable of saving money, he spent
freely. His hectic, lavish life prompted one actor friend to
remark: “The links of our chains are forged not of
cruelties, but of our luxuries.” He was constantly in
and out of rehab. It is sometimes irksome to behold Lorre’s
pampered poolside torment in the midst of Never Never Land
while tens of millions are dying from disease, starvation,
and a Nazi war machine he narrowly escaped. Brecht, who
served seven miserable years in what he called the “Hell of
the easy-going,” describes Lorre’s situation in his poem
"The Swamp":
I saw many friends
And the friend I loved most
Among them helplessly sunk
Into the swamp
I pass by daily.
And a drowning was not over in a single morning.
This made it more terrible.
And the memory of our long talks about the swamp
Which already held so many powerless.
Now I watched him leaning back
Covered with leeches in the shimmering,
Softly moving slime,
Upon the sinking face
The ghastly blissful smile. |
By
1948 Brecht was interrogated by the House Un-American
Activities Committee and, like many Leftist refugees,
hounded out of the country. Despite his close association
with Brecht, Lorre was never persecuted, though there were
people who denounced him. He eluded HUAC by going to Europe
to make a film.
Eager
to build a company in Berlin’s Russian Zone, Brecht begged
Lorre to join him. Brecht, who considered Lorre “the finest
reader of prose and poetry in the German language,” had
planned a Lorre Hamlet - an extraordinarily tantalizing
prospect, no matter how it turned out. They also planned to
perform The Good Soldier Schweik, which Lorre was born to
play (and a work from which the young Brecht had drawn his
outwardly cynical attitude and verbal style). Lorre, like
Charles Laughton, believed that Brecht was the new
Shakespeare, but the collaboration they both devoutly
wished, alas, never came to pass. Lorre, apart from
his addictions, was already in poor health by the time that
Brecht had established himself in Berlin.
By
the early 1950s the Hollywood studio system that kept him in
relative luxury, under pressure of courts and television,
was dissolving into competitive cut-throat independent
companies. Desperate to repeat his success with “M,” Lorre
returned to Germany in 1951 to direct and star in “The Lost
One,” but the production foundered due to his drug problem
and growing megalomania. Lorre, the brilliant Brechtian
paragon, plummeted in a single decade from Huston’s
brilliant Maltese Falcon cast (Bogart, Greenstreet, Lorre,
and Mary Astor), which set a standard for ensemble play, to
the wastelands of B movie back lots and Roger Corman’s no
frills epics.
By
the early 1960s Lorre was lucky to be re-cycled with Boris
Karloff, Bela Lugoisi, and Lon Chaney Jr. in kitschy horror
films. Production standards plummeted: the work was fast,
dirty and ill-paid. Lorre became lost in reveries of days
with Bogart, Brecht, and a life in the theatre he had
abandoned. Tragically, Lorre couldn’t reconcile the
responsibilities that Brecht insisted were the lot of a
great artist, with his own desire for personal comfort and
adulation. His health failing, his third marriage ending,
unable to remember his lines, and victim to an "Industry"
which makes his 1930s films seem like Renaissance dreams, he
visited his brother in Europe and, before departing,
lamented: " I have to return to latrine duty."
In
March 1964 Lorre died of a massive stroke. His friend
Vincent Price, after a rabbi’s prayer, delivered the eulogy.
Bankrupt, Lorre left no will. Yet his death spawned a
roaring Lorre industry: his unique mannerisms, vocal and
facial tics became the mimicked basis for hundreds of TV and
radio shows, cartoons, commercials, and feature films. At
the end, Lorre called himself, deprecatingly, a "face
maker," forgetting to add, it’s a face you never forget.
Mr.
Youngkin's prose can wobble at times, but his life of Lorre
is a monumental piece of research and sheds new light on a
career that has too long been ignored and undervalued. The
Brecht connection alone makes this an extraordinary piece of
scholarship. We are indebted to the author.
Warren Leming is a writer and critic. (www.coldchicagocompany.org)