The Lost One Read online

  In the wake of M, Peter Lorre watched the “lively,” “naive,” “melancholy,” “explosive,” “carefree” personality that had found expression on stage slip from public view. The mantle of screen villainy concealed it. According to friends and co-workers, we saw only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lay unplumbed depths. Sound waves sent out saying, “Who are you, really? And what were you before? What did you do and what did you think?” came back only as vague blips. Finding the real Peter Lorre proved difficult. His “life interest” had gained the upper hand on his life long before the cinema opened up to him. He was, in a word, elusive, at times laughing at the truth, at others hiding from it. He was also modest. Opening up about himself in interviews went “against the grain,” he explained to New York talk-show host Helen O’Connell in 1961. “I had a very strict father and he brought me up not talking about myself, like a decent person should. Now in an interview, all of a sudden you have nothing but talking about yourself, so you have to overcome a certain amount of inhibition.” He also had not joined the throngs of actors who had penned autobiographies: “It’s a racket now. I want to be the only actor who never wrote a book.”

  As a biographer, I soon realized I would not reconcile man and myth by treading ties. Middle ground does not accommodate who Peter Lorre was and what he became. I broadened my parameters. Spanning the wide tracks of his personality conditioned my appreciation of the extremes of his life. Along the fringes of memory, I found scattered remnants of a being long since extinct, one who had given us not what he wanted of himself, but what he thought we wanted. Between creator and creature stood a man who had lost his way.

  1

  FACEMAKER

  Acting is a ridiculous profession unless it is part of your very soul.

  —Peter Lorre

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Arad looked to the future. Thanks to its position as an important railroad junction, the commercial center of southeastern Hungary boasted one of the largest distilleries in Europe, its own brand of flour (Arad Königsmehl, or King’s Flour); a lumberyard; and wagon, machine, and barrel factories. The surrounding countryside produced grains, fruit, tobacco, honey, and cattle. Underground lay gold, silver, and copper. Above lived nearly 40,000 inhabitants. Predominantly Roman Catholic, the population also included nearly 10,000 Greek Orthodox Christians and 5,000 Jews, together with Greek Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed Protestants. Little wonder the bustling community could afford to top its new city hall with a tower and fund a telegraph, a business school, a cathedral, a conservatory, a theater, and a horse-drawn trolley to connect the growing suburbs. Given its importance as an industrial hub, it is not surprising that the city attracted the businessminded Loewensteins.1 Born to Savolta and Wilhelm Loewenstein, an office worker and assistant rabbi, in nearby Csene on January 27, 1877, Alajos followed in his father’s footsteps. After graduating with honors from a three-year commercial academy in 1897, he established himself at the Erste Arad Fabrikshof Aktiengesellschaft, a manufacturing concern. Three years later, he stepped into the comfortable position of chief bookkeeper at Adolf Weigel and Company.

  The need to supplement his income no doubt played an important part in his decision to join the kaiserlich und königliche Armee, the professional standing army of the Habsburgs, on September 18, 1897. More likely, his love for Emperor Franz Joseph tugged at his heart and universal military service forced his hand. Whatever his motivation, Loewenstein signed up for one year at a volunteer training school, ten years in the Heer (army), and two years in the Landwehr (national guard). The Haupt-Grundbuchblatt described the five-foot-four soldier as having black hair, brown eyes, a well-formed mouth, a round (dimpled) chin, and an oval face.2 A surviving portrait of Alajos Loewenstein in his uniform shows a proud man with clear, strong features that convey a firm sense of purpose.

  Loewenstein began at the bottom but advanced rapidly. After passing the volunteer’s one-year examinations at the infantry regiment number 33, Kaiser Leopold II, in Arad, he was promoted to the rank of titular corporal, then field sergeant. Another exam paved the way for his rise to deputy cadet and finally lieutenant in January 1901. Believing war with Russia inevitable, the Dual Monarchy had increased its military budget in 1895. The army was slowly awakening from a period of stagnation, and active reserve officers, drawn from the ranks of the one-year volunteers, were becoming increasingly important. Alajos was among the better-paid public servants. He was soon earning six thousand kronen per year, three times what he was making behind his desk. That he was able to speak and write both German and Magyar pushed his stock higher. Besides being remunerative, the Austro-Hungarian Army—composed of “different and often hostile nationalities … held together by tradition and discipline”—was surprisingly liberal, becoming one of the first European forces to open its officer corps to Jews. Military historian Gunther E. Rothenberg notes that although the “well-educated and largely middle class Jewish population of the monarchy” constituted only 5 percent, it “continued to provide over 16 percent of reserve officers.”

  Between military exercises at nearby Grosswardein (Nagyvárad), Loewenstein found time to marry twenty-three-year-old Elvira Freischberger, a native of Zubrohlava, on September 8, 1903. The following year he accepted the position of chief bookkeeper with the Textil Industrie Aktiengesellschaft in Rószahegy, a small primarily Slovak town of 12,490 inhabitants nestled against the High Tatra Mountains on Hungary’s northern border. Rising sharply out of a high plateau in the central Carpathians, they kept close company with the Transylvanian Alps. However, as the elevation dropped, wolves, bears, and wildcats gave way to spring and summer cow pastures and, lower yet, to vineyards. Closely tied to the land, Rószahegy depended on the production of textiles, wood, cotton, flax, grains, livestock, and marble.

  On June 26, 1904, Elvira gave birth to their first child, László, who would become better known as Peter Lorre.3 True to what would become an all-too-familiar pattern of enforced absenteeism, Loewenstein barely had time to greet his new son before reporting for another month of military maneuvers. Two years later, a second son, Ferenc (Francis) was born. In April 1908, shortly after giving birth to a third son, András (Andrew), Elvira died of either blood or food poisoning, depending on the brother who searched a distant and vague memory of a mother he never knew. Her death certificate cites blood poisoning (vérmérgezés, literally “angry blood”) as the cause.

  “To me, the food poisoning theory is much more plausible,” said Kathy Vern-Barnett, Francis’s daughter. “‘Opi’ [Alajos] had an absolute obsession about not saving up cooked potatoes (even when we had refrigeration). He insisted that they were poisonous.”4

  Loewenstein, who was seldom home, recognized the boys’ need for a mother and married Elvira’s schoolmate and best friend, Melanie Klein, who raised them (and Liesl and Hugo, her two children by Alajos) almost singlehandedly. Lorre later told his first wife, actress Celia Lovksy, that when Melanie entered the house in her new capacity, he hid under his bed. His stepmother apparently neither forgot nor forgave the affront, setting the bitter tone of their relationship. Lorre admitted in 1947 that he had gotten along very poorly with Melanie, who “spoke of him only in terms of the prodigal who let them down, who wasn’t there to support them when they needed it.” The hand-held joy nurtured by Elvira’s touch turned to closed-fisted defiance of the interloper. Young László struck off from the family. Instead of playing soccer with his brothers, he kept to his room and sketched and painted in watercolors. “At home and also in school,” Francis recalled, “he kept separate from us, never joined in any play we had in mind and never helped to do the home chores, which we had to do before leaving for school, such as make the beds, clean and so on.” Kathy recalled that the “extremely pragmatic” Melanie, who insisted that the boys learn to knit, sew, and cook, disapproved of László’s sloppy ways and late hours, habits that were, to her mind, symptomatic of an artistic temperament. Described by Andrew and Francis as a
strict but loving parent who doled out equal treatment to the boys, she won no recognition from László, who willfully resisted her efforts to mold him in the image of her successful brother-in-law, Oskar Taussig, and resented her harangues about the importance of good grades.

  Lorre’s childhood memories of what he called the “dark mountains” yield little else. Those who imagine a Kafka-like tragedy in his youth that will solve the mystery of Peter Lorre are disappointed. It did not exist and he knew it. The best lies couldn’t hide the truth. Nonetheless, by steering people away from his early years, he helped create the mystique of clouded beginnings.

  His memory of the period ran to extremes, when it flowed at all. In 1936 he confessed that the death of his mother had “taught me what sadness can be.” Lorre disingenuously credited his father with being “a very rich man, owning many castles.” History again took a back seat one year later when he dug into his early memories of Christmas for interviewer J.M. Ruddy.

  To my small boy’s mind, no other event could compare in grandeur and enchantment with the thrill of Christmas. For nights my dreams were filled with wonderful thoughts of a bag full of beautiful toys and luscious candies dropped down our chimney by the ever-thoughtful Kris Kringle.

  But always I was doomed to disappointment. My family was thrifty and exceedingly practical. My father and mother realized how much wiser it was, if not so pleasing, to supply their son with a pair of extra warm boots, or a new pair of pantaloons, than to give him something which would fill his heart with joy but not further material welfare.

  Forty years later, Andrew had only one thing to say about his brother’s Yuletide tales of colorfully garbed country folk, full larders, street dancing, and plaintive carols: “Unadulterated B.S.” Peter, he maintained, would have remembered little about life in Hungary because by 1910 the Loewensteins had moved on to Brăila, Romania, where Alajos had been promoted to inspector at another division of the Textil Industrie Aktiengesellschaft. Brăila, with its nearly sixty thousand inhabitants, was far from rustic. The one-time military fortress was now a transportation nexus. Both hub and harbor, it lay on the Barbos-Buzau line of the Romanian state railway and trafficked grains to Constantinople by steamship down the Danube River to the Black Sea. Here, László and Francis enrolled in a private German school. Although Alajos had been transferred to nonactive status in the Landwehr in December 1907, the breakout of the Second Balkan War in August 1913, and the likelihood of a larger conflict, in which he most certainly would be called to play a part, induced him to move his family to Vienna (Landstrasser Hauptstrasse 123) in September.5 There they stayed with “Uncle” Oskar Taussig, who was married to Melanie’s sister, “not a real uncle,” said Francis, “but he definitely was a good friend of my father and helped him on many occasions when he was in trouble, which, unfortunately, was very often.”

  Loewenstein’s military service record, somewhat inexplicably, ends here. According to Francis and Andrew, their father was called up August 5, 1914, one day after World War I erupted. As the oldest ranking lieutenant in his regiment, he was automatically promoted to Oberleutnant and assigned to the Third Army’s operations on the Eastern Front, where he witnessed the collision of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian forces in the Carpathians during the winter of 1914–15. Bitter fighting produced heavy casualties, while subzero temperatures and severe food shortages pushed the death toll higher. By 1916 the Austro-Hungarian Army had suffered eight hundred thousand dead and another 1 million sick or wounded. Although a German-supported counteroffensive repelled the Russians, thousands fell into enemy hands. After heart trouble forced him to retire from active duty, Alajos was put in charge of a Russian prisoner-of-war camp. “I believe the Russians praised him,” said Kathy, who recalled hearing her grandfather tell stories about “cleaning up the barracks where they were living and feeding them, because by the time some of those Russian soldiers were finally caught by the Germans in that particular area, they were on the verge of starvation.” During their internment the prisoners fashioned an aluminum ring with a copper inlay inscribed “M.L. 1914/16,” which they presented to Melanie in appreciation of their kind treatment.

  In March 1915 Loewenstein moved his family to Ludwig-Höflergasse 20 in Mödling, ten miles south of Vienna, where they lived in a townhouse built in 1913 by the Jugendstil architect Karl Lehrmann. Since the nineteenth century, this fashionably expensive bedroom community near the Wienerwald had drawn artists who wanted to retreat to the country but stay within striking distance of the city. There they could touch nature and be touched in turn by the area’s famous Heurigen (“new wine” from the last vintage). The city also hosted a Jewish enclave of merchants, tradespeople, and civil servants. While only 100 of Mödling’s 18,680 inhabitants (fewer than 1 percent) listed their religion as Israelisch, they formed a Kulturgemeinde (cultural community) that exerted influence beyond its number.

  Here László attended Mittelschule (sixth to ninth grades) at the Niederöster Landes Realgymnasium from 1915 to 1917, when the family again moved, this time to Valeriestrasse 88 (today Böcklinstrasse), near the Prater, Vienna’s great amusement park. As a Jew and one of only two private students, he was in the minority. While his brothers applied themselves, studying long hours in anticipation of helping their father support the family, the “clever” László seemingly breezed through school, admitted Francis, “with an ease which was always an envy from my side.” He earned A’s in drawing and writing and B’s in religion, German, history, geology, mathematics, and physical fitness. He lagged behind only in Latin with a C.

  Grades, however, tell only part of the story of László’s school years. No one has painted a more damning picture of turn-of-the-century education than the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig. Using “unfeeling and soulless” methods, unapproachable teachers taught nothing worth knowing. School became a treadmill of lifeless lessons as coldly impersonal as the dreary, barracks-like classrooms, whose whitewashed walls smelled of mold and whose hard wooden benches twisted the spine. Doctrine, dogma, and discipline suffocated the intellect and suppressed the spirit of many but engendered in others “a hatred for all authority” that awakened a passion for freedom. For these students, the “impulse to creative production became positively epidemic,” fostering an “artistic monomania.” Melanie’s stringent standards had edged László out of the nest, but school “spread his soul out wide” for flight into the boundless worlds of art, literature, theater, and, alas, business.

  Loewenstein acquired three thousand acres along the Sava River in Carinthia after mustering out of the army. Rich in mountain scenery, the Austrian crown land, with more than 1 million wooded acres, was populated by far more trees than people, who numbered only eighty-four inhabitants per square mile. Now an agriculturalist, Loewenstein filled small timber contracts for the army. In May 1917 less lucrative circumstances necessitated relocation of the Loewensteins to the inner city. After months of deprivation in Vienna, where ration cards allowed each adult only a small portion of meat that was all but inedible, when it could be found, the family depended increasingly on their country estate. Here the boys spent “the nicest time of our youth” eating, playing, and working. To earn a little pocket money, László and his brothers harvested hay, minded cows, and collected apples from more than two thousand trees and helped press them for wine. Alajos also taught his sons the fundamentals of horsemanship. A detachment of military riders furthered their equestrian education by teaching them circus trick riding. Fit and full-bellied, the boys returned to the city of shortages.

  With war’s end, lands changed title. Loewenstein’s property became part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, called Yugoslavia after 1929. According to Andrew, because he had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Alajos was classified as an “enemy officer” and his land was placed under state supervision, with a commissar to oversee its production.6 Convinced that the government supervisor was skimming off the profits, Loewenstein sold the estate to Unc
le Oskar, who, since he had not served in the army, could operate the business free of restrictions, and started dabbling in the grain export business. Through Taussig, who was on the board of Steyr-Automobil-Werke, he also developed a long association with the car company. Loewenstein’s promotion to director of sales for personal cars and trucks eased the family’s financial worries but kept him on the road for weeks at a time. “Practically always on the move,” he would not come to rest until he moved to Australia in 1949. “My father was very intelligent, oversensitive and a good organizer,” observed Francis, which was “perhaps the reason [why] he was either on top and in high position or without a job for many years.” A photo taken toward the end of the war frames a face world-weary in its lean knowing. Tired and subdued, Loewenstein once again felt the weight of starting over in a city whose burgeoning population (from 476,220 in 1857 to 2,031,420 in 1910) had witnessed the growth of a housing shortage into a housing crisis. Rents ate up more than one-quarter of a worker’s wages.

  Unlike the stabilizing Melanie, Alajos hovered just a couple inches above the ground. “Opi was an idealist,” said Kathy. “He wasn’t a terribly practical man.” Strongly bound to his cultural roots, Loewenstein nurtured “a passionate secret love, [which] was the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and [he] was a great supporter and admirer of the Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl.” His conversion to Catholicism during the war years had been, according to the family, only a “life-saving exercise.” When asked by the Gestapo how long he had been a Catholic, Loewenstein reportedly replied, “Let’s just say that I have been a Free Mason for a lot longer.” Until his death in 1958, he faced east every morning and faithfully read from the Hebrew prayer book.