The Lost One Page 3
Alajos also prided himself on his ability to “examine a pregnant woman’s hand and prognosticate as to what the sex of the child would be,” said his granddaughter, “and I never knew him to be wrong. I remember him very proudly telling me that he won two dollars from Bogie [Humphrey Bogart] because he forecast his son and daughter to Lauren Bacall.”
In September 1918 good marks allowed László to advance to the second year of a four-year business program at the Wiener Handels-Akademie. Already striking his independent colors, he listed his religion as konfessionslos (without a confession of faith or creed). The designation set the pattern for nonobservance that characterized the rest of his life. Like so many of his artist friends, he fell somewhere between agnosticism and apathy. Given his fiscal irresponsibility as an adult (euphemistically dismissed as inattention to daily details), it is easy to understand why he never mentioned that he had earned high grades in merchant and travel geography, commercial history, business mathematics, bookkeeping, business law, and economic policy. László took his final exam on June 28, 1921, and graduated the following week at the top of his class, a distinction that undoubtedly would have surprised his future creditors.
Actors who talk about being bitten by a bug or infected by a desire to act might have taken their cue from Lorre, who claimed that his addiction to acting amounted to a disease transmitted by an unknown host. Although Lorre expounded by the paragraph when questioned later about the psychology of acting, he had little to say on the subject of his beginnings. He later explained, seemingly searching his own past for the seeds of his first flowering, that as a young boy he had “read a great deal [“like somebody else is eating,” said Francis] and lived in fantasies wherein I acted, all unconsciously, my many parts.” Francis recalled that he and László debuted as dwarfs in a grade school production of Snow White. “I was the smallest of these people,” recalled his brother, “and Peter the biggest one. Of course, we just had to hop around on the stage and not talk.” If Lorre remembered his early introduction to the stage, he never spoke of it.
László did not act again until his Mittelschule years. When his German professor learned that Hans Winge was casting three one-act plays for a theater evening, he recommended a student from another class. László Loewenstein accepted the role of a quarrelsome defendant and stood upon the stage of the Vienna Kammerspiele for the first time. “He had no interest in the theater,” wrote Winge, “but I infected him with my enthusiasm…. I dragged him into the theater and into the movies and further from the business career, which he had intended to pursue.”7 Again, Lorre seemed to have forgotten his first role as a criminal.
Lorre later downplayed his acting origins and the idea of “expressing yourself. I think they are automatic. You either make faces or are born to it, or you don’t like it and that’s all there is to it.” He commented in 1935 that becoming an actor wasn’t a conscious decision: “I did not say to myself, ‘I am going to be an actor,’ because I did not really know what an actor was. But somewhere, in my subconscious being, the root stirred and motivated me and I went…. I knew then why I had left my father’s house.”
Not without a word of advice. As the apple of his father’s eye, László bore a double burden. Loewenstein expected great things of his firstborn and looked to him to set a good example for his younger brothers. News of his son’s acting aspirations fell on unappreciative ears. Acting was barely tolerable as an avocation; as an occupation, it was downright foolish. With Vienna’s economy in shambles, he warned, his son would starve. Loewenstein urged him to pursue a more practical profession, a trade with a solid future. Unable to “imagine that anybody would be wasteful enough of their talents to want to go into such a thing as the theater,” recalled Kathy, Melanie seconded her husband’s opinion.
Thanks to his influential Uncle Oskar, a director at the Anglo-Österreichischen Bank in Vienna’s Strauchgasse, László landed a job in the foreign exchange department.8 According to his first Meldezettel (residence registration forms), in late October 1922 he took up lodgings in Margarethe-strasse 56. The local authority listed his occupation as “beamter” (official) and his religion as “konfessionslos.” Within a few months, the clever and efficient bank employee headed his section. His superiors smiled down on him. Herr Engel, his manager, even extended his hand in friendship. Earning his own way sat well with László. The six telephones on his desk rang to the importance of his new position. Alajos beamed with pride and sighed with relief.
What his father did not know—and the local authorities soon learned—was that László divided his life into public and private sides. In early April, when he moved from Webgasse 30 to a studio apartment in Fischerstiege 9, he again filled out the required Meldezettel. Alongside the designation beamter is a handwritten note that reads, “auch Schauspieler” (also actor). The young bank employee had, in effect, come out from behind his desk.
With “some other nuts” determined to explore their acting skills, László built a stage in a barn. After quickly learning that the inexperienced actors became self-conscious and stiff delivering memorized lines, he suggested an improvisational approach. One of the players would invent a situation and create a character. The others would then define their roles, ad-libbing the dialogue and the action until they exhausted the possibilities of the situation, and then move on to another scene.
“I am amazed when I look back now,” Lorre reflected from his Hollywood home some sixteen years later. “We acted out these plays we had concocted. They were bad and we were bad—but we were acting. And do you know my parents had been so strict that I had never been inside a theater; had never seen a play? I was an actor before I had ever been part of an audience.”
The late nights played havoc with László’s schedule. One day he didn’t report to work. When Herr Engel telephoned to inquire after his absent worker, Melanie told him that her son had left that morning at the usual time. That evening, when he returned home, she confronted her undependable stepson, who declared that he wanted to be an actor, not a bank teller. “Counting people’s money is a thankless business,” he later said. László vowed he would not return to work, but Melanie’s strong hand prevailed. Herr Engel opened a canned speech about tardiness.
“You know,” interrupted László, dropping a sure hint, “you can fire me, but you can’t reprimand me so severely.” (To make sure that others didn’t miss the point, he appended to the oft-repeated story a postscript about wiggling his ears during the lecture.)
Engel fired him.
In a revised version of the story told to New York talk-show host Helen O’Connell in 1961, Lorre confessed that he “wasn’t very good” at banking: “One day the manager of the bank told me a long story in front of all the other people. To me it was very boring. I didn’t listen to him, so I guess unconsciously I wiggled my ears and everybody laughed and I was fired.”
Whatever the cause, “his boss got him past the promise he had given his father that he wouldn’t quit,” explained Peter’s brother Andrew. “From that time on he just devoted his entire attention to the stage.”
It was the worst of times for an actor. Postwar Vienna knew poverty, hunger, widespread unemployment, and rampant inflation. “We got our pocket money and carried it home in two suitcases, all paper,” recalled László’s friend Walter Reisch, who went on to become a prominent screenwriter at Universum Film AG (UFA) and eventually wound up in Hollywood.9 “By the time you came home you couldn’t buy a cigarette with it.” Against this backdrop, László decided to “run away from home.” There was a ring of truth to it, just enough, in fact, to feed the movie tabloids years later. More accurately, the door closed on him and he drifted away. After losing his bank job in November 1923, László lodged on a day-to-day basis, first at the Hotel Wandl for a few months and then at the Hotel Nord for a few weeks. On nights when he could not afford even a cheap room, he turned up at home. But with Alajos away, Melanie had set new rules. She told László she could not forbid him
to stay there, but if he wasn’t home by nine o’clock, he would be locked out for the night. Likewise, if he failed to show up for meals, he could go hungry. Francis recalled that although László never came home again, “sometimes he was so desperate he waited in the morning in front of our flat until my sister and I went to school and we gave him the sandwiches our mother had packed for us. I know that for some time this was the only food he consumed, as he had no money to buy anything. We also gave him our pocket money and sold some of our books in order to give him something to live on.” At one point, the large-hearted Loewenstein also gave László what he thought would be an adequate sum to tide him over until he found work as an actor, despite his disapproval of his son’s new career. The next week, however, the jobless offspring returned for another handout, prompting heated discussions between Alajos and Melanie. To keep peace in the family, he secretly deposited an allowance with his attorney. Once a week, László rolled in to collect the gratuity.
During the making of I’ll Give a Million some fifteen years later, Lorre told actor John Carradine that he had lived in packing crates and even “robbed people out of necessity.” However much romance he read—and later related—into his poverty, he did sleep on wooden benches in the nearby Prater. With the metallic grind of its giant Ferris wheel, the pinging of the shooting gallery, and the cacophony of outdoor concerts, it is no surprise that he sought out, as he later claimed, a bed of pine needles in the woods or a quiet doorway. Reduced to selling newspapers to buy his beloved goulash, he used the extras as bedding. Celia remembered Peter telling her that hunger forced him to trade his “little lilac wool jacket for a roll.”
“For a long while I went hungry and friendless and cold,” Lorre told an interviewer in 1935. “I knew park benches for beds and the feel of a face pressed against the window of a sweet-shop.” People didn’t know it to look at him. Because of his starchy diet, he stayed surprisingly pudgy, although his health was poor: “I am the only actor, I believe, who really had scurvy.”
Francis recalled that his brother was determined to act: “I know that once he decided to be an actor, he stuck to it and spent all his time either going to the theater or learning.”
To shelter himself from the elements as well as gain free entrance to the theater, László joined a claque, or group of clappers, at the Burgtheater. Around seven-thirty each evening a stagehand admitted László, Walter, and a few others and planted them throughout the theater, where they were expected to sigh, whistle, laugh, and applaud at just the right moments in the show. The members of the claque received no pay for their services, but they nurtured their aspirations—for as many as thirty performances of the same play—of one day finding themselves on the stage. “Peter’s great obsession and ambition was the theater,” recalled Reisch, “and since at that time Vienna had an enormously rich theater life, he spent practically every night there.”
While the theater filled his head with dreams, the American government filled his stomach with food. Under the direction of Herbert Hoover, the American Relief Administration supplied foodstuffs to the war-torn countries of central Europe after the armistice in November 1918. After its liquidation, Hoover helped form a private charitable organization called the European Children’s Fund, which provided food and clothing to needy youngsters until June 1922. Reisch credited Hoover with saving his and Lorre’s lives:
The Herbert Hoover action was one of the most beautiful things God ever invented…. Hoover’s name was more popular in Austria than Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, much more important than Woodrow Wilson…. It was always four o’clock in the afternoon when the kitchen opened…. Anybody who lined up with a pot and a little box could, free, completely free, by the grace of the United States of America, get a big pot of chocolate, which was unheard of. Hot chocolate! And a huge piece of gugelhupf, which was a certain pound cake…. And while lining up, Peter only talked about the theater.
Destitute and malnourished, László jumped the ship of blind optimism and security enjoyed by the older generation and was swept away by the liberal tide of the times. Vienna’s younger generation rejected the moth-eaten morality, “petrified formality,” and “disciplined conformity” of a bourgeois existence. For László, abandoning the values he had known at home made way for a new emphasis on self-expression, intellectual mobility, and bohemianism.
While the theater satisfied his ambition to become an actor, another Viennese institution met most of his other needs. In the literary coffeehouse, László discovered the “ersatz totality” that family, profession, and political party could not offer. It was a home away from home for those who could not afford even a cramped and cold apartment. There, too, he could stay busy without purpose, receiving and answering letters, making telephone calls, discussing the merits of a play, a book, or a painting, or perusing an assortment of newspapers and journals. As an “asylum for people who have to kill time so as not to be killed by it,” the coffeehouse held body and soul together, soothing what writer Alfred Polgar liked to call a “cosmic uneasiness” by offering escape “into an irresponsible, sensuous, chance relationship to nothingness.” Here the “organization of the disorganized” built an inner world out of anecdote at the expense of facts.
Lying “on the Viennese latitude at the meridian of loneliness,” the literary coffeehouse offered “solo voices [that] cannot do without the support of the chorus” a longitude of fellowship among the cultural elite. To an assimilated Jew with artistic aspirations, the strong Semitic presence of the coffeehouse was an intellectual magnet. At the Café Central László could huddle anonymously over a cup of coffee or rub shoulders with writers of Kleinkunst (small forms), such as Polgar, Peter Altenberg, Egon Friedell, and Karl Kraus.10 Or he could walk a few steps down narrow Herrengasse and further his education in psychoanalysis at the spacious and sunny Café Herrenhof, which was frequented by Alfred Adler, Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Gross, and Adolf Josef Storfer.11 Something of a shining figure there, “Laczy” (pronounced Lazzy) Loewenstein brilliantly advertised his cabaret gifts. Milan Dubrovic, the doyen of Austrian journalism, remembered László “as an unmasked blitz parodist notorious and famous for his mischievous sayings, puns and bawdy rhymes, which he produced on an assembly line.” Most famously, after the homosexual actor Gustaf Gründgens wed actress Marianne Hoppe, he devised the popular chant
Hoppe, Hoppe Gründgens
they don’t have children.
And if they do have children,
they are not by Gründgens
Reduced to begging, László made the café circuit in the hopes of cadging a cup of coffee or collecting enough spare change to buy something to eat. At one stop, he met William Moreno, whose older brother Jacob had founded the Stegreiftheater (Theater of Spontaneity) in 1922.12 Jacob Moreno believed that traditional theater had lost its surprise. Words and gestures had grown tired in their long trip from page to stage. To restore the lost sense of immediacy, he proposed stringing together “now and then flashes” that would unchain illusion and let imagination run free. As a young medical student at the University of Vienna, he had walked through the public gardens collecting children for “impromptu play.” In his interactive kindergarten, he learned how to “treat children’s problems by letting them act extemporaneously.” He also conducted sessions in the streets and at military camps, prisons, and hospitals. On April 1, 1921, psychodrama, a “science” that explored the therapeutic effects of spontaneous drama, was born.
Not only social misfits, malcontents, and psychological rebels (which László must certainly have appeared to be) were attracted to the experimental theater, but also natural actors untainted by experience or orthodoxy—certainly a cut at Freud’s teachings—and gifted enough to improvise both gestures and dialogue. Among those who came by the Stegreiftheater to watch, listen, and learn were Alexander Moissi, Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, Franz Theodor Csokor, and Arthur Schnitzler.
William Moreno was intrigued by the young waif. Zerka Moreno
, Jacob’s widow, recalled that William listened attentively to László’s stories of street life and (somewhat skeptically) to his claims that “he had been ejected from his parental home because he had impregnated a maid” and that his parents “were middle-class people who could not deal with him, and did not support him in any way.”13 He reported to Jacob that he had met a rather odd-looking young man who was in need of a job. He “might be a suitable character for the theater, he had such a curious smile and face, quite unforgettable.” Would Jacob like to meet him? He would. Jacob, who was “always fond of mavericks, being one himself,” tested László at the Stegreiftheater, “putting him into a situation with a surprise element, to test and evaluate his ability.” He apparently showed promise and was invited to become a regular member of the acting troupe in 1922.
Years later, Lorre remembered it as an “ideal school of acting.” Instead of focusing on linear time, the actors discovered a collection of moments that aroused “the subject to an adequate re-enactment of the lived out and unlived out dimensions” of their private worlds. In this way, he pointed out, they could commit “dramatic suicide,” if they were so inclined, and rid themselves of psychic complexes at the same time. Always contemptuous of conventional methods, Lorre defiantly pointed out that acting cannot be taught in school: “I don’t believe in studying a thing that lies definitely in the realm of imagination.” Rather, he believed that “the actor must have a feeling for it. If a person acts because he has ‘learned it in school,’ rather than because he has a striking talent for it, he’ll just be reaching a dull medium in his performances.”
Also known as The Therapeutisches Theater (Therapeutic Theater), the Stegreiftheater followed two lines of development, one purely aestheticdramatic, the other psychiatric. Steering a course between the “ecstatic pathos of expressionism” and direct analytical therapy, Moreno stressed the need to define the individual in relation to the group, an approach that put László in the spotlight. As a talented improviser capable of using his “facial muscle acrobatics” to instantly change his normal expression—a “mask frozen in an ugly grimace”—from the saintly face of a Tibetan beggar monk to that of a demonic lust murderer, he was an ideal actor for Moreno. The so-called star of the Stegreiftheater, according to Dubrovic, could motivate patients who played with him to “spontaneous healing reactions.” Zerka Moreno remembers hearing about another side of László: “He acted particularly in roles involving streaks of cruelty, pimps, murderers, gamblers, etc. One of his best roles was that of a wealthy miser who lived, however, in abject poverty and whose sole reason for living was to count his money, neatly stacking his coins and from time to time letting them run through his hands as if they were water. His delight in this was captivatingly infectious.”