Over the years there have been so many depictions of Peter and allusions to him in comic strips, animated cartoons, comedy sketches and stand-up routines, radio plays, stage plays, television programs and films, advertising, popular music, and literature that it would be futile to try to track down and catalog them all. Still the notion persists that Peter was an obscure and insignificant cultural figure. When Leslie Epstein decided to write a novel about Hollywood Jews during the Holocaust, and to make Peter Lorre his protagonist, he apparently did no research, perhaps because his father and uncle were screenwriters on a couple of films Peter appeared in and he felt that this gave him the authority to write about Peter’s Hollywood career without really knowing any specifics about it.

A Jewish Peter Lorre fan once told me she thought that the “Peter Lorre” who’s the main character in Epstein’s novel “Pandaemonium” is a version of the classic Jewish schlemiel, a ridiculous, ineffectual man who in this case represents the dilemma of the American Jew in the Nazi era, wracked with survivor guilt and maddened by his inability to stop the

suffering of his people in Europe. Epstein depicts Peter as a particularly contemptible schlemiel,  consoling himself with furtive snorts of cocaine as the Hollywood beauties he attempts to molest reject him, the ultimate symbol of his impotence being his grotesquely small penis. (When I asked James Bigwood, coauthor of “The Films of Peter Lorre,” if he knew of any factual basis for this, he chuckled and said no.)

This grossly defamatory, entirely imaginary portrait of Peter was accepted without question. “Pandaemonium” got enthusiastic reviews, won awards, and was chosen one of the “New York Times Book Review” notable books of 1997. Jack Terricloth, front man for the pop band World Inferno Friendship Society, used “Pandaemonium” as the basis for his song cycle “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century,” in which he reimagines Epstein’s Peter as a decadent and self-destructive rock and roll star. Like Epstein, Terricloth felt no sense of responsibility to the historical Peter and never bothered to check his facts. E.g., his Peter, like Epstein’s, is addicted to cocaine, while the real Peter was a morphine addict.

Epstein’s decision to use the name Peter Lorre for an essentially fictional character is a prime example of the tendency to think of Peter as sort of a folk character like Santa Claus rather than a historically real person. While there are characters in “Pandaemonium” that are obviously supposed to be Jack Warner, Marlene Dietrich, and Erich von Stroheim, Epstein chose to fictionalize them, though all of these individuals were dead when the book was published and could have been libeled with as much impunity as Peter. But Warner, Dietrich and Stroheim do not occupy the same plane of cultural iconography as Peter. Those of us who know who they were are also aware of their existence as actual human beings with published life stories, and if you made up defamatory lies about them, people might notice and object.

Those critics who gave Epstein high marks for creativity and originality for creating a bawdy, flamboyant, darkly comic novel featuring Peter Lorre are probably unaware that not only wasn’t it an original idea, but that another American novelist had done it much better three decades earlier. Brock Brower chose to use the name Simon Moro for the protagonist of his 1971 novel “The Late Great Creature” rather than calling him Peter Lorre, perhaps out of respect since Peter had only been dead for a few years when the book came out, or because Brower felt freer to take liberties with a clearly fictional character than a specifically historical one (the postmodern disregard for boundaries between truth and fiction had not come into fashion yet), or because living persons like Jacob Moreno, Vincent Price and Roger Corman are also depicted in the novel in a highly libelous manner, but almost certainly because he couldn’t have written a faithful account of Peter’s life if he had wanted to because he simply didn’t have the necessary information to do it. Until “The Films of Peter Lorre” was published in 1984 there was next to no reliable information available in print about Peter’s life.

Brower had interviewed Peter as part of a 1964 “Esquire” magazine feature article about the making of the film “The Raven,” and evidently found him interesting enough to dig around and find out what he could about him, probably mostly by word of mouth, thus giving him the idea for this novel. What’s fascinating about “The Late Great Creature” is that, despite the fact that it is almost a complete fantasy, it comes closer to recreating what the real Peter Lorre must have been like than anything else written about him.

“The Late Great Creature” is structured like “Citizen Kane,” with a journalist on a quest to uncover the hidden life story of Simon Moro, a mysterious German actor who specializes in playing haunting, monstrous characters. To find out the truth about Simon is a challenge, since he is a trickster who delights in paradoxes, illusions, and diabolical games. He has a sick sense of humor and ingenious sexual skills that make him a delight to women and a devastating rival to men. Already you get the idea that Simon Moro is radically different than Epstein’s Peter Lorre. Simon is a mercurial, charismatic creature whom you really can imagine being a legendary popular entertainer. He also shares certain unmistakable attributes with the real Peter, such as his fondness for weird practical jokes and his habit of biting people. The fact that Brower does not make Simon Jewish or a drug addict probably means that none of his sources knew these things about Peter. But the escalating shocks of the personal history he invents for Simon indicate that he suspected the high stakes nature of what Peter had so carefully concealed about himself. And even as he speculated, at least Brower had the decency to admit to himself and to us that he was making it all up.

100. (c) Anne Sharp. All rights reserved.
     

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