Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

It’s probably accurate to state that Isador was a kind of self-taught scholar of Peter Lorre’s life and films. I don’t mean he used scholarly words to describe any of it. But he knew a lot, especially about what he called Lorre’s “early years.” He didn’t much care about movie stars, though like anyone he had his favorite movies. I was impressed by Isador’s knowledge in these matters. When you don’t know anything about a subject, everything’s a revelation. “You ever watch the one called M ?” he asked. “In that picture Lazzy murders a child. Talk about guilt! You don’t get guiltier than Lazzy in that picture. There’s nothing worse than murdering a child, is there? There’s one scene, well, it’s famous, I suppose. Lazzy looks into a mirror and twists his face all up. Like he wants to permanently change his features. His character hates himself. At least that’s how I always see it.”

Before I knew it, Isador’s face — no, his entire posture, it seemed — fell into severe despondency. As if all his years had actual weight that was pressing on his shoulders, he slumped on the sofa and tears filled his eyes. He opened a bottle of vodka, poured us each a glass. Then he used one of his favorite phrases, which characterized his inventive locutions in Yiddish-accented English— unconditional unforgiveness. “I have unconditional unforgiveness toward myself,” Isador said, pouring himself a second shot. You understand what I refer to?”

“I was worried this would come up, Isador. Watching this movie.”

“Just now I’m suffering plural remorses. Maybe you should go home.”

Plural remorses— another of his memorable phrases.

But I didn’t return to my apartment, which was Mathilde’s former apartment. I stayed and heard Isador out yet again about his decision to play a Nazi in The Cross of Lorraine. Naturally, to anyone else this would comprise the tiniest footnote in film history. But in Isador’s mind, it not only loomed large, it defined him from that point on as “not a good person.”

Peter Lorre’s and Isador’s lives first intersected in the 1920s. Back then, in Germany and Austria, Lorre appeared in stage works by Bertolt Brecht; Isador was an understudy to him in Mann Ist Mann. He remembered going to a performance of the infamous musical Happy End, written by Brecht with music composed by Kurt Weill, and was friends for a few years with the actor Oskar Homolka. Isador and Lorre would meet in cafés in Berlin. “After Fritz Lang cast Lazzy in M —that was 1931—our lives fell away from each other almost completely. Then Hitler.” In 1933 Isador traveled on a Dutch passport—“this cost me an arm and a leg”—to Amsterdam. He eventually entered Canada through Pier 21 in Halifax—“the Ellis Island of Canada,” as he and many others referred to it. “I had dreams still of working on the stage, but in Halifax at that time there wasn’t much opportunity.” So began his work in hotels.

“As for my nemesis, The Cross of Lorraine, ” he said, “let me put it this way: for a moment it was a blessing, a paycheck, then the curse of a lifetime.”

I had the pressing obligation to work off the debt for Laughing Gull, and two days after I’d purchased it at auction, I sat at the table in the cramped kitchen where Mathilde had served me breakfast and dinner. (“My opinion? If a woman doesn’t at least sometimes cook meals for you to eat together, she doesn’t love you. I don’t care if it’s just using a skillet on a hot plate,” she’d said after making lamb chops in a skillet on a hot plate.) I was scouring the employment listings in the Halifax Herald.

My eye caught an advertisement for a night janitor at Nova Scotia Hospital on Dartmouth Street. I had a perfunctory interview with the director of maintenance services. She asked two questions: did I have a criminal record, and did I mind working alone. I signed some employment and tax forms, and she said, “You can start tomorrow night. Report to Mr. McKenzie in the cafeteria at nine o’clock. Your hours are nine P.M. to six A.M., and you don’t work on Friday or Saturday nights, but Sunday you work.”

The next night, Mr. McKenzie, who was about sixty and the size of the actor Sidney Greenstreet, showed me the ropes. He introduced me to the men and women of the night janitorial staff and gave me a tour of the hospital wards, the supply rooms, the emergency exits. His instructions in how to use the electric floor polisher came with a World War Two reference. “I ran mine sweepers along the beaches in France,” he said, demonstrating the polisher. “Now you try it.” The machine was surprisingly difficult to control; in my first attempt, along a corridor in the children’s ward, it ricocheted loudly off the floorboards, leaving black scuff marks. “You’ll have to scrub those off,” he said. “You’ve just made extra work for yourself.” Then Mr. McKenzie left me to practice with the floor polisher.

My first night of official employment I polished eight corridors on three different floors, and as a result my shoulder and arm muscles, my lower back and calves, felt knotted and sore. When Mr. McKenizie checked on me at about midnight, he said, “There’s muscle liniment in your locker. Don’t go asking a nurse to rub it in, either. The nurses’ll kick your butt halfway to Sunday, you ask that sort of favor.” I hadn’t thought of asking anybody. So now I was a floor polisher.

The Cross of Lorraine tells the tragic story of the capitulation of the French army, narrated through the nerve-racking confusion, despondency, and anxieties of a small group of agents provocateurs who, against their better judgment, surrender and are transported to a German prison camp. There they realize the poisonous intent of the Nazis, and though one cowardly weakling defects, dignity and self-respect and French nationalist pride finally dictate their heroic actions. It is basically a War Office propaganda film. The Cross of Lorraine itself was originally a symbol of Joan of Arc and was added to the French flag by Charles de Gaulle, adopted as the symbol of the Free French. The film had a few commendable performances by the likes of Lorre, Hume Cronyn, and Joseph Calleia, and a stymied one by Gene Kelly, owing to the stilted script. Much of the story is clichéd. The French Resistance (no mention is made of the Vichy regime) is composed only of the noblest of brave souls; the Germans — with the qualified exception of the Peter Lorre character — are robotic sadists. As for Isador, Lorre had arranged for him a minuscule role as a Nazi prison guard.

So in 1942, Isador, making his first plane flight, traveled to Los Angeles, where he stayed in a cheap hotel and had a total of three days on set. On one of those days, he told me, he got to watch Tommy Dorsey and his band rehearse a scene for Girl Crazy on the studio lot. And the day Isador left by cross-country train for home, then-Senator Harry Truman visited the set, escorted by the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Louis B. Mayer. “I was sorry to have missed those big shots,” Isador said. “But I’d bet Lazzy said a thing or two to Mr. Truman about the Nazis. I bet he took Mr. Truman aside and gave him what for. I got to spend a total of about ten minutes alone with Lazzy. Enough for a cigarette. Though he greeted me warmly and introduced me around. In the commissary I sat with other actors playing Nazis. Not that any of this hurt my feelings exactly, and besides, Lazzy was a very busy man. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone out there. But I was paid all right, and I believe that Lazzy contributed something extra out of his own pocket. I never set eyes on Gene Kelly. It all was an experience to write in my diary, if I kept one, which I didn’t.”