Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Bacall essentially confirmed all this in her own way. She said that it wasn’t until around the fourth week of shooting that anything started, that it was Bogart who had “started,” and that they had the greatest time with each other. Over the last two weeks of the movie, she thought only about him. No doubt a good deal of what happened resulted from their “playing scenes” for Hawks’ picture. Bacall acknowledged the obvious “living the part” associations, but said that this certainly didn’t happen “consciously.” Bogart did not believe in living-the-part acting techniques. He used to tell Bacall she had to let the movie-work stay on the lot, and have a decent life at home. For Bogart, she said, what was crucial was being true to oneself and never lying.

  At first, Bacall’s mother didn’t like Bogart at all and tried to keep them apart. One night the phone rang at three in the morning and it was Bogart asking her to meet him in Beverly Hills. She leapt to go. Her mother was outraged, angrily exclaiming that he was married. Yes, he’s been married three times, Bacall replied, and left to meet Bogart, standing with veteran character actor James Gleason, at a corner by the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. When she saw him she “just ran into his arms.” Their period of “wooing” had been extraordinary. Bacall had been a virgin until Bogart.

  For the actor, however, Bacall then being only nineteen plagued him, and her age continued to do so for years. Before their marriage, he would say that he was so much older she’d be gone within five years. His friend German actor Peter Lorre told him that five years was “better than nothing.” Bogart countered that she was just starting out and he, at forty-five, was running down. Bacall reflected sadly that he did have only another twelve years.

  Things became serious between Bogart and “Baby,” as he called her (the press picked it up), during the summer after To Have and Have Not wrapped. One time at four a.m. he phoned asking her to meet him on Highway 101; he would be wearing a sunflower in his buttonhole. Again, despite her mother’s objections, Bacall drove down and found Bogart as promised, walking alone down Highway 101, unshaven, wearing a large sunflower in a buttonhole, white slacks, blazer, espadrilles. Bacall could hardly believe the sight. He was “irresistible,” “stunning”; Bogart “wooed better than anyone” she would ever know.

  The two had a “fabulous” time, were “a great pair,” Bacall said. Despite their twenty-five-year age difference, he often seemed considerably younger than her, had more energy than she did, and slept little. They would write letters to each other once a week. Bogart had partial duty with the U.S. Coast Guard (at the end of World War II), and one night a week they would meet at an agreed-upon spot, sit in his car for a half hour, exchange letters, and then she would have to leave. Bacall referred with affection to this romantic time as “kid stuff,” very “collegiate,” and said Bogart’s letters were “flowery” and “wonderful.” When she thought of those days, she noted that even though they happened so many years ago, “it’s all so clear still.”

  Bogart was endlessly fascinating to Bacall because of his many-sided personality, his intelligence, his slightly cynical attitude. Yet she believes it was his essential integrity that is responsible for his ongoing popularity. He would not compromise his values—with movies or in life. What he cared about most, she said, was “doing good work.” Bogart, she explained, never made the kind of money Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or many other stars made. Because studio head Harry Cohn knew how badly Bogart wanted to play Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, the actor even cut his salary to be in it (and received another Oscar nomination). “But Bogie was a last-century boy,” Bacall said, referring to Bogart’s birth in 1899, he wasn’t “a cheat,” never fooled around, and did not behave like a movie star with an entourage of sycophants. He never kowtowed, always spoke his mind, and in pictures was always anxious to make the work “better.”

  Bacall described Bogart as extremely “generous” to act with, and in no way competitive. Because of his training and experience in the theater, Bogart was not simply a “personality,” but an underrated, consummate actor, well educated and intelligent, an “avid reader,” said Bacall. This was a surprise to her, his intelligence. After their marriage, she saw how much he would read, and here she herself had thought he was “one of those ‘deez, dem, and doz’ guys.” Bogart was by nature “a worrier,” with great anxieties about his work, fatherhood, things that were new to him, often “tense,” which explained his love for the freedom of the sea and the boat where he would “unwind” and “relax,” said Bacall. Not only was his bravery real, but he had great courage and “high standards of behavior” by which he himself lived. He would refer to “the luck of the draw,” which might be “lousy” but simply had to be dealt with.

  Bogart’s fatal illness—he was to say he’d never been sick before in his life—lasted eleven long months, from the first terrible operation at the start of February 1956. Bacall remembered his amazing strength of character. Although there must have been strong feelings going on inside him, he never discussed them. There was no self-indulgence of any kind, she said; he acted as if all he had was “a cold.” Bacall did not discuss the cancer with him because that was clearly his preference. While he slowly wasted away, those who dropped by to visit most often were Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; they came regularly as a couple. Tracy and Bogart had started in pictures together on the same film (John Ford’s 1930 Up the River) and Hepburn and Bogart, of course, co-starred in John Huston’s The African Queen, shot on tough locations in Africa, Bacall with them the whole time. Tracy and Hepburn were among the last to see him alive.

  On the night before he lapsed into a coma from which he never revived, Bogart asked Bacall to sleep next to him above the covers. During that night, he woke up nearly every half hour, kept pushing on his chest from a feeling of suffocation. The next morning, a Sunday, they watched a musical on TV, Frank Sinatra came by on his way out of town, the doctor visited briefly and said Bogart’s difficulties of the night before were not unexpected. Heading out for a quick trip to pick up their children from Sunday school, Bacall kissed him as usual, saying she’d be back right away, and returned to find him in a coma. Sensing the end, she “broke down.” He was dead within twenty-four hours.

  When watching him in a film, Bacall would remember all the fun they had shared, his wit, his “great sense of humor.” He was “difficult,” not at all an “easy man,” but they “just happened to fit.” Looking at a Bogart movie she thinks again how “unfair” and “terrible” it is that his life was cut so short, that he couldn’t see his children grow up, especially because of his being such an “unusually good human being.” And despite everything, the strength of his character prevailed. No one could possibly replace him, or be compared to him, in life or on the screen.

  When I said that somehow even that kind of American didn’t seem to exist anymore, Bacall shook her head. “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “And that kind of America doesn’t exist either.”

  Humphrey DeForest Bogart, born December 25, 1899, New York, NY; died January 14, 1957, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1930: Up the River (John Ford)

  1936: The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo)

  1937: Dead End (William Wyler)

  1938: Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz)

  1939: The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh)

  1940: They Drive by Night (Walsh)

  1941: High Sierra (Walsh); The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)

  1943: Casablanca (Curtiz)

  1944: To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks)

  1946: The Big Sleep (Hawks)

  1948: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Key Largo (both Huston)

  1949: Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray)

  1950: In a Lonely Place (Ray)

  1951: The African Queen (Huston)

  1954: Beat the Devil (Huston); The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk); Sabrina (Billy Wilder); The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

  1955: The
Desperate Hours (Wyler)

  1956: The Harder They Fall (Mark Robson)

  *See Hawks chapter in Who the Devil Made It.

  3

  MARLON BRANDO

  The first and only star I ever asked for an autograph was Marlon Brando; he was also the first star I had met. It was around New Year’s 1954, I was fourteen, and had just seen a matinee at New York’s City Center starring José Ferrer in a heavy drama, The Shrike. Outside on the darkening winter sidewalk, I was looking at the posters proclaiming the production “a major cultural event” when I glanced up the street toward Seventh Avenue, and instantly from about a half-block away recognized the person coming toward me. My heart started beating faster as I quickly turned back to the poster. I felt I had to talk to him: it was Marlon Brando, for God’s sake, and if I didn’t get an autograph, no one would believe I had just seen him walking up 55th Street toward Sixth Avenue.

  I knew Brando was in town shooting the longshoreman drama On the Waterfront, with Elia Kazan directing (and for which Brando would win his first Best Actor Oscar), but I didn’t know until I saw the film eight months later that he was wearing his costume home: soon-to-be-familiar-to-the-world gray checkered jacket, work pants and motorcycle boots. I glanced again; when he was just a few feet away, absorbed in thought, hands shoved into the jacket’s side pockets, I turned and approached him, saying, “Mr. Brando, may I have your autograph?”

  He didn’t alter his step a fraction, looked at me briefly, and just kept walking as he said, fairly deadpan, with that slightly nasal Midwestern twang, “Yeah.” I fell in step with him, starting to search for a pad and pencil I knew I had somewhere, which is what I muttered. Brando looked over at me, still walking, and said, not unpleasantly, “You got a pen?”

  I repeated that it was on me someplace and, to fill the moment, said enthusiastically that I had just seen José Ferrer in The Shrike. Had he seen it?

  “Yeah,” he said, “I thought it stunk.”

  Marlon Brando in the costume he was wearing home the night I met him, with the wonderful Eva Marie Saint, on location in Hoboken for Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront (1954), written by Budd Schulberg. Although both Schulberg and Kazan had been willing witnesses who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the revisionist view of the movie as a kind of apologia for informers was certainly not the way the picture was perceived in its day, either by critics or the public; it won a slew of Oscars, including Brando’s first, after four nominations in a row.

  I stammered something meek, finally found the pencil and small pad, handed them over. Still without hesitating or changing his stride, Brando signed his name lengthwise on the pad, first name above the second, then gave it and the pencil back to me. I thanked him and, still a bit thrown by his comment on the Ferrer production, couldn’t really get it together for another remark, mind speeding the whole time to a kind of blurred blank. I would later recognize that same strange look of stasis on people asking for my autograph. The mind goes into overload—there is suddenly so much to talk about that no words at all can formulate themselves.

  At this point in his career, Brando was already a kind of legend and yet he had appeared only in four Broadway plays, only two of them successful (in the original I Remember Mama and in Kazan’s production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire), and five films, of which two (Fred Zinnemann’s The Men, and Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One, both produced by Stanley Kramer) had done poorly at the box office. When I ran into him on the street, I’d seen four of those five film performances more than once: seen him as Stanley Kowalski in Kazan’s film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (Brando’s first Oscar nomination); in the title role for Kazan’s Viva Zapata!, written by John Steinbeck; as Marc Antony in the all-star Joseph Mankiewicz–John Houseman production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; and as the rebel biker in The Wild One, the first biker film, essentially the start of the modern Western.

  After twelve years, Roger Corman had the first success in this genre with The Wild Angels (for which I wrote 80 percent of the final script and directed the second unit), making Peter Fonda a star and therefore setting the stage for Easy Rider three years later, which finally made the genre legitimate. And altered the Hollywood hierarchy radically for a while by inaugurating the brief Era of the Director in the United States, of which Brando himself would become an integral, indeed crucial, element with his 1972 performances in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, the wheel coming full circle.

  Brando’s first picture, The Men, had not been in circulation since its small initial 1950 release; Brando as a paraplegic was such a dud financially that when it was reissued (not until 1957, to cash in on Brando’s extraordinary popularity in the mid-fifties) the title was changed to Battle Stripe to make it seem like a new war film. The public wasn’t fooled and the movie fared no better. The Wild One (despite the success of Streetcar and moderate winners Zapata and Caesar) had recently opened in New York as the top half of a one-week double-bill, a sure sign that the studio didn’t think it would work commercially.

  Brando in the role that made him a star, first on Broadway, then on the screen: as Tennessee Williams’ brutal Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Elia Kazan directed both, with the transfixing Vivien Leigh winning an Oscar as Blanche DuBois.

  Meanwhile, Brando is brilliant in both, and was already by this moment in time the hippest actor there was, the most influential, most imitated, most controversial, most respected by other actors. Since I wanted very much to be a professional actor, my awe in his presence essentially rendered me speechless though my mind was racing with all those many images of Brando I had already accumulated. The whole truth is that in those early teenage days I was a popular mimic at school, doing impressions of a number of stars, Brando prominent among them, and to such a degree that within a year or so some students started calling me Marlon.

  By now, Brando and I had reached the corner of Sixth Avenue and 55th. The light was green so Brando kept going. I thanked him again as he moved off the curb and glanced at me to say, “So-long, kid.” As he did I noticed one boot stepped into a pile of dog shit. I thought of advising him of what had happened but he continued on determinedly, hands shoved back into jacket pockets, and I flashed that my father had said stepping in dog shit was good luck. Certainly before I could figure out how to say, “You just stepped in dog shit,” he was at the other side of the avenue, and soon disappearing into the darkness.

  For years I treasured the little piece of paper with Brando’s signature on it, carrying it in my wallet long into my twenties (though now it’s lost). That evening, on the bus home, I felt a kind of magical sense of being special, of being among the chosen; why else would I be lucky enough to have had such an encounter? My inside pocket glowed like hot gold with the proof it contained of the miracle, the benediction. Certainly, I’d never felt anything like this before. Perhaps it’s the sudden proximity to genius, talent or celebrity; the old thing about the spotlight falling on you because you’re momentarily illuminated by the star’s glow: reflected glory. I have felt it many times since that chance meeting with Brando but never again with the kind of intense mystery of the first experience.

  Our second meeting was also by accident. It was four years later, the spring of 1958, and by then I had seen everything he had done since winning for On the Waterfront and becoming the most sought-after star in pictures, with his choices being just about everything that was out there. Brando had made four selections since we had met: as Napoleon in Desirée, a bizarre pick surely and a best-forgotten flop; as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, the successful Mankiewicz–Samuel Goldwyn version of the hit Broadway musical, out of Damon Runyon by way of Frank Loesser; as a wise Okinawan for the film version of another Broadway smash, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Brando’s first of numerous major associations with Asia and Asians; and as U.S. Army Lt. Gruber falling in love with a Japanese girl while stationed in Japan, for Joshua Logan’s producti
on of Sayonara, among the actor’s biggest box-office successes.

  Though I had admired the basic quality of all these performances, the ones I hadn’t seen before receiving Brando’s autograph, and now had seen more than once, were The Men, On the Waterfront and Sayonara, his most charming and refreshingly undisguised performance to that time, one which by now tended to dominate my own (and others’) Brando impressions because the role seemed most like him in real life.

  In the meantime, I had met many other actors and a few other stars, had worked in three seasons of summer stock, and had been studying acting for three years with Stella Adler, who was, of course, Marlon’s own teacher. I had a regular girlfriend, and had auditioned for the Actors Studio and been rejected. I was walking from Fifth Avenue toward Madison and, passing the side windows of the famous F.A.O. Schwarz toy store (this is long before they moved), I looked at one of the displays in the shop window and saw Brando standing inside, leaning against a counter, looking at a stuffed animal. I turned on my heel and walked back to the entrance on Fifth. Brando was gazing quizzically at a different stuffed animal when I went over and said hello and told him my name, that I was a young actor and was working with Stella Adler.