Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  ii

  Vaudeville and silent-movie houses were Humphrey’s oases in the city. In the country, the Comrade became his sanctuary. He had an innate ability to read the wind, and the silence and beauty of the flat water gave him a sense of calm he had never felt before. When Belmont let him steer, he seemed to take control not only of the vessel, but of his whole being.

  There was an additional reason to enjoy puttering around the dock and the lake: Canandaigua was three hundred miles from school. Humphrey had found his first private academy, Delancey, a pain. He was even more restive at the all-male Trinity, an institution of learning founded in 1709, and since that day attended by offspring of the well-connected. In a magazine interview many years later, one of his classmates confessed that “the fact that he posed for his mother’s ‘pretty’ illustrations helped earn him a sissy reputation. We always called him ‘Humphrey’ because we considered that a sissy name. We must have made life miserable for Bogart.”

  Underachievers often make themselves popular by excelling in sports. But Humphrey only looked like an athlete. In fact he had no gift for any game except chess. Nor had he any for concentrating on his studies. He was bright enough, and his erect posture and fine features gave him the look of the customary WASP Trinitarian. But, like the Bogart estate, it was all for show. Easily distracted, unhappy at home, he got into fights with classmates and quarreled with teachers. His grades hovered at C level. The headmaster confronted him: “This endless flouting of authority. Why do you do these things?” The adolescent was sullen but unresponsive. Only after decades was he able to supply an answer: “I always liked stirring up things, needling authority. I guess I got it from my parents. They needled everyone, including each other.”

  In Humphrey’s junior year, Maud was offered a position as art director of the Delineator, a prominent ladies’ magazine. The hours would be long, the vacations brief. On the other hand, the pay and expense account were generous. She signed on. The new arrangement meant that Willow Brook would be a rarely used, and therefore prohibitively expensive, family retreat. It was sold, effectively ending Humphrey’s long summer idylls. Belmont acquired a smaller place on Fire Island, but nothing was the same after the five Bogarts stopped summering upstate.

  Resentful of circumstances over which he had no control, Humphrey played hooky and affected an indifference to achievement of any kind. Upperclassmen were required to wear blue suits to school; he topped his with a black derby, giving him the air of a racetrack tout. His behavior made Maud edgy, and he was the absolute despair of Belmont. Here was his only son, the one who would carry on the family name, given the best of material comforts, the finest schooling. And what was he turning out to be? A scapegrace, a bottom-of-the-class wastrel. It would never do. Using all the pull he could muster, Belmont got the wayward boy into his old alma mater, Phillips Andover, gateway to Yale.

  The oldest boarding school in the United States, Phillips, in Andover, Massachusetts, had been established two years after the Declaration of Independence. John Hancock signed the institution’s papers of incorporation, Paul Revere created its seal, and Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park and himself a graduate, laid out much of the campus grounds. Understandably, an aura of privilege has been part of the school’s tradition since the day George Washington’s nephews were admitted. This has caused the predictable hostility from outsiders, encapsulated by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye: “I sort of hated old Sally by the time we got in the cab, after listening to that phony Andover bastard for about ten hours.” Within its walls there have also been dissidents who failed to catch the school spirit summarized by its motto, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends on the Beginning). Humphrey was one of the surliest.

  The year was 1917, and the end of the old world was at hand. The tsar of Imperial Russia had just abdicated. The Great War inflamed Europe. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” steered his nation into the conflict. Conscription began. Thousands of American boys were put in uniform and given basic training; they would shortly be sent to join the decimated Allied troops in Belgium and France. Yet in the leafy little town in Massachusetts, all were sheltered and secure, even though a handful of students did recite the popular ditty “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany,” and sang a spirited version of George M. Cohan’s new tune “Over There,” with its warning to beware because the Yanks were coming, to the accompaniment of drums rum-tumming everywhere. For most of them this was merely an upbeat lark; what fool would want to wear puttees and carry a rifle when he could be enjoying a cloistered life behind these ivied walls? Study was the main thing; as long as you kept up your grades, you were immune from the draft.

  But safety was the last thing Humphrey wanted. It was the old story in a new setting: he had applied himself for the first month, and his grades showed the effect, gratifying his parents. And then, as before, things fell apart. He tested poorly and hardly ever participated in class discussions. By the end of the academic year he was failing geometry, English, French, and Bible study. Belmont examined the report card. Fuming, he gave Humphrey a lecture on responsibility and self-discipline. In a letter to the Andover headmaster he adopted a cooler tone, advising him that “Humphrey is a good boy with no bad habits, who has simply lost his head temporarily.” A line was appended: “The harder the screws are put on the better it will be for my son.”

  The screws were applied—and they completely closed Humphrey’s mind. The only times he experienced anything like enlightenment came during after-hours bull sessions at Bishop Hall dorm. The most popular talker was Floyd Furlow, whose father ran the Otis Elevator Company. Floyd was up on world affairs as well as local scuttlebutt, and he had a generous allowance with which he bought luxurious snacks to share with his fellow students. One of them spoke about his origins in South Africa; another, to Humphrey’s transparent envy, let everyone know he had worked on a ship before returning to school. Arthur Sircom, a frequent attendee, was to remember young Bogart sitting on the floor, irritable and melancholy, as out of place as a porcupine in a herd of colts. It was Arthur who ran across Humphrey packing up his belongings. It was a Thursday afternoon near the end of the spring term. Arthur inquired about the early departure; was Humphrey planning a long family weekend at Fire Island? “No,” came the reply. “I’m leaving this fucking place! For good! It’s just a waste of time here.” Arthur shook his head. Humphrey never did understand the meaning of Finis Origine Pendet. He had cut himself off from his future. He would be drafted now, made into cannon fodder, perhaps maimed or killed overseas.

  As Humphrey packed, he explained his departure to the other boys in the dorm: “The bastards threw me out.” The faculty and staff had done exactly that, not because of Humphrey’s disposition or his demerits. Or, as Andover legend still has it, because he had thrown grapefruits through the headmaster’s window. It was because his grades had fallen so precipitously. He came home in disgrace to find Belmont icy and Maud sulfurous: the boy had had every chance, she said, and he failed both himself and his parents. She went on like that for four days straight. Finally Belmont broke his silence. He had arranged with a friend, a naval architect, to employ the wayward youth in a Manhattan shipyard. At least Humphrey could contribute to the war effort, like a decent able-bodied male.

  Humphrey had a better idea, though he left it unexpressed. In his life he would journey to Europe and Africa, and he would make his home three thousand miles from the house on 103rd Street. But he would never take a longer journey than the one he made on May 28, 1918, when he dropped a nickel in the subway turnstile and headed for Brooklyn.

  iii

  The recruiting officer aboard the SS Granite State was pleased to receive him, as he was pleased to receive all volunteers for the U.S. Navy. Enlistment had been brisk since May 7, 1915. On that date a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 of the passengers aboard, many of them America
ns. The incident turned U.S. opinion against Germany and prompted scores to volunteer for naval service. Now, two years later, the nation had joined the Allies in the fight to save civilization, and men were lined up by the thousands, ready to go to battle against the Hun.

  Looking back, Humphrey saw that in the eyes of an eighteen-year-old dropout, “The war was great stuff. Paris! French girls! Hot damn!” He was given a physical on board the ship, checking in at five feet, eight inches in height, weighing 136 pounds, with brown eyes and hair and no remarkable scars. He had, in effect, run away from home, but when his parents learned of the enlistment they expressed pride and euphoria. Now Maud saw her boy as something of a hero, an American in uniform ready to do his duty for his country. Belmont thought the navy might teach him a thing or two about discipline, and make a man of him in the process. School wasn’t everything; didn’t Herman Melville write “A whaleship was my Yale college and my Harvard”?

  The enlistee received his basic training at the Naval Reserve Training Station at Pelham, New York, graduating with rank of coxswain. Like most of the class, he was assigned to the Leviathan, a troop transport. According to Humphrey’s own version, his father got what he wanted on the second day out, when Coxswain Bogart received a direct order to carry out an assignment and told his superior, “Not my detail.” This was the old navy, and infractions were dealt with directly; Humphrey was decked with a right to the jaw. From above him he heard the command, “Don’t say that again when you’re given an order.” He never got in an officer’s face after that. But neither did he become a model sailor. Various infractions landed him in the brig several times; he got demoted to seaman second class, lost a month’s pay in a crap game, and never saw any action overseas—the war ended on November 11, 1918, five and a half months after he had signed up. He also got into a disfiguring accident that year, one that would turn out to be the stuff of legend.

  In later years movie publicists would churn out a story about the mark on Humphrey Bogart’s upper lip: just as he had taken the wheel of the Leviathan, a U-boat fired at the ship and an errant piece of shrapnel hit the valorous young Bogart in the face. This was a total fiction. Darwin Porter’s scabrous and dubiously referenced The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart claims that a drunken Belmont Bogart savagely struck his fourteen-year-old son, loosening two front teeth and smashing his upper lip. The beating was supposed to have come after the boy used an air rifle to shoot out some red lanterns on the grounds of the Delancey school. Sober, says Porter, Belmont might have sewed up the lip leaving a minimum trace, but he was drunk and botched the job. Nathaniel Benchley, a confidant and early biographer, seems a more reliable source. He swore that the scar came from a stateside non-domestic incident. Humphrey had been assigned to guard a navy prisoner being transferred from a docked ship to Portsmouth Naval Prison, in New Hampshire. The captive’s wrists were cuffed to each other, and he was quiet and obedient as they made their way north. When they changed trains in Boston he pleaded for a smoke, and Humphrey amiably handed over a cigarette. He even supplied a light. As the prisoner bent over the match he suddenly put his hands together, struck the guard’s mouth with the manacles, and fled. Humphrey was stunned, but not disabled. He took his .45 from its holster and fired away, hitting the running man in the leg. After the prisoner was locked up in Portsmouth, a doctor tended to the lip. He sewed up the wound badly, and left a small disfiguring cicatrix.

  The incident made Seaman Bogart suspicious of prisoners in particular and the navy in general. And then he became a jailbird himself. It happened in 1919, five months after the armistice. He had just been transferred to the USS Santa Olivia, a small troopship assigned to pick up American soldiers in Europe and ferry them home. On April 13, the night before she was due to sail, Humphrey and a few other servicemen tied one on. A game began: Who would be the last to board the Olivia? One by one they clambered aboard. At the very last minute they looked around. No Bogart. There was an iron law about sailing time, and the ship left Hoboken without him. He was marked down as a deserter. Panicked, he turned himself in to the authorities. He had not deserted, he pleaded; he had merely overslept. He was wrong, he admitted, he was contrite, he would suffer any punishment for his neglect of duty, just as long as the authorities understood that he was not a traitor, only a sailor who’d gone absent without leave. The U.S. Navy let him dangle for weeks, and then accepted his plea.

  All the same, AWOL was not a crime without punishment. Humphrey was put behind bars for three days, confined to solitary and restricted to bread and water. A few weeks later he was demobilized and given an honorable discharge. Seaman Bogart was astonished to see his performance sheet: some forgiving officer had given him the highest possible marks in Sobriety and Obedience.

  iv

  In 1919 Humphrey faced a problem common to every war veteran: how to reenter civilian society. But he had special problems for a man of his class and upbringing. He possessed no degree in anything, no seagoing skills that could be adapted for peacetime use. And there was one other impediment. While he was gone, Belmont, his judgment clouded by morphine addiction, had made some unwise investments in the timber industry. The end of the war had meant the end of shipbuilding, and there was an unpredicted slump in housing. The Bogarts had lost a fortune. En route, Belmont also lost many of his important patients. To hold up his end of the family finances, the doctor agreed to become the official physician on ocean liners. This kept him away for weeks at a time, an arrangement agreeable to Maud. But not to Humphrey. Whatever his father’s faults, he still had business connections; his mother had none, and when he moved back to his room at 103rd Street he found her as critical and as cold as she had been before he enlisted. “There was no running down the stairs with arms outstretched,” he remembered ruefully, “no ‘My darling son!’ Only ‘Good job, Humphrey!’ or something like that.” The lack of affection between mother and son could only have intensified Humphrey’s feelings of dislocation and self-doubt.

  He turned to his father. To his surprise, Belmont came through. On one of the doctor’s shore leaves he spoke to businessman clients and friends, calling in chips for his wayward boy. In later years Humphrey claimed to have been an entry-level executive for the National Biscuit Co., a tugboat inspector, and a Pennsylvania Railroad worker. He left the last job, according to his own account, “when I found that there were 50,000 employees between me and the president.” Finally he became a runner for a major Wall Street firm, S. W. Strauss & Co. None of it added up to a career. As far as he could see, making whoopee was about all he was good at. He threw himself into Manhattan’s raucous nightclub scene, refusing to look back, unwilling to peer into the future.

  The Volstead Act of 1920, forbidding the sale of alcohol, had become the law of the land. Warren G. Harding had replaced Woodrow Wilson in the White House and, harrumphing about a “Return to Normalcy,” did nothing as the stock market went wild and the liquor business boomed. With broad winks and nudges from the police, speakeasies were set up throughout the city, and Humphrey and his short-skirted, hair-bobbed dates were frequent visitors to the hot ones. He wasn’t a hit with everyone, though. A local girl, Lenore Strunsky, later the wife of lyricist Ira Gershwin, was to remember the twenty-year-old Bogart as “an attractive boy,” but not very popular with her crowd. “For one thing, he ate onions, and he didn’t write poetry. In fact, he didn’t do anything interesting that I can recall.”

  Humphrey was all too aware that he was a slacker in real life, a wise guy with no future. Everybody seemed to be getting on, in the media, in show business, on Wall Street—everyone except Humphrey Bogart. He griped to friends who listened, but did nothing. In the company of Bill Brady Jr. he was particularly down. His pal had a show business future ahead of him; all he had to do was follow Bill Sr.’s trail. But what chance did Humphrey have? Junior thought about it. He convinced his married half sister, Alice, to work on their father, persuade him to give Humphrey a job doing something, anything, backstage. It was during
this time that the senior Brady changed his mind about cinema. One look at the profit sheets at Fox and Universal had been enough to persuade him that a man could make a nice living in the picture business—if he got the right people in front of the camera. To that end, he founded a company, World Film Corporation, in Fort Lee, New Jersey; hired two proven stars, Nita Naldi and Arlene Pretty, for one movie; and signed a director to develop another, provisionally entitled Life. He needed an office boy—or said that he did—and took Humphrey on. The kid had something, God knew what; better to give Junior’s pal a job than let it go to a stranger.

  A few months into production, William Brady Sr. decided that the director of Life had no talent and fired him. Senior prided himself on his seat-of-the-pants instincts about people and tapped Humphrey to finish the picture. This was the young man’s big chance. He turned the opportunity into amateur night. In too many scenes the camera recorded Humphrey’s gesticulations, reflected in the windows of storefronts as he directed the actors. The footage had to be thrown away. Brady took over and finished the picture himself. Humiliated, Humphrey regarded the experience as strike one and expected to be dismissed.

  But Brady Sr. didn’t want to upset his children. They liked Humphrey and, for that matter, so did he. The young man was encouraged to try another branch of show business: writing. He sat down before a typewriter and in a few weeks came up with a script. Brady thought it was a bit too violent for his studio, but that the dialogue showed promise. He gave the pages to Jesse L. Lasky, head of a burgeoning new film company. Lasky was busy and handed them to his assistant. Walter Wanger said Humphrey’s script was just about the worst thing he had ever seen, pitched it in a wastebasket, and let everybody know what he had done. Strike two.