“It was only at that moment,” Humphrey was to recall, “that I realized how much I loved him and needed him and never really told him. Just before he died I said, ‘I love you, Father.’ He heard me, because he looked at me and smiled. Then he died. He was a real gentleman.” This summary was in sharp contrast to his portrait of Maud. Told about Belmont’s death, she “doubled up momentarily, as if she had the wind knocked out of her, then straightened up and said, ‘Well, that’s done.’ ”
Belmont DeForest Bogart left ten thousand dollars’ worth of debts. Here the other Humphrey, the son of well-bred, accomplished people, emerged to meet the crisis. He resolved to pay off the IOUs to the final dollar, stepping into the role of dignified and enlightened person—Belmont before his fall from grace. The burden of that role was heavier than he imagined. The more Humphrey thought about the money he owed, the sadder he got. And the sadder he got, the more he imbibed. His wife and friends worried about him because he had assumed a quiet, fatalistic air, as if the dying man was going to be his next role. Among the friends were convivial journalists and writers who gathered at familiar drinking holes. Playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood, the most successful of the bunch, had taken to Humphrey from the day they first clinked glasses. Like the others, he was disturbed by the actor’s profound melancholia. But unlike the others, he was in a position to do something about it. Sherwood’s producer-director, Arthur Hopkins, was in the process of auditioning actors for The Petrified Forest. The writer had an idea. His play had a cast of twenty-one. What if Humphrey were to take one of the smaller roles? The job might get him back on track. Sherwood put in a word with Hopkins.
The male lead was already signed. Leslie Howard had made his mark on the West End and Broadway, and in the last few years he had conquered Hollywood as well. In his latest film, The Scarlet Pimpernel, he had demonstrated a unique talent for swashbuckling and comedy. Audiences couldn’t get enough of him. But there would be very little humor in Petrified Forest. Howard, né Steiner, a man of Hungarian-Jewish background, had journeyed to Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933. He saw for himself that Winston Churchill’s warning was not an exaggeration: a threatening militant force had taken over Deutschland and war lay dead ahead. What interested Howard now was not the brittle, lighthearted work he did with such ease. He wanted to be part of a committed theater, expressing the pervasive sense of dread that characterized the era. He looked enviously at the Federal Theater downtown, the dark exploratory work of Eugene O’Neill, the fireworks of the Group Theater, with its exciting new talents, Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, Marc Blitzstein.
In The Anxious Years: America in the Nineteen Thirties, Louis Filler observes, “Numerous writers hoped to build careers upon their understanding of the world’s needs and conditions, and, in fact, to no small degree did so. What they had in common was their belief that their writing constituted a contribution to the world’s work, rather than to ‘mere’ personal expression.” Sherwood was among that number, and he found his ideal surrogate in Howard. The Englishman was going to play Alan Squier, a doomed intellectual marooned with a group of foundlings, wastrels, and criminals in a lunchroom at the edge of the Arizona desert. Sherwood imagined that with a little swagger and a few more pounds, Humphrey might play Boze Hertzlinger, a dreamy ex–football player.
Arthur Hopkins had a better idea. The fifty-six-year-old writer-director-producer had dominated the New York theater since the 1920s. He had introduced Ibsen and O’Neill plays to Broadway; produced Hamlet and Richard III, both starring John Barrymore; directed hit comedies, dramas, and musicals. His vita was long and his instincts reliable. So when he turned down Humphrey for the part of Boze, Sherwood could only bow to his wisdom and experience. But Hopkins was not through talking. Every season he made a point of seeing everything on Broadway, the flops as well as the smashes, and he had been impressed with Humphrey’s performance as the villain of Invitation to a Murder. In that play his silences seemed more impressive than his speeches; when he was quiet, said Hopkins, “time seemed to stand still.” In his biography of Sherwood John Mason Brown goes into considerable detail about the producer’s reasoning. At that moment, Humphrey was wearing his personal tribulations on his face. “Hopkins thought of more than Bogart’s masculinity.” He thought of his “driven power, his anguished dark eyes, the puffs of pain beneath them, and the dangerous despair which lined his face.” That despair was both a personal matter and a general one; in his speech and demeanor, Humphrey had caught the spirit of the Aspirin Age.
The producer asked Sherwood and his colleagues a question: What about casting Bogart as Duke Mantee, the escaped convict? They were uncertain, hemmed and hawed, asked for a delay. First among equals, Hopkins refused to take maybe for an answer and made a declaration. Bogart would be Mantee and that was that. The stage was literally set for an epoch-making performance. The run would begin on January 17, 1935, a key date in the history of American theater, and, as it turned out, also in the story of American cinema.
CHAPTER 2
Let Me Know When You Want to Be Killed
i
Robert Sherwood had left Harvard before graduation, romantically eager for battle. Journeying north, the New Yorker enlisted and trained with the Canadian Black Watch before sailing off to France in 1917, appropriately kilted and armed, towering (six feet, six inches), proud and fervent. Private Sherwood’s tour of duty opened his eyes in a way he could not have foreseen. The enlisted man witnessed most of the horrors the Great War had to offer, from the ineptitude of the generals to the slaughter of the troops who obeyed them. In the process he was choked with mustard gas and pierced with shrapnel. Sherwood was invalided home early in 1918, a troubled veteran of twenty-two. For him, as for most of his contemporaries, the armistice signaled more than the end of the war. It meant the end of his world.
Ernest Hemingway caught the zeitgeist in A Farewell to Arms: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice.… I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”
John Dos Passos had also been at the front. “How damned ridiculous it all is!” he wrote. “My God what a time. All the cant and hypocrisy … all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas.”
To these returning Americans, everything they knew seemed to be tainted or senseless. Even small pleasures circled the drain. “The idea staggered me,” says Nick Carraway, narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, when he sees Meyer Wolfsheim, the racketeer who brought down baseball. “I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”
As the Roaring Twenties proceeded, gangsters took over the distribution of alcohol. Extortion, violence, and slaughter became a part of city life. The Teapot Dome scandal revealed that Warren Harding’s White House was in the pay of Big Oil. Its companies had been allowed to plunder public land, and would have gone on plundering if their crimes had not been inadvertently exposed. Science took a beating during the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, where it was forbidden to teach evolution in the state schools. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of participating in a holdup despite a paucity of evidence, were railroaded to the electric chair in August 1927. That month, President Harding’s successor, Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, conveniently arranged to be on a Montana fishing trip.
Sherwood’s literary comment on the sham and greed of the 1920s, followed by the scarifying Depression of the early 1930s, was The Petrified Forest. Within the four walls of the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q, he sought to represent America’s enervated intellectuals, selfish capi
talists, obsolete partisans, violent crooks, and malleable citizens. It was a tall order, and the playwright’s ambitions outreached his talent. Yet he was a professional theater man, and with Arthur Hopkins’s help and a sterling cast he brought off the illusion of profundity.
Leslie Howard offered an amalgam of pathos and charm, accurately described as Chaplin in a Savile Row suit. He was never less than elegant, but in every role Howard hinted at an undertow of vulnerability and melancholia. Fellow actors admired his gift; women found him irresistible. In the role of Alan Squier, Howard portrayed a failed writer, formerly kept by a rich lady but now on his own, hitchhiking across the southwestern desert. Squier’s knapsack contains a shirt, underwear, socks, toothbrush, passport, and a copy of Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung. “Call it gypsying,” the wanderer explains. “I had a vague idea that I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean, and perhaps drown in it.”
As he chats with the daughter of the garrulous old owner, Squier becomes captivated by her innocence and artistic yearnings. Gabby (short for Gabrielle) admires the poetry of François Villon (whose name she touchingly mispronounces) and longs to study painting in France, an unattainable goal since her family is stone broke. Others traverse this bleak emotional landscape, including a former college athlete, a callous industrialist, his wife and their black servant, linemen, lawmen, and, fulcrum of the play’s action, Duke Mantee, a gangster on the run, accompanied by his small and fearsome entourage.
On the page, Mantee is a dime-store sociopath (“Just keep in mind that I and the boys are candidates for hanging, and the minute anybody makes the wrong move, I’m going to kill the whole lot of you”). As Humphrey played him, though, he became much more than a desperado on the lam. Something about Duke’s unshaven, lived-in face suggested a renegade, but also a man of his time, a time that has bent and disfigured him. Mantee, in Sherwood’s stage description, is “well-built but stoop-shouldered, with a vaguely thoughtful, saturnine face.” If he “hadn’t elected to take up banditry, he might have been a fine left-fielder.” Duke has “one quality of resemblance to Alan Squier: he too is unmistakably condemned.” In Petrified Forest, Broadway theatergoers got their first glimpse at two modern existential figures, long before those words became fashionable. Squier longs for death—but death with a purpose. Gabby provides that purpose; with a bold stroke of the pen, he makes her the beneficiary of his five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. The money will provide a ticket to France and a new life. Squier considers his options aloud. If he commits suicide, the policy will be invalid. But there’s another option. What if Duke were to shoot him? The insurance company would have to pay in full. Mantee’s side-of-the-mouth response masks a new respect for Squier: “Let me know when you want to be killed.” As the authorities close in, the gang heads for the doors, but not before Duke makes good on his promise, ennobling Squier by gunning him down. Duke’s fatalistic exit line was soon to be echoed along Broadway: “O.K., pal. I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Critics showered the play with raves. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson called Sherwood’s new play “a peach” and “a roaring Western melodrama.” Howard was, as always, exemplary, and Humphrey Bogart did “the best work of his career as the motorized guerilla.” In the News Robert Garland wrote that “Humphrey Bogart is gangster Mantee to the tip of his sawed-off shotgun.”
Cast against type, Humphrey had thrown himself into this role as never before. In the process, he showed the world that he had outgrown his white flannels forever. As Duke Mantee, everything about him was different. His diction, his gait, his attitude, his prison pallor all spoke of a life outside the law. A man like that would not have the time or inclination to shave, so Humphrey’s beard was the real thing, carefully maintained at a quarter-inch length. When Duke made his first entrance there were audible gasps, in part because he was so dark and menacing, in part because John Dillinger, America’s most wanted fugitive, had recently escaped from jail. The real-life gangster seemed, in the play’s edgiest moments, to have materialized onstage. Humphrey Bogart, the eternal upper-class twit, had turned himself into the new villain du jour, and the play’s strongest attraction. Indeed, according to the Post, wealthy ticket buyers were demanding seats close enough to see Bogart’s facial hair. In those first few weeks Humphrey learned something that would stay with him all his life: “When the heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death and taxes in a husky voice, the audience is his and his alone.”
The play ran from January to June, allowing Humphrey to pay off his father’s debts and put a thousand dollars aside for himself. He referred to the bank account as his F.Y. fund—money that would give him the freedom to spurn trivial roles from now on. He took joy in every night and every matinee. One tragic incident did occur during the run: Bill Brady Jr. had been relaxing in his summer bungalow in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. Perhaps he had been smoking; in any case, the wooden house caught fire and burned to the ground. Humphrey’s boyhood pal died in the blaze. At his funeral, the seventy-one-year-old Bill Brady Sr. put his hand on Humphrey’s shoulder and told him how glad he was to see his protégé get on. “I always knew one day you would be a great actor.”
Throughout the run Humphrey made a special point of being courtly offstage, in direct contrast to Mantee’s snarling persona, as if to show that he could inhabit a part without allowing it to affect his private life. His dressing room was next to the one occupied by Esther Leeming, who played a Mexican cook. She was to remember him fondly as quiet and gentle, scrupulous in his behavior toward her and all the other actresses. That, too, was in direct contrast to the shenanigans of Howard, a notorious skirt chaser. For despite Humphrey’s checkered scholastic career, it was now apparent to all who knew him that he was truly old school. He never believed in totally immersing himself in a character; there was no fusing of the performer and the part that was to mark film and stage acting in the decades to come.
No doubt Petrified Forest could have gone on and on—there were still long lines at the Broadhurst Theater when the final curtain rang down. But Howard was not only the star, he was a co-producer, and he had no taste for going on the road. Nor did he want another actor to take the role with which he had become so strongly identified. Humphrey accepted the star’s decision philosophically; it was time to move on. Besides, Warner Bros. had bought the play. It would go before the cameras next year, with Leslie Howard repeating as Squier. Backstage at the last performance, Howard told Humphrey that no one else could possibly play Mantee.
Unencumbered, reassured, Humphrey made plans to enjoy married life to the full. His wife had other ideas. If Humphrey was idle, she had no intention of joining him on the sidelines. Mary tried out for the female lead in A Touch of Brimstone, a new comedy. She got the part, playing opposite Roland Young, one of the slyest comic actors in town, and busied herself with rehearsals and then with out-of-town tryouts. All along, she insisted on being billed as Mary Philips, and in newspaper interviews Miss Philips omitted the fact that she was the wife of Humphrey Bogart. That was not good news, and there were more disappointments in the air. Anxious to get away from the stifling New York summer, Humphrey went north to Maine, appearing in a regional production of Somerset Maugham’s Rain. The money was good, but he was really in it for a lark, well aware that the melodrama’s big draw was the fan-dancing artiste Sally Rand. When he got home he learned that Warners had cast their film adaptation of The Petrified Forest. Howard would be Squier. The part of Duke Mantee would be assumed by a studio favorite, Edward G. Robinson.
ii
To comprehend the Warner decision is to understand the Warner studio. It was founded by four brothers whose family fled the ghettos of Poland for the sanctuary and promise of Ontario, Canada. From the beginning, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner had big ideas. After a few false starts as butchers and bicycle salesmen, they started projecting silent films in nickelodeons. When this venture met with success, the brothers expanded their activities, acq
uiring theaters in the United States. They became American citizens and, in 1918, relocated to Hollywood. Five years later they officially incorporated as Warner Bros., with the avowed intention of becoming big-league film producers. Few took the quartet seriously; they were regarded as the new boys on the block, upstarts who had little chance against powerhouses like MGM, Universal, and Fox. And, in fact, following a profitable start with movies starring the heroic German shepherd Rin-Tin-Tin and the Broadway matinee idol John Barrymore, Warners floundered.
And then came sound.
Their 1927 picture The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson in the world’s first singing, talking film. A global sensation, it revolutionized the movie business and put the studio on the map. No one could afford to ignore Warners now. A great flow of Warner Bros. musicals followed, from Fifty Million Frenchmen to 42nd Street. But by the mid-1930s the public had wearied of pop tunes, and profits fell off. It was at this point that the studio found its true mission. By then Sam had died, Albert had become the company treasurer, and the day-to-day functions were in the hands of Jack, Harry, and a Rin-Tin-Tin writer turned executive, Darryl F. Zanuck.
Unlike their more elegant and financially secure competitors, the brothers were still bitter about the hard climb from the ghettos of Eastern Europe to the gated communities of Southern California. Nor had they overlooked the way they had been ostracized and mocked when they first hit town. Since then the Warners had acquired money and influence, but they continued to nourish a deep-seated sympathy for the powerless—as long as the powerless didn’t work for the brothers. Jack and Harry suffered from an ethical myopia when it came to their own employees. Actors chafed under restrictive, long-term contracts; writers, in Jack’s view, were “schmucks with Underwoods,” typists who punched a clock and turned out the requisite number of pages per week.
Tough Without a Gun Page 5