Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  Humphrey’s friends kidded him: now he wouldn’t have to worry about money until he was sixty-one, by which time he’d be getting ready for Social Security. With a mock growl, Humphrey reminded them that he had worked goddamn hard for that loose change. At the age of forty-seven he had already appeared in nineteen plays and fifty-three films. Name another actor who could say as much. And, he added with a wink, he was just getting started.

  His young wife really was just getting started, and she quickly took a nosedive. Confidential Agent, an adaptation of Graham Greene’s Spanish Civil War espionage novel, was Lauren Bacall’s third film and her first disaster. The director, Herman Shumlin, had enjoyed a string of Broadway successes (The Children’s Hour, Grand Hotel, The Little Foxes). But his cinema experience consisted of one previous film, Watch on the Rhine—essentially a photographed play. In the role of a world-weary foreign operative, Boyer needed no guidance from Shumlin. Nor did the great character actors Peter Lorre, George Colouris, and Katina Paxinou, and they got none. The director neglected his leading lady as well, and this proved to be a crucial error. Early in November 1946, critics announced to the world that Lauren was an overrated talent, and so she appeared to audiences as well. In the first place, she was playing Rose Cullen, a young British heiress, and she couldn’t manage any intonation east of Manhattan. In the second place, she had no idea how to move. Slinking was all very well for Vivian; it was inappropriate for Rose, and the smoldering, sultry stare that wowed Bogart in The Big Sleep made her laughable when played against Boyer’s Luis Denard. Audiences stayed away. The twenty-year-old was devastated by the failure; in time she acknowledged that “to cast me as an aristocratic English girl was more than a stretch. It was dementia.… I just didn’t know enough, hadn’t a clue as to how to be British, and Shumlin never gave me a clue. So I remained my awkward, inexperienced, miscast self.”

  Humphrey did what he could to comfort Lauren during the painful setback to her career. They went sailing, had friends to their new house, savored their marriage. He still imbibed, but not nearly so much as before, when he had used alcohol as a psychological painkiller—particularly during the final years with Mayo. Now he could joke about booze; asked whether he had ever quit drinking, he answered blithely, “Yes, and it was the most miserable afternoon of my life.” Again, the attitude of Ernest Hemingway hovered in the background: “Modern life is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”

  Of greater medical concern, although no one knew it at the moment, was Humphrey’s addiction to tobacco. Toward the end of his life, when revival movie houses began to offer Bogart festivals, audiences remarked that they were watching the star kill himself with inhalations. But nearly everyone smoked in films of the 1930s and ’40s; cigarette cases were constantly being filled and refilled, ashtrays emptied and reemptied. Indeed, through the years, cigarettes had become a vital Bogartian prop. Producer Rob Long recalls that once, when a great deal of exposition had to be spoken in a concluding scene, Humphrey protested that the only way the monologue would work is “if two camels were in the background, fucking.” The director had a better idea. The scene would be filmed as written—with one addendum. Humphrey would unwrap a pack of Chesterfields, remove one cigarette, tap it to pack down the tobacco, speaking all the while, ignite the cigarette with a match, toss it aside, add some more lines, take a large drag, exhale, and finish the speech, the words mingling with the smoke. “Cut. Print. Instant drama.”

  Humphrey and his prop became inseparable. In Ashes to Ashes, a scrupulous nuts-and-bolts history of the tobacco business in America, Richard Kluger devotes a long passage to Humphrey Bogart. Cinema’s existential antihero of the 1940s, writes Kluger, was a man whose “every considered drag and expelled puff of smoke seemed to represent a mocking laugh of bitter defiance.” Humphrey wielded his Chesterfield cigarette (a product he was paid to endorse) the way a duelist or gunslinger would flash his weapon. “But instead of slaying his tormentor, he was more likely to resolve matters ambiguously by deftly discarding his still burning butt in a low, flat trajectory that ended in life’s gutter.”

  Humphrey was hardly alone in his habit. Classic fiction has numerous references to tobacco. The fallen Anna Karenina becomes a smoker. Another sinner, Madame Bovary, flaunts her new vice. “Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth.” Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front speaks of the linkage between soldiers and nicotine: “Over our heads a cloud of smoke spreads out. What would a soldier be without tobacco?” (Exactly eight decades later, the Pentagon asked the same question. In the war zones of 2009, declared the secretary of defense, soldiers could smoke as much as they wanted.)

  Later in the century popular songs celebrated smoking—Bing Crosby’s “Two Cigarettes in the Dark,” Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People” (“Here we are, out of cigarettes”), Holt Marvell’s “These Foolish Things” (“A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces”), and many more. Beyond the romance, there was a connection between tobacco and masculinity that had begun early in the century and carried on for decades. When the United States entered World War I, General John J. Pershing stated that tobacco was every bit as vital to the fighting man as victuals. During World War II the common expression of enlisted men on a break was “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.” The Western leaders all smoked: Franklin Delano Roosevelt inhaled through an elegant cigarette holder; Winston Churchill chomped on cigars; Joseph Stalin puffed a pipe. Humphrey was right in line with them and much appreciated for his addiction. After all, Adolf Hitler was the one who didn’t use tobacco or eat meat.

  ii

  Two Bogart films made in 1945 were released in 1946. Conflict, which Humphrey had tried so hard to avoid, portrayed him as a psychopathic killer who murders his wife in order to marry her sister. He and Alexis Smith seemed to be reading from different scripts, and save for the adroit Sydney Greenstreet as a psychiatrist who inveigles the murderer into confessing his crime, it was a waste of time and talent. The picture proved to be a downer in every sense of the word; Humphrey looked depressed throughout, the lines delivered mechanically rather than provocatively, as the part required. It did very little business, and Warner Bros. executives wondered whether some of the Bogart magic had worn off. The Big Sleep reassured them. It was Conflict’s diametrical opposite, diverting, confusing, full of smart Raymond Chandler backchat and loaded with the Bogart-Bacall magic first glimpsed in To Have and Have Not. Lauren was once again the sexually charged, husky-voiced seductress. The effect was powerful enough to make her performance in Confidential Agent seem no more than a trivial error. As for Humphrey, he was both heartened and embarrassed by the film’s enthusiastic reception in the papers and at the box office. He relished the praise of his fellow actors, journalists, and audiences. What made him uncomfortable were the trappings of celebrity. He was, for example, asked to leave the imprints of his hands and shoes on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Though he protested privately, he knew that it would be impossible to boycott the ceremony; this was the way Hollywood staged its fondest tribute. His only comment was a dedication to the theater owner. He wrote in cement with one finger: “Sid—May You Never Die Till I Kill You.”

  Two other films followed, neither with any distinction. In Dead Reckoning, Humphrey played a veteran investigating the disappearance of an army buddy. The lethal temptress was Lizabeth Scott, whose brilliant blond hair and husky voice could not compensate for a lack of range; the villains, Morris Carnovsky and Marvin Miller, were more vaudevillian than cinematic. It was pathetically clear that the studios—in this case Columbia—were searching for another Maltese Falcon, even lifting lines from it almost verbatim (“A guy’s pal was killed, he ought to do something about it”). Critics on both sides of the Atlantic panned the movie. Obviously Humphrey had outgrown his days as an out-and-out villain. He neede
d to show some redeeming quality, no matter how deeply buried. How he would do that remained a mystery to him as well as to the studio.

  The Two Mrs. Carrolls was Humphrey’s next film. It did nothing to ease his bewilderment. He was cast against type as a struggling painter—and homicidal lunatic. Having murdered one wife (Alexis Smith), he weds another (Barbara Stanwyck) and then plans to do away with her. The film was not successful with the public or the critics; some comments were harsher than any Humphrey had seen since his early days on Broadway (“He is equally unconvincing as artist, madman and murderer”).

  The survivor of so many bad films needed to reclaim the high ground. With an old New York friend, Humphrey established a new company, Mark Hellinger Productions. At first glance, the two ex—New Yorkers seemed polar opposites: Mark’s parents were Orthodox Jews, Humphrey’s were indifferent WASPs. Mark was from the outer borough of Queens. Humphrey was from high-toned Manhattan. In fact the partners had a great deal in common. Mark’s father, Paul, was a prosperous real estate lawyer who wanted his son to follow in his profession. Early on, Belmont Bogart hoped his only son would also be a doctor. Both boys flouted family tradition. Mark was kicked out of public high school for being a student agitator; Humphrey, as we have seen, was ejected from prep school. So the Hellinger-Bogart union actually made sense, and began with enormous energy and optimism.

  Hellinger had just produced a huge hit, The Killers, starring Burt Lancaster and introducing Ava Gardner, adapted from the famous Hemingway story. He and Humphrey thought they could do more pictures based on other tales by the same author. These had been written by a great talent, and no filmmaker had touched them. The Killers had demonstrated that good work could also be good box office. As 1947 began, Hemingway, Hellinger, and Bogart looked to be an ideal trio. And Humphrey had a good feeling about two of his own upcoming films, Dark Passage and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The former co-starred Humphrey and Lauren in their first feature since the marriage. Humphrey didn’t lobby for Lauren; she got the part on her own merits. He was delighted with that news, and with the fact that he would appear in part of the film heavily bandaged from plastic surgery. “I can just hear Jack Warner scream,” he chuckled. “He’s paying me all this money to make the picture and nobody will even see me until it’s a third over.”

  The year before, Robert Montgomery had done The Lady in the Lake, a Philip Marlowe mystery told with a “subjective camera technique”—all the action is seen from the star’s point of view. The first half of Dark Passage borrowed this method, and used it with greater finesse. Vincent Parry (Humphrey) is an innocent man, framed for killing his wife. He escapes from San Quentin, hell-bent on finding the real assassin. To keep from being spotted in San Francisco, he undergoes major plastic surgery. All during these sequences the viewer perceives the world through his eyes. Only when the bandages come off does the camera become omniscient. Assisting Parry in his quest is Irene Jansen (Lauren), a rich artist whose own father was once wrongly accused of a crime. The story was somewhat murky, and Agnes Moorehead offered a caricature of wickedness, Cruella De Vil before her time. But the director, Delmer Daves, co-scenarist of The Petrified Forest, maintained a high regard for Humphrey’s skills and knew about his marital history. He put them both on display. An exchange with a stranger contained just the right autobiographical tone:

  PARRY: I’m hiding.

  STRANGER: From what?

  PARRY: My wife, my friends, my family, everybody.

  STRANGER: Come on now, it can’t be as bad as all that.

  PARRY: Well, I’ll tell you what you do. You go up there and spend seven years with my wife, and then if you’re still in your right mind, come back down here and tell me about it.

  Daves also used Lauren well, encouraging her to radiate domestic warmth, rather than the steam heat she had generated in the earlier films. With all the effort, though, Dark Passage was still a production-line film noir with no particular distinction; Warners knew the movie would need a lot of advertising and publicity to put it across.

  The studio regarded The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as even less promising. John Huston had been enthralled by B. Traven’s 1927 novella for years, but no production house shared his interest. It was not hard to see why. The tale was a downer: a group of adventurers climb a mountain in search of gold, promising to share and share alike. But when they strike the mother lode one of them becomes consumed by greed and suspicion, kills another, and in turn is cut to pieces by strangers even more avaricious than he is. In the end, the gold dust is carried away by the wind, going back to the Sierra Madre from which it came.

  The escapade takes place entirely in Mexico. To achieve any kind of authenticity the movie would have to be done on location, with all the concomitant expenses. And to further increase the odds against a box office success, it was a story without a significant female role. Only a man with Huston’s powers of persuasion could have worn down the Warners executives. (It didn’t hurt that he had induced Humphrey Bogart to play the unstable gold hunter Fred C. Dobbs—and John’s father, Walter Huston, to be Howard, the foxy old prospector.)

  Luck went John’s way with the rest of the cast. Ronald Reagan was scheduled to play Bob Curtin, the third of the gold hunters. But when he and his agent played hard to get, Huston bypassed him for the underrated character actor Tim Holt. Zachary Scott, a fine performer but all wrong for the part of bounty hunter James Cody, was replaced by the versatile Bruce Bennett. The Mexican bandit Gold Hat was played by Alfonso Bedoya, who offered a disturbing blend of humor and malevolence (“I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges”). In the spring of 1947 they were all working away in Tampico. Lauren was on the set most of the time; she compared Walter and John to “a couple of kids together—they made each other laugh, they enjoyed and understood each other’s wickedness.” Père et fils had a chaffing, amiable relationship; they even smoked grass together. Walter enjoyed the experience; his son got sick.

  Humphrey had no use for drugs. Not for any moral reasons; he just preferred good old-fashioned alcohol. According to Huston biographer Lawrence Grobel, Bogart felt that “Dos Equis”—the name of Mexico’s leading beer—were the only Spanish words he needed to know. On the set, though, he came prepared to play the most difficult role of his career.

  During the early search for nuggets, Dobbs is a boon companion and a likeable, if eccentric, adventurer. But when the trio finds success, he begins to exhibit signs of gold fever. Moment by moment, turn by turn, he makes a precipitous descent. It begins with a slight mistrust of his fellow miners, then slides downhill from angry suspicion to outright and mortal paranoia. With the exception of Gold Hat no one in the script is more repugnant. Humphrey had taken the part to prove something to himself as well as to the industry and the public who now saw him as a luminary rather than an actor. No one disputed that Humphrey Bogart knew his craft; the question was whether he had lost track of the art. Treasure gave him a chance to redeem himself. Thus it was with considerable joy that he told the New York Post film critic, “Wait till you see me in my next picture. I play the worst shit you ever saw.”

  Humphrey knew that motiveless malignity would not be enough to make Dobbs stand out. He needed memorable dialogue, and the script and direction were John Huston’s best since The Maltese Falcon. To give the movie an extra spin, John made his acting debut in a cameo role. He plays a wealthy, white-suited tourist who initially feels sorry for the panhandling Dobbs, and then can’t wait to get rid of him. “This is the very last you get from me,” he declares, parceling out pesos for the second time. “From now on, you have to make your way through life without my assistance.” (This was John’s in-joke: having written the script for High Sierra and directed Falcon and Across the Pacific, he was now handing Humphrey yet another pivotal role.)

  As Dobbs and Curtin make their way up the high, arid Sierra Madre, they grow weary and frustrated. Not Howard. The grizzled guide is decades older than his companions, but as Dobbs remarks
, he’s “part goat.” The two men announce they’re ready to quit: Why not admit it? All along, this exploit has been an exercise in self-delusion. Howard cackles, “Well, tell my old grandmother! I got two very elegant bedfellers who kick at the first drop of rain and hide in the closet when the thunder rumbles. My, my, my, what great prospectors!”

  Dobbs picks up a rock and threatens to knock him galley-west. Curtin gets in the way: “Can’t you see the old man’s nuts?” Howard responds with more laughter. “Nuts? Nuts am I? You’re so dumb you don’t even see the riches you’re treadin’ on with your own feet. Ah, haa, haa.” To underline his opinion of the tenderfeet, he dances a derisive little jig over the gold dust. The camera closes in on Walter as he pockets the scene, and, in effect, the picture. John later said Walter’s dance reminded him of the best moments of Chaplin, Jack Dempsey in his prime, and the bullfighter Manolete. When the director shouted “Cut!” Humphrey could only shake his head in wonder. “One Huston is bad enough, but two are murder.”

  Seen in retrospect, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is indeed a love letter from a brilliant son to a gifted father. But it’s something more: a portrait of rapacity, irony, and tragedy. The film’s centerpiece is undoubtedly Walter Huston. And yet, faced with the old man’s big moments and canny scene stealing, Humphrey delivers the more powerful performance, a detailed representation of a hustler who strikes it rich and gets ruined by his unchecked desire for more. There is no vanity in his work, no attempt to soften Dobbs’s mean aspirations or vicious conduct. Indeed, after he murders Curtin, a stream-of-consciousness episode underlines the moral breakdown: