Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  And in the fall, Good Housekeeping ran “The Woman Who Dreamed About Humphrey Bogart,” a short story by Mignon McLaughlin. In it, a childless couple, married for twelve years, begin to drift apart. Warren finds himself infatuated with a young redhead—though in the unspoken code of “shelter book” fiction he does nothing but flirt a little and squire her to a dance. Hilda finds her own lover in a reverie, dreaming of Bogart on a regular basis. In the end, Warren confesses his infatuation and promises never to see the redhead again. Hilda responds by silently swearing off Humphrey. She sees him in a final dream. The two are together at a nightclub, Humphrey in a dinner jacket, Hilda in a gold lamé gown. “Then, after they had been seated, they saw Warren, with That Girl.” With Humphrey’s patented combination of nobility and violence, he walks over to Warren and smacks him around as the girl melts away. “Then Humphrey Bogart turned away disdainfully, brushing his hands, and went back to Hilda. His eyes softened at sight of her; his mouth shaped a wry smile; his touch on her arm, as they swept out of the night club, was inexpressibly tender.

  “Hilda, asleep in her husband’s arms, sighed a little sigh.

  “THE END.”

  The good news was that Humphrey’s romantic status had remained undisturbed by the ideological wars in Washington, New York, and Hollywood. The bad news was that Ed Sullivan had read the entrails correctly: Humphrey couldn’t afford to stay on the sidelines much longer. Under pressure, Warners arranged for Photoplay magazine to publish “I’m No Communist” over the Bogart byline. Until that dramatic flight to Washington, the piece testified, his political activity had consisted of endorsements for FDR. This year, because of his objections to HUAC’s ham-handed investigations of Hollywood, he was a Marxist in the eyes of the conservative press. “The New York Times, the Herald Tribune and other reputable publications editorially had questioned the House Committee on Un-American Activities, warning that it was infringing on free speech. When a group of us Hollywood actors and actresses said the same thing, the roof fell in on us. In some fashion, I took the brunt of the attack. Suddenly, the plane that had flown us East became ‘Bogart’s plane,’ carrying ‘Bogart’s group.’ For once, top billing became embarrassing.” He went on to describe his trip to Washington as “ill-advised,” and himself as a dupe and a “foolish and impetuous American.” The moral of the story, he noted with asperity, could be seen in a gift presented to him when he got back to Hollywood. “Some friends sent me a mounted fish and underneath it was written: ‘If I hadn’t opened my big mouth, I wouldn’t be here.’ ”

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  Writer and, later, director Richard Brooks maintained that Humphrey’s renunciation of the First Amendment committee signaled an end “to the illusions of life, that everything is going to be fine, that there’s going to be a happy ending. Bogie was never the same again.” This smacks of the kind of romantic wish-dream that stayed with the Old Left for decades, crystallized in a film called The Front. Woody Allen, an apolitical schlemiel who lets blacklisted writers put his name on their scripts, is hauled before HUAC. Defiantly, he responds: “Fellas, I don’t recognize the right of this committee to ask me these kinds of questions. And furthermore, you can go fuck yourselves.” The frame freezes as the voice of Frank Sinatra is heard singing, “Fairy tales can come true …”

  For two divergent groups of filmmakers, the period of the blacklist would redefine the notion of masculinity. Opponents of the new studio policy considered themselves loners standing against the violators of civil liberty (i.e., HUAC). Those who furnished the committee with names portrayed themselves as guardians of freedom, fighting thugs (i.e., Communists) who sought the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

  In his drama The Crucible, Arthur Miller would view the superstitious witch hunts of seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, as a metaphor for the anti-Communist hysteria sweeping America in his own time. The playwright’s spokesman, upright farmer John Proctor, is willing to recite his own sins, but “I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.” He is hanged for his principled silence.

  Screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan gave names to HUAC. In On the Waterfront they would make their hero, Terry Malloy, a failed boxer turned hired goon for a corrupt union chief. An investigating body is met with a code of silence. Only when Terry’s brother is annihilated by racketeers does the thug spill what he knows to the investigators, and is nearly beaten to death for his action. Given the right occasion, the audience is meant to conclude, informing may be the only way to strike back at criminals.

  Which was the true male, then? Was it the rigid Proctor, as originally played by Arthur Kennedy on Broadway? Or the informer Terry Malloy, as portrayed by Marlon Brando? It was a matter of great importance to those affected, but it was not the only way to take the measure of a man, and many refused to be defined in such narrow terms. Humphrey Bogart was one of them. As the decade wound down, he continued to present his own brand of masculinity, which had nothing to do with polemics.

  For despite the dire pronouncements about the Bogart soul, Humphrey was not ruined personally or professionally by his choices. Though he remained a liberal in private life, he felt a justifiable anger about the way his name and reputation had been used. To be sure, if Humphrey and the other First Amendment committee members, and the studio heads, and the principal Wall Street investors in those studios had stood together in opposition to the so-called Inquisition in Eden, there might have been a chance to save the industry from the predators. That coalition never developed, however, and it is folly to assume that Humphrey Bogart should have sacrificed his reputation, standing mutely and obediently by as the Nineteen manipulated him for their own purposes.

  In any case, the clash of committees was only one event that made Humphrey Bogart Topic B in Hollywood that year. On December 21, 1947, Mark Hellinger suffered his final heart attack. Hellinger had been a hard-driving, self-indulgent cardiac case for years, but friends thought of him as always dying, never dead. Now, at the age of forty-four, he drew his last breaths in Cedars of Lebanon hospital in West Hollywood. Born a Jew, he had never embraced any religion. Nevertheless, his funeral was staged—and that is the apposite word—at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. Tout Hollywood was there, actors, producers, reporters, all milling about, trying to avoid a glimpse of the gray-faced corpse in the satin-lined coffin. A Catholic priest gave a eulogy and made the sign of the cross. It was all too much for Humphrey. The Irish had it right, he told Lauren. They had a wake and celebrated life. When he went, he wanted to be cremated. “My friends can raise a glass and tell stories about me if they like. No mourning—don’t believe in it.”

  David O. Selznick waited a decent interval, then canceled the agreement to produce film adaptations done by the Bogart-Hellinger company. Hellinger was no more, and he was the producing end of the team. No use pretending Humphrey could go it alone. Jack Warner expressed grief at the outcome; privately he was delighted. Bogart was back in the fold, working with Lauren in Key Largo. He was a Warner Bros. employee again, very high priced, granted, but an employee nonetheless. The situation did not bode well. Humphrey had matured in many ways, but when it came time to confront father figures, particularly ones who liked to exert their authority at every turn, he could become as insubordinate as a schoolboy. He and Warner regarded each other warily, like two boxers in the early rounds, as the film got under way.

  Maxwell Anderson’s overcooked drama had opened on Broadway in 1939. Richard Brooks and John Huston did the film adaptation, with Huston directing with his customary mix of intensity on the sound stage and chaffing humor off-screen. He liked to ride Humphrey between takes, always being careful not to push him too far. When the New Yorker reporter Lillian Ross visited the set, she sat with the Bogarts, Huston, and Edward G. Robinson, the film’s snarling heavy. Huston told Ross that “Bogie has succeeded in not being a politician.” Why? Because “he owns a fifty-four-foot yawl. When you own a fifty-four-foot yawl, you’ve got to provide
for her upkeep.” In a snarl that recalled Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson spoke of his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The great chief died and everyone’s guts died with him.” Lauren was worried: “The Daily Worker runs Bogie’s picture and right away he’s a dangerous Communist. What will happen if the American Legion and the Legion of Decency boycott all his pictures?” Humphrey played it cool. “It’s just that my picture in the Daily Worker offends me, baby.” Robinson grunted. Huston had heard about a congressman who objected to a line in Sierra Madre: “An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin’ and the gettin’ of it.” Maybe it was the word “labor” that bothered the representative. John changed the subject: “Let’s eat.”

  Profound differences separated the theatrical version and the cinema adaptation made nine years later. Anderson had written the dialogue in free verse, as if to give his gangster melodrama a Shakespearean tone. The film actors spoke unadorned hostile American. The play concerned the moral battle between two disparate figures. Frank McCloud is a burned-out veteran of the Spanish Civil War, stopping at a hotel to visit its owner, the father of a buddy killed in battle. Johnny Rocco, a crime czar grown old and bitter, is stuck in the same place when a hurricane batters the Florida coast.

  In the film, McCloud is a World War II veteran of the Italian campaign, weak in spirit and lacking all conviction—a distant relative of Alan Squier in The Petrified Forest. Rocco, far removed from the Roaring Twenties, seems more of a dinosaur than an aging kingpin—a heavyweight Duke Mantee, also surrounded by armed and dangerous henchmen. Not that he needs them: the man who runs the hotel is confined to a wheelchair, and the women are terrified. As for McCloud, he offers even less of a challenge:

  MCCLOUD: I had hopes once, but I gave them up.

  ROCCO: Hopes for what?

  MCCLOUD: A world in which there’s no place for Johnny Rocco.

  ROCCO: (Handing him a pistol) OK, soldier. Here’s your chance.… You can make your hopes come true. But you gotta die for it.

  (Pointing his own sidearm at McCloud) See where I’m aiming?

  At your belly. Go ahead, shoot.… Show them how you’re not afraid to die.

  MCCLOUD: (Giving up) One Rocco more or less isn’t worth dying for.

  Alan Squier found salvation in withdrawal and self-sacrifice—an honorable stance to take between the wars. Twelve years later, that position was untenable. Frank McCloud could only show a momentary cowardice. In the end he would recover his manhood and morality by confronting Johnny Rocco at sea.

  Working under the restraints of a limited budget and a short schedule, Huston completed the movie in seventy-eight days, an extraordinarily brief time for an A picture. To accomplish this feat, he had the down-at-heels hotel constructed on the Warners lot. Exterior shots of the storm were taken from stock footage used in Night unto Night, a Warner Bros. melodrama starring Ronald Reagan. Huston also benefited from a happy cast. Besides the Bogarts and Robinson, he had such experienced pros as Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Gomez, and Claire Trevor. Humphrey and Edward G. liked each other and took pleasure in their role reversals. In his early Hollywood years, the younger man was regularly gunned down by his elder. At the finale of Key Largo, Rocco is killed by McCloud, who regains the courage he thought had been lost forever. Robinson had no objection; he relished the role and made the most of it. In Huston’s opinion, Key Largo was “best remembered by most people for the introductory scene, with Eddie in the bathtub, cigar in mouth. He looked like a crustacean with its shell off.” Before filming began, Robinson and his agent complained about his reduced status. When he wrote his autobiography, though, Robinson steered away from any hints of acrimony. “Why not second billing?” he asked rhetorically. “At fifty-three I was lucky to get any billing at all.”

  Claire Trevor took a pay cut to play Gaye Dawn, Rocco’s alcoholic mistress, a part that was not in the original play. It was obvious to her, as it was to Huston, that the role would showcase her ability to make a hooker into a sympathetic victim. The weary, humiliated Gaye will do anything for a shot of whiskey. Rocco makes her sing “Moanin’ Low” before the group of appalled and helpless onlookers. The woman has no talent, but she plunges ahead anyway, her voice filled with tears. “I was after John all the time to rehearse this song,” Trevor remembered, “and he would always say, ‘Plenty of time.’ ” One day, after they came back from lunch, the director suddenly announced that she was on. Furious but ever professional, Trevor performed on cue, warbling in and out of key, pathetically vulnerable, psychologically isolated. Huston “knew what he was doing,” she acknowledged. “I was embarrassed. I was supposed to be embarrassed. I thought that day would never end. That was torture. But that’s what got the effect.” Spontaneous applause greeted her effort. Out of earshot Harry Lewis, playing one of Rocco’s henchmen, whispered to Gomez, his fellow hoodlum. “She’s going to win the Academy Award for that song alone,” he predicted—correctly, as it turned out. Humphrey was appreciative, but quiet. Sad women always got him down. His mother and both sisters had been afflicted with depression, and Mayo was a classic case of emotional despair. When Trevor sang in a pathetic, uncertain voice, she had to have reminded Humphrey of the days when he and Mayo went on the USO tour of Italy. Mayo warbled World War II favorites for the GIs in the same sort of quavering tone.

  But he wasn’t one to wallow. By the time Key Largo wrapped, Humphrey was in a celebratory mood. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had received universal raves. Variety admired the picture’s “compelling honesty” and predicted that the “distinguished work will take its place in the repertory of Hollywood’s great and enduring achievements.” In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther had nothing but admiration for Treasure’s steel-springed outdoor drama, and singled out the man who played Fred C. Dobbs for special commendation: “Mr. Bogart’s performance in this film is perhaps the best and most substantial that he has ever done.” The most extravagant praise came from James Agee, then writing for two magazines. In the Nation he called Treasure “one of the most visually alive and beautiful movies I have ever seen.” In Time, which then had no bylines, he wrote that the film was “one of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk.… Humphrey Bogart cannot completely eliminate the existence of Humphrey Bogart—but he makes a noble effort to lose himself and does far and away the best work of his career.”

  Key Largo opened in midsummer to generally appreciative reviews, although none to match the reception of the previous Bogart-Huston film. It was, after all, only a Warner Bros. gangster movie outfitted with modern, portentous dialogue and experienced professionals. Bogart and Robinson had been doing this sort of material for so long that the movie sometimes seemed like Old-Timers Day for big-league crooks. Trevor and Gomez went along for the ride, and John Huston made sure they all gave a lot better than they got from the shooting script.

  Nevertheless, Key Largo did better at the box office than The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, possibly because its leads were more celebrated, and because Maxwell Anderson was something of a brand name. Treasure’s cast had only one authentic star, and the book’s author, B. Traven, was a recluse whose personality and work were unknown to the general public. None of this seemed to matter to Humphrey. He had it both ways now, on top artistically and commercially. More good news came his way late in the year when Lauren informed him that he was going to be a father. At least she thought it was good news. Humphrey was not so sure. Yes, he had wanted a baby; why else had he taken those hormone shots? And yet, when he thought about it, what kind of life would the Bogarts have now? A child would surely come between them. Besides, at the age of forty-nine how would he relate to a newborn? He hardly knew how to talk to kids of any age. A story made the rounds, and one friend swore it was true: Humphrey had been told to speak to his godson about religion. The boy was thirteen and it was time to confront the relationship of God and man. He took the teenager to a restaurant, ordered a drink, and began. “List
en,” Humphrey instructed. “There are twelve commandments.”

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  Henry Luce had proclaimed the twentieth “the American Century,” and his magazine, Fortune, euphorically offered exhibit A: 1947 had enjoyed “the greatest productive record in the peacetime history of this or any other nation.” The ascent continued in 1948. Unemployment had just fallen below 4 percent. General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford were all prospering in this sunny economic climate, as were the steel, oil, and home-building industries. Americans seemed to prosper in every field, just as Luce foresaw. The Olympics were held in 1948, the first since Berlin hosted the “Hitler Olympics” of 1936. American athletes, especially Bob Mathias, Harrison Dillard, and Melvin Patton, dominated the track and field events and took home thirty-eight medals. At Mount Palomar, California, the world’s largest telescope probed the skies. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. New medicines, such as cortisone, aureomycin, and other wonder drugs, were being developed in U.S. laboratories.

  But one sector ran counter to the national trends: moviemaking. To Wall Street’s dismay, Hollywood found itself in a vast and deepening depression: film attendance was down by 25 percent. Only two years before, some eighty million people had gone to the movies every week. But that was before the advent of affordable television. Now one out of eight American families owned a set and their numbers grew by the week. No need for viewers to go out; entertainment and sports came to them. Current events, formerly the exclusive province of theatrically released newsreels, became available in the living room. (For the convenience of the networks, the Democrat and Republican conventions would both be held in Philadelphia.) And TV had not dealt the only body blow to the film business. The HUAC investigations and the resultant blacklist did considerable damage to the image of Hollywood as a “dream factory.” At the year’s end came the knockout punch, otherwise known as the Paramount decision. For years the Justice Department had accused the studios of monopolistic practices, and for years Hollywood’s expensive lawyers had fended off the prosecutors. In 1948 the government finally triumphed in its battle against “vertical integration.” In essence, this meant that the major studios could no longer control every aspect of the film industry from the actors to the composers all the way down to the technicians, and all the way out to the movie houses, which were owned and/or operated by the studios. Something had to give. “It is clear,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, that the big studios were guilty of a conspiracy and that “the conspiracy was exclusionary, i.e., that it was designed to strengthen their hold on the exhibition field.” To break up the monopoly, the studios would have to relinquish their interests in about fourteen hundred movie theaters. The older moguls thought this decision was nothing to trouble their heads about. Once their more literate sycophants pointed the way, they found comfort in the words of Nietzsche: “That which does not destroy me makes me stronger.” They told themselves that the latest emergency was like the hysteria once prompted by the arrival of sound, and the censorious production code, and the periodic money shortages. It would fade away like all the others. The realists knew better. This was the true fade to black. Justice Douglas had sounded the death knell of the studio system. Hollywood’s Golden Era was done.