Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  Because the production chiefs were so drastically weakened, actors with clout found themselves in a position to bargain. Humphrey, quick to see what was happening around him, acquired a new business associate. Robert Lord, a screenwriter turned producer, used his address at Columbia for the new company, Santana Productions. It was named after Humphrey’s boat, and at the moment had only a little more capital than a new yacht would have cost. It hardly mattered; Bogart and Lord struck a fresh deal with Harry Cohn, the Columbia chief. Humphrey would star in Santana’s first movie, Knock on Any Door, adapted from Willard Motley’s book. Motley, a black novelist who had been raised among poor whites, knew more about slum folk than he knew about writing. His works were filled with finger-pointing platitudes, and his biggest best seller conveyed messages as terse as bumper stickers. Poverty creates criminals. Society is at fault. We are all murderers for looking the other way.

  The focal point of Knock on Any Door is Nick Romano, a slum kid accused of murder. At the time Marlon Brando, a champion of underdogs everywhere, was rumored to be interested in playing the defendant. In fact, the sensational twenty-four-year-old star of A Streetcar Named Desire would hardly have been enticed by a courtroom melodrama, but the buzz didn’t hurt. The new team of Bogart and Lord looked the field over, and gave the role to a handsome, dark-haired newcomer. Next, they needed a director. Insiders were talking up They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s Depression-era film of a young couple on the run. Humphrey had to find out whether the advance word was RKO hype or the real thing. He got hold of a print and screened it at the house. Several days later Ray was signed to direct Santana’s first feature, starring Humphrey Bogart and introducing John Derek. “Play the role as tough as you can—see, kid?” Humphrey advised the newcomer. “Look what happened to Gable, Tracy, Cagney, Robinson, Raft, Ladd and myself. We all got our start in crime.”

  As all this transpired, the Bogarts became parents. Lauren gave birth to a six-pound, six-ounce boy on January 6, 1949. In Cedars of Lebanon Hospital the infant was called Steve, in honor of the character in To Have and Have Not. The birth certificate was more formal; it read Stephen Humphrey Bogart, a name that would haunt the boy for decades. Friends of the family sent gifts and cards, none more heartening than one from the president. While he was campaigning, Harry Truman had been introduced to the Bogarts at a Democratic Party fund-raiser. Lauren was visibly pregnant, and Truman bet twenty dollars that the child would be a boy. Humphrey insisted that it would be a girl. After Steve’s birth Humphrey mailed a check to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A thank-you note came back along with the check. The newly elected chief offered his congratulations and added, “It is a rare instance when I find a man who remembers his commitments and meets them on the dot. Harry S. Truman.”

  There wasn’t time to revel in his new fatherhood; Humphrey immediately went back to work on Knock on Any Door. Professionally written, acted, and directed, the film followed the novel’s simplistic approach, evident in Humphrey’s valedictory lines: “Until we do away with the type of neighborhood that produced this boy, ten will spring up to take his place, a hundred, a thousand. Until we wipe out the slums and rebuild them, knock on any door and you may find Nick Romano.” Reviews were mixed. They could hardly have been otherwise. A youth whose credo is “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse” exerted little appeal for journalists over thirty. Few bought the then-trendy argument that criminals aren’t responsible for their actions—they’ve been trapped by poverty, peer pressure, and absentee parents. In the end, Knock on Any Door did more to establish Nicholas Ray as a director to watch, and John Derek as the latest teenage idol, than it did to augment Santana’s bottom line.

  Next up for the company: Tokyo Joe, a feature whose attractions were obvious—a little too obvious. This time out Santana took no chances. The director was Stewart Heisler, who had been in the business since the 1920s when he had edited such vaudeville films as In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter. Since Humphrey had no intention of going to Japan for the filming, a second unit was assigned to take footage of the Japanese capital. An actor with Humphrey’s trademark trench coat was shot from behind; in the editing process, matching shots were lined up showing the hero against a rear-screen projection of Ginza streets.

  The story follows the trail of war veteran Joe Barrett. Before Pearl Harbor he and his wife, a White Russian named Trina, ran Tokyo Joe’s gambling joint. When Joe returns to occupied Japan, he finds that Trina, reported as slain during the war, is not only alive but living with a new husband and their little daughter, Anya. Joe is the child’s father, however, and he wants her to go back with him to America. The trouble is, Trina won’t give her up and too many laws stand in Joe’s way. To achieve his goal he strikes a deal with a gang leader, Baron Kimura. Joe will front for an airfreight service smuggling war criminals back into Japan, and the baron will get him the child. Betrayal, kidnapping, and violence follow. Before the finale, Anya is rescued and the fascists are caught, thanks to the American’s valor. But Joe pays for all this with his life.

  The international movie star Sessue Hayakawa played the gang leader; the slender, austere Alexander Knox was Trina’s new husband; and Trina herself was the thirty-year-old Czechoslovakian actress Florence Marly. Resemblances to Casablanca were everywhere, with Knox standing in for Paul Henreid, Marly for Ingrid Bergman, Hayakawa for Conrad Veidt, and Tokyo Joe’s for Rick’s Café Américain. But as many filmmakers have learned the hard way, there is only one Casablanca. This imitation looked particularly jerry-built and inadequate, even though both films starred Humphrey Bogart. Reviews were gloomy across the board. Once again Humphrey Bogart was doing an impression of Humphrey Bogart, delivering the lines professionally, tough and terse as always, but showing none of the inner life that had invigorated so much of his recent work. No amount of promotion would make the film a hit. Still, Humphrey was about to turn fifty. He was not just the star of Tokyo Joe, his company had produced it. Wearing two hats was not his style, but there was no way out of his obligations to Santana. He grimaced at the schedule of meetings the publicity department had set up. The palaver would have to be gone through all over again—the stories about his youth, his school, his early years in the movies. But the interviews had to be done. He flew east to the paparazzi, who, with any luck, would give him valuable column inches. He got the inches, all right. Every one of them was injurious to his image, and served to blight Santana’s future. Humphrey would have been far better off at sea or at home. Anywhere but in New York.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cut the Gab and Bring Me an Order of Fried Rabbit

  i

  Since the release of The Squaw Man in 1914, the public appetite for Hollywood gossip has been insatiable. Originally journalists reported what they saw and heard. In time public relations specialists stepped in, feeding items to columnists, fending off reporters, carefully shaping the images of their clients. Skilled as these experts were, though, they couldn’t bottle up scandals forever. Bad news always had a way of leaking out. But sometimes, to the studios’ astonishment, that news turned out to be good for business. In 1932, for example, Jean Harlow’s second husband, Paul Bern, killed himself. The reason, said investigators, was because of an inability to satisfy a wife twenty-two years his junior. After the suicide, the movies’ first blond bombshell was offered her biggest and most popular roles. In 1942 Errol Flynn, who liked to boast, “I like my whisky old and my women young,” was accused of statutory rape by a seventeen-year-old girl. He was cleared of the charge; nonetheless, the durable phrase “In like Flynn” was coined. Errol became the movies’ quintessential womanizer, as irresistible on-screen as he was in the boudoir. In this tradition, Humphrey was involved in an incident at El Morocco that burnished his reputation as a treat-’em-rough romantic lead.

  Nightclubs flourished in the immediate postwar period—the Stork Club, El Morocco, and 21 were special favorites of hard-drinking New Yorkers, and of tourists who paid high prices to gawk at celeb
rities. On the evening of September 25, 1949, Lauren and Humphrey were joined by his old drinking buddy Bill Seeman, a prosperous wholesale grocer. The trio stopped off at 21 for a few glasses. By midnight Lauren had consumed more than enough liquor and retired to the Bogarts’ suite at the St. Regis Hotel. Humphrey and Bill, noisily advertising their thirst for more, went on to the Stork Club. On a drunken whim they sent a waiter out to purchase two enormous stuffed pandas, souvenirs sold at Reuben’s Broadway delicatessen. After a few more drinks, the pals and their pandas taxied to El Morocco on East 52nd Street. They secured a table for four, set up the big toys in chairs, and ordered some adult beverages. Around 3 a.m., twenty-two-year-old Robin Roberts, a self-described “model,” rose from her own table and tried to grab Humphrey’s panda. He saw what she was doing, and pulled the toy in his direction. Roberts lost her footing and fell down awkwardly and hard. Robin’s friend Peggy Rabe rushed to Roberts’s rescue. She, too, wound up on the floor. The ladies’ dates rose to defend them, saucers and plates were thrown; security personnel intervened; threats to sue followed a few minutes later.

  That was on Saturday night. Four days later Humphrey was served with a summons to appear in Mid-Manhattan Court early on Friday morning—“too damn early,” in his opinion. Nevertheless, he showed up on time. By then the tabloids had covered the “Panda Fracas” in lurid detail. There were photos of Roberts in a dress that showed plenty of poitrine, and quotes from Humphrey abjuring any thoughts of violence. He had socked no one, he reminded reporters, and would never hit a woman in any case because “I’m too sweet and chivalrous. Besides, it’s too dangerous.” He did confess to being drunk at El Morocco, “but who isn’t at three o’clock in the morning?” Covering the courtroom procedure for the Guardian, journalist Alistair Cooke described Humphrey as looking tight-lipped and melancholy, sober as a judge. A lawyer accompanied the actor, who was now wearing a gray suit, white shirt, and tie of subdued colors. “Tapping behind him on limb-breaking high heels came a sultry brunette, her lawyer and a bosom companion, a round-faced blonde.”

  After hearing both sides, the court issued an opinion. This was a case of attempted extortion; the testimony of Misses Roberts and Rabe was not to be taken seriously, hence the case had no merit and was rejected. “Mr. Bogart nodded his expert appreciation of American court proceedings, and the lawyers, the blondes and brunettes swept out to the grinning crowd outside.… Once again, justice had triumphed.” Justice notwithstanding, the club owners got righteous. El Morocco declared Bogart persona non grata, and some two hundred and fifty “niteries” gave out the word that they would tolerate no more outrageous behavior from a customer—any customer, no matter how high he was on the movie marquees. The incident gave rise to a remark by Dave Chasen, proprietor of Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, where Humphrey was known to knock back a few: “Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11:30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart.”

  Warners executives were unhappy about the rumble in New York. Granted, bad attention was better than no attention. However, this was not the Prohibition era and alcoholism had lost the power to amuse long, long ago. But to Jack Warner, booze was only a secondary annoyance. The basic problems were effrontery and ingratitude. Warner considered the possibilities, and devised a way to strike back. His revenge was the downside of the panda affair, and it damaged the man who was still teetering between celebrity and serious actor.

  At the half-century mark, Humphrey still had trouble defining his persona. On one hand he was a serious and versatile film actor who had paid his dues in scores of plays and dozens of B movies on his climb to the top. On the other hand, he was a wise guy, a drinker, a persistent annoyance to authority figures—in short, a case of arrested development. This conflict arose from a lifelong ambivalence about celebrity. Stardom had brought him money, status, glamour, love. But it had also robbed him of privacy and a chance to reflect on it all. He was not comfortable with many actors on his level; he preferred the company of writers and artists. But in the Hollywood caste system, stars were expected to live in a certain neighborhood and entertain in a prescribed manner, no matter how alien to their wishes and yearnings. In the coming years Humphrey would find more solace aboard the Santana than he did on dry land. Bobbing about Catalina, he was not fleeing the business, he was seeking himself.

  Warner’s payback was just the sort of insult that drove Humphrey wild. It took the form of two second-rate vehicles, Chain Lightning and Murder Inc., later retitled The Enforcer. Bogart, the studio pointed out, was contractually obliged to do both of them. For the first picture, Stuart Heisler functioned as a foreman rather than a director. Humphrey played Matt, a swaggering, onetime bomber pilot. His ex-girlfriend, Jo (Eleanor Parker), works for Mr. Willis (Raymond Massey), an unscrupulous manufacturer reminiscent of the executive in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Anxious to sell a jet plane to the air force before it’s been properly tested, Willis hires Matt to do some airborne experiments. But the company’s designer, Carl (Richard Whorf), takes an intense dislike to the new man and flies the plane himself—only to perish when an escape device fails. Guilt-stricken and humbled, Matt takes a new plane for a long, risky flight. He accomplishes his goal and, for lagniappe, wins back Jo’s affection.

  Chain Lightning was efficient hackwork, nothing more. Bogart did a lot of grimacing; Massey matched him scowl for scowl; Parker went through her scenes with one expression—weariness. Aloft, the film displayed a certain tension and style; back on planet Earth it turned into a stodgy, dated, by-the-numbers melodrama.

  There was nothing inherently wrong with the other Warners project. The Enforcer was based on the true story of Murder Inc., a group of killers who worked for the mob in the 1930s. New York detectives closed in, working with victims and stool pigeons to track down the leaders. One of the informants, a thug named Abe Reles, promised to give state’s evidence against his employers. Reles was in police custody when he mysteriously “threw” himself out a window, thereby weakening the prosecutor’s case. Surrounded by corrupt cops, the enforcers found other ways to nail the criminals. By the end of the decade Murder Inc. was defunct.

  The cinematic Bogart had visited this underworld many times, first as a criminal, then on the other side of the law. The remorseless private eye of The Maltese Falcon, the wisecracking shamus Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep, the street-smart defense attorney of Knock on Any Door were unforgettable. That was their trouble. Those film noir types were familiar not only to Humphrey but to moviegoers. As crusading district attorney Martin Ferguson, the star could add little to such a retrograde feature. Ironically, what saved The Enforcer from ignominy were the supporting characters. The Broadway director Bretaigne Windust (Life with Father; Arsenic and Old Lace) was supposed to make his debut with this film. But several weeks into production Windust was hospitalized. Raoul Walsh took over. The seasoned old pro refused credit—this was Windust’s first film opportunity, and he wasn’t going to spoil the debut. Nevertheless, it was Walsh who coaxed outstanding performances from Zero Mostel, shortly to go on the blacklist, and Ted De Corsia, a seasoned actor who had played racketeers so many times audiences thought he was a Mafioso gone straight. Humphrey was the one who suffered from their brilliance. Notes British film historian Jonathan Coe, “This is one of the few Bogart films where it is possible to believe—as you couldn’t with High Sierra, say, or The Big Sleep—that it might have been just as good with a different star in the central role.”

  None of this sat well with Humphrey. “He knew damn well that in this town you’re only as good as your last movie, and the last two movies were a lot less than great,” observed a friend. The regression was demoralizing on two counts. It meant that Jack Warner had won the battle, and it meant that fewer first-class scripts were going to be sent to the recalcitrant Bogart. The backslide could be measured offscreen as well. Almost all major movie stars repeated their big roles on radio, the dominant electronic medium of the time. Lux Radio Theater, for example,
used such Hollywood luminaries as Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and Gary Cooper. On other programs Humphrey voiced his parts in High Sierra, Casablanca, and The Maltese Falcon; in addition, he had been the male lead in A Farewell to Arms opposite Joan Fontaine. But now Humphrey and Lauren made plans to act in their own radio program, set in a shady Havana hotel. It would do very little to burnish the Bogart image—but then, what was the Bogart image these days? Humphrey was no longer sure whether the radio show was a smart move or an act of desperation.