Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Still soaked from the fountain, Tallulah screeched for a second cab. “Since Helen and Naps are tied up with other engagements this evening,” she said, “I guess that means you’re stuck with me as your fuck buddy.”

  ***

  Scripts were frequently offered to Hump by Brady Sr. Bill Jr. remained Hump’s steadfast friend, and promoted Hump as an actor to his father, despite telling his stepsister, Alice, that Hump “really has no talent.” Bill also confessed to her that the only reason he hyped roles for Hump was that he wanted him to have a weekly paycheck. “I’m tired of always picking up the bill at speakeasies.”

  Brady Sr. had revived Up the Ladder, a four-act play presented at The Playhouse on March 6, 1922. Originally, George Le Guere played the part of Stanley Grant. After a respectable run, when Le Guere opted to move on to other venues, Bill talked his father into giving the role to Hump. The play starred Nannette Comstock and George Farren. The original production had featured Rod La Rocque, who still wrote Hump letters, claiming that, “I’m mad about the boy,” predating the Noël Coward lyrics.

  Farren had starred in the 1917 screen version of The Cinderella Man. During rehearsals, Farren was always forgetting his lines. “No wonder,” Hump later told Bill. “He was born before the Civil War.”

  It was during his appearance in Up the Ladder that Hump befriended the actor, Paul Kelly, who was also appearing in the play, but in a minor role.

  When Up the Ladder closed, a play called Swifty followed. Brady Sr. offered Hump the role of the juvenile lead, Tom Proctor, described by playwrights John Peter Toohey and W.C. Percival as “a young sprig of the aristocracy.” John Cromwell, a member of Hump’s “pussy posse,” was signed on as the director.

  The male star was Hale Hamilton, not the more famous Neil Hamilton as many biographers have reported. Throughout their professional lives, the two actors were often confused because of their name similarity. Hump had worked with Neil Hamilton during the ill-fated production of The Ruined Lady with Grace George.

  The female lead in Up the Ladder was played by Frances Howard, and Hump was immediately attracted to her. A flapper, Frances was hailed as one of the great beauties of Broadway. She’d already appeared in The Intimate& Stranger, starring Alfred Lunt and Billie Burke.

  Frances was slender and well-proportioned with big dark eyes. Her features were so exquisitely chiseled, Hump called her a “fragile doll.” Under bobbed raven-colored hair, she had a true peaches-and-cream complexion.

  In spite of her strict Catholic upbringing, her years in show business had toughened her. Bill was the first to have an affair with her, calling her a “sexual predator in bed.” When Hump pressed him for more details, he said, “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

  Frances told Hump that she’d learned “all there was to know about men” when at the age of fifteen she toured with her sister, Connie, in an act billed as “The Howard Sisters.” In between stage jobs, Frances doubled as both a fashion model and a chorus girl.

  Hump was eager to fill in those three lonely nights a week when Helen was out with Tallulah and a pack of actresses called “the girls.” Without telling Frances that he was engaged to Helen, he actively pursued Frances who kept turning him down.

  Rehearsals on Swifty were going poorly. Brady Sr. wasn’t pleased with Cromwell’s direction, and had virtually taken over as “co-director.” Brady placed himself in the back seat of the theater. During rehearsals, every time Hump uttered a line, Brady would shout, “What? Louder! LOUDER! ” Handicapped by his lisp, Hump was mumbling some of his lines.

  Growing increasingly despondent with what he saw on the stage, Brady brought in Ring Lardner as play doctor to save Swifty. But even such a writing talent could not do the job.

  In his role in the play as that “young sprig of the aristocracy,” Hump was said to have “deflowered” a girl in an Adirondack cabin and then deserted her.

  In the play, Hump made his first appearance with a gun, a pose that would eventually become legendary for him. He was directed to rush toward Hale Hamilton, shouting, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

  Moving down to a front row seat for the final rehearsal, Brady had ordered Hump to repeat his big moment in the play a total of twenty times.

  When Brady ordered Hump to do the scene yet another time, Hump was exhausted and near tears. Consumed with rage, he gave the role his all. When he’d finished, he looked over the pit at Brady in the front row. The showman was asleep or at least feigning sleep.

  Screaming in rage, Hump ran off the stage and tried to attack Brady, but was restrained by both Hale and Bill Jr. The men took Hump into an alley and cooled him down, Bill offering a cigarette and Hale producing some brandy from a hip flask.

  Opening night could proceed. What a disaster it was. Hale and Frances were trained professionals, and did the best they could. But Hump’s mouth became so dry he disappeared from the stage to get a glass of water, leaving Hale to “vamp till ready.” Hale at that point didn’t know if Hump would come back on stage or not. Finally, he did and the play proceeded to its dull ending, receiving very weak and only scattered applause.

  The only blessing that came out of that night was that Hale wanted to go to a party and not accompany Frances back to her hotel room as she’d requested. Remembering that Hump had been repeatedly asking her out for a date, she agreed to go to the 21 Club with him. She told him, “I hope your performance later in the evening will be better than what you did on stage.”

  After midnight, Frances invited him back to her hotel room, where he discovered what his friend Bill had already learned. Frances might look like a fragile doll but in bed she was a steel magnolia. “She taught me a trick or two,” Hump told Bill Jr. the next day.

  When Hump woke up the following morning, Frances was already getting dressed. “You’re good,” she said. “Almost as good as Bill. But last night was our one and only time.”

  “What’s the matter?” Hump asked. “Last night I had you crying out for more.”

  “Occasionally I do it for fun,” she said, messing with her hair. “I waste few favors on struggling actors, especially bad struggling actors. I’ll never get ahead fucking the penniless. I’m determined to go to Hollywood where I’m gonna marry some bigtime producer or director. He’ll not only make me a star but I’ll become the wife of a millionaire.”

  To Hump, Frances’ ambitions sounded like just so much morning after pillow talk. That’s why he was eventually astonished to read on April 23, 1925 that Frances had married her “dream man” in Jersey City.

  She had found the perfect role for herself, a part that she would play for almost fifty years. She’d persuaded Samuel Goldwyn to marry her.

  When he arrived at the Bogart home the morning after, Maud was waiting with the newspapers and his reviews.

  Alexander Woollcott, the leading theater critic of his day, wrote of Swifty : “The young man who embodied the aforesaid sprig was what might mercifully be described as inadequate.” Bogie would carry around Woollcott’s review in his wallet for the rest of his life.

  Only Helen Menken urged him to keep trying to become a successful Broadway actor. One day she altered that vision of his future profession. “I’ve decided you should be on the silver screen.”

  ***

  Helen was always vague, even to her husband-to-be, about how she had met Lillian Gish. Tallulah later claimed that she was the one who introduced Helen to Lillian, presenting Helen as “my discard” in the lobby of the Hotel Algonquin.

  Discard or not, Helen seemed to mesmerize Miss Gish, who suggested that “a beauty like yourself should also appear in flickers. You’d look lovely in close-ups.” Coming from Lillian, the D.W. Griffith star who invented closeups, that was high praise indeed.

  Through her close relationship with the more famous of the Gish sisters, Lillian herself, Helen arranged for a screen test for Hump in Lillian’s upcoming film, The White Sister.

  The film s
cript had been written by F. Marion Crawford and Walter Hackett. It had opened in September 27, 1909 at Daly’s Theatre in New York, having only a short run before it closed November 6. Lillian and Henry King hoped to resurrect this tired vehicle, as indeed they would one day as a film.

  Two days later, in a barnlike studio in Astoria, Queens, Hump was introduced to the already legendary Lillian, who told him that in her upcoming film she hoped to capture a “spiritual fragility.”

  Hump remembered that she maintained several quirky “little conceits,” which included referring to her Canadian friend as Gladys Smith, even though Gladys was known to the world at large as Mary Pickford. “Griffith used to pay Dorothy and me five dollars a day,” Lillian said. “Henry King and I hope to pay you considerably more.”

  Dorothy, of course, was the other Gish sister, and was also famous as an actress.

  King, the director, introduced himself to Hump just before his screen test and explained in rough outline the plot for The White Sister. Lillian was to play Angela Chiaromonte, the daughter of a rich Italian count killed in a fall from his horse. Lillian is cheated out of her estate by her older half-sister and is thrown into poverty. She’s saved by her engagement to a dashing officer, Captain Giovanni Severini, but he is captured by Arabs in an expedition to Africa. She dedicates her life to her lover’s memory by becoming a nun. She’s not aware that her lover has escaped and returned to Italy. The climax takes place against a backdrop of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

  “Just my kind of part,” Hump told King, who apparently did not catch the sarcasm in the actor’s voice. Hump thought the script ridiculous but agreed to film the final close-up with Lillian minus the volcanic eruption.

  He never saw the screen test but felt that he was very wooden with Lillian. “We had all the screen chemistry of yesterday’s bathwater.” To Hump’s surprise, both King and Lillian complimented him on his performance, claiming that they felt he had “real screen presence.”

  Hump was asked to stay at the studio until after lunch. King was considering asking him to film one more segment of The White Sister, depicting when the captain first meets the woman who will become the love of his life.

  When Hump returned from lunch, another actor was waiting in the reception room. An Englishman named Ronald Colman was eight years older than Hump. He appeared suave and debonair with a soft cultured voice that contrasted with Hump’s lisp. Hump, thinking the role was his, was upset to learn that Colman was also testing for the part. He not only “spoke pretty,” as Hump later recalled, “but he was also God damn good looking.” Colman, in fact, would in a decade be voted “the handsomest man on the screen.” Both King and Lillian had seen Colman appearing in a Ruth Chatterton play and had been impressed with his performance.

  Hump and Colman were interrupted when King came into the studio. With Colman’s permission, King penciled in a mustache on the clean-shaven actor, a tonsorial touch that would remain with the star for the rest of his life.

  Even before the more polished Colman went before the cameras, Hump knew that the British actor had the part. He suspected that King and Lillian had tested him only as a favor to Helen. King called Colman into the studio and dismissed Hump, claiming it wasn’t necessary to stick around for that second scene.

  Colman not only won the part of the tragic soldier hero in The White Sister, he went on to become one of Hollywood’s greatest film stars, pioneering a band of “gentleman heroes” on the screen. As Hump went from one “dumb comedy to another,” he watched Colman’s meteoric rise to film fame.

  For the rest of his life, Bogie would refer to Colman as “that limey bum,” blaming the British actor for sabotaging Hump’s own screen career in silent pictures.

  ***

  One evening Bill Brady Jr. invited Hump to the opening night of his father’s 1923 Broadway production, The Mad Honeymoon. They sat next to George M. Cohan.

  At the time, any aspiring actor was in awe of Cohan, “the man who owned Broadway.” The song-and-dance man of all song-and-dance men, Cohan was celebrated for his hit song, “Over There,” for which Franklin Roosevelt would one day award him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Cohan would go on to write such hits as “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Ironically, Hump’s future film rival at Warner Brothers, James Cagney, would win an Academy Award for his impersonation of Cohan in the 1943 film hit, Yankee Doodle Dandy.

  Fifteen minutes into The Mad Honeymoon, both Bill and Hump knew that the show would be a disaster. The only saving grace of the play was when a teenage actress, Mayo Methot, walked onstage as the maid. She had only five lines of dialogue, but brought momentary life to the dying play.

  In their front row seats, Hump remembered being intrigued by her cupid’s-bow mouth and mass of blonde curls inspired by the MGM screen goddess, Mae Murray. Mayo had big, soulful eyes that looked out across the stage lights, seeming to make direct contact with the audience.

  When the curtain went down, Cohan had nothing to say about the play. It received only scattered applause and was lambasted the next morning by all the leading critics of the day.

  With his sharp eye for good theater, Cohan said nothing to Bill about his father’s opening night disaster, but asked to be taken backstage to meet the maid. “I have just discovered the next Lillian Gish.”

  Hump was surprised, thinking that a comparison to Mae Murray—not Gish—would have been more apt.

  When word spread that Cohan had come backstage, the stars of the play expected that Mr. Showman had come to greet them. They were startled at having been ignored. Cohan sought out Mayo and told her that she was terrific in the role. Mayo reached over with her cupid’s bow mouth and kissed Cohan right on his lips.

  She shook hands with Bill and Hump but her eyes remained focused on Cohan. That very night he offered her the role of Leola Lane opposite him in his new production, The Song and Dance Man. Without even knowing what the role entailed, she accepted on the spot.

  Hump remembered Mayo as a cute little blonde, and Bill and he would like to have dated her, even though Bill was married and Hump engaged. But it was obvious that Cohan had seen her first and had a lot more to offer her.

  Years later, Mayo recalled her first meeting with Cohan “which changed my life.” She also recollected meeting Bill Brady Jr., the son of the producer of The Mad Honeymoon. She had “no memory whatsoever” of being introduced to Hump. She later told an interviewer, “If someone had told me then that I would one day become the third Mrs. Bogart, I would have fallen on my cute ass.”

  ***

  Hump went back to working as a stage manager for Brady Sr. At night he frequented the speakeasies, spending every dollar he made. Sometimes Helen accompanied him, and often he was joined by Bill and his new wife, the always competent but never exciting actress, Katharine Alexander, who was forging ahead with her career playing wronged wives, society snobs, and respectable women. John Barrymore was in hot pursuit of her, but she claimed she was still faithful toBill.

  Sometimes the director, John Cromwell, would also join the crowd as it made its way from such mob joints in Harlem as the Cotton Club over to Connie’s Inn. When they had more money, Hump’s party showed up at The Dover Club.

  With Stuart Rose, Hump continued to go horseback riding in Central Park. Stuart and Hump also took up ice skating, usually with Hump’s sister, Frances. Stuart and Frances were still “an item,” as they called it.

  Smoking his Andover pipe, Hump went sailing off Long Island whenever he was free from Broadway. He was seen frequently at Mayfair, an actors club, when he wasn’t at the Lambs Club, another hangout for actors. Often he took Helen dancing at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the 21 Club remained his favorite watering hole. He was also becoming known for his expert chess playing.

  When a year went by and Hump wasn’t offered another role, he felt his career as an actor had come to an end. Unexpectedly, Rosalie Stewart, a producer, sent him
a script, Meet the Wife, a comedy starring Mary Boland and Clifton Webb. Hump was offered the role of a young, fresh-faced reporter, Gregory Brown, in this three-act comedy by Lynn Starling, an up-and-coming playwright of her day.

  Mary Boland was already an established stage star when Hump first met her. Born in Philadelphia in 1880, she’d begun her career at the age of fifteen, following the death of her actor father, W.A. Boland. Her film debut in 1914 was in The Edge of the Abyss. She’d become a star in 1919 playing the stately scatterbrain, Mrs. Wheeler, in Booth Tarkington’s Clarence opposite Alfred Lunt.

  From the first day they met, Hump was fascinated by the male co-star of Meet the Wife. Clifton Webb and Bogie would become friends and remain so for the rest of their lives together. They were an odd couple. Webb was an immaculate dresser and had impeccable manners, but this young dancer turned actor was known along Broadway as “Miss Priss.” Born in Indianapolis in 1891, he changed his name from Webb Parmallee Hollenbeck to Clifton Webb. Hump both affectionately and jokingly called him Parmallee.

  Known as “the Irritable Bachelor,” Clifton even then was a notorious homosexual, specializing in seducing young juvenile leads who appeared with him. The still handsome Hump became his chief target during rehearsals for Meet the Wife. Hump felt as ardently pursued by Clifton as he had been by Rod La Rocque when he’d directed that actor in the film, Life.

  One night at a Harlem night spot, Hump decided to confront Clifton. “I’m not going to become your boy, and if you come on to me again I’ll punch you out,” Hump told him. “But I will be your friend. I like you a hell of a lot. I don’t take it up the ass.”

  “Don’t worry, my dear fellow,” Clifton said. “I’m a famous bottom.” Clifton bent over the table and affectionately kissed Hump on the nose. Somehow this impulsive act endeared Clifton all the more to Hump. Never again did seduction rear its head.