Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Although the men did not really look alike, Broadway writers often cited the physical resemblance between Valentino and Hump. Typical of the comments was an interview written by Elita Miller Lenz in 1924. “Humphrey Bogart is one of the few young actors along Broadway that can be classed as a Valentino type in color, which should help much in the matter of future popularity.”

  Just for fun, Helen acquired a Sheik costume for Hump, which he wore to a masquerade ball at the Plaza Hotel. Helen herself appeared disguised as Agnes Ayres, who had starred opposite Valentino in The Sheik. Their photograph ended up in the New York papers.

  Helen had even gone so far as to purchase pink silk underwear for Hump, after reading in a fan magazine that Natacha Rambova, Valentino’s second wife, insisted that her husband appear “only in pink bloomers.”

  Whenever Hump pulled off his trousers in the bedroom of many a chorus girl, his partner for the evening often laughed at his “pink powder puff” underwear. However, when Hump slipped off what he called “those sissy drawers,” the laughter stopped as he went about his sexual maneuvering for the evening.

  As 1924 drew to a close, producer and playwright Barry Connors offered Hump the role of the male lead in a three-act comedy directed by John Hayden. The play was Hell’s Bells, and it starred two women, the established Broadway actress, Olive May, and also Shirley Booth making her debut at the dawn of a stage and film career that would bring her international fame.

  Connors described Jimmy Todhunter, the character Hump would play, as “a regular fellow of twenty-seven, well-educated, ambitious, self-reliant, and industrious.” The role would launch Hump into a series of juvenile parts, each of which required the standard costume for an ingénu of that era—white duck trousers and a blue blazer. Each of these early roles was radically more wholesome than some of the gangster and tough guy roles (among them Duke Mantee, Sam Spade, Charlie Allnut, and Captain Queeg) that Hump would later play.& But at least in the 1920s, Hump became known for playing “young sprigs.”

  Hell’s Bells would hardly be remembered except for one immortal line, which Hump delivered and which would forever haunt him, becoming part of the national vocabulary.

  The director, Hayden, needed a device to move some actors off the stage to make way for a scene that focused only on his two leading actresses, Shirley Booth and Olive May. He devised a setup whereby Hump appeared on stage carrying a tennis racquet. Surveying the male actors, he asked of them, “Tennis anyone?” Even today, Casablanca’s Rick is ridiculed for playing such a tooth-some juvenile with such a jejune image.

  Although admitting that he had at one time or another delivered some of the most ridiculous lines ever written for the Broadway stage, Hump in later life repeatedly denied that he had come on stage and said, “Tennis, anyone?” in Hell’s Bells or any other play. Hump claimed the line was, “It’s forty-love outside. Anyone care to watch?”

  However, Richard Watts Jr., longtime theater critic for The New York Post, claimed that he reviewed the opening night of Hell’s Bells and that indeed Bogart did say that line. “I made a note of it but didn’t publish it in my review.”

  When an attempt at a revival of the play was made in 1934 for a road show tour, Hayden’s original script was discovered. The line about it being “forty-love outside” was indeed in the script as Bogie later claimed. But before opening night, Hayden had crossed over the line and written, “Tennis anyone?”

  In later life Bogie often spoke bitterly of his early career on the stage. “With my hair slicked back, I’d appear in white flannels with pale blue knit sweaters, always carrying a tennis racquet. Those early parts made me feel silly and girlish. The god damn director would have me come out modeling the latest pinch-back sports coat with pansy neck cloths and a swishy new hairdo.”

  The star of Hell’s Bells, Olive May, had been appearing on Broadway since Hump was one year old, introducing herself to audiences in The Surprises of Love on January 22, 1900.

  During rehearsals Hump met and became briefly attached to Shirley Booth, who was one year older than he was. Those who know her today only as the irrepressible maid on the television series, Hazel, which ran from 1961 to 1966, may not understand the physical allure that Shirley had during her youth. In 1925 she was a lovely, gracious, and even beautiful woman. Born Thelma Booth Ford in New York City, she had had an even more miserable childhood than Hump. Her mother, Virginia Wright, was terminally ill, and her father, business executive, Albert J. Ford, was a brutal, stern father. Over her father’s objections and at the age of fourteen, Shirley dropped out of school, determined to be an actress on stage.

  Interviewed years later at her saltbox house in North Chatham, Massachusetts, she was reluctant to talk about her involvement with Bogie.

  “I wouldn’t call our first meeting an affair, more like a weekend together,” she said. “He was a real gentleman, very polite and respectful of women, although I’d heard that he had a run-in or two with the star, Olive May. We were two frightened kids trying to make our way on Broadway, and we sensed a soulmate in each other, and perhaps turned to each other for a little comfort. I don’t have much to say about that. On the few occasions we talked later in life, we both sympathized with each other about how long it took each of us to become a star.”

  Hell’s Bells opened at the Wallack Theatre on the night of January 26, 1925. It was a flop, running for only fifteen performances. The only consolation for Hump was a claim by Alan Dale, critic for The New York American, that “Bogart gorgeously acted his role.”

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Bogie later said. “Maybe it was because I’d appeared in three comedies on Broadway, Swifty, Meet the Wife, and Hell’s Bells. All of a sudden I was typecast as a comedy actor on stage. The next few years would offer me nothing but a series of three-act comedies, most of them not funny.”

  ***

  Helen was a friend of Woollcott. She felt that Hump’s career would be advanced if he actually met some of the critics who would one day review his future plays.

  He escorted her to a speakeasy, Tony’s, which was patronized by hard-drinking actors and writers. There Hump met the owner, Tony Soma, who loved artists and who welcomed him with great enthusiasm. That welcome would continue for years even when Hump went as long as three months without paying his large and forever mounting bar tabs.

  Tony’s was the kind of watering hole where Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley would go with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to celebrate Jack Dempsey’s four-round victory over Georges Carpentier. When Hump first saw all the celebrated patrons of Tony’s, he felt that it was another branch of the famous Algonquin Roundtable. One by one he met all of them.

  He was first introduced to Robert Sherwood, who would one day write The Petrified Forest which would be Bogie’s last stage play, and also his best, and would be made into a film with Bogie and Bette Davis that would become the biggest break of his movie career in the 1930s.

  Helen decided she had “to work the room.” Before she had finished making the rounds, she introduced Hump to the newspaper reporter, Mark Hellinger, who invited him for a drink at the bar. Even though he couldn’t afford it in those days, Mark was known for picking up everyone’s bar tabs. Hump and Mark liked each other at once, having no inkling, of course, what important roles they would play in each other’s future life.

  Tony put his arm around Hump and invited him to frequent his bar and “make it your favorite. You’re always welcome here. In return, I want you to marry that Helen. She’s one good-looking woman, and I’m afraid some man is going to snare her if you don’t tie the knot.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Hump said, although he showed up at Tony’s the following night without his bride-to-be.

  After only two nights, Hump became a regular at Tony’s, often dropping in alone and continuing to meet and talk to some of the fabulous personalities of New York in the 1920s.

  On nights when Hump drank too much, he’d become quite caustic. One night h
e insulted Gentlemen Jim Corbett, the boxing champ. He grabbed Hump by the back of the neck and tossed him out onto the rainy street.

  Six months went by before Hump dared enter Tony’s again. When he did, he always sent a friend ahead of him to see if Gentleman Jim was among the patrons that night.

  ***

  When the newspaper reporter, Mark Hellinger, finally got around to inviting Hump for that night on the town, he made up for lost time. Mark’s world, then known as “gay Broadway,” was comprised of a square mile of real estate between 40th and 50th streets, bounded by 6th and 8th Avenue. If it wasn’t the world’s most glamorous mile, it was the most exciting, a district of dime-a-dance joints, speakeasies, chop-suey outlets, cabarets, theaters, movie houses, plush apartments for kept women, panhandlers, Minsky’s Burlesque, the Palace Theater, and even Spinrad’s Barbershop.

  The barbershop was pointed out to Hump by Mark who suggested he should go in there tomorrow and ask for George. “If you’re going to be a big Broadway star, you’ve got to get your hair cut right,” Mark said. He also promised Hump to introduce him to his tailor. “The Jimmy Walker cut is the way to go.” Hump had heard about the political aspirations of this fancy dresser, whose career had included stints as a Broadway actor. He was also a talented musician, having written such songs as “Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?” Rising through the ranks of Tammany Hall, Jimmy Walker was entering the mayor’s race.

  Hellinger was on a first-name basis with Jack Dempsey, Clarence Darrow, Theodore Dreiser, Ethel Barrymore, Florenz Ziegfeld, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jeanne Eagles, Bobby Jones, and even Eleanora Duse and Aimee Semple McPherson. He spent his nights in some of New York’s five-thousand speakeasies devoted to drinking “Staten Island or New Jersey champagne” at $35 a bottle or unreliable Bahamian Scotch at $20 a fifth.

  During his rounds, Mark was accompanied by another reporter, columnist Walter Winchell. Hellinger eventually evolved into the world’s first Broadway reporter, Winchell the first of the Broadway gossip columnists. The two men were seen together practically every night of the week, so much so that they were rumored to be lovers.

  Disdaining Winchell’s show biz gossip, Mark preferred heart-rending sob stories, filled with laughter and tears, with an O’Henry ending. Mark called his reporting “short stories about the people of Broadway,” ranging from the long-legged Ziegfeld girls to the Irish immigrant cop on the block with a nightstick, to the little Sicilian hood who dreamed that he might one day take over Al Capone’s crime empire.

  Mark had invited Hump to El Fey club, run by bootlegger Larry Fay. (The club was named after him but spelled slightly differently.) Rumor had it that Fay didn’t know how to spell his name. The club’s hostess was the fabulous Texas Guinan, whose own club had recently been closed by the police for selling bootleg hooch.

  Hump was eager to meet Guinan, a name known all over Broadway. The flamboyant show-biz personality and actress was born in Texas in 1884 as Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan. The robust Irish lass grew up on a small ranch near Waco where she became an accomplished horseback rider and roper. She went from there into live Wild West dramas, and in time ended up in the chorus line in such Chicago comedies as The Gay Musician.

  In Hollywood, cast as the gun-girl heroine in a silent screen western, The Wildcat in 1917, this pistol-packing, barrel-riding queen of the West became America’s first movie cowgirl long before the likes of Dale Evans. She went on to appear as a gunslinger in The Gun Woman in 1918 and Little Miss Deputy in 1919 before being lured by the aura of New York in the Roaring Twenties.

  When Hump entered the bar with Mark, Guinan called out, “Hello, suckers! Come on in and leave your wallet on the bar.” On meeting her, Hump liked her free-wheeling, devil-may-care aura. “I’m hanging out at Larry’s dump,” she said, “because the cops have padlocked my place. I don’t have to worry about an automobile ride in New York. Taxpayers foot the bill. Unfortunately, my free ride from the city is always to jail. I’ve fucked Jimmy Walker six times. He owes me plenty of favors. When he becomes mayor, the cops will get off my back except when they come around to fuck me in the ass.”

  “You’re my kind of gal,” Hump said to Texas as Mark lost himself in the bowels of the club.

  “I’ve got some special entertainment planned for you tonight in more ways than one,” Texas said.

  She ordered Hump a drink, although she always denied that alcohol was sold in her speakeasies. When his drink was served, she told Hump where Fay had stolen the booze. “The other night some of Fay’s hoods armed themselves with pistols, sawed-off shotguns, and Tommy guns,” she said. “They piled into a large boat and sailed ten miles out to sea where they hijacked a French freighter like a team of God damn pirates. They made off with five-hundred cases of whiskey, wine, champagne, and brandy. Fay didn’t go out on the raid himself. He was waiting on shore and paid a measly one-hundred bucks for the whole thing. He’ll make thousands off the stuff, especially when my brother, Tommy, waters it down at the bar.”

  Surveying the club, she said, “I’m not doing too bad. When I was a movie star in Hollywood, I earned fifty dollars a week—those asshole cheats out there. Before the year is out in New York, I expect to earn $700,000.”

  As the night progressed, she told him that a producer was here tonight, considering casting her in the appropriately titled Broadway review Padlocks of 1925. It took a while for the revue to be produced, and the title had to be changed to Padlocks of 1927.

  “I’m gonna die young,” Texas told him. “But I’m gonna have a hell of a lot of fun along the way. What about you, Bogart?”

  “I’m gonna die young too but I’m gonna have more fun than you,” he said.

  “I’ll race you to the finish line, sucker,” she said before getting up to announce the star act of the evening.

  In another one of the strange coincidences in Hump’s life, the act being introduced by Texas that night at El Fey was a dance routine by George Raft.

  This was the same George Raft that would become the legendary Broadway dancer, the Hollywood tough guy, the gambler, and Don Juan himself with a life-long courtship with the underworld. Hump had read in Winchell’s column that Raft had taught the Charleston to Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, and later, the Duke of Windsor.

  In his early reviews, Hump was called the Valentino of Broadway. But in Hollywood it was George Raft who’d be billed as Paramount’s “replacement” for the long-dead Valentino.

  To Hump’s regret in the 30s, Warner Brothers eventually signed Raft to a stable of cinema tough guys that included Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. Hump would often find that whenever he was competing for a choice film role, Raft got the part instead.

  ***

  Future movie stardom was hardly on Hump’s mind as he sat mesmerized, watching Raft dance to an audience of patrons consisting of millionaires and bluebloods mingling with nattily dressed hoodlums.

  After introducing Raft, the brassy, shoot-’em-up gal, Texas herself, rejoined Hump at table. “Raft is the weirdest, maddest dancer you’ve ever seen,” Texas said in her tough, deep voice. She quickly waved at a couple entering to see Raft dance. “Fuck, I’m starting to attract the literati.” Hump recognized Robert Sherwood escorting Dorothy Parker.

  “Raft mesmerizes my customers,” Texas said. “All eyes shine on Raft as he whirls faster and faster. Every night he stops the show. He’s taking in a thousand big ones a week.”

  Hump didn’t need this running dance critique from Texas. He watched in fascination as Raft performed his mongrel dance, called “the Peabody.” It was a fantastic speed dance with all kinds of interpolations, a choreography strangely known as “cake-eating.” The dance was filled with dozens of twists, turns, and jerks.

  The owner of the club, Fay, joined Texas and Hump at table. It was obvious that he’d been quarreling with Texas. Texas was attracting an upper-crust crowd of the Whitneys, the Vanderbilts, and the Astors, whereas Fay was inviting his
hoodlum friends from Brooklyn. There was no place with such a mixed clientele in all of New York. An aristocrat like Vincent Astor could be spotted at the bar drinking with five guntoting and trigger-happy desperados.

  Hump was equally fascinated by Raft’s incredible speed dance and by Fay himself. Bootlegger Fay looked like a tough hood from Brooklyn, perhaps an unruly labor organizer, more than the owner of a swank night club. Hump later claimed that he used Fay as his role model when he first had to impersonate a gangster in films.

  After his performance, Texas brought Raft over to the table to meet Hump. “Here’s the actor who’s gonna marry Helen Menken.” And although they were later to become bitter rivals for the same film roles, Hump liked Raft at once. The young dancer was actually the character that latter-day film fans thought Bogie was, even though his background and character were almost the complete opposite of Raft’s.

  Raft had slicked down his black hair with what appeared to be a whole jar of Vaseline, a hairstyle that had become known as the patent-leather look. Unlike the baggy suits of the day, he wore tight, form-fitting trousers and jackets, along with three diamond rings, one on his pinkie.

  He spoke with such brutal honesty and candor about who he was and what he did that Hump was mildly surprised that he’d been so confessional to a stranger. “Listen, unless you’re going to fuck Texas tonight, I can get you a hot date,” Raft said. “I’ll give you the phone number of this go-to-hell pussy, Grayce Mulrooney. She’s my wife.”

  At first Hump thought that Raft was joking until he realized that the dancer was perfectly serious.

  “She’s alone every night.” Raft pointed to a cute little brunette dancing in the chorus line. “That’s Ruby Keeler, She’s only fourteen and working for Texas and Fay illegally. I’m going to go for her tonight. I’m gonna make the big play. Sometimes I fuck young.”