Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Even when they got to the apartment, Kenneth didn’t say much as he showed Hump around. There wasn’t much to see. It was a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment—the two men, both lovers of Mary, would be sharing the same bed.

  Kenneth was eager to talk about work, not Mary. He said he’d made a film, Men Without Women, co-starring Frank Albertson and Paul Page. The 70-minute film depicted the saga of 14 sailors trapped in a sunken submarine with not enough escape gear to go around. It was directed by John Ford.

  “That Ford is one tough bastard,” Kenneth said. “His first words to me were, ‘I run a tight ship. I’m the officer in command and don’t forget it!’” He paused to light a cigarette. “I hope you never work with this Ford asshole. He nearly killed all of us.”

  Eager to share news about his own success in films, Hump told Kenneth that Fox Studios had brought him out as a candidate for the leading role in The Man Who Came Back. Kenneth laughed when he heard the news. “You’re the fifth actor they’ve brought out as a candidate for that role. I was the first. None of us is going to get the role. It’s going to Charles Farrell, and he’s still stuck in the methodologies of the Silent Screen. He can’t even talk right.”

  Hump felt that Kenneth had seemed a little too gleeful in informing him of this, no doubt paying him back for the revelation about Mary having an affair with his brother Jo.

  The next day Hump got up early and reported to work at Fox Studios as a contract player. To his painful regret, he learned that Kenneth was right. Not only was silent screen star Charles Farrell already signed to play the lead in The Man Who Came Back, Hump had been assigned the job of giving him diction lessons.

  Farrell became a big star just as the screen learned to talk, and he’d been famously teamed with Janet Gaynor, especially in their big hit in the 1927 version of Seventh Heaven. Ironically, Seventh Heaven had been Helen Menken’s most successful play a few years previously.

  Only a year younger than Hump, Charles Farrell was the Brad Pitt of his day, and with his well-developed physique, had been doing half-clothed scenes on film back in the silent era. When Hump met the hunk in 1930, Farrell was decades away from his future role as mayor of Palm Springs, a position he was elected to in the late Forties.

  Hump had seen the film, Seventh Heaven, and felt it represented the sappy peak of silent screen romanticism, a gauzy, idyllic romance combined with wholesome vitality. Farrell was wholesome all right, and, in fact, was one of the handsomest actors Hump had ever known. Hump was quickly learning that film actors were required to be more beautiful and photogenic than stage actors.

  Even though Hump was forced to work with Charles for six weeks, he took an instant dislike to the star. “I hope you don’t teach me your fucking lisp,” Farrell said. “You sound like a fairy.”

  Hump wanted to belt him one, but he feared that Farrell with his athletic physique might flatten him.

  On the third day of voice coaching, Farrell became so angry at Hump that he crushed his cigarette out in Hump’s palm. Hump winced in pain and rushed into the bathroom to run cold water over his wound. “You fucking conceited bastard,” Hump said. “Fox contract or no Fox contract, I’m going to lick you for that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Farrell said. “I didn’t mean to do it. I’m mad at Raoul Walsh for making me take diction lessons from some lisping New York actor.”

  His hand still stinging from the cigarette burn, Hump came out of the bathroom. “You’ve gone too far.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Farrell said. “I don’t know what came over me. When I did that cigarette number on you, I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was standing up for all silent-screen actors who are losing their jobs to Broadway thespians.”

  “Listen, I need this job, and I want it to work out for me,” Hump said. “Let’s get on with it. God knows someone should teach you to speak English.”

  Farrell said, “I still feel sorry about that cigarette thing. The third lead, the juvenile role, hasn’t been cast yet. I think you’d be ideal. I know you wanted the lead, but third billing in the latest Gaynor/Farrell film ain’t bad.”

  “You’d put in a plug for me?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  When Hump got back to Kenneth’s apartment that night, his actor friend was jubilant. “I just got a call from Raoul Walsh. He’s cast me in The Man Who Came Back after all.”

  The news stunned Hump. “You mean Farrell’s out of the flick?”

  “Not at all,” Kenneth said, his face radiant. “I’ve been cast in the supporting part of the juvenile lead.”

  ***

  At long last Hump was freed from having to give diction lessons to Farrell. Fox gave him his first major film role, a picture called A Devil With Women, based on a novel, Dust and Sun by Clements Ripley. It was to star Victor McLaglen and Mona Maris.

  His brother-in-law, Stuart Rose, was on a train to Hollywood, bringing with him a series of plays and novels from the New York office, with recommendations of each of them as a possible film scenario. Kenneth had invited Stuart to stay at his apartment, with Hump agreeing to sleep on the sofa.

  When Hump met Stuart at the railway station in Los Angeles, he was eager for news from New York. Stuart, though seemingly glad to see Hump, was not forthcoming with much information, as if deliberately concealing what he knew about what was going on back East.

  Stuart and Frances had not visited the Bogarts in weeks and didn’t know how they were doing. He’d not seen Mary Philips either. Since coming to Hollywood, Hump had written his wife only two letters, neither of which was answered.

  In a taxi en route to Kenneth’s apartment, Hump detected that something had gone seriously wrong in Stuart’s marriage to his sister, Frances. It wasn’t anything that Stuart specifically said. That he said almost nothing about Frances left the lingering suspicion that the marriage was on the rocks.

  Finally, Hump decided to press the issue. “God damn it,” he said. “I want to know. How are my sisters?”

  Anger flashed across Stuart’s face. “Okay, if you must know. Catherine has become a hopeless alcoholic and is sleeping with every guy in town. As for Frances, she grows more mentally unstable every month. The last time I talked to your dad about it, he held out the possibility that we might have to put her in an asylum.”

  “My God,” Hump said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it now with Kenneth,” Stuart said. “It’s too painful. Before I go back east, I’ll let you know everything. I figured you had enough on your mind trying to launch yourself at Fox.”

  Once upstairs, Kenneth and Stuart warmly embraced. Each man’s face lit up at the sight of the other. Up to that point, Hump never knew that Stuart and Kenneth were any more than casual acquaintances. But they related to each other like two best friends bonded at the hip.

  As if suddenly aware of Hump in the living room, Stuart turned to Hump. “I bet our boy Kenneth has to fight off the beautiful gals out here in Hollywood.”

  His eyes downcast, Hump headed for the kitchen to get himself a beer. “Something like that.”

  He heard the phone ring. When he returned from the kitchen, Kenneth told him that he had to report back to the set of The Man Who Came Back to re-shoot a scene.

  After he’d dressed, Kenneth again embraced Stuart warmly and agreed to meet back at the apartment later when all three of them would go out on the town.

  After Stuart showered and dressed, he came into the kitchen and joined Hump at the table, accepting a can of beer. “The publicity department at Fox called me, and they want to begin your buildup. Since the scar on your lip can’t be concealed on screen, we’ve got to invent a cover-up story.”

  “I got it.” Hump said. “But we don’t want to implicate Belmont in this.”

  “No we don’t,” Stuart said. “The Fox publicist I talked to thinks we can claim that you were injured by a flying wooden splinter from a bursting shell when your naval vessel, Leviathan, came under fire from a German U-boat.”

/>   “Neat story,” Hump said. “If anybody checked, though, I saw no action in the war. The Leviathan never came under fire. You’re good at embellishing. Can’t you come up with a better story, one that can’t be checked?”

  Stuart excused himself and made some business calls to Fox Studios. When he came back, he said, “I think I’ve got it. We’ll have you stationed in Portsmouth. The Navy had assigned you to take a handcuffed prisoner—let’s call him Johnny Ireland—from the naval station to a military prison forty miles away. Ireland, let’s say, had been arrested in Boston and charged with desertion. At one point as you’re changing trains, let’s have Ireland ask you for a cigarette. As you go to light it for him, Ireland raises up his handcuffed hands, smashing you in the face, damaging your lip. We’ll then say that Ireland made a run for it. With some skin on your upper lip hanging by a thread, you take out a .45 and shoot the man in his left buttock, grounding him. We’ll have some Navy doctor sewing up your lip. Badly.”

  “That’s kinda cute,” Hump said. “I like the ring of it. Let’s go for it.”

  That fantasy, conceived by Stuart late one afternoon in a small Hollywood apartment, became, in time, a Hollywood legend.

  ***

  It was Friday night and all of Hollywood seemed to be having a good time except Hump. Mary had said that during their separation he was free to date. So far, he’d met no one.

  He then remembered that bouncy blonde bombshell, Joan Blondell, with whom he’d appeared in that Ruth Etting flick, Broadway’s Like That. He searched through his papers until he found her number.

  Feeling a bit shy, he went to the phone. It was probably a useless gesture. A woman as sexy as Joan probably had guys lining up at her door, especially on a big date night like Friday in Hollywood. “What the hell,” he said, deciding to ring her up anyway.

  “Say hello to Miss Dallas, honey,” the expressive face with the pop eyes said to Hump as she pulled up in front of his apartment house to find him already waiting on the sidewalk. “Miss Dallas, Texas, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.”

  “Good to see you out here in Hollywood,” Hump said, leaning in to kiss Joan on the lips. “Here we are: Two stars of tomorrow.”

  “Get in, handsome.” Her big smile and big blue eyes lured him into the passenger seat of her secondhand 1927& Dodge, with its dented fenders and ripped canvas hood tied down with a rope to keep it from flapping. “As you can see, this ain’t no Gloria Swanson limousine,” Joan said.

  She drove toward Santa Monica, where she knew a small and charming Italian restaurant where they could dine quietly. On the way there, he brought her up to date on what was happening—or not happening—to his career at Fox.

  With a youthful exuberance lighting up her kewpie doll face, she told him about her own career. “I’ve been out here long enough to know that Warners has got me pegged as a brassy, gum-chewing, wisecracking blonde floozy. Better that than no work at all.”

  “I hear that back East a lot of us thespian hacks are out of work,” he said. “They call it a depression.”

  “Jimmy Cagney and me are going to try to make the world forget its troubles,” she said. “They signed us both to five-year contracts. He gets the big bills. I get the small change. But it’s a job. I’ll take any part they want me to play. The only thing I’m fighting is my name change.”

  “I think Joan Blondell is a great name for a movie star,” he said. “What did the Warner friars come up with?”

  “Inez Holmes.”

  He burst into laughter and reached for a cigarette, offering her one.

  “Don’t laugh too loud,” she said. “You don’t think Fox is going to let you keep Humphrey, do you? Bogart is okay, but Humphrey. I’m sure they’re going to change it to something like Dale or maybe Cary. What about Brad?”

  “Hell with that,” he said. “It’s going to be Humphrey Bogart or nothing. Don’t let them rename you Inez Holmes. Warners will take enough from you. Hold onto that name, girl.”

  Over dinner he got to know her for the first time, as they’d hardly gotten acquainted in New York. Before the spaghetti was served, he’d learned that her father, Ed Blondell, had been one of the original Katzenjammer Kids. Joan was a true “born in a trunk” show biz woman, reared on vaudeville stages, having made her first appearance at the age of three months when she was brought out before the lights as a “carry-on” in the play, The Greatest Love.

  “I grew up on the stage,” she said. “I’ve taken more baths in train station toilets than anyone.”

  “How did you get the nickname, Rosebud?” he asked.

  “We toured everywhere,” she said. “Ed even took the Blondells to China. My big number was called ‘In a Rosebud Garden of Girls.’ Since then, only my intimates are allowed to call me Rosebud. But before the night is out, I hope you’ll be calling me that.”

  She leaned over and planted a light kiss on his lips.

  “Before this night is over, I hope your rosebud and I are on intimate terms,” he said.

  “Now, now,” she said. “No need to get vulgar. Let’s keep it clean.”

  The waiter arrived with the veal parmigiana just as she was telling him how she came to be teamed with Cagney. Hump had told her that he’d known Cagney in New York. “He was a drag queen appearing in cabaret revues back then,” he said.

  She seemed startled to hear that, and Hump deliberately didn’t tell her how Cagney was offered a drag role.

  “That big cheese, George Kelly, spotted Jimmy and me trying out this dance number,” she said. “He cast us in Maggie the Magnificent. Kelly thought Jimmy looked like a fresh mutt, and I, of course, the blonde hooker with the heart of gold.”

  “I’m hearing real good things about the two of you,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I’m just a little bit jealous. Are you guys shacking up?”

  “So?” she said, smiling. “Do we really know what Mary Philips is doing in New York tonight?”

  “ Touché!”&

  After dinner they went for a walk along the Santa Monica pier, noticing the boats rocking from side to side as the water was choppy. He spotted a drunk throwing up over a rail.

  “I’m living with Kenneth MacKenna,” he said.

  “And I’m living with three broads and sharing the rent,” she said. “But there are ways.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Have you ever tried it in the back seat of a broken down Dodge?”

  ***

  On the Fox lot Hump encountered his director for A Devil with Women, Irving Cummings, for the first time. Hump was startled to learn that if A Devil With Women became a hit, the studio planned to co-star him in an ongoing series of adventure stories with the film’s big-name star, Victor McLaglen. Cummings seemed very excited at this prospect but Hump managed only a faint smile.

  The idea of playing second fiddle to McLaglen, or to any other actor, in an ongoing series of B pictures wasn’t part of Hump’s dream before he came to Hollywood. He found the prospect so dismal, and the plot line so inane, that secretly he hoped that the picture would fail. Ironically, if the film had been successful, its success would probably have typecast Hump into the& kind of marginal bit player whose consequences might have haunted him for the rest of his career.

  Cummings put his arm around Hump and walked him over to McLaglen’s dressing room. “You might as well meet the star of the picture. If my gut instinct is right, you’ll appear with him in at least twelve films, and I’ll direct every one of them. The McLaglen/Bogart films will be my old-age pension.”

  When Cummings introduced Hump to the British actor, McLaglen had just emerged dripping wet from the shower. At that point an aide summoned Cummings to the set, leaving Hump standing alone with a jaybird naked McLaglen.

  “Fix yourself a whiskey, kid,” McLaglen said, reaching for a thick towel. “Pour one for me too, letting it fall from the bottle into the glass like a horse pisses.”

  Hump poured the actor a drink and said, “I
’m happy to be working with you Mr. Mack-loff-len.”

  “That’s Muh-clog-len,” he said. “Since you can’t pronounce my name, just call me Victor.”

  During their two-hour wait before they were due on the set, Hump got acquainted with this famous and rambunctious star who stood six feet, three inches. His hair was jet-black, and he had a twinkle in his blue-gray eyes. Hump became more comfortable after McLaglen put on his drawers.

  The son of the Right Reverend Andrew McLaglen, a Protestant clergyman in South Africa, the young Victor was the eldest of eight brothers. He tried to fight in the Boer War by joining the Life Guards, but the Reverend McLaglen tracked him down and, drawing on his persuasive powers and his political connections, secured his release.

  Heading for Canada, he worked only temporarily on a farm devoted mainly to turnips before running off to become a professional prizefighter. That was followed by a tour in circuses, vaudeville shows, and Wild West shows. In these shows, he was billed as a fighter who would take on all comers in the audience. Any young man who could last three rounds with McLaglen was paid $25. He toured with these shows from America to Australia. In Sydney he fought heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the champ knocking McLaglen out after six rounds.

  When World War I broke out, McLaglen signed up with the Irish Fusiliers and was sent to the Middle East. Eventually he became the Provost& Marshal for the city of Baghdad, responsible for the military police.

  With his pugnacious nature, he had hoped to resume his boxing career after the war but ended up being cast in the Call of the Road in 1920. From that day on, he became a popular leading man in English silents.

  By 1924 he’d been lured to Hollywood to appear in The Beloved Brute. One role followed another, from Women and Diamonds, also in 1924, to Beau Geste in 1926. His own glory came to him when he played Captain Flagg in What Price Glory ? in 1926.