Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  After the first day’s shoot of Up the River, Tracy and Ayres invited Bogie to their suite for drinks, to be followed by dinner. From the first, Bogie took an enlightened view about their relationship. He didn’t exactly encourage it but he didn’t condemn it either. “I say if it feels good, go for it,” Bogie told both men as he downed some of their whiskey. “It’s no one’s God damn business but your own.”

  “But there’s the matter of my faith, my beliefs,” Ayres protested. “I don’t even like to look myself in the mirror in the morning.”

  “That’s a crock of ….” Bogie hesitated, searching for a word. He detested the use of the word “shit.” “That’s bull. Frankly, you guys are no different from anybody else I’ve met in Hollywood. Take myself, for instance. Nobody likes a broad better than I do. I’ve even had thoughts about taking Claire Luce from you.” He smiled at Tracy to indicate he wasn’t really serious. “But I’ve done some weird stuff on occasion. Name an actor on Broadway or in Hollywood who hasn’t.”

  Tracy leaned back, his face and demeanor radiating calm in spite of any inner turmoil. “Bogie, unless you were born Catholic, unless you seriously wanted to be a priest, you can’t understand Catholic guilt.”

  “Whatever the fuck that is,” Bogie said.

  “I understand it,” the youthful Ayres chimed in. “It’s our faith that drew me to Spence. We actually met in church, not some bar.”

  Bogie looked at Ayres with that keen eye he used to appraise someone he was meeting for the first time. “I must say, Spence old boy, you sure know how to pick ‘em. Lew here is prettier than most gals I know. Put some lipstick on him and a dress and I’d go for him myself.”

  “All of this seems like one big joke to you,” Ayres said, confronting him.

  “I didn’t mean to get your feathers ruffled,” Bogie said. “But I wish you guys would lighten up. I’m just trying to be a supportive friend to the both of you.”

  Although Bogie’s friendship with Tracy would remain steadfast, even when they were fighting over a potential screen billing in a co-starring venture that never happened, or when they were up for the same coveted role, their love for each other never wavered, jealousy or not.

  It was two weeks later on the set of his next picture for Fox, Body and Soul, that the director, Alfred Santell, introduced him to the film’s two leading ladies, each of them gorgeous, charming, and at least in his opinion, available.

  They were Elissa Landi and Myrna Loy. He didn’t know which woman to look at first: the screen vamp Myrna Loy or the scion of the Habsburg Empire, Elissa Landi. The problem was solved for him, when Santell called Loy to the set for a scene with the picture’s star, Charles Farrell. Bogie hoped that Farrell would remember some of his speech training, but seriously doubted if he would.

  Landi, in Loy’s absence, wanted to discuss the characters they’d be playing, Bogie was struck by her regal bearing, cultured voice, and aristocratic beauty.

  Rumor had it that Landi was the secret granddaughter of “Sissi,” the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, the beautiful but strong-willed Bavarian-born wife of Emperor Franz Josef, who presided over the final years of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

  “How should you be addressed?” Bogie asked, being a little provocative with her because he didn’t believe in aristocratic titles.

  Landi took him seriously. “Countess would be fine.” As he was to learn later, the actress wasn’t a real countess. She’d just assumed the title from her mother’s second marriage to an Italian nobleman, Count Carlo Zanardi-Landi.

  Known for having made a number of British silent films, Landi came to the attention of Fox when she’d appeared on Broadway in A Farewell to Arms.

  “Just between you and me, I think this flicker we’re making is nothing but an old-fashioned hack melodrama,” Landi said. In addition to being an actress, Landi was also an acute critic and would go on to write several novels. Together, they tried to make sense out of some dumb, ill-conceived plot by Jules Furthman based on an unproduced and unpublished play called Squadron.

  After reading the script, another tiresome piece about “The Great War,”& Bogie told Landi, “At least I know why the play was never staged.”

  “As I read it, I’m thought to be this German spy named Pom-Pom, but it turns out that Myrna is the real German spy.”

  “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I understand that Fox is going to open it with a Mickey Mouse cartoon, a Fox Movietone, even a Hearst Metrotone newsreel, and a Mickey Mouse stage act. After all that, no one will notice what a stinker it really is.”

  “In the script, you’re married to me for only four days before sailing, always wearing your aviator uniform, to France, where you pursue other women,” Landi said. “If you were married to me in real life, you’d get such a workout you’d have no time for other women.”

  “Promises, promises,” he said. “Since we’re married—it says so right here in the& script—I guess that gives me conjugal rights.”

  “Perhaps,” she said enigmatically. “You’re rather cute.” Getting up, she kissed him and excused herself, heading for her dressing room.

  Later, when Farrell invited Bogie to lunch in the Fox commissary, Bogie accepted reluctantly and only because the actor was the star of the picture. There was no mention that Farrell had double-crossed him and pushed Kenneth for the juvenile lead in The Man Who Came Back. Perhaps Farrell had forgotten all about it.

  As he was leaving Farrell’s table, Bogie spotted Elissa Landi coming toward him. “I was told I could find you here,” she said. “At 7:30 tonight, I’m giving a dinner party. Black tie. There’s been a last-minute cancellation from Chaplin. Please, please fill in for him. I have to have another man to make my dinner party work. Would you pick up Myrna Loy?”

  “Sure,” he said, wondering where he could come up with a tuxedo on such short notice. “I didn’t have anything planned for tonight.”

  She gave him addresses and some instructions, then hurried off. He was a bit excited to be attending his first formal dinner party in Hollywood.

  After renting a well-worn tux for three dollars on Hollywood Boulevard, he drove back to his apartment house.

  ***

  As Bogie drove to pick up Loy to take her to Landi’s formal dinner, he fantasized about all the big names who’d be there. Loy was beautifully dressed and waiting out on her front porch when Bogie pulled up at her house. She scanned the sky. “I think it’s going to rain tonight.”

  “That wasn’t the forecast,” he said.

  Noting an ominous cloud rising in the distance, she said, “We Montana belles don’t need a radio forecast to tell us when a storm is coming.”

  In her black velvet gown, she looked lovelier than she did in the movies where she was most often cast as an Asian vamp. She was dressed with a high collar, although he suspected that most of the other women at the dinner would be in plunging décolletage.

  Noting that he was observing her high-button neckline, she said. “I have to wear this. The other night at a party, Clark Gable and his wife, Ria, offered me a ride home. Clark walked me to my door. As I was fumbling for my key, he gave me a monkey bite. His teeth marks are still on me. Our director, Santell, was furious when he saw that I had been branded like a Montana cow. Naturally, my first appearance on screen called for me to appear in a low-cut gown.”

  “I hear that when Gable walks into a room,” Bogie said, “It isn’t a question of if a woman will go to bed with him. It’s a question of which one he’ll choose for the night.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  As he drove toward Landi’s home, he said, “I’m real honored that you’re going out with me. If I can believe everything that Louella Parsons writes, I’ll be part of a long lineup of distinguished beaux. Let me see. Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper.”

  “I know all those men, of course, but there’s no romance,” she said.

  “I heard that you and Cooper grew up on the sa
me street together back in Helena,” he said.

  “We did indeed.”

  “Surely you must have played doctor,” he said.

  “Not that,” she said. “But I did sneak off with him one late afternoon into the cellar at our house. We didn’t conduct any medical examination, however. We were looking for Mother’s last jar of apple jelly.”

  As he drove and talked to her, he found that she was a witty, intelligent, and also beautiful woman. If anything, directors hid her true beauty on the screen with gaudy makeup, usually trying to turn her into an Oriental temptress.

  “You look as American as blueberry pie,” he said. “Why do they always make you Chinese?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “I’m just a Montana cowgal. Up against Anna May Wong in that flick, The Crimson City, I looked about as Chinese as Raggedy Ann. I’ve played Burmese, Chinese, a couple of Tijuana vamps, an islander from the South Pacific, and a hot-blooded Creole. The beat goes on. Darryl Zanuck just can’t believe that I can play a straight part, and I don’t know why.”

  As he pulled into the driveway of Landi’s home, he was amazed at the parade of big and expensive black cars. His battered vehicle looked pathetic. Loy seemed unconcerned with such trivia. She was not a woman of pretensions.

  In the golden light from Landi’s porch, he was awed by Loy’s copper-haired beauty and her delicate, porcelain-white skin. “Once we get inside that party, we’ll probably have no more chance to talk,” she said in her marvelous voice, which sounded like a hoarse flute.

  Her sleek, sassy nose captured his attention. He’d never seen a nose like that, and he thought it was the cutest thing. Impulsively he leaned over and kissed her on the nose.

  Little could he have known that in just a few short years, hordes of women across America would be going to the offices of plastic surgeons with pictures of the star, demanding that a “Myrna Loy nose” be carved for them as well.

  ***

  The party was in full swing when Bogie escorted Loy into the foyer where Landi was waiting to give each of them a kiss on their lips and welcome them to her home. She wore a stunning example of Parisian haute couture, an emerald-colored silk gown with a large emerald necklace, no doubt looted from the royal treasury of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  As predicted, Loy was swept away, talking to various people she knew. The graceful hostess, Landi introduced Bogie to a circle of her friends clustered around William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies. In front of the other guests, Hearst chastised Marion for ordering another drink. She ignored his command.

  The press tycoon returned to relating stories about his annual tour of European spas and was telling the group that while in Germany he’d attacked the Treaty of Versailles in an interview he gave to the Frankfurter Zeitung. “I claimed it subjected the Teutonic peoples to the domination of non-German European powers, especially France. If there is one country I loathe above all others, it’s France.” He looked cautiously around the room. “I hope there are no Frenchman here tonight.”

  As Bogie made eyes at Davies and the blonde courtesan/actress winked at him, Hearst was reporting on yet another trip he’d made.

  Finding Hearst a little too pompous for his tastes, Bogie puckered his mouth in a false kiss to Marion, but only when the media baron wasn’t looking.

  Some members of the English colony living in Hollywood were at the party. One of them was Basil Rathbone, whom Bogie had met during his appearance with Helen in the lesbian play, The Captive.

  The two actors reflected briefly, with a tinge of bitterness, on how the New York police had shut down this play because of its strong lesbian theme. “God, if we’d been allowed to continue in that play, we would have been a cause célèbre all over America. Every paper in the country featured our predicament. We would have been sold out for months.”

  “Helen certainly did a lot for the lesbians of America,” Bogie said. “The last I heard, Helen was still getting letters from the Sappho crowd from everywhere. Young women still send her slave bracelets. And most ironic of all— and probably missing the point completely— the deans of several women’s colleges wrote thanking her for warning their students about ‘the dangers of a reprehensible attachment.’”

  “I was the one who suggested that Helen wear that ghastly white makeup,” Rathbone said. “I thought it would convey the severe physical toll a woman must pay for having such ‘perverse’ thoughts about other women.”

  Both men laughed at that. “And the violets?” Bogie asked. “Throughout the play, we never saw Helen’s pursuer, Madame d’Aiguines. But Helen’s character was always getting nosegays of violets.”

  “We did some research on that,” Rathbone said. “Sappho wrote about ‘diadems of violets’ on the Isle of Lesbos in the Seventh Century B.C.”

  “I hear The Captive and those damn violets have started a fad,” Bogie said. “It’s the fashion now for women in New York and Hollywood – I’m assuming there are no lesbians in the Middle West – to send violets to each other as a sign of their love.” To his dismay, Bogie suddenly spotted the approach of an English actor he’d rather avoid.

  Bogie was a bit chilly when introduced a second time to Ronald Colman,& remembering with bitterness how his screen test was compared unfavorably to that of the English actor’s when they both competed for the male lead opposite Lillian Gish in The White Sister.

  The talk was of the latest news about George Bernard Shaw, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Grace Moore, Irene Castle, Elsa Maxwell, and Daisy Fellowes. Knowing none of these people, except by their reputation, Bogie grew bored and wandered off.

  In a city famed for grand entrances, the latest arriving guest was creating a sensation. All eyes in the room focused on the foyer. Dressed in a man’s tuxedo, a blonde goddess stood under Landi’s Viennese crystal chandelier, being welcomed by Landi, who kissed her on the mouth.

  Right then and there Bogie decided that he was going to divorce Mary and propose marriage to this sultry, alluring Venus de Milo. Her escort was some foreign-looking man, perhaps German.

  Bogie’s fantasy woman was heading across the room in his direction. He virtually stood in her pathway.

  Coming up only two feet from him, she smelled of the most exotic perfume. The scent wasn’t overpowering but had great subtlety, a sensation for the nostrils.

  He was convinced that her smile was the most provocative since the dawn of time.

  “I’m told that God has a talent for creating exceptional women,” he said, staring into eyes bluer than any alpine lake on a summer day.

  “H-e-l-l-o,” she said in her German-accented voice. “You are in my way. Do I have to kiss you or fuck you to make you move?”

  “For now, I’ll settle for a kiss,” he said, standing up to her with more bravado than he actually possessed. His knees were shaking.

  “Your wish is granted,” she said, leaning in to give him a quick kiss on the lips. The four wettest lips in Hollywood, male and female, exchanged body fluids. He felt the flicker of her tongue. “Since the entire room is watching, including my very jealous director, that is all for now. Catch me later.” She nodded her head at some people she knew across the big room and headed in their direction.

  As he passed by, Josef von Sternberg glared at Bogie. Bogie felt that he’d just blown his chance to get cast opposite the star in any of her future movies.

  Before stepping down into the sunken living room, she paused and looked back at him. “Not bad,” she said, her tongue darting out ever so slightly as if to taste his kiss, which still lingered on her lips.& “What is your name?”

  “Humphrey Bogart,” he said.

  “Your studio will change that,” she predicted. “And, of course, you know who I am. Marlene Dietrich. I could be no one else but me.”

  He watched her go, as von Sternberg followed. Bogie’s heart was beating faster, as he’d just fallen in love. He feared that he’d have to join a long line of suitors, both male and female, forming on her left
and right.

  ***

  At 1pm on the afternoon of the following day, seated with Myrna Loy and his hostess of the night before, Bogie ordered a plate of ham and eggs in the Fox commissary. Both Loy and Bogie had thanked Landi profusely for inviting them to her dinner party the previous evening.

  He’d learned that Landi was an avid equestrian. He told her that “second to sailing,” he preferred horseback riding better than anything. After saying that, he smiled awkwardly, looking first at Landi, then at Loy, deciding they were two of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. “Of course, there is something I like even better than horseback riding or sailing.”

  Both women laughed. Loy affectionately stroked his cheek. It was just a flash, and it was quickly concealed, but Landi shot Loy a look that Bogie definitely interpreted as jealousy.

  For the second time that morning, he was flattered by a female appraisal of him. Not knowing which woman to ask out first, the issue was solved when Loy went to the powder room to take the shine off Hollywood’s cutest nose. After she’d gone, Landi said, “I’m going riding in the morning. If you want to drop by my house at six o’clock, we’ll head over to the stables.”

  “That’s a bit early,” he said, smiling at her, his eyes twinkling in anticipation, “but I’ll be there. Maybe a little hung over. Bleary-eyed or not, I’m ready to race you.”

  She got up from the table to report back to the set. “You’ll find, Mr. Bogart, that your horse can easily overtake mine.”

  Bogie spotted Loy returning from the powder room. This woman of quick wit showed her acute sensitivity when she looked first at Landi, then at him. “I’m afraid I might have intruded on something.”

  ***

  High in the Hollywood Hills, Bogie and Landi brought their horses to rest at a shady spot beside a stream. It was one of those idyllic places that makes a New Yorker glad that he’s moved to the West Coast.

  Later, they were to learn from a stable hand that they’d stopped at the same spot where the Sheik, Valentino, used to take the screen vamp, Gloria Swanson, to make love to her.