Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  He wanted to ask Helen if she knew who Mary was dating or perhaps even shacked up with, but he restrained himself. “Sorry to hear about the depressed state of affairs. That’s real bad news for me. I’m planning to go back to New York and try for a job on Broadway. Fox isn’t going to renew me. They don’t know what to do with me. In a few weeks I’m leaving Hollywood for good.”

  “It’s a ghastly place out here,” she said. “You and I are New Yorkers. We don’t belong outside the civilized world.”

  “C’mon, let me show you to your new home.” He went around to the trunk to get her luggage.

  She stood looking at the façade of the Garden of Allah, now functioning as a somewhat rundown colony of rentable cottages.

  “I can’t believe that this was once Nazimova’s private home. I still see her on and off. It’s hard to imagine that she was once queen of MGM.”

  “Garbo seems to have filled her shoes.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I didn’t think Garbo would survive the advent of talking pictures. I guess her audience wants whiskey pronounced viskey.”

  “You talk real pretty,” he said, “and look great. I hope to take you around to a lot of parties. Maybe some director will discover you out here and make you a big star like Garbo.”

  “Oh, Hump,” she said, heading for the reception desk as if she already knew where to go. “The Twenties are dead and gone. That was a time for daydreaming. It’s the grim Thirties now.”

  In the privacy of her bungalow, she told him that it was almost certain that a production of her lesbian play, The Captive, would be mounted on the stages of Los Angeles. “I’m out here negotiating the deal now.” She paused. “That and other things.”

  For whatever reason, she chose not to tell him what she meant by “other things,” which was a signal to him that he would be with her only on certain days, leaving the rest of her Hollywood sojourn a private affair.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “In New York, that play got you thrown into jail. What makes you think the Los Angeles police won’t do the same thing? If anything, they’re a lot more liberal in New York than out here. If what they define as perversion is depicted on the screen today, it’s got to be hidden. No more Erich von Stroheim. He was the last of that era of decadence, I’m sorry to say.”

  “We’ll see,” she said enigmatically. “I have my assurances we’re going forward with the project. I can’t give you any details until I know more.” She waved her arms theatrically. “Here I am installed in my new home in California but with yesterday’s husband.”

  As she twirled around the room, that old sexual stirring came back to him. He still desired this woman.

  “I know you just got into town,” he said, “and haven’t even unpacked. But I’ve got to know something.”

  “Whatever do you want to know,” she said, coming up to him and kissing him on both cheeks. “You divine, handsome thing you. If anything, in maturity you’ve grown more beautiful.”

  “C’mon, Helen,” he said. “Even on my finest day no one ever calls me beautiful.”

  “Handsome then.” She kissed him on the lips. “Still keeping those lips moist for me, are you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got to know something. When a woman divorces her husband, does said husband have to surrender his conjugal rights, or can he reclaim them at any time?”

  “It doesn’t matter what the legal restrictions are with me,” she said. “If you’re talking about that marriage contract between Helen Menken and one Humphrey Bogart, I view the bond as unbroken. Said husband can reclaim those rights whenever he wants to.”

  “Glad to hear that,” he said, taking off his jacket and beginning a striptease in front of her.

  “If you’re taking off your clothes, I guess you’re glad to see me.”

  En route to the bedroom, she promised him lots of loving before her eight o’clock engagement. “When she heard I was coming to California, Lilyan Tashman wrote me. She wants me to come over for dinner tomorrow night as a means of celebrating my arrival in Los Angeles. As part of your Hollywood rounds, have you met up with the Miss Tashman yet?”

  She did not wait for his response, but continued, “Both Katharine Cornell and Nazimova told me Tashman is absolutely divine. Even though married, I hear she has a thing for the ladies. I’ll have to be careful that she doesn’t seduce me, too.”

  That did it for him. As he mounted Helen and plowed her good, he was more zealous in his efforts because his brain was flashing images of Lilyan Tashman and not the picture of the woman beneath him. From the ecstatic look on her face, Helen was none the wiser.

  Later, when he was spent and she too was exhausted, she whispered in his ear. “I don’t know who’s been letting you fuck them in Hollywood, but your technique has improved.”

  ***

  Bogie didn’t reach the set of A Holy Terror until eleven o’clock that morning. Sucked into the tangled affairs of his roller-coaster private life, he had paid little attention to the script. But when called for a wardrobe fitting, he began to take his role of Steve Nash more seriously. In full cowboy garb, he was to play the foreman of a ranch opposite that handsome, body beautiful stud, George O’Brien.

  Greg Brooks had fitted Bogie with a beige-colored Stetson, a six-shooter, a gigantic red handkerchief, which he was to wear around his neck like a tie, a pair of black-and-white striped pants (for some reason), a black shirt, and a battered old leather jacket.

  Even Bogie laughed at himself when he saw his image in a full- length mirror. He could never make a convincing cowboy on screen.

  After carefully studying his figure, Brooks said, “something’s not right. You’re just too short to be a cowboy.”

  “What do you suggest?” Bogie asked. “You got something to make me grow taller?”

  Brooks thought for a minute before sending his wardrobe assistant to fetch a pair of shoes for Bogie. When he returned, Brooks insisted that Bogie put on a pair of elevator boots. “That way you can stand up with O’Brien eyeball to eyeball in your scenes together.”

  Horrified, Bogie put on the elevator shoes and walked around the dressing room. “I’m walking on God damn stilts. I feel like a fucking dummy.”

  “You’re getting paid $750 a week, aren’t you?” Brooks asked. “That’s a lot more than a lot of actors at Fox are taking home. Why don’t you just wear the shoes and quit griping?”

  “Griping is what I do,” Bogie said. “It’s my specialty.”

  “Take off your shirt,” Brooks demanded.

  “What?” Bogie asked, astonished. “Am I supposed to strip down for you? I’ve dealt with you little fairy boys from wardrobe before. With me, sweet cakes,& you can dream but not touch.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Bogart,” Brooks snapped. “You’re not my type at all. I go for he-men. Now take off your shirt. We’ve got a real problem here.”

  Although infuriated, Bogie still wanted to earn that paycheck. He pulled off his shirt. Brooks went over to a drawer and pulled out two strips of white padding. “For some of our insufficiently endowed actors, we fake it. Since you don’t have shoulders, I’ll create some for you.”

  As reluctant as he was to do it, Bogie allowed Brooks to apply tape and padding to his shoulders. When Bogie put his shirt back on and stared at his image in the mirror, he was impressed. Unlike the elevator shoes, which he detested, the padding did make him look more like a fully developed man who could be the tough foreman of a ranch.

  The person Bogie encountered on the set was Sally Eilers. “I’m sure he’s already told you,” she said in a low voice. “But when I’m not hooting with Hoot Gibson, I’m seeing your friend, Mr. Spencer Tracy. He’s a wild one.”

  The existence of that liaison had escaped Bogie. When Tracy was with him, he spent more time talking about the men he was seeing instead of the women he was seducing. “He failed to fill me in on that one.”

  “In the case of Spence, he’s got so many women
he probably loses track,” Eilers said.

  “That’s our boy Spence,” he said

  On the set George O’Brien came up to Bogie and invited him for a drink in his dressing room. Minutes later, O’Brien poured him a whiskey before filling a glass most generously for himself. “Love your shoes,” he said.

  “The less said about them the better. Couldn’t they photograph me standing on a rock or on a staircase looking down at you?”

  O’Brien pulled off his shirt. As Bogie was to learn during the shoot of A Holy Terror, O’Brien took every opportunity to pull off his shirt. Bogie could-n’t help but admire his muscles, which reminded him of his own padded shoulders. Brooks was right. O’Brien didn’t need any padding.

  O’Brien was quick to detect Bogie’s interest in his physique. Very bluntly he asked, “Are you a homosexual, like my best buddy, Spence?”

  “Like hell!” Bogie said defensively. “I’ve got a lot of credentials to prove otherwise. I can summon witnesses if& necessary.”

  “Don’t get so rattled,” O’Brien cautioned him. “I wanted to know who I have to fuck on this picture. I know that Eilers is after me. I’ve already done Brooks in wardrobe. The director’s not a fairy, or at least I don’t think so. Who knows? The picture’s not over yet.”

  “Rest assured you can keep your pants on around me.”

  “It’s good to clear the air in the very& beginning,” O’Brien said. “When it comes to sex I don’t like to beat around the bush. I come right out with it.” He laughed at his own remark. That sounds sexually suggestive, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m beginning to think everything in Hollywood sounds sexually suggestive,” Bogie said.

  He remained long enough to finish his whiskey, but his presence in O’Brien’s dressing room seemed so completely unnecessary that he quickly excused himself and left.

  “Mama didn’t raise no cowboy,” he said to himself as he headed to his dressing room to change out of his uncomfortable Western gear.

  After leaving the studio, he drove to the Garden of Allah to take Helen for dinner. He found her still dressing when he came into the room. He took her in his arms and kissed her with more than the usual passion. “I made a big mistake,” he whispered in her ear. “We should have stayed together. I should never have married Mary.”

  “It was my fault,” she said. “All my fault that we broke up.”

  His need for her—his need for any woman, but especially for her—was greater than it had been even when they’d had their reunion in Los Angeles.

  Sensing that need, she said in a soft voice, “Dinner will have to wait.” She led him to her bed.

  ***

  The next morning on the set of A Holy Terror, Bogie, dressed in cowboy drag, had only one scene, after which he was finished for the day.

  When O’Brien invited him for lunch, Bogie accepted. Although he wanted to order his typical ham and eggs, O’Brien had insisted that he ask for huevos rancheros instead. “The cook in the commissary is Mexican, and they’re really good.”

  For himself, O’Brien asked for four raw avocados. “It’s my favorite food. For breakfast, I eat an avocado sandwich on white toast. For lunch I eat them raw with just a little bit of lemon juice. At night I always make guacamole, which I eat as an appetizer before I order a very lean and very rare steak. It keeps my skin young and beautiful.” He leaned over to Bogie. “Go on. Feel the skin of my face. Tell me skin like that can only be compared to a baby’s ass.”

  “Hell, man,” Bogie said, “I don’t want to be seen sitting here in the commissary running my fingers across your cheek. People will think we’re a couple of fags.”

  “Don’t be such a sissy,” O’Brien urged. “Go on. Rub my skin.”

  When he sensed that no one was watching them, Bogie ran his fingers across O’Brien’s cheek. “That’s smooth skin all right, a hell of a lot smoother than mine. I’m not aging well. Starting tomorrow, I’m gonna go on the avocado diet like you.” He reached for a cigarette. “Smooth as your skin is, I’d rather be running my hands over the breasts of—say, Jean Harlow.”

  “Relax, relax,” O’Brien told him. “You don’t have to assert your heterosexual credentials around me. I’m not going to put the make on you. You’re not my type. Either man or woman, I insist they have great bodies. You don’t look like you have any physical fitness regime at all. Wardrobe told me they had to pad your shoulders. And those fucking high-heeled boots you wear— that’s not my idea of a man who’s tall in the saddle like I like ‘em.”

  Blowing smoke toward him, Bogie said, “I guess that means you’re not going to ask me out.”

  Since neither man was needed on the set for the rest of the day, O’Brien invited him to go swimming at Santa Monica. Bogie said that he didn’t have any trunks. O’Brien told him that his house was on the way to the ocean, and they could drop off there and change.

  An hour later, Bogie found himself in O’Brien’s home. Although the actor kept himself incredibly well groomed, he obviously didn’t have a maid come in too often to clean his house. It was a pigsty. Dirty dishes piled high in the sink were growing mold, and newspapers and magazines littered the floor. Cups of coffee and platters of half-eaten, long-rotted food were seen about the living room, and the dark wood furnishings looked as if they’d barely survived the Dust Bowl.

  When O’Brien emerged from his bedroom, he was stark naked, a most impressive sight. Bogie could only dream of having a physique like the star. “You’re not my size,” O’Brien said to him. “A buddy left these trunks here. I think you can fit into them.”

  “I’ll let you in on another one of my beauty secrets,” O’Brien said, as Bogie stripped down to get into his swim suit.

  Observing Bogie’s less than perfect figure, O’Brien said, “We’ve got to get you on a new regime of a sensible diet and vigorous physical exercise to build up your body. You probably drink too much. I take it easy with the booze. I notice you lighting up a cigarette every minute. I confine myself to one after-dinner cigar, and I don’t inhale. Your hair too is a problem. You look like a man who is going to loose his hair before he’s forty. The trick is you’ve got to dry your hair thoroughly when you shower or go into the water. Water rots hair. If you keep your hair wet, it’ll start to fall out.”

  At the beach O’Brien the athlete attracted a lot of attention. Several of his female fans approached him asking for autographs. The actor seemed in his element, and it was obvious that he adored showing off his body. After all, he was called “The Chest.”

  The beach didn’t bring any cheer to Bogie, as he sat watching the adoration heaped on O’Brien by half the women on the beach. The star had made him feel inadequate, and he’d never been proud of his body. “How,” he asked himself,& “was he ever going to become a leading man in films without a great body?” As each day went by, he thought more and more about heading back to New York. Of course, that too could be a problem. Helen had told him that there were longer lines at the soup kitchen than at the Broadway theaters.

  ***

  One night at a party honoring Kay Francis and Kenneth, they had arranged for him to meet gossip maven Louella Parsons, claiming she might jump-start his film career and he could remain on the West Coast.

  Bogie was ushered into a library. Seated in a large love seat beside the fireplace, Parsons was busy emptying her latest glass.

  With his own drink in hand—he’d lost count of how many he’d had—he introduced himself to Parsons. She said nothing but motioned for him to sit down.

  As unbelievable as it seemed at the time, Parsons still considered herself one of Hollywood’s “glamour gals,” although even then she was well on her way toward becoming the hag of Tinseltown.

  She had removed a notebook from her purse into which she scribbled some information—probably misinformation—that had gotten trapped in her soggy brain. After that, she reached for her compact and smeared on an extra heavy application of blood-red lipstick, even more of a five-alarm
fire tube than Clara Bow wore.

  “Bogart,” she said, finally staring at him with those steely eyes that had seen too much. “I’ve been meaning to interview you but have been too busy. With every guy on Broadway getting off the train daily, how can I possibly interview every out-of-work actor who hits town trying to make a buck in Hollywood?”

  “You’ve got a point there, pal,” he said, reaching for his drink which he’d placed on a coffee table.

  “Even when I interview somebody, all I hear is their lies,” she said.

  “Maybe that’s because the real and the illusional in Hollywood are inextricable,” he said.

  “God damn,” she said harshly. “An intellectual. If there’s one kind of actor I positively hate, it’s an intellectual.”

  “That I’m not,” he said. “You can print in your column that I was kicked out of Andover. Not only for poor grades, but for being a bad boy.”

  “That’s it!” she said. She motioned to a whiskey bottle left on a table beside the French doors. “Pour me some of that and don’t be& stingy, baby. I’m misquoting a line from that Garbo flick, Anna Christie.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” He also got up to get her that whiskey and to replenish his own supply. When he gave her the drink, he asked, “What did you mean by, ‘That’s it!’”

  “I need a peg to hang a label onto you,” she said. “A college dropout. I bet that as the bad boy of Andover, you got into a lot of trouble with girls. Yeah, that’s it. I’m gonna call you the bad boy of Hollywood.”

  “Seems like I have a lot of competition for that title,” he said. “George Raft, for instance.”

  “Hell with him,” she said. “He’s nothing but a New York gangster. If he gets to play gangsters in movies, it’ll be type-casting.” Slugging down a hefty swig of that bootleg whiskey, she aimed her eagle eye at him once again. “I’ve got to ask you something right off the bat. That lisp of yours. It bothers me. I know you’re married, but are you a fairy like William Haines? Forgive me, but I have to ask. All the butterflies from Broadway are descending on us out here. It’s very hard to make fairies sound manly in my column. Just how many more times do I have to write that Ramon Novarro is still waiting for the right gal?”