Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Bogie and Mary, “along with the rats and roaches,” had moved together into a dismal apartment at 434 East 52nd Street. At night they spent their time listening to the radio and finishing off a bottle of booze. There was nothing else for them to do.

  On this marriage’s second time around, sex did not emerge as a vital part of their relationship. “I’m too depressed to get it up,” Bogie told his friend, Bill Brady Jr.

  Even after the first week’s anniversary of his reunion with Mary, he had serious doubts that their second attempt at marriage would work out.

  One afternoon, he came home to find her writing a letter to Kenneth, now married to Kay Francis. He asked her if he could read it before she sent it, and she refused, tearing the letter into shreds and throwing them into the wastepaper basket.

  Not finding any regular work, he sometimes earned as much as five dollars a day playing chess for two bits a round on Sixth Avenue, and bridge at the Players Club, a venue frequented mostly by recently unemployed actors, of course.

  After pounding the pavement, Bogie landed a small part in a British comedy called After All. It opened to lackluster business at Broadway’s Booth Theatre on November 3, 1931.

  Helen Haye, who was often confused with Helen Hayes, was the star of this ill-fated play.

  Wearing a fake mustache, as required by the role he was playing, Bogie encountered After All’s British playwright, John Van Druten, who invited him to a tavern on 46th Street, Bogie thought it was to talk about the play, but after a drink or two, Van Druten felt his crotch. Bogie turned down the playwright’s offer of sex.

  Van Druten, of course, would go on to dazzling success in the theater and in film adaptations, striking gold with such hits as The Voice of the Turtle and Bell, Book, and Candle. He was not as successful with Hump’s play. After All closed after only twenty performances.

  On the last night of the show, Elliott Baker came backstage. He was one of the many talent scouts working for Columbia, among other studios. He was looking for young actors for talking pictures.

  He had seen one of Bogie’s pictures and had been impressed with his role in After All in which he played an architect married to an invalid.

  Invited out for a hamburger, Bogie was expecting another proposition like he’d received from Van Druten. To his shock and delight, the agent offered him a six-month contract at Columbia for $750 a week, a dream salary back then.

  Once again, Bogie found himself on the Santa Fe Chief, traveling west across the vast expanse of& the American continent. This time he knew he was going to make it big.

  The big difference was that Mary now sat beside him. In spite of her “beak” nose, she was hoping to get cast in movie roles herself.

  Kenneth had secured modest lodges for them at a pretentiously named apartment complex, The Château Elysée. Meeting them at the train station, Bogie appeared dismayed at the extended kiss Kenneth delivered to his wife.

  ***

  Early in 1932, Bogie was awarded the second lead in a romantic comedy produced by Columbia entitled Love Affair.

  An English beauty, Dorothy Mackaill, four years younger than Bogie, had been cast in the lead. Bogie found her “a stunner, with skin like polished porcelain.” A former Ziegfeld Follies dancer, she’d been a bosom buddy of Marion Davies, mistress of William Randolph Hearst.

  Mackaill had made silent films with Bogie’s pal, George O’Brien, and had even co-starred with John Barrymore. She told Bogie that she was delighted to have him as a leading man, since the studios wanted young, fresh talent.

  “My contract with First National wasn’t renewed, and I’m free-lancing. I think if I don’t build up a new following in Talkies, I’m through. Help me!”

  He didn’t know how he could help her exactly. He’d already told friends, “I’m hanging on as an actor by the skin of my left nut.”

  He worked closely with the director, Thornton Freeland, of North Dakota, who’d started out at Vitagraph back in 1918. “He was more a cameraman than a director,” Bogie said, “but he claimed he’d photograph me so I’d look like a matinee idol. That’s okay with me, if that’s what was needed and wanted. I’d flunked as Fox’s answer to Clark Gable, so I needed a new persona.”

  Love Affair is significant today only because it marked Bogie’s first starring role. In it, he played an aeronautical engineer. His& lisp is more pronounced in this picture than in later films.

  At the end of filming, Mackaill told Bogie, “Here I am, not even thirty years old, and my career is fading fast. Perhaps we’ll have a bit hit with this.”

  They didn’t.

  Back at their apartment, Mary was often gone until late at night, and he suspected she’d resumed her affair with Kenneth. For some reason he didn’t feel particularly jealous. Kay Francis often wasn’t home with Kenneth, who was pursuing various affairs with other women, or so Bogie had heard.

  Bogie’s next job came when Columbia lent him to Warner Brothers, which would eventually become his signature studio. He was given a small part in Big City Blues (1932), which “pissed me off—I’m a leading man, not a bit player.” The only good news was that he could resume his affair with the star of the film, Joan Blondell.

  On the set of Big City Blues (1932), Bogie found Joan making two films at a time. She’d have to complete twenty movies before the studio allowed her to take a vacation. Even though both of them remained free agents, Bogie fitted comfortably into the relationship with her as if he’d never left it behind.

  Cast as a New York gold digger, Joan had thrived as a Depression-era Showgal. “Chorus girls used to get pearls and diamonds,” she wisecracked. “Now all they expect is a corned beef sandwich.”

  She told Bogie, “My dad always complains about my playing low-life gals of the night, but I seem to fit into those roles better than nun parts.”

  The San Francisco director assigned to the picture, Mervyn LeRoy, was A-list. His film, Little Caesar (1931), had started the gangster craze that Bogie would soon be cashing in on.

  Eric Linden was the film’s male star. He’d be a leading man in minor Hollywood fare from 1931 to 1941. In Gone With the Wind, he’d be cast in a small role.

  When he met Bogie, he was cornering the Tinseltown market in portraying artistic, sensitive, smart but weak-willed juvenile males, those who hovered between boyhood and manhood.

  “The first time I saw you in Up the River, I was totally captivated by you,” Eric told Bogie. “You remind me of my father.”

  “I guess I must be getting old, kid, and I’ve been told a lot of things in Hollywood, but never that I reminded someone of their father. And, by the way, kid, I’m not an adoption agency.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Linden said apologetically. “I hope we can become close friends.”

  “I’ve got a lot of bad habits,” Bogie said. “Drink too much. I fart in bed. I leave skid marks on my underwear.” He lit a cigarette. “And I’m a skirt chaser.”

  “With all your faults,” Linden said, “I want us to become very close friends.”

  After talking with him for a while, Bogie became dismissive. “It’s just not going to happen, kid. You’re awfully cute, but it’s not for me.” He turned and walked away.

  There would be a third film before Bogie returned to Broadway. Mervyn LeRoy liked working with Bogie so much he also cast him in Three on a Match (1932). Bogie found himself working in a movie that starred four women he’d seduced—Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Glenda Farrell, and once again Bette Davis.

  He felt awkward encountering Bette again after dumping her so ungallantly. But when he met her, she shook his hand, “Welcome back to Hollywood, Mr. Bogart.” She made no mention of their brief affair, and for that he was grateful.

  “I had these big pictures like Cabin in the Cotton,” she said, complaining to Bogie. “Now I’m the third female lead, working with those two whores, Blondell and Dvorak.” She seemed unhappy and couldn’t wait for the movie to end.

  When her sho
rt shooting schedule came to an end, Bogie told her, “I hope we work on another picture soon.”

  “It is my most fervent wish,” Davis said, “that that doesn’t happen, Mr. Bogart.”

  At the wrap, LeRoy told her, “I predict stardom for Blondell, success for Dvorak, and unemployment for you, Bette.”

  ***

  Still in California, before he returned to New York, Bogie appeared in a Broadway-bound comedy, The Mad Hopes. It starred Billie Burke, who would later gain screen immortality as the Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz (1939), with Judy Garland. Years before, in 1914, she had generated newspaper headlines thanks to her marriage to the theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld.

  The comedy with its giddy goings-on had been specifically written for Burke, but after its run in California, she wisely abandoned it as a means of avoiding the cynical scrutiny of Manhattan audiences. When it finally opened& on Broadway on May 28, 1932, it starred Violet Kemble Cooper, and no Bogie. It ran for only twenty performances.

  At the end of his stage appearance with the ever pleasant Burke in California, he learned that Columbia was not going to renew his contract. Since there was absolutely no work in Hollywood film studios, he opted to return to his native New York City to see what his chances there might be.

  After the train deposited him at Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, he headed back to the sleazy apartment he shared with Mary. Relations between them had became increasingly tense. During their obsessive search for work, they had each been leading separate lives. She would often come home late and had little to say. He noticed, however, that she still had time to write one letter a day to Kenneth back in California.

  Many Broadway theaters had closed. Most former theater patrons couldn’t afford a ticket. Movie tickets were a lot cheaper. Amazingly, Bogie managed to secure roles in five plays in a row, each with long rehearsal periods. Once the plays opened, each of them flopped. He would later remember performances where there were no more than twelve to twenty people in the audience.

  His first job came when he was cast as the third lead in a play called I Loved You Wednesday, which opened on Broadway at the Sam H. Harris Theatre on October 11, 1932. He was cast as a “sybarite with the morals of a tomcat.”

  The star of I Loved You Wednesday was Frances Fuller, who played Bogie’s lover. This Charleston-born actress from a fine American family was related to Secretary of State and U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Francis Byrnes (1882-1972). Frances later became the director of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and was instrumental in developing the acting style of such& stars as Grace Kelly and Anne Bancroft.

  She was strictly business with Bogie. “No hanky-panky with that stuck-up bitch,” Bogie told another young actor in the play, Henry Fonda, who appeared briefly in a non-speaking part which called for him to sit onstage at a bar, wordlessly enjoying cocktails with another future star, Arlene Francis.

  Henry Fonda had married Margaret Sullavan in 1931, but his marriage seemed as much a failure as Bogie’s marriage to Mary. The two young actors shared their marital and career woes.

  Bogie told Fonda one night, “I can play this aging juvenile just so long. My voice is deeper. My beard is darker. Makeup can hide only so much. If I don’t get a good role soon, I think I’ll be washed up.”

  “I don’t think so,” Fonda said reassuringly. “Once you get the right part, you’ll be the biggest thing on Broadway, except for me, of course.”

  Sullavan showed up backstage one night, spending more time checking out Bogie than Fonda.

  “I can’t stand a man who’s lousy in bed,” she told him. “Fonda’s a fast starter and a lousy finisher.”

  Bogie had never heard a woman talk in such graphic terms describing her husband. She seemed like such a castrating female that he shied away from her. He liked his women a bit more demure. Sullavan was far more aggressive, with a more pronounced streak of malice, than Barbara Stanwyck. Bogie genuinely liked Fonda and would encounter him on and off over the years.

  Years later, in the early 1960s, when Edward Albee wrote the play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, he had Fonda in mind when he crafted the character of George, the Milquetoast husband who comprised half of an corrosive marital relationship in an outwardly genteel college town.

  Fonda’s agent arrogantly rejected the choice role without consulting him. When Albee’s play became the hit drama of 1962, Fonda was furious.

  Before the 1930s came to an end, Fonda would join the A-list of stars in Hollywood, fathering Jane Fonda and seducing Bette Davis, his co-star in Jezebel.

  It came as a total surprise, a ironic shock really, when Bogie found himself cast with Margaret Sullavan in his next job, a Broadway play called Chrysalis, which opened on November 15, 1932, running for twenty-three performances at the Martin Beck Theatre.

  Bogie’s role was defined as “a patent-leather parlor sheik.”

  The play was a commercial disaster, even though it was cast with some of the most talented actors on Broadway, including Osgood Perkins, a famous actor of his day. He would become the father of an even more famous actor, Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame. He and Bogie shared long talks about the theater.

  Bogie also befriended Elia Kazan, another actor in the play. He told Bogie he’d rather be directing the play instead of appearing in it.

  Elisha Cook Jr., who would appear years later with Bogie in The Maltese

  Falcon and The Big Sleep, was also one of the actors in Chrysalis.

  Cook told Bogie, “When a director wants to cast a cowardly villain or a weedy neurotic, he calls on me.”

  On opening night, one critic blasted Bogie, calling him “an oily insect, who gets Sullavan drunk and instructs her, through many long and monotonous kisses, in what he refers to as ‘the joys of propinquity.’” Brooks Atkinson found the play “astonishingly insignificant” and claimed, rather enigmatically, that “Bogart plays the wastrel in his usual style.”

  Mary Orr, an actress/writer whose short story, The Story of Eve, would eventually evolve into All About Eve, Bette Davis’s most famous movie, also appeared in Chrysalis.

  “While the plumbing was being fixed, I had to share a dressing room with Sullavan,” Orr later recalled. “What a bitch! She claimed she was going to seduce Bogie that weekend. Sullavan told me, ‘He’s become a friend of Henry, and I always make it a point to seduce Henry’s friends, especially James Stewart. Of course, in the case of Stewart, Henry does far more seducing of him than I do. My husband tries to make it with women, but he’s basically a faggot.’”

  One night, Sullavan asked Bogie to walk her home, and he reluctantly escorted her. She complained to him that she’d appeared in four Broadway flops in a row. “But I got great reviews,” she hastened to add.

  She invited him up for some “bootleg hootch,” and he readily accepted. He warned her, however, that the U.S. government was deliberately poisoning some bootleg liquor to frighten the public away from alcohol.

  She was angry that Fonda had gone off with James Stewart that night. “I can’t be tied down to one man, especially a husband that’s inadequate.”

  Before the night ended, Sullavan seduced Bogie. Shortly thereafter, she told Mary Orr, “Bogie’s okay in bed. I mean, I’ve had better. But he’s got the proper technique. He makes sure the woman is satisfied before he pulls off her.”

  Later, Bogie told Osgood Perkins that Sullavan was “one of the Red Hot Dames of 1932 Broadway.”

  Bogie’s next Broadway play was a romantic comedy set in Paris, Our Wife. This time, Rose Hobart was the star, with Bogie playing her lover.

  A stunning-looking actress, Hobart evoked Marlene Dietrich in appearance and dress. When on occasion Bogie took her out, fans often came up to her table, asking, “Miss Dietrich, may I have your autograph?” She always obliged, signing, “Love, Marlene.”

  Born into a family of musicians, Hobart had starred opposite Fredric March in his legendary Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932). Although he found
her an attractive woman, Bogie did not put any moves on her, because the talk of Broadway was that she was involved in a torrid lesbian romance with a big Broadway star, Eva Le Gallienne.

  Regrettably, Our Wife opened at Manhattan’s Booth Theatre on March 2, 1933, the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared an emergency bank holiday. Only ten people showed up, each a member of the press. One newsman wrote that the play “is tamely acted and meagerly directed,” a blow against Edward Clarke Lilley who helmed it.

  Bogie earned fifty-six dollars the first week of the show. Even though the play lasted for twenty performances, the producers ran out of money and couldn’t write any more checks after that.

  After that, Bogie played a supporting stage role in an Italian comedy, The Mask and the Face, which opened on May 8, 1933. Produced by the Guild Theatre, it ran for forty performances. The farce was by Luigi Chiarelli as translated by W. Somerset Maugham. It had first been performed in 1916.

  The play also starred Shirley Booth with whom Bogie had had a brief fling back in 1924 during the Broadway production of Hell’s Bells. The two former lovers worked well together, never mentioning their previous tryst.

  During rehearsals for The Mask and the Face, Bogie came into conflict with the formidable Australia-born lesbian, Judith Anderson. She would make a name for herself playing cold, imperious, or sinister women. When he met her, Anderson was years away from her Oscar-nominated performance as the lesbian housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, in Rebecca with Joan Fontaine. Exasperated during rehearsals when Bogie had not memorized his dialogue, she made a& suggestion, “You should seek another profession, perhaps ladling soup to the poor in the breadlines.”

  The cast also included Leo G. Carroll, who would later appear with Bogie in both All Through the Night and We’re No Angels.

  Critics referred to the The Mask and the Face as both “a dubious graveyard lark” and “a grisly farce.” Bogie felt lucky that no reviewer mentioned him.