Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

When he thought he’d never see his mug on a movie screen again, a call came in from director Chester Erskine, who was casting Midnight (1934) to be distributed by Universal. There was a small role in it for Bogie, and he gladly accepted when he heard it was to be filmed in New York and not on the West Coast. He was familiar with Midnight ’s star, Sidney Fox, with whom he and Bette Davis had appeared in Bad Sister.

  This 80-minute film, which also co-starred Henry Hull, would mark Bogie’s first appearance on the screen as a gangster.

  In the wake of Midnight, Bogie returned to the stage once again for a less-than-memorable role in Invitation to a Murder.

  This play, a melodrama in three acts by Rufus King, opened on May 17, 1934 at Broadway’s Masque Theatre, running for only thirty-seven performances.

  Bogie played Horatio Channing, a member of a southern California family whose fortune was created by piracy. It was an old-fashioned mystery melodrama, featuring “the usual suspects”—trapdoors, ghosts, and all the other clichés. Critic Pollyanna Garland wrote, “Humphrey Bogart Humphrey-Bogart’s his way through the role.” The New York Post referred to it as “high-voltage trash.”

  This was Bogie’s first stage interpretation of a villain, a part he later referred to as “a gruesome little mishap.”

  In this murder mystery, Gale Sondergaard was the star, with support from Jane Seymour and veteran character actor Walter Abel.

  Bogie admired Sondergaard, who would go on to a Hollywood career as one of the era’s most formidable bad women. She became the first winner in the newly established Best Supporting Actress category in the lavish costume picture, Anthony Adverse (1936). Her promising career was later derailed when she became one of filmdom’s& blacklist victims during the Red Scare of the Joseph McCarthy era.

  Even though Bogie did not impress the critics in this play, he did attract the attention of Arthur Hopkins, the film’s producer and director. A year later, when it came time to cast The Petrified Forest, Hopkins would remember Bogie’s performance in this otherwise forgotten play.

  ***

  When Bogie couldn’t find work as an actor, he was offered a job as a chess player at the sleazy Sportsland on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan’s West Forties. He would sit in the window, taking on any member of the public who wanted to challenge him, for a fee of fifty cents, to a game of chess.

  When he saved up enough money, he would go over to the “21” for a drink. The owners liked him and let him run up a big tab, which he could not pay until he was cast on stage in The Petrified Forest in 1935.

  In September of 1934, Mary Philips appeared at the Sportsland Arcade to interrupt Bogie’s chess game. She ran up to him. Her message was brief. “Belmont is dying.”

  At the hospital, Bogie stayed in the same room with Dr. Bogart, watching his life wane. He lived for another forty-eight hours, dying in his son’s arms at Manhattan’s Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled on September 8, 1934, at the age of 67.

  Belmont expressed no particularly articulate last words. He was unable to speak. However, he did seem to hear his son’s last words to him. “I love you, Father.” Bogie would tell Mary, “I should have told him that years ago, but I never could.”

  There was no one to accompany Bogie to Fresh Pond Crematory in Long Island. Mary was auditioning for a Broadway show, and Maud made it clear that she found the idea of cremation, as requested by her husband, “quite ghastly.”

  After his father was buried, Bogie returned to Maud’s apartment. She was going through his papers. “He left $10,000 in debts and $35,000 in uncollected doctor’s fees.”

  She handed him his father’s old-fashioned ruby ring. He would wear it until his death, and it can be seen in his films over the years. He told Maud that as a point of honor, he would work to pay off the entire $10,000.

  “Then I suggest you find some more profitable line of work than the stage and or B-list movies that no one wants to see.”

  ***

  After a string of failures, with a career going nowhere, the “chess player, sometimes actor,” as he called himself, had a change of luck. He was plucked from oblivion. Had fortune not shone on him— finally —he’d have joined the hundreds of actors, male and female, who enjoyed brief fame in the Silents or had their fifteen minutes of fame in the Talkies during the 30s.

  “I would have become a footnote in the history of the theater or the movies,” he said. “I would make it as a footnote if that history were summed up in ten volumes. If only one volume, I would have been such an insignificant flea, I would not even have made it as a footnote.”

  When its producer and director Arthur Hopkins asked Bogie to audition for the coveted role of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, Bogie renewed his friendship with Robert Sherwood, who wrote the play. Sherwood actually didn’t want him to play Duke, preferring instead that he be cast in another role. Hopkins stood his ground, however.

  At Bogie’s audition sat Leslie Howard, the English actor, who was to become his friend. Howard agreed with Hopkins. Bogie would be perfect for the part.

  After the audition, Sherwood changed his point of view. In The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, John Mason Brown wrote, “He thought of more than Bogart’s masculinity. He thought of his driven power. His anguished eyes, dark eyes, the puffs of pain beneath them, and the dangerous despair which lined his face.”

  The character of Duke Mantee was inspired mainly by bank robber John Dillinger. Bogie actually resembled the real-life Dillinger.

  Cast as an escaped convict, Bogie threw himself into the role and tried to live up to Sherwood’s description of the character. “He is well built but stoop shouldered, with a vaguely thoughtful, saturnine face. He is about thirty-five and, if he hadn’t elected to take up banditry, he might have been a fine left-fielder. He is unmistakably doomed.”

  During the course of the play, Duke holds its main characters hostage, including Leslie Howard, who played Squier, the romantic intellectual who believes that “my ilk” is becoming as ossified as the petrified forest in the Arizona Desert. Hostages are held at the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q.

  Preview audiences in Hartford gasped at their view of the “new” Bogart. He was no longer a sprig with a tennis racket, but a gangster with a prison pallor and a three-day growth of beard.

  Opening on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater on January 7, 1935, The Petrified Forest starred Leslie Howard and Peggy Conklin, who portrayed Gabrielle Maple, the waitress heroine.

  At last, praise came from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who asserted that Bogie “does the best work of his career as the motorized gorilla.”

  In a strange coincidence, Kenneth MacKenna had migrated back to New York to pursue his own luck on Broadway. Ironically, he was eventually hired as Leslie Howard’s understudy in the Broadway version of The Petrified Forest.

  Bogie’s marriage to Mary Philips continued dysfunctionally, as each pursued his or her respective career in the theater. It was increasingly obvious that their link was held together by a not very sticky glue.

  One late afternoon, Bogie told Mary that he was going to stay in the Broadway area for the three hours leading up to the show and wouldn’t return home until after curtain.

  But when he discovered that he’d either lost or misplaced his wallet, he called her to see if it were left in the apartment. There was no answer, so he made his way back to their apartment. On the floor of the living room, Kenneth was screwing his wife.

  Bogie took one look at the coupling and then shouted into the living room. “Carry on, guys. Don’t let me stop you.” Slamming the door on his way out, he headed back to the theater.

  At the theater, he reported the details of the seduction scene he’d just witnessed to Leslie Howard.

  Right before the curtain went up that night on The Petrified Forest, Bogie received devastating news.

  On September 26, 1935, his long-time best friend, Bill Brady Jr., had burned alive while drunk in his country cabin at Colts Neck, New Jersey when the buil
ding caught on fire. Ironically, Bogie had been invited to spend that weekend with Bill in his bungalow. “I could have been burned to death along with Bill,” he said.

  Unusual for him, Bogie burst into hysterical sobs. Howard was going to ask his understudy to go on in Bogie’s place. But he pulled himself together in time to face the audience. Howard later asserted that “Bogart gave the best performance of his career.”

  At Bill’s funeral, Bogie stood next to his mentor and long-time friend, Bill Brady Sr. He was now seventy-one years old. The two men embraced, as both of them sobbed for their loss.

  Mrs. Brady came up and embraced Bogie. Before leaving that day. Mr. Brady turned to Bogie. “I always knew you’d be a great actor. I was the first to believe in you. I wish to see you return to Hollywood and make your greatest films.”

  Mr. Brady’s wish came true. He sat through a showing of Casablanca three times. He saw each and every film Bogie made until 1950, when he died at the age of eighty-six.

  With all the rave notices the Broadway version of The Petrified Forest received, it was only natural for Hollywood to take notice. Agents for Warner Brothers purchased film rights for the play, with the contractual obligation to cast Leslie Howard in the lead.

  In spite of the rave notices generated by his performances in the play, Bogie was not rewarded with a firm contract to play Duke Mantee in the film. Instead, Warner Brothers took an “option” on his services, paying him a small fee to either cast him or not cast him, according to their perceptions and whims, into the movie role. “I was left dangling in the wind,” Bogie later said. “Am I getting the part or not?” he kept asking Mary. “According to this god damn option deal,” Mary told him, “they can drop you at the last minute and bring in George Raft or Edward G. Robinson. Your option deal means shit.”

  The play could have run for at least another three or four months but Howard had grown tired of the part. He also nixed a road tour, feeling that an extension might hurt the eventual box office receipts of the movie. Thanks to his role as one of the play’s co-producers, along with Gilbert Miller, Howard had such power, and he ordered that the final curtain come down after 181 performances.

  During the run of The Petrified Forest, Bogie had paid off all of Belmont’s debts, and still had two thousand dollars left in the bank.

  Since he wanted to save his bankroll, he looked for a job in summer stock. Based on the reputation he’d built on Broadway, he was hired after only two weeks’ search, signing a commitment for a series of performances with Will Seabury’s Repertory Theatre Company in Skowhegan, Maine.

  ***

  In Skowhegan, in 1935, it was understood that he would appear that summer as a character within three separate plays.

  The first was entitled The Stag at Bay, a cloak-and-dagger melodrama about the theft of a formula for poison gas. In it he also starred with Keenan Wynn, whom he would often encounter in later years in Hollywood. Keenen was usually seen in the company of Hollywood star Van Johnson, his long-time lover.

  Ceiling Zero came next. A drama by Frank Wead, it was said to be the first play ever produced revolving around the life of a commercial airport as its theme. It had starred Osgood Perkins when it was first produced on Broadway in 1935. Bogie’s appearance in this summer stock production went unnoticed. But the Wead drama had legs. Warner Brothers optioned it for its 1936 film, also called Ceiling Zero, but Bogie wasn’t offered any role, the honors going to James Cagney and Pat O’Brien. Just a few years later, in 1941, Warners remade it. Re-titled International Squadron, the lead went to the up-and-coming Ronald Reagan.

  For his adieu to summer stock and to the stage in general, Bogie found himself cast opposite the notorious fan dancer, Sally Rand, in Rain. Far more famous as a coyly erotic dancer than as an actress, Sally was noted for her flirtatious ostrich feather dance and her balloon bubble dance.

  It was Cecil B. DeMille who had assigned her the name “Sally Rand” years before, back when the now-aging star had first appeared in silent films. DeMille took what became her surname from the Rand McNally Atlas.

  Rand became infamous throughout America thanks to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, an event also entitled Century of Progress. She was arrested four times in the course of a single day, charged with “indecent exposure” while imitating a provocatively dressed impersonation of Lady Godiva riding a white horse down the streets of the city.

  When she met Bogie, he found her a “stunner,” as he later told his pals at Tony’s in New York. At the time she was described as a “diminutive (5’ 1”) damsel with a knockout (35-22-35) figure.”

  She told Bogie she was tired of burlesque and that “the stage is my destiny.”

  “It’s my destiny, too, when I can find a job that pays at least fifty bucks a week.”

  Rand had recently agreed to play W. Somerset Maugham’s prostitute, Sadie Thompson, in his play Rain. A 1928 silent film entitled Sadie Thompson had starred Gloria Swanson. In 1935, Tallulah Bankhead had brought the character to Broadway in a revival.

  Actually Rain was first seen on Broadway in 1922, starring the legendary Jeanne Eagels in a box office success. June Havoc, sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper, starred in a 1944 Broadway musical, Sadie Thompson. In 1932, Joan Crawford appeared in the film version. In 1953 Rain would be taken out of mothballs, the character interpreted once again by Rita Hayworth in the film Miss Sadie Thompson.

  What happened that summer between Bogie and Rand remains a mystery. When he returned to New York, Bogie told his cronies that he had seduced her. “She was my steady piece up in Maine.” Later, Rand denied that she’d had an affair with him. Simultaneously, however, she claimed that the impotent Paul Bern, husband of Jean Harlow, was “great in bed.” So much for her honesty in reporting.

  As far as it’s known, there has been only one printed romantic link between Bogie and Rand. A long-ago article claimed, “After the curtain went down on Rain, the real action began with the young actor Humphrey Bogart and the aging Sally Rand, the famous fan dancer.”

  Even that was wrong. Bogie was born in 1899, Rand in 1904.

  ***

  After his immersion in Maine’s world of summer stock, Bogie returned to New York City and Mary. She did not ask him what he’d done for private pleasures during his absence. And he chose not to grill her either.

  Despite his many previous successes on Broadway the previous season, there were no immediate job offerings. On the slim chance that Jack Warner might take up his option and cast him as Duke Mantee, Bogie decided to take the train to the West Coast.

  He asked Mary to go with him. She adamantly refused, devoting her attention instead to starring in a Broadway play, A Touch of Brimstone. “My career’s about to take off—it’s getting hotter and hotter,” she told him. “What would I do in Hollywood? Sit around for three weeks waiting for you to finish the shoot? That is, if you even get the role.”

  Bogie decided to take the train by himself. Incidentally, Mary’s co-star was none other than Roland Young. Still sexually involved with Kenneth, she resumed her affair with Young—and “his cheating heart,” as she put it.

  As Bogie entered the Garden of Allah Hotel in Hollywood, he picked up a copy of Variety. Later, by the pool, he read that Edward G. Robinson, a Warner Brothers contract player, had been signed to play Duke Mantee in the film version of The Petrified Forest.

  Bogie was crestfallen and got horribly drunk that night. Leslie Howard had been vacationing in Scotland when he received a cable from Bogie. “Robinson set to play Duke Mantee. Help me!”

  Immediately Howard notified Warner Brothers that if Bogie could not retain the role, that he was also pulling out of the cast. Jack Warner caved in.

  Even with Howard as his champion, Bogie still had to get involved in more than a dozen screen tests before he was finally signed to the part.

  Bogie was given only a three-week contract at $750 per week. This was the same wage he’d been paid in 1932. Bette Davis agreed to get involved with
the film for $9,000, Howard taking in $62,500.

  On the first day of shooting, Bogie once again encountered Bette Davis, and once again, previous intimacies seemed to have been forgotten, at least by her.

  Smoking a cigarette, she came right up to him and didn’t welcome him to the studio. “I was rather looking forward to working with Eddie,” she said, referring, of course, to Edward G. Robinson. “I think he would have made a great Duke Mantee.”

  “What am I?” he asked. “Chopped liver?”

  “The trouble with you, Bogart, is that you cannot portray menace on the screen,” she said, blowing smoke in his face.

  “Since I last saw you, I’ve learned menace.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “That’s good,” she said in a voice already famous to movie audiences.

  She told Bogie, “Leslie and I really didn’t get along when we made Of Human Bondage (1934). But now he’s very affectionate. I can show you my arms and shoulders.” She pulled back her dress to reveal bite marks across her skin. “At times I think he’s a dog. Did you know that he actually enjoys biting women?”

  “As you well know, I prefer to plow into them instead.”

  “No, I don’t know that,” she said with an imperial air. “You see, I’ve forgotten all about that.”

  Her acknowledgment of these bites and nibbles was an odd admission from Bette. She told several friends, “Did you know that Leslie screwed every female star on every movie he was ever in, with the exception of me? I told him that I was not going to be plastered on the end of a list of his conquests.” Of course, what Bette sometimes said and what she did were two different things.

  The director of The Petrified Forest was Archie Mayo, who on film more or less shot the play as it had been presented on Broadway. He detested “that limey bastard,” Leslie Howard, but had praise for Bogie.

  With Bette Davis, Mayo established an uneasy truce, having directed her in Bordertown in 1935. “I believe in giving that bitch wide berth,” Mayo told Bogie.