Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Ironically, both Bogie and Mayo would work together again on the film, They Drive by Night, in 1940, a movie that was inspired by Davis’ Bordertown.

  “Davis and Howard had egos bigger than their talents,” he said. “Actually, Bogie was the only actor in a starring part in the film that did what I asked him to do. Later, of course, he became an S.O.B.”

  Mayo said, “Bette seemed pissed off throughout the movie. She constantly complained that she was playing some little field mouse while Howard and Bogie were ‘eating up the scenery.’ She said she longed for a strong part like the one she’d played in Of Human Bondage with Leslie Howard.”

  At the end of the shoot, Bogie gave Howard his warmest embrace, thanking him for all his support. The two actors agreed to “become friends for life,” although for Howard, that would be defined as only a few short years to& come.

  Before saying goodbye to Leslie Howard on the set of The Petrified Forest, Bogie and his mentor had made a vow. Bogie agreed to follow Howard’s precedent and seduce each of his upcoming leading ladies. What he didn’t know was that he’d occasionally be cast opposite a lesbian. These actresses were certainly beautiful and desirable, but many of them preferred not to share their charms with men.

  Bogie would later name his second child Leslie in honor of Howard, who had given him his first big break. A baby daughter was born to Bogie and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, on August 23, 1952. Time magazine reported that the six-pound, five-ounce baby girl was a boy. But such was not the case.

  Movie critics and fellow stars agreed that no man in the history of movies had turned the act of smoking a cigarette into such high drama. The juvenile sprig had become a Hollywood tough guy.

  In spite of rave reviews, Jack Warner wasn’t all that impressed. He didn’t think Bogie had broad appeal.

  At the time, Warner Brothers was in the throes of releasing a wave of& gangster films, and the studio decided that Bogie would be in a lot of them. There were, in fact, some twenty-nine films released in the five-year span between The Petrified Forest (1936), and High Sierra ( 1941). Often he played a jailbird. He died in eight of them, once in an electric chair and once by means of a hangman’s noose.

  Nine days after shooting on Petrified Forest ended in 1936, Jack Warner signed a forty-week contract with Bogie for $550 per week. In signing the contract, Bogie agreed not to “offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency.”

  The contract contained a complicated series of options, with the understanding that if all of them were activated before the end of 1941, Bogie conceivably could make as much as $1,750 a week.

  The moment he signed the contract, Bogie became a tenant along what the studio referred to as “Murderer’s Row.” Fellow residents included Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, George Raft, Paul Muni, and John Garfield.

  Eventually, Bogie became beloved by the press because he was one of the few actors in Hollywood who spoke what he felt. “Everybody else out here is hiding behind some fake image,” he said. “Nobody likes me on sight. There must be something about the tone of my voice, or this arrogant face—something that antagonizes everybody. I can’t even get into a mild discussion that doesn’t turn into an argument.”

  Meanwhile, Mary’s star as a Broadway actress had dimmed, her latest play not attracting the audience that its backers had anticipated. After it closed after ninety-six performances, there were no more offers. She accepted her husband’s invitation to take the train to Los Angeles.

  Once there, she spent Christmas of 1935 at the Château Elysée, where they celebrated Bogie’s birthday. Her first question upon arrival was, “Which stars have you fucked?”

  “No one! I’ve been celibate. How about you?”

  “Just the usual suspects,” she said frankly. By that, he knew that she meant Roland Young and Kenneth MacKenna.

  Bogie seemed to want to assert his manhood now that he was a contract player, and she was an out-of-work actress. Before, he’d been married to an actress more famous than himself. After The Petrified Forest opened to big box office, “I started to clank my balls,” he told Spencer Tracy.

  A few weeks later, Mary received an offer to return to Broadway to star in The Postman Always Rings Twice, adapted from the James M. Cain novel. The property was considered too hot, too steamy for Hollywood. Later it would become one of Lana Turner’s most sensational movies. Mary had been cast opposite Richard Barthelmess, the silent screen star who would be making his Broadway debut.

  Eager to “return to glory,” as she put it, she told her husband that she could never settle down, become a housewife, and have children. “I’m afraid, dear, that if that is what you want, you should not have married a Broadway star.”

  Long after The Petrified Forest was distributed and screened around the world, the drama still had “legs.” Bogie himself would appear in future manifestations of this play.

  In years to come, Bogie contracted to perform in a radio version of The Petrified Forest. Produced by the Screen Guild Theater, it was aired on January 7, 1940, starring himself alongside Joan Bennett and Tyrone Power.

  The Petrified Forest would also be remade in 1944 as a retitled film called Escape in the Desert. This was a second-rate movie, with Philip Dorn in the Leslie Howard role. The gangster role of Bogie was reconfigured into that of an escaped Nazi POW, with Helmut Dantine taking the part.

  In a touch of irony, The Petrified Forest would be performed again on live television in 1955, with a cast of Bogie and Henry Fonda. The Bette Davis role was played by a young actress named Lauren Bacall.

  ***

  When& Hollywood& director William McGann called Bogie to tell him that he had been cast as the lead in a 1936 film Two Against the World, he was at first delighted. But delight turned to disappointment when he learned that he was actually making a B picture reprise of a five-year-old A-list film, Edward G. Robinson’s Five Star Final, first released in 1931.

  The original 1931 version of Five Star Final had been based on a play by Louis Weitzenkorn. But in Bogie’s recycled and “watered down” version, scripter Michael Jacoby wrote a much weaker role for Bogie, a role utterly lacking any of Robinson’s “fire” from the the original film The setting was switched as well: What had been a newspaper office in the original, became a radio station in Bogie’s version. As part of the plot motivation, the radio station is hell bent on increasing the number of its listeners by any means it can conjure. Bogie never liked his role.

  After Bogie rehearsed his first scene under the scrutiny of director McGann, he was not impressed. “The fucker spent more time watching the clock than in directing me.”

  Even though the director was aware of his schedule’s time restraints, it was still not enough to appease top management.

  Hal Wallis was the studio’s chief honcho, but Bogie’s boss was Bryan Foy, “The Keeper of the Bs,” as he was known on the Warners lot. Bryan was the eldest son of vaudeville star Eddie Foy, and he had appeared on stage with his father as one of “The Seven Little Foys.” From 1924 to 1963, he produced 214 films, one of which was the distinguished Guadalcanal Diary in 1943.

  The first time Bogie met Foy, he rushed onto the set accusing McGann of running overtime and over budget. McGann protested that he had forty more pages to shoot. Foy grabbed the shooting script from him and, without reading it, ripped out twenty pages. Before storming off the set, he said, “Now bring this stinker in on time . . . or else!”

  That’s why Two Against the World ran for only sixty-four minutes.

  Later, while analyzing that period of his life, Bogie claimed that in a lot of films during the late 1930s, “I was assigned one of two different types of leading ladies—either a star who’d arrived in Hollywood via the casting couch, or else a card-carrying lesbian.”

  When he met Beverly Roberts, his Two Against the World co-star from the latter of those two categories, he immediately recognized her as “one of the boys,” from the latter of those two categories. Bogie liked thi
s “tough-talking broad.”

  Roberts had been spotted singing in a New York City nightclub by a Warner Brothers talent agent and sent to Hollywood to appear with Al Jolson in the 1936 film, The Singing Kid, which was followed by her star part with Bogie.

  She was signed on at Warner Brothers the same day Errol Flynn became a member of the troupe. Flynn met her that day and also became friends with her. Flynn later told Bogie, “Beverly and I have a lot in common. We both know how to take care of a woman.”

  Roberts became known for playing “tough-edged dames” on the Warner lot, mainly potboilers. In one film she played it particularly butch during her portrayal of a woman who’s running a lumber camp. In another movie, she operated a fleet of buses. “I was women’s lib before the term was invented,” she said.

  Later, Bogie asserted that “Beverly Roberts had more cojones than I did.”

  When Roberts met actress Wynne Gibson during their filming of the 1938 feature film, Flirting with Fate, she met “the love of my life,” as she told Bogie. She meant that.

  Gibson herself was one of the “lovelies” who appeared in the 1930s, making mainly B movies between 1929 and 1956. Roberts and Gibson would live together until Gibson’s death in 1987.

  Also cast in Two Against the World was an actor named Carlyle Moore, Jr. Bogie in the future would appear with the same actor in both Bullets or Ballots and in China Clipper.

  “The last time I encountered this Moore kid, sometime in the late 1930s, all he could talk about was ‘Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan—he’s the handsomest man in Hollywood. He’s got a great physique, and he’s not stuck up at all. He’s the nicest guy.’ I let him blabber on. Moore did end up in Reagan’s Knute Rockne — All American. On Moore’s part, I think it was more than puppy love. Good luck to that kid if he thought he was going to get Reagan out of his pants.”

  When Two Against the World was released, none of the cast, including Bogie himself, was pleased with the way the film had been ruthlessly shortened. Beverly Roberts and Carlyle Moore Jr. were among those who complained about how their roles had been cut.

  Two Against the World was such a bad picture that Jack Warner delayed its release for months. “We’ll release it one day when every newspaper in America is on strike,” the studio chief said. “That way, no one will review it.

  When the film was finally released, critics slammed it. For television, the movie was more temptingly re-titled One Fatal Hour. Today, Two Against the World is recommended “Only for diehard Bogie fans.”

  ***

  As author Jeffrey Meyers put it, Bogie in the mid-Thirties began a new phase of his career where he’d be “slapped, muddied, shaken, submerged and drenched; bitten, choked, cut, thrown, singed and burned.”

  He reported early to work to a studio, Warner Brothers, that evoked a prison, with tough security guards at the gate. When he first arrived, he didn’t even own a car, so he showed up at the gate in a taxi.

  His packed lunch was always the same every day—two cheese and tomato sandwiches, one hard-boiled egg, and a bottle of beer which he had to drink warm.

  Unlike plush Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers was cost-conscious. In his first year under contract, Bogie would make four films back to back for release in 1936. Each was a B picture, with a minor director. Shooting schedules were tight, sometimes with as little as three weeks allotted.

  Bogie often regretted that he’d arrived in Hollywood after the self-regulating Production Code came into effect on July 15, 1934. Strictly forbidden was subject matter which included “profanity, nudity, drug trafficking, sex perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, sex hygiene and venereal diseases, scenes of actual childbirth, children’s sex organs, ridicule of the clergy, and offenses against a nation, race, or creed.”

  Jack Warner was terribly disappointed with Bogie’s performance in Two Against the World, but decided to give him another chance since he already had him under contract. “Cast him in Bullets or Ballots,” he ordered Bryan Foy. “Make Edward G. Robinson the star and give Bogart fourth billing. That way, no one will notice the fucker. Throw in Joan Blondell for the floozy sex appeal.”

  Bullets or Ballots marked the first picture Bogie made with Robinson, but it was the fourth picture in which he was cast opposite Joan.

  Joan Blondell had heard that this hardboiled drama had encountered problems with the Production Code. Joseph Breen, the censor, sent Jack Warner a warning, suggesting that Bullets or Ballots was the kind of movie we had “agreed not to make.”

  Joan introduced Bogie to their director, William Keighley, who had helmed her in Penny Arcade. This Philadelphian in Bullets or Ballots created a role model of the kind of fast-paced, tightly made film of which Warners would specialize in the next few years.

  Bogie never liked phonies, and he was put off by what he viewed as the director’s “continental manners,” perhaps acquired during his tenure on Broadway in the early 20s.

  Whenever his name came up in the future, Bogie would mock him, mainly when he cast James Cagney as the lead in the Technicolor epic, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Of course, Keighley came to his senses and later cast Errol Flynn instead. Keightly himself was replaced by Michael Curtiz when Robin Hood, Warner’s most expensive film of all time fell behind in production.

  Bullets or Ballots marked the first of several films Bogie would shoot with Barton MacLane, a native of South Carolina. When directors wanted a furrow-browed tough guy, MacLane was on call. Cameras would move in on his squinty eyes and tightly clamped mouth. He seemed to pose a menace to whomever he encountered.

  MacLane’s character was modeled on Dutch Schultz, the notorious gangster and main patron of Polly Adler, America’s most famous madam.

  One afternoon between filming, on a particularly hot day, MacLane went to his dressing room and brought back a violin, and played it for Joan and Bogie.

  “Not bad, not bad at all,” Bogie said. “For my next party, I’ll hire you for a sawbuck.”

  Bogie was cast as “Bugs” Fenner a mobster. Before the film ends, he will kill a crusader against vice; MacLane’s character, and finally Johnny Blake (Robinson). In the final reel, Robinson, wounded by Bogie, finally guns him down.

  When Bogie came up to greet Robinson, the shorter man studied him skeptically. Before their careers were over, they would make five films together, with Bogie eventually assuming the lead in Key Largo (1948). “I keep reading that you created the movie gangster. I guess you didn’t see Little Caesar. I do believe that I have become the prototypical movie mobster, and let’s get that straight. Did you hear my dying line?”

  To Bogie’s astonishment, he delivered it again. “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Roco Bandello?”

  Born in Bucharest, Rumania, Robinson was no gangster, but a Renaissance man of great cultivation, a devotee of art and music. He would later collect some $3 million worth of art. At first he didn’t want to go to Hollywood, holding movies in disdain, preferring the stage. But after he hit the jackpot as the vicious gang leader in Little Caesar, he thought he could put up with all those orange and palm trees after all.

  In spite of his charm, Bogie remained leery of him. “Let’s face it:& Robinson is the guy to beat.”

  This good, tough gangster film more or less holds up today. In it, Robinson leaves the police force to crack a city-wide mob run by MacLane.

  On April 17, 1939, Bogie signed with the Lux Radio Theater to broadcast a one-hour radio play of Bullets or Ballots. Both Robinson and Bogie reprised their roles, but Mary Astor stood in for Joan Blondell.

  After his watching himself in his latest film, Bogie said, “I owe it all to Clark Gable with those big ears. Dames go crazy over him. He paved the way for all of us with ugly mugs—Robinson, James Cagney, and my dear friend Spencer Tracy.”

  ***

  With Mary still in New York, Bogie resumed his on-again, off-again affair with Joan. She told him she was tired of these dumb, wise-cracking roles and wanted
to make it in drama. He worked closely with her and helped her through her scenes. She played a shady Harlem nightclub owner and gave an admirable performance when stacked against Bogie and Robinson.

  When Bogie saw how Joan’s household was being run, he said, “Hot damn, woman. You’ve become a movie star at last. Do you need someone to look after your fan mail?”

  “Joan was at the peak of her beauty, during the making of this film,” Bogie said. “In her wardrobe, she became a fucking garden of flowers. I didn’t know whether to water her or not. In spite of Dick Powell beating down her door, she threw me a few mercy fucks so I wouldn’t be so tense.”

  ***

  After Bullets or Ballots, Bogie was cast as the fourth lead in China Clipper, a 1936 release from Warners directed by Ray Enright. Bogie played Hap Stuart, a daredevil pilot and wartime buddy of Pat O’Brien, who had been cast as the lead. The screenplay by Frank Wead focused on the creation of the famous China Clipper, the plane that made the first passenger run from San Francisco to the Orient. The plot was inspired by Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I aviation hero who went into the commercial flying business, a career move evocative of Howard Hughes.

  Once again, Bogie was cast with Beverly Roberts, who played the female lead.

  “We spent a lot of time in my dressing room having a drink,” he said. “Beverly could hold her liquor as well as I could. I told her that I hope in the future we wouldn’t compete for the same dames.”

  Ross Alexander and Marie Wilson rounded out the cast. Also appearing in the movie was Wayne Morris, who would go on to greater glory, if that was what it could be called. In China Clipper, he had only a bit part.

  The son of Irish immigrants, with an ugly mug, O’Brien was an unlikely candidate to become a leading movie star in the 1930s. A friend of both James Cagney and Spencer Tracy, he never bonded as well with Bogie, although they worked together fairly smoothly.

  Bogie called him “Hollywood’s walking embodiment of Ireland.” He once studied to become a Roman Catholic priest, but gave that up, although he often performed as “Father This” or “Father That” in films. If not a priest, he wore a cop’s badge in movies. Politically, O’Brien and Bogie were oceans apart. Because of his extreme Right Wing views, Bogie called him “a near Nazi.”