Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  In the role of Dave Logan, Barton MacLane played a character inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s conquest of the Atlantic on his history-making flight to Paris. In the movie, Logan plans a trans-Pacific airline.

  In her usual “Dumb Dora” role, Marie Wilson pursued Ross Alexander. Bogie wasn’t living up to Leslie Howard’s challenge of seducing all his leading ladies. He found the well-stacked Wilson a sexy number with her ultra-blonde locks, her generous mouth, and her great big eyes.

  Wilson had appeared in Satan Met a Lady (1936), starring Bette Davis. This was the second film adaptation of the detective novel, The Maltese Falcon. Davis would later say, “Marilyn Monroe’s on-screen persona was a complete rip-off of Marie Wilson.” Wilson would go on to gain national prominence with her hit interpretation of My Friend Irma on radio, TV, and film.

  Wilson only looked innocent on the screen. In private she wasn’t adverse to going to bed with a nice-looking man. Bogie took her out on two dates,& and perhaps he scored. He obviously told Leslie Howard, but didn’t share much information with any of his pals.

  ***

  At long last Bogie came face to face with Ross Alexander, a young actor whose reputation had preceded him. Bogie already resented him for getting star billing over him as the third lead.

  Standing 6’ 1”, he was hailed as the most promising young player at Warner Brothers. With his wavy brown hair and penetrating eyes, the Brooklyn-born actor seemed ideal for those romantic juvenile roles.

  Although he’d never met Alexander, he was well known on Broadway. He was what Bogie called a “star fucker” and had seduced several famous actors or directors. He’d been the kept boy of a series of wealthy men, including the renowned John Golden, age 54, producer, playwright, actor, and songwriter.

  Alexander was tormented about his homosexuality and tried to conceal it by marrying or else pursuing female stars. His marriage to Aleta Friele in 1934 had ended disastrously. In 1935, despondent over her marriage and career as an actress, she killed herself with a .22 rifle outside the Hollywood home she shared with her husband.

  Alexander was also known to many of Bogie’s friends or acquaintances, notably Henry Fonda. In fact, other than James Stewart, Alexander was Fonda’s best friend. The two actors had met when performing in summer stock together, and on and off had lived together. On the Warners lot, the rumor was that they had been lovers.

  It was said that Alexander had caught Fonda on the rebound while still carrying a torch for his former wife, Margaret Sullavan. “I’ll always be grateful to Ross Alexander,” Fonda said. “He restored my confidence in myself as a man after Margaret de-balled me.”

  Alexander was often photographed with Errol Flynn and his wife, Lili Damita, at swank Tinseltown soirees. The Flynn/Alexander affair intensified when Alexander was cast in Flynn’s film, Captain Blood.

  When Bette Davis heard that Bogie had been cast with Alexander in China Clipper, she called Bogie and reported an alarming story.

  According to Davis, Alexander had developed an obsession about her. Although married, he& kept bombarding her with love letters. “He’s not really in love with me,” Davis said. “I heard he really wants both of us to divorce our spouses and marry each other. I am told he thinks I’m going to become queen of the Warners lot, and that I’ll let him be my co-star in all my future movies.”

  “Jack Warner may have something to say about that,” Bogie told her.

  To confirm what Davis had said, Alexander asked Bogie to use his friendship with Davis to advance the actor’s cause. “I desperately want to get cast in her next movie,” he said. “We’ll have a love scene together. Once I get her in my arms, I know she’ll respond like a wildcat.”

  “Probably so,” Bogie said. “Claws and all. That’s Bette.”

  Every day a love letter was slipped under Bette’s door. She didn’t bother reading them, tossing them in the wastepaper basket.

  When Davis was filming Satan Met a Lady, her husband, Ham Nelson, arrived at the studio for a rare visit. Attached to the door to her dressing room was one of Alexander’s latest letters to Davis. It was addressed in large letters “TO MY BELOVED ONE, BETTE.” Nelson ripped it off the door, opened it, and read it.

  Storming into his wife’s dressing room, Nelson confronted Davis, accusing her of having an affair with the young actor.

  “That queer is having pipe dreams,” Davis shouted at her husband. When she was called before the cameras, Nelson went to find Alexander, discovering him in the studio men’s room, where he attacked him, slugging him repeatedly.

  In spite of that, Alexander with a black eye did not stop writing love letters to Davis, posting one the very next day.

  On the set of China Clipper, Bogie met a Boston-born actress, the dark-haired, rather beautiful Anne Nagel. He decided to pursue her only to find that his major competition was& Alexander himself. Privately, Bogie confronted him. “What’s& between this Nagel dame and byou?” he asked.

  “Anne and I are falling in love, and I plan to marry her,” Alexander said.

  “What about Bette? Bogie asked. “I thought you were in love with her.”

  “You of all people should know that it’s possible to love two women at the same time,”& Alexander said. “If Bette responds to my love letters and divorces that monster, Ham Nelson, I will get a divorce from Anne, assuming we go through with the marriage.”

  “That makes perfect sense to me,” Bogie said before walking away to have a drink with Pat O’Brien in his dressing room. “Losing a gal to a bonafide queer,” Bogie told O’Brien. “That doesn’t say much for me as a man. Of course, Ross is sorta cute. If I get desperate one night, I might ask him to give me a blow-job.”

  “You’re kidding, of course,” O’Brien said.

  “That’s me. Bogart the kidder.”

  Right after the release of the film, Nagel and Ross were married. Even so, he continued to write those love letters to Davis. His wife discovered some unfinished letters under his desk blotter. He told her, “I can’t help myself.”

  Around Christmastime in 1936, Alexander picked up a handsome male hitchhiker and had a sexual encounter with him. Recognizing him from the movies, the hobo threatened to blackmail him if he weren’t given $10,000.

  Alexander didn’t have the money but persuaded producer Bryan Foy to secure that amount from Warner Brothers. Alexander agreed to pay it back by having the studio deduct it from his future salary.

  Growing increasingly despondent, Alexander on January 2, 1937, picked up the same .22 pistol that his former wife, Alete Friele, had used to commit suicide. He went to his barn and shot himself in the temple.

  Warners reacted quickly to Alexander’s death and within a few weeks had signed another young actor to a seven-year contract. This former sports announcer was to be cast in the roles that the studio had intended for Alexander.

  On the studio lot one day, Bogie was introduced to this affable newcomer who spoke in the same clear baritone that evoked Alexander’s voice.

  “So, you’re the new kid on the block,” Bogie said. “Welcome to the prison.”

  “Hi,” the young man said, extending his hand. “I’m Ronald Reagan.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be co-starring together very soon,” Bogie said.

  He never pretended to be a prophet, but in this case he was right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Beginning in the mid-1930s, Bogie would establish his professional movie home at Warner Brothers, with whom he’d be associated for most of the rest of his life. He stayed with the studio until the late 1940s. Even after he formed his own production company, Santana, he continued to arrange for his films to be released through Warners, alternating them with less frequent releases through Columbia Studios.

  “At Warner Brothers in the 30s, I became a one-man film factory,” Bogie later recalled. “I turned out movies so fast that even today the plots are a big blur in my head. Sometimes, I went from one film into another so fast, I forgot what character I
was playing. I figured the best way to deal with that was to play Humphrey Bogart, meaning play myself.”

  During his filming of The Petrified Forest for a 1936 release, the Hollywood press once again began to take notice of him. Louella Parsons had already discovered him during his first stint in Hollywood during the early 1930s.

  Throughout the 30s, Daniel Mainwaring operated as Bogie’s press agent, also functioning privately as both a novelist and screenwriter. His pseudonym was “Geoffrey Homes.” With that name, he began to create myths and legends about Bogie, many of which got printed in newspapers as truthful and accurate facts. Perhaps as a means of getting tongues to wag, even though Bogie was playing a tough guy on screen, Homes claimed that during his spare time, the actor painted floral designs on teacups.

  Homes continued to pile one myth atop another for processing by the gullible press of the mid-1930s. He spread the word to the press corps that Bogie slept only in Palm Beach suits, never pajamas. Other falsehoods he spread included stories about how Bogie would frequently slip away for late-night music gigs. According to one of Home’s PR campaigns, Bogart was said to play the bull fiddle at a roadhouse in the San Fernando Valley, disguised with fake whiskers to avoid recognition from his fans.

  When he had any free time from Warner Brothers, which was rare, Bogie, or so said Homes, retreated to an worm farm in Eastern Oregon. Homes told Bogie, “I’m amazed those dummies in the press actually go ahead and print all that shit.”

  One morning over coffee, Bogie read that “Geoffrey Homes, the noted author, is en route to the Mojave Desert to inspect the rattlesnake farm that he and Humphrey Bogart, the actor, recently purchased.

  If Bogie believed that he’d be offered another role as meaty as that of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, he was sadly mistaken, at least for the moment. He was ordered to report to work on a movie called Isle of Fury, a movie so horrible that Bogie would later deny any involvement in making it.

  Jack Warner, on seeing the final product, also realized how truly awful it was, and delayed its release until Bogie had shot two more movies for the studio.

  It was only during the first week of shooting that Bogie learned that Isle of Fury was a remake of The Narrow Corner, which had been a vehicle, released in 1933, for the showcasing of then up-and-coming star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. In some respects, Isle of Fury evoked Clark Gable’s Red Dust (1932).

  Released by Warners late in 1936, the sixty-minute tale of tropical adventure co-starred Donald Woods and Margaret Lindsay. With a fake, pencil-thin mustache, Bogie played the lead in a script which was loosely and awkwardly based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Narrow Corner.

  Its director was Frank McDonald, who had been born only a month before Bogie. A former railroad worker, McDonald seemed nervous and unsure of himself. Actress Evelyn Keyes once said, “I’ve never seen anyone as terrified of directing as Frank McDonald.”

  In spite of his fears, McDonald churned out more than 100 pictures during the course of his long career, achieving his greatest success at Republic, grinding out popular westerns starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

  In a moment of candor, McDonald confided to Bogie, “Let’s face it: Both you and me are hacks turning out shit.”

  “Don’t use that word around me,” Bogie said. “Why say shit when crap will do?”

  Actually, from its inception, the script of Isle of Fury had been tailored for Pat O’Brien, who& dropped out three days before shooting began.

  One scene in Isle of Fury got Bogie virtually laughed off the screen. The plot called for him to be attacked by a giant octopus created by the props department. It was suggested that McDonald should have made it a shark attack instead of some ridiculously artificial-looking octopus. The scene just didn’t work on screen, and the octopus was such an obvious fake that it provoked ridicule.

  Years later, when asked about Isle of Fury, Bogie said, “I don’t recall making such a movie. Perhaps you’ve confused me with someone else. If I recall, that movie starred Errol Flynn.”

  Months before, when shooting had ended on The Petrified Forest, Bogie and Leslie Howard had made a bet to see which of them could seduce a greater number of their respective leading ladies. Bogie felt that he was at an unfair advantage since he was often being cast alongside lesbians. An example included the picture-pretty brunette Margaret Lindsay, of Dubuque, Iowa. She was Bogie’s love interest in Isle of Fury, but her eye was trained on women, not at any man.

  Bogie knew that Lindsay had starred on Broadway with Roland Young in Another Love Story, and he was interested in picking her brain for any information he could about Young. After all, rivaled by Kenneth MacKenna, Young was a contender for the love of Bogie’s wife, Mary Philips. Bluntly, Bogie asked Lindsay, “Is this Roland Young creature still banging Mary?”

  Lindsay was equally blunt in her response. “Almost every night from what I hear. You’d better get back to Broadway soon if you expect to hold onto Mary.”

  Meanwhile, Lindsay was playing an equivalent game of musical chairs. Before filming Isle of Fury, she’d been engaged in a torrid romance with actress Janet Gaynor. But when& Mary Martin took Gaynor from her, Lindsay turned her romantic affections onto another& actress, Mary McCarty.

  This time the girl-on-girl romance worked, and Lindsay and McCarty became longtime companions.

  Bogie never understood the long enduring success of his co-star, Donald Woods, who was born in Manitoba. “Now I know why he’s named Woods,”& Bogie told McDonald. “Donald is the most wooden actor on the screen.”

  Yet, in spite of that assessment, Woods would have a career that encompassed 75 films and 150 TV shows over forty years. He became known as “King of the Bs.”

  In the 1950s, long after his appeal as an actor had faded, Woods became a successful real estate broker in Palm Springs, where he tried to sell Bogie a weekend vacation home. His pitch was that Clark Gable had once used the retreat for secret trysts with beautiful young women or—get this—handsome young men.

  “That’s about the best sales pitch I’ve ever been offered in my life,” Bogie said, facetiously, “but I must turn it down. Gable, huh? Who would have thought that?”

  During the spring of 1936, Mary was still on Broadway, appearing in The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was doing lackluster business. In marked contrast, Bogie was getting roles in one film after another, and working so hard his friends decided he needed some female companionship to take him out of his frequent dark moods.

  Producer Walter Wanger, with some involvement from Henry Fonda, planned a party for Joshua Logan, and he invited Bogie and some actresses from the studio. At the time Wanger was shooting Vogues of 1938, a film whose plot revolved around eight of the supposedly most beautiful “models” in the world.

  At the party, the girls imported from the cast of the movie looked like cheap hookers, not the “lovelies” that Wanger had promised. Except for a few private talks with Fonda, Bogie sat by himself, although on occasion a gum-chewing cutie encouraged him to join the party, even visit one of the bedrooms upstairs.

  At the end of the party, after the models had been driven home, Fonda asked Bogie why he didn’t want to “roll in the hay” with one of them.

  According to Fonda’s biographer, Howard Teichmann, Bogie responded, “Anyone that would stick a cock in one of those girls would throw a rock through a Rembrandt.”

  The next day, at the Garden of Allah, Bogie paid a visit to the small writing studio of the corpulent Robert Benchley, the actor/humorist who’d been a founding member of the celebrated and gossipy Algonquin Roundtable in New York. Bogie had long been a fan of his, taking special interest in Benchley’s sardonic theater reviews.

  Through the open door of Benchley’s studio walked a slim, panther-like woman with a seductive gamine face. Thanks partly to her distinctive, helmet hairdo, she was as alluring as when he’d seduced her long ago as part of an arrangement set up by his first wife, Helen Menken.

  “Brooksie,
” he said, rising from his chair and giving Louise Brooks a lingering kiss.

  “Your lonely nights are over,” Brooks said, “at least temporarily.” Then she gave Benchley a peck on the cheek.

  “Here I am back in Hollywood, a has-been at twenty-nine,” she said. “Got anything to drink, fellows?”

  Benchley had three bottles of Scotch resting temptingly on his bar. As Bogie remembered it, at least two of those bottles would be finished off “before we heard the wild cackle of Tallulah Bankhead chasing a nude John Barrymore around the pool at three o’clock that morning.”

  It was at that very moment, 3am, that Bogie and Brooks staggered out of Benchley’s studio. They were just in time to see Barrymore and Tallulah jump into the pool, splashing around as if trying to drown each other. Although in need of assistance himself, Bogie half supported Brooks as they made their way back to his own rental unit.

  Since he didn’t have an early morning call, Bogie slept soundly until eleven o’clock. When he woke up “with the worst hangover of my life,” he found a note on the counter from Brooks.

  “You’re slipping, Bogie boy,” it said. “You didn’t even fuck me before you passed out last night.”

  When he encountered Benchley by the pool later that afternoon, his neighbor asked him. “How did it go? I’m all ears.”

  Not wanting to ruin his reputation, Bogie said, “It’s always fun seducing my former wife’s girlfriends. I feel closer to Helen that way.” He looked over toward Benchley’s studio. “Didn’t we leave you with one bottle not emptied last night?”

  “We did indeed,” Benchley said, heaving his heavy body from its position deep within a chaise longue. “I’d always dreamed of becoming a bartender for the great Humphrey Bogart.”