Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  When Bogie met Sheridan, she, like Bogie, was struggling through a long involvement in Warners B pictures. There was something so frank and honest about her that he fell for her almost immediately.

  “She has this come-hither look,” he told Archie Mayo. “Show me a real man who can resist that deep, suggestive voice. I’ve got the hots for her.”

  “By the way,” Archie responded, “isn’t it a coincidence that your girlfriend’s first name, Mayo, is my last name? And, come to think of it, how’s your wife, Mary Philips?”

  Bogie got the point and walked away.

  During their first luncheon together, Sheridan described her philosophy of life. “What’s the use of living if you can’t have fun?”

  Bogie later said, “There’s one thing that dame isn’t, and that’s a phony. It’s well known in Hollywood how I hate phonies, and the town reeks of them.”

  The following afternoon, when they weren’t needed on the set, he invited Sheridan for a drink in his dressing room. Seated across from her, he studied her figure. “I hear you Texas gals are great in the haystack.”

  “Why don’t you find that out for yourself?”

  “I just might do that,” he said.

  “I can be had.” As he later related to Mayo, she stood up and began to remove her dress.

  At the time, Sheridan was married to an actor, Edward (Eddie) Norris. But, as she claimed, “Why should having a husband prevent a girl from workouts on the side?”

  “Why indeed?” Bogie said. “Both of my wives played around on me. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “If we play this right, we can both have the security of marriage and a lot of fun whenever we’re not with our devoted spouses.”

  “My sentiments exactly. You know what really attracted me to you?” Bogie said. “You smoke three packages of cigarettes a day. My kind of woman.”

  His meeting with Sheridan that day would mark the beginning of a long friendship, both on and off the screen.

  Black Legion remains one of Bogie’s best early films. Upon its release, The New York Post proclaimed, “No more B pix for Bogart!”

  He came to believe the press reports affirming that indeed Black Legion would make him a star. Although Bette Davis warned him not to get his hopes up—she’d been disappointed too many times herself—Bogie believed great scripts were on the way. A critic writing in the New York American even suggested that “the dynamic Humphrey Bogart would be ideal for the role of Rhett Butler in the coming Gone With the Wind, to be produced by David O. Selznick.”

  Black Legion generated a solid box office return, but not in the league with The Public Enemy (1931) which made James Cagney a superstar, or Paul Muni’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).

  Nevertheless, Jack Warner was not impressed. His publicity department promoted the film by saying, “There’s no Paul Muni in Black Legion, but there’s Humphrey Bogart.”

  When the Black Legion was released, the KKK sued Warner Brothers, not for libeling their hate organization but for copyright infringement. The studio had used their symbol of a white cross with a black diamond in its center, positioned against a circular red background. The judge wisely tossed the case out of court, but not before ordering the KKK to pay legal costs.

  Back at Bogie’s house in West Hollywood, Mary was sometimes there, but more often not. During extended periods when she was missing, he called Mayo, who was beginning to frighten him by ratcheting up the pressure to divorce Mary and marry her.

  ***

  Ann Sheridan was the first to hear the news. She and Bogie had been cast together in The Great O’Malley, a police drama slated for direction by William Dieterle. The movie would star Pat O’Brien in his familiar incarnation as a cop. “We get third and fourth billing,” Sheridan told him.

  “Who got the second lead?” Bogie asked.

  “Sybil Jason,” she said.

  He’d heard of this child star. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, she was being groomed by Warner Brothers as a rival to the box office champ, Shirley Temple.

  On the set he met this child prodigy, who had learned to play the piano at the age of two. “Would you like to see me do my impression of Maurice& Chevalier?” she asked Bogie.

  “Later, kid,” he said.

  Sybil didn’t achieve the success at Warners that Jack Warner had hoped for, and the following year, he didn’t renew her contract.

  Ironically, her last two films were for Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox. He cast her opposite her rival, Shirley Temple, in The Little Princess (1939) and The Blue Bird (1940). Sybil abandoned the screen after that. “I had my fifteen minutes of fame,” she later recalled.

  Born in the Rhineland of Germany, director William Dieterle was stiff and formal with Bogie when they first met on the set. He wore a large hat and white gloves. Throughout the entire course of the shoot, he would remove neither of them. His striking good looks had earned him roles in German films during the 1920s. He’d directed his first film in 1923, Der Mensch am Wege, which had co-starred a young Marlene Dietrich.

  In 1930, he emigrated to Hollywood, where he took a job directing German versions of American films. His first movie, The Last Flight (1931), is today called “a forgotten masterpiece” by critics.

  During the span of his long career, he would direct five different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, including Paul Muni, Brian Aherne, Walter Huston, Jennifer Jones, and Joseph Schildkraut. Alas, Bogie would not be a member of that distinguished list.

  The Great O’Malley would be one of Dieterle’s less distinguished efforts. Bogie wasn’t impressed with the script, calling it “another cop picture for Warners. It was terrible, just& another of those dramas we turned out at that goddamn sweat-shop. Pat O’Brien was very good.& But then Pat is never bad.”

  “My fucking role’s too small,” Sheridan told Bogie. “Jack Warner said he cast me as a schoolmarm because I’d once studied to become a teacher. My Southern Baptist parents, real zealots, still want me to become a school teacher. They warned me that I’ll perish in hell if I play bad women on the screen.”

  In the film, Bogie played a jobless veteran driven to crime to feed his family. His most dramatic& scene occurs when he tries to pawn his war medals for money to buy food. The surly pawnkeeper says, “Ten dollars for this junk? Why don’t you go on relief?”

  Exploding in fury, Bogie responds, “The only things left to remind me I was once a man and you call them junk!” This is but a prelude to robbery and a vicious attack on the pawnbroker.

  Later, the Warners publicity department got it all wrong when they advertised the film as AN IRISH COP VS. A GUN-MAD KILLER!

  During the course of the filming, Bogie slipped away with Sheridan for “some Texas gal loving,” as she called it. In just a short time, she’d become his confidante.

  He told her, “My marriage is all but over. Mary can’t find work in Hollywood, and she’s returning to New York to look for work on Broadway. But the die is cast. Guess who I’ll be working with in my next film? Mayo Methot herself. Oh, yes, and the star of this thing is what’s her face?”

  “Bette Davis,” Sheridan said. “I heard the news this morning.”

  ***

  Ever since his childhood days on Lake Canandaigua, Bogie had been devoted to sailing. With his increase in salary, he was able to purchase a 36-foot cruiser that he docked at the Newport Beach Yacht Club.

  His “first mate” on these weekend trips, most often a sail to Catalina Island, was Methot. She talked often about marriage, urging him to file for divorce against Mary the way she’d filed for divorce against Percy Morgan. Finally, during a drunken sailing expedition heading back to Newport Beach, Bogie broke down and agreed to marry her.

  Just before Christmas in 1937, shooting began on Marked Woman, directed by Lloyd Bacon, with Bette Davis getting star billing followed by Bogie in the second lead. The film also starred Lola Lane. Methot was cast into the small role of Estelle Porter, getting seventh billing. Even in such a
small role, Marked Woman would remain her most famous& film appearance.

  After reading the script, Bogie told Bacon, “This movie is about a bunch of whores.”

  “I know,” Bacon said. “But because of the Production Code, we have to call them hostesses at a shady nightclub. But the plot is based on a notorious prostitution ring run by Lucky Luciano, the Sicilian gangster.”

  For greater verisimilitude, Bacon hired one of Luciano’s henchmen, Herman (Hymie) Marks, to play the bit part of a gangster named Joe. Hal Wallis, the producer, objected, claiming that no one would believe Hymie as a hood. “He looks like a Presbyterian deacon.”

  San Jose-born Bacon was one of the Warners’ “work horse” directors during the 1930s. As an actor, he had been known for supporting Charlie Chaplin in such films as The Tramp (1915).

  Between 1920 and 1955, he directed more than 100 films, and would helm Bogie again in the immediate future.

  Bacon is known today for directing Knute Rockne—All American, starring Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper.”& Even& during the Depression, Bacon was the highest paid director at Warners, pulling in $200,000 annually when many Americans were in breadlines.

  Thomas Dewey, as District Attorney for Manhattan, became a household word in the 1930s when he tackled organized crime in New York City. His greatest achievement was the conviction of Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano, the boss of organized crime throughout the entire city. On the side, Luciano ran one of the largest prostitution rings in American history.

  Born in Sicily in 1897, Luciano became the father of modern organized crime in America and the first official boss of the modern Genovese crime family. Deported from the United States, he died in 1962.

  In the wake of Luciano’s conviction, Dewey became more deeply entrenched in national politics. In 1944, he ran as a candidate for U.S. president against Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he did again in 1948 against Harry S Truman.

  Audiences who knew Bogie because of his role as a brooding gangster in The Petrified Forest were shocked to see him cast as a district attorney modeled on Dewey in Marked Woman. Viewed today, one scene is particularly laughable, when Bogie lectures one of the “hostesses,” (in this case, Bette Davis) about what a bad girl she is.

  In Marked Woman, t he role of Johnny Vanning, the pimp, was portrayed by Eduardo Cianelli. In his role, he terrorizes the women who work for him, forcing them into submission at his nightclub.

  Ciannelli had a brilliant career in films, some 150 cinematic appearances. In time, he would work with major stars, including Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Anthony Quinn, and Marlon Brando. Bogie and he would eventually team again for Passage to Marseille (1944).

  Meeting Bogie on the set, Davis was eager to tell him about her ongoing lawsuit against Warner Brothers, in which she’d protested the inferior quality of scripts she’d been assigned. In court, Davis had testified that her seven-year contract with Warner’s was “a form of slavery.”

  In fighting the suit brought by their major star, the attorneys for Warner Brothers told the judge that Davis “was a naughty, overpaid young woman.”

  Even though she eventually lost the lawsuit, she was promised better scripts. The first of these was Marked Woman, whose dramatic possibilities appealed to her.

  In Marked Woman, a young Jane Bryan was cast as Davis’ kid sister. As the plot unfolds, Bryan is killed by the mob, which incites Davis to swear vengeance.

  During the making of the film, Davis adopted Bryan and protected her as if she was her own daughter. She was worried that a “wolf-like Bogart” might attempt to seduce Bryan. Davis spent all her time with her between shots, talking, eating, or having a smoke. “I have made her my new discovery,” she announced to Bogie, “and I want you, and all the other horny bastards on the set, to keep away from Jane.”

  So mesmerized was Davis by Bryan that she used her influence to secure future roles for her in Davis’ upcoming films, including Kid Galahad, The Sisters, and The Old Maid.

  “What? Saving her for yourself? So, those rumors about Barbara Stanwyck and you are true?”

  “You are a slimy beast, Bogart,” Davis said. “But we have to get through this picture together.”

  “Your little sister is safe with me,” he said. “She’s far too demure for my taste. Besides, I have Methot to keep me company.”

  “Yes, a broken-down old hag with a drinking problem,” Davis said. “Just your type. Now get out of my dressing room, I’ve got to make up my face.”

  “That should take all day,” he said before she shoved him out the door.

  Bryan had had a brief fling with Ronald Reagan when they made Girls on Probation (1938). But when she met Jane Wyman and they worked together on Brother Rat (1938), “I surrendered him to Wyman. They made an ideal couple.”

  After Bryan met and married the love of her life, Justin Dart, the head of the Rexall drug empire, she left films. Dart made his first million during Prohibition by cornering the market in bourbon and selling it as “prescription whiskey.”

  Both Bryan and her husband were instrumental in getting Ronald Reagan, the aspirant politician, to run for governor of California and later President of the United States. An ardent Republican, the drug king in time became one of the most trusted members of President Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet.”

  For an actress who once thought of herself as young and beautiful, Mayo Methot in Marked Woman was assigned an unattractive role. In the film, the boss of the nightclub where she wants to work eyes her up and down, and is most skeptical. “Kind of old, ain’t ya?” he asks her.

  Methot’s appearance in the film came across as hard and crass, and she looked particularly whorish. She earned $2,500 for five weeks of work on Marked Woman, with Bogie, a salaried player, taking in about $3,200.

  Davis, in her role of a beaten-up whore attacked by a gangster’s goons, decided to make herself look grotesque. She went to her doctor, F. Le Grand Noyes, and asked him to bandage her as if she’d been brutally beaten.

  Swathed in bandages, she showed up at Bogie’s dressing room. “How do I look, Bogart?”

  He looked at her abrasions, swollen black eyes, horribly broken nose, and miles of bloody gauze. “Didn’t you used to be the glamorous Bette Davis?”

  “Even playing a whore, Bette comes off as a lady,” Bacon told Bogie. “Now take your bitch, that Mayo Methot—she’s one dame who could play a whore.”

  Bogie slugged Bacon, but since the two men were under contract, they made up the next day so the picture could continue.

  In the film, as a crusading District Attorney, Bogie persuades clip-joint party girl (Davis) to testify against her mobster boss after her innocent sister is accidentally murdered during the course of one of his unsavory “parties.”

  There is a memorable scene at the end of the picture when Bogie, just for a moment, shows that he might be interested in pursuing Davis’s character.

  When she saw the movie, Davis told Bogie, “I’m the one to watch. I go full throttle in this one. Frankly, I think as the DA you were a little slow and more than a little dull.”

  Bacon fell ill during the shoot, and Jack Warner called in Michael Curtiz to fill in. After watching Curtiz at work, Bogie told Davis, “That illiterate is one hell of a pain in the ass to work with. He devours actors and spits out the bones.” Unknown to him at the time, Bogie was talking about the future director of Casablanca.

  One of the stars of Marked Woman was Lola Lane, of the famous Lane sisters. Years later at his favorite Hollywood watering hole, Romanoff’s, Bogie told Peter Lorre that, “My claim to fame one day will be that I seduced each of the Lane sisters.”

  Since Bogie was a kidder, he perhaps exaggerated, though Ann Sheridan later claimed that he “might have gotten around to at least Lola and Priscilla.” He made pictures with all of these Lanes.

  Three of the Lane Sisters—Lola, Priscilla, and Rosemary—achieved success in the 1920s and 30s as a singing act. They later made
a series of successful films, including Four Wives in 1939.

  In Marked Woman, Lola played the role of Gaby, a prostitute in a clip joint working alongside fellow prostitutes Davis and Methot.

  Lois Lane, the comic book and TV character who evolved into Superman’s girlfriend, was inspired by the name of the real-life actress Lola Lane, who played “Torchy Blane,” a fictional reporter in one of her 1930s films for Warners.

  Although Davis consistently praised Marked Woman, particularly her performance within it, Bogie referred to it for years after as “just another Warners potboiler.”

  ***

  Bogie put through an early morning call to Bette Davis after he’d received the script for the boxing movie Kid Galahad, s cheduled for direction by the ferocious Michael Curtiz and starring Edward G. Robinson.

  “Have you read this piece of crap?” Bogie asked. “It’s a joke. You’re to play a woman called Fluff, and I’m to be a guy named Turkey.”

  “At least I know how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” Davis said. “That’s something that can never be said for you, Mr. Bogart.” She abruptly put down the phone.

  Bogie read the script one more time. It was a totally unsympathetic role for him, that of a crooked promoter in the boxing game. To make matters even more difficult for him, word was spreading that Jack Warner did not plan to renew his contract.

  Budgeted at $416,000, Kid Galahad went into production on January 25, 1937. Robinson had agreed to do the picture for $50,000, with Davis taking home $18,000. The scandal involved the size of the paycheck that went to Wayne Morris.

  Desperate for a movie role, Morris accepted a fee of only $66 a week for his appearance in the film, even though he’d been cast into the title role. For the entire picture, he was paid $396. When fan letters started pouring in, he immediately demanded that a raise in pay accompany whatever new roles he’d be assigned. “In Kid Galahad, I was green to the business. Back then, even a fifty dollar bill looked like good money to me. But I was a fast learner in the ways of Hollywood. And even though we didn’t particularly like each other, Bogie gave me some good advice about money.”