Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Finally, over another drink, he asked Tracy, “Are you sure that Clark Gable is& not going to play Rhett Butler? What about Gary Cooper?”

  With a heavy heart, Bogie awaited his next acting assignment.

  No longer a gangster, Bogie found himself cast as the Deputy Commissioner of Correction, running a reformatory school in Crime School (1938). His leading lady this time was the unknown Gale Page, with Billy Halop, one of the Dead End Kids, co-starring. Once again, Bogie was appearing with the Dead End Kids, not only Billy but Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey. Vincent Sherman, who would become an A-list director and helm pictures for Bogie, was the co-author of the screenplay along with Crane Wilbur.

  Lewis Seiler, the director, rushed to welcome Bogie to the set as if he were a major star. “At least there’s somebody on the Warner lot who respects me,” he told Billy.

  Bogie sized Seiler up as a lightweight and determined that he would more or less have to direct himself. Seiler had come to Hollywood in 1919 as a gag man and had worked in two-reel comedies before hooking up with Tom Mix during the 1920s in a series of Westerns. Before he left Hollywood, he would attach his name to two A-list pictures, Pittsburgh (1942), with Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne, and Guadalcanal Diary (1943), with Preston Foster. Between 1923 and 1958, he would direct 88 films, most of them undistinguished.

  Heading to Los Angeles from the northwest—Spokane, Washington, to be exact— Gale Page became one of Bogie’s less distinguished leading ladies. Her most famous role would be with Ronald Reagan, not Bogie. In 1940 she appeared in Knute Rockne—All American.

  In a phone call after the first week of shooting, Joan Blondell asked Bogie, “Have& you already fallen in love with your leading lady?”

  “Gale’s nice enough, a pretty brunette, but much too wholesome for me. Privately, Seiler and I have agreed that she was cast just for decoration in this potboiler. I predict she’ll have a short career before retiring to the kitchen as a dutiful housewife rattling pots and pans.”

  Leo Gorcey was “full of himself” in Bogie’s words, especially in the commissary when he was bragging that he’d played Joan Crawford’s brother in Mannequin. “I’m not gonna be ‘Spit’ in the Dead End Kids forever.”

  “Did Crawford seduce you?” Bogie asked.

  “Well, not really,” Gorcey said.

  “Then you’re not going to be a star. Before you can become a really big star in Hollywood, you’ve got to get fucked by Crawford.”

  Although Bogie had worked previously with Billy Halop in Dead End, he didn’t really get to know him until they made Crime School together. What caught his attention was one reviewer who called Billy “the next Humphrey Bogart.” Bogie’s response to that was, “the original Humphrey Bogart is still around and isn’t going to Forest Lawn any time soon.”

  When he really met Billy and had some time to talk to him between takes, he actually came to like the kid. “He brought out the father side of me,” he told Blondell. “I don’t plan to have any kids in life, so Billy is the next best thing.”

  Billy had been one of the original Dead End Kids on Broadway in that stage hit, Dead End, in 1935. Samuel Goldwyn had brought him to Hollywood. In the early 1940s Billy abandoned his association with the other Dead End Kids, seeking a career of his own. To his regret, he could land parts only in B pictures.

  Even as early as the period when he met Bogie, when he was still a teenager, Billy was already battling alcoholism. In the decades to come, Bogie would stand on the sidelines, watching his protégé through a series of money problems and marital disasters.

  Billy seemed pleased with the salary he was pulling in for Crime School : $275 a week. “But they’re gonna raise me to $650 a week—at least that’s what I was told,” he said to Bogie.

  One night Billy’s car had to be hauled off to the garage. “Damn,” he told Bogie. “I’ve been screwing this hot chick. She’s a singer and has a gig tonight at this dance joint in Santa Monica.”

  “Is it just for teenagers?” Bogie asked.

  “No, it’s for grownups.”

  “Well, my girlfriend, Mayo Methot, likes to dance,” Bogie said. “Tell you what. I’ll take you and your gal to Santa Monica, and we’ll have some fun. People seeing us together will think we’re your parents serving as chaper-ones.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  With Mayo in the front seat with him, and Billy in the back, Bogie drove to the house of Billy’s girlfriend.

  The girl must have been looking out the window. Billy didn’t have to ring the doorbell. She came running out to the car.

  Even younger than Billy, this teenager was a bundle of nervous energy. Without waiting for Billy to introduce her, she jumped into the back seat. “Hi, I’m Judy Garland. I know all about you from Spencer Tracy. He took my cherry when I was only fifteen.”

  “Now that’s how I like a gal to introduce herself,” Bogie said. He’d never met a teenager like Garland before. Already, even though she was just breaking into Hollywood, she gave the impression of a battle-scarred show business veteran. Later he’d say, “When Judy sang ‘Born in a Trunk,’ I believed her.”

  “I lost my virginity to dear old dad,” Methot chimed in as a rejoinder to Garland’s revelation. “I was only fourteen.”

  “Now let’s keep it cooled down,” Bogie said as a warning to Methot. He couldn’t help but notice that she was already drunk. She’d taken a flask so they’d have liquid refreshment during the long drive to Santa Monica.

  As the evening evolved, neither of “The Battling Bogarts” were able to fulfill their duties as “chaperones” who’d drive their “charges” back home. Billy took the wheel and delivered the smashing drunk chaperones back to Bogie’s home, leaving his car parked in front. He and Garland took a taxi back to where they were going.

  “That kid’s got something,” Bogie said about Judy Garland the next morning over coffee with Methot. “I found it thrilling to hear her sing. She really got to me. I think she’s going to topple that Deanna Durbin from her throne.”

  “Deanna Durbin,” Methot said with contempt. “She may be the favorite singer of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, but I can’t stand the little stuck-up bitch.”

  Later, when Crime School was released, Bogie told Spencer Tracy and Joan Blondell that “I am seriously pissed off.” Because of the growing popularity of the Dead End Kids, they received top billing over him in Crime School. In posters advertising the film, the names of the Dead End Kids appeared in typeface larger than Bogie’s in movie posters and newspaper advertising.

  ***

  Most mornings, usually over coffee, Bogie was a faithful reader of Sidney Skolsky’s column “The Gospel Truth.” In one of its editions he read: “Humphrey Bogart will marry Mayo Methot in September when his divorce from Mary Phillips (sic) is finalized. She will marry Kenneth McKenna (sic), who was formerly married to Kay Francis, who will marry Baron Barenekow.”

  “At least Skolsky spelled my name right,” Bogie said.

  Bette Davis phoned Bogie that week with the news. “I got the news before you did,” she said. “Warners has just informed me that you and I will be co-starring in a new film together, with me getting star billing, of course. It’s called Men Are Such Fools. I haven’t seen the script yet, but I just adore the title.”

  Two weeks later, Bogie still hadn’t received a copy of the script. Instead, he got a call from Joan Blondell. “Duckie, it looks like we’re going to be starring in a new film together. It’s called Men Are Such Fools.”

  “What about a certain Miss Bette Davis?” he asked.

  “Oh, she’s out the door. I’m in.”

  By the end of the week, Bogie learned that Blondell was out of the picture too, the lead female role now going to Priscilla Lane.

  When Warner Brothers finally contacted Bogie that his next picture was to be Men Are Such Fools, and the director was to be Busby Berkeley, his reaction was, “You’ve got to be& kidding. I don’t wear feathers and boas, and I don
’t dance, at least not on camera.”

  Warners was insistent, however, claiming he’d be with such previous “film mates” as Penny Singleton and Priscilla Lane. The catch was that Bogie was assigned the third lead. The star of the picture would be Wayne Morris. “The big lug,” Bogie said. “If you look good on camera, you can be dumb as a carrot but shoot right to stardom.”

  In addition to Singleton, Bogie’s other love interest in the film would be Mona Barrie, playing a sardonic vamp. Before hooking up with Lane and Singleton again, Bogie met the English-born Barrie, who’d begun her career as a teenage ballerina.

  He told his director, Berkeley, “Talk about a kid who’s going nowhere in pictures. She’ll get two or three more film jobs, and it’ll be all over for that one. The only woman she can play on camera is the one who loses the man.”

  It’s true that Barrie’s career would fade into the setting sun by the early 1950s, but in the meantime she would appear in secondary roles in some fifty motion pictures, earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  Morris, as the film’s romantic lead, was being groomed as Warner’s answer to MGM’s Robert Taylor. Newspapers were billing him as “Hollywood’s latest hearththrob.”

  “You’ve worked with Morris before in Kid Galahad,” Berkeley said to Bogie. “Do you think he can carry this picture as the male lead?”

  “I think if you tossed Morris a football, he could run to the goalpost,” Bogie said. “As an actor, he’s tall and blond and some say handsome. I also hear he’s got a big dick.”

  “The first qualifications are just fine,” Berkeley said. “But I don’t get that about the big dick. We can’t show that on camera.”

  “Why not?” Bogie asked. “The day will come in film when you can. Why not be the first? Also showing big dicks on the screen will increase attendance from women and homosexual guys.”

  “Bogie, you’re such a kidder.”

  Based on a magazine article by Faith Baldwin, the plot of Men Are Such Fools was weak. Lane played a woman who wanted both a career and a husband simultaneously, with Morris playing her spouse, an ex-football star. Bogie was cast into the role of a sleazy advertising big shot who will help Lane’s career if she’ll be “nice” to him.

  Bogie had initially thought he’d despise Berkeley on sight. But the two men bonded, each finding that the other was a drinking man. Although he’d reigned as one of the most creative directors in Hollywood, Berkeley was late into his career and deep into alcoholism when he made Men Are Such Fools.

  “If I recall, and I do, Busby and Bogie drank a lot during the shooting of that picture,” said Priscilla Lane.

  Although much of Hollywood thought Berkeley was gay because of his outlandish musical extravaganzas, he was a notorious womanizer.

  Eddie Cantor said, after seeing Golden Diggers in 1937, “Only a flamer would feature 75 helmet-wearing dancers carrying drums and flags with 50 oversized white rocking chairs, each one big enough for three.”

  Berkeley admitted to Bogie that he went from woman to woman, but had nothing but failed relationships. “I can’t satisfy a woman, yet I lust after them.”

  “Sounds like you got a real problem there,” Bogie said, embarrassed at hearing such a personal revelation.

  Bogie told Berkeley he drank because he wanted to, but Berkeley said he did it to control his nervousness. He’d been through several highly traumatic experiences in 1935, his divorce from his fourth wife, Merna Kennedy, being the smallest of his problems.

  He’d attended a party thrown by William Koenig to celebrate the completion of In Caliente (1935). On the way back home, he crashed into two cars.

  Defended by hotshot attorney Jerry Giesler, Berkeley was put on trial for murder, not manslaughter.

  Two passengers had been killed and five others seriously injured in the accident. Berkeley was badly cut and bruised. Hauled into court on a stretcher, he heard witnesses testify that they smelled liquor on his breath. They also testified that Berkeley whizzed down Roosevelt Highway, cut out of line, crashed headlong into one car, and then sideswiped another.

  After two trials, each ending in hung juries, Berkeley was acquitted in a third and final trial.

  “This Giesler sounds like a great phone number to have,” Bogie told& Berkeley. “I’m gonna need him when I finally get around to killing Mayo Methot.”

  On the set, Bogie and Singleton shared their mutual despair over the bomb they’d made, Swing Your Lady. She also confessed that, “Ronnie got away from me,” meaning Ronald Reagan. “Among others, he’s dating a gal named Jane Wyman.”

  Priscilla Lane came up to Bogie and said, “When you worked with my sister, Lola, on Marked Woman, she told me all about you, you wolf.”

  “Did she also tell you how good I am in bed?” he asked provocatively.

  “Watch those come-ons with me,” she said. “I look like a sweet and innocent gal, but I’m not. I might take you up on that.”

  Maybe she did take him up on his proposition. Bogie remains the only source of his claim to his pals that he seduced each of the three Lane sisters.

  He was yet to work with Rosemary Lane, but in a few months he’d be co-starring with her in The Oklahoma Kid.

  During the shoot, Bogie shifted his attention to a young Carole Landis, who got 17th billing.

  When he met her, he told her, “You are the most beautiful woman working in movies today.”

  “A compliment like that will get you anywhere,” Landis said.

  And so it did.

  Landis got the part in the movie because of Berkeley, who was her boyfriend and supporter.

  Landis agreed to date Bogie but they had to slip around and conduct a clandestine affair, since Berkeley was hot on her trail, wanting her to marry him, and Bogie had his stalker, the fierce and occasionally violent Mayo Methot.

  Without attempting to make Ann Sheridan jealous, Bogie told her that “Carole is my kind of woman. She broke into show business on the casting couch. That’s how a gal should do it.”

  He found Carole strikingly beautiful, but terribly insecure. She seemed to be searching for love and not finding it. He was certain that her extraordinary beauty would win her many men, but not one with whom she could ever build a lasting relationship.

  Their affair ended when the shoot was over. “It was brief, but memorable,” he said. “Call it An Affair to Remember.”

  Even though he no longer saw Landis, he remained intrigued by her.

  When he saw the final cut of Men Are Such Fools, producer Hal Wallis said, “I should have junked the whole thing. Let’s re-title it Hanky Panky in an Ad Agency.”

  No complete version of Men Are Such Fools exists today. In the footage that does exist, Landis does not appear. Just a few months earlier, she’d worked with the same stars, Wayne Morris and Priscilla Lane, on a picture called Love, Honor and Behave.

  In the years ahead, Bogie often speculated that he should have married Landis instead of Methot. He eagerly listened to any news of her tragic final years in the 1940s and was titillated by the streams of gossip swirling around her.

  In 1945, he heard that Landis was appearing in a Broadway musical called A Lady Said Yes.

  Jacqueline Susann, who later became one of the world’s best-selling novelists, had been cast into the same show. The talk of Broadway was that Landis and Susann were sustaining a torrid lesbian affair. When Susann wrote her blockbuster book, Valley of the Dolls, she based the character of Jennifer

  North on Landis.

  Bogie was deeply saddened by the death of Landis, presumably by suicide. The date was July 5, 1948, and at the time, Landis was only twenty-nine years old.

  Landis had spent her last night with her lover, actor Rex Harrison. On the final evening of her life, he had told her that he would not divorce his wife, Lilli Palmer, that he planned to resuscitate his marriage, and that he was ending his affair. Reportedly, Landis threatened Harrison that she’d reveal the details of their affair to the newspapers.<
br />
  A maid discovered her dead the next afternoon on the bathroom floor of her Pacific Palisades home. She’d overdosed on Seconal and had left two suicide notes, one for her mother,& the second for Harrison. The maid gave Harrison the note, and he destroyed it.

  At a coroner’s inquest, Harrison denied there was a second note and claimed he knew of no reason why Landis would consider killing herself.

  There was underground speculation that Harrison was responsible for Landis’ death, faking a suicide when it was actually murder. He apparently feared that a revelation of marital infidelity would destroy his stellar career.

  Bogie always maintained that Harrison—“that limey bastard”—had arranged for Landis’ death. “No one can convince me otherwise,” he said.

  ***

  Since he had no real star power at Warners, Bogie more or less had to take whatever roles he was assigned. Often he found out what role he was slated for by reading the trade papers. Previously known for its black-and-white films, Warners was moving more and more into Technicolor.

  He’d heard that George Brent and Wayne Morris were set to star in Valley of the Giants, a Peter B. Kyne story about lumber camps in the Northwest.

  On March 30, 1938, he picked up a newspaper paper and read an item by Elizabeth Yeaman. Brent was off the picture, having been replaced by Bogie himself. “Oh, no, not Wayne Morris again,” he shouted at Methot. “And, to top it off, my puss in Technicolor.”

  Yeaman predicted that Valley of the Giants “will be a bigger opportunity for Bogart, who has plugged along delivering villainous supporting roles, but always turning in a good performance.”

  Like so many previous casting announcements, this one fell through for Bogie. Valley of the Giants (1938) was filmed without him. Morris kept his starring role but Bogie’s part went to Frank McHugh, appearing in the film with Claire Trevor taking the female lead.