Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  Director Lloyd Bacon called Bogie with the news. “Jack Warner wants you to do another gangster movie. You play the most powerful gangland chief in Manhattan wanting to muscle in on the trucking business.”

  “It sounds like something from the bio of George Raft, but I guess he turned it down. What’s the billing?”

  “You’re the fucking star,” Bacon said.

  “At least that’s an improvement.” Who’s the leading pussy?”

  “Gloria Dickson,” Bacon said.

  “Never heard of her.”

  “It’ll be good working with you again, Bogie,” Bacon said, “without that Irish drunk hamming it up.” The director was referring to Bogie’s San Quentin picture, in which he’d co-starred with Pat O’Brien and Ann Sheridan.

  The film, Racket Busters, was based on Thomas E. Dewey’s investigations of organized crime in New York City, specifically as they applied to New York City’s trucking businesses. George Brent, Bette Davis’ frequent leading man, was cast as Bogie’s co-star.

  Even before meeting him, Bogie had many reasons to dislike Brent, whom he derided as having all the excitement of a tube of paste. His main objection was that Brent had been the lover of Bette Davis ever since the making of So Big in 1932. In the years to come they made a series of pictures together including Golden Arrow in 1936.

  Brent was actually married to the star, Ruth Chatterton, and had little interest in Davis, who was still married to Ham Nelson. But Davis still managed to seduce him in her dressing room whenever they made a picture together.

  The same year that Racket Busters was released, Brent had been reduced to playing third lead after Davis and Henry Fonda in 1938.

  Suddenly, as Davis moved up as the number one star at Warner Brothers, Brent’s allure was fading at the box office, although he’d hang on for many years to come.

  Bogie had another reason to resent Brent. While casting was being considered by Jack Warner, Bacon had promoted Bogie to play the role of trucker Denny Jordan.

  The role of the male lead, an independent truck driver who later rats on the gangland bosses, was clearly the most sympathetic. Bacon cited Black Legion in which Bogie had played a similar role, and suggested he’d be excellent as Denny. Warner turned Bogie down, going for Brent instead.

  Since Bogie had to work with Brent, he decided to conceal his hostility and accept his invitation for a game, just assuming Brent meant a game of golf.

  Arriving at Brent’s home, he was directed to a rifle range out back, one which used focused beams of light from photo-electric cells instead of real bullets.

  Little tin rabbits painted in rainbow-hued colors raced across the target, but fell “dead” whenever Brent got a “bead” on one of them with the light from the photo gun.

  After about fifteen minutes of target practice, Bogie asked Brent, “Got something strong to drink?”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent listening to Brent discuss his role in IRA guerrilla fighting during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1922). He later fled Ireland with a bounty on his head.

  To end the day, Brent, a licensed pilot, took& Bogie on a sightseeing tour at sunset over the California coast.

  On the set the following week, Bogie met his co-star Gloria Dickson. “Where you from, kid?”

  “Pocatello, Idaho,” she said.

  “I thought Pocatello, Idaho, was a joke. I didn’t know that somebody actually came from there.”

  Later he said to Bacon, “The gal looks familiar. I must have seen her in something.”

  “She made an auspicious debut in They Won’t Forget,” Bacon said.

  “Yeah, I caught that one,” Bogie said. “But I was too busy watching Lana Turner’s tits bounce around in that tight sweater to pay attention to anything else.”

  Dickson had just gotten married to Perc Westmore, so he gave her wide berth, although he told Bacon that Dickson “is definitely fuckable. But I’ve got my own bottle blonde at home. Think I’ll sit this one out.”

  Bogie thought Dickson’s career would be short but not so tragic. In one of her last performances in Crime Doctor’s Strangest Case, she played the wife of a man who habitually started accidental fires with carelessly discarded cigarettes. Ironically, within just two short years, she would die in a house fire caused by a carelessly discarded cigarette.

  Her footnote in history? Her image was the first natural color photograph in history to be transmitted by International News Pictures from Hollywood to New York.

  After she’d died, Bogie was waiting in a dentist office, thumbing through some old movie magazines. He was surprised to find Dickson on the cover. The title of the article was THE LUCKIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD.

  Racket Busters almost became Bogie’s last movie. His life was saved by the quick-thinking crew. As part of his portrayal of a racketeer in the story, he was instructed to stand on a platform with a bucket of highly toxic sulphuric acid, waiting to throw it over a truck of garden produce as it drove by. The director had ordered that real acid be used because it would raise smoke as soon as it hit the produce.

  Just at the moment he was to toss the acid, Bogie lost his footing and fell into the moving truck with the bucket of acid over him. Had it hit his face, he would have been permanently disfigured for life.

  Rushing to the scene, the prop men ripped off all his clothes, leaving him jaybird naked. He watched in horror as his clothing seemed to burn to pieces. Someone finally thought to bring him a blanket to cover up his nudity.

  The doctor on call at Warners examined him for wounds or damage, but amazingly he had emerged unscathed from the lethal acid.

  Instead of allowing him the rest of the day off, Bacon ordered that the scene be re-shot. Dry ice would be used instead of sulphuric acid.

  On the set, Bogie couldn’t help needling Penny Singleton. “In seventh billing, huh?” he asked. “Just a few months ago you had star billing over me in Men Are Such Fools.”

  “No gentleman would ever point that out to me,” she said.

  “I’m not a gentleman,” he said.

  “That was obvious from the first day I met you,” she said.

  “I hear you just made a movie called Blondie where you’re the wife of Dagwood Bumstead. And you once told me you wanted to be a serious actress.”

  “Didn’t you set out to be a serious actor?” she asked. “Now look at you. A fourth rate George Raft.”

  “Okay, Singleton, I think we’ve traded enough barbs for one day. I’ve got to hunt up George Brent and needle him. You know, I’m billed over him?”

  “Why I’ll never know,” Singleton said, turning and walking away from him. She paused and looked back at him. “Why can’t you be a gentleman like Ronald Reagan.”

  “Because ladies like a man who treats them rough,” he said.

  “Then I’m no lady,” she said.

  “I’d already figured that out for myself.”

  “Oh, let me out of here,” she said. “You just won’t let go.”

  “Not when I’ve got hold of a hot pair of tits,” he said.

  “You! You’re just insufferable. I don’t know how Mayo Methot puts up with you.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  That day he had lunch with the mustachioed character actor Walter Abel. He had a favor to ask. Abel was married at the time to the concept harpist Marietta Bitter.

  Bogie began with an apology. “Of course, there’s no money in it but I’d like your wife to play her harp at my wedding to Mayo Methot.”

  “I’m sure she’d do it,” Abel said. “I’ll ask her.” Bogie ordered ham and eggs, Abel preferring the blue plate special, beef stew. “You know, Bogie, you and I are the same age, but I just don’t seem to get the star parts like you. What have you got that I don’t have?”

  “Three extra inches, your wife tells me.”

  “You just can’t give up that damn needling, can you?” Abel asked. “Not even when you’re asking a favor.”

  “I’m a sic
ko.”

  During the course of his long career, Abel would appear with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, ranging from Bette Davis in Mr. Skeffington (1944) to Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County (1957).

  At the end of the shoot, Brent came up and shook Bogie’s hand. “It’s been real swell working with you. I hope I’ll have the pleasure again.”

  “Perhaps Bette Davis will cast us in her next picture where we’ll be two beaux fighting over her honeypot,” Bogie said. “Incidentally, speaking of that honeypot—it’s ginger if you remember—Bette told me you were a lousy lay.”

  ***

  At long last, Michael Curtiz, future director of Casablanca, brought Bogie together with one of his three arch rivals on the Warners lot, James Cagney. Thanks partly to his status as a major box office star, Cagney, of course, had been awarded the lead in Angels with Dirty Faces, with Pat O’Brien coming in second. Bogie and his friend, Ann Sheridan, had the third and fourth leads.

  Bogie was also reunited with the Dead End Kids, Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, and Billy Halop. He preferred to spend his time with Billy and not the other boys.

  Curtiz, riding the rest of his fame, at first objected to doing a gangster movie. But Hal Wallis insisted. “I know you conflicted with Cagney while making Jimmy the Gent with the little fart, but you also have the balls to keep that one in line.”

  As critic Robert Sklar put it, casting Cagney as the lead criminal instead of Bogie gave the menacing figure “a violent comic energy, not a morose lethargy.”

  Bogie played James Frazier, a crooked lawyer fronting for the mob. Wallis was hoping with the Dirty Faces movie to revive the gangster genre, which had catalyzed a stream of box office hits for the studio throughout the 1930s.

  Bogie’s first words to Cagney were, “No longer in drag, huh? Don’t mess with me or I might spread the word around the lot about how you got your start in show business.”

  Bogie and Cagney would never be friends—they were far too jealous of each other—but they tried to amuse each other with stories of their work at Warner Brothers.

  At one point, Cagney related to Bogie what it was like making the film Boy Meets Girl (also set for release in 1938) with sexy, ‘dumb-blonde’ Marie Wilson.

  Cagney knew that Bogie had appeared with Wilson in China Clipper. “Marie was required in one scene to sit on my lap, and the director had to shoot and reshoot,” Cagney claimed. “I kept& getting a hard-on. Marie later told everybody, ‘Sitting on Jimmy’s lap was like being on top& of a flagpole.’”

  Bogie was known for delivering the last word before he walked away from a person. “That’s a good one, Cagney. But I heard Howard Hughes turned down a loan-out offer from Warner Brothers because he said you’re ‘nothing but a runt.’ As for exact measurements, I guess I’d better ask Noël Coward.”

  “You know about that, you mother fucker?”

  Bogie and Cagney made up the next day. After having recently been suspended by the studio, Cagney was eager to make this picture work. He viewed his role of Rocky Sullivan as a sort of comeback picture for him.

  “I told Wallis that I was tired of doing just another gangster picture, and I wanted to make this one something special,” Cagney told Bogie.

  What Bogie didn’t confide to Cagney was that he’d lobbied behind his back to play the role of Rocky himself.

  “I haven’t read the script yet,” Bogie& said. “But I assume you’ll kill me in the final reel.”

  “You got that right, kid,” Cagney said.

  “I hope you go to the electric chair for it,” Bogie said.

  “I do, but it’ll be the most dramatic last mile in the history of cinema.”

  Pat O’Brien, in the first of his roles as a fighting priest, played Father Connolly, who struggles to keep the Dead End Kids from pursuing a life of crime. Cagney, a hero to the boys in the neighborhood, is trying to drag them along to hell with himself.

  During his direction, Curtiz continued to butcher the English language. Cliff King, the still cameraman, asked Bogie to pose for some publicity stills.

  Bogie was a bit fidgety during the shoot, and King asked him to “Please try to keep still while I make the picture.”

  Curtiz overheard him, “You bum,” the director shouted. “When you make the movies you’re still, and when you take the stills, you move.”

  In one explosive scene, real bullets were used, based on direct orders from Curtiz. Regrettably, neither Curtiz nor any of his assistants bothered to tell Bogie. When Bogie found out, he physically attacked Curtiz but two grips pulled him away before he could harm the director.

  “I know you don’t like the word shit, so I’ll say crap.” It was Ann Sheridan talking over lunch. “I’m trying to make the best of this part but my character isn’t well defined. Rowland Brown [the creator of the original story] spends far too much time cocksucking than he does developing my character. What can I do?”

  “Collect your paycheck and go on to your next picture,” Bogie said.

  As it turned out, Sheridan wasn’t the little wren she feared she was. Angels With Dirty Faces marked her first big featured role in an A-list picture, and a turning point in her career.

  During the making of the film, George Hurrell released his soon-to-be famous photographs of her, and they were published across the country. The publicists at Warners immediately launched a massive campaign, releasing these pictures in magazines and newspapers.

  Bogie kept a cheesecake picture of Sheridan posing as the Oomph Girl in his dressing room until Methot visited and ripped it down before hitting him over the head with a liquor bottle, which caused a minor concussion.

  During the shoot, the Dead End Kids terrorized the set. One afternoon, they held Bogie to the ground and stripped off his trousers. However, when they tangled with Cagney, he fought back, bloodying Gorcey’s nose. After that, they gave him wide berth, “Don’t fuck with me,” Cagney had told them. “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen.”

  One day, Judy Garland showed up on the set for a rendezvous with Billy Halop, whom she was still dating infrequently. Bogie generously lent them his dressing room for their tryst.

  Afterward Garland came to him, “Oh, Mr. Bogie, a girl can’t make up her mind. Should it be Billy? Should it be Mickey Rooney? I just don’t know.”

  “If I was a gal, I’d go for the one with the biggest dick.

  “That would be Billy, of course, and he’s far handsomer, but Mickey is such a delight to be with.”

  “Play the field,” he told her.

  “I’ve got another problem,” she said. “I think Louis B. Mayer actually wants to take me to bed. What can I do? He’s the boss.”

  “Honey, do what every smart gal in Hollywood has done since movies began,” he said. “Lie down on that casting couch and endure it. Just five minutes of horror, and it’ll all be over. You’ve got the talent. You might become the biggest star at MGM. So go for it.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Bogie, for making up my mind for me. I’ll let you know how it works out.”

  “When all these guys have broken you in real good, you come to me for some real loving,” he said.

  “I will, I will, I promise,” she said.

  “After these amateurs have worked you over, you can learn how a man does it.”

  Cagney was right about the movie’s final dramatic scene, perhaps the most memorable he ever shot. Just before his execution, Father Connolly begs him to become a sniveling coward on the way to the chair. That way, he’ll no longer be a hero to the Dead End Kids.

  At first Cagney refuses his old friend. But at the last minute, he breaks down and becomes hysterical. Movie-goers over the years have pondered exactly what was going on in this final scene. Did the character Cagney was playing really turn yellow, and did he decide in the final moments of his life to give in to Father Connolly’s last plea to him? Regardless of his motive, he destroyed himself as a role model for the young, potential criminals in waiting.

&n
bsp; This is the movie that inspired Cagney impersonators. He twisted his neck, lifted his shoulders, and bit his bottom lip which became his signature act. He said he learned these ticks from a pimp in Hell’s Kitchen who used to stand on his street corner.

  Reviewer Harrison Carroll claimed that Angels With Dirty Faces “is the most grimly realistic gangster film that has come out of Hollywood since the early days of the cycle.”

  After the film opened, Cagney walked off with honors, winning the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor. In addition, he was nominated for an Oscar.

  One film critic claimed if there was only one Cagney film to place in a time capsule, it should be Angels With Dirty Faces.

  Somehow Bogie got lost in all the buzz over Cagney. But Bogie was left with a steely determination to star with Barbara Stanwyck in Golden Boy. To do that, he had to renew his relationship with the Steel Magnolia herself.

  ***

  As she made preparations to marry Kenneth, Mary opened on Broadway in the comedy Spring Thaw. Appearing opposite her was her long-time lover, Roland Young.

  One drunken night, Bogie called his old friend, Kenneth, when he found out he was making plans to marry Mary. “I keep hoping Mary will change her mind and come back to me before our divorce becomes final.”

  “Surely you don’t mean that,” Kenneth said in protest. “You never really loved Mary. I should have married her back in the 20s in New York. Tell me you don’t mean what you just said.”

  “Of course, I mean it,” Bogie said. “Have you ever heard me say something I don’t mean?”

  “Yeah,” Kenneth said, not concealing the anger in his voice. “You didn’t mean it when you told me I was your best friend.” He put down the phone.

  Bogie’s best friends continually speculated that he was not in love with any of his three wives. Spencer Tracy once said that “in Helen Menken he found a mother figure. Young boy dominated by a strong mother ends up marrying mother. Classic case.”