Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Originally, Dark Victory was to end on an anticlimactic scene with Bogie. According to the movie plot, after Judith’s death, her horse was seen winning a race while its trainer, Michael& (Bogie) was seen crying. Sneak preview audiences in Pasadena mocked Bogie’s tear-filled moment, and Goulding cut his scene.

  Dark Victory became a hit at the box office, and marked Davis’ third Oscar nomination in five years, although it did little for Bogie’s career. “I spent most of the movie shoveling horse shit,” he said mockingly, finally bringing himself to use the word shit.

  One reviewer noted that Bogie played his role with a “creepy kind of sexuality and seemed terribly miscast and out of place. As for Reagan, he does-n’t do much of anything but guzzle vast quantities of alcohol and generally embarrass himself.”

  Time Out London critic Tom Milne pronounced it “a Rolls-Royce in the weepie world.”

  Davis would lose the Oscar to Vivien Leigh that year for her portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, a role Davis had coveted.

  ***

  As a boost to his career, Bogie eagerly wanted to play the male lead in The Old Maid, which had been tailored as a vehicle for Bette Davis with a script based on a novel by Edith Wharton. Budgeted at $778,000, shooting on The Old Maid began on March 15, 1939, with Edmund Goulding directing.

  Bogie was scheduled to begin working five days later, even though both Goulding and Davis would have preferred Alan Marshall. With a dapper manner and a mustache, he was suave and sophisticated. He was often described as the poor man’s Ronald Colman or perhaps the discount version of David Niven. Bogie had met Marshall briefly and thought this Aussie-born actor was “a complete phony.”

  Hal Wallis, the producer of the movie, told Goulding he wanted “a George Brent or David Niven type” for the role. That Bogie was offered the part has never been fully explained, since no one seemed to want him.

  On his first day, Bogie went to call on Davis and found her furious at Goulding. He’d cast Miriam Hopkins, her dreaded scene-stealing enemy as the second female lead. “I should cut off Jack Warner’s balls,” Davis told Bogie. “That’s not all. I, the star, am getting paid $35,000 for this picture, while dear Miriam is hauling in $50,000.”

  In his first scene, Bogie knew he was bombing. Davis later recalled that unhappy Monday at Warners. “One of the funniest miscastings I remember was Humphrey Bogart playing a nineteenth-century romantic lover opposite me in The Old Maid. In the opening scene, he appeared in a flowing black cloak, running through a railroad station trying to catch up with me. As he pursued me along the platform, he looked so sinister that he seemed for all the world like a thug trying to kidnap me—rather than a hero trying to express his devotion.”

  “After watching him for a while, the entire cast became hysterical with laughter,” Davis said. “When we finally subsided, Bogie said to Goulding, ‘I guess you’ll have to get yourself another lover boy.’”

  Jack Warner interpreted Bogie’s first day on the set with comtempt. “He’s far too old and too ugly. Far too unconvincing to play the role of a man who wins the love of two women, especially two pussies like Hopkins and Davis. He’s fired.”

  “Hal Wallis was the first to suggest George Brent,” Warner said to Goulding. “Get Brent.”

  Goulding did just that.

  “Maybe I’m lucky,” Bogie told Methot. “Miriam and Bette will probably stage the biggest catfight in Hollywood history.”

  Privately, Bogie was furious, as his drinking increased and his fighting with Methot intensified.

  ***

  Bogie reunited with director Lewis Seiler, who had helmed him in King of the Underworld. Cast as a petty crook, Frank Wilson, Bogie also reunited with his friend Billy Halop of the Dead End Kids.

  The picture was You Can’t Get Away With Murder. On the first day on the set, he met up again with Gale Page, playing the female lead. “It’s old home week,” he said to her, having worked with her in Crime Schoo.

  “I detest Bette Davis,” she said.

  “The line forms on the right,” he told her.

  “Jack Warner was set to give me my big chance,” she said. “Then Miss Jezebel intervened at the last moment. The greedy bitch took the role from me in Dark Victory. Now I may never become a big movie star.”

  “You weren’t the only actress left out& in the cold,” Bogie said. “Even Tallulah Bankhead called me—she used to be my first wife’s girlfriend. She wanted to repeat her stage role in the film.”

  “What chance does a gal have up against such dragons as Bankhead and Davis?”

  “Not much,” he said. “They chew and devour little guys like us for breakfast.”

  Minus the Dead End Kids, Billy was cast as a hood from Hell’s Kitchen who idolizes a small-time gangster as played by Bogie.

  Years later, Bogie recalled very little about the film. “I played one nasty son of a bitch. Not a shred of humanity. Henry Travers, who played Pop in the movie, the Sing Sing librarian, got it right when he said my character is the kind of guy who’s so crooked if he tried to go straight he’d crack. The only good thing I could say about the movie was that it didn’t have Reagan or Bette Davis in it.”

  All he remembered later on was, “I got to meet Betty Grable, who I think had had an affair with Reagan—or was about to have one. Judy Garland had dropped Billy, and he’d taken up with this lady with the million dollar legs. I could go for Grable myself. She was one hot blonde. But I didn’t put the make on her since she had eyes only for Billy, and, of course, Jackie Coogan and Mickey Rooney and Desi Arnaz.”

  Grable had been kicked around Hollywood for more than a decade. Even today it is hard to understand why she became the hottest female box-office attraction of the 1940s. Maybe it was those array of pin-up pictures of hers that lined footlockers from Bataan to Okinawa.

  Bogie never got to know Grable, but he said he would have liked to. She married Jackie Coogan, the child actor and her co-star in Million Dollar Legs in 1939. Later she’d marry bandleader and trumpeter Harry James.

  “Honey,” she said to Bogie, “Coogan taught me more tricks than a whore learns in a whorehouse.”

  He’d already heard that when she was only fifteen, George Raft had taken her virginity. After that, she seemed to be giving it away—not only to Reagan, but to Tyrone Power, Victor Mature, Robert Stack, Artie Shaw, and lots of drivers she liked to fellate at truck stops.

  Reflecting on Grable, Bogie told his director, Seiler, “That’s what Mayo Methot should look like but doesn’t. If she keeps letting herself go, people are going to take her for my mother. As for George Raft, he gets all the good roles that I should be playing, and gets to the fifteen-year-old virgins like Grable before I’ve had my chance to deflower them.”

  When Bogie saw the ad for You Can’t Get Away with Murder, he was taken back. It read: SIXTY-THREE CENTS WORTH OF ELECTRICITY WOULD END THIS MENACE FOREVER!

  ***

  When Bogie heard he’d been cast as the third lead in The Roaring Twenties, to be directed by Raoul Walsh, he called his old friend from New York, Mark Hellinger. His short story, The World Moves On, had become the basis for The Roaring Twenties. “Listen, pal,” Bogie said. “I love you. But...”

  “But what?”

  “Let’s get together for a wet lunch at Romanoff’s.”

  When Hellinger entered Romanoff’s, all eyes turned to him. A nationally syndicated columnist, he looked like he’d somehow landed directly from Times Square. At table, Bogie was already deep into his second martini.

  Hellinger had always been proud of his links to the mob on both coasts, and he seemed trapped in some time capsule from the 1920s. Unlike the other men of his day, Hellinger wore a tight-fitting suit with a midnight blue shirt and sunflower yellow tie. He could easily have been mistaken for either a gangster or a pimp. He’d arrived in a chauffeur-driven, bullet-proof Lincoln that had previously been owned by the notorious gangster, Dutch Schultz.

  Seated at table oppos
ite Bogie, Hellinger told him he’d just come from his doctor’s office. “I don’t have long to live. This burly doctor told me that this morning. As you know heart disease runs in my family. My parents died young. Since I last saw you, I lost my brother. I really loved him.”

  “I’m real sorry, pal, to hear this,” Bogie said.& “Anything I can do?”

  “Sure there is,” Hellinger said. “Help me celebrate life. I’m doing so with three packages of cigarettes a day, a quart of brandy before the cocktail hour, and all the barbiturates I can get my hands on. There’s a lot to be said for dying young. There’s also sex, lots and lots of sex. You know I married this hot-to-trot showgal, Gladys Glad. She wants it morning, noon, and evening, and always a blast-off at midnight. She’s not satisfied until all three holes are plugged.”

  Glad was a beautiful, ex-Ziegfeld showgirl he’d married in 1929, divorced in 1932, and would remarry a year later.

  When their dialogue finally focused on the script for The Roaring Twenties, Bogie said, “I haven’t read it yet. I know James Cagney is playing Eddie Bartlett, with me playing this guy called George Hally. I’m sure before the final curtain, Cagney will kill me like a buzzard, and perhaps die himself in a long extended death scene.”

  “You must have read the script,” Hellinger said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Bogie said. “I didn’t have to.”

  “It’s a bit of a gangster picture cliché, I admit that,” Hellinger said.

  “I can’t believe how many more times in how many movies Cagney will be killing me,” Bogie said. “Just once, can’t I shoot the creepy little guy himself and give myself an extended, histrionic death scene?”

  “Your day will come,” Hellinger said.

  “You play a ruthless bootlegger.”

  “The part should have gone to George Raft,” Bogie said. “Let’s face it, he was a ruthless bootlegger in the 1920s when I was a ‘young sprig’ on Broadway with a tennis racket, wearing a blue blazer and white shoes.”

  In the plot set at the end of World War I, Army buddies Cagney, Bogie, and Jeffrey Lynn, find their lives intertwining dramatically in this largely hackneyed script.

  It had been a long time since Bogie had met the colorful director Raoul Walsh, who had voted against casting him in The Man Who Came Back way back when. Instead of giving Bogie a star role, he had assigned him the job of giving diction lessons to silent screen star Charles Farrell.

  “So, we’re working together once again,” Walsh said. “When I first met you, I didn’t think you’d go far or go anywhere for that matter. Now you’re the leading male co-star in a Cagney movie. Who would have thought that?”

  “Not you,” Bogie said sarcastically, angry that& many years ago Walsh had not given him the break he so desperately wanted when he’d first arrived in Hollywood.

  “Let’s put bygones behind us and get on with the job of the day,” Walsh said.

  “Looks like I don’t have much choice if I want to get paid at the end of the week.”

  “I’ll go easy on you,” Walsh said. ‘Just be on screen the vicious son of a bitch you are in real life. It takes one to know one.”

  The director still had a patch over his eye, perhaps the same patch he wore back when Bogie first met him. He claimed that a jackrabbit crashed through the windshield of his car, permanently injuring his eye with the broken glass. Walsh’s eye patch had become almost as synonymous as the jodhpurs worn by Cecil B. DeMille. To other listeners, he claimed that a buzzard in Arizona descended and plucked out his eye one scalding hot afternoon.

  Years later, Walsh reflected on shooting a movie with both Cagney and Bogie. “I learned that a director must never kill off Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, or Gregory Peck,” he said. “But when we ‘shot’ Cagney or Bogart, the audience and the box office loved it.”

  It was said that Walsh never let the truth get involved in a great story. He later claimed, “I was the one who made Bogie a star when I cast him in The Roaring Twenties. He was going nowhere until I put him in some of my other films. He was referring to They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941). I also saved James Cagney’s career.”

  Priscilla Lane had star billing over Bogie, much to his regret. “Well, well, well,” he said sarcastically, “Little Miss Priscilla is rising fast. Who are you fucking?”

  “You do reduce things to their most vulgar level,” she said. “I’m not a casting couch kind of girl. Talent, Mr. Bogart—that’s what I have. Right now

  I’m getting the most fan mail at Warners except for Miss Bette Davis. No one can touch her.”

  “Who would want to?” he asked, ignoring his own past experience with the star. “Well, my advice to you is to keep it up. You look like Ginger Rogers. Can you dance?” He did not wait for an answer. “I hear you and Wayne Morris are shacked up.”

  “We are dating on occasion—nothing serious,” she said.

  “Well, keep him out of any future movies with me,” Bogie said. By the way, ever since I’ve known you, you’ve worn the same brown leather shoes. Want me to buy you another pair?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I wear these shoes in every scene of every movie. They’re my good luck charm. What’s your good luck charm?”

  “My dick.”

  “You do know how to say the most enchanting things to a lady.”

  “You were lucky with your hit, Four Daughters,” he said. “I didn’t bother to see it, but I heard that Fannie Hearst tearjerker was meant to star Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. They turned it down.”

  “If you go to see it, and I hope you will, pay special attention to John Garfield. He’s from the New York theatre, and I predict he’s going to become the biggest male star at Warner Brothers. Jack Warner told me that he plans to make a screen team of John and me. He wants to make the two of us the biggest stars at Warner Brothers in the 40s. As for you, Cagney, Raft, and Edward G. Robinson, it’s time you gave up those gangster roles and started playing father parts.”

  He just couldn’t let her get away with that.

  “Walsh told me your role as the singer Jean in The Roaring Twenties was inspired by the real Ruth Etting,” he said. “I knew her in New York. Now that was a torch singer. What a woman! Perhaps Walsh can get Etting to dub your voice for such songs as ‘Melancholy Baby’ which you sing in this movie.”

  “You really can’t help needling people, can you? Have you ever considered it as a mental illness instead of a virtue. I assure you I can do my own singing in any movie I’m cast in. Get it? I’m a singer. Got that?”

  ***

  Although there was nothing romantic going on between them, Bogie bonded with character actress Gladys George who blazed across Hollywood films in the 1930s and 40s. She was cast as Panama Smith. “She’s my kind of broad,” he told his director Walsh. “She worked in vaudeville since she was three years old,” Bogie said. “No one plays a bad girl like Gladys. She’s a gal who knows how to party, how to hold her liquor, and how to have a romance in a dark alley.”

  When he more or less shared this point of view with Methot, she hit him over the head with a beer bottle in a bar. “The God damn part had my name written all over it—not Gladys George. I can play a role like that in my sleep. Listen, you better get me a job—or else. No one seems to want to cast me in anything. Living off your dough these days, I’d even work for free.”

  Ann Sheridan had originally told Bogie that she was up for the role of Panama Smith, which was clearly based on the notorious nightclub hostess Texas Guinan. But at the last& minute Sheridan was assigned to another picture.

  Cagney’s character was based on the bootlegger Larry Fay. Bogie knew Fay and Guinan, and the movie sparked many memories of his life in the speakeasies of the 20s.

  The real-life Fay didn’t end as glamorously as Cagney in the movie. Fay was shot and killed on New Year’s Day of 1932 when he told his doorman that he was forced to reduce his pay. The doorman pulled out his revolver and fatally shot his boss four times
.

  One scene between gangster Cagney and speakeasy queen Gladys George became legendary. She confronts a fatally wounded Cagney staggering up the steps to a church. He’s just been rubbed out by Bogie. In his usual death scene manner, Cagney staggers back down diagonally and falls professionally face up and camera ready.

  Kneeling next to him, George tells the police, “He used to be a big shot.”

  This line from Gladys George was inserted into the script at the last minute and was interpreted at the time mainly as a fade-out remark, nothing special at all. But somehow it caught on with movie audiences who remembered and often repeated it. At the begining of the 21st century, the line was still remembered. Members of the American Film Institute ranked George’s last line as the number one most famous remark ever uttered in a gangster movie. B o g i e would work with George again when she was cast with him in The Maltese Falcon.

  In The Roaring Twenties, Gladys George had fourth billing, with fifth billing going to Jeffrey Lynn. Along with Bogie and Cagney, Lynn was cast as the third doughboy in the movie. A handsome, mild-mannered actor, he had been a former schoolteacher in Massachusetts. Unlike Cagney and Bogie, Lynn was completely without menace on the screen.

  Before being cast in The Roaring Twenties, Lynn had had a notable success in 1938 when he had appeared with the& Lane sisters--Lola, Priscilla, and Rosemary--in Four Daughters. That film had been so successful it had spawned three sequels.

  Bogie had only a few encounters with Lynn on the set. Either kidding or not, he asked Lynn, “Well, how do you score, pal? I’ve worked with all the Lane sisters, and screwed each one of them.”

  “I didn’t even try,” Lynn honestly claimed.

  “Well, Priscilla’s in this movie,” Bogie said. “Here’s your last chance.”